by Peter Ferry
That feeling was compounded by the e-mail he got from me the next day when he walked to the library. “Tom, Carly says Uncle Brooks has filed a criminal complaint against you with the State’s Attorney for the misuse of Uncle Tony’s funds. Apparently anyone can file a complaint about anything, so in and of itself it doesn’t mean much and won’t unless the State’s Attorney files charges. Still, I thought you’d want to know. Nora.”
Tom did not want to know. He did not want to think about his old life. He wanted to live in Holland, walk Leo, throw sticks with Dickie, wait for Ella, and hope for Pim. That afternoon he got dressed up. He knotted his tie, buffed his shoes, smoothed his jacket, clipped his nose hairs, and walked to Dickie’s building. Someone let him in, and he went up in the elevator and knocked three times on Dickie’s door. He knew the third time was out of frustration. Dickie wasn’t home. A man came down the hall and paused. “Hospital,” he said. “Heart. Sorry. Bad English.”
“Heart?” asked Tom.
Tom took a cab directly to the hospital in which he had been a patient only days earlier. He sat at Dickie’s bedside.
“Bum ticker,” said the Dutchman. “Okay now.” But he made no effort to lift his head.
“Can I call anyone?”
“No one left. One nephew in South Africa.”
Their exchange was desultory and awkward to the extent that Tom wasn’t sure he should even have come, but when he was leaving Dickie said, to his surprise, “Do come again. Please.” So Tom went every day. He did so with some chagrin, knowing that the sick man was an easy mark and his own attentiveness was self-indulgent.
On the second day Dickie was restless. He had trouble getting comfortable. He asked Tom, “Do you ever worry about death?”
“Not much anymore. I used to when I was young. You?”
“Never,” said Dickie with some feeling. It was a little bit as if they were strangers on a plane that was crashing who looked at each other across the aisle. Or was it as in Hopkins’s poem himself for whom he grieved? Or was it displacement? Was he like one of those people who lavish their attention on dogs and cats because they can’t figure out how to have real relationships with people? And was this true with Saskia, too? One day he had found the refrigerator standing open and empty. “Kaput,” she said, and Tom went right out and bought a brand-new bigger, better one. When it was delivered, she seemed a little nonplussed, and he realized that his extravagance made her uneasy. Did he make everyone uneasy now, or was it mostly himself? Would he ever feel comfortable with Ella or ever see Pim again? “These things take time,” he heard Dickie saying, Ella saying, a woman in the café saying to a friend. It was a Dutch mantra, one said automatically and in just such a way and to which Dutch ears were apparently inured, and he wondered if Americans had mantras of their own: “It will all work out in the end,” “Everything happens for a reason,” “It’s all good.” No, it isn’t. He felt suddenly hopeless, or was he just tired? Very, very tired. Death was very much on his mind, and he wondered if it would be okay to die now, if he could go in peace.
“Never been religious,” said Dickie the next day. “Don’t believe in an afterlife. Except children. They’re your afterlife.” Was he commenting on the fact that Tom had three and now four or the fact that he himself had none? “That’s Aristotle, you know: producing children is as close as we can come to participating in the eternal and divine.”
Tom did not know and was impressed that Dickie did. He thought it an odd thing for a childless man to remember. Perhaps not.
“Love’s eternal, too, you know,” said Dickie as if he had once believed it a little more resolutely.
On the fourth day Dickie complained about the food and talked of going home, and Tom thought that maybe he was turning the corner. That evening he shopped for cheeses, meats, bread, fresh fruit, and even a bottle of Rosé d’Anjou, Dickie’s favorite. The next day a nurse stopped him with a hand on his arm as he was about to open Dickie’s door. “Wait,” she said. “He died, your friend. I am very sorry.”
“Richard Druyf? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am sure. It just happened.”
Dickie’s clothes and bedclothes and hair were mussed, apparently by attempts to resuscitate him; a portable defibrillator still stood at the foot of the bed. Tom tried to imagine the scene: the paddles, the nurses leaning over him, doctors hurrying in. Dickie looked at peace now, but as if he recently hadn’t been, as if he had, perhaps, just come in out of a storm. He was Dickie and then again he wasn’t; in fact, he was the farthest thing from Dickie.
Tom went home and had the picnic by himself in the garden, including more than half the bottle of wine. That night he lay with his head against his pillow, listening to his heart beat in his ear, or perhaps listening for it to stop beating. Was he next? Was Dickie just a tired bit of foreshadowing in Tom’s story? Silly. Presumptuous. Nonetheless, Dickie was gone, and Tom was alone again.
He was alone at the funeral, too, sitting in a pew by himself. The patterns and cadences and prayers were the same, though the words were Dutch. A soprano sang something he didn’t know in a plaintive voice. Sunshine came in through the high, clear windows of the little church. There were more people there than he expected. Some cried. Dickie had had friends.
Tom walked home through the park where he and Dickie had so often met. He saw Pim on the bench long before he knew who she was. When he did it was because of the familiar way she was sitting, holding her head, crossing her ankles, and he stopped. “Hello,” he said.
