Old Heart Read online

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You smoke, too?”

  “Trying to quit.”

  Now Tom hesitated. “Want one?”

  Roger thought. “Sure.” He got up to open the windows and turn on the fan. Tom shook out two smokes, and they sat there together, knees practically touching, using the wastebasket as an ashtray. He must have been about forty then, Roger thirty and fresh out of residency, but that had sealed it. Roger had been his doctor ever since. Now they were both old men.

  “Mr. Johnson?” someone was saying. “Bryce Heinz. You probably don’t remember me. …”

  “Well, of course I do, Bryce.”

  “Please don’t get up.” And then he was meeting his former student’s wife and two teenaged children and the student was telling a funny story about something Tom had said in class one day.

  “I just wanted to stop by and say hello.”

  “Well, I’m so very glad you did, Bryce.”

  Now the lawn was filling up with people, Christine or someone had put on a CD—was it Creedence Clearwater? He could never tell (he probably would have chosen the 1812 Overture or the Brandenburg Concertos, but he’d lost the privilege of playing music at all because two of his neighbors had complained that he played it too loud especially in the early morning although a third liked to awaken to Tom’s music especially Debussy because it allowed her to feel that in a world of calamity and distress, there was also some grace).

  In the lake young guys with their girlfriends on their shoulders were engaged in chicken fights, and Tom was thinking about diphtheria. He had read in the paper way back on New Year’s Day that it had been the leading cause of death in the United States one hundred years ago, and Tom did not know what diphtheria was. He had intended to look it up half-a-dozen times and never had. This was probably what Christine and Brooks meant by lapses in memory. But Tom had always been absent-minded. No, it was his getting lost in the woods that really concerned them. Of course he hadn’t really been lost in the woods; he’d been lost in thought. He’d been working on his plan, but he couldn’t tell them that. Besides, he’d often gotten lost. It had been Tony’s old dog, Al Jones, who’d always known the way home. He’d followed Al Jones for years. And if he hadn’t stepped in the creek and finally been coming out of the woods all wet and muddy just when Christine had stopped by after dinner, she would never have known.

  Diphtheria. If he could get out of his damn chair, he’d go look it up right now. Or if he had the energy; was this what Roger Daugherty had meant by “losing strength”? What if he really couldn’t get up, and no one came by or looked out a window and a storm blew in and lightning crackled all around? Would he raise his face to the pelting rain? Would he be willing to die this way? Tom was testing himself again, and as was always the case, he knew he wouldn’t know the answer until the moment. And then there was what he was going to do the next day. He knew he would regret it sometimes. He knew there was a chance that he’d regret it altogether, that it would be a mistake. He had tried to be objective. He thought his odds were good. If he could just weather the bad days. If he could just keep his eye on the ball. If he could remember the alternative. Of course it was a wild hare, but wasn’t that exactly the point? In truth, he wasn’t quite sure; it all seemed so big.

  What he was entirely sure about was that despite all the people who covered his lawn this day, despite the letters and phone calls and marriages and promises and prayers and all the many and constant attempts not to be alone, he was. First and foremost, before anything else and after everything else, he was alone. It was a fact. It was his fact. It was what he knew and always had known. He’d known it as a child at his brother’s funeral amidst the flowers, robes, music, scented air, and stained glass, all of which were elaborate lies carefully designed to deny the thing that was so viscerally apparent, so blatantly obvious to him even then. And all his life he had wondered if it was a fact he would abandon, knowledge he would compromise when he was old and sick and death was near. He wondered if he would find himself in a church pew searching for some solace in the ancient words and smells and rituals. He hadn’t yet.

