Old Heart Page 13

  “We did that yesterday.”

  “No, I mean take a fishing trip. Get out of here for a while.”

  “My Lord, Julia …”

  “Look,” she said, “I just need time to heal. I need time alone.”

  Tony sat in the bow of the boat, and I sat in the stern, staring at his back, for a whole week. He had no idea that his mother might die, that I was going to die, that his own days were numbered. He had just turned forty. Suddenly it seemed that Tony hadn’t much to show for his life. He’d worked at the IGA for twenty-four years, bagging groceries, stocking shelves, and collecting grocery carts in the parking lot. This latter task was his favorite because he got to sing while he did it, and he often sang at the top of his lungs. Most people quite liked his singing, although occasionally kids mocked and imitated him. It seemed to me that he didn’t know, but I was wrong.

  Late in the afternoon on Friday, with a cold beer and a fish fry in the motel restaurant on my mind, I said something about having a good week, about being fishing buddies or the two Musketeers or something.

  “Yep,” he said, “just Tom and the retardo.”

  “What?” I said. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, Tony, tell me. You’re not in trouble.”

  “I said, ‘Tom Johnson and his retardo.’”

  “Where did you hear that, Tony?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who said that to you?”

  “Geez, Dad, everyone says that to me. People been calling me that for years.”

  “What people?”

  “Kids. Kids mostly.”

  “Oh, Tony, kids don’t know what …”

  “It’s okay, Tom.” It was one of the rare times he called me by my name, and I realized that he was comforting me. “It doesn’t bother me. It’s just another word for Down syndrome; I know I’m a retardo. It’s okay.”

  “You know you are a man who has Down syndrome, yes, but that’s not all of you. You’re much more than that.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, smiling hugely. “What more am I, Dad?”

  “You’re many things. You’re a brother. You’re a son. You’re an employee, an excellent employee. You’re a local character.”

  “Oh, yeah? A local character?”

  “Sure. Don’t you know that people stop and shop at the IGA just on the chance you’ll be in the parking lot singing? Sure, they do.”

  “I like to sing, that’s for sure. So what else am I?”

  I looked at him for a long time. I looked in his eyes, and he looked back. I’d never known him in all these years to look at himself in this way, to introspect. Had he been doing it all along? It was a bit like your dog suddenly saying, “Do I look goofy when I pant?” Was that what Tony had been to me: a glorified humanoid pet? What if he’d been like any other kid and just fallen off a motorcycle and hit his head? Wouldn’t he still have a soul? Didn’t Tony have a soul?

  “I’m a pretty good fisherman!” he said.

  “And you are an excellent fishing companion.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re never in a hurry, and you’re comfortable being quiet.”

  Tony got a big kick out of that. “I like being quiet!”

  “I’m serious. Lots of people don’t know how to shut up. Not you.”

  Tony threw his head back and laughed. I could see he was loving this. “That’s why you’re a good friend,” I went on.

  “I do have lots of friends.”

  “You’re my good friend. Fact, I think you’re my best friend.” It sounded odd coming out of my mouth, like pronouncing a word I’d only seen written. I said it again just to hear it.

  “Oh, no,” he said, “Mike’s your best friend.”

  “Nope, you are.” And the amazing thing, Nora, is that he was. He really was. There was no one in the world with whom I was more comfortable. There was no one in the world I cared about more than this odd, chromosome-impaired little man-child sitting at the other end of the boat, smiling foolishly at me, this Tony Johnson.

  “Nooo,” Tony said. “You’re crazy. You’re nutso. You can’t be my friend. You’re my dad.”

  When we got home to Frenchman’s Lake, there was a note on the kitchen counter from Julia that said, “Gone to Hilton Head.”

  “Hilton Head, South Carolina?” I asked Christine on the phone.

  “Yeah. I guess they play a lot of bridge there.”

  “Well, how long’s she going to be gone?”

  “At least a month.”

  “A month?”

