Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

The lawyer nodded his head. “Well,” he said, “it’s been a very long time. I think very much you wanted to see her, ja? Perhaps it was someone who looked like her, maybe even a relative. Unfortunately, I have proof.” He showed Tom a copy of the death certificate. “This is her address, the same you gave. Her mother’s name is the same, too. Her age is not quite right, but, well …”

  “She’s dead?”

  “Ja.”

  “I don’t believe it.” But even as he said it, he was thinking of how very fleetingly he had seen the woman, how much younger than eighty-three she had seemed. “How is she supposed to have died?”

  Dekker said that she died of tuberculosis in the sanatorium Zonnestraal near Hilversum in May of 1949. “I wish I knew more, but it was the war, you see. Many people were sick.”

  Tom was stunned. When he finally pulled out his wallet, Dekker said, “There is no charge.”

  “But surely …”

  “I am repaying a debt of mine own, something I promise to my father that if I ever had a chance to help an American, I would make it. And now, well, ja, here it is. You set us free, you see.”

  Tom barely thanked the lawyer. He went back to Mrs. Waleboer’s. Standing in the quiet of the kitchen, he saw his reflection in the window. He looked slope-shouldered and ancient. He had had no idea that he would feel this crushed. He had told himself over and over again not to count on finding Sarah van Praag, but apparently he had, and now there was nothing more. Nothing. He felt so foolish. More than that, he felt finished. He’d been walking down a long corridor, and he’d come to the end of it. There was no door, no window, just a blank wall. “Fool,” he said out loud. “Goddamn old fool.”

  Sarah was dead. Sarah had been dead fifty-eight years. In 1949 Tony was two, Brooks an infant, Christine about to come along. Sarah had been dying in some dark room while he and Julia had been madly creating lives. And what about the woman in the café? He thought he knew. All the other elements had been there: the paving stones beneath his feet, the taste of Dutch tea, the licorice drops in the little bag in his pocket, the low Dutch sky and smell of rain, the way people bared their teeth to make certain sounds, pursed their lips to think, nodded their heads just once—so he had added Sarah; he had recruited someone to take her place.

  He went slowly up the stairs and lay down. He slept fitfully with jumbled, awful dreams he couldn’t remember when he awoke in the late afternoon. A soft breeze moved the curtains, and there was birdsong outside, but both were somehow reminders of his aloneness. This didn’t make sense. He’d been alone for a year. In certain ways he’d always been alone. He was the most self-reliant person he knew. His reaction was out of proportion.

  Tom found himself looking down at Saskia Waleboer, who was sitting at the little table in the garden with her elbows on her knees, rolling a cigarette. On the table lay a pen, a pad of paper, and a calculator. Tom watched her. After a time she rested her forehead in the palm of one hand, as Tom’s mother used to when she was thinking or worried. Was Saskia worried? He hadn’t noticed that she smoked. He hadn’t noticed much of anything about her. Tom lay down again, this time with his face to the wall. He hugged himself. He slept as you do in a fever, losing track of time and place and dreaming wildly. He got up only to urinate. He lay there for twenty-six hours, and he might have lain there much longer had he not heard a cry from the garden late the next afternoon. He raised his head, listened, then put his head down again, but then there was another cry, someone yelling, “Help! Hellup!”

  Tom listened again, then got up and hurried down the stairs. Ilse was bent over Nienke, who lay on her back unmoving. The younger girl’s mouth and eyes were open to the sky. She was conscious but dazed; she was not crying. The older girl was crying and babbling in Dutch, trying to explain. Tom gathered Nienke in his arms. “Doctor?” he asked. “Doctor?” Ilse led him through the garden gate, down a long walkway, and across the next street to a house that bore a brass plaque and a name: Theo Gossens. Inside, a nurse appeared and then a doctor. It was only when Tom had laid Nienke on the examination table and backed out of the room that he felt his legs dissolve and the fierce beating of his heart. He sat down hard in a chair and waited with neither fear nor panic for his heart to stop altogether. When it calmed instead, he felt a little disappointment. Might have been a nice way to go, he thought, trying to be flippant, but when the doctor came to tell him that the child would be all right, Tom’s eyes suddenly brimmed with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand.

