Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

“Would you have a cup of tea with me?” he asked.

  Standing there, she looked into his eyes for a long time. Finally she said, “Let me get my umbrella.” It had started to drizzle.

  Tom and Pim were never to talk of their last evening together so long before; she was never to tell him that she had found out she was pregnant that day, that she’d doubted him for the first time and run scared, that when she’d gotten home there had been a telegram from the sanatorium saying that her sister was hemorrhaging, that she had gone immediately on the last train because her parents just couldn’t do it. She would not tell him any of this, and he would not ask about what had happened that day. It didn’t seem to matter to either of them anymore.

  What they did talk about, at least at first, were the kinds of things you’d discuss on a plane with a pleasant stranger: music, movies, best vacations, favorite foods.

  “Indian,” she said.

  “I see Indonesian but not Indian here.”

  “No. I eat it in London.”

  “Do you go there often?”

  “As often as I can.”

  He knew nothing about her. He didn’t even remember that she was left-handed. He didn’t know that she sang or gardened or whether she drank wine. He knew she’d once wanted to die and decided against it. Sometimes he thought “to be or not to be” was the only question.

  The next day he knocked again and steeled himself. “Going to the market. Do you need anything?” Again she hesitated; again she fetched her umbrella. So most days it was something: a trip to the library, a bite of lunch, or just a walk. And in the same way they had agreed tacitly not to speak of the past, they agreed not to speak of the future. Instead they talked of the books they were reading. They described plots and characters, and they talked of their families, not of histories and explanations but of doctors’ appointments and stolen bicycles. Or they didn’t talk. They sat and listened to music together. They sat side by side on the couch in Saskia’s parlor and listened to Bach’s sonatas. They sat, they walked, she went down one aisle in the market and he another, and when they parted, it was without any kind of plan or promise. All of this was strangely comfortable; although Tom had been given to them all his life, he found life easier without grand designs and pronouncements.

  One day he went to the library alone again. Perhaps he was hoping for an e-mail from me, something that would persuade him to leave or something that would persuade him to stay. Nothing. He sat looking at one-way fares: Amsterdam/Schipohl to Chicago/O’Hare. He would have to eat crow, he knew, but that could not be the reason for not going home. At the same time, could this fragile, damaged old woman be the reason? He thought of Dickie’s card. Was she what he’d come here for? And how often is what happens not what you think is going to happen if not usually or maybe always? And isn’t that exactly what Pim herself had meant?

  No, saving face could not be his reason for not leaving, but neither could proving Pim wrong be a reason for staying. He thought of her delicate dichotomies: frailty and strength, sadness and contentment, fright and fearlessness. And what if they had married and it had been their child who had died? Would he have abandoned her as her husband had? It was too easy to say no. And was that what he had done to Julia? Left her emotionally stranded until her angst had turned to anger?

  For what felt like a very long time, he’d known exactly what to do, and now he hadn’t any idea at all. Not today, not the next day, not at all. There was this woman, and if he let it, his mind kept coming back to her, and if he didn’t, it came back to her anyway. Still, she was a different woman, the wrong woman, at least not the one he’d expected to find.

  “You’re different, too,” she would say to him.

  “Am I? How?”

  “You are rueful and needy.”

  Rueful. Disquieted, maybe, but he wasn’t troubled. He was oddly free of trouble or anxiety or almost anything at all but a desire to knock on Pim’s door, to see her one more time, to make her smile again. He would tell her about the two cops. “You can be, well, ja, exported,” they had said. She would surely smile at that. As for remorse, he might finally be finished with that, too. What good does it do to regret anything if nothing is what it seems? If those things you’ve always regretted should be celebrated and those things you’ve always celebrated turn out to be disasters?

  Oddly free. Liberated by Dickie’s death from any concerns about his own. Liberated by delusion, by illusion, by deception. How easy it all is then. I was misinformed. Oops. Forget everything I’ve said until now. Go back to square one. Start over.

