Читать книгу Old Heart - Peter Ferry - Страница 7

Frenchman’s Lake, July 4, 2007

The pig was done. The pig boys, Brooks’s grown sons, Lou and Charlie, began to carve it. One of them brought a steaming morsel across the lawn on the end of a chef’s fork to the pink chairs, where Tom tasted it and said it was the best ever. People began to line up at the pig, at the keg, and at the picnic tables to spoon out salads and to butter ears of corn. Now I was sitting on the edge of Tony’s chair, holding a manila folder in my lap and watching my grandfather.

“Oh, Nora,” he said when he finally noticed me. “Oh, my beautiful Nora.”

“Oh, my beautiful Tom,” I laughed, mimicking if not quite mocking him, “I think you’re going blind. I’ve been sitting here for five minutes.”

“I was woolgathering. Time-honored pastime of the very old.”

“I have something for you.” I held up the folder. “I wrote a paper about you.”

“About me?”

“Based on some of what you told me last summer. I needed something for a class in personal historical narrative, and, well, I used your story. Just the first part of it, and I didn’t use your family name, of course.” I started to apologize, but then I didn’t, and Tom seemed amused by that.

“You are certainly like your grandmother. So what grade did we get?”

I laughed. “An A, of course.”

“Well, as long as it was an A. Is that it?” He nodded toward the folder in my hands.

“It is.”

“May I see it?”

“Of course. That’s why I brought it. I realized this might be my last chance to give it to you.”

“Not so loud.”

“And something else,” I said more softly. “I thought just maybe I could talk you into writing the rest of it.”

“Oh, I don’t know …”

“Or at least writing the part you didn’t tell me about: the war years and Sarah van Praag.”

No one knew what Tom would do with himself when he didn’t have Tony to take care of, so the summer of Tony’s death I was drafted to spend a few weeks with him. He was annoyed, and I was reluctant. He knew that he didn’t need to be tended to, and, although he couldn’t say it, I knew that he felt his new freedom impinged upon. As for me, I had just found the place I’d long been looking for. I had grown up in the suburbs and gone to college in a small town and didn’t feel at home in either place, but I did in Evanston, where I was in grad school. It was only an hour from my parents’ house and another half hour from Tom’s, but it was a world apart. It was full of bookstores and coffee houses, of people who had conversations in German or Italian on park benches, of people who rode bikes to hear string quartets on Sunday afternoons, of people who not only read books but wrote them. And I had made wonderful new friends there, witty people full of insight and passion, morose, cigarette-smoking fatalists, people with causes and complex belief systems, people who got emotional about Descartes or the Fabians or game theory over plates of noodles in cheap Thai restaurants. And then suddenly I was uprooted to babysit Tom, and in the summer, the best time of the year, when every restaurant and bar and coffee house in Evanston moved out onto the sidewalk, when there were free concerts in the park, sailboats on the lake, and I could ride my bike all the way down the shore to the Loop if I wanted to, when all I could see from my sunny sixth-floor studio was the sky above and a rolling carpet of treetops like green clouds below so that I hardly knew I was on earth, let alone in the city. And now that corner room, windows closed against storms, was stuffy and empty and the cellist from across the hall was coming in twice a week to water my ferns and I was stuck here in the land of the fish fry surrounded by big, fat people riding motorized shopping carts. And I was resentful.

I arrived with one small suitcase and two large cartons of books. It was a statement. So was my refusal to let Tom help me with any of it. I set up shop in one of the dormered bedrooms on the second floor that overlooked the lake. I used a card table as a desk and ostentatiously lined the windowsill with books. For the first three days I emerged from my room only for the dinners Tom cooked me. At that, I read at the table. On day three, over grilled salmon, roasted potatoes, and blanched asparagus, Tom said, “I want to thank you for coming out here to take care of me.”

I didn’t acknowledge his sarcasm, but the next afternoon I came to sit in Tony’s chair beside Tom. Still, I read and took notes on a legal pad. In fairness, I had lots of work to do. The next day I came again and finally put my book and pad down. When I did, Tom said, “D’you like Evanston?”

“I love it,” I said, a little fiercely, I suppose, as if to contrast Evanston and un-Evanston, which was here.

“Chandler’s still there?”

“What’s Chandler’s?”

“The bookstore.”

“I don’t think so. How do you know about that?”

“I did my master’s at Northwestern on the GI Bill after the war.”

“In education?”

