Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

  They carried on and might have done so indefinitely had it not been for Julia’s father’s death. For some time Julia had been Russ’s chauffeur, first because he was losing his eyesight and second because it seemed the one thing he was capable of telling her she did well. The phone would ring and she’d be out the door. Tom found this annoying and sometimes insulting, especially when it took precedence over his own work at the school, so one morning when Julia asked him to stay with one of the kids who had a high fever and go in late so she could run Russ to the airport, he refused. Worse, he lied. He said he couldn’t because his students were reading assigned parts from Act V of Hamlet aloud, and he’d made special arrangements to use the theater and to tape-record their performances. In fact, the whole senior class was out on a field trip that day.

  Julia’s father drove himself, ran a red light near O’Hare, and was broadsided by a cement truck and killed instantly. When Julia showed up at the school to tell Tom, she found him sitting alone in his classroom, grading papers. She stood in the doorway, blinking and looking at the empty desks.

  Tom and Julia were to stay together until her death in 1996 because “that’s what people of our generation did,” but their marriage effectively ended that day. They saw less and less of each other. Julia stopped cooking, and there were lots of pizzas and tubs of chicken. Communication was increasingly by notes left on the refrigerator or under the windshield wiper. Soon Julia moved into the spare bedroom. She did not even say it was because Tom snored. For Christmas she renewed his subscription to the New Yorker, and he gave her some kitchen utensil or other. “In the end,” he says, “irony was the only form of intimacy we continued to share.”

  Studies of the marriages of returning World War II GIs, including those by J. P. Arnold and Cynthia Berger, Matson B. Toms, and Philip Kapstein, suggest that Tom and Julia’s marriage was of a type. In Mid-Century Marriages, Kapstein identifies this group as survivors of the war and Depression, most of whom were Caucasian, Christian and frequently Roman Catholic, middle class, and increasingly suburban, who stayed together despite personal dissatisfaction and often unhappiness, changing social mores, and no-fault divorce laws that saw divorce rates double between 1950 and 1979. He labeled them “the Undivorced” because they were people caught on a cultural cusp.

  On the one hand they were inheritors of nineteenth-century values that saw marriage in the unsentimental terms of a partnership between a dominant husband whose job it was to make money and decisions and a submissive wife whose job it was to bear, rear, and often bury children. Such partnerships were bound together more by duty and loyalty than by love. On the other hand, these people’s sensibilities were shaped by the twentieth century with its growing popular belief in free will, increasing educational and employment opportunities for women, and romantic notions of life and love cultivated by popular literature, the music of Tin Pan Alley, and the films of Hollywood. These two forces were in conflict not only in the marriages Kapstein portrays among “the Undivorced” but in the individuals in those marriages. I submit that Tom and Julia J. were such individuals in such a marriage.

  Antwerp, July 8, 2007

  In Antwerp Tom took a room in a pleasant modern hotel on the square in front of the Central Station. He rested. He snoozed in the sunshine that came through the big windows. He thought about the beds of bright flowers in the park across the street. They reassured him. He needed a little reassurance. But in the park there was also a bench, and on the bench facing the hotel, seeming to face his very room, sat a black man wearing a Dodgers cap slightly cocked to one side, so when Tom started to make his way toward the cathedral, he went out the back door of the hotel and followed a street of sidewalk restaurants beneath big awnings. t He turned into a broad pedestrian avenue that swept around dramatically toward the center and was lined with grand, ornate buildings in the Belgian style, only now all of their ground floors were shops, banks, and fast-food restaurants with plate-glass windows and bright plastic signs. Neither this nor anything else he had seen matched his memory of this place. The cathedral had not changed since the war, of course, and yet it had because everything else had changed. It was surrounded by curio shops and tourist restaurants advertising their daily specials on blackboards, banks of tables and chairs and umbrellas, kids heavily pierced, kids heavily tattooed, Peruvian musicians, and middle-aged couples from all over the world looking at guidebooks, so that the ancient church seemed oafish and a bit ironic, like an adult sitting on a child’s chair. Tom sat in front of it and had a Belgian witbier. It was light and spicy and refreshed him. He studied people as they passed. He did not see the black man. He looked at the cathedral and wondered if it was a metaphor for the church itself: a relic, an irrelevance, at times an embarrassment. Perhaps it also stood for his more personal conflict, the one between the past and the present, what the world wanted him to do and what he was doing.

  He looked down a tiny lane that opened off the square. The more he looked at it, the more familiar it seemed. Finally he paid the tab and walked down the lane, and then another, and then a third, which was shaded and quiet and off which there opened double doors into a modest lobby. He waited at the desk until a young African woman appeared.

  “Do you speak English?” Tom asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did this used to be the Hotel Metropole?”

  “I do not know. How long ago?”

  “Sixty years. Sixty years ago.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Who would know that?”

  That evening he ate in a tourist restaurant with leaded-glass windows on the side of the cathedral. It, too, felt faintly familiar. He ordered mussels and frites, though mussels were not in season, and drank a different Belgian beer with his meal. He took his time. He thought, It’s possible that this is as close as I come.

