Old Heart

by Peter Ferry

  At this Braden looked up quizzically.

  “She says she does,” Tom said, pushing a letter across the table. “You see, I only met her a few weeks ago. I’m only getting to know her.”

  Braden studied the papers. “You are Ella Mostert’s father. Is that correct?’

  “Yes.”

  “And Pim de Wit was her mother?”

  “Is her mother. She is still alive.”

  “She is still alive? And do you have a relationship with Pim de Wit?”

  “I know her,” Tom said carefully.

  “Well,” said Jeanette Braden, sitting back and looking at Tom Johnson for a long time as he had hoped that she would look at him, “a family constitutes a good reason to grant residency, Mr. Johnson, perhaps the best reason, and you and Ella Mostert do constitute a family. I have little choice but to approve your Provisional Resident Permit. Congratulations.”

  Now they were outside on the street. My mother and Brooks had brief, harsh words; then she was crying on her father’s shoulder, holding him tightly under both arms, her hands curling up to grip his shoulders, and Brooks was saying with resolve, “Look, Dad, I’m not going to stop until you are safe at home with us. I am not going to give up. This is not over yet.” And then he was lighting a cigarette in cupped hands and walking away to the end of the block to stand and smoke. Tom felt only sadness as he held his daughter and watched his son because he knew suddenly and finally that it never would be over, not by way of resolution. That was not to be.

  “I just can’t believe this,” my mother said. “I can’t imagine it. You and this woman had a child, and you never even told anyone?”

  “I never knew, Christine.”

  “Then why in God’s name did you come here?”

  “I came to look for Ella’s mother, for Pim de Wit.”

  “Oh,” said my mother after a moment. “Oh …”

  “Yes.”

  “My God, Dad. Can we meet her and … ?”

  “Ella. Ella Mostert.”

  “Can we at least meet these people?”

  “No, not yet,” said Tom. “It’s too early. Maybe someday.”

  “So what are we supposed to do? Just go on home?”

  “Yes,” said Tom. “Give me some time. I need some time, so, yes, please go on home, but hold me a little longer before you do.”

  There was more, of course, but I’m not going to tell you very much of it. There was a cab ride, an awkward lunch in a hotel dining room, some recrimination, some pleading, an intemperate outburst, some more tears, finally some soothing words and reassurances that may have been sincere or may have only been expedient. But finally Tom was on the train alone; it took some time, some deep breaths, and some staring into the middle distance for him to return completely to Holland, but when he did, it was a different Holland. This one in some small part belonged to him. As he crossed the rivers moving south toward Brabant, he had for the first time the feeling that he was nearing home. My Lord. He’d done it, and it meant more to him now than he’d known it would. It legitimized him for a little while longer, and that, he thought, was about all any of us can hope for.

  Part Three

  The Netherlands, the North Sea and England, 2008

  The seasons are subtler things in Holland. Summer’s not so long, autumn not so colorful, winter not so deep. And spring sneaks up on you; one day you look down, and grass is growing in the cracks in the sidewalk. Tom had forgotten that about the Dutch spring. He’d forgotten the low gray skies, the long, cool rains, the smell of ammonia coming off the dairy farms, the daffodils and crocuses, the tulips in so many colors and such profusion.

  It was very early spring when he started making the pink chairs. He’d been thinking of it ever since Pim had seen them in a photograph, Tony sitting in one, Al Jones lying in the other, said she liked them, said they were “colorful.” On Easter morning, when he had Henk and Robby sneak them through her garden gate and she found them sitting there “like big Easter eggs,’” she clapped her hands and laughed aloud.

  They had begun as a sketch he made quite absently and then one he made not so absently and then a design he drew carefully with a straight-edged ruler. He had the lumber delivered and stacked behind Mrs. Waleboer’s shed, drafted Robby to cut it and drill it but assembled and then painted the chairs himself, just as Tony once had: a coat of primer and two of pink latex. He did all of this quite deliberately, as he found himself doing everything now. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Do the next right thing.

  So it was with Ella. Things had stalled out. His residency permit hadn’t freed them to move ahead, as he had hoped and expected. They started repeating themselves. Perhaps she had gone as far with him as she was willing or able to go, or perhaps they had needed urgency to make things vital. Now they were flat, and sometimes he felt like a nuisance, like the long-lost birth parent who after the initial flush of discovery makes demands and asks to borrow money.

  So he invited her to go to London. She had translated a local newspaper review of a revival of My Fair Lady for him, and he bought tickets. He thought that perhaps a little vacation, a day of leisure, would shake them loose. The day started out poorly for one that would come to mean so much to them both: Their crossing on the ferry was choppy, and the luncheon buffet for which he had paid a good bit was tired, mostly yesterday’s fare. Even the glass of white wine he’d insisted they have turned out to be a tawdry midday gesture that only gave him a headache. Their B & B was also a disappointment. The photos he’d seen had been taken with a wide-angle lens some years earlier; their rooms were tiny, and the Laura Ashley wallpaper was peeling. Then when he lay down for a nap, he slept too long and too hard so that he woke up late and groggy and they hadn’t time for dinner. But the performance was surprisingly fresh and relevant, and the little bistro they found afterward was good. They shared a big salad Niçoise with good bread and a chilled bottle of wine. For the first time all day Ella was animated; she had been distracted, distant, moody, preoccupied, perhaps even a little hostile. Now she relaxed and talked enthusiastically of the play, which she had also seen in London as a young girl.