  The doctor hesitated. “Is she your granddaughter?” he asked quizzically.

  “No,” said Tom, “no.”

  Then Saskia was bursting through the office door, and there was a great deal of explaining and reassuring, all in Dutch. After some time the doctor carried Nienke to Saskia’s car, and Saskia carried her upstairs and tucked her into bed, and there was much coming and going to her room. Finally Tom went back to his. He looked at his bed and thought about lying down on it again, but he didn’t. He sat at the desk and looked into the garden instead. He knew what he was feeling, but he was loath to admit it. Except when he had been an adolescent and a young man, he’d been pretty much immune to depression—“No time for it,” he used to say—and had taken a certain pride in that, but now this, this … Tom was a little frightened. Where was his rational voice, the one that never failed him, that could always put things in perspective? No, he would not lie down, but neither could he move; he felt not paralysis but overwhelming inertia. He sat there until sometime later when Saskia tapped at his door and came in with a tray of food and a bottle of cold beer. “Thank you,” she said in English, “thank you.” When she was gone he began to cry. He felt so goddamn grateful for something.

  Saskia tapped again in the morning, eyebrows raised and dog leash in hand, and Tom understood that she was asking him to walk Leo. She did so the next morning, too, but the third she didn’t need to. It was good. It got him up, and although he still felt like he was a bicycle whose fender was rubbing, he went. Once outside he was able to keep going for some shopping or a meal that he seldom ate all of. . He walked through the shops using an umbrella as a cane. He’d grown aware that when he tired, he shuffled. That had scared him. That had been his greatest fear: the stumble, the missed step, the dreaded broken hip. But what did it matter now? And what the hell did he mean by that? He did not want to feel hopeless, but he found he couldn’t help it.

  Finally he found his way to the library and mustered the courage to ask for help negotiating the computer there. He had three short e-mail messages from me. He looked at them a long time, then typed, “Dear Nora, I’ll write you a letter soon. Tom.” He hadn’t really intended to write me. Well, he had, but to say that he’d found Sarah, not that she’d been dead for fifty years.

  One day he saw Dickie and his dog and apologized for missing their chess game. “I didn’t feel well.”

  Dickie looked at him a little too closely. “Are you well now?”

  “I feel fine.”

  But when they parted, Dickie turned back to ask, “Did you find your friend?”

  “What friend?”

  “The woman.”

  “Oh, no. She died years ago.” Tom wondered if he hadn’t answered a question other than the one that had been asked.

  The two men began to meet in the park with their dogs. Tom welcomed the distraction. It gave him a few minutes of relief, even bemusement. Dickie had a theatrical manner that involved lots of facial expression and the exaggerated use of his hands, and he often spoke as if what he said had been written and rehearsed so that now and then Tom found himself trying to place a line or a speech and wondering if Dickie did all the same things when he spoke Dutch. Plus he could be elaborately deferential. He bowed, shook hands, called Tom “sir,” inquired after his health, complimented, flattered, and laughed at all of Tom’s jokes. Tom wondered if he was being humored or if he even minded. This gave him pause. Had he become pathetic? He didn’t want to be pathetic. He forced himsel
f to resume reading Madame Bovary, to listen to a concerto each day, to eat three meals, to do little exercises. One day he bought a Herald Tribune, the first he’d purchased for some time. He also bought a small notebook and a green felt-tip pen. He sat in the garden again, drank tea, and made himself read the paper from front to back. When he finished, he sat longer. Then he slowly opened the notebook, creased and folded it back on itself, took the cap off the pen, and carefully began to write.

  Veldhoven, August 2007 The War, Part I

  First of all, Nora, I got here and I am okay. I think I’ll leave it at that for now. Second, I’ve decided to honor your request and tell you the story of my part in the second war and my relationship with a young Dutch translator named Sarah van Praag. I’m doing this, quite frankly, because I have time on my hands, but also because those long-ago times occupy my mind more and more these days. I hope that by writing about them I can relive and perhaps dismiss them, but doing so presents a special kind of challenge. This is a story that in all these many years I have never really told, so it’s like speaking a language I once knew well but haven’t used in more than half a century; I may have trouble finding all the words.