  He knocked on her door. “Do you drink wine?”

  ‘Yes.”

  “Would you have a glass with me?”

  October 9 came and went. He didn’t mention it, and she didn’t seem to notice at first, but then she did. “Hasn’t your visa expired?”

  “It’s been extended.”

  “Extended?”

  “I need to tell you something, Pim. I’ve applied for residency. I have a hearing coming with the IND, but what I want you to know is that no matter what happens, I won’t stay in Holland without your permission.” He phrased this carefully. He very intentionally did not say “unless you want me to” or even “if you don’t want me to,” nor did he actually ask her permission, and he anticipated several possible answers, but not the one she gave.

  “Did you come here to die?”

  “To die? No. No, I didn’t come here to die. I may die here, but that’s not why I came.”

  “How long?”

  With someone else (Ella? My mother? Me?) he might have pretended that he didn’t understand, but with her he found that he couldn’t. “A year or so.”

  Ella had left them alone for a while, but as the date of Tom’s hearing approached, she reappeared, and with a new agenda. She always seemed to have one, and Tom was both amused and impressed by the compartments of her mind and the ease with which she moved from one to another. Now she seemed to want him to know about her without being quite sure what she wanted him to know, so she talked of her travels and travails. She talked politics and expressed opinions, some as if she knew he’d approve, others as if she was afraid he might not. She had been to North America just once. She liked Toronto and Santa Barbara. She thought Americans were too fat. She was disturbed by people sleeping on park benches and begging with hand-lettered signs at traffic lights. She loved Mexican food.

  “I make some very good enchiladas,” said Tom.

  “I like them with green sauce, and I like chile rellenos.”

  “I can make those too if I can find poblano peppers.”

  They both realized at the same time that that wasn’t going to happen now, that they weren’t likely to start cooking for each other, and that there wasn’t time anyway. Ella talked then about the future. In ninety days he could come back, and then it would be springtime; “The flowers are best in the spring.” Or perhaps she and Henk would come to the States. She seemed to be saying that she wanted this to end at the same time that she didn’t. Tom knew that feeling well, but he was not thinking of endings or next times. He was thinking of roasting poblano peppers over an open flame.

  Veldhoven to Eindhoven to Rijswijk and back, Winter 2007

  Tom got up very early on the day of his hearing, but Saskia got up earlier, and when he came downstairs she served him a breakfast of rolls, cheese, ham, and marmalade, something she had never done before. “Good luck,” she said to him in English.

  “Thank you, Saskia, thank you very much,” he said. What was he to her? Something other than the old man who lived in the spare bedroom or a profligate stranger? The old American? Perhaps.

  Ella gave Tom a ride to the train station at dawn. Their moments together were pregnant with unspoken words. I’m not sure what Ella wanted to say to Tom, but what she said was “I’ve never had a father before. I don’t know very well how to do it, but I want you to have these things,” and she gave him a manila envelope. “Read them on the train. They may help. I
… I hope …” It was all fairly awkward.

  “Thank you,” Tom said, holding the envelope, turning it in his hands. “But I can’t use these. Not unless your mother knows you are doing this. Does she know?”

  “Shh. Go, now. Good luck.” Ella kissed her father on the cheek and squeezed his hand.

  “Does she know, Ella?”

  Ella hesitated before answering. “She knows.”

  “Are you having second thoughts?” Tom had asked Jan Dekker three days earlier.

  “No.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “I think your path is clear. There is nothing to concern you in the doctor’s report or the social worker’s.”

  Tom was feeling the same sharp, perhaps fatalistic sense of equanimity he’d felt on the day in 1944 when he had parachuted into Holland. After weeks of anxiety, he had been calm even when flak had begun exploding around them.

  He’d felt then, he felt now, that the thing was out of his hands. He was prepared, he would do his best, and then it would be over. Even Dekker’s call the day before the hearing hadn’t rattled him. “Their lawyer has asked to be present. The hearing officer says that it’s your hearing, so you may make the decision. Your children have no standing and no rights in the matter. All you have to say is no.”

