Courtesy of Coffee House Press
Steve Healey, Safe Houses I Have Known
To the best of Steve Healey’s recollection, he was 13 when his father, Richard Healey, told him and his 16-year-old brother that he was a CIA spy. Healey says his dad used “spy” to describe his job, despite that most CIA employees do not call themselves spies (their titles are typically case officers).
The teenage boy took the news in stride. Healey says he knew it was important not to tell anyone, as his dad still actively worked for the CIA. “That was kind of the way I was taught to react to anything intense,” Healey says. “Basically, that was my dad’s job, to pretend like everything was normal. He was just a regular dad, doing a regular job. But, secretly, he was a spy. And we were sort of trained, programmed to do the same–just pretend like everything’s normal, we’re going along fine. My parents aren’t getting divorced. There’s no conflict here. Everything’s fine. My father just told me he’s a spy. I’m going to pretend like that didn’t happen.”
Despite the subject matter, my conversation with the Minneapolis College professor, poet, and author was strangely normal at the coffee shop where I met him. He doesn’t break down talking about his parents’ divorce that started when he was 9 and living in Italy, or at his dad’s death from cancer in 1993, or his distant but amicable relationship with his brother. He is matter-of-fact about the secrets his family carried for most of his childhood.
“My father was in the business of keeping secrets and keeping his identity secret, but another level of that was that our family trauma and difficulty and conflict was also kind of a secret. We didn’t talk about it, we didn’t acknowledge it, we didn’t get support for it,” Healey says.
He talks about his father and his CIA role during the Cold War like the biography of a stranger. Much of the information Healey has learned about his dad’s occupation is from books on the CIA and publicly accessible documents. Scant information in his new poetry book, Safe Houses I Have Known, out now through Coffee House Press, is from his father.
Steve Healey was born and raised on the East Coast, but until the age of 9, he lived in various places based on where his dad’s spy duties took them. Vienna and Rome are on the list and make it into his poetry book. But, once his father’s cover was blown in Italy, the four Healeys moved back to Washington D.C., and his parents divorced shortly thereafter. “We just kept moving forward, and in many ways, I had a very functional life,” he says.
Richard worked for the CIA once he left college until his early retirement in the 1980s. Steve’s father became a case officer almost by accident. In 1951, his father was in ROTC at Boston College, and likely would have been sent to the Korean War. When a CIA recruiter visited campus, his father was suggested for an interview. “They said ‘Well, you can either come work for us, or go to Korea.’ And he said, ‘Okay. I’d prefer not to go to Korea.’”
Steve Healey’s parents met working for the CIA in Berlin, shortly after the Berlin Wall was built. His mother was a clerical worker at the CIA and was placed at the same office as his father. They met, dated, and married shortly after. His mother stopped working for the CIA when they married, but his father continued his covert career.
His father’s cover name was Victor T. Redvane, and his mother assumed the guise of Paula L. Spectorski. “I thought always that these names were so hilarious. They totally sound fake,” Healey says. “My mother tells me that the CIA would find cover names by looking through old obituaries because they thought ‘Well, these names aren’t being used anymore, so we’ll use them.’”
When Steve was 9-years-old, they were living in Rome when his mother (who he says was likely unhappy in the marriage for some time) had an affair with a close family friend. The man’s wife, who knew Richard’s secret, discovered the affair and promptly went to the U.S. Embassy. She demanded that Richard come to the lobby, where she told him about the affair. She knew that by blowing his cover his family would need to leave the country immediately, and so she informed an Italian media outlet he was a spy. Within a few weeks, they moved back to the states, resettled in D.C., and his parents began a messy divorce.
Some families are pulled together by trauma, and some are pulled apart. Some live in different states and don’t discuss it. Healey and his brother, who now lives in Arkansas, only see each other once or twice a year. “We don’t talk much about that whole family history. He claims actually that he doesn’t remember it, especially some of the traumatic stuff. That’s sort of his way of coping, just moving on, staying in the present,” Healey says. “I’m cursed with the need to go back and revisit the past and dig deep into it.”
Photo by Kelly Everding
Steve Healey speaking
Steve Healey, Minnesota resident of about 25 years, gives a talk on his new poetry book, Safe Houses I Have Known.
Personal poetry was not something Steve Healey was previously inclined to write. “It was about putting on a mask, being someone or something that I wasn’t, living in metaphor and wordplay,” he says. “It took me a lot of years to trust that being real and personal and autobiographical was okay and was interesting, artistically.”
