Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

  Sometime after Christmas Sarah announced to me that she had to go to Amsterdam to see her sister. “Good,” I said. “Let me engineer some leave. I’d like to meet her, and I’d like to see Amsterdam.”

  “No,” she said cautiously. “Listen, Tom, I have to do this myself and to ask you to let me and to not question me. Can you do that for me? Please can you trust me?”

  She said she’d be gone five days, and she was gone nine. In that time I imagined many things: her sister was in trouble. Perhaps legal trouble. Her sister was a Nazi. She was pregnant. She was pregnant by a German. She was one of those pathetic, disowned women wandering around with her head shorn.

  When Sarah came back she was chastened. After a time I asked her, “Is your sister all right?”

  “Please don’t ask me, Tom. Please understand that I can’t talk about it.”

  “Sarah,” I said, “it’s not good for us to keep secrets.”

  “I know, but I have to. I made a promise.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  She turned then and looked in my eyes. “Let me tell you a story.”

  “Is it about your sister?”

  It turned out to be about Sarah when she was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. There was a student in her form named Bep who was immature and quite unpopular. Bep did things that invited teasing, like picking her nose and being inappropriate. Also, she was fat, and she smelled because she didn’t bathe often enough. So people teased her, and then she’d make matters worse by crying or fighting. One day the headmaster called Sarah to his room. Naturally she thought she was in some sort of trouble, but what he wanted was for Sarah to be Bep’s friend. He said things about Bep as if Sarah were an adult. He asked her to sit with Bep during breaks and to include her in her group of friends. He seemed to think that Sarah was well adjusted and could help Bep.

  I said that that must have been quite flattering.

  “It was awful. No thirteen-year-old is well adjusted. I was just as insecure as everyone else.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t do anything, and then I had great feelings of guilt that grew and grew the longer I did nothing. It was terrible. He never should have asked me to do it. I was a child.”

  Was she telling me that she was not as strong as I’d come to believe she was? “And now I shouldn’t be asking you to tell me about your sister, is that what you are saying?”

  “Yes.” Then she said slowly, “I shall tell you about my sister when you leave. I shall tell you on that day.”

  My leaving was on both our minds. In the final weeks, Sarah began to teach me Dutch quite purposefully, and I began to really work at it. It was as if we were trying to forge some more permanent connection, something I could take with me or something I could bring back.

  One spring weekend we took a trip to Antwerp, and the train was full of GIs headed for Ostend to ship out. Three sat in our compartment, and I remember that they started to talk about home, about cold beer and hot showers and thick steaks. About angel-food cake, strawberry shortcake, and cold watermelon. Then they talked about baseball, about all the ballplayers who had enlisted, about the retired players and kids who’d replaced them. One said that the St. Louis Browns even had a one-armed outfielder and the Reds had a fifteen-year-old pitcher.

  “Fifteen?” the other two asked each other.

  When the GIs left, I caught Sarah watching me. It was as if she’d learned something new about me, something she didn’t quite understand or perhaps even trust, as if she’d seen me in my element for the first time. She asked me if I felt like the young soldiers.

  The little I remember about that weekend isn’t very pleasant. I remember a lot of bombed-out buildings, elegant old buildings ruined. I remember the whores of Antwerp. They were also old and damaged-looking. I remember our bleak little room and that we quarreled and went to bed angry with each other. I remember that we walked beside the River Scheldt which was still littered with war wreckage: things floating, things washed ashore, the burned and half-sunken shells of launches and barges. I remember Sarah saying, “What’s wrong, Tom? Are you all right, darling?” I was quite sure she’d never called anyone “darling” before. I was quite sure she’d been waiting a long time to do so.

  I remember that I ate mussels for the first time, that we dipped hunks of bread into the broth they’d been steamed in, that Sarah gave me a lesson in dark Belgian beers, that I called her the docent of the beer museum. It wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t the romantic escape we had planned; we had wanted it to be a gay occasion.

  Everything that came afterward was anticlimactic. We were waiting, and waiting is an anxious state. One evening we rode our bikes to the café in Dommels, hoping to recapture the good time we’d had there, but our effort was forced. I was trying to speak Dutch, which I did then at the level of a very young child, and Sarah was laughing at me good-naturedly. She wanted me to say “Scheveningen,” which is a place name so hard to pronounce that it has been used in the past by the Dutch army to unmask spies.

  I tried and tried. “I’ll get it,” I said.

  “You’ll never, ever be able to say it,” she said, laughing, “not like a Dutchman.” And then she was serious and honest in a way I was not prepared for. She said that Holland, unlike the United States, was not a nation of immigrants, that everyone there was Dutch and had been for a thousand years, and besides, now it had been bombed to bits. She wondered why we would not logically go to my home in Illinois. “I know you think I’d be bored. …”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then try to help me understand what it is, Tom.”

  What it was was that I was twenty-four years old, had been the first in my family to get a college degree, and now I’d been to Europe. I was quite impressed by how far I’d come and quite embarrassed by where I’d come from, by my father saying “right cheer” for “right here” and falling asleep in front of the fire with his shirttail sticking through his fly, by my mother putting canned soup in the meatloaf.

