Old Heart Read online

  Each time Tom passed a mirror or a store window, he looked a little more closely at himself, like a man with a new hat or one growing a mustache. All these years he’d had four children and never even known it. He thought about that most intimate and personal of facts that many of us are not privy to but the rest of the world is: how and when we die. “My father was an American.” Past tense. He wondered how he was supposed to have died and also what else he didn’t know about himself: some weak-walled blood vessel, secret tumor, genetic predisposition, as yet unrevealed fatal flaw, accident waiting to happen, some kindness or unkindness or miracle or devastation he was destined to deliver or had already delivered without even noticing. The world had changed just like that. For Tom now, every single idea, act, fact, thought, and feeling was itself and one thing more, was itself plus Ella Johnson. Nothing was the same. Not his last night with Ella’s mother. Certainly not. Not his first night with Julia, oh, my, no. Not bliss or clarity or certainty or love. Nothing.

  “Hard to be an American now,” said the doctor, sitting above him during their second session.

  “Uh-huh.” And when he could speak, he said, “This damned cowboy.”

  “You weren’t believing in the weapons of mass destruction?”

  “No, I didn’t buy that. I used to teach debate, and any first-year debater could tell you there wasn’t enough evidence. Some aluminum tubing, a couple trucks, and one questionable informant. Besides, there is only one real reason for war, and that is because it is necessary. This one isn’t.”

  “You are sounding like the voice of experience. Were you in World War II?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Europe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “In France, Belgium, and Germany,” he said cautiously.

  “In Holland?”

  He couldn’t lie to her again, although he’d planned to. He’d made up a son and a name, but when she asked him directly, he said, “A little.”

  “Where?”

  “In Eindhoven.”

  She had her back turned to him, although he could have touched her. Her head was bent, her elbows splayed, her hands engaged. Tom was still trying to assess if the silence in the room was awkward when she said, “I am thinking you may be my father.”

  From the beginning there were ground rules. They were not to be seen in public, at least not in Veldhoven. He could have no encounters with Pim, not even accidental ones; he was to turn and go the other way. Pim was also off limits in their talks; he was not to ask about her. Any information Tom came by, Ella volunteered. And he was to tell no one. Of course he had to tell someone, and it pretty much had to be Dickie. Besides, the other man seemed to be slipping away. Perhaps he’d been embarrassed by their night of drunken intimacy, or perhaps Tom had said something offensive that he hadn’t remembered afterward. Dickie wasn’t picking up his phone and was less often in the park. On a day when he was, Tom blurted out the whole story, in part to say it and in part to confide it, to signal to Dickie that as far as he was concerned, nothing between them had changed.

  “Bloody hell,” said Dickie.

  “I had no idea,” said Tom.

  “Rubbish,” said Dickie, and in just that word, there was some slight asperity or impatience. “’Course you did. Something brought you here.”

  “Yes, her mother.”

  “And something else, I think. You must have considered the possibility.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Tom. “I was the condom king; that’s what they called me. I had crates of the damn things. Of course I’d never used one before. I’m not sure I would have known had one failed.”

  “Apparently not.”

  His meetings with Ella were all initiated by her, each for a limited time and covering a specific subject. For a while they took place at Mrs. Waleboer’s when neither Saskia nor the children were home. The first thing Ella wanted to know about was her half-brothers and half-sister. They sat at the dining room table. He had a stack of Kodak packets, and he emptied these one by one, laying the pictures out in front of her in rows almost as if he were dealing cards. She studied each intently, and Tom watched her. Some of the photos she picked up to see more closely or to hold in the light. First she wanted to know about my mother. Tom had already decided that if this moment came, he would have no secrets. “The only trouble we ever had with Christine was when she was a teenager. She went with this wild boy I never liked. She got pregnant, but she miscarried. They quarreled over it and broke up.” He told her that my mother was generous, genuine, sensitive, high-strung, and conscientious, a worrier who would be worrying about him right now. Saying it made him feel guilty and then immediately defiant, as if guilt were a trap laid by his children. Goddamnit, he thought. So he told her a little less sympathetically about Uncle Brooks. Big, funny, loud, gregarious. Always falling out of trees. Always landing on his feet. Not much work ethic but lots of charm and a big heart.

  “And this is Russell Anthony?”

  “We called him Tony.”

  “When was he born?”

  “Same year as you: 1947. You’re a few months older.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He had a weak heart. Down syndrome people often do.”

  “Did he live in a hospital or rest home?”

  “No, no. He lived with us and then with me after Christine and Brooks grew up and Julia, my wife, died.”

  She wanted to know everything about him, so Tom told her. He told her about Tony the classroom helper, the grocery bagger, the fisherman, the baseball fan, the dog lover, the singer of Beatles songs. She wanted to know his favorite. “‘She was just seventeen, you know what I mean’ … ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ …”

  “Was it difficult to care for him?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you think he was happy?”

  Tom didn’t want to answer this too quickly or certainly. “I think so, and so was I. He was my pal.”