Healey did not talk about his father’s CIA occupation with anyone until after Richard retired. He doesn’t know exactly when, but sometime in the 10 years after his father retired, and before his death in 1993.
When he started writing the collection in 2010, he hadn’t written a personal poetry book, and didn’t feel it was necessary to do so. “I didn’t really know that I was writing this about my father and the spying and all that, for a number of years, until I started to see the pattern in the poems,” he says.
I wondered if his father had ever read one of Healey’s poems. “No, my father never read any of the poems or any of the personal stuff. It took me a lot of years to get to this point,” he says.
Photo courtesy of Steve Healey
black and white photo of Steve Healey
Steve Healey has been a professor of English and creative writing at Minneapolis College for about 10 years.
Steve Healey’s present life appears typical. After his father died, he moved to Minnesota in the mid ‘90s, and he still lives here with his wife and two kids in St. Paul. Although he isn’t a native Minnesotan, he enjoys living here except for the “obvious drawbacks: winter.”
Healey went to the University of Virginia for his undergrad and continued on to the University of Massachusetts Amherst for an MFA in poetry writing. Once there, he picked up drumming in a rock band (as all ‘80s and ‘90s grad students should). Healey has never taken a lesson but played drums for 10 years. “We played like we didn’t know how to play,” Healey says of the band, which was modeled on the garage, power-pop sound of The Replacements. “But we actually didn’t know how to play.”
The band followed their member, Paul Dickinson, who wanted to move back to his home state. It was a time in Minneapolis music when artists like Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum were launching hits out of the polar vortex. “We just tagged along, and I’ve stayed ever since. In fact, I only stayed in the band for one more year,” Healey says.
In the music of his rock band past “there was a certain shock value–an artful shock value–that I was really attracted to, and I wanted that in my poetry as well,” Healey says.
Once in Minnesota, he entered the PhD program at the University of Minnesota, where he met his wife. Although he has three times the education of the average adult, he doesn’t parade his title. “It’s not that great. It just was an extension of my school,” he says. “It didn’t feel like any sort of magic happened after I got the PhD.” He and his wife joke with their children, who know doctors as medical professionals, that “we’re the kind of doctors who don’t necessarily help people.”
His open-minded approach to poetry is rooted in taking a child’s perspective. “Even before I had kids, I was interested in tapping into that kid voice,” Healey says. “There’s something magical about giving yourself permission to speak the way kids do. It’s sort of unfiltered and they just cut from one thing to the next.”
In the book, the poem “How About” uses the phrase as a kid would, introducing new things into a scene in an unexplained sequence. Healey writes, “all the ghosts are part of our family / but grown-ups can’t see them.”
In poems throughout the book, Healey addresses his father in the present, wondering what he would tell him if he was still alive. In “I Can’t Say This to You,” a childhood recollection of following his dad into the night and getting lost in Vienna, Healey writes “like dads did I did try to follow you / and of course spy on you but I got lost.”
Elsewhere, like in the poem “Drinking,” he writes about his dad’s alcoholism. “His favorite cocktail was a manhattan [...] he’d often let me eat his maraschino cherry when / I was a kid, and I loved that boozy candy taste,” Healey writes. “He poured so many / cheap cocktails into his body that he became / too sick and weak to leave his home.”
Richard Healey worked for the CIA for almost 9 years after the divorce was finalized. After his early retirement, Steve and his brother lost touch with their father, who became somewhat of a recluse until they intervened when Steve was in his early 20s. “He was literally almost dead when we found him. He had been drinking for so many years, and he was a heavy smoker. He was severely anemic and so forth,” Healey says. They helped him recover temporarily and he lived for several more years, a period of time when Steve visited his father regularly to mend their relationship, if only slightly.
“I don’t think I’ve ever fully said this,” Healey says slowly. “I don’t know if anybody really chooses to be a CIA spy, but it’s not something that he sought out. It kind of happened accidentally for him, and I don’t know if he was really the spy type, frankly. He was a very soft, gentle, nice person, despite having sadness and mental health problems.”
When you think of spies, you think of the strong, resilient, James Bond-type parachuting out of choppers and using parkour to get out of sticky situations.
“I don’t know what it would take to be a good spy, but it would take a certain kind of strength and toughness maybe, that I don’t think he really had,” Healey says of his father. “I think he was more of a mid-level, competent spy, who did okay. He lasted three decades.”
Despite his tumultuous relationship with his father, Steve Healey dedicates the book “for my mother and for my father, who told me that if he ever wrote a memoir, he’d call it Safe Houses I Have Known.”