  When he walked back through the square, the black man was sitting alone in a sidewalk café. He did not get up, and he did not follow Tom.. But why should he? He already knew where Tom was staying. And wasn’t paranoia another sign of dementia?

  The next day, pulling his bag behind him, Tom slowly crossed the square to the train station. He sat down to rest and studied the big arrivals and departures board. In line at the ticket counter, he didn’t look behind him. In line hiring the porter and waiting at the elevator, he didn’t look back. He went down the platform followed by the porter and checked his watch before the man lifted his bag up the stairs of the fourth car of the ten o’clock train to Brussels. Then the two of them entered the third car and worked their way back down the aisle in the direction from which they had come. Tom looked at his watch. He peeked out the door of the car and thought he saw the black man climbing onto the fourth car of the Brussels train. He stepped down and crossed the platform. “Wait,” he called to the conductor, who took Tom’s bag from the porter, lifted it aboard the nine fifty-six train to Dordrecht, and closed the door. Tom sat on a jump seat, breathing hard, head pressed against the wall, looking obliquely out the window as the train left the station. He saw his porter but not the man in the blue Dodgers hat on the platform as he passed; the man had to still be looking for him on the other train. Slowly his heart rate and breathing returned to normal. He held up his hand and watched it shaking. Finally he took a deep breath and looked around. A girl across the car was watching him with wide eyes. Tom smiled and shook his head. “Cops and robbers,” he said.

  The train crossed the border, and Tom left behind the randomness of Belgium and encountered again the uniformity of Holland. That much was familiar: the brick streets, the row houses, the shops strung together, the church at the village center, and beside it the rector’s house with its small yard, its formal center door, its ornate eaves and dormers. And more: the long, straight canals, the broad, flat fields, the low farmhouses, the lambs now in midsummer almost as tall as their mothers, the windbreaks of poplars all in a row as if placed there carefully by a huge child, an old man slowly riding an old bike along a dike. But here was a superhighw
ay, and some of the barns were free-standing metal buildings, and all the town centers were now surrounded by blocks of newer row houses with larger gardens and bigger plate-glass windows.

  On the platform changing trains in Dordrecht were people with dark skin, with spiky hair, dreadlocks, red shoes, yellow shoes, listening to iPods, talking on cell phones. There were none of the fair, stolid people in colorless, shapeless woolen clothing and heavy shoes whom he had left here half a century ago.

  Tom did not see the man in the Dodgers cap. No one seemed to recognize or even notice him.

  Frenchman’s Lake, July 4, 2007

  Just before the fireworks, Mike McIntyre, who’d taught with Tom for forty years, showed up. “I was hoping I’d see you,” Tom said. The two old men shook each other’s hands, held each other’s forearms, and touched each other’s shoulders. Then they sat down in the pink chairs.

  “Hell, I wasn’t going to miss your last party, was I? Hey, what happened to Al Jones?”

  “Bad stroke. Found him in the morning. Couldn’t get up.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah. I laid him on blankets in the back of the truck. Drove him into town real slow, but there was nothing to be done. I held his face in my two hands as they put him down. He was looking up into my eyes, and then his eyes went dead.”

  “That’s hard.”

  “Where’s Irma?”

  “She’s coming. She’s dropping off our goods in the kitchen.”

  “What goods? The party’s over.”

  “Just some lemon squares to go with the coffee.”

  Irma was Mike’s second wife, a former student twenty years his junior who was a deaf-mute; “Perfect wife for an English teacher,” he liked to say. “Goods” was a reference to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a movie both old men liked; the two of them often spoke in allusion. It was a kind of game, maybe even a kind of code that made them and their relationship distinctive. It was also a form of intimacy or perhaps a substitute for it. This much at least was true: their personal bibliographies had much in common, and the older they got, the less theirs had in common with those of younger people. In a way, then, over the years their bond had grown stronger, and they had grown closer, but all of that growth seemed to have stopped some time ago. Tom did not know quite why, but though he and Mike McIntyre addressed each other with the familiarity of brothers, he knew that to some extent, attrition and default were at work.

  “I can hardly believe this is happening,” said Mike McIntyre. “I always figured you’d be the last one of us to go.”

  “‘Beautiful view of the stocked fishing pond, elegant country living, atrium dining room, all the amenities of a small European hotel …’”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come in, take a number and have a seat. We’ll call you when it’s your turn to die. That’s not for you. You can’t tell me it is. I think you’re up to something.”

  “I’m not up to anything, Mike. I’m just tired of fighting with the kids. Aren’t yours after you?”

  “’Course they are, but I’ll be damned …”

  Then Brooks was hurrying up from the dock. “Dad, who’s going to take Tony’s place?”

  “Why don’t you do it? Mike, excuse me for a moment. …” In truth, Tom welcomed the distraction. He wanted to end this exchange, which saddened him more than amused him, because he knew it involved deception. He had thought of making Mike his confidant rather than me, but Mike had become forgetful and Tom wasn’t sure he’d remember not to tell where Tom had gone. Besides, their dialogue was old and tired, a remnant of a friendship that was mostly memory now, that had grown distorted: bulbous and distended like their noses and earlobes.

  So after all the bombs bursting in air, the red-white-and-blue star clusters, the booms, the comets and rockets building to the finale, it was my Uncle Brooks who stood at the very end of the dock, only a little drunk, holding Tony’s baton, the one Tom had bought him, the one Tony had kept in its velvet sleeve in his top drawer the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year (Brooks must have gone looking for it). It was Brooks who got everyone’s attention, got us all standing, raised both his hands, and got us all singing. “This is for Tony!” he shouted. “Make sure he can hear you up there in heaven. Can you hear us, li’l buddy?”

  Tom closed his eyes. My God, he thought, must he always overdo everything? Or is it the beer?

  “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain …” But we really did sing it for Tony, sing it loudly and fully, because he had taken it so seriously and worked so hard at it. “… God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood …”

  And it was over. Oh, some people lingered, but most began to clean up, gather their things. There were screen doors slamming, muffled voices, and the distant clattering of dishes from the house. Soon there were car engines starting and a murmured tide of thank-yous and good-byes.

  Tom was the last man at his own party. Still he sat. He heard the lapping of the little night waves and the wind in the high branches of the oaks and cedars. He looked at the silhouettes of the houses on the far shore, the gently rocking lights at the ends of distant docks. He watched and listened to everything that happened on or around the lake—the parties that went on, the cherry bombs that went off, the quiet lovers on the diving platform out in the middle. He smelled in the breeze tinges of gasoline, others of smoke and food and the mingling scents of life from the water and the farms and prairies beyond. God, he had loved this old lake. It had given him such comfort. It had given him something to believe in. It had allowed him to look at the shore from a distance.

  Mike had left as suddenly as he’d come, and Tom wondered now if his health was failing. And Roger Daugherty hadn’t come at all for the first time in how many years? Too many to count. Roger was mad at him or disappointed in him or frustrated with him. Or perhaps frightened himself. Was that the difference between eighty-five and seventy-five? Had Roger not yet achieved resignation? Was that why he was still going to the office three days a week, still making his hospital rounds every morning, still reading medical journals?

  “There’s a shadow on your x-ray,” Roger had said. They were sitting in the same tiny examination room in which they’d always sat. “Maybe nothing, but we should take a look.” Tom had always known that one day there would be a shadow or a blur or a blip or something. There had to be, for God’s sake, after thirty years of smoking, sixty-five of drinking, eighty-five of living. Something had to go wrong.

  The next time the nurse led him not to the examination room but to Roger’s office, and he knew he was in trouble. Roger put a desk between them, as he never had before. The desk was too big and too ornate for the plain little room; it had leather inlays. It was very strange to discover after all these years that Roger had such a desk. It was a bit like an embarrassing secret, perhaps a tattoo.

  Roger told Tom that he had a condition called mitral valve prolapse, had very likely had it for years, perhaps his whole life, that it was a leaky valve that allowed blood to seep back into the atrium from the left ventricle, that now after eighty-five years the leak had become more significant, and that it needed to be surgically repaired. “They replace your valve with one from a cow or a pig. It’s major surgery, and I won’t pretend it’s without risk, especially at your age, but other than this thing, you are fit and healthy and the surgery has become so routine that there are surgeons who specialize in the procedure, do nothing else. I’ll recommend one of them. He’s probably done a thousand heart-valve replacements.”

  “And if I choose not to have the surgery?”

  Roger hesitated. “Choose not to? I don’t think … maybe my caveat was too harsh or clinical, Tom. We’re talking a success rate of ninety-five percent, maybe higher, and you’re in so much better shape than most people your age—”

  “And if I don’t have it?”

  “Well, the thing will end up killing you, I suppose.”

  “How long?”


  “Oh, my, I don’t know. …”

  “Guess.”

  “Well, assuming the deterioration continues, I would suppose within a couple years or so, but—”

  “Then not tomorrow?”

  “No, not tomorrow. It will happen more gradually. But—”

  “Then I don’t want the surgery.”

  Roger was surprised. He shifted gears. “Can you tell me why?”

  “Sure, and don’t think I haven’t thought about it. I’ve been thinking about it since the tests, and in certain ways I’ve been thinking about it for many years.” He had three reasons. One was that he didn’t like pain and never had. He said he would like to live all the rest of his days, however many there might be, without pain. “I know that surgery will cause me pain, and because of my age that that pain could be permanent, would at least last a long time. Will this condition ever become painful?”

  “Not really. It’ll just wear you down. You’ll tire more easily. You’ll have less and less energy. You may lose some mental acuity, but you shouldn’t experience pain. Your heart will just stop one day. That’s all. But Tom—”

  “Second reason.” He didn’t like what anesthesia did to old people; he’d seen its effects and didn’t want them to happen to him. He said his mind was still sharp, despite what his children might say, and he wanted to keep it that way. “The third reason, Roger, is that I’ve lived long enough. Eighty-five years is a long time, and eighty-six is more, and eighty-seven more yet.”