  To start with, I was with the 101st Division of the United States Army, which parachuted into Brabant in the southeast of Holland with the 82nd Division and the British 1st Brigade in what was called Operation Market Garden on September 17, 1944. To give it a context, this was three months after D-day, three months before the Battle of the Bulge, and almost a year before the end of the war. The plan was to emulate the success of the D-day parachute assault and then connect with and be supplied by a column of Field Marshall Montgomery’s XXX Corps that was coming up from the south into the city of Eindhoven, the home base of Philips and thus the center of the Dutch electronics industry. We were then to advance on Nijmegen and Arnhem to the northeast, taking the bridges that crossed the Rhine and using them to invade Germany. That was the plan, but many things went awry. A lot of gliders went down with heavy loads of much-needed cargo. Then the British got bogged down in Eindhoven because the Dutch people came out to welcome them, and there was much premature dancing in the streets and beer drinking. It was harvest time, and the Dutch people passed out apples to all the soldiers and clambered onto the trucks, jeeps, and tanks, stalling the convoy. During the night the Germans attacked from the air. The British vehicles, still strung out through the city center, were sitting ducks. In an hour of bombing, Eindhoven’s business and industrial districts and the British convoy with its precious supplies were destroyed. This had a direct effect on me because I was a supply officer.

  Our men up the line were isolated and low on everything. They had expected to be a strike force, to lead a three-day charge to Nijmegen and then be replaced by infantry troops. Instead Montgomery began using them as infantry troops, and they were ill-equipped for the job. Behind the lines we had to scramble. An airlift was started to drop in supplies. We had hoped to open up the port of Antwerp, fifty miles to the southwest, now that Montgomery controlled it, but it was heavily mined, and the long access route to it along the Scheldt River estuary was guarded by German artillery in southern Holland; this meant that supplies desperately needed to liberate the Netherlands and invade Germany itself would not come in through Antwerp at least until November.

  As you can see, I was in the thick of things, but that was a sudden development. In fact, just one year earlier I had been a student in my sleepy little prairie college far, far from the war. My roommate and I had an old Philco radio, and on it, in that little school in that little town, we listened to news of the events that were about to lift us up and sweep us away. Toby enlisted in the Marines. He survived Anzio and became a dentist and then an orthodontist in Midlothian, Illinois. He once told me that sometimes with his fingers in the mouth of one teenager or another, he would ask himself if this was what God had saved him for.

  I was sent to Officer Candidate School, and I remember almost nothing about it except big Tony Longo, after whom your Uncle Tony was named. How and why that happened is part of this story. Tony Longo was very Italian and, I think, the first Italian I knew personally. Before the war most of us lived in and rarely strayed from our own small ethnic communities. Ours was white, northern European, and mostly Protestant. There were some Catholics, but they were circumspect Germans and Irish. Tony was not. He was one of those fellows who stands too close to you and talks too loud. One day he and I were paired off to fight each other with pugil sticks, and we ended up in a pile on the ground, going tooth and nail. The next day on the parade ground I caught up with him and said, “Sorry about yesterday.”

  “Next time, I’ll f****** kill you,” he said.

  I tried to avoid Tony Longo from then on, but we were constantly thrown together. He took to calling me “the little quartermaster” because I was being trained in logistics, which meant in all likelihood I’d be in the rear rather than on the front. To Tony that seemed to mean that I wasn’t tough enough for combat or strong enough to be a leader of men.

  By the winter of 1943 I was in England, which was both frightening and thrilling, the busiest, most exotic place this small-town boy had ever been. I was assigned to a logistics group at Division Headquarters of the 101st Airborne, which was located in a manor house near Aldbourne. The house had already lived several lives, including one as a boarding school that had left it threadbare and inelegant. And it was cold. Sometimes the drafts would scatter papers on our desktops as if a window had been opened. We worked in our woolen overcoats. Still, we knew we were engaged in a great cause, and we were impressed with ourselves. “We” included another second lieutenant by the name of Earl Karl Singer, some rotating noncoms, and companies of enlisted men. Earl Karl was a stacker of coins, a collector of dandruff, an obsessive brusher of teeth who color-coded his keys for quick and easy access. He endeared himself to me by believing in his heart that despite these things, a prematurely receding hairline, and the biggest Adam’s apple I’d ever seen, he would one day be president of the United States. He called it his destiny and spoke of it fondly, as you might a little brother or a pet. Earl Karl Singer and I worked with British officers to accommodate the thousands of American troops who were pouring off troop ships in Liverpool and Portsmouth every day and spreading out across the southern counties.