  His brother had died of a burst appendix at the age of twelve. What year was that? 1930 or ’31? Tom had been eight. Diphtheria, influenza, diarrhea. Simpler ailments for a simpler time. With so many childhood dangers lurking, he wondered if parents then could afford to love their children as much as parents did now that babies came with warranties: three years or thirty-six thousand miles. Don’t worry about measles or small pox or polio or tuberculosis or diphtheria, whatever that is; we’ve got those covered. Did his parents love him a little more or a little less after Paul’s death? Love was riskier then. A little riskier. Did they love him at all? They didn’t kiss him much. Didn’t hug him. Didn’t really touch him after a certain age. Perhaps they were afraid. Perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps they simply knew what people had always known until very recently. Pass the party mix, please. And had it been easier when you’d had more children and loved them each a little less? Perhaps he had loved Brooks not too little but too much. (The thought momentarily relieved the guilt he seemed to always carry with him.) Had he doted and smothered and coddled until the boy thought he deserved it all: happiness, success, prosperity, even luxury, seventy-six point eight years, a full head of blond hair, and erections on demand?

  Someone sat down heavily in Tony’s chair. It was Brooks, and Tom’s heart sank a little because he was wearing the Brooks smile, the one he always wore when, even though you’d said “no way,” “absolutely not,” said “no” a thousand times in a thousand ways, he was going to ask you again. He was the most relentless person Tom had ever known. Self-centered and relentless. And now here was another grand scheme, an insurance deal he was working on with Claude Collier that would revolutionize the home health care industry, and if they could just get their foot in the door of one major health care corporation, like Premia, for instance, and Claude had contacts. … Tom put his hand on Brooks’s forearm to stop him. He didn’t want to hear this.

  “Brooks, listen to me for a minute. I called Paul Sianis at Coldwell Banker and told him I wasn’t going to sign that contract tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Dad, why’d you go and do that?”

  “Because I’m not going to sell this house, Brooks.”

  “Oh, for Chrissake, Dad, we’ve been through this. …”

  “Hush, now. Listen to me. I didn’t say I’m not leaving. I am. I said I’m not selling, and the reason is that I’m going to give this house to you and Christine. Fact, I already have. All you two have to do is go into Jerry Santoro’s office and sign the papers. It’s all arranged.”

  Brooks and Christine would own it jointly, but Tom wanted Brooks and Marian to live there. He’d explained it all to Christine. But there was one condition: they had to live there ten years before the house could be sold. By then, he reasoned, the house should be worth a great deal of money. Tom talked about buying the place after the war, when it was the only house on this road, about paying twelve thousand dollars for it and wondering how he’d ever make the mortgage payments every month, about the money he and Brooks’s mother had saved and invested, about how he would be quite comfortable, about his good teacher’s pension. “Now, I know you weren’t very happy about the size of Tony’s estate, but there was method in my madness,” Tom said. “I used up his money so we wouldn’t lose so much of it to taxes, and now you’re getting the house instead. It’s worth more anyway, and a lot more if you take the taxes into account.” What Tom didn’t say was that this way Brooks couldn’t blow the money, or gamble it away, not for a while at least.

  Through all of this, Tom was aware that Brooks was quiet, and after he finished, there was more silence. Finally Brooks said, “Know what’s worried me?”

  “What?”

  “What we’d do with these damned ironic chairs. Now I guess we don’t have to do anything.”

  “Except sit in them.”

 
“Perfect timing, too. You’re number one on the list at Hanover Place. I didn’t tell you that, did I? They called a couple of days ago.”

  “Hmm,” Tom said, “someone must have died.”

  “Now, Dad, please don’t start. …”

  But he wasn’t about to. It was a diversionary tactic, just a little ground fire to make Brooks think Tom was still fighting. In point of fact, the battle was over. It had gone on a long time, but it was over. Tom was tiptoeing away under cover of darkness, rowing with muffled oars, and Brooks had no idea. Neither did Christine, of course, and that he regretted, but it had to be.

  The battle had started long ago, when Julia had died. Julia turning her face to the wall, closing her eyes, breathing ever less deeply and often. It had been the act of turning away. He’d been standing there talking, making small talk, and she had simply rolled over as if to say in the plainest terms what they both knew: We have wasted our lives on each other. In that sense it was dismissive, impersonal, perhaps even cruel. In another it was intimate, an acknowledgment of the secret only the two of them shared completely, and for just a moment hope had formed and burst again in his heart like a soap bubble: ephemeral, glistening, and doomed. Or perhaps it was just the act of a woman so worn out by dying that she had no time for pretense or delusion. Whatever it was, it had left each of them utterly alone: he standing there, she lying there.

