Old Heart Read online

  “Tom,” he said, “can you help me go home?”

  I told him I still knew people at Division and would try. Then he asked me to come back and read to him. Later I wondered if maybe his mother or father had read to him when he was sick as a kid, or maybe he just realized that I needed something to do as I sat at his bedside. That was what he really wanted, someone sitting there. On my way out I found his doctor. I lied and told him I was at Division Headquarters and that I could get Lt. Longo stateside if he’d approve him for evacuation.

  “He’s not going anywhere, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. Tony had left too much of himself on the battlefield. Half his insides were gone, and he was badly burned. That night I wrote all of this in a long letter to Sarah. It was a letter I couldn’t send because civilian mail service hadn’t been reestablished yet.

  Over the next couple of weeks I visited Tony whenever I could and read him In Our Time, the only book I had. I remember that he liked the “Big Two-Hearted River” stories about the young soldier fishing by himself in the woods and cool waters of northern Michigan.

  Tony died on July 2, 1945. I wasn’t there. A few days earlier new orders had come through—I was being sent back to Veldhoven to help prepare for the reverse flow of men and machines that would soon be coming.

  Looking out the train window as we traveled through southern Holland I tried, not very successfully, to avoid thinking about both Tony and Sarah. I tried to focus on the familiar things we were passing: the long, straight canals, the wide, open pastures, the village church spires. Eindhoven was already being rebuilt. Piles of rubble and bricks had become neat stacks. Others had actually become walls again.

  I caught a jeep out of Eindhoven toward the depot with a growing fear in my heart that Sarah would have gone to Amsterdam to be with her sister, or to England, or that she would have just disappeared, as people do in war, and no one would know anything about her. In the compound new men looked up from the table that had once been ours. New men worked in the yard. As soon as I’d thought of a reason, I took a jeep to Sarah’s house. She opened the door.

  “Oh, Tom,” she said. She had never before called me anything but Lieutenant Johnson. Standing there in that doorway, we agreed that we were very, very happy that the European war was over, that the Allies had won, that the Nazis had been defeated, that Hitler was dead, that Holland was free. We agreed on all these things despite the fact that it had been eight weeks since VE day. Then we said what we really were thinking.

  “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you,” I think I said.

  “I was so sure that you would be the last one killed,” she said with tears in her eyes. That was the first time we held each other.

  I guess I’m going to leave the story right there for now, Nora. Perhaps I’ll tell you the rest later. I had in a sense come home to Veldhoven, and now I’ve come home here again, only this time I can’t find Sarah van Praag. She is dead. The details don’t matter. I’ve stood at her grave and read her name. I even put some flowers there, but it was a windy day and they blew away. I know that is the worst kind of high school English-teacher metaphor, but it’s also true. I put them back two or three times, and still they blew away, so I brought them home and gave them to my landlady, Mrs. Waleboer, in whose garden I’m presently sitting. There is a pear tree in the middle of the garden, and the east wall is covered with wild roses whose scent is fresh and spicy and clean, especially after it has rained, which it does often here. Great Dutch bumblebees lumber around from flower to flower and above swifts wheel and squadrons of starlings fly in formation.

  It’s a lovely garden, and that much does matter and perhaps that much is all that matters. The Dutch have a proverb for it: “If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a year, get married. But if you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden.” What that means in my life is that my great love, like my great goals, ambitions, and dreams, was made of dust, but I’ve long known that the grand things almost always are, and I’ve long known that it’s the not-so-grand things that make life worth living: a cup of pea soup, a small glass of bitter beer, a new friend, an old memory, a warm fire on a cold day, a cool breeze on a hot one, the smell inside a dog’s ear, putting one word after another.

  I think I’m going to go on writing if you don’t mind. It helps me. I think I’ll finish the family history you started. I will not do it better, although I may do it differently, especially now. Your paper affected me deeply, Nora. Thank you for telling the truth. I guess I didn’t know how complicit I was or how selfish and petty I could be.

