Old Heart Read online

  She also said that he was the only man she had slept with besides her husband, and that included Briggs S., whom she called a “goddamn drunk and lout.” She said that Tom should have seen that. Then she wept. He had never seen her cry before; her tears and sobs erased the echoing laughter from the last night on the lake. He got into the car and held Julia. Before he had admired her for her grace, coolness, and irony; now he loved her for the sadness, loneliness, and fear he realized those things were disguising. But when he told her he loved her, she grew angry and argued with him. He had to plead with her. He had to go further. He said he wanted to marry Julia and have the baby. He said he wanted to spend his life with her and wanted them to grow old together. He said that this was why they had fought the war and men had given their lives, so the two of them could fill up the world with babies. She made him promise that he would never leave her, and he did it. She made him swear to God, and he did it. She asked him over and over if he loved her; she did not, however, say that she loved him. Tom remembers this because he was waiting for the words she didn’t say. He thinks now that she didn’t say them not because she didn’t love him but because it didn’t matter; all that mattered was that he loved her. Julia wept, and Tom held her tight, resolving to love her enough to make up for everything that had gone awry in what now appeared to be her tragic life. Only afterward did he come to realize that he had promised more than one could or should and that his promises were a form of emotional condescension that would eventually create resentment and distrust. Also that Julia had revealed things about herself she hadn’t wanted to and seldom would again.

  Perhaps this was why, a few days later, as they drove to Keokuk, Iowa, to get married, Tom assumed that the high emotions of the earlier day had broken a logjam when the opposite seemed to be the case. Julia was remote. She acted as if she were embarrassed by all that had happened and deflected any references Tom made to it. He remembers being concerned. He wondered for the first time if Julia was capable of love or even vulnerability. He thought of her indifferent father, of her emotionless mother, and of Buddy P., who drank beer and played softball in the city park, who flipped his bat away, who Tom once saw run over the catcher and not even help him up. Tom admitted to himself that Buddy the war hero had also been arrogant. Why, he wondered, had Julia married him? And crossing the cornfields that day en route to Iowa, Tom wondered if he was making a horrible mistake. He banished the thought. He had it, but he banished it. He chose to think that he was experiencing cold feet or the jitters. He knew that what he was doing was both necessary and noble. What he did not know was that Julia would come to see it as a smug sacrifice, a superior gesture of rescue only serving to show that the most the world was going to offer her was pity, and Tom thinks that that would ultimately make her, in his words, “definitively angry.”

  Despite his uneasiness, Tom was to have fond memories of that day and night, of the plain little courtroom in which they were married, of eating hamburgers afterward and playing gin rummy until midnight in a motor court near Dubuque because neither of them knew if a pregnant woman could have intercourse. In fact, so does he have good memories of the first six months of their marriage; he thinks it may have been their best time. They were performing, he says, as young people do when thrust into new roles, but in those roles he thinks they were happy, or at least too busy to be unhappy. He had been hired to teach English at the high school after all (the history positions had all been filled) and was busy staying one step ahead of his students, and she was busy setting up their house, being a wife again and preparing to be a mother. No one seemed to mind that they were suddenly married and pregnant; the war had allowed for the relaxation of the rules. They went to movies or out for ice cream with other couples, played bridge, and were invited for dinner to their parents’ houses. They lived in a garage apartment and called each other “dear” and “sweetheart” even though the words sounded like they had borrowed them from their parents, as they had furniture, dishes, and flatware. Each was leaving something behind. For Julia, it was her first marriage. For Tom, it was the war and the Dutch girl who had broken his heart. He wanted to prove something to that girl and to himself. He wished that he could take snapshots of his new life and send them to her.