  “Yeah, she rented a condo. Dad, listen, you know how she is. …”

  After a couple of weeks, I called Julia. I asked her how she felt, how the bridge was going, when she was coming home.

  “Don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Listen, Tom, this is what I want to do, and I’m going to do it. I suggest you figure out what you want to do and do that. Don’t wait around for me.”

  And that was pretty much how we lived the next nine years. Julia sold the dealership and bought a condominium in Hilton Head. She played lots of bridge and lots of golf, showing up at home when it pleased her and then spending much of her time at the country club. Every now and again she’d have us all over there for dinner as if it were her house. Brooks and Christine and all you kids were invited to South Carolina every year for specific and limited periods of time. She flew everyone in and flew them out. Tony and I sometimes stopped there for a day or two, coming or going somewhere else.

  And what I figured out early on was that I didn’t have a lot of choice. Tony and I were stuck with each other. Our mutual commitment was as absolute as it was involuntary. I could make either the worst or the best of the situation, and I decided on the latter.

  One morning I said to Tony, “You know what I have a taste for?”

  “What?”

  “A grouper sandwich.”

  “Oh, yeah! A grouper sandwich. But you only get those in Florida, Dad.”

  “Let’s go to Florida, then,” I said.

  Tony took a leave from the IGA, and a few days later we were sitting in Frenchie’s on Clearwater Beach, eating grouper sandwiches. Then we started to work our way back. Slowly.

  You couldn’t be in a hurry traveling with Tony. You had to stop at every historical marker and almost every Dairy Queen for a butterscotch-dip cone and tuck a napkin in his collar so it didn’t all end up on his shirt. In time there were other mandatory stops: scenic overlooks, drive-in theaters, water parks, petting zoos, demolition derbies, minor league baseball games, and Sunday brunches. We became masters of the brunch (eat eggs Benedict first, seafood next—especially oysters, shrimp, and smoked salmon—then meat and salad; avoid fried foods, breads, and desserts).

  On the road you had to listen to either the Beatles, to which Tony always sang along, or English mysteries on tape. I was never sure how much of these stories Tony understood, but it didn’t really matter because he just liked the way English people talk. We listened to some of the stories over and over, including Taken at the Flood at least ten times; we liked Hercule Poirot because he was little.

  And we drove. I was the pilot and Tony was the navigator, always aflutter in unfolded maps that he didn’t really understand. In those years we explored every corner of the United States, much of Canada, and a good bit of Mexico. There was something about the noise and motion of the car that made Tony happy and tired. He often fell asleep with his head on my lap. I would drive, smooth his hair with my hand, and sing “Danny Boy” or “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” to him. Then when he woke up forty-five minutes or an hour later, he always wanted to know exactly where we were. I’d pull over, and we’d hold the map between us while I traced the route we’d driven and the distance we’d covered.

  The trick to life with Tony was doing it on his terms. Otherwise it was all condescension, frustration, and impatience because he lacked many conventional skills. He could not wal
k, read, think, or bait a hook as well as I could, but he could do other things better. He could outwait a fish, any fish. He could lose himself in a song like no one I ever knew. He had an uncanny knack for knowing when a traffic light was going to change. “Now,” he’d say a split second before it went yellow. And he could talk to animals, but this I never even knew until he was in his forties and we got Al Jones, which happened when we were driving in southern Illinois and saw a hand-lettered sign by a farm road that read, “Free Dog.” Tony instantly wanted it. For twenty miles I tried to talk him out of it, but he would not be deterred, and I began to think, Why not? We went back and found the farmer working on the engine of his pickup. I told him we were interested in the dog.

  “What dog?” the farmer said.

  “The free one,” Tony said.

  “Oh, that. There ain’t no free dog. That’s the name of my place here.”

  “Why’d you name it that?” asked Tony.

  “Well, my wife always called me ‘dog.’ When she was mad, which was a good bit of the time, she called me ‘shit dog’ or ‘scum dog’ or some such. Then she up and left.” He smiled.

