Old Heart. Peter Ferry
on the wobbly, shifting seat, Tom steadying it with both hands from behind.
“I’ll get you there, sir!” said the fat man.
“Good man, Daniel.”
“Some drivers don’t like the elderly. Not me.” And then, in the spirit of the momentary confidentiality that had blossomed between them, “How old are you, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m eighty-five, Daniel.”
“Eighty-five? Well, I never would have guessed that, but now I know you’ll understand what I’m going to say: I like old people. Know why? They got something different about ’em, like me, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, I do,” said Tom. What he didn’t say was “You’re fat and I’m old,” but it was true, and somehow that was enough for them to like each other and joke a bit at least for this hour.
Tom took out the letter, unfolded it, and read it one last time.
Dearest Brooks and Christine,
By now you’ve discovered that I am gone. Please rest easy. I am healthy and happy and doing exactly what I want to do. I know it is not what you want me to do, but that’s just the point. This is my life, whatever is left of it, and I want to live it on my terms. You were simply never going to leave me alone. It was Hanover Place or nothing, and you were right, of course. You were doing what you had to do, and now I am doing what I have to do, because, you see, I do not want to live in Hanover Place or any place like it. I just don’t. I’d rather be dead, and this is better.
What is this? Well, I’m off to see the world, but if you try to follow me, the trail will end in Paris. Let me save you a lot of time and trouble. I have covered my tracks very well. I am not using credit cards. I am not purchasing tickets beyond Paris in my name. I have closed out all life insurance policies, bank accounts, mutual funds, and annuities and converted everything to cash, which I am carrying in the form of foreign bank drafts. All records of these are secured by legal confidentiality. My pension payments will be forwarded directly to me, and all related information is legally confidential. The same goes for health insurance payments and reimbursements, all of which automatically come out of and go into a confidential foreign bank account. I have left no forwarding address. I have taken everything I want and need and given away most of the rest to your kids, including my pickup, the pontoon boat, my tools, and your mother’s pearls. What’s left, do with all of it as you wish. Save nothing for me. I am not coming back.
Being your dad and Tony’s has been the greatest honor and achievement of my life; nothing else comes close. I shall think of you every day and always with absolute love; please do the same of me.
I love you both.
Dad
Tom sealed the letter, looked up, saw that Daniel was again watching him, and smiled.
“So,” said Daniel, “sounds like you had yourself quite a little party.” He said this somewhat wistfully, like someone who hadn’t been invited.
“Yes,” said Tom, “quite a little party.”
Frenchman’s Lake, July 4, 2007
Tom really hadn’t thrown the Fourth of July party himself for several years; his family and friends had. We’d brought the tub of iced pop, the keg of beer, the corn and cakes and pies, and the great bowls of potato salad, pasta salad, slaw, and baked beans. We’d even dug out the fire pit and roasted the pig all day long, slowly turning it and turning it so that people could come and watch, could inhale the rich, fatty smells, could feel the water running in their mouths. Tom just officiated. He was the high priest of Independence Day. All day long he sat in one of the two Adirondack chairs at the top of the broad lawn that rolled down to Frenchman’s Lake, looking craggy and magisterial while subalterns attended to him, delivered things—cups of tea, glasses of beer, plates of food. People came to greet him or thank him, to sit in the other chair for a moment or two and chat with him. One of those people was my mother, his daughter, Christine, who brought him a slice of watermelon. “Lovely,” he said. “Can I have a little salt?”
“Not supposed to use salt. Which reminds me, did you take your meds?”
“’Course. Took ’em first thing. Always do.” But in fact he hadn’t taken them, and later, after he’d softly closed his bathroom door and was standing in front of the mirror looking at his pill organizer, he discovered that he hadn’t taken them the day before, either, or the day before that. So he took them all right then, took three days’ worth, a whole handful, not so much because he thought he needed to or was concerned about his health as to prevent Christine from finding them still in their little compartments. But that was later because right then he did not want Christine to know he’d forgotten or to see how hard it was for him to get up from the Adirondack chair.
For the year since my Uncle Tony’s death, he had wondered if the day would come when he couldn’t get out of his chair at all (Tony sometimes used to grab Tom’s hand and pull him up), when he couldn’t move himself far enough forward or push himself all the way up into a standing position. It occurred to him now that this was no longer a concern. Funny. He had worried about it. That someone might see him struggling and use it as evidence of one thing or proof of another. He had never even thought of that when he had bought the chairs in kits at the lumberyard ten years earlier and assembled them one breezy summer afternoon out on the lawn with Tony’s help and Brooks stopping by.
“Oh, my God!” Brooks had said. “It’s such a cliché!”
“What?”
“Adirondack chairs on a rolling lawn. It’s a bad book cover, Dad.” This from a guy who hadn’t had a real job in two years, whose dyed hair you could spot from two blocks and whose muffler you could hear from six. Remembering now, Tom once again marveled (is that the word when you are annoyed?) at his younger son’s almost total lack of self-awareness. “I think I’m in a greeting card. For God’s sake, Dad, promise me one thing. Promise you won’t paint them green.”
So he had painted them bright pink, a coat of oil-based primer one day and then two of shockingly pink pink over the next two days. Actually, Tony had painted them and with meticulous, timeless care, his tiny pointed tongue protruding in concentration, his stubby little fingers clutching at the brush as he knelt in the grass and talked to himself, sang, “Love, love me do, you know I love you” over and over again. Up on the porch, Tom watched and called out from time to time, “Atta boy, Tony. Spread that stuff on as smooth as silk.” A couple of days later they became the Ironic Chairs because Tony got the words “Adirondack” and “ironic” mixed up. When I was studying French in high school, I called them the “chaises ironique” and my sister, Carly, called Tom and Tony the “chers ironique,” and the legend was born.
Tom and Tony sat in those chairs for the next nine years, Tony’s short legs never quite reaching the ground, Tom’s long ones usually crossed, one foot dangling. They sat in them all summer, of course, and all fall, as early in the spring as they could, and even on selected winter days when the temperature moderated, the sun shone, and the wind died down. The neighborhood kids whom they let fish from the dock always waved and called them “the big man” and “the little man,” and one once said to Tony, “You’re almost little as me.”
“That’s ’cause I got Down syndrome,” Tony explained with something like the patience a parent shows a child. “It makes you little. ‘I’m little but I’m old,’” he then said, paraphrasing his father and quoting Harper Lee.
“How old are you?”
“Fifty-one. My birthday was on April sixteenth and we went to the Museum of Science and Industry. You ever go there?”
“No.”
“Gotta go. They got a Nazi submarine.”
Brooks could be facetious one moment and supercilious the next, and Tom was embarrassed to admit that he couldn’t always tell or perhaps trust the difference, which was to say he never