  Two minor corrections: it was a 1930 LaSalle that the Capone men were driving, and Tony actually managed the basketball team, not the football team, at the high school.

  Veldhoven, Autumn 2007

  Sometimes Dickie would teach Tom how to say a Dutch word or phrase, would model for him the guttural rattle that happened at the back of the mouth or the vowels that came off or out of the pursed lips, and now and again he produced a special strong licorice drop or a particular kind of sticky bun that could be purchased only at a certain bakery. Tom began to feel as if he was Dickie’s project and wondered just a little suspiciously why the other man might be quite so available. Every few days Dickie telephoned or appeared with an outing in mind. Wearily Tom went along. He began to call Dickie his “camp counselor” and “the tour guide.” Dickie smiled when Tom said these things, but it was hard to know if he was pleased or embarrassed. Whatever his self-appointed role was, he was conscientious in it. On one outing Dickie took Tom fishing in a canal and brought along an odd little quilted blue cooler and “a little something Belgian,” two cold brown bottles of some rare Belgian beer supposedly brewed in tiny batches by a handful of old monks in some abbey or other, and two matching glasses bearing the brewery’s insignia. “That’s part of the ritual, old man. Never drink a De Koninck out of a Duvel glass.” Dickie rolled a cigarette, the two men drank together, Dickie smoked, and I think Tom realized then how very sad he had been since learning of Sarah’s death because for that moment he was a little less sad. Perhaps it was the beer.

  Sitting there, he wondered again what to do next. He knew he was waiting, but he didn’t know for what. He hoped it was for his path to become clear, but he feared it was simply out of habit or the lack of anything better to do. He wanted desperately to go home and hated the very thought of it at the same time. He had considered Paris, but it was too massive and amorphous. He could imagine only loneliness there. Or some BBC village in the Cotswolds if one still existed. No. Why not stay here? he thought more and more often. He had a room. He had a history. He liked the no-nonsense people and the quiet. He liked the beer. Or was this inertia, too? And would this place only feed his blues?

  He wondered these things as he reread a letter he’d written to me about Dickie, about his journal, and about his indecision, as he carefully folded it and addressed its envelope, as he walked to the post office to mail it. He had always wanted to write; perhaps this was his chance. There were stories to tell, if only to himself and me. Perhaps I could be his muse and his audience. He knew I would read what he wrote. He thought I would understand it.

  A week later Dickie took Tom on a “fishing expedition.” They drove out of town in Dickie’s old Citroën Deux Cheveaux with the windows rolled down and the sunroof rolled back, fishing rods protruding, and fished the Wilhelmina Canal west of Best on the way to Tilburg. Dickie whistled the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai all the way, as if he’d decided to in advance and couldn’t renege on that decision now when his lips and cheeks were tired. Sometimes too much about Dickie seemed forced.

  Tom was invited to dinner to eat their catch and given special instructions to bring two chilled bottles of a certain French rosé. On the way to Dickie’s apartment that evening, Tom saw the same round man he’d seen earlier that day when he’d walked Leo, only the man who’d been wearing a cap was now wearing a hat. Tom said, “Goede avond.” The ma
n ignored him, and Tom had the sinking realization that the man might be following him. He looked back, and the man was gone. Nothing. But when he entered Dickie’s building, he waited a few moments in the vestibule, and here came the round man around the corner. “Oh, please!” he said. “Not this again.” But yes, this again. He remembered his own words: “You were doing what you had to do, and now I am doing what I have to do.” And they would all go on even though it would all come to naught. Nada y nada y nada. He was embarrassed when he thought such melodramatic things.

  Tom sipped a glass of Belgian beer as Dickie, whistling again, bustled around the kitchen, and he looked at pictures of Dickie’s wife, Olive. She had been quite stunning as a girl, beautiful later, handsome finally. How old had she been when she died? In the pictures of them together, Dickie was posing and she was not, and Tom saw then that that was about self-consciousness, not mania. And so was all of this; behind the role-playing and bravado, Dickie was self-conscious. How very little he knew about his new friend; he felt as sudden and fickle as a teenager.

