Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

  “I haven’t much of a chance, have I?”

  “Not really. Not unless you are willing to reveal that you have a Dutch daughter.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then I am thinking that maybe your best chance is to go alone.”

  “Without you, you mean? Why would I do that?” Tom feared suddenly that he had offended the other man with the abruptness of his response.

  “Because if I am there, I will have to speak for you. It’s my job. And your best chance is to speak for yourself. Only then can they see you are not incompetent.”

  “Is this about your fee? I’ll be happy to pay you. I think I should be paying you.”

  “No, strategy. I’ll charge you if you want, and I’ll go with you if you want, but I don’t think it is a good idea, and I would like to see you succeed. You have opened my eyes, you see, and I am thinking that perhaps you can open the eyes of the hearing officer, but you’ll only have one chance, and it’s a bit of a small one; hearings are brief. The officer taps the gavel, and, well, it is over.”

  Then Pim came back. She stood in front of his park bench as if summoned or sent, and her tone had changed. There was some graciousness in it and perhaps even some contrition, like someone who had wanted too badly to win and now had won and was a little embarrassed about it. “I know you are leaving, and I want to thank you; it is for the best.” To this intelligence Tom did not react at all, did not disagree or even look quizzical, and later he would think that fortunate. What he did do was imagine the conversation that must have taken place with Ella, and it added something to the picture he was forming in his mind of his daughter, which existed largely in the negative, as much of things that were not there as of things that were. What was not there in this case was strict adherence to the truth, impulsiveness, unwillingness to manipulate or to sacrifice the ends for the means, and, surprisingly, distrust of him; she must have gambled that he would understand and not give her away. “She wants to be able to see you before you go,” said Pim, “and, well, I think that’s fair.” Here it was clear that she had been convinced that to acquiesce in this was to be generous. “And she wants me to tell you the things about her that only a mother can know, and, well, I said I would.” And now Tom saw Pim’s half of the conversation, saw her leaning slightly, saw her listening carefully and watching and nodding. He remembered her once doing all these things with him when they had talked of the life they would lead together.

  Pim told Tom about Ella. She sat down on the edge of the bench quite tentatively at first—still holding a book she had apparently brought for him—and talked, also quite tentatively at first, but then less so. He welcomed the opportunity to watch her without feeling like a voyeur; he had forgotten just how elegant she was: her raised brow, her squared shoulders, the movement of her hands.

  Ella had been a quiet child, not shy, but someone who didn’t want or need to say very much. She had spent much of her childhood in her room, drawing pictures of horses, so that Pim had feared she was antisocial, but she wasn’t. She was just naturally confident. She had always known her own mind. She had gone on being a little plain, a little plump, largely unconcerned about her appearance and quietly happy in a self-contained way most of the time. Pim described a day when she had looked out the window to see the seven-year-old Ella coming down the street through a sudden heavy downpour that had sent other kids running in all directions, bicyclists racing for shelter, mothers in their aprons hurrying in their doors. Not Ella; she trudged along, red slicker buttoned to her throat, rain hat pulled down over her eyes, lugging her book bag, until she trudged right through the front door that Pim was holding open for her. “And that’s how she’s gone through life.”

  Pim smiled at the memory, and Tom recognized her smile as you might a voice on the telephone many years later. It was the smile he had remembered for so long and then forgotten for longer, the one that began as a tiny crease, a comma, a momentary dimple on one side of her mouth, and then, with a little bob of her head and the crinkling of her eyes, migrated wryly across her mouth, opening it and exposing her teeth. And suddenly she was a girl again, the girl who all those years ago had squinted into the sun and first shared the smile with him. It was a playful smile, and he recalled now her playfulness, which had surprised him at first because it contrasted with her patina of refinement. He remembered her ability to turn almost anything into a game: thumb wrestling and who could read the most pages in an hour or kiss the longest or swim the farthest underwater. He remembered admiring her resourcefulness, her refusal ever to be bored at a time when he had often been. It was this as much as the competence with which she’d guided him to the underground and the Germans that he admired in her.

  But there was more to Pim, too. There was sadness, there was vulnerability, and there was fear. And sitting there, listening and watching, he realized he hadn’t known these things were in her, or perhaps they hadn’t been in her or he had been too young or too much in love to see them. And maybe what she was afraid of was his image of her. So gilded. So romanticized. This woman sitting before him was brittle. She was tarnished and damaged.

  When Pim and Bert Hendriksen separated, Ella was eleven. She was badly hurt, and it was only then that Pim began to tell her about her father—that he was an American soldier who had died in the war. From that moment on Ella was in love with all things American. She played with hula hoops and Barbie dolls and wore a baseball cap. She loved Disney movies, especially Old Yeller. She watched Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy, and later All in the Family. While other girls her age were devoted to the Beatles, she loved the Monkees. She went to Amsterdam to march in protests against the Vietnam War and dressed like American teenagers she saw in magazines. She practiced Americanisms in her Dutch accent: “cool,” “far out,” even “y’all.” She called her friends and family “you guys” and smoked Marlboro cigarettes.

