Old Heart Read online

  “Sorry,” Tom said. “Listen, can you tell me—”

  The man said something in Dutch and closed his door.

  The next day Tom went to Jan Dekker’s office. The lawyer was surprised to see him. “Can you tell me who lives at this address?”

  “Easily.” Dekker turned to his computer. And a moment later, “Her name is Pim de Wit.”

  “Oh,” said Tom, “I see.”

  “What?”

  “Well, Sarah had a sister named Pim. It must be her sister.” He could not hide his disappointment.

  “Well, ja, there you have it. That explains it.”

  “So,” said Tom a little reluctantly, “that explains it.”

  They sat. Finally the lawyer said, “Is there something else?”

  “Maybe,” said Tom. “Have you done immigration law?”

  “Some.”

  “I am thinking of applying for residency.”

  Dekker smiled at him a little as if he’d won a bet with himself. He turned to his computer again. He found and printed the proper forms. He carefully went over a checklist of the things Tom would have to provide. “If you decide to apply, bring it all back and we’ll send them in to the IND. You give your papers and wait. They are informing you by mail.”

  Turning the corner into Mrs. Waleboer’s street, Tom walked past two men in a parked car and then heard them opening their doors and heard them come up behind him. He turned just as one man took him by the elbow. “Mr. Johnson,” said the man in a British accent, “please don’t be alarmed. We’re friends. We just—”

  “I know all of my friends, and I don’t know you.” The man was still touching but no longer holding his arm.

  “We’re friends of your family. We just want to have a word. They are very concerned about you. Everything they are doing is in your best interest, I assure you.”

  “How do they know that?”

  “What?”

  “How do they know what’s in my best interest, and I don’t? Is it because I am old? Isn’t that kind of presumptuous? Did they ever think of asking me what I think is in my best interest?”

  “Well, yes of course, and we can talk about that. …”

  Tom knew that that was all they wanted, to talk to him, to reason with him, to persuade him. He knew they were not going to bundle him into the car and jab a hypodermic in his thigh and force him onto a plane. He knew he wasn’t in any danger, but when the other man took him by the other arm, he produced the pepper spray he’d been holding in his pocket and sprayed the man in the face.

  The man screeched and grasped at his eyes, swearing loudly in Dutch. Tom turned to the first man and held the can toward him. The man leaped back. He hesitated as if considering his next move. Tom took one step toward him and sprayed some more. That was enough. The man helped his companion into the car and drove away.

  A woman working in her front garden down the block was watching. Tom looked away, embarrassed for himself and his children and his family. A public spectacle. He wondered what he would have done if Brooks and Christine had simply left him alone. He saw their move and his countermove as parts of a board game that one day soon would be folded and put away on a closet shelf. What in God’s name did any of it matter? How long would any of it be remembered? “Tom Johnson? Wasn’t he the one who ran away as an old man?”

  Tom knew he hadn’t needed to do what he had done to the men, one of whom he realized now just might have been wearing a clerical collar, but at the same time he knew that he had very much needed to do it, and afterward he felt the same sense of relevance that he had felt after carrying Nienke to the doctor, and after that he felt the same dam-break of emotion so that he was crying when he opened his front door.

  Johnson Family History Continued For Nora

  Julia’s and my marriage didn’t “effectively end” when Russ Lawton was killed in the auto accident, but it started to end. It was like a slowly sinking ship; we closed one bulkhead after another and settled deeper and deeper in the water until the only compartment left was the one marked “parenting.” Still, there were times when I thought we might be able to right the thing, but that was all before Julia fell in love.