  What he was left with was the house and Tony, and almost immediately Brooks had started in about selling the house. Had Tom suspected an ulterior motive even then? At any rate, he was appalled; he was only seventy-four at the time. The arguments were the usual ones: too much upkeep, too much yard work, out here all alone.

  “I’d rather be out here all alone,” said Tom, and at that time it was true, “than any other place in the world.” But he wasn’t all alone, of course; he had Tony. His sidekick, his soulmate, his pal. And then when he didn’t anymore, well, then he was all alone and then he did have time on his hands and then the house did seem suddenly large and empty. And then he really could go looking for Sarah van Praag, as he’d always told himself he wanted to. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “Oh, come on, Dad, think about it. Chance to be with people your age. Socialize. They say it keeps you young. Who knows? Maybe meet someone.” Why was Brooks always saying these things? He lacked knowledge not only of himself but of Tom, perhaps of everyone. Somehow he’d always treated Tom as a generic commodity, as if he must feel as all other parents, teachers, old people feel. It raised Tom’s ire that Brooks could be so stupid about his own father, or perhaps uncaring. Maybe it just hurt him.

  “Brooks, I’m a curmudgeon. I don’t like people.”

  “And what about Tony? Wouldn’t it be good for him to be in a more social milieu? Everyone would love him. Besides, there’ll come a time when you’re going to need help with him.”

  Social milieu! He’d finally put an end to it, at least round one of it, with Christine’s help. He had just the two of them—no spouses, no kids—to dinner. He wowed them with his paella Valencia, softened them with Spanish wine, amused them, charmed them, and then, while Tony was doing the dishes and singing “She Was Just Seventeen” in the kitchen and they were oohing and ahing over his flan and espresso, he said, “Look, you two, I went through a bad time when your mother was dying, and I know there are probably hard times ahead with Tony, but right now I’m in a very good place. I’m on one of those little plateaus of happiness and good health that comes along every so often, and I am enjoying it thoroughly.” He said that he had Tony, Al Jones, music, books to read, this place that he loved, the lake to swim in and sail on, the forest to walk in, and his family all around. “I’m strong, I’m healthy, I’m happy. Please let me be. Please.”

  Christine looked under raised brows at Brooks. “He’s right, you know.” And they let him be until Tony died, and then it started again.

  “Dad, you already know about ten people who live there.”

  “Yeah, but do I like any of them? And what about Al Jones?”

  “He’s a dog, Dad.”

  “He’s the best damn dog in the world, and I’m not going anywhere without him.”

  “He’s incontinent.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. He has an occasional accident.”

  He was holding his own until the “incidents” that occurred after Tony’s death and after Al Jones got too old to take long walks. That was what Brooks called them: “incidents.” The first was an automobile accident. Tom glided through a stop sign and was broadsided. Neither vehicle was going very fast, so the damage was minimal. Problem was, the stop sign was at the end of Tom’s street less than a block from his house; he’d been stopping at it for almost fifty years. This time he didn’t.

  “I didn’t see it,” he said.

  “How could you not see it, Dad? It’s practically in your yard.”

  “I just didn’t, okay?”

  Incident number two was the time Tom got lost in the woods. “Dad,” Christine said when she saw him wet to his knees, his boots caked with mud, “what in the world!”

  “Don’t even bother to ask.”

  “But Dad, I have to ask.” And of course she did have to ask and to wring her hands. It was part of her. It was in her genes. So now she came with him whenever she could for his walk in the woods. Sometimes he tried to outpace her just to prove a point, but usually they just walked and talked, and the first time they did, he realized that it had been a long time since it had been just the two of them like that, since their conversation hadn’t been cluttered with details. Once he took her soft, cool hand and held it a long time as they walked, and once he asked about her marriage, and she blushed and said, “We’re fine, Dad. We’re good. For a while we tried to be great, and that didn’t work out so well, but as long as we stick with good, we’re okay.” Then she smiled at him a little wistfully, and he looked at her a little differently. Had she grown wise and strong in time, and had he missed it?