  Tom wasn’t sure why Pim was telling him all of this. Perhaps because she’d promised to. Maybe to say he’d always been part of their lives, or maybe to say he’d never been.

  When Ella went to university at Utrecht, she had a boyfriend from California named Don Williamson. She was forever dragging home Americans whom she met at the university, in train stations, at campgrounds: skinny, stoned, long-haired kids with gigantic backpacks stuffed full of dirty, smelly clothes.

  “And you took them all in?”

  “Her grandparents did. Ella was living with my mother and father then.” She did not say why, and again Tom was aware of missing chapters, of things unspoken.

  At some point along the way Ella figured out that she was too young to have a father who had died in the war, so Pim had concocted an even more elaborate lie. In it Ella’s father was a fighter pilot whose plane had been shot down during Operation Market Garden. He had been found, sheltered, and nursed by the Dutch underground, of which Pim had been a member. Their plan was for her to join him in the United States, but he’d been stationed in the Aleutian Islands and then Korea, where he had been shot down again and killed.

  “Oh, that,” Ella said to Tom later, rolling her eyes. “I never believed any of it. It was obviously made up. But I did have a fantasy that you would one day try to find me, and now I have found that you didn’t even know about me at all.”

  I know about you now, he thought as he studied her across the table, this solid, strong-willed little woman with her sudden smile and brash laughter who had quietly begun to crawl into him somehow. Or trudge. What he felt for her was very different from what he felt for Brooks, my mother, or Tony, something he’d become aware of since he hadn’t been able to see her. Was this feeling because he had just met her? Was it because he had missed out on her whole life? No history. No scar tissue. They were an experiment in the laboratory of love. A case study. A National Enquirer headline: “Man Has Sixty-Year-Old Baby at Age Eighty-Five.” Or was this a different feeling because he had loved her mother and hadn’t loved Julia? She was very slowly beginning to fill out in front of him, to infla
te like a balloon. He could now recognize her handwriting. He knew what she took in her coffee and how she answered the phone.

  “Do you still read?” Pim was asking, standing now, presenting him with the book in her hand. It was the first time she had acknowledged anything from their past or that they’d even had a past, had once traded books and read them aloud to each other.

  “Thank you,” he said. I’m sure it was the present itself, combined with her softer demeanor when she was speaking of Ella, that allowed him to relax a little and try to engage her. Only later that evening, when he’d finished the novella she’d given him, did he realize that it was not a present at all but a warning, a cautionary tale, the story of a couple of their age and time who were absolutely destroyed by love. Now, however, he was hopeful and said, “Do you remember the first book we read to each other?”

  It took her some time to answer or to decide to answer. “A Tale of Two Cities,” she said finally.

  “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’”

  “War always is, they say. Anyway, I’ll not object if you see Ella.”

  “You know it wasn’t Ella I came here to find.”

  “I know, but it’s been too long, Thomas. …”

  “Well, I didn’t know you were going to change your name and hair color and fake your death.”

  Suddenly she looked away. Quite unexpectedly he had made her smile.

  Tom wanted to return Pim’s favor by sending her a book that he thought particularly American and a thank-you note, so he looked in the box of desk contents that Dickie’s nephew had given him. Beneath some stationery he found a small sleeve of embossed cards. Familiar. He took one out. It was a match to the one that now sat on his nightstand that read, “You have not done what you came to do.”

  He sat on the bed holding the two cards. Damn. Dickie. Dickie Druyf. But he did not think for even a moment that this was Dickie the sentimentalist, Rosé d’Anjou Dickie, no, no. This was desperate Dickie, dying Dickie, Dickie who needed one more time to believe in love even if it was someone else’s.

  Veldhoven, Autumn 2007

  Ella came back, too. She brought along her husband, Henk, a big, flat-faced man who needed something to talk about and talked about the elaborate system of dams and bridges that had saved Holland from the sea. Then she brought her children, Robby and Hanneke, who shyly called Tom “Opa.” Hanneke had her baby in a stroller, and Tom held him. But mostly Ella came alone, and mostly she was interested in Tony. So Tom told her all the old stories he could remember. He told her about DeWayne Purchase, who befriended Tony when he was captain of the high school basketball team and Tony was the manager, and how DeWayne took Tony bowling and to a church youth group and one time camping overnight with his Scout troop. And how, when he was studying at the University of Iowa, he invited Tony for a football weekend, how Tony went to Iowa City alone on a Greyhound bus, both quite scared and very proud of himself, how he came home full of tales about parades and marching bands and drinking beer for breakfast at a fraternity party before the game, and how he also came home with a black-and-gold University of Iowa sweat suit that he wore every day for weeks and weeks, refusing to wash it.

  Ella had told her mother that Tom would be leaving when his tourist visa expired, although she knew it had been extended. She said Pim had sat down with a calendar and circled October 9, which was ninety days from the first time she’d seen him. It was less than three weeks away.

