The Heroines (22 page)

W
hen we returned to the Homestead, I was so exhausted I slept late into the next afternoon. My withdrawal dreams were vivid and kaleidoscopic, and though I can’t remember any precise sequences, I imagine they were filled with horses and nurses or anxious visions of returning to Prairie Bluff Academy a different girl. Still, the comfort of my duvet, the cross-breezes of my bedroom, soothed me like no medication ever would. I knew then something that I would never forget: meddling with the Heroines was not worth it.

Desperate and looking for someone to turn to, Mother had taken Marone completely into her confidence. After I’d been hospitalized, he’d checked in several times on Mother, and they’d struck up a friendship. With his help they managed to call off the search and ensure that I wouldn’t get sent back to the Unit.

Slowly, things returned to normal. After the furious Unit energy and my jittery nights in the woods, just getting up for breakfast seemed a luxury. I cherished the calm Homestead hallways, the hum of locusts on summer nights. Marone came over the night of Nixon’s resignation, and we all sat on the couch and watched the sorry spectacle. Mother and he were relieved to see the man get his due, but his stooped shoulders and billowing jowls made me feel sad and sorry for him, in a way that would confuse me for years. How could I feel sorry for someone so crooked, especially when Mother was so delighted? Distinguishing Villains from Heroes would always be hard for me.

Later that week, Gretta and Mother sat me down in the kitchen and told me about my father. Ever since I was born, Mother had lived in mortal fear that one day I would disappear back into Heathcliff’s story, that he might come back for me. That was why she had always warned me against wandering the woods alone. Mother had sent me to the Unit because she thought I would be safe there. That I wouldn’t disappear.

“But no Heroine has ever returned,” I said.

“Not yet,” Mother said.

“These two—Heathcliff and Catherine. They were a lot of trouble!” Gretta said. “Your mother was only young girl. She was no match for them.”

“And you’re even younger than I was then, Penny,” Mother said. “I didn’t know how you would fare against a full-fledged king.”

“Conor was all right,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her about his code for sleeping with women. I knew it would only worry her more.

“I want to read the book,” I said. “I want to know who my real father is.”

“He was a tough character,” Gretta said.

“Was he evil?” I asked.

“Maybe just misunderstood,” Mother said. “He came from a very different time. But I think maybe you should wait. It’s a lot to take in after everything you’ve been through.”

Accepting the news that my father was not a football player from Lincoln Park, but instead a Villain from fiction, didn’t come easily. Thirteen was probably the worst age for me to find out. I’d never read
Wuthering Heights,
of course, because Mother had burned her only copy. She still tried to shelter me from it (censorship went against her grain on every other front), but the book wasn’t hard to track down in the library. I read it on the sly, tucked the paperback copy under my mattress, and pulled it out to read by flashlight at night. The blurb on the back called Heathcliff a “savage, tormented foundling.” We had one thing in common: dicey paternity. Yet his was worse, as he’d also been abandoned by his mother. He’d never felt accepted by his adopted family, who harped on his so-called Gypsy looks. Reading his physical description, I knew that I took after my mother, but his character disturbed me. How cruel he was to Isabella, Linton’s sister. He’d married Isabella only to get back at Linton for marrying Catherine. Heathcliff and Catherine’s passion didn’t mean much to me at that age, and I found her fits and fevers annoying. Nelly, the narrator, even implied that Heathcliff might be a changeling—a being with supernatural powers (put to ill use). I started to wonder if there might be something evil in me, that his ugly nature had been transferred through the genes. I became self-conscious about my temper, checking myself when I felt I might be displaying some melodramatic Heroine tendencies. I wondered if my need to compete with the Heroines for Mother’s attention in some way resembled Heathcliff’s jealousy of Linton.

Sometimes I wondered if Mother had made the whole thing up, out of some adolescent self-aggrandizement. In public I still continued to say that my father was dead, a former high school football star. But then these feelings of demi-reality would overcome me. At times I felt half real, half illusory, a feeling that continues to bother me to this day. No therapist can coax me out of it, because there is no one I can confess this to who wouldn’t want me immediately hospitalized and medicated. I’ve sometimes wished for children of my own, hoping to dilute the Heathcliff gene pool, but I feared that his genes might dominate, and I’d have children whom I’d eventually fear.

