“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