  “It’s not that you’d be bored, really. You just don’t understand,” I said, wanting very much for that to be the fact and not that she’d wounded my pride by being amused by my Dutch. “The people I live with are farmers. They’re very, very provincial. They’re worse than that. They’re small-minded, narrow-minded. To tell you the truth, half of them are German, if you know what I mean. …”

  “No, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Of course you do. They’re German. Don’t make me spell it out.”

  “Because they’re German and I’m Dutch?”

  “Because they’re German and you’re a Jew, for gosh sake. There aren’t any Jews in the town.”

  She said that she was half Jewish and that no one would have to know.

  I said everyone would know. For that moment I wanted to have authority over her, to know something she didn’t.

  “They’re all anti-Semites? Are your parents?”

  “No, of course not. They just don’t know any Jews.”

  “Have you told them I’m Jewish? I don’t think you have. What have you told them about me?”

  “Well, you know, just general information.”

  “General information? Like my name, rank, and serial number?”

  “Oh, Sarah, no, of course not. Like you work for me. Like I’ve been a guest in your home.”

  “Have you told them that we’re talking of marrying and spending our lives together?”

  “Look, I thought I’d—”

  “Have you told them about me at all? Do they even know I exist?”

  “Of course they do.”

  “They don’t, do they? You haven’t even told them about me. Are you embarrassed by me?” She stood up suddenly with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry. I can’t be with you. I must go.” I thought she’d gone to the toilet, but then she was pedaling her bike right past me. I looked for the waiter. I called for the check. I dug money o
ut of my pockets. I rode after her, but she had sprinted ahead or turned off.

  What I realized as I rode along was that I’d never really thought about taking Sarah home with me because I’d always assumed that I’d stay here, that I’d become a Dutchman, that we’d wear Wellingtons into the woods and ride bikes and drink beer in cafés for the rest of our lives. I thought that the status and standing I had as an American officer would somehow continue after the war. I’d never thought at all about making a living or pronouncing “Scheveningen” or how inchoate and unrealistic my fantasy had been, and as soon as I saw it, I was too embarrassed to admit it. So I didn’t. Now, riding faster and faster, it was all I wanted to do. Of course we can live in America, I wanted to say. Of course my parents will love you, and yes, I’ve told them all about you, especially that I love you and want to marry you. I don’t care where we live as long as we are together.

  I was so lost in all of this that I missed a turn and was a long time getting to Sarah’s house. When I finally did, I knocked several times at her door before her stepfather came. “She is not here,” he said. The next day, when I knocked again, he said, “She has been called away to Hilversum.”

  “But my orders have finally come through. I’m shipping out now. Possibly tomorrow.” I must have seemed desperate to him because he was a little frightened.

  “But she is not here. It is the truth. She is gone. I am very sorry.”

  And that was it. I never saw her again. I rode in the back of a jeep to Belgium half in a daze but still sure we’d reconnect. Then I was in England, writing endless drafts of a letter saying everything to her that I had said to myself on my long bike ride and finally “Please, please forgive me. Please, please write me. Know that I do love you so.” Then I was on board a ship. Then I was home.

  For the next sixty years I wondered what had really happened. Did I somewhere in my deep recesses harbor ancient, atavistic fears and hatreds? And what had Sarah meant by “I can’t be with you”? Now? Had she meant “I need a moment alone,” or had she meant “I can’t ever be with someone like you”? Had she discovered that thing in me that we all fear will eventually be found out?

  I still don’t know, Nora, but I think I may soon. Sarah is alive after all. The details aren’t important except that her name isn’t Sarah van Praag at all. It is Pim de Wit; don’t ask me why because I don’t know. What I do know is that she’s here, she’s very angry, and she wants me to leave. So, strangely, I have hope. What I also know is that all these years, I’ve never spoken of that time, but neither have I forgotten it, and I’ve never forgotten Pim de Wit and the night we invented love.

  Veldhoven, Spring 2012

  Much later Pim would also remember that night for me and would laugh when I used Tom’s phrase “we invented love.”

  “That man,” she would say.

  We would be sitting in her spring garden amidst budding flowers, drinking tea. She would speak with the candor and directness for which the Dutch are famous. She would, despite the differences in our ages, speak to me confidentially as one woman to another, leaning a little toward me as if we were two people who knew something that one-half of the human race did not, and I guess maybe we did. She would look at me with those steady, very blue eyes, those still-water eyes that surprised me at first because Tom had never written about them, but then maybe eyes are one of the things that men don’t know about or understand. She would say to me, “Of course I liked him. He was tall and handsome and had that wonderful smile, a bit too wonderful if you know what I mean. There were stories—we had been warned about Americans that they were, oh, I don’t know, glib and insincere. I kept waiting for him to be those things, kept expecting him to be. That smile. I thought he used it as a weapon, and here he didn’t even know he possessed it. And yes, I was falling in love, but reluctantly. I was fighting myself over it. I was angry with myself about it. I just didn’t trust him. Not until the night you’ve asked about. And oh, yes, I remember it. I’ve always remembered it.