  And when they stepped out the door of the restaurant at almost midnight, she suggested they walk. “We’ll hail a cab if we get tired.” Instead they walked all the way. She hummed and sang some of “On the Street Where You Live” as they crossed Trafalgar Square; then she was quiet.

  He wanted to prevent her from withdrawing again. “Frost forming,” he said, nodding at the grass.

  “Do you ever regret having children?”

  He started to say no, thinking she must somehow be asking about the two of them. But he didn’t.

  “I thought there was something on your mind.”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that one of those questions we don’t allow ourselves to ask?” he said. “Sure, I’ve wondered what my life would be like without children.” He avoided saying “without them” because it seemed to exclude her and “without you” because it included her perhaps gratuitously.

  “So do I, sometimes. I spend all my time worrying about them. Robby lives to go to the cafés on weekends. He drinks too much and then brags about it. He thinks it is a great accomplishment. And Hanneke …” She sighed. “Hanneke’s going to have another baby. No husband, no job, no education. Just babies.”

  They turned and walked alongside St. James’s Park.

  “There’s a little cottage in Zeeland,” Ella said, “just beneath the dike that we bicycle by on holiday. Sometimes there are an old man and woman working in the rose garden. Lovely roses. Sometimes I wish Henk and I were they. It’s quiet there.”

  Tom thought of the quiet of the house on Frenchman’s Lake, of the morning glories climbing trellises, of the yellow rosebushes on the east wall. He wondered if Brooks had pruned them in the fall.

  “I don’t think I’m ever happier than when I’m working in the garden.”

  “Tony and I had a garden.”

>   “You miss him, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you miss the others?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Do you think of me as your child?” she asked abruptly.

  “I keep having to remind myself that you are my daughter. I try not to force you into a box. I try to focus on the fact that I’m still getting to know you and be content that you are becoming more and more important to me.”

  He would think later that his candor and lack of hesitation encouraged her. At any rate, she went on to talk about her functional if imperfect marriage, to tell him things about Henk that made him a little uncomfortable, to talk of her awareness of her own mortality, her weariness with her work, her weariness generally—all much in the way that my mother used to launch a screed of complaints at him and Brooks used to rail at him—until he realized exactly what Ella and he were doing: she was being his child, and he was being her father. He took her hand in his.

  When they turned onto their street, Tom thought perhaps she’d said everything, but she hadn’t. “When I was forty-one I had breast cancer. Mastectomy. My mother came every day, and that’s the way it has been ever since. I don’t know why she comes, and I don’t know why I let her; it’s just what we do. I’ve quit trying to understand it.” A moment later she asked, “What are you going to do about her?”

  And he said, “Ella, I’m trying not to think about her tonight.” In fact, he was trying not to think about Pim at all. After many years of thinking about her too much, he was trying simply to enjoy being with her when he was able, to appreciate her soft voice, her asymmetrical smile, the scent of her shampoo or perhaps lotion when she passed by him through a doorway. That spring they began reading and exchanging mystery novels, leaving them in each other’s mailboxes, meeting in the park to talk about them, even discussing them on the phone once or twice, which made him feel like he was in high school again and trying to think of a reason to dial the number of the girl whose name he could no longer be sure of: Nelson didn’t sound quite right. Nielson? Karen Nielson?

  It was also that spring that Tom and I started to e-mail each other in earnest and Tom and Ella started to break bread together. The first time was an awful, awkward dinner at Ella’s house that no one was quite ready for and that he aborted as an act of mercy as soon as he politely could, relieved to the point of exhilaration to be walking home alone in the chill air. Thank God. That was another thing he and Pim came to realize they agreed upon. “I like being with them,” she was to say, “but the best part of that is when I leave them.” It was true. He was always his own best company. Was she warning him not to get too close? he wondered. Or was she inviting him to be just that confidential himself? He told her that Brooks and my mother and perhaps even Ella ran on a different speed than he, that he was too slow and made them impatient, and they were too fast; they wore him out and made him nervous.

  Another time, quite out of the blue, she started talking about a friend she had made in the hospital, a woman named Evelyn who developed cervical cancer and died. “Her death made me want to live. I hadn’t wanted to for a long time. I was in the hospital for seven and a half years. At first Ella came to see me; then she didn’t. When I got out she was at university. I had hurt her. She felt abandoned. She was very angry. We had an awful scene, and she told me she wished I was dead, that as far as she was concerned I was dead; that I was just as dead as her brother, Joost, whom I had always loved more than her anyway.” Listening, Tom realized with some relief but also some disappointment that the little boy Joost—and not he—had been the lost memory that Ella had referred to.

  “She didn’t speak to me for almost twenty years. You’d have thought that that’s when I would have given up hope, but it wasn’t. It became my mission and maybe my penance to wait her out. If there was one thing I’d learned in the hospital, it was to wait.”