“I am sorry about your friend,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“I knew him, too.”
“Dickie?”
“His wife, really. Not well, but you get to know who the native English speakers are.”
“Of course. You would, wouldn’t you?”
After so much and so long, their talk was easy and ordinary, or seemed that way. He might have been on his way to the grocery store, and she might have been reminding him to pick up a thing or two. “Butter?” “Yes, and some fresh parsley; I want to make those potatoes you like.” For just an instant it was possible to imagine that they had never been apart.
“I have some photographs of yours. Ella gave them to me.” She sifted through them and put one down on the bench beside her.
“This was your son Anthony?”
Tom knew which picture it was even at that distance. “Yes.”
“I want to tell you something,” she said. “Once I saw an American movie with an actor in a red sports car. I think perhaps it was James Dean. The top was down. The wind was blowing in his blond hair. Well, all this time, all these years, I thought that was your son. I hated you for choosing him over Ella.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“And now this.” Beside the photograph she was laying the letter Tom had written after Julia’s death, which I had recently found and sent as he had asked me to. “I’m not sure what to make of it, Thomas. I guess you didn’t know about Ella. I guess that wasn’t your fault. Okay, but I’m not sure what difference that makes.”
“It means I didn’t come here for her. I came for you.”
“You don’t have any idea what you are saying.”
“I know exactly what I am saying.”
She laughed then, not cruelly but knowingly. “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. I barely remember you. You had a romantic soul, that is what I remember, and I loved you for it once, that’s true, but I was twenty-three, and now I am eighty-four, and it seems like foolishness. And believe me, you do not know who I am. You know nothing about me. I am here to ask you to leave it that way. To leave me alone. I truly want to be left alone, Thomas. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand. I do. And I will leave you alone. I promise. But in case you change your mind, I shall be right here on this bench every day at one o’clock.”
“Thomas, please …”
“Do not worry,” he said aware that she had now spoken his name thr
ee times. “I sit down somewhere every day about one to read my paper anyway. Now it’s going to be here.”
He didn’t look at her, and she was silent for a moment. Then she said, “That’s from a movie, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“About being on a bench at the same time every day. Oh, Thomas, you still think life is a movie.”
“All I mean is—”
“Listen, when I was a girl and I heard the parable of the prodigal son, I always identified with the other son, the one who stayed and worked hard and did his duty.”
At first Tom thought that this was a non sequitur, but then he knew it was not, that it was something she had wanted to say for a very long time, perhaps all these many years. At the same time he knew that she immediately regretted saying it. Perhaps that was why she was now walking away. And there was something in all of this that suddenly gave him a little hope. Maybe that they had had the same feeling at the same moment, that they had both known that she shouldn’t have said what she had just said, that for an instant it had compromised the dignity he had always thought uncompromisable. Surely she knew that as well. Surely they knew it together, as they had once known so many things. He felt like hurrying after her, like taking her by the shoulders and turning her toward him. Instead he watched her until she was gone. She was old now, but there was in her step the same feline grace grown a little fragile that she had had as a girl. What was it that she so desperately did not want him to know?
Tom picked up the photographs Pim had left on the bench. He shuffled through them absently. He touched the letter she had left there with his forefinger. He held it for a while, trying to remember what it said. He couldn’t. He knew what he had wanted it to say ten years earlier and what he wanted it to say now, but he wasn’t sure what it said. In fact, he was a little afraid of what it said. Finally he took the letter from its envelope and slowly unfolded it.
May 11, 1998
Dear Sarah,
I am writing to tell you I recently discovered that many years ago you wrote me a letter I never received. It was destroyed. I think it must have been the last letter you wrote me. I think you must have written it in 1948. And while I do not know what it said, I spend a good bit of my time these days thinking about that. I guess I hope it said good-bye. I guess I hope it said you had fallen in love with someone else, and I guess I hope you’ve lived happily ever since.
I have not. I have had a long and healthy life, but I was never able to replace the love you and I once had. It has been through all these years very precious and important to me. I have always regretted that we quarreled, that we parted, and that I never came back for you.
I would love to hear from you. I would love to know all about you, and I would love to know that you are well, but if this letter is an intrusion, please forgive me and forget it. Just know this much: other than my children, you have been in many ways the most important person in my life.
Respectfully,
Tom
Later, in fact much later, Pim would admit that in the days that followed that day in the park, she often passed by his bench on the street behind him, sometimes on a bus, sometimes in Ella’s car, always hoping he would not be there, and each time she felt frustration and anger until one day he really wasn’t there, and then to her surprise and embarrassment she felt something like concern, and then she knew that this thing was not going to end easily. “Damn your soul,” she said at the time. “Damn your soul!” But that was later.
