Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

  “Because you fought in it?”

  “Yes, and he got it right, I think, although the people who quote him all the time, mostly politicians, must not have read the book because they don’t seem to know that the title is ironic, or else they’re just stupid.”

  “Ironic?”

  “As in ‘There’s no such thing as a good war.’”

  “Not even World War II?”

  “Especially not World War II.”

  “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

  “I do.”

  “You were in Europe, weren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where?”

  “England, Belgium, Holland, Germany.”

  “Why wasn’t it a good war?”

  “Sixty million people died. Only one of them was Adolf Hitler. None of them was Hirohito.”

  That warm evening we ate dinner at the picnic table on the lawn, and Tom opened a bottle of dry rosé wine. Perhaps it was our earlier conversation, or perhaps it was the wine; I’d only recently been taught to distinguish dry pink wine from sweet (I remember being a little surprised that he knew the difference) and to enjoy its chilled tartness. Perhaps it was the evening or the high lacy clouds lolling about the heavens. I’m not sure what it was, but when Tom asked about my research, I answered him. I had resolved not to, of course, long before I came and several times since on the assumption that he would either be offended, like my parents, or amused. I found myself turning to him (we had pushed our plates aside and were lingering on this perfect night over the wine and cigarettes as the colors of the day flattened, faded, and sank into the darkness and the lake) and answering without hesitation or reservation.

  “I’m helping a professor named Maria Donlon write a book. It’s a bunch of case studies, really, that have to do with the failure of marriage in the twentieth century. Interviews with contemporary women.” I went on to describe several of the women as he listened and nodded. Women who had bought into an institution designed by the male architects of our patriarchal society to fail them or even exploit them. Women for whom the social contract had turned out to be a death sentence or, if that was a little too strong, at least a form of imprisonment.

  When Tom said, “Why only women?” I remembered instantly and exactly why I had resolved not to talk to him about any of this in the first place, and I cursed myself for letting my guard down. Of course he wouldn’t understand. Of course he would take offense. He was a man, and an old man at that. What had Belchirre said in class that day? “They are still living in the twentieth century.” He had both shocked and amazed me that the epoch in which I’d been born, everything had been born, was now gone, was truly history. And, of course, Tom belonged to it. (I was now trying hard not to.) I explained semipatiently (I suppose I didn’t mind betraying a little frustration) that an institution set up by men to serve men could not, by definition, fail men except, perhaps, situationally, certainly not systematically.

  “Still,” he said, “might be interesting to get a male point of view, Nora.” Yes, I agreed, but that would be another book altogether. This one was not about men; it was about women. It was not intended to be balanced or fair or objective. Those were all twentieth-century thinking. This was something different. This was a polemic, not a dialogue, not a discussion.

  “I see,” he said. “Now I see.” And of course I immediately felt guilty for quite intentionally and unkindly patronizing him. The hardest part was how predictable I was with him. Embarrassingly predictable, and he wasn’t at all, so that when he said the expected, I seized on it as if to make a point. It was supposed to be the other way around.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. I thought about my grandfather. All the things I’d assumed. All the things I didn’t know. I thought about the watery blue eyes through which he had been watching me, a quiet voyeur observing my naked pretension, his long face that I realized suddenly might once have been handsome, his odd, old sense of humor; where had he learned that? His patience.

  In the morning I went around the house looking at photographs of Tom Johnson. I opened photo albums and yearbooks. I studied him as a younger man and then a young man. I found pictures of him as a boy. Then I went out and sat beside him in the pink chair. “May I ask you a question?”

  He looked up from his book and smiled.

  “How did you meet Julia?”

  “Your grandmother? Do you really want to know?”

  “I really do.”

  He studied me for a while. “Well, let’s see …”

  Now here I was sitting in Tony’s chair again, holding Tom’s story.

  “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll read it on the plane.”

  “You ready?” I asked. At first, he told me later, he wasn’t going to tell anyone, but then that didn’t seem quite right. It was too punitive or angry. No, he finally decided that he wanted one person in the world to know where he was and what he was doing, and to my surprise it was me.

  “I think so. I hope so.”

  “Using your MP3 player?”

  “I listen to it every day. Love it.”

  “You been going to the library to check your e-mail?”

  “Often as I can.”

  I cocked my head. “I sent you a message.”

  “I haven’t gotten there in a couple days,” he confessed.

  “You’re an old dog, Tom, and it’s a new trick.”

  “Well, I imagine they have dog trainers over there, too. Very civilized little country. I’ve been reading about it online.”

  I smiled and decided to let him off the hook. “Running away from home,” I teased him quietly, “at your age!”

  “Isn’t that funny? No, running away is what children and convicts do. That’s why children come back and convicts get caught. I’m not running away,” he said, seemingly aware that some mild petulance had crept into his voice. “Now, there’s something I need to ask you.” He said he wasn’t going to need a car any longer, was ready to give up driving anyway. He wondered if I’d like to have his little truck. Not much of a city vehicle, he said; “You might not want it.”

  But I did. I could already see myself picking up Catherine or maybe Hector in it, waiting on the street, gunning the engine a little. I could imagine myself one day having a dog to ride in the back of it. I was already thinking about buying a pair of black lace-up combat boots at the Army Surplus Store.

  “Title’s in the glove box, signed. You can take it tonight if you want. Drive it home.”

  “If I do, I don’t know when I’ll see this place again.”

  “I never will.” Of course that meant we might never see each other again, either, but that was more difficult to say. No, it was easier to talk about the old frame house with the big screened porch across the front, which I turned now to look at, the lawn, the lake, the cottonwood trees at the water’s edge.

  “How many years, Tom?”

  “Fifty-seven.” He’d obviously figured this out recently. “Long time.”

  “I remember the first time you ever saw it,” I said, “or really the first time you ever didn’t see it. In fact, I put it in my paper.”

  Nora Panco Narrative History

  Thomas J. The Personal History of a Man and a Marriage 1946 to 1996

  GIs came back from World War II to a new world. The Depression was over, prosperity and conformity abounded, the suburbanization of the country was beginning, and the interstate highway system was soon to follow. Institutions as diverse as education and marriage were about to be redefined, as were the roles of both men and women.

  Thomas J. was one of those returning GIs. Today he is eighty-four years old. He is a tall, thin man with a white crew cut that bristles, square features in a square face, a stern demeanor, an easy smile indicative of his personal warmth and wisdom but a certain edge that is sad and bitter. A retired teacher, he lives alone in northern Illinois in a rambling lake house filled with books, music, and family photographs.

  The Fou
rth of July parade in 1946 is Tom J.’s first distinct memory of his return from the war. He and other GIs assembled on the ball diamond in the city park in Frenchman’s Lake, Illinois. He remembers it as a macabre accounting that was almost more about the people who were not there than the people who were: six men from his high school class alone had died in the war.

  The parade, complete with the high school marching band, the Shriners in fezzes and on little motorbikes, a couple of old tanks, and some World War I veterans on horseback, was another odd combination of mourning and celebration. As Tom put it, “We walked down the street with all of our feelings and everyone else stood along the curb with all of theirs.” Tom’s included exhilaration, survivor’s guilt, and a good bit of residual fear.

  After the parade there was a picnic in a park by the lake, and although Tom had dreamed of just such a gathering many times during the war, he found it almost unbearably anticlimactic. He was just about to leave when Julia P. stopped to say hello. Tom was flattered. Julia P. née Julia L. was two years his senior. Her father owned an auto dealership, and she drove a roadster, often with a cigarette dangling from her lips. By local standards she was a sophisticate and, with her square shoulders and long legs, was sometimes compared to Lauren Bacall. Tom had had a schoolboy crush on Julia but did not remember her ever speaking to him before the picnic. Then she did so quite familiarly. She said she hadn’t been surprised when she’d heard that he’d gone to Officer Candidate School, for instance, and when he downplayed the Bronze Star he’d been awarded, she said she didn’t remember him being so modest. Tom was surprised that she remembered him at all.

  Julia had left college after a year to marry a football star named Buddy P., but he had died on Omaha Beach on D-day. When Tom expressed his condolences, she was touched, and he was touched in turn, so when Julia’s father, mother, and two brothers came by in their locally famous Chris-Craft motorboat, she invited him to join them. They cruised around, waiting for the fireworks—the first since before the war—and Mr. L. spoke as he piloted the boat about the lake’s legends; there was supposed to be the rusted carcass of a 1934 LaSalle touring car on the bottom at the south end that had been driven by some of Al Capone’s men who were being chased by federal agents when it went through the ice. Mr. L. claimed to have once sold Capone a Lincoln. Tom thought him something of a blowhard. He also noticed that when speaking of his wife and daughter, Mr. L. used pronouns rather than their names.

  After that night Tom was smitten, but he couldn’t even begin to entertain the notion that Julia might be interested in him. Besides, he had other things on his mind. Although he had majored in English and Spanish in college, he had applied to a graduate program in history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison at least in part because he had now taken part in some of it, and he had an interview with the head of the department, Robert Whalen, the next day. The interview did not go well. The head was a busy, impatient man who was clearly skeptical about the value of the GI Bill and Tom’s motives for wanting to “read history.” Still, he gave Tom a long bibliography and a paper assignment to be submitted in August. Tom understood this to be a kind of entrance exam.

  The next day, back at home, Julia called him and invited him for another boat ride. Tom remembers it because he had never before received a personal phone call from a woman. He went out and bought deck shoes. He assumed that he would again be part of a group, but when he got to the dock, Julia was alone. They sped around for a while—Julia liked going fast—and then anchored offshore from the house they would eventually buy and live in most of their lives. Tom didn’t know this at the time, of course. He wasn’t looking at houses; he was looking at Julia. She was unlike any woman he had known. She swore like a sailor, called women “dames,” smoked Pall Malls, tossed the anchor into the water by herself, and, with bare feet and legs, was casual to the point of immodesty. At various times Tom describes her as salty, earthy, original, and fiercely independent. Still, there were contradictions in her that, if they didn’t bother him, at least struck him as curious. Why had she dropped out of school and married a hometown hero? And after his death, why had she stayed in town? More than anything else, why did she tolerate her father’s disregard? But these things probably didn’t occur to him that night. That night he remembers as magical. They drank wine and lay back on the leather engine cover in the stern, looking at the stars and telling each other their dreams. He thinks he probably talked of a new world order, a second League of Nations, a great alliance of free countries that would shape the future. “I was very determined to make some kind of sense out of the war and its devastation.” Of Julia’s dreams he remembers little. “Perhaps that was a problem even then,” he says. What he does remember is that she told him he was cute when he was saving the world.

  That July was a whirlwind of a month. During the days Tom worked on his paper. He piled the dining room table high with books, journals, and abstracts, perhaps emulating Professor Whalen, certainly asserting his privilege as an adult and a war veteran. The nights he and Julia spent on the lake, often until after midnight. Sometimes they ate, sometimes they just drank and smoked, always they talked, and occasionally toward the end of the month they lay in each other’s arms and listened to music from a dance club on the shore. Tom remembers wondering if they were in love. During the war he had been in love with a Dutch girl, and this was somehow different.

  Around the first of August Tom showed up one night, and there were three other people on the boat: a couple named Bonnie and Chuck whom he knew vaguely and a somewhat older fellow named Briggs S. of whom he had often heard. Looking back on it later, Tom would wonder why they had been invited. Had Julia grown tired of him? Was she trying to ease away because she knew he might be leaving soon and didn’t want to be hurt? Was she trying to integrate him into her life? Or was she trying to get his distracted attention and make him jealous? Whatever it was, the evening had a staged quality about it.