  Field’s nocturnes began to play. Dickie came in and lighted the candles on the small table he had set with a white tablecloth in front of the great windows that looked out upon the fields and canals. He poured the rosé and served a bowl of mussels (“Just coming into season again. They’re tiny and very fresh”) steamed in a broth of wine and diced vegetables, then melon “to cleanse the palate” wrapped in prosciutto.

  Dickie was agitated. He was a little loud, a little frenetic, perhaps already a little drunk. He poured more wine and drank it quickly. He served the sautéed white fish in a mild mustard sauce full of herbs and tiny pink shrimp with very small parsleyed potatoes and Belgian endive on the side. There were a few halved cherry tomatoes with a little vinaigrette and some carrots sautéed with mint. The tastes fit together like puzzle pieces: the savory sauce, the bitter endive, the sweet carrots, the acidic tomatoes, the buttery potatoes. And the wine was perfect; they were already halfway through the second bottle.

  “My Lord, Dickie, this is just wonderful.”

  Dickie opened his eyes very wide. “Well, old chap, I am the cook,” he said as if it were an old joke, one Tom should have known but didn’t. Tom was reminded that they were pretending to be better friends than they were.

  “Chief cook and bottle washer,” said Tom. “Do you know that one, or is it an Americanism?”

  “Oh, yes, chief cook and bottle washer.”

  “That’s what we used to call Julia, the kids and I. Of course we did so sarcastically. She wasn’t much of either.”

  Dickie opened his eyes very wide again, perhaps surprised that Tom would say something critical of his dead wife. “You know, she’s been gone a long time now, Dickie. Eleven years.”

  “Do you still miss her?”

  And here was that moment Tom thought they’d both agreed to avoid. He hesitated. “We didn’t have a very good life together, I’m afraid. We didn’t have a very good marriage, Dickie. We got on the same life raft and couldn’t get off. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Hmmm.” They were suddenly awkward.

  “Do you miss Olive?”

  “I do. She would have stopped me today.” And again Dickie was inviting something he had not before.

  Tom waited and waited; the invitation seemed both perilous and unavoidable. Finally he asked, “What happened today, Dickie?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t ask. Don’t bloody ask,” he snapped. “But she wouldn’t have let me do it. She would have said, ‘Dickie.’ She would have said, ‘Richard.’ She would have put her hand on my arm, but she’s not here, goddamn her soul.” Then he was sobbing with his chin on his chest, sobbing without any intent to stop, perhaps ever. Tom had only been vaguely aware of Olive until now, hadn’t even known her name for a long time, didn’t have any idea when she had died but assumed it had been long ago because Dickie had rarely even mentioned her.

  Then Tom saw everything, as you sometimes do when you are drunk, and even when you are not. Dickie did not speak of Olive because he had forgotten her but because he couldn’t think of anything else. He was incomplete; he was half of something; a mirror image, a one-legged man in a three-legged race. He was desperately hanging on. He had been trying to save not Tom but himself. Tom had great pity for an instant, then great envy. In the face of the other man’s pain, he felt himself small and dry and hard, wallowing in his own pool of self-pity over an ancient, imagined love after he’d never in eleven years shed a tear for Julia.

  “You see,” said Dickie, finally drained, “I’m not a stoic like you.”

  “I’m not a stoic,” said Tom.

  “I’m not paying you a compliment, old boy. She would have stopped me from saying that, too, wouldn’t she? But then, she’s not here. Not here. So.” He got up and came back with a stone bottle of Dutch gin. “The elixir; the thing every real Dutch celebration must get to in the end. Jenever!”

  “Is this a celebration, then?”

  “It is, old chap.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Tom was not to recall much of what happened after that, nor for how long it went on. An hour? Perhaps two. There was some confession, some speechifying, a good bit of confiding. There were several toasts.