  “We were coming back from somewhere on our bikes. We were riding along a river, and we stopped to adjust something on one of our bikes and started to look up at the stars. All day long I had thought that he was going to try to make love to me that night. And I had thought of what I would do, how I would turn my face from his, how I would say no. But then he was so frightened and uncertain that I felt awful. I felt guilty and cynical, I guess, and—well, yes—in love for the first time in my life. And though I knew nothing at all myself, I suddenly knew that I knew much more than he did.

  “We had put our bikes down. We were standing on the banks of the river, and he tried to hold me. Awkwardly. He put his arms around me, and I started to put my arms up between us as you do—I’m sure you’ve done it—but before I could, I felt his heart beating. I felt his heart beating against my breastbone, and I felt him trembling, and, well, it disarmed me.” She said it also thrilled her and frightened her and sent a surge of desire through her like an electrical current. “I had felt desire before that night, but I’d never known what to do with it. That night I did. I could feel my body preparing itself for love.” And her defenses dissolved. They were gone. “I looked at him again. He was a man-child, a little boy, a baby. He, too, was scared to death, so I took a step back and looked into his bewildered eyes. And then I smiled at him as you might smile at a little boy or a puppy, perhaps, and I said, ‘Touch your hands to mine. Go ahead.’ And then we were holding hands like that, just hands, face to face. ‘Feel my hands,’ I told him. He was uncertain, so I said, ‘Now touch your forehead to mine,’ and then I said, ‘Touch your nose to mine,’ and then he said, ‘Oh, Sarah,’ as I’d always wanted someone to say my name even though it wasn’t my name, and then we were kissing.” Now Pim laughed and shook her head. “Oh, my, did we kiss. The next day my face was a little chafed, and my lips were swollen. Do you know what I mean?”

  I should tell you that at the moment when Pim asked me that question, I did not, but I should also tell you that I do now; that is also part of this story.

  “And then, I don’t know … I’m sure we did it all wrong.” She laughed again. “We hadn’t any idea what we were doing, neither of us. I lifted him with my hips, and he entered me, he parted my flesh as if he’d always been waiting for me and I’d always been waiting for him. And then I quite suddenly felt everything I’d ever wanted to feel, and I knew in an instant what I’d always wanted to know. We didn’t stop kissing for a long time.” Those blue eyes had a faraway look in them now. Then they looked at me, and Pim smiled and asked a bit incongruously, “Can I pour you some more tea, Nora? Would you like a biscuit?”

  Part Two

  Veldhoven, Autumn 2007

  The first woman was too young. She was pretty in that uncomplicated, sanitized, spearmint-scented way of dental technicians, and she had the easy patter about pets and children and holidays one step removed by good but not perfect English. She’d been to Chicago, stayed in a hostel “near the university,” gone to a free concert in Grant Park, and eaten deep-dish pizza. She took x-rays as she told him all of this, scraped and polished and flossed his teeth.

  The second woman was older, shorter, and plumper. When Tom said he’d never had a female dentist before, she said all dentists should be women because their hands are smaller and their fingers nimbler, and he knew they were having an exchange that she’d had a thousand times with a thousand patients. She studied his mouth, and he studied her face; how else could he have gotten so close? Her chin doubled as she leaned over him; her eyes were magnified by safety glasses and her pores by proximity. Her smallest finger was sharply tapered at the end, just as his mother’s had been. That made him take a little breath. She was taking little breaths, too. They were breathing together, Tom and his daughter, alone and together in that little room.

  “So you are an American, then?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why are you living in Veldhoven?”

  “I’m staying with my son. He work
s for Philips.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My father was an American,” she said.

  “Uh.”

  “Soldier in the war. He abandoned us. Not really me. I hadn’t been born yet. He abandoned my mother. You are having a cavity. Make an appointment, and I’ll fill it.”

  In the days between the appointments, Tom thought mostly about two sentences. The first was “He abandoned us.” He tried to put together all that he knew and all that he could assume. The letter Julia had destroyed must surely have told him of Ella’s existence, and when he hadn’t answered it, the rest of the narrative was easy to imagine: Cavalier American soldier impregnates trusting Dutch girl and leaves. Takes no responsibility. Offers no support. No wonder Pim de Wit was so hurt and angry. And all these years that he’d been remembering her with fondness and longing, she had been hating him. She had hated him for decades, fifty times longer than she had loved him, if she ever had.

  The second sentence Tom couldn’t get out of his mind was “My father was an American.” What would he have done if he’d gotten Sarah’s second letter? Well, certainly supported Ella, maybe gotten to know her, possibly helped raise her. He imagined her visiting during the summers, saw a ten-year-old Ella in the rearview mirror sitting on the backseat of a station wagon, reading to Tony, Brooks, and my mother, Christine. But of course Julia never would have tolerated or allowed this, which was why she had destroyed the letter, he was sure. What would have happened then? Trans-Atlantic phone calls. Long letters. Yearly trips to Holland. Or perhaps it would have precipitated the break that never came and maybe should have. The undivorced.