  Tom wondered if she was also talking about him and them. He thought that his relationship with Pim was even more complex than his relationship with Ella, existing as it seemed to at the confluence of imagination, memory, and perception. It was often hard to know where one began and another left off. What Tom saw ever more clearly as time passed was the keenness of Pim’s mind and the deepness of her wound. He had nearly forgotten the first of these, and he did not know what to do about the second. But in fairness, neither did she.

  And it was in the springtime that Tom began to cook and bake for Pim. The first time was actually for the whole family, including Robby and Hanneke, on Easter Sunday, when he roasted a perfect leg of lamb and made a pecan pie the texture of which the others found “interesting.” The second time was out of necessity. Pim hadn’t eaten breakfast and felt faint. . He made her an omelet that she thought was very good. Then he began to bake bread and make soup for her. He would boil a chicken all morning, throw in whatever vegetables he had and egg noodles at the end. She loved it. He made the soup and bread once a week. And when he stumbled on poblano peppers in a village market in Waalre, he made chile rellenos for Pim, Henk, and Ella. After dinner he walked her home, and at her door Pim kissed him three times on the cheeks: left, right, left. This is how Dutch men and women greet and part from each other. This is how they come and go. It is done millions of times each day, but it was the first time Pim had done it to Tom.

  So it was that Tom and Pim started touching each other that spring. Their early gestures were tentative, simple matters of politeness: a grasped elbow, an extended hand. Then they were clearly expressions of fondness. A hand on a shoulder that lingered there, an arm that was offered and taken. One day over tea Tom reached across the table and touched the back of Pim’s hand with his fingers. This touching was a casual-appearing, momentary gesture but one he had been thinking about for weeks. She turned her hand over to receive his fingers in her palm.

  “What are we doing, Tom?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Then there was the dance band that played in the bandstand behind the Kromstraat early on a Saturday evening. There were saxophonists and clarinetists in sparkly dinner jackets and a portly, animated director who encouraged everyone to dance, and everyone did: husbands with wives, sisters with sisters, grandfathers with granddaughters, young kids, even teenagers. Pim hooked her arm in Tom’s as they stood watching. “Come on,” she said.

  “No, no. I don’t dance.”

  “Of course you dance.”

  “No, I really don’t. I don’t dance.”

  “Okay,” she said, turning to face him. “Okay,” she said, taking his hands.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shhh,” she said, putting her palms against his. “Just close your eyes. Now, see if you can feel energy coming from my hands into yours.”

  He did close his eyes, and when he opened them again, she was watching him and smiling at him. “Do you remember?” she asked.

  “I remember,” he said.

  After a while she shifted, and as her hands began to move, so did his, and as she began to sway, so did he. And when the song ended, she leaned close to him and said, “That was dancing, mister.”

  On another day Tom gave Pim a volume of Emily Dickinson’s verse. That evening, in her kitchen, with soup makings all around them and loaves of bread just out of the oven cooling on the countertops, she stretched up to kiss him on the cheek, and he kissed her back on the cheek. But their mouths came together—you know how it is—and they stayed together. He was wearing an apron and she had a carrot in one hand and a paring knife in the other, but they went on for quite a while.

  It must have been at about this time that Tom sent me his journal without comment or explanation. It was in an exercise book, carefully written in longhand using green ink. At the same time his e-mails became even more frequent and detailed. It was almost as if he were trying to hang on to something—me, us, his old life, even life itself. Maybe he thought that by writing about his life he could preserve or extend it. Or maybe he just wanted to be sure we got thing
s right.

  On the morning of June 17th, Pim came home from the market to find Tom sitting in her garden. He had turned the pink chairs to face the sun. She made tea, made toast and buttered it, opened a jar of orange marmalade, put it all on a tray, and backed through the kitchen door. “Tom,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. His paper had slid off his lap to the ground.

  “Tom,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, waking. “Yes.”

  “Well, good morning. Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes. Thank you, Pim.”

  “Tired?”

  “Yes, I guess I am.”

  “Here,” she said, laying a book and a small envelope on the arm of the chair. The book was a Harry Bosch novel. The envelope was a birthday card. “Happy birthday, Tom.”

  “Oh,” he said, “how in the world did you know?”

  “How? I remembered.”

  “All these years … ?”

  Pim sat on the other pink chair. “Tom, I have always thought of you on this day. Every year.”

  And then he was pressing his eyes with his forefinger and thumb.

  “Darling,” she said, “are you all right?”

  “Hmm,” he said, “old women don’t say ‘darling.’”

  “This one does. Drink your tea, and let me read you something.” Pim opened the slim volume of poems Tom had recently given her and began to read.

  Now she crossed one ankle over the other. Now she leaned on her elbow. Now she caught a stray strand of gray hair and twisted it around the tip of her index finger a time or two. She might have been a schoolgirl reading something a little risqué in w or maybe Emily Dickinson herself. Yes, Emily Dickinson. That was it. Tom watched her as she tilted her head, as she raised her brow, as she smiled a little wistfully, as she looked up.

  “Isn’t that lovely?” she said.

  “It is. Read another.”

  “Which one?”

  “How about ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’”