Free Pearl by Mary Gordon Page A

absorbed in my work. Lying to her parents like everyone does in those days. I’ve been very busy. She must spare him. He has been ill.
    It is difficult for her to call him Papa, her childhood name for him, given the facts of her life (the filthy room, the filthy dishes, the sheets that don’t fit the mattress, the new knowledge that men like her father are murderers, the smell of Ortho-Gynol jelly that clings to her clothing). But she can only call him Papa. What else can she call him? Not only is she frightened of the evil of the world, the death machine, she is frightened of the weakness of her father’s body. She does not want to be his treasure, but she is. His treasure, the rest of which is made up of things that her boyfriend, William, says are produced by the death machine. But because her father has said to the world: Preserve, preserve my treasure, she has always felt that, whatever else happens, she will be preserved.
    Her father says he needs an operation, that his heart has a little squeak and needs to be fixed: not an emergency but something that must be dealt with. He’s set a day for the operation. Will she be there beside him?
    Of course, Papa, she says. She doesn’t know what she will say to William Ogilvie, who shares the mattress and the greasy sheets, William, who may be hiding guns in the basement. Violence is the only language they understand, he says. You know that, don’t you? And she says, Yes, of course I understand. She understands because he’s said that if she doesn’t agree with him it’s her weakness. But she will not give in to her weakness, and she will refuse her privilege. She believes what he says, partly because it makes her afraid, and she knows she must get over fear; that is the only way to be strong; she must love truth more than comfort, justice more than mercy; she must cast her lot with those who will give their lives to end injustice and oppression. She is afraid all the time, but she thinks it’s right to be afraid, it’s the only honest thing, because the times are evil and in the presence of evil the honest are afraid.
    What will William Ogilvie say if there’s an important meeting or an important demonstration on the day she’s said she’ll be at her father’s side at the hospital? She tells him she has to go somewhere, but she can’t give him the details. She hints that she’s going away with another man, thinks he will admire her for that, call it independence, but in fact he barely notices that she’s gone; he is busy smashing the war machine, he is busy with the revolution.
    William Ogilvie—Billy—knows nothing about her father.
    The night before her father checks into the hospital, Joseph and Maria and he have a peaceful, harmonious, enjoyable dinner. For the first time in years they don’t argue about politics.
    Joseph and Maria wait six hours in the hospital while Dr. Meyers is operated on. Even while her father’s chest is an open cavity, she listens to the news; when the doctors speak of invasive surgery she hears the word
invasive
and thinks of the invasion of Cambodia; even while she is worried that her father is at the door of death, she reads the newspaper, she traces the location of the troops.
    The operation is successful. She sees her father, pale in his white bed. She holds his beautiful fine hand. She stays with him a week; she misses classes, but it is the year of Cambodia, the year of Kent State, after all, and regular attendance no longer seems important.
    When she gets back to Cambridge, she is met with the end of everything. The filthy house is empty and, in its emptiness, no less squalid. While she was away, the FBI came in the night and found boxes of guns in the basement and material for making bombs. Billy has been arrested; he is in jail with some of the other people who were staying in the house, people whom she’d met but whose real names she was not allowed to know.
    She tells the police she should be in jail; she lived in