  Briggs was from a prominent family that owned the town’s only factory, one that produced ball bearings. He had not gone to war himself, and some people said it was because he had a heart murmur, others because he had been exempted in order to manage the plant, which had run around the clock to supply the war effort. Briggs had already been drinking and immediately engaged Tom in a political discussion. “I was a sucker for it,” Tom remembers; this was because of his enthusiasm for the Marshall Plan, which had just been proposed. He praised it as a whole new concept. His first inkling that Briggs was picking a fight came when Briggs said something like “Here’s a whole new concept: to the vanquished go the spoils.” Still, Briggs was alternately flattering and aggressive. He praised Tom for his heroism and modesty while teasing him about his politics and naïveté. Tom went along in order to please Julia (it was clear that she and Briggs knew each other well) and because he was intimidated by the older, more confident man. He doesn’t remember what they were drinking but thinks it might have been bourbon. As the evening advanced, Briggs got drunker and more hostile. He attacked Roosevelt, the University of Wisconsin, and “Jew bankers.” He sang the praises of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. At some point his attack turned personal; he insisted on calling Tom “Tommy” and made fun of him for being in charge of “toilet paper and sardines” during the war because Tom had been a supply officer. In the end, perhaps fueled by the liquor himself, Tom answered back. Chuck and Bonnie tried unsuccessfully to break it up, and finally Julia stepped in. She accused Briggs of being drunk and Tom of being immature. He was surprised and hurt. He had simply assumed that she was on his side. He asked to be taken back to the dock. Julia refused and said, “Don’t be childish.” Tom swam ashore, holding his deck shoes out of the water. He remembers Briggs yelling after him, “Don’t get those Thom McAns wet. They might run,” and he remembers more than one person laughing at the joke. He was humiliated. Ironically, the “Thom McAns” (an inexpensive brand of shoes) did run, and Tom threw them away.

  Tom felt as if the whole
town were laughing at him. Neither he nor Julia called the other. He stayed home, licked his wounds, and worked on his paper. It became his refuge and his chance to escape what seemed to him the provincialism and narrow-mindedness of Frenchman’s Lake. “I was wounded. I came back from the war thinking that I was a man of the world, and now I felt like a schoolboy again.” He realized all of this when he happened by the town’s high school one day and was enthusiastically received by the principal, who wanted to know all about the war and Tom’s plans. He offered Tom a job teaching history on the spot. Tom’s flagging spirits were buoyed. At least someone wasn’t laughing at him. At the same time, he hoped he had not betrayed the distaste he felt for teaching high school when he declined the principal’s offer.

  Tom hand-delivered his paper to Professor Whalen, whose only response was “Self-addressed, stamped envelope?” A week later he got it back in the mail. He still has it; he displays it with some pride and care. The early comments are terse: “Unsupportable thesis,” “Expand here,” “Weak source.” Then they get a little more conversational: “Interesting premise—develop more fully,” “See McCracken on this point in current Public Policy.” Finally there is a long page of notes that ends with these words: “This is quite impressive work. With a little polish, it might be publishable. Welcome to Wisconsin, Lieutenant.”

  Tom went back to Madison. He enrolled in classes, bought books, rented a room that had a bay window overlooking a dogwood tree, ate the baked-ham sandwiches and potato salad his mother had packed for him, and slept in the backseat of his father’s car beside Lake Mendota, dreaming about his future: Professor Thomas J., Dr. J. He imagined a leafy little college somewhere or a cluttered office like Whalen’s in an old sandstone building on a major campus, papers published, a book, students waiting outside his door, conferences and symposiums.

  The next day back in Frenchman’s Lake his mother called up the stairs that Julia was sitting in her car in front of the house. He looked out the window. She was parked, just sitting there, hands on the wheel as if she were driving. Tom went out and stood on the parkway beside the car. Julia told him she was pregnant. She called this a “courtesy.” She said he was not to worry; arrangements had been made, and it would be clean and safe. She said all of this without looking at Tom.