“In English lit. Spent a lot of time there.”

“Did you live there?”

“No, no. Tony and Brooks had already been born. We lived right here. Bought this place in 1950.”

“Then you did it by extension?”

“No. I drove back and forth once a week. Took whatever was offered in the late afternoon. Made for an odd mix of classes, but then I went a couple of summers, too.”

“That must have been a long drive back then.”

“Well, not too bad. The roads weren’t as good, but the traffic was better. It’s kind of a wash, I guess, like most things.”

“Like most things,” I repeated, probably a bit too pointedly. “You believe that?”

“Do I believe that?” he asked himself. He thought he did. He talked about balance in life, yin and yang, the whole equal to the sum of its parts.

It should be said that a few years earlier I had been a sweet, compliant girl, and now I am—at least I hope I am—a fairly confident, fairly grounded woman. But the summer that I went to stay with Tom, I was in transition. I was just learning to be assertive, and I wasn’t very good at it yet. I was practicing on Tom and other family members because I thought correctly that they, unlike my professors and fellow grad students, were either intellectually or emotionally incapable of attacking and destroying me, although in truth I didn’t know my grandfather very well at all, didn’t even know what to call him anymore. It had always been “Grandpa,” but that now seemed juvenile or perhaps rural, so I called him “Tom,” and he let me.

“Is that the organizing principle of your life, then?” I remember asking.

“One of them, I suppose. What are the organizing principles of your life?”

Well, I didn’t really have any yet, at least none that were firm and formulated, so I said something silly I’d heard someone else say about life being a kaleidoscope of rotating, concentric spheres.

Tom said, “Hmm.”

The next afternoon I came outside with a pack of cigarettes. I shook one out and lit it a little defiantly without asking Tom if he minded. Tom pointed at the pack. “Okay if I have one?”

“A cigarette?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ve never seen you smoke a cigarette.”

“I’ve never smoked one in your lifetime, but I used to smoke a lot of them.” He took one, lit it, and inhaled it. “Whew. First pull still makes me dizzy.”

We sat that way for a bit, smoking together, looking at the lake. “No book today,” he noticed. “Sometimes it’s hard to put ’em down.”

“Sometimes,” I said noncommittally, uncertain whether or not he was being sarcastic.

“You remind me of me when I was falling in love with literature before the war. Got a job as a night watchman at a factory in Waukegan and sat in a little booth all summer just reading. Read twenty-two books. Didn’t understand a damn thing. Didn’t night-watch a damn thing, either.” Before I could take offense, which I was quite inclined to do then, he waved it away. “’Course I was much younger. Still in college. You,” he said, “I’m thinking you might be looking for a dissertation topic.”

I was, of course, but I wasn’t going to admit that he was right. “Not really.”

“What are you working on?”

“Oh, just some interviews. They’re part of my research assistantship. I’m helping a professor with an oral-history project.”

When he saw that I was being intentionally vague, he didn’t ask any more, but another day he said, “Only oral historian I know is Studs Terkel, and I suppose he’s not a real historian, but I did like The Good War.”

“Because you fought in it?”

“Yes, and he got it right, I think, although the people who quote him all the time, mostly politicians, must not have read the book because they don’t seem to know that the title is ironic, or else they’re just stupid.”

“Ironic?”

“As in ‘There’s no such thing as a good war.’”

“Not even World War II?”

“Especially not World War II.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“I do.”

“You were in Europe, weren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where?”

“England, Belgium, Holland, Germany.”

“Why wasn’t it a good war?”

“Sixty million people died. Only one of them was Adolf Hitler. None of them was Hirohito.”

That warm evening we ate dinner at the picnic table on the lawn, and Tom opened a bottle of dry rosé wine. Perhaps it was our earlier conversation, or perhaps it was the wine; I’d only recently been taught to distinguish dry pink wine from sweet (I remember being a little surprised that he knew the difference) and to enjoy its chilled tartness. Perhaps it was the evening or the high lacy clouds lolling about the heavens. I’m not sure what it was, but when Tom asked about my research, I answered him. I had resolved not to, of course, long before I came and several times since on the assumption that he would either be offended, like my parents, or amused. I found myself turning to him (we had pushed our plates aside and were lingering on this perfect night over the wine and cigarettes as the colors of the day flattened, faded, and sank into the darkness and the lake) and answering without hesitation or reservation.

