Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

  And then there was Brooks the generous: giving away things he didn’t own, giving gifts he couldn’t afford. Brooks the foolhardy: getting kicked out of high school (Tom’s high school) for smoking marijuana, flunking out of the state university no one had ever flunked out of. Brooks the athlete who could hit a golf ball three hundred yards but who wouldn’t go out for the team because he didn’t like the coach, didn’t want to give up drinking beer, and refused to sign the honor statement saying that he had. Brooks the lover, who had to screen his calls from girls even as a kid, who rolled his eyes and made excuses and broke hearts, who sang Prince’s song “Kiss” in the karaoke bar at Louie’s wedding and had a whole chorus of mothers and daughters laughing, dancing, waving their hands, singing along. Brooks the husband who had somehow chosen Marian and had somehow stayed with her all these years. Beleaguered, world-weary, old-before-her-time Marian, who got teary-eyed at the wedding dancing with her husband. Brooks the salesman who could sell anything but always had bigger plans, wouldn’t show up, was “let go,” but with regrets and best wishes. Brooks the twelve-year-old towhead with more freckles than sense, who would laugh harder than anyone Tom had ever seen, who would rather sit at the dining room table all night and not do his homework than sit there for half an hour and do it, who told his seventh grade teacher that he didn’t do homework because “I like to keep my school life and my home life separate.”

  And what if Tom had just let him be, had recognized way back then that Brooks was a self-deluding, good-natured layabout who somehow would get through life without a nickel, a wrinkle, or an enemy—except perhaps his own father? What if when Brooks was nineteen, Tom had allowed him to hitchhike to California or drop out and become a ski bum in Aspen? What would the real difference have been? Perhaps only the distance between the conviction that Tom had caused it to happen and the one he now held that he couldn’t have stopped it from happening. And why hadn’t he ever just let go and relaxed and laughed along? Sitting there on a park bench under a shade tree in the Tuileries in Paris, for heaven’s sake, Tom felt suddenly very old and very foolish, the “tight ass” Brooks had often accused him of being, or James Joyce’s Gabriel, who, so full of puffery and pretense, had missed the point altogether, had somehow failed to love or to allow himself to be loved, neither of which could be said about Tom’s son. Brooks, after all, was loved; Marian and those boys believed as much as Brooks himself that he was always just one break away from hitting it big. Then for a moment it seemed that everything could be Tom’s fault. Not just Brooks but Julia, too. Had he been too stubborn, too stupid, to recognize and accept her love?

  But no, that couldn’t be it, at least not all of it. Otherwise how could you explain all the people on his lawn two days earlier, all those people who had come to sit beside him in Tony’s chair, to thank him, share a memory with him, take his hand in theirs, kiss him on the cheek? His colleagues, younger teachers he had worked with, former students: “I’ll never forget that day in class …” “You’re the reason I became a teacher … ” “You taught me to think.” His nephews and nieces and their friends stepping forward to shyly shake his hand. Wasn’t that all proof of something?

  Perhaps only that he was a fraud.

  Tom stopped at a café in the park and had a juice and later another café and drank a beer. He watched people hurrying by. July. Any self-respecting Parisian was in Provence or Spain. These people must all be imposters or tourists like himself. And had he come all this way just to think about Brooks? Maybe he had. Maybe he needed the perspective. Or maybe he was trying not to think about Tony, who was no longer there, or about Sarah van Praag, who couldn’t possibly still be there. Suddenly his whole plan seemed quixotic and more than a little crazy. But then he revisited the conversation he’d had with himself when Tony had died and he had finally been free; he’d thought about it so often for so long, and now here it was, and he was overwhelmed by the question “What do I do with the rest of my life?” Overwhelmed until he asked the next question: “Do I do something, or do I do nothing?” And then it was easy. He knew he had to go looking for Sarah van Praag just as surely as he knew that it was a ridiculous long shot. “Lost love,” he once said to me, shaking his head. But what better way to spend the rest of his life than finally taking the chance he’d never had the guts to take before? Blaze of glory! And did it matter that he hadn’t much of anything left to lose?