  “It means they’re coming, Jan. I had an e-mail from my granddaughter.”

  “Okay, then, I think you should give permission. Place all cards on the table.”

  Nor had his parting from Pim the day before unsettled him. He had turned back. “Pim,” he had said, “my hearing is tomorrow.”

  “I know. Ella told me.” He had wanted her to say, “Good luck.” She didn’t.

  At the IND building in Rijswijk, Tom found the room and looked through the window in the door. There was a long table, on one side of which sat a man with an open briefcase. Brooks and my mother sat to his right, and though Tom had thought he’d prepared himself for this possibility, he felt a little lightheaded and had to sit down. He was still sitting there when a woman and a man came briskly down the hall. “Mr. Johnson?” the woman said.

  “Yes.”

  “I am Jeanette Braden, the hearing officer. Let us go in, shall we?”

  When they did, my mother jumped up and Brooks stood up. Tom went to them. He took them both in his arms.

  “Daddy, Daddy …” my mother said.

  “Shh,” Tom said.

  “I just want …” said Brooks. “I’m just trying to do—”

  “Shh.”

  Then they were all sitting down, facing the stenographer and the hearing officer, who was saying, “Very informal here. Not a court of law. We are here to hear the petition of Thomas Johnson that he be granted a Provisional Resident Permit in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. I am IND Deputy Commissioner Jeanette Braden, and I will be hearing Mr. Johnson’s petition. And are you Thomas Johnson?”

  “I am.”

  “And you are?”

  “Anton Smits, representing Brooks Johnson and Christine Panco.” He gestured to them. Jeanette Braden had them identify themselves, then went on, “First, since Mr. Johnson and those who contest his petition do not speak Dutch, we will conduct these proceedings in English.” This she said with a certain reserve that may have been disapprobation. “Second, those who contest this petition are here at Mr. Johnson’s indulgence. As you know, his petition has already been reviewed and denied once. Your written challenge was considered and duly noted at that time. Do you bring anything new or additional to today’s hearing?”

  Anton Smits did not, but he plugged ahead with the same old catalog of Tom’s high crimes and misdemeanors—his accidents, his oversights, his forgetfulness, his contentiousness, his losing his way in the woods, his “confusion and apparent disorientation”—and Tom noted that the hearing officer let him. Smits passed one document after another across the table, all the time using a kind of formal legal English, speaking almost as if he were in a classroom. Tom could see that he was very nervous, but he did not like him anyway. He talked as if Tom were not sitting less than five feet away. Tom went over in his mind all the things Jan Dekker had told him he must not say to the young lawyer.

  Then Braden was asking for evidence from Tom. He handed across his bank statements. “As you can see, I have a private income in the form of a pension through the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois.”

  Smits was speaking again. “The commissioner should know that there is a court order in Illinois that the funds in Mr. Johnson’s possession be seized. My client contends that they were stolen, that Mr. Johnson illegally appropriated those funds from the trust fund of Anthony Johnson, his elder son, now deceased, of whom Thomas Johnson was guardian. A criminal complaint to that effect has been brought in Illinois.”

  “And have charges been preferred?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, if no charges have been preferred, Mr. Smits, you know as well as I do that an individual’s complaint will have little or no bearing on this proceeding.”

  “Commissioner, Brooks Johnson and Christine Panco have no other motive in pursuing this action than to protect their father and their father’s assets, both of which are in clear jeopardy because of Thomas Johnson’s foolish, imprudent, and dangerous actions. All my clients want to do is to take their father home so they can care for him as only his children can. What other possible reason would they have to go to such lengths and expense?”

  “To gain control of my money,” said Tom.

  “Commissioner, it is a common and widely recognized phenomenon that parents who are aged, infirm, and losing control of their faculties—”

  “What money?” asked Braden. “I see a record of funds in the original petition, Mr. Johnson, but not in the documents you have submitted today. Do you still control those moneys?”