  She wanted to know what “pal” meant, and he tried to translate: “Buddy, friend, little friend.”

  “Little friend,” she said. “Vriendje.” She looked at more photographs and asked more questions: Did anyone ever make fun of him? Did he know he had Down syndrome? Did he like girls? What did he like to eat?

  “His favorite thing was a grilled cheese sandwich.”

  She wanted to know what it was.

  “Like a tosti,” he said. He made them each a grilled cheese. They ate them with pickles and chips and glasses of cold milk, just as Tony used to. Ella sat with her ankles crossed and chewed so thoroughly and earnestly that Tom had to chuckle at her.

  “Why do you laugh?”

  “You’re reminding me of someone. Maybe my father.”

  It was after the first visit that Tom decided he needed to check on Brooks and my mother. Perhaps because he wanted to make sure that just because Ella had suddenly appeared, they hadn’t suddenly disappeared, or perhaps because since the pepper-spray incident things had been strangely quiet. Could they possibly be content just to know where he was and that he was well? Maybe my mother. Not Brooks. No, Brooks was up to something; Tom just knew it. He began to feel the annoyance a parent feels toward a child who has disobeyed him: “But I told you … I instructed you!” But when he allowed himself to think of Christine, he felt the alarming ache a parent feels for a child who is in pain. When she didn’t make cheerleader in junior high school and cried herself to sleep in his lap. When her second baby was stillborn and she came home to sit in a lawn chair and stare at the lake for hours and hours under a quilt on a chilly day; how many times had he looked out the window at her?

  He dialed half her numbers before stopping, thinking, replacing the receiver, going for a walk along the little canal behind the church. Maybe that was a line he mustn’t cross. Maybe that was the one door he couldn’t reopen. If he did, then they would be here or he’d be there, and after this great fiasco, this co
lossal Toby Tylering, they’d lock him away so fast. They’d handcuff him to his bed. They’d never rest easy again.

  He went back and used a calling card to phone his lawyer, Jerry Santoro. “They’re worried about you, Tom. Can they contact you?”

  “No. Did you see Brooks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he ask you about guardianship?”

  “No,” he said carefully, “but then he wouldn’t, would he? I’m your attorney. But I heard something across the table at the Rotary luncheon last week you might be interested in. It’s on the QT, but apparently Brooks has applied for a rather large home equity loan.”

  “What? Why would he do that.”

  Jerry didn’t answer, but neither did he have to.

  “Wouldn’t Christine have to sign for that, too?”

  “For it to be legal.”

  Afterward he sat a long time, worrying about what was going on. Would Christine ever have agreed to sign the loan application? He didn’t think so. Did that mean Brooks had forged her signature? And how much trouble was Brooks in, anyway?

  At their second meeting Ella brought the photographs. The first few pictures were of Ella through the years. Tom would later call this small collection self-effacing: carefully selected, representative, modest in number, more modest in what the photos depicted—Ella the infant, the toddler standing knock-kneed and openmouthed, the tiny, pudgy broomball player in a swarm of others, with pigtails, giggling, looking embarrassed in a two-piece bathing suit, looking awkward with a teenaged boy, looking mysterious and intense with other girls who looked the same at a table filled with beer bottles in a room filled with cigarette smoke, graduating from dental school, wearing a lab coat in a clinic, with a baby in her arms, caught off guard and looking over her shoulder. Next were photographs of her garden and her house: all windows and open space, which surprised Tom. Then there were pictures of Ella’s husband, Henk. And of the children. There was a boy, Robby, and a girl, Hanneke. Both kids were blond. The girl had the delicacy of her grandmother, a certain fineness of feature, a certain grace in movement that could be seen even in still photos. It was in the way she sat, stood, held her arms and hands. The boy was also delicate, perhaps even frail, when he was young, but in adolescence his shoulders broadened, he grew tall, his hair became a tangled mop that hung over his eyes, and Tom wondered if he ever blew it away as his grandmother once had. There were many pictures of Robby playing tennis. Tom could tell, as he was poised beneath a serve he had tossed high in the air, as he cocked himself to hit a two-handed backhand, that Robby was an accomplished player.

  At their third meeting Ella explained her mother’s two names.