  The third incident was actually a series of incidents that had to do with snowmobiles and Jet Skis, both of which Tom loathed because they were so noisy and disturbed his peace. Almost since both vehicles had been invented, Tom had been trying to get them banned from the lake, as they had been from several others. But also almost since their invention, snowmobiles had become a working-class institution, and Jet Skis had been celebrated as “poor men’s yachts,” and since there was a blue-collar town at one end of the lake and a summer community consisting of trailers and shabby cabins at the other, Tom was derided and dismissed as an elitist. He made matters both better and worse when he saved a Jet Skier’s life.

  It was a weekday summer morning about ten o’clock, and Tom was sitting on the dock in a lawn chair, reading. Around the bend came a Jet Skier going fast and much too close to the shore. Tom put down his book and yelled at him, to no avail. Then he watched the boy, who, it turned out, was fourteen, lose control and plow into the neighbor’s dock. Tom stood up, looked, and listened. A moment later he heard a gurgled “Help me.” Tom let himself down into the waist-deep water and slogged the hundred feet to the accident. The boy’s legs were trapped beneath the heavy machine, which had turned onto its side and become wedged beneath the dock. His arms were free, and he was flailing but sinking. Tom got behind the boy, put his hands under the boy’s arms and across his chest, and rested the boy’s back against his own legs and body so that he could keep his head above water. Then he began to call for help. It was almost an hour before the garbage collectors came by and heard his now weakening pleas. By then both Tom and the boy were shivering and exhausted. The local weekly put Tom’s photograph on the front page and called him a hero.

  Unfortunately, they also interviewed him. To the question “What can be done to prevent accidents like this one from happening in the future?” Tom answered, “Keep hillbillies and half-wits off the lake, and ban Jet Skis altogether. I think that in order to operate a snowmobile or a Jet Ski on Frenchman’s Lake, you should have to
meet one or both of these qualifications: first that you have an IQ of at least 75 and second that you have less than 75 percent body fat. That should pretty much eliminate the problem.” With that public statement, Tom’s status moved from eccentric to crank, and the affair became an official “incident.”

  And incident number four, which Brooks came to call “the last straw,” had to do with his income taxes. It wasn’t that Tom didn’t do the tax return. He did. He filled out the forms neatly, completely, and accurately, all before April first, and he even wrote his check for two hundred forty-three dollars.{Then he put the stamped envelope aside and forgot about it. Christine found it on May 6 while sorting through a stack of mail. “Dad, didn’t you send your taxes in?” she said.

  “’Course I did. Had ’em in by April first.”

  “What’s this, then?” She held up the envelope.

  The IRS fined him, and it was agreed that Christine would come by once a month to look over the bills and help him balance his checkbook and that next year they would hire a professional to do his taxes. It was humiliating. If it had happened twenty years earlier, it would have been a good joke, maybe even one he told on himself. “So I did ’em early, set ’em aside, and forgot to send ’em in. What a moron.” It was also the first time that Brooks mentioned the term “power of attorney,” causing Tom’s heart to sink into the deepest pit of his stomach and his mind to flood with fear and paranoia. Had it come to that? Was he that far gone?

  “Just sign it over so Christine can help you keep track of things, Dad.”

  “No way. Never.”

  On the phone his lawyer, Jerry Santoro, had said, “Oh, hell, Tom, they can’t make you do it unless you’re a lot worse off than you are. Not to worry.”

  “Well, I do worry.”

  “Tom, look, you’re fit, you’re strong. I know men ten years younger …”

  “That’s not what my children think.” He resisted adding “or doctor.”

  “Children don’t think, Tom, you know that. You still out there on the lake sailing your boat?”