  “Some of them. I’ve used some to pay legal fees, some for rent and living expenses, some for gifts and charitable contributions.”

  “See,” said Brooks, “this is what—”

  “Commissioner,” said Smits, “this is a matter for discovery—”

  Braden held up her hand. “Save it for the courts, Mr. Smits.” She then turned to Tom. “Mr. Johnson, I very much respect your desire to be independent, but from any objective point of view it is difficult to be seeing how you would not be better off at home with your family. I’m sorry, but unless—”

  “May I ask my son one question?”

  “I object,” said Smits. “My client is not on trial here.”

  “No one is on trial here, Mr. Smits,” Baden said in some pique. “Again, this is not a court of law. I will allow a question.”

  “Have you recently applied for fifty thousand dollars in home-equity loans on the property at 26 Lake Road in Frenchman’s Lake, Illinois, that I gave you less than six months ago?”

  “What?” said Christine.

  “No,” said Brooks.

  “And do you need that money to pay off gambling debts?”

  “I have not—”

  “Stop!” said Christine. “You mortgaged our property?”

  “And do you have a serious gambling problem?”

  “Absolutely not. This is—”

  “Stop!” said Christine again. “You know that’s not true! You know—”

  “Commissioner,” said Anton Smits, still not looking at Tom, “this man’s wild accusations are further evidence of his dementia and incompetence. It is in his best interest …” He had begun to lose his way. Braden was not holding the gavel. Tom decided to say what he knew he probably shouldn’t; if she gave Smits latitude, perhaps she’d give him some, too. “I mean, it is not in his best interest …”

  “Son, may I ask you a question?”

  Smits ignored him. “Uh … in the best interest of Mr. Johnson …”

  “You don’t mind if I call you son, do you, Mr. Smits?”

  Smits stopped. “Yes, I do.”

  “Kind of diminishing, isn’t it?”

&n
bsp; Smits didn’t answer.

  “Well, now you know how you are making me feel. After all, I’m sitting right here, and you are treating me as if I am not present.”

  “Commissioner,” Smits fairly pleaded.

  “Do you know me, Mr. Smits? Have we ever met before?”

  Smits had his eyes fixed on Jeanette Braden. He nodded once as if at a signal, but Braden was looking at Tom. “Commissioner …”

  “Answer Mr. Johnson’s question, Mr. Smits.”

  “No, we haven’t met.”

  “Then how in the world can you presume to know what’s in my best interest? Mr. Smits, I may be old, but I’m still a human being, and I still have opinions and feelings and desires, and one of my desires is to live in Holland. Is that too much to ask?”

  “I’m pleased that you like it here, Mr. Johnson,” Braden was saying, “but so do many people, and if we let them all stay, we’d be quickly overwhelmed. I’m sure you understand. So, in the absence of further evidence …”

  “I have further evidence,” said Tom quietly. “I have a daughter who is a Dutch citizen. Her name is Ella Mostert, née Johnson. She is a resident of Veldhoven. I’ve brought along her birth certificate,” he said, sliding it across the table. “There.”

  Tom did not look at his children, but he heard my mother gasp and Brooks say, “What the hell?”

  “You can see here that I am her father. And I have two Dutch grandchildren.” Now he slid pictures and more birth certificates across the table. “Robert Mostert and Hanneke Mostert.”

  Jeanette Braden studied the documents and photographs through half glasses. At the other end of the table, there was only silence now. Tom looked that way and smiled and nodded as if to say, It’ll be okay. My mother was covering her mouth with the fingers of both hands and staring at him. Brooks was looking straight up at the ceiling. “Do you live with Ella Mostert?” asked the hearing officer.

  “No. I have a room of my own in a house near hers, but I see her and my grandchildren often.”

  “Then Ella Mostert wants you to take up residency in The Netherlands?”

  “Yes.” The word caught for just a moment in his throat.