  During World War I Ella’s grandmother had married a local boy named Ard van Praag, who was Jewish. They had gone to live in Rotterdam, perhaps because his parents or hers had disapproved. They had a child named Sarah; then van Praag died of influenza, and the woman came back to Veldhoven with her infant daughter. There she married another local boy, a young clerk named Alfons de Wit, and they had a daughter they named Pim after Alfons’s brother, who had enlisted in the Belgian army and died in the war. “That’s how she got a boy’s name.” Years passed. World War II broke out. Brabant fell to the Nazis in the spring of 1940, and Sarah, now twenty-two, went into hiding in the vegetable cellar; the family told their neighbors that she had got out just in time, that she had gone to England before the fall. The subterfuge worked, but during the course of the war, Sarah became ill and weak. As soon as the Americans liberated Veldhoven, she was rushed to a doctor and diagnosed with tuberculosis. The best treatment and the best doctors were at a sanatorium called Zonnestraal in the town of Hilversum. The problem was that Hilversum was in the part of Holland that had not yet been liberated and that was still behind German lines, but Sarah would die if she was not treated, and her parents didn’t trust the Belgians or the French or the English. “They were very provincial,” Ella said. “Only a Dutch doctor was good. Besides, at that time the Germans are fleeing and the Allies are coming fast; everyone thinks that the war is almost over. Of course it is not.” Pim, who was twenty-three, made contact with the underground and arranged to smuggle her sister into German-controlled territory. “This is how she knew to be your guide a few weeks later. Already she had done it once.” But of course Sarah was half Jewish, so the two girls exchanged identities and papers. Sarah became Pim, and Pim became Sarah. The plan worked. Pim, of course, was safe because Brabant was under Allied control. “Safe, so, until you come along and ask her to work for you. Now her harmless deception looks not so harmless, especially to her parents. What if it is found out that she is carrying false papers? Someone can think she is a spy.”

  “Why not just tell us the truth in the beginning?”

  “It is wartime; the truth is not worth for much, and besides, five years under the Nazis and my grandparents do not trust all authorities. Also they feared that if Pim is revealed, Sarah might be in danger. So Pim lived as Sarah, and she fell in love with you as Sarah van Praag.” There was something important in this to Tom: an acknowledgment that Pim had been in love with him, something the daughter could know only if the mother had told her. So she must have said the words years afterward.

  “But why not tell me after the war was over?”

  “She wanted to, but her parents are still frightened. Trials are going on in Nuremberg. People are hanging, and my mother has lied to you. They are afraid she will be accused of espionage.”

  “Then I have been looking for the wrong person,” he said.

  “No, just the wrong name. Sarah never got better. She never left hospital. She died only a little after the war.”

  “Then your mother, Pim de Wit, is the same woman that I knew as Sarah van Praag in 1946.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She is the same person many years later, and that is not the same person. When people go away, they think that what they leave behind stays the same, but it doesn’t. It changes.” Now Ella smiled at Tom. It was a cautionary smile. There was in it a component of curiosity and perhaps one of warning, as if to say, “There are things you don’t understand.”

  Northern Illinois, Autumn 2007

  The part of academic life I was beginning to think I didn’t really like was the academic part: the academy, academe, belonging to a group of people I wasn’t sure I belonged with. This occurred to me one dreary afternoon in a seminar on Marxism as I watched the students across the table from me nodding their heads almost in unison to something obvious and unbrilliant that the professor was saying. He was a slouch who could barely bother to show up, let alone teach, a task he farmed out to us; we spent the quarter reading our papers to each other, laughing at his bad jokes, currying his favor, and kissing his ass. I’d mortgaged my future in loans and was working my butt off waiting tables at Bar Louie for this? And here was the real joke: the half-dozen Marxists in that class were about the only ones left in the world. The thought of spending the rest of my life with them in these little rooms that had once thrilled me now scared the shit out of me, but not quite as much as the thought of what I’d do if I didn’t have these little rooms.

  I got someone to take my shifts at the restaurant and went home for the weekend, but that wasn’t much better. My mother tried to impress me by cooking coq au vin, something she’d never, ever done before, and my father by engaging me in an intellectual discussion of an episode of Law and Order. After dinner I gave up and went to meet some friends in a bar, but that was worse yet. They seemed consumed with talk of boys, cars, and clothes, almost as if they were still in high school. I watched from a growing distance until I realized they, too, were trying to impress me, and that really got me down. If I didn’t fit in one place and I didn’t fit in the other, where did I fit? I felt very much at sea.

  When I got home my parents were still up. My mother was in tears and my father in a rage. Apparently Uncle Brooks had been using my mother’s car all week because
his transmission had gone out and was supposed to return it that night, but he had called at nine o’clock with some fishy story about his car not being ready, so he was going to have to keep hers until Monday.

  “He’s up to something,” my mother said.

  “Didn’t even ask,” said my father. Now my mother was going to have to use my father’s car to go to work, and he was going to have to change his plans to go to the botanical gardens.

  “Take mine,” I told him.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Well, no need to be snippy.”

  But that’s what I was: snippy. Maybe it wasn’t that I was at sea but that I needed to go to sea, like Ishmael when he feels like knocking men’s caps off. The next day, with the house to myself, I turned the music up, lit some candles, and took a long, very hot bath. While I was soaking there, I had an idea. When I got out I got on the computer and looked up my mother’s I-pass. There was the whole record. Three times since Monday Uncle Brooks had crossed the Chicago Skyway and the Indiana Tollway to exit 10 in Gary.

  “Shit,” I said aloud. Then I e-mailed Tom and told him, “You know what that means: riverboats.”

  Brabant, Autumn 2007

  Tom looked for traces of himself in Ella. He held her hand in his and touched her tiny, tapered finger, explaining that it was identical to his mother’s. She was visibly affected by that, as she had been by his letter.