  In 1963, having given up on me and his own sons and apparently without ever even considering Julia sitting there in her glass office, Russ hired a business manager named Tim Hodges from Dayton, Ohio, with an eye toward eventually making him a partner if things went well. Tim was an ambitious, progress-minded guy who wore a Princeton haircut, creased gray flannel slacks, a blue blazer, and the first tassel loafers I’d ever seen. He almost immediately talked Russ into abandoning his cramped old showroom and garage downtown and moving out to the edge of town, where they would have acres of land and lots of room for expansion. This was a good idea. He then talked Russ into buying out an underfinanced Ford dealership in the next town and incorporating his old and new agencies on their new site. Another good idea. Next he talked Russ into importing English Fords, not such a good idea, but one that made the agency seem open-minded and future-oriented. And it was Tim who recognized Julia’s acumen and began to involve her in decision making.

  It was about then that Julia stopped going on vacation with the rest of us; she became too busy. I’d take the kids up to a rental cottage in Door County, Wisconsin, for a couple of weeks as soon as summer school was over. We fished, hiked all over Washington Island, canoed on the bay, and ate fish boils. We spent all our money on go-carts, miniature golf, and batting cages. Then on spring break we’d go to a little motel on Treasure Island in Florida that had a pool, a grill, and shuffleboard. Christine got her own bed, Brooks and I shared one, and we put Tony on a roll-away. We had a kitchenette to make breakfasts and lunches and the grill for hot dogs and hamburgers, and we’d walk the beach for hours looking for the best grouper sandwich. It was all kids’ fun, of course, and while I enjoyed it, sometimes at night, when they were in bed or watching TV, I’d sit outside in the dark, drink a beer, and wish Julia and I could be sitting there together, remembering the day, smiling about something one of the kids had said, planning tomorrow.

  We became the “Jonnsons” on one of those vacations and while Julia was a part of us, she also wasn’t. She was watching us through a window. It happened when Tony was about eight and Brooks was seven. Tony made a lanyard for me with our name on it at a little day camp in Door County, except it read, “the Jonnsons.” Brooks was learning to read, and he picked right up on it. He said Tony forgot the “h” and didn’t even know how to spell his own name. He laughed at Tony, and Tony got very upset.

  “That’s an ‘h’!” he said.

  “No, that’s an ‘n.’” said Brooks. He called Tony a dummy, and Tony started crying. He said it was an “h” okay, an “h” with a short neck.

  I gathered Tony in my arms, took him across the yard, and set him still blubbering on a picnic table. I took out the lanyard and examined it. To make it at all was an achievement because Tony had very poor small motor skills. “Yep,” I said, “that’s an ‘h’ okay. A little short in the neck, but that’s definitely an ‘h.’”

  “See, I know how to make an ‘h.’”

  “Make an ‘h’?” I said. “Tony, you made this whole lanyard, and I am very proud of you. This is the best present anyone has ever given me. And you know what I want to do? I want to put it on my key chain so that I’ll have it in my pocket right next to me every single minute of every single day the whole rest of my life.”

  “’Cept when you have on your pajamas.” One thing you had to always remember with Tony was that he was an absolute literalist.

  “Then I’ll get a pair of pajamas with pockets. And every single time I use my keys I’ll think of our family, and I’ll think of you because you gave it to me, and I’ll think of the twenty-seventh letter in the alphabet, the one you invented.”

  He looked at me uncertainly. “Which one?”

  “Why, the short-necked ‘h,’ of course.”

  So that’s why Julia wasn’t a Jo
nnson, not quite. I think she wanted to be but couldn’t figure out a way. Perhaps she wouldn’t let herself. Perhaps I wouldn’t let her. I know she shared some of my regrets. Many years later, when she was dying, she said completely out of the blue one day, “I never should have stopped going to Door County with you.” It melted my heart. She could do that. Every now and then she would show me that there were other places in her. Once she came down to sit on the dock on a warm spring morning, rare enough in and of itself, but then she said right out of nowhere, “I’m sorry you weren’t able to finish your doctorate. You would have been a wonderful historian.” Imagine that. I had no idea she knew or cared how I felt, but one part of her did. Trouble was, there were very few times I can remember that she showed me that part. I think it was just too dangerous to do. Perhaps for me, too. Perhaps it meant compromising roles we had made commitments to play no matter how disabling or destructive those roles might be.