  When Pim came back to return his book, Tom was ready for her. “Pim,” he said, “you once wrote me, ‘I love you, and I always will.’ I’ve believed that all my life. I think love is like wisdom, and once you have it, you can’t lose it. I’ve never lost the love I have for you and cannot imagine having lived this life without it. You once wrote, ‘If you can come back, I shall be waiting for you.’ Well, I’ve come back, and here you are. I don’t think it is a coincidence, Pim. Life’s given us one more chance, late and confusing, I admit, but I just don’t think we should turn it down. I made a terrible mistake once; I didn’t believe in you enough. I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

  Tom knew even before he’d finished that he was too proud of this speech, that it sounded a little too much like something from a movie again. But he was to realize then and appreciate later that Pim wasn’t really listening to him very closely. She nodded and smiled a little. “Thomas, there are things you need to know.”

  “I don’t need to know—”

  “Hush,” she said. “Listen. I had a little boy who died when he was just eight. Little boy. I insisted on having his tonsils out because I was tired of his getting sick all the time. My husband objected. He was old-fashioned, and I thought I was being modern. We quarreled, and I won, but the doctor gave too much ether. My husband blamed me. I blamed myself. I had a breakdown, Thomas. I tried to commit suicide. I tried more than once. I was in the hospital for a long time. I had many treatments. Even now I take medication. I take it every day. I need it.” She paused then and waited, watching him. “I lost my son and my husband, and I nearly lost Ella; in some ways I’ve never gotten her back, you see. Thomas, forget me. Go home and live your real life, not your old dream.” She watched him as if to say, Do you understand? Do you finally understand? but she didn’t say that. What she did say was “Life didn’t work out the way I thought it would.” Then she stood up carefully, like someone about to step out of a canoe. “Thank you for the book,” she said. “I enjoyed it. I know you think I’ve stereotyped you, but that hasn’t been it at all.” She said this kindly, but still it swept away what now seemed his mawkish sentiment and rhetoric. He wished he hadn’t spoken, hadn’t put his naïveté and self-centeredness on display for her to be kind about.

  Tom found himself alone, sitting on his park bench for what was likely the last time. He was embarrassed that he’d understood so little, that he’d forced the glass slipper of his delusion on this poor woman, that he’d insisted so mindlessly that his compulsion be hers too. He had tried to make the words she had spoken a detached recitation, but they insisted on being a confession, and then he knew that he was her confessor, that the words had never been spoken before, perhaps had never even been thought, because they had never needed to be. But now they did because he had come here and she had failed to send him away. A confession that was framed thoughtfully and delivered dispassionately, like a précis or a synopsis. A lifetime in two hundred words or less. A reduction. An admission of failure and shame. And why? For him? Certainly not just for herself. To release him? To spare him? Perhaps even to forgive him? Or maybe to invite his condemnation of her secret, ancient sin, which seemed, as do all private sorrows that are long buried, so pedestrian and somehow unterrible when it was finally sitting there for all to look at? Tom thought of Brooks. He thought of Julia. He thought of how easily we can forgive another that which we can never forgive ourselves.

  In the morning he lay in bed until nine thirty, wondering why he didn’t get up, finally realizing that it was because his compulsion was gone, that the sense of urgency that had been planted sixty years before, that had germinated with his discovery of the letter he’d never received and been growing ever since, had dissipated. This concerned him at first because he had come to depend on it so much, and it saddened him, too, because he assumed with some reason that to lose it was to lose Pim as well, and it was, but it was to lose Sarah van Praag, really, the Pim who had never truly been there, or not for a very long time, the Pim who both you and I have suspected all along was perhaps only two-dimensional. And almost certainly Tom was not alone in his misconception. Sometime later Pim herself said to him, “You aren’t what I imagined.”

  “You imagined me?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “But inaccurately?”

  “No, just incompletely.”

  “Are you talking about imagination or perception?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Tom wasn’t sure if her question was linguisti
c or philosophical. “Do you mean that imagination is what you think you see and perception is what you actually see?” he asked her.

  “Isn’t what you think you see what you see?”

  That which was happening to Tom now made it impossible for him to think any longer of Sarah van Praag. To do so was both fantastic and puerile. Instead he thought of Pim de Wit, the old woman who had so matter-of-factly described her wounds and revealed her scars. What, he wondered, had that cost her? He felt like a schoolboy shown lines by a master poet that rendered those he’d labored over doggerel.

  Grace. She had spoken without any pause or inflection that might invite pity or even compassion but somehow offered both. Perhaps it was in the way she leaned slightly toward him, or was that to say, “Please look at me; please see me”? Suddenly he realized that those very words were what he himself had been saying to Brooks and Christine and the world. And he thought again that Pim had probably never before put all those words and feelings together at one time.

  And he finally had seen her, not the pale, distant reflection he’d been trying to grasp for so long but the white-haired, straight-shouldered old woman who’d been standing there all along. And it was she about whom he couldn’t stop thinking now, although he really did try, in defense of himself and deference to her. He tried while baking bread, something he’d once done every week but hadn’t done since Tony’s death. He tried when he sat in front of the computer in the library, checking airfares, and when he wrote long, rambling e-mails to me that he probably hoped sounded wise.

  Finally he went back to Pim’s door, where he hadn’t been since before the Mutt-and-Jeff cops had visited, and he wasn’t at all sure she wouldn’t call them again or slam the door or scream or faint or die.