  Their first fight was about the baby’s name. If a boy, Julia wanted to call him Russell after her father and Tom wanted to name him Anthony after a comrade who had died in the war. For a while they jousted good-naturedly about this, but one day Julia said that Anthony didn’t sound American. Tom took offense, he thinks perhaps because he had some guilt about his relationship with the dead man, whom he felt he had judged and let down; in reality, he hadn’t really known the man very well and certainly not well enough to name a child after him. He made fun of Julia and her family for being big fish in a small pond and said something unkind about her father’s name. She defended her father, saying that at least he would never have spent his honeymoon in Iowa. Tom was taken aback, as he had been the night with Briggs on the boat; he had simply assumed again that he and Julia agreed about something that they didn’t.

  One day in March a letter arrived for Tom at his parents’ house. It had multiple postmarks, the first of which was June 1946. Tom read the letter standing in the foyer. He read it over and over.

  Dearest Tom,

  I have made a dreadful mistake. I am so sorry we had a row. I meant none of the foolish, cruel things I said. I was frightened. Please forgive me. I wish I could take away what I have done, but I cannot. I know that I will probably never see you again, and that is a bigger reason for me to tell you that I love you, and I always will. If you can come back, I shall be waiting for you. I am yours,

  Sarah

  A month later Tom and Julia’s baby, being breech, was born by cesarean section. He was very small. Tom remembers seeing a nurse holding him as if he were a broken vase. He remembers the young doctor’s fumbling attempts to explain the baby’s condition. In his awkwardness he was too technical. Finally Julia interrupted him and said, “He’s got a birth defect, hasn’t he?” The doctor said no, not exactly. “He’s retarded, isn’t he?” Julia asked.

  “He has a condition called Mongolism,”1 the doctor finally managed to say.

  Tom remembers that it was an early warm day. People kept commenting on it. The room was hot. Someone opened the window. Tom and Julia agreed to name the baby Russell Anthony and to call him Tony so his name wouldn’t get confused with her father’s.

  As an infant Tony was so small that Tom could almost hold him in his hand and certainly in the crook of his arm. He was amorphous and still, “like a sock monkey” with no apparent skeleton or muscle tone. He was content to lean against any part of Tom, and it was Tom who held him at first while Julia recovered from surgery. When she did begin to carry the baby around, it was in a way that Tom calls cavalier; slung over a shoulder or later riding on her cocked hip almost like a duffel bag. She was the same kind of mother that she was a wife and friend and later business partner: no-nonsense. “The baby’s defective, Tom,” she once said. “Call a spade a spade, for the love of Mike.” What both Tom and Julia knew but never said was that he had wanted the baby and she had not, that they had made an agreement from which there was no escape. “That may sound like a compromise made in hell,” Tom says today, “but it wasn’t.” For one thing, it was based on some truth. For another, all around them Tom and Julia saw couples making astounding but functional deals to accommodate each other’s delusions, phobias, and dreams. For a third, while their deal was far from perfect, it was absolutely necessary.

  One night before Julia and the baby came home from the hospital, Tom smoked two baby cigars, got drunk on Dutch gin, listened to the jazz records he had brought home from the war, and wrote a half-a-dozen letters to Sarah v. P. In the morning he tore them all up and then, with a shaky hand, wrote one more. He was numb as he walked to the post office and then the hospital. From that time forward he tried not to think about the Dutch woman because to do so se
emed like either self-pity or disloyalty to Julia, whom he was trying very hard to love and to change, as she was trying very hard to love and change him, a process both would continue for most of the next twenty years. “And that was a mistake,” he says today, “or perhaps a red flag because what you are saying to the person you are trying to change is ‘I don’t like you as you are.’” And apparently they did not, although for many years they tried to. In the beginning she laughed at some of his jokes and enjoyed his roughhousing with her parents’ dogs. He liked to hear her sing and watch her water ski. He appreciated her offhanded creativity in the kitchen and good nose for unusual music; he remembers nights when they sat on the floor listening to records, drinking wine, passing cigarettes back and forth, and “talking in that way that you think is intimate when you are tipsy.”