  When the next year I suggested that she might like to join us in Florida, she fixed me with a long, icy stare before saying, “You’ve got to be kidding.” She was right, of course. My invitation had been unrealistic if not insincere, and we both knew it. In fact, we had long since begun the process of discovering just how far from perfect we could exist together with some measure of contentment and comfort, at least enough to allow us to go on, at least a little more than our measure of discontentment and discomfort, for the truth of the matter is that if you can win just fifty-one percent of the time, your potential is limited only by how much you have to invest, and most people who would never settle for fifty-one percent when it was first offered would if given a second chance. Fifty-one percent is not that bad, and a person can live a pretty good life on it.

  When Russ died, Julia threw herself into the business. If she’d once been a dilettante, she was no more. She left it to her brothers, Warren and Frankie, to drive around in convertibles with dealer plates, play golf, and go to auto shows. She rolled up her sleeves and worked. That meant a lot of meetings, business lunches, and drinks after work with Tim Hodges.

  For three or four years their relationship seemed to be nothing more than a great flirtation. Hodges was married, had kids, and was home every night for dinner, and there were precious few places in our small town for a tryst. I think that up to a point it was all theoretical. And in the beginning I pretended to be happy for her. In a way it was, after all, what I’d always said I wanted for her: a life of her own. Plus, she was happy in a way I knew I’d never made her, or perhaps lighthearted or even fulfilled. I realized that for the very first time, she was hopeful. And that thing happened to me that happens when someone else sees something in a person that you had missed altogether. I wanted to see it, too. When someone else wanted her, so did I. I think that during that difficult time I learned more about my very human nature than I ever had before.

  When I told Mike McIntyre what I was feeling, he said, “Hmmm. I think you may be confusing possession and love. Tell me this: Were you ever in love with Julia?”

  “Oh, who knows?”

  “You would if you had been.”

  “Can you ‘finally’ be in love?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I guess the only time I was really in love was with that girl in Holland.”

  “Then I’d wait,” he said. “See if this goes away.” He said to stay out of Julia’s way and let the thing play itself out. It was advice that I tried to honor until Julia told me that she and Hodges were going together to the national sales meeting in New York. That was in 1970.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” I said. She looked at me as if I didn’t have the right to think that or anything else. Actually, she looked at me as if she hadn’t seen me in a very long time, which I realized then was almost certainly the case. Funny because all along I had assumed that at least part of what was going on was for my benefit. Now suddenly I knew that I was the last thing on her mind.

  “It’s business, Tom.”

  “But I mean after the business.”

  “That’s business, too. Mine, not yours.”

  “Julia, we still have a marriage here and a home and a family.”

  She looked at me again. She said carefully and not unkindly, “We have a home and a family, true, but we don’t really have a marriage, Tom.”

  “Then maybe we shouldn’t have a marriage at all.” I said it to see if I could still hurt her, but the fact that she hesitated was about something other than hurt.

  “You promised you’d never leave,” she said.

  “We both made lots of promises that don’t seem to mean much anymore.”

  “No, we didn’t,” she said very quickly. “I never promised you anything.”

  It was true, and at least part of the reason was that I had never asked her to, something of which she seemed keenly aware and apparently always had been. I wondered then and wonder still if anything would have been different if I had asked for her word rather than just giving my own.

  Julia went to New York with Hodges that winter, and I went to see a divorce attorney. But when Julia returned, something had changed. Not only was her hope gone, but something harder and darker had replaced it. She smoked more. She took long, aimless drives. She spent hours listening to the soundtracks of musicals she had seen on Broadway. She continued to go to the meetings, dinners, and golf outings, but something was different. Once while I was sitting in my chair in the living room reading the paper, I watched her through the open door to the kitchen staring out the window above the sink. She didn’t move for perhaps two minutes. At first I thought she must be watching someone or something: a sailboat, a fisherman, a deer drinking at the shore. Later I thought she probably wasn’t. Eventually I called the lawyer and told him to put things on hold.