  “So there isn’t a free dog?” I asked.

  “Just me. But there’s a twenty-dollar dog.”

  “I guess I should have known.”

  The dog turned out to be a black-and-white border collie mix of indeterminate age.

  “Is he housebroken?”

  “After a fashion.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve never let him in my house, but he knows not to shit where he lives.”

  I wanted to call him Twenty Dollar, but Tony insisted on Al Jones after a former produce manager at the IGA. Now it was the three of us. We lived like children despite the fact that the hourglass had been turned and our sands were running ever faster. Of course Tony was only vaguely aware of this, and Al Jones wasn’t aware of it at all, much less that by virtue of his genes or the lengths of his telomeres, his lifetime would be squeezed into just twelve or thirteen years. Sometimes, driving along, I’d look across the car to where Al Jones had his head out the window, tongue lolling, ears blown flat, and Tony was singing “Yellow Submarine” too loudly, and then at my wrinkled old face in the rearview mirror, and I would wonder which of us was better off.

  Tony loved Al Jones. He took him on long walks, fed him, groomed him, talked to him, taught him tricks, tried to teach him to walk on his hind legs, bathed him too often, always using Alberto VO5 shampoo, fell asleep with him in front of the TV, and fried eggs for him on Sunday mornings. And he talked to him endlessly. He sat on the floor with Al Jones in deep, heartfelt discourse, and the dog cocked his head and ears and looked every bit as if he were about to answer.

  When Julia’s symptoms reappeared, she ignored them. By the time she went to the doctor, the cancer was everywhere. This time her reaction was entirely different. It seemed that the part of Julia that died first was her animus, and when it was gone, when she was stripped of anger and suspicion and resentment, there wasn’t much left. When this happened, I knew that the thing had defeated her, and then I realized that for a long time I had thought she couldn’t be defeated.

  The children were very attentive to Julia while she was dying. Christine drove over three times a week to bathe her. She would sit on her mother’s bed, and the two of them would talk quietly. Brooks was there just as often, striding around the room full of false cheer. Tony would tiptoe up the stairs and peek in at Julia’s door. Sometimes they watched old movies together. Julia even took a brief if awkward turn toward me. One day when I was bringing her a tray of food, she gestured toward the book that lay beside her on the bed. She asked me to read to her.

  It was Christopher Ogden’s biography of Pamela Harriman called Life of the Party. I read until Julia fell asleep. The next day I read again, this time for two or three hours. The day after that, after I had read, Julia had me help her into a sitting position and brush her hair. She put her head back, closed her eyes, and let me gently pull at her hair and massage her scalp with the soft brush. It was the first time I had touched her with anything like tenderness in a very long time. But when I came to read again the following day, she rolled away and said she didn’t think she could take it. I stood there saddened, embarrassed, afraid that I had, as I often do, given ten when only one had been requested or imposed something on her that I’d thought she was enjoying. I felt foolish. Of course she wasn’t enjoying it; she wasn’t enjoying anything. And what couldn’t she take? Me? Intimacy? Pamela Harriman’s gay, exciting life? Perhaps life itself. A few days later I was speaking to her, and again she rolled away.

  “Julia?” I said.

  She didn’t answer me. I had started to leave the room before she spoke. “There was a letter for you from Holland.” She said it as if it had come yesterday, and I was puzzled because she hadn’t been downstairs in weeks.

  “For me? When?”

  “Back then. In the beginning. I destroyed it.”

  “You destroyed it?” I knew I couldn’t ask her if she’d read it. I knew I couldn’t ask her what was in it, but I also knew why she had accused me of having a “Dutch whore.”

  It was about a month after this exchange that Julia died.

  Her funeral was not the celebration that many modern funerals try to be. Instead, people said careful things.

  “I so admired her.”

  “She was always so stately.”

  “She was a presence.”