  They had enough such romantic moments to keep them going and to produce two more children. Brooks was born thirteen months after Tony and Christine two years later. By that time they were living in a two-bedroom apartment, and they needed a house. Julia and her mother had found one. It was a brick salt box on the second-best street in town. When Tom said it was a banker’s house, not a teacher’s, Julia said he didn’t have to be a teacher the rest of his life. When Tom said they couldn’t afford it, Julia said her father was going to help them buy it. She should have said that he was willing to help them buy it. Tom said no. He surprised both of them; he did not know how strongly he felt about being beholden to Julia’s family. What followed was their second big fight. Tom remembers it now because the words said that day, with variations and refinements, became their basic script, one that they could fall into easily and almost instantly and reference or set off with a key word or two. Julia said that he was too proud, an elitist, a phony intellectual, a jealous little man who was scared of his own shadow and had a big head because high school girls had crushes on him, a reverse snob who looked down his nose at her family because they were rich and successful. Tom claims with an embarrassed smile not to remember his part of the exchange quite as well but admits it probably included such words as “philistine,” “Babbitt,” “bourgeois,” and “materialistic.” What he does remember is that that day they hurt each other in ways that never healed and that in the years to come they would spend a great deal of time trying to explain and apologize for those words but also repeating them. And he remembers laughing at his wife for the first time and realizing just how furious it made her. “I’m afraid it was a trick I used often after that.”

  That day the fight ended with Julia shouting, “Find your own goddamn house and live in it alone, you bastard, or with your goddamn Dutch whore!” Tom ignored the latter part, but in more or less short order he found the lake house that we sat in front of during our interviews. It was inexpensive because it was a cottage without a foundation (they would later dig one and build two additions), and in those days everyone wanted to live in the town. Only fishermen, hunters, and people who could not afford town houses lived on the lake, but Tom was able to talk Julia into it because it had a dock where her father could keep his boat and a lawn down to the lake on which it was easy to imagine children playing. The compromise was that they would let Russell L. remodel and furnish the place. Tom tried to do as much of the work as he could and to not notice how much Julia’s father was spending, but in the end all that really mattered to him was that it was he who was making the mortgage payment each month. This allowed him to feel independent and self-sufficient. Still, it was during this time that Julia first used the term “my money,” as in “This is coming out of my money” or “Don’t worry, I’m using my money.” Where that money came from and how much there was of it was never discussed, but it became clear that its use was discretionary and that she believed they could not get along without it.

  At the same time her parents kept offering Tom things. For Christmas they gave him a family membership to the country club and tried to get him to take up golf. He played a few times with Julia and her parents or with Frankie and Warren, her brothers, who always made a point of talking about how much money they made and how much time they had for golf. Tom did not like golf or much about the country club except club sandwiches. “I did develop a taste for those.” He used Christine’s birth as an excuse to beg off from golf games, saying that he was just too busy with school, the house, and the kids and hoping that Julia’s father would understand. “Russ turned out to be a hard man not to offend.” But he didn’t give up. One summer he talked Tom into working on the showroom floor as a salesman. Almost immediately he made two sales. Both customers traded in their Lincolns every year, and Julia’s father simply sent them to Tom. Then he bought him a big cigar and took him out to lunch. He talked about retirement, a pretty little piece of beachfront property in a village called Naples on the southwest coast of Florida where he hoped to end up, and leaving the agency in the hands of Frankie, Warren, and Tom if he was interested. At that moment Tom thought he might be. “I felt like Jimmy Stewart on the other side of Potter’s big desk,” a reference to Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. But then Russ, working on his second martini, said the wrong thing. It was something like “Besides, you don’t want to spend your life in the world of women and children, do you? You got too much on the ball for that. I mean, I think it’s fine you put in a few years. Public service kind of thing. Sure. But for Chrissake, Tom, you don’t want to be a schoolteacher your whole life.”