  And it was that night that Tom heard Dickie’s story, and Olive’s. How Dickie’s father was a great admirer of the British and the English language, even named his son Richard after the Lionhearted and called him Dickie after an English music-hall juggler and comedian he’d seen in London. How when Dickie was sixteen in 1938 his father sent him to study at a public school in Oxford and asked his father, Dickie’s grandfather, to go along as a chaperone. How Dickie and his grandfather took rooms, really a room, in a boarding house on the Effley Road that was operated by a Scottish woman named Mrs. Mundell, who had a fifteen-year-old daughter named Olive. How Dickie and his grandfather got trapped in England when the Germans overran the Netherlands, and Dickie enlisted in the Royal Navy and, because he spoke both Dutch and German, worked as a translator in London at the Admiralty.

  It was during that time that Dickie began to write to and see Olive Mundell. After the war Dickie came home to Veldhoven, but in the summer of 1946 he went to visit Olive, and together they bicycled all over Cornwall. He sang Dutch folk songs to her, they camped on the beach and the heath, and by the end of the month they were engaged. During the next year he returned on holidays to visit Olive, but the next summer she came to visit him, and this time they bicycled around and fell in love with Brabant, which, in those days before superhighways and fast trains, seemed idyllic and quite remote and very much divorced from the larger world they were not sure they trusted. In the spring of 1948 they were married by a Presbyterian minister in the parlor of Olive’s mother’s boardinghouse, and they settled in Veldhoven because Dickie got a job in Eindhoven as an editor and technical writer.

  Tom did not remember walking home that night or early morning, and the next day counted himself lucky not to have fallen. He realized that he’d forgotten the round man and had no idea if he’d been followed again, but he did remember Dickie’s words: “I’m not paying you a compliment.” And he did remember Mrs. Waleboer opening her bedroom door a crack as he apparently made too much noise coming up the stairs. He remembered saying, “So sorry,” and telling himself he had to learn more Dutch if he was going to stay here. The next day he didn’t care a whit. Nor did he get out of bed until late afternoon. The hangover disarmed him and plunged him back and deeper into despair, reminding him of just how close to it he always was. He couldn’t lift his head off the pillow without being dizzy. He sipped water. He ate the two chocolate bars he’d bought to give to Ilse and Nienke. He slept and listened to the BBC, to shows about politics and sheepherding and what records someone famous he didn’t know would take to a desert island. He lay still and stared at the can of pepper spray on his nightstand that Dickie had forced on him for h
is walk home the night before: “Can’t be too careful. The world has changed, you know.”

  Or is it we who have changed, thought Tom, while the world goes on and on and round and round? Again he embarrassed himself. He decided, perhaps in reaction or perhaps because he was feeling vulnerable, to carry the pepper spray with him from then on. His glasses, his wallet, his passport, his watch, his pen, his umbrella, and now his pepper spray. And what of Dickie? What did Tom have in common with the old Dutchman except their damned near adolescent need for another?

  The second day Tom didn’t get dressed or leave the house. He let Leo shit in the garden, ate soft-boiled eggs, and sat for a while in the sun like a patient in a wheelchair at a sanatorium. Slowly he began to pull himself back up, if only in chagrined deference to Dickie’s real sorrow, and the next day he made himself go out. He was standing in a supermarket aisle trying to decipher the cooking instructions on the back of a box of rice when he felt a presence. He looked up, and there was the woman from the market standing stock-still at the head of the aisle, staring right at him. Then she was gone, just like that, and although he abandoned his cart and followed her, he lost her again. Out on the sidewalk he went one way and then the other but couldn’t find her. Finally he gave up and started home. Then he saw someone who might have been her nearly a block ahead of him, and he followed her. She turned right, then left, then right again. He came around the last corner as she was entering a row house at the end of the block. Just before she did, she looked directly at him. It was the same woman. Tom kept his eye on the door and walked toward it. He rang the bell and waited. He rang and rang. He knocked. Then he began to call out: “Hello? May I please speak to you for one moment? Hello?” He rang and knocked and called until the next door opened and a man looked out.