“I’m helping a professor named Maria Donlon write a book. It’s a bunch of case studies, really, that have to do with the failure of marriage in the twentieth century. Interviews with contemporary women.” I went on to describe several of the women as he listened and nodded. Women who had bought into an institution designed by the male architects of our patriarchal society to fail them or even exploit them. Women for whom the social contract had turned out to be a death sentence or, if that was a little too strong, at least a form of imprisonment.

When Tom said, “Why only women?” I remembered instantly and exactly why I had resolved not to talk to him about any of this in the first place, and I cursed myself for letting my guard down. Of course he wouldn’t understand. Of course he would take offense. He was a man, and an old man at that. What had Belchirre said in class that day? “They are still living in the twentieth century.” He had both shocked and amazed me that the epoch in which I’d been born, everything had been born, was now gone, was truly history. And, of course, Tom belonged to it. (I was now trying hard not to.) I explained semipatiently (I suppose I didn’t mind betraying a little frustration) that an institution set up by men to serve men could not, by definition, fail men except, perhaps, situationally, certainly not systematically.

“Still,” he said, “might be interesting to get a male point of view, Nora.” Yes, I agreed, but that would be another book altogether. This one was not about men; it was about women. It was not intended to be balanced or fair or objective. Those were all twentieth-century thinking. This was something different. This was a polemic, not a dialogue, not a discussion.

“I see,” he said. “Now I see.” And of course I immediately felt guilty for quite intentionally and unkindly patronizing him. The hardest part was how predictable I was with him. Embarrassingly predictable, and he wasn’t at all, so that when he said the expected, I seized on it as if to make a point. It was supposed to be the other way around.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I thought about my grandfather. All the things I’d assumed. All the things I didn’t know. I thought about the watery blue eyes through which he had been watching me, a quiet voyeur observing my naked pretension, his long face that I realized suddenly might once have been handsome, his odd, old sense of humor; where had he learned that? His patience.

In the morning I went around the house looking at photographs of Tom Johnson. I opened photo albums and yearbooks. I studied him as a younger man and then a young man. I found pictures of him as a boy. Then I went out and sat beside him in the pink chair. “May I ask you a question?”

He looked up from his book and smiled.

“How did you meet Julia?”

“Your grandmother? Do you really want to know?”

“I really do.”

He studied me for a while. “Well, let’s see …”

Now here I was sitting in Tony’s chair again, holding Tom’s story.

“Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll read it on the plane.”

“You ready?” I asked. At first, he told me later, he wasn’t going to tell anyone, but then that didn’t seem quite right. It was too punitive or angry. No, he finally decided that he wanted one person in the world to know where he was and what he was doing, and to my surprise it was me.

“I think so. I hope so.”

“Using your MP3 player?”

“I listen to it every day. Love it.”

“You been going to the library to check your e-mail?”

“Often as I can.”

I cocked my head. “I sent you a message.”

“I haven’t gotten there in a couple days,” he confessed.

“You’re an old dog, Tom, and it’s a new trick.”

“Well, I imagine they have dog trainers over there, too. Very civilized little country. I’ve been reading about it online.”

I smiled and decided to let him off the hook. “Running away from home,” I teased him quietly, “at your age!”

“Isn’t that funny? No, running away is what children and convicts do. That’s why children come back and convicts get caught. I’m not running away,” he said, seemingly aware that some mild petulance had crept into his voice. “Now, there’s something I need to ask you.” He said he wasn’t going to need a car any longer, was ready to give up driving anyway. He wondered if I’d like to have his little truck. Not much of a city vehicle, he said; “You might not want it.”

But I did. I could already see myself picking up Catherine or maybe Hector in it, waiting on the street, gunning the engine a little. I could imagine myself one day having a dog to ride in the back of it. I was already thinking about buying a pair of black lace-up combat boots at the Army Surplus Store.

“Title’s in the glove box, signed. You can take it tonight if you want. Drive it home.”

“If I do, I don’t know when I’ll see this place again.”

“I never will.” Of course that meant we might never see each other again, either, but that was more difficult to say. No, it was easier to talk about the old frame house with the big screened porch across the front, which I turned now to look at, the lawn, the lake, the cottonwood trees at the water’s edge.

“How many years, Tom?”

“Fifty-seven.” He’d obviously figured this out recently. “Long time.”

“I remember the first time you ever saw it,” I said, “or really the first time you ever didn’t see it. In fact, I put it in my paper.”