  Tom smiles wryly at the memory. “Funny thing is, until that moment, I don’t think I did,” but after that, the thought of working with his father-in-law made everything inside Tom feel as if it were sinking: the money, the clothes, the handshakes, the uncertainty in the other man’s eyes because he was wondering if Tom’s only interest was in selling him a car. Even more than that, it was living the life Julia so desperately wanted him to live; quite early on their relationship had defined itself as a competition in which they needed to oppose each other in almost everything. Besides, to his surprise Tom had begun to like teaching and to think that it might be important. A former student in a perfectly pressed Coast Guard uniform with the bill of his peaked cap pulled right down over his eyebrows came back to visit. He said Tom was the only teacher who had ever listened to him. Strangely, Tom could not remember the boy ever saying a word in class, but when a chance to teach American history in summer school came along, Tom took it. He never again played golf or sold cars.

  But if Julia tried to change Tom, he also tried to change her. He clipped New Yorker articles for her that she never read, played her jazz and chamber music records, even dragged her to French movies in the city once or twice. They each managed to regularly find a way of saying, “See, this is whom I really want you to be. This is the person I really wish I’d married.” And there were other cracks in the dam. A major one appeared when Tony reached school age. There was no special education yet. Six years of age was the time when children with Down syndrome often were sent away, and that was what Julia wanted to do with Tony. “Then the dinner table would be balanced,” says Tom, still with sarcasm in his voice. “Two parents, two kids, two males, two females, all with forty-six chromosomes.” Tom objected. They fought. In the end he prevailed by agreeing to take total responsibility for Tony, but it was another nail in the coffin of their marriage. Today he muses, “I wonder now if at that moment I’d accepted her, realized that she was telling me that she had limits, that she was asking for my support … but back then I just couldn’t do that; I wasn’t capable of it, I’m sorry to say. Besides, it would have meant pretty much giving up on Tony.”

  Instead Tony grew up in Tom’s classroom, first as a little boy dusting erasers or curled up with a cookie and a carton of chocolate milk on a Mickey Mouse throw rug under Tom’s desk, later as a passer-out and collector of things, a roll taker and a pencil sharpener. Later still as errand boy, message runner, member of the theater crew, and manager of the football team. Once or twice he took part in a talent-show skit, and when his class graduated
, Tony was allowed to cross the stage with them. A great cheer went up that was not entirely facetious. After that Tony worked as a bagger and stocker at the IGA.

  Tom admits now that he didn’t know Tony well at first. He didn’t know that he was a rule follower who never cursed or swore, a hard worker who was never happier than when he had a job, a tender, sensitive boy who longed for the companionship of a dog, who loved sentimental songs and silly puns, appreciated pretty girls, and was as loyal as the day was long; he became a Pirates fan when his best friend moved to Pittsburgh at the age of nine, and he rooted for them the rest of his life. In fact, Tom suspects his own motives in undertaking to rear Tony. He thinks he was probably making a statement about himself, or perhaps about Julia. “I did it for all the wrong reasons, but I was lucky,” Tom says. “I think Tony probably saved my soul.”

  It was that summer when Tony was six that Julia started going to the dealership every day as soon as Tom came in the door from school, but it wasn’t until he stopped in there for something and saw her sitting at a desk in a glass-fronted office that he realized she was working. And although he didn’t know it yet, she had fundamentally changed the rules of their game: she was shooting the moon. The changes in their day-to-day lives were subtle and gradual but real. They were changes in priorities, duties, and expectations; now it was Julia who had an early meeting or a late one, who needed the car, who stayed up working at the dining room table, for whom the kids needed to be quiet so as not to disturb, who brought home chop suey or piled everyone in the car to treat them to cheeseburgers at the club. Less and less often did she and Tom share a special bottle of wine and a quiet evening. In truth, they’d stopped confiding in each other or talking about anything of much importance, but this was a fact that it was easy to overlook or ignore because they had other things to discuss, from grades to sales figures, from Little League games to dance recitals to proms and college applications. And they carried on all the formalities: Sunday dinners, Christmas mornings, Fourth of July parties.