  We lived in tiny servants’ quarters on the third floor of the manor house and in the evenings drank beer in a pub called the Griffin, where we spent much of our time being beaten at darts. When we finally got weekend passes, Earl Karl and I went to London. We ate small gray pieces of mutton with watery mint sauce and boiled potatoes, sitting at a long communal table in a bleak lunchroom, and later we looked in at the American Bar in Piccadilly Circus, hoping to find a couple of cold Miller High Lifes, I suppose. There were none. Most of the crowd was British soldiers, and one of these who was quite drunk started asking us questions in a thick, slurred Cockney accent.

  We couldn’t understand him, and Earl Karl made the mistake of saying so. The soldier and some of his pals took umbrage at the suggestion that there was something defective about their English and by implication something superior about ours. They began to jostle us. I think the drunkard said (pardon my Cockney), “Take off your bars and les se’uhl this ’ere and now.”

  Then I heard a very big voice: “Well, if it ain’t Lt. Tom Johnson.” And there was Tony Longo. He said something corny like “Looks like you boys could use some help here,” and then he grabbed a couple of Brits and, just like Moe used to do to Larry and Curly, clunked their heads together hard. This act created considerably more mayhem than it did for the Stooges; there was blood and screaming and reeling and we went out the door, down into the Tube, and onto a train. What ensued was a night of drunkenness and high jinks that involved another fight and several more bars and clubs.

  By eight a.m. we were standing in the canteen in Paddington Station, trying to sober up on ersatz coffee, when Tony called me “quartermaster” and I remembered
how much he’d always disliked me. I asked him why he had bailed us out.

  He didn’t know, said it was good to see a familiar face, even mine. Besides, he didn’t much like the Limeys, and he’d gotten ditched by some “Ivy League SOBs.” I tried to imagine what had happened and pictured a couple of trim, soft-spoken young lieutenants glancing sideways at each other and being embarrassed by Tony.

  We were quiet a moment. Then Earl Karl asked if D-day was coming soon.

  “’Course!” said Tony, waving a hand across the station waiting room, where there were literally hundreds of troops from half-a-dozen countries. “What do you think this is all about? All this leave?” He asked if we were being well fed lately. Real eggs for breakfast? Fried chicken? Spaghetti and meatballs?

  So one day I was studying for my Shakespeare final, and the next I was drinking beer in London, and the next I was racing around farmers’ fields in The Netherlands, dodging German machine-gun fire and trying to collect supplies that had been dropped in. I worked out of Division Headquarters in the village of Son just northeast of Eindhoven, where a depot of sorts had been set up to manage the meager supplies that were getting through. By then the Dutch underground had reported that the Germans had withdrawn to the north of the Maas River. The southern tier of the country had been liberated except for the westernmost province of Zeeland, where the Canadian First Army was beating back Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army, which had bombed the dikes and flooded most of the island of Walcheren. When Antwerp opened, I was given the assignment of developing supply lines from it, and I led the first couple of convoys there and back.

  Just to the west of Eindhoven the farming village of Veldhoven had missed out on the bombing. We took over some farmland and buildings on its outskirts, and almost overnight there was a steady stream of trucks arriving from Antwerp and guarded convoys going up the corridor toward Nijmegen. My CO was a Colonel George McDougal. He had an easy, collegial style. He invited us to be creative and taught us to be respectful of the locals. He would say, “These people have had a hell of a time of it.” Shortly after I got there he gave me orders to go see the mayor of Veldhoven. Now, here is one of those odd little quirks of fate that seem to determine so much in life; there were no jeeps available at that hour of that morning, and I didn’t want to drive anything larger into the village, so I rode a bicycle.