After I read
Wuthering Heights,
I rooted around the Prairie Bluff Library until I finally dug up the story of “Deirdre of the Sorrows.” Everything Conor had told me in the woods was there: the druid Cathbad’s prophecy that Deirdre, who cried out in her mother’s womb (“the weird uproar at your waist”), would be the downfall of many Ulster warriors. Once Conor heard that she would be the most beautiful woman of all time, he wanted her for himself, even though the other Ulstermen wanted her dead.

Reading about Conor, seeing him portrayed in the one-dimensional print, unleashed extremely painful feelings. I suddenly recalled the heft of his body, his voice, his beard—I’d been so close to him; I’d been in love with him in my own childish way.

Deirdre grew up in seclusion with her foster parents, grew into “a woman with twisted yellow tresses, green-irised eyes of great beauty and cheeks flushed like foxglove.” The story said that “High queens will ache with envy” and lowly girls did too. Deirdre’s dream man would have all the colors of a crow drinking blood in the snow: black hair, red cheeks, fair skin. And along came Noisiu, whose ears Deirdre grabbed as she said, “Two ears of shame and mockery if you don’t take me with you!”

Deirdre had such drive, forcing Noisiu and his brothers to escape with her. Then the men of Ulster tricked the sons of Uisliu into thinking they’d be safe if they came home, but when the exiled ones reached Ulster, “Eogan welcomed Noisiu with the hard thrust of a great spear that broke his back.” Then all the sons of Uisliu were murdered, and Deirdre was captured. That was when she came to the Homestead. Pages of Deirdre’s heartbroken poetry followed, how she refused to eat or sleep and spent a year with her head on her knees.

The final paragraph tore through me like shrapnel. Deirdre was trapped in a chariot, with Eogan and Conor on either side of her, though she’d sworn that two men would never have her. “You’re a sheep eying two rams, Deirdre,” Conor chided her. Then Deirdre swung her head out of the chariot and smashed it to bits on a rock.

I sat stunned. She’d killed herself. Just like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. I couldn’t stand it, especially when I recalled her courage when we turned her over to Conor. I pulled a notebook out of my bag and started to write. In my story, Deirdre lived, went on to become a great woman warrior. She had a dozen children who became great leaders of Ulster. But then I stopped and tore up the sheet. The original ending had a purpose. Her suicide was different than Emma Bovary’s. It was a kamikaze move to save herself from falling into enemy hands.

I pressed my pen to the next page and wrote about an eighteen-year-old girl who finds true love with a handsome stranger. He takes her away to his house on the moors, and they live together with their darling daughter. The love of the girl Anne-Marie changes the man, softens him. He teaches his daughter to ride horses and hunt. And they all live happily ever after. They live immortally in the pages of
Wuthering Heights,
which had enormous fiscal success in its day, but has no timeless quality to it.

I flip the page and write “Real Ending.” I am not the skittish girl in the cold library. Mother forgives me, and I forgive her. Deirdre meets her exact fate. Mother goes on to live in the Homestead; she marries Officer Marone. After Vassar I become the
gardienne
of the Homestead. I welcome Heroines and I never mess with their fates. Franny stops by for holidays. I bury Mother in 2025. And my father never ever returns.

For their priceless support during the writing of this book, I thank Cecilia Pinto and Lisa Reardon. I thank my agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, for her enthusiasm and spirited contributions to this book. Hats off to Nan Graham at Scribner for brilliant editing and peerless vision. Many thanks to Anna deVries and Claudia Ballard for their always-kind attentiveness.

I thank the Ragdale Foundation and the wonderful staff who, on many occasions, provided me a break from my narrative line in the lovely home that inspired this work. Thanks to Jim and Purcell Palmer for a glorious residency in the Catwalk tower. For fiscal support during the writing of this work, I thank the Illinois Arts Council and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thanks also to Dr. John Mayer for his precise descriptions of adolescent psychiatric wards in the 1970s.

I thank my parents, Tom and Dolores Favorite, for having only one TV and tons of books around the house. Thanks to my brothers and sisters: Eddie, Reets, Therese, Martha, M.B., Art, Laura, and Phil.
Merci à ma belle-mère,
Françoise Laval, for providing
un petit coin pour écrire à Belle-Ile.

For their guidance and inspiration, I thank Julia Alvarez, Carol Anshaw, Rosellen Brown, Roderick Coover, Barbara Croft, James McManus, Christine Ney, and Beth Nugent.

Finally, thanks to Martin Perdoux for all his love and faith over the years.

Eileen Favorite teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in writing in 1999. The Illinois Arts Council has awarded her two fellowships in prose and poetry. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter.