Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

  “Sometimes, but they want me to stop.”

  “Don’t stop, Tom. Die at the tiller! That’s what I say!”

  He felt a little guilty because he hadn’t sailed in almost two summers and really wasn’t even sure he could anymore. Or was he just buying into Brooks’s propaganda? He found himself thinking more than once about Wayne Rasmussen. He even said his name out loud once, and it sounded so odd and foreign on his lips that he thought perhaps he had never said it in all these years, not since the first time. He had been fifteen then. His father had gotten him his very first job working on a delivery van at Christmastime for Walter Flowers, the florist. Walter’s son Walter Junior was seventeen, and it was his job to drive the delivery van and call out the next address from a routing list on a clipboard that hung from the rearview mirror. It was Tom’s job to locate the next delivery, which he would then run up to the door of this house or that while the van idled in front. The only time Walter Junior got out of the van was when they had multiple deliveries at the hospital or the county home. Then he would walk ahead with the clipboard while Tom pulled a wagon full of flowers behind. Tom didn’t mind the hospital, but he dreaded the county home, which had been converted from a shabby old hotel called The Monroe and was full of people slumped in wheelchairs sitting at odd angles in dim corridors and the smells of stagnation, decrepitude, old flesh, dying flesh, dead flesh that no disinfectant could ever wash away or disguise. It was a smell with which for the rest of his life Tom’s association was immediate and absolute, like burnt hair, vomit, shit, and spoiled food.

  “Wayne Rasmussen.” Walter Junior said his name as they went up in the elevator. “Room 412.”

  Wayne Rasmussen was a man notable not so much for being old as for being ill. You could see the veins and very nearly the bones through his skin. He was sitting upright in a hospital chair, and all four limbs were tied down.

  “Mr. Rasmussen? Got a little Christmas flower for you,” said Walter Junior.

  “Nice,” said the old man as Tom put it down on the nightstand. “Nice. You wouldn’t happen to have a little Christmas cigarette for me, would you?”

  “Well …” Walter Junior hesitated.

  “Make an old man mighty happy. Only pleasure I got left. Hell, look at me, I’m nine-tenths dead already. Ain’t hardly nothing left of me. Won’t do no harm.”

  “Sure,” said Walter Junior, tapping three smokes out of his pack.

  “Now, just untie my right hand here.”

  “Well …”

  “Can’t smoke without my hand here.”

  “Of course.”

  “Walter …” said Tom.

  “Shut up,” said Walter Junior. They left the old man smiling and inhaling deeply. They delivered the last of the flowers and went back down in the elevator. Out on the sidewalk a small crowd had gathered around a fallen body. Tom thought someone must have slipped on the ice, but the person was dressed in a hospital gown. His legs and feet were bare. Someone looked up, and then they all looked up at an open window.

  “Must’a just sat there on the sill and tipped over backwards,” someone said.

  Tom heard a siren. The man had hit a no-parking sign, and bits of him stuck to the pavement, the ground, and the sign. Back in the van, Tom sat in the drop seat on the passenger side. “That was Wayne Rasmussen,” he said.

  “So what if it was? He was nine-tenths dead anyway. Didn’t you hear him?” Walter Junior was shivering so violently as he said this that Tom was afraid they would crash.

  “You shouldn’t have … we shouldn’t have …”

  “Don’t you ever tell anyone, you hear? Don’t you say a goddamn word. If you do, I’ll say you did it.”

  “Me?”

  “My word against yours.”

  And so he didn’t tell anyone, at first out of fear, then out of shame, then perhaps out of habit, until the day he told me. But he decided that day at fifteen that he would never end up in a home for old people. Never.

  Chicago to Paris, July 5 and 6, 2007

  On the plane Tom thought about all the people he loved from whom he was moving away now at half a thousand miles an hour, at nearly ten miles a minute. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three … Grandchildren he’d never see again. Great-grandchildren he’d never see at all, never hold or tickle or kiss. Perhaps this was all a grand mistake. Could he just step off this plane in Paris and onto another and be home again before anyone knew? But the die was already cast, his property disposed of, the letter mailed. And then there had been my last phone call, the one I had thought long and hard about before making. It was spring then, and spring can be such a cold season in that place.

  “Tom, listen,” I said, “I feel as if I need to tell you something. I overheard Uncle Brooks and my mom …”

  “I know, I know,” he said. I imagined him taking off his reading glasses, pushing his book away and trying to ignore the fact that the rain outside his window was turning to snow and that he’d just caught himself reading the same page for a third time. “He wants me to sign over power of attorney. Well, I’m not going to do it. I—” “No, it’s something a little more serious than that,” I said. “He’s talking about guardianship. He wants to be appointed your legal guardian.”

  “My guardian? Oh, my Lord.”

  “Tom, he says you’re losing it. He says he thinks he can prove dementia. Says he can document it.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Nora. That’s nonsense.”

  “I know, I know. But don’t forget he plays golf with half the judges in the county.”

  “I’ll be damned. I can’t believe this.”

  “Just to let you know, my mom said no. She said she wouldn’t stand for it.”

  But that was all before Tom got stuck between the wall and the toilet. He dozed off sitting on the can in the middle of the night; anymore he sometimes had to sit there a long time, and it was dark and he was groggy and he fell asleep. Groggy. Or senile. He wondered if one condition could simulate the other. He awoke with a start when he slumped to the side, found himself off balance and disoriented, put the palm of his left hand on the seat between his legs and tried to push himself up while reaching in the dark for the sink. But the toilet seat he’d been meaning to tighten for weeks shifted, his left palm slipped, and his right hand failed to find the sink because that sink was in the downstairs bathroom and this one was across the room. This time he lost his balance altogether and fell harder against the wall, sliding down it until he was wedged between it and the cold porcelain of the toilet. He had a brave little laugh, sitting there half naked in the pitch black, but then he couldn’t move. He wiggled and inched and squirmed, but he was stuck and he stayed that way the rest of the night. He slept in starts, dreaming once of the old man named Wayne Rasmussen sitting on a cold windowsill and letting himself fall backward. Then, when he couldn’t hold it any longer, he urinated on the floor beneath himself. By the morning his discomfort had turned to pain, and when he finally heard someone downstairs, he croaked, “I’m up here.”

  Later, after my mother had burst through the door and gaped at him, turned away from him, said, “Oh, my God,” been unable not to gasp, after the firemen had greased his sides and worked him free, the ambulance had taken him to the hospital, the doctors had wrapped him and rehydrated him, and he was resting in the emergency room, he tried to make a joke. But my mother said, “No! Don’t! Don’t even try to pretend that this is funny, that this is nothing, that this could happen to anyone, that you’re not an old man. You are old, Dad. I’m sorry. This is just irrational. You shouldn’t be mowing your lawn; you shouldn’t be out on your boat. You shouldn’t be living out there all alone while I lie awake in bed worrying about you. You’re not able to do all these things anymore; I’m sorry. My God, Daddy, you could have died!”

  “Okay, Christine,” he said. “Okay, okay.”

  “Why can’t you just move into a nice retirement home like everyone else’s parents? Why can’t you think of someon
e other than yourself? I mean, do we have to …” She didn’t go on, but she didn’t have to. It was that unfinished sentence and the use of the word “irrational” that told him he had lost, that she’d crossed over to Brooks’s side, that the clock was now ticking and his days as a free man were numbered. He would have to act soon if he were to act at all.

  But what if she were right? Was all of this self-indulgence? Delusion? Demented hubris? Was he torturing or was Christine overwrought? Was he paranoid or was Brooks conniving? “How the hell should I know?” he said the next day, badly bruised and heavily bandaged, as he stood at the window looking out at Frenchman’s Lake while a light rain fell and Haydn played. “How in God’s name should I know?” And if he didn’t know, if he really didn’t know, he should at the very least appear to go along with them. So he let Brooks buy him a cell phone and painstakingly teach him how to use it, and he dutifully answered their calls every day. He agreed to sell the house, and he agreed to put his name on a waiting list for Hanover Place, “a retirement community for active seniors with thoughtfully designed independent apartments and tasteful, elegant common areas, gardens, and grounds.” He even agreed to sign the forms giving my mother power of attorney in his affairs. But he didn’t sign them. Not yet. “Wait ’til we sell the house,” he said. “It will be easier for me to keep it until the paperwork is complete so one of you doesn’t have to run out here every other day.” He did all of this as if he had suddenly seen the light, and perhaps he had. He acquiesced, he apologized, he accommodated, and he planned.