  Brooks was very emotional. Christine wept silently. Only Tony didn’t show much feeling, and I worried some that he didn’t know or understand what had happened. When I tried to explain, he wasn’t very interested or he was impatient. I gave up, but one day more than a year later, when we were fishing, I saw that his cheeks were tear-stained.

  I asked him if he was okay.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I was just missing Mom.”

  As for me, I felt grief, but it was the grief of finality, that now there was no chance at all of a knowing glance or a whispered secret. I also felt the relief you feel with any death that isn’t sudden and unexpected: relief from the illness but also from life itself, which at its sweetest and softest is still hard. “To die, to sleep … ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” And I felt release, from my vigil, from our long mistake.

  After Julia’s death I made a conscious decision to try to find Sarah. I wrote her a letter and sent it to her parents’ address. Sometime later it came back. I sent it again to Veldhoven, general delivery. It came back again with words that translated “address unknown.” Still, I knew now that our dialogue had not ended with my letter to her. No, there had been a reply, and perhaps there was still a question to be answered.

  I do not know why Julia destroyed the letter nor why she finally told me about it. Perhaps to torture me, perhaps to give me hope. Perhaps as an act of contrition or confession or forgiveness. I really do not know, but then there were many things I did not know about my wife.

  In the years that followed Julia’s death, Tony and I slowed down. We still traveled, but our trips were fewer and shorter. Perhaps it was because we were both getting older, perhaps because we had some health problems. I had my gall bladder removed, and Tony had high blood pressure. Or perhaps we no longer had as much reason to be away from home. We spent a lot of time sitting in our big pink chairs, fishing on the lake, and cutting and stacking firewood, although we finally had to get someone else to do that for us. In May we planted a garden of roses, impatiens, petunias, marigolds, lettuce, zucchinis, tomatoes, peppers, parsley, basil, and sometimes a pumpkin or two. We put onions, potatoes, and carrots in, too, to harvest in the fall, and when the weather turned we baked bread once a week. Tony was the kneader, kneeling on a chair and pushing and pounding the dough with his hands and fists while listening to the Beatles turned up loud. Sometimes we baked oatmeal cookies or butterscotch brownies, too.

  For my eighty-fourth birthday, Tony gave me two third-row box-sea
t tickets for a Cubs/Pirates game at Wrigley Field. That was a big deal for both of us, so I told him we’d make a day of it. After the game we’d eat outside at Penny’s Noodles and drink cans of Guinness with the hot food.

  “Oh, yeah!” he said.

  I let Tony sleep in and cooked him a special Mexican breakfast. When I heard the dog whining, I opened Tony’s bedroom door to let him out. Al Jones lay on the bed beside Tony, who had been dead for some hours. His mouth was open and twisted.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and touched his cool hand. I smoothed his hair. Al Jones nosed at me and whined. I let him out the back door, got the phone, sat back down, and started calling people. After a while I called the undertaker.

  So that’s the story of our family, Nora. Julia and I didn’t have much of a marriage, it’s true, but we made three children, and they hit doubles in the gap, flunked out of college, got pimples, bought houses, bagged groceries, had five more children, and those children won medals, earned degrees, got arrested, broke legs and hearts, and they’ll have children, you’ll have children, and it will go on. Julia has been dead for a while, and I’ll be dead soon, but for the moment I’m still here, and as long as I am, I’m going to keep going because even after eighty-five years, life can still surprise me. I’m not ready to give up on it quite yet. In fact, I’ve decided to stay here in The Netherlands if I can. I’m in the process of applying for permanent residency.

  Veldhoven, Autumn 2007

  How long should it be until we hear?” Tom asked over the phone.

  “How long since we submitted the application?” replied the lawyer. “Two weeks? Shouldn’t be long.”

  “I also wanted to ask you if you can find out more about Pim de Wit.”

  The lawyer hesitated. He seemed about to offer some advice but asked instead, “What do you want to know?”