Old Heart. Peter Ferry
“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.”
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