  In truth, none of the “incidents” really worried Tom or mattered to him. The only one that did was the one Uncle Brooks and my mother didn’t know about; I was the only person he told. He found himself one day standing with a shopping cart in the frozen-foods aisle without any idea of what he’d come to buy. Of course he’d often entered a room and been drawn up short because he didn’t know why, but when he’d gone back and discovered the pan on the stove, the open book, the shoes awaiting polish, he’d remembered. This time he didn’t. He never knew what had sent him to the grocery store that day or why there were three frozen pizzas and a can of hairspray in his shopping cart or why, when he went out to the parking lot, it seemed to be on the wrong side of the building or why then he couldn’t find his car, and when he did, it didn’t look right; it didn’t seem to be his car. He told himself that it was because he hadn’t slept well the night before. He told himself it was because he’d drunk a caffeinated cola. He told himself these things, but he wasn’t convinced.

  Somewhere high over the Atlantic, when darkness had settled around them, when the dinner dishes had been cleared, the movie shown, the lights dimmed, and the man next to Tom was reclined and snoring lightly, Tom pushed his seat back, pulled the cotton blanket around him, and listened to the drone, felt the occasional shudder of the great craft. As he dozed he recalled falling asleep at night in the backseat of his parents’ car when he was still young enough to do so but old enough to know that he would not be much longer. He remembered listening to them as they talked in soft voices. Sometimes he could hear a song on the radio. Sometimes it rained and he could hear the rhythmic swish-swish of the windshield wipers. He felt then, he felt now, a sense of peace and safety in the warmth and soft lights of the night missile.

  And what was he moving toward, if anything at all? Sarah’s soft, rich voice? Her smiling eyes? Her self-knowledge that seemed to allow her to be so damned certain of everything, including him? Could any of that have survived all these years? He did not want to get his hopes up, so he made himself think about, fell asleep thinking about, Tony’s ashes, which very early on the morning of the Fourth of July he had scattered from his pontoon boat on the waters of Frenchman’s Lake. They had created a silvery wake that had ridden the surface before very slowly disappearing beneath it.

  His hotel room had doors that opened onto a railing above a narrow, nondescript street (if he craned his neck, he could see a café down at the end), a wooden floor that creaked, a tarnished brass bed that sagged, and a faded print that hung askew. It did not have a bathroom. The toilet was down the hall, but it had no tub or shower. “That’s all right. I’m not staying long.” The room was very inexpensive. That was important. He did not want to waste his money. He would rather go to hear the string quartet in Sainte-Chapelle that he’d seen a poster for or have a second glass of wine with dinner than have a television he’d never turn on, an air conditioner he didn’t want, or even a shower.

  It was still morning. He washed his face and went downstairs. The two Algerian brothers who ran the hotel nodded to him. “Bonjour!” They seemed somehow honored to have him as a guest. Was it his age? He went to the corner café and sat outside at a small table. The street had been washed and smelled damp and warm. The smell stirred some ancient memory or association with springtime: exhilaration, perhaps abandon. For a moment he was thrilled, and the feeling rose through him to his head, and he felt delightfully free.

  He carried with him a new translation of Madame Bovary. He had always wanted to read Flaubert’s novel in France. He opened it at his bookmark and drank tea as he read about Charles and Emma. They talked first of the patient, then of the weather, of the periods of bitter cold, of the wolves that roamed the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not find it much fun living in the country, especially now that she was almost solely responsible for running the farm. As the room was chilly she shivered as she ate, revealing her rather full lips that she tended to nibble when she was not speaking.

  Tom took the Métro to the Arc de Triomphe. He stood a long time looking at the great monument. Then he turned and looked across the town and across the river to the Eiffel Tower. It was more odd and graceful and wonderful than he’d imagined it would be. He spent the rest of the day walking slowly down the Champs-Élysées and through the Tuileries and thinking about Brooks. All afternoon on the Fourth he had thought about Brooks. As he had watched his second son crossing back and forth in his motorboat, Tom had thought about their many battles over the years, about the many promises Brooks had made and broken, about the fresh starts, the new deals, the last chances, about how Brooks had never changed even a little, had only gone through the motions, gone to the meetings, worked the steps, carried the literature, and kept right on gambling. He thought of the file of his correspondence with Brooks over almost forty years now that he had recently leafed through. Did the fact that he’d always made copies, some of the early ones with carbon paper, say more about Brooks or about him? There were the proposals, the bargains, the incentives, the attempts to understand, to find common ground, to meet halfway. All of it achingly familiar and similar. Had he never changed, either? And yet there Brooks was, spending the afternoon of the Fourth pulling tubers and skiers across the lake (Tom had wondered how many beers he’d had). Brooks the coach, the scoutmaster, the tutor, the Sunday-school teacher, the ne’er-do-well (“Brooks, you’ve got it backwards; first you find a vocation, then an avocation”). Brooks who somehow cobbled a life together out of plans, schemes, projects, poker games, pipe dreams, ponies, odd jobs, ten-dollar Nassaus on the golf course, occasional employment, workers’ comp, unemployment insurance, and the money his mother had left him, most of which was gone in those same schemes, projects, and pipe dreams but a good bit of which had been gambled away or simply wasted. Living in apartments, moving in the middle of the night, always almost in legal trouble with the IRS or the attorney general’s office but not quite. Old cars, “great deals,” a community college for Charlie and an apprenticeship for Lou, hanging around golf-club locker rooms, surviving on Marian’s meager income as a teacher’s aide and depending always on her health insurance even, especially, when she had breast cancer. Now both boys had jobs, homes, and families, and Brooks had a motorboat that was sure to be repossessed next month (“Hell, the summer’s almost over anyway”). And then there was the time when he got fired and took his whole family on a Caribbean cruise (“What better time for a vacation?”). Th
at was just it; he could turn misfortune and misery into a good story or a bad joke, and pretty soon, almost against your will, you found yourself laughing along with him even if you were shaking your head. Once Tom had asked Marian not quite playfully why she’d stayed with him all these years, and she had said, “You know, Tom, he can always make me laugh, and he’s so good with the boys.” Had anyone ever said that about Tom? Had anyone ever said, “He’s so good with Brooks”? And earlier that very day, when Tom had asked about Marian and Brooks had said, “Cancer-free five years now, thank the good Lord,” Tom had found himself envying his son’s joy and relief. “We just got the results Friday.”

  For years Tom took comfort in the fact that Brooks had never stolen from him, never cheated him. But then he tried to get his hands on Tony’s money. Perhaps Julia had distrusted Brooks even before he had; perhaps that was why she had left Tony’s money in a trust and made Tom, to his surprise, the trustee. Otherwise Brooks might have pulled it off. Of course Tony, flattered by Brooks’s attention and proud to be a “businessman,” had blurted it out. “Heart of Gold!” he’d said. “Heart of Gold Inc.!”

  “What’s that, Tony?”

  “Going through the roof! Going to make a million!”

  “Tony, what are you talking about?”

  “Going to make a killing, Dad!”

  Brooks had denied it, of course. “It’s an investment opportunity, Dad. An excellent investment opportunity. He could double his money. Triple it.”

  “Well, if it’s so good, why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “’Cause I knew you’d thwart him. Stifle him like you always do. Hell, Dad, it’s his goddamn money. Why not let him live a little?” Then it had poured out, as sometimes happened when Brooks had had a few drinks. “Because you can’t. Because you have to stifle him just like you’ve stifled us. Ever wonder why Christine is such a goddamn nervous mess? Ever wonder why I can’t pull the trigger on a big deal? If just once you had said, ‘Go for it,’ if just once you had believed in me instead of … instead of …” Tom hadn’t answered, and he had been proud of his restraint at the time, but afterward he had wondered if there was room for pride in any of this.