  When Tom got tired, he took a cab, and back at the hotel he nodded again to the two brothers, and they to him. He lay down for an hour, then took a sponge bath and left to find an early meal before the concert. He found himself in a pedestrian square in Le Marais inhabited by friends and couples lying on the summer grass and children playing in a large sandbox. All around were colonnaded buildings and pretty cafés. He imagined this was the kind of place where he and Sarah van Praag might have come if they had come to Paris. He ate spaghetti Bolognese and a green salad because they were easy to order. He walked along the Port de Plaisance and onto the Île de la Cité to Sainte-Chapelle. “Oh, my,” he said, entering the great room and looking up. “Oh, my goodness.” There he bathed in the crystalline beauty of the evening light through those high windows and in the sharp, clear notes of the strings, which described the light so well.

  The next day Tom was weary in his very center, perhaps ill, certainly low. Of course he was. After the exhilaration of the trip, his first day in Paris, plus jet lag. Market correction. He’d overdone it. Walked too much, rested too little, pushed himself. Don’t panic. Keep things in perspective. Besides, he’d always known there would be bad days, but this bad this soon? He took a deep breath and wondered if he could take another. His head spun; his whole body ached. He was not sure he could even stand up. He was pretty sure he couldn’t walk. Easy. Easy. Breathe. He lay on his back flat against his mattress, as flat as he could make himself. He was okay with the horizontal; it was the vertical that suddenly frightened him. What if he were dying? What if he died right here in this bed? “Elderly American Found Dead in Parisian Hotel.” Okay. You could do worse. Better than a Motel 6 somewhere. Better than on the street with a crowd of people looking down on you.

  All this he thought lying there while downstairs the Algerian brothers smiled and nodded, while cabs and trucks and motorbikes passed his open window and those heels clicking on the pavement were someone late for a job interview or waiting for biopsy results or about to fall in love. Easy does it. He was shaky when he got up, weak in the knees. He needed food. Across the street was a kabob stand. It was as tantalizing as it seemed unattainable, but he was sure he’d feel better if he ate. He washed his face and changed. He went down the stairs one at a time, hand on the wall. He sat at a tiny table and methodically ate a kabob and some fries. Much better.

  Back in the lobby of the hotel, one of the brothers spoke to him in French, then held up an imaginary telephone receiver. When Tom didn’t understand, the other brother was called from the tiny office behind the desk. “Yes,” he said, “a man called for you on the telephone.”

  “Me? Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Now. Perhaps five minutes.”

  “Thank you.” Tom started away, then came back. “In French or English?”

  “French.”

  “Hmmm. Can you check me out and call a taxi?”

  “A taxi?” The brother was a little surprised.

  “Yes. To the Gare de Lyon. And then come for my bag, please.”

  In the cab, he told the driver, “Gare du Nord.”

  “Nord?”

  “Oui, Nord.” He looked at Paris out the window. All his life he had wanted to come here, and now he was hurrying away. He thought of me and how I would be disappointed. “They’ve found me. Thirty-five hours, and they’ve found me. How the hell did they do that?” They couldn’t have gotten the letter. No.

  But then he knew. Someone had noticed the cab and remembered its name. They had told Daniel Pecora that Tom was ill o
r senile, and he had caved in. They’d found the airline, found the flight, found the destination. Hired someone to call all the hotels in Paris. Shit. Freedom is an illusion, he thought. No one’s ever really free.

  At the station he waited in a toilet stall for his train so long that the attendant seemed concerned. Tom smiled and waved him off. “No, no.” Only when the train was passing Sacré-Coeur, which he’d intended to visit that day, did he take a real breath and begin to feel a little better. And a little better yet when he ate the ham-and-cheese baguette and drank the Orangina he’d bought on the platform. He tried then to imagine his best day at Hanover Place: an early-morning walk around the grounds, a hot shower, a warm breakfast, working on his garden plot, reading the New York Times in the solarium. And then what? Waiting for lunch? Waiting for Jeopardy to come on? No, he thought as he looked out his window and his hand steadied, this is better; this is right; this is what I want to do. Now, if they will only let me.

  He knew he had been easy to trace to Paris. He hoped he would be harder to find now, but he suspected that Thomas Wolfe had gotten it wrong: it isn’t that you can’t go home again but that you can never really leave.

  Frenchman’s Lake, July 4, 2007

  The pig was done. The pig boys, Brooks’s grown sons, Lou and Charlie, began to carve it. One of them brought a steaming morsel across the lawn on the end of a chef’s fork to the pink chairs, where Tom tasted it and said it was the best ever. People began to line up at the pig, at the keg, and at the picnic tables to spoon out salads and to butter ears of corn. Now I was sitting on the edge of Tony’s chair, holding a manila folder in my lap and watching my grandfather.

  “Oh, Nora,” he said when he finally noticed me. “Oh, my beautiful Nora.”

  “Oh, my beautiful Tom,” I laughed, mimicking if not quite mocking him, “I think you’re going blind. I’ve been sitting here for five minutes.”

  “I was woolgathering. Time-honored pastime of the very old.”

  “I have something for you.” I held up the folder. “I wrote a paper about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Based on some of what you told me last summer. I needed something for a class in personal historical narrative, and, well, I used your story. Just the first part of it, and I didn’t use your family name, of course.” I started to apologize, but then I didn’t, and Tom seemed amused by that.

  “You are certainly like your grandmother. So what grade did we get?”

  I laughed. “An A, of course.”

  “Well, as long as it was an A. Is that it?” He nodded toward the folder in my hands.

  “It is.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Of course. That’s why I brought it. I realized this might be my last chance to give it to you.”

  “Not so loud.”

  “And something else,” I said more softly. “I thought just maybe I could talk you into writing the rest of it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know …”

  “Or at least writing the part you didn’t tell me about: the war years and Sarah van Praag.”

  No one knew what Tom would do with himself when he didn’t have Tony to take care of, so the summer of Tony’s death I was drafted to spend a few weeks with him. He was annoyed, and I was reluctant. He knew that he didn’t need to be tended to, and, although he couldn’t say it, I knew that he felt his new freedom impinged upon. As for me, I had just found the place I’d long been looking for. I had grown up in the suburbs and gone to college in a small town and didn’t feel at home in either place, but I did in Evanston, where I was in grad school. It was only an hour from my parents’ house and another half hour from Tom’s, but it was a world apart. It was full of bookstores and coffee houses, of people who had conversations in German or Italian on park benches, of people who rode bikes to hear string quartets on Sunday afternoons, of people who not only read books but wrote them. And I had made wonderful new friends there, witty people full of insight and passion, morose, cigarette-smoking fatalists, people with causes and complex belief systems, people who got emotional about Descartes or the Fabians or game theory over plates of noodles in cheap Thai restaurants. And then suddenly I was uprooted to babysit Tom, and in the summer, the best time of the year, when every restaurant and bar and coffee house in Evanston moved out onto the sidewalk, when there were free concerts in the park, sailboats on the lake, and I could ride my bike all the way down the shore to the Loop if I wanted to, when all I could see from my sunny sixth-floor studio was the sky above and a rolling carpet of treetops like green clouds below so that I hardly knew I was on earth, let alone in the city. And now that corner room, windows closed against storms, was stuffy and empty and the cellist from across the hall was coming in twice a week to water my ferns and I was stuck here in the land of the fish fry surrounded by big, fat people riding motorized shopping carts. And I was resentful.

  I arrived with one small suitcase and two large cartons of books. It was a statement. So was my refusal to let Tom help me with any of it. I set up shop in one of the dormered bedrooms on the second floor that overlooked the lake. I used a card table as a desk and ostentatiously lined the windowsill with books. For the first three days I emerged from my room only for the dinners Tom cooked me. At that, I read at the table. On day three, over grilled salmon, roasted potatoes, and blanched asparagus, Tom said, “I want to thank you for coming out here to take care of me.”

  I didn’t acknowledge his sarcasm, but the next afternoon I came to sit in Tony’s chair beside Tom. Still, I read and took notes on a legal pad. In fairness, I had lots of work to do. The next day I came again and finally put my book and pad down. When I did, Tom said, “D’you like Evanston?”

  “I love it,” I said, a little fiercely, I suppose, as if to contrast Evanston and un-Evanston, which was here.

  “Chandler’s still there?”

  “What’s Chandler’s?”

  “The bookstore.”

  “I don’t think so. How do you know about that?”

  “I did my master’s at Northwestern on the GI Bill after the war.”

  “In education?”

  “In English lit. Spent a lot of time there.”

  “Did you live there?”

  “No, no. Tony and Brooks had already been born. We lived right here. Bought this place in 1950.”

  “Then you did it by extension?”

  “No. I drove back and forth once a week. Took whatever was offered in the late afternoon. Made for an odd mix of classes, but then I went a couple of summers, too.”

  “That must have been a long drive back then.”

  “Well, not too bad. The roads weren’t as good, but the traffic was better. It’s kind of a wash, I guess, like most things.”

  “Like most things,” I repeated, probably a bit too pointedly. “You believe that?”

  “Do I believe that?” he asked himself. He thought he did. He talked about balance in life, yin and yang, the whole equal to the sum of its parts.

  It should be said that a few years earlier I had been a sweet, compliant girl, and now I am—at least I hope I am—a fairly confident, fairly grounded woman. But the summer that I went to stay with Tom, I was in transition. I was just learning to be assertive, and I wasn’t very good at it yet. I was practicing on Tom and other family members because I thought correctly that they, unlike my professors and fellow grad students, were either intellectually or emotionally incapable of attacking and destroying me, although in truth I didn’t know my grandfather very well at all, didn’t even know what to call him anymore. It had always been “Grandpa,” but that now seemed juvenile or perhaps rural, so I called him “Tom,” and he let me.

  “Is that the organizing principle of your life, then?” I remember asking.

  “One of them, I suppose. What are the organizing principles of your life?”

  Well, I didn’t really have any yet, at least none that were firm and formulated, so I said something silly I’d heard someone else say about life bei
ng a kaleidoscope of rotating, concentric spheres.

  Tom said, “Hmm.”

  The next afternoon I came outside with a pack of cigarettes. I shook one out and lit it a little defiantly without asking Tom if he minded. Tom pointed at the pack. “Okay if I have one?”

  “A cigarette?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ve never seen you smoke a cigarette.”

  “I’ve never smoked one in your lifetime, but I used to smoke a lot of them.” He took one, lit it, and inhaled it. “Whew. First pull still makes me dizzy.”

  We sat that way for a bit, smoking together, looking at the lake. “No book today,” he noticed. “Sometimes it’s hard to put ’em down.”

  “Sometimes,” I said noncommittally, uncertain whether or not he was being sarcastic.

  “You remind me of me when I was falling in love with literature before the war. Got a job as a night watchman at a factory in Waukegan and sat in a little booth all summer just reading. Read twenty-two books. Didn’t understand a damn thing. Didn’t night-watch a damn thing, either.” Before I could take offense, which I was quite inclined to do then, he waved it away. “’Course I was much younger. Still in college. You,” he said, “I’m thinking you might be looking for a dissertation topic.”

  I was, of course, but I wasn’t going to admit that he was right. “Not really.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “Oh, just some interviews. They’re part of my research assistantship. I’m helping a professor with an oral-history project.”

  When he saw that I was being intentionally vague, he didn’t ask any more, but another day he said, “Only oral historian I know is Studs Terkel, and I suppose he’s not a real historian, but I did like The Good War.”