But no, that couldn’t be it, at least not all of it. Otherwise how could you explain all the people on his lawn two days earlier, all those people who had come to sit beside him in Tony’s chair, to thank him, share a memory with him, take his hand in theirs, kiss him on the cheek? His colleagues, younger teachers he had worked with, former students: “I’ll never forget that day in class …” “You’re the reason I became a teacher … ” “You taught me to think.” His nephews and nieces and their friends stepping forward to shyly shake his hand. Wasn’t that all proof of something?
Perhaps only that he was a fraud.
Tom stopped at a café in the park and had a juice and later another café and drank a beer. He watched people hurrying by. July. Any self-respecting Parisian was in Provence or Spain. These people must all be imposters or tourists like himself. And had he come all this way just to think about Brooks? Maybe he had. Maybe he needed the perspective. Or maybe he was trying not to think about Tony, who was no longer there, or about Sarah van Praag, who couldn’t possibly still be there. Suddenly his whole plan seemed quixotic and more than a little crazy. But then he revisited the conversation he’d had with himself when Tony had died and he had finally been free; he’d thought about it so often for so long, and now here it was, and he was overwhelmed by the question “What do I do with the rest of my life?” Overwhelmed until he asked the next question: “Do I do something, or do I do nothing?” And then it was easy. He knew he had to go looking for Sarah van Praag just as surely as he knew that it was a ridiculous long shot. “Lost love,” he once said to me, shaking his head. But what better way to spend the rest of his life than finally taking the chance he’d never had the guts to take before? Blaze of glory! And did it matter that he hadn’t much of anything left to lose?
When Tom got tired, he took a cab, and back at the hotel he nodded again to the two brothers, and they to him. He lay down for an hour, then took a sponge bath and left to find an early meal before the concert. He found himself in a pedestrian square in Le Marais inhabited by friends and couples lying on the summer grass and children playing in a large sandbox. All around were colonnaded buildings and pretty cafés. He imagined this was the kind of place where he and Sarah van Praag might have come if they had come to Paris. He ate spaghetti Bolognese and a green salad because they were easy to order. He walked along the Port de Plaisance and onto the Île de la Cité to Sainte-Chapelle. “Oh, my,” he said, entering the great room and looking up. “Oh, my goodness.” There he bathed in the crystalline beauty of the evening light through those high windows and in the sharp, clear notes of the strings, which described the light so well.
The next day Tom was weary in his very center, perhaps ill, certainly low. Of course he was. After the exhilaration of the trip, his first day in Paris, plus jet lag. Market correction. He’d overdone it. Walked too much, rested too little, pushed himself. Don’t panic. Keep things in perspective. Besides, he’d always known there would be bad days, but this bad this soon? He took a deep breath and wondered if he could take another. His head spun; his whole body ached. He was not sure he could even stand up. He was pretty sure he couldn’t walk. Easy. Easy. Breathe. He lay on his back flat against his mattress, as flat as he could make himself. He was okay with the horizontal; it was the vertical that suddenly frightened him. What if he were dying? What if he died right here in this bed? “Elderly American Found Dead in Parisian Hotel.” Okay. You could do worse. Better than a Motel 6 somewhere. Better than on the street with a crowd of people looking down on you.
All this he thought lying there while downstairs the Algerian brothers smiled and nodded, while cabs and trucks and motorbikes passed his open window and those heels clicking on the pavement were someone late for a job interview or waiting for biopsy results or about to fall in love. Easy does it. He was shaky when he got up, weak in the knees. He needed food. Across the street was a kabob stand. It was as tantalizing as it seemed unattainable, but he was sure he’d feel better if he ate. He washed his face and changed. He went down the stairs one at a time, hand on the wall. He sat at a tiny table and methodically ate a kabob and some fries. Much better.
Back in the lobby of the hotel, one of the brothers spoke to him in French, then held up an imaginary telephone receiver. When Tom didn’t understand, the other brother was called from the tiny office behind the desk. “Yes,” he said, “a man called for you on the telephone.”
“Me? Here?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
“Now. Perhaps five minutes.”
“Thank you.” Tom started away, then came back. “In French or English?”
“French.”
“Hmmm. Can you check me out and call a taxi?”
“A taxi?” The brother was a little surprised.
“Yes. To the Gare de Lyon. And then come for my bag, please.”
In the cab, he told the driver, “Gare du Nord.”
“Nord?”
“Oui, Nord.” He looked at Paris out the window. All his life he had wanted to come here, and now he was hurrying away. He thought of me and how I would be disappointed. “They’ve found me. Thirty-five hours, and they’ve found me. How the hell did they do that?” They couldn’t have gotten the letter. No.
But then he knew. Someone had noticed the cab and remembered its name. They had told Daniel Pecora that Tom was ill or senile, and he had caved in. They’d found the airline, found the flight, found the destination. Hired someone to call all the hotels in Paris. Shit. Freedom is an illusion, he thought. No one’s ever really free.
At the station he waited in a toilet stall for his train so long that the attendant seemed concerned. Tom smiled and waved him off. “No, no.” Only when the train was passing Sacré-Coeur, which he’d intended to visit that day, did he take a real breath and begin to feel a little better. And a little better yet when he ate the ham-and-cheese baguette and drank the Orangina he’d bought on the platform. He tried then to imagine his best day at Hanover Place: an early-morning walk around the grounds, a hot shower, a warm breakfast, working on his garden plot, reading the New York Times in the solarium. And then what? Waiting for lunch? Waiting for Jeopardy to come on? No, he thought as he looked out his window and his hand steadied, this is better; this is right; this is what I want to do. Now, if they will only let me.
He knew he had been easy to trace to Paris. He hoped he would be harder to find now, but he suspected that Thomas Wolfe had gotten it wrong: it isn’t that you can’t go home again but that you can never really leave.
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