  The next year Julia went to San Francisco for the national sales meeting. This time she came home early, and Tim Hodges didn’t come home at all. It was suddenly announced in the newspaper that he had taken a job in Middletown, Ohio, and he and his family were gone just like that. I never completely understood what had happened, but I think it fair to say that it was something between a love affair gone bad and a coup d’état. At any rate, Julia moved into the big office, the one that had been her father’s and then Tim’s, and in short order Warren and Frankie were back out on the floor rather sheepishly selling cars again. Neither lasted. Eventually Warren became a silent partner and moved to Florida. Frankie sold out to Julia and opened a bar and restaurant in town.

  Julia now worked twelve hours a day and had little time for anything other than her job. At the same time her dedication was cheerless and angry. She left Tony alone, was even sweet with him at times, but she quarreled with Christine, Brooks, and me about selling the house and building a show place in town. When we wouldn’t let her, she added another addition to our lake house even though Christine and Brooks were grown and gone. She made a lot of money, took a lot of trips, drove big, fast cars, became increasingly and somewhat famously profane, suffered no fools, cultivated her own small growing legend, and in time developed a kind of permanent smirk that seemed to say, “See, I knew all along that it was all just a bunch of bullshit.”

  As for me, I had a flirtation or two over the years and tried unsuccessfully not to think of Sarah because I was superstitious. If I thought of her she wouldn’t be there, and some part of me needed her to be there somewhere. Of course I never really stopped thinking about her, but when I thought of her, it was still 1946 and Sarah was still a girl with slim legs and thick hair who smiled and smelled and giggled like a girl.

  I don’t know why Julia stayed in our marriage all those years, but I have a few theories. One is that she was a Hedda Gabler: larger than life and outrageous but strangely afraid of scandal even when divorce was no longer scandalous. Or perhaps she liked being angry and disappointed. Some people need those things. For some, disappointment confirms something important. Or perhaps behind it there was just a flicker of hope that before it was a
ll over and against all odds, we’d somehow manage to figure things out and end up sitting at the end of the dock together. As for me, I stayed for several reasons. One was because I said I would. Oh, I can hear Julia now: “Gimme a break. Don’t kid yourself. How noble.” Fair enough. Another reason was inertia. I couldn’t ever see myself sitting in an apartment somewhere watching a rented TV. It was also the children—I couldn’t imagine myself explaining this thing to them. And for a time I stayed because I wanted to resent Julia. I didn’t know it then or wouldn’t have been able to admit it. In fact, I think I’ve only fully realized it quite recently. I resented her, and I resented her deeply. So there, we weren’t so different after all. I wanted to blame her for toying with my naive little heart, for getting pregnant, for spoiling my dreams of a life with Sarah, causing me to forgo a doctorate, trapping me in marriage, the town, our life, even for having poor little chromosome-impaired Tony. And I resented her for not feeling guilty about any of it. Of course my resentment ended way back on the day Julia’s father died because the books were balanced then. If resentment had ever been my due, it was no more. But in reading your paper, Nora, I see that bitterness took its place. Clearly I have blamed her for things that were my own damned fault.

  Maybe Julia and I were more alike than I know, or maybe in some perverse way we complemented each other: her yin to my yang. I guess that’s the main thing she and I did for each other; we were each what the other person was not. It’s a dynamic I can’t seem to escape even all these years after her death.

  The year I retired, Julia got sick. Her reaction to the cancer that first go-round was pretty much the same as her reaction to anything: it made her angry. “Oh, right, now this.” In the end she not so much denied as defied it. “Just you try!” she seemed to say. She refused to give up smoking or drinking, and although she allowed Tony and me to take care of her after the surgery and during the chemotherapy, she grew impatient with us after that. She did not like to be fussed over. So one day she just said, “Hey, why don’t you take Tony and go fishing?”