Now a man passed Tom’s bench, riding along the path on a bicycle. He was holding a sheet of plywood perhaps four feet square against his back with both hands down low behind him and turned backward. Tom wondered what he would do when he had to stop. Perhaps the world would see what he was doing and stop for him. Cars would come to a halt at green lights, crossing guards would hold up their hands, and pedestrians would step back onto the curb. Another man came along, walking two dogs, one large, one small, one black, one white, neither on a lead. Tom thought about Leo; he’d need to go out soon. Coming the other way, a young mother on a bicycle rode by with two small children. One sat in a seat behind her; the other sat in a seat suspended from the handlebars in front of her.
Tom would never see the plywood man again, but he would see the dog walker from time to time, and he would see the bike woman and her children often. Eventually they would nod and say “Goedemiddag” to each other. In time the older child, the one on the back, would watch for him and open and close her hand to him, and he would have become a tiny part of her life: the old man on the park bench with the friendly smile. De oude Amerikaan.
Veldhoven, Autumn 2007
Of course in the matter of reading the newspaper, Tom had dissembled; he usually saved it to read later in the garden or by Mrs. Waleboer’s little blue enamel potbelly stove with a glass of beer. So what? Now he read it a little earlier on the park bench. What was the difference? In the rain he read it under an umbrella. In the wind he folded it into quarters.
Dickie’s nephew from South Africa was a big, bewildered man anxious to bury his uncle, finish his business, and go home. Tom helped him inventory Dickie’s possessions and select the papers, letters, paintings, books, and jewelry he would take with him; he welcomed the opportunity to seem capable. For everything else, including furniture and clothing, Tom introduced the nephew to Jan Dekker, who arranged an estate sale. In thanks the nephew presented Tom with a box of everyday, practical items, probably the contents of Dickie’s desk: stationery, pens, pencils, paper clips, rubber bands. It was the gesture of a niggardly, inept person, and it made Tom feel even more capable, which was, he supposed, the real gift.
Sometimes Tom looked at the photographs that Ella had left with him, especially those of her daughter, Hanneke, because she reminded him a bit of the Pim he had once known, although she was much thinner, and her hair was lank, maybe unwashed, so that Tom wondered in a detached way, as you might about someone you saw on a train, if she used drugs. Sometimes she held an infant, but, at least in these pictures, she had no partner or ring on her finger. In one she wore a tank top that revealed a sleeve of tattoos resembling Hieronymus Bosch figures on her right arm. Harry Bosch. Tom thought of Michael Connelly’s tough-guy detective, and for just a moment he was homesick for hard-boiled, hard-baked American idealism—the hell with this always sensible Dutch practicality—and for another moment he missed corn dogs, flag lapel pins, trailer parks, “God Bless America,” and all the other silly American detritus he’d left behind. And he thought of his trip to Amsterdam to buy books, of the kid from Indianapolis he’d come across sitting cross-legged on the pavement, his guitar case open in front of him, tuning his instrument, telling rambling, funny stories in that easy Hoosier drawl to a crowd of almost a hundred people. As Tom had looked over people’s shoulders, he had been proud of that kid. And why hadn’t he remembered Harry Bosch when he was going up and down the aisles of the American Book Center? He’d give anything right now for a good Harry Bosch novel. Harry in his cantilevered house dangling over the expressway just miles from the San Andreas Fault in the mad, amorphous jumble that is Los Angeles, where nothing matches, nothing goes together, everything is out of place. Perhaps he’d grown a bit tired of Dutch uniformity, of bricks. If they could stand for stability, they could also stand for monotony. And he’d grown a little tired of people who wore drab clothing and drove discreet cars and hid their big houses in the woods. He wouldn’t have minded seeing a bleached blond in a big Cadillac convertible with vanity plates that said “Look at me” or “36D” or something else outrageous.
But this appreciation was distant and nostalgic. He knew he couldn’t leave. Not now. Not when Pim was upset, when she was feeling something, when she was not feeling nothing, which was what he half expected and feared after their two lifetimes had passed—that they would have a cup of tea, sum everything up in half an hour, and have nothing else to say. But that was not what had happened, and now he knew two things with certainty: that wa
s not what was going to happen, and something else was going to happen. He also felt that Pim knew these things, that they knew them in common; they knew them together. He hoped like hell he wasn’t crazy, that he wasn’t making all this stuff up like some mad stalker.
Once a week Tom trooped off to the library, smiled at the librarians, sat down at the computer, and checked his e-mail from me. Occasionally he sent a short reply, if only to prove he could do it; it did not seem to him a very civilized form of communication. Then one day he got this note from me: “Tom, Heads up. Carly tells me that Mother and Uncle Brooks are making plans to come to The Netherlands in December. I’ll let you know the dates. Nora.” At about the same time Jan Dekker told him the hearing had been postponed until December.
“Do you know why?”
“No. Maybe because of the end of the year. Maybe they are having, ja, too many cases. But the new date is the day your visa extension expires, so if you are denied, you might have to leave the country very quickly.” What worried the lawyer was that for Tom to reveal his assets was to risk them because Brooks might try to attach them. But if he didn’t reveal them, his case would be that much weaker than the one made by petition that had already been denied. “That may be the reason for the postponement. Their advocat may be trying to find out what you have and where it is.”