Middle Age
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
J C O
Middle Age:
A Romance
R
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
In the chapter “The Fell of Dark,’’ the quoted poetry is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark.’
Throughout the novel are scattered quotations from Plato (primarily the Symposium, the Republic, and the Phaedo), translated by W.H.D. Rouse.
MIDDLE AGE: A ROMANCE. Copyright © 2001 by The Ontario Review, Inc.
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Appendix: ENCHANTED PLACES. Copyright © 2001 by Joyce Carol Oates.
PerfectBound ™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Adobe Acrobat E-Book Reader edition v 1. August 2001 ISBN 0-06-008725-0
Print edition first published in 2001 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my Princeton friends,
who are nowhere in these pages
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue: Fourth of July
/ I Y C M . . .
Survived by . . .
Old Mill Way: The Cave
The Madonna of the Rocks
The Game
Farewell!
/ . . . A I D’ E Y
The Fell of Dark
Old Mill Way: The Transformation
The Girl in the Red Beret
Deardeaddad
The Missing
/ E A
Dream Creatures
Old Mill Way: The Attack
The Ballet
The Lovers, by Night
The Homecoming
Appendix: ENCHANTED PLACES
About the Author
Credits
About the Publisher
. . . I was trying to find out the meaning of
certain dreams . . .
—Socrates speaking in Plato’s
Phaedo
Life devours life, but man breaks the cycle, man has memory.
—“Adam Berendt’
Prologue:
Fourth of July
I You leave your home in Salthill-on-Hudson on the muggy afternoon of July Fourth for a cookout (an invitation you didn’t really want to accept, but somehow accepted) and return days later as ashes in a cheesy-looking funeral urn: bone chunks and chips and coarse gritty powder to be dumped out, scattered, and raked in the crumbly soil of your own garden.
Fertilizer for weeds.
Y , with the highest intentions. No suicidal urges!
Anything but. Securing your faithful German shepherd to a lengthy sliding leash in the back lawn, leaving him a big bowl of water spiked with ice cubes and his favorite dry food with a promise you’ll be back by midnight at least, by which time fireworks will have been bursting into the sky above the Hudson River for hours, by which time you will have been dead for hours, declared dead of a burst heart, your body temperature rapidly cool-ing in the Jones Point Medical Center morgue. You (or the body you’ve become) present the usual problem for professionals. Whom to notify?
Who’s this man’s next of kin? “Adam Berendt” is the name affixed to the body, if the ID in his water-soaked wallet is correct.
What to do with “Adam Berendt,” the man of mystery.
J C O
I “Adam Berendt.” For so long a period of time, I came to believe he was my life.
Y , you drive up the river to Jones Point, New York.
You find yourself among people you don’t know, and will not know.
Invited to join your host and several others on a dazzling-white twenty-five-foot sailboat,
The Albatross.
On the river you hear children’s cries. You’re panicked, thinking you hear children’s cries. Then in fact you hear: children’s cries. For help?
N I was born, which I’ve long forgotten. Or where I would die, which I would not know. But where I lived,
where I was known
. The Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, New York. Where by a sustained act of will through twenty-one years I created ADAM BERENDT as you might fumble a human, or humanoid, figure out of such materials as clay, earth, dung. Rotted wood and driftwood salvaged from the river. Bits of glass, plastic. Crude materials to be shaped by crude fingers.
ADAM BERENDT: if you glanced at this guy once, you’d possibly glance twice. One of those ugly burly fellows you can’t imagine other than middle-aged. A big jaw, Cro-Magnon head, thinning steel-colored hair he’s shaved close to the skull so the baldness will seem intentional. Even aesthetic! He has a flushed oniony skin, a peeling-flaking skin, of varying textures, but generally coarse, scarred-looking. A single functioning eye, the left, often bloodshot from strain; the right eye, amid scar tissue, glazed over like marble and glaring white, blind. (This eye, I’d explain, had been injured in a childhood accident. Which was, more or less, the truth.) ADAM BERENDT, the body. Not a work of beauty. Not monumental. Not heroic! Nor even (in my own opinion) especially brave. Only just impulsive. Stubborn. Maybe reckless.
What I do, I do on principle
.
The hell
with the rest
.
Because I was a sculptor. Or tried to be. And even mediocre sculptors are not easily discouraged or dissuaded.
Middle Age: A Romance
Help! Help us! Save us!
The cries tore at his heart, he turned to see a small sailboat capsizing, children sliding overboard, screaming and thrashing.
And no life jackets.
This was about thirty feet from
The Albatross,
itself about thirty feet offshore. The drunken careening speedboat, a luxury Chris Craft item, continued on its way.
No time to think, only to act.
The hell with the rest!
One of the children was a little blond girl and it was this child he swam for, this child he was determined to save.
ADAM BERENDT, whose official age would be a matter of speculation among his Salthill friends. For no birth certificate would be found among his papers. His closest friends, one of whom was his attorney, had no absolute knowledge of ADAM BERENDT except what he’d told them, carefully. It was generally conceded he was in his early or mid-fifties. It was generally conceded he’d been born somewhere in the Midwest. Or the West.
Blinded in one eye in a childhood accident, he said. And scar tissue, burn-scar tissue, lightly tattooing his body, on his burly hairy chest, and elsewhere. (More private. A few women have seen.) It was a shame, it was tragic, ADAM BERENDT wasn’t in better condition when he dived into the river to swim to the capsized children’s sailboat, maybe he was being reckless, maybe it was poor judgment, he didn’t pause to think, only just to act; maybe this qualifies as heroic, maybe just reckless, a man who acts before he thinks; a man who, having acted, will have abrogated forever the possibility of thinking.
But won’t give in. God damn, will not. The terrified blond child is only a few feet away,
Adam Berendt will save her
.
E - in the floating paradise of Salthill-on-Hudson I lived what people thought was
beyond his means
.
J C O
Because I was an impoverished-looking and -behaving sculptor with no reputation beyond the local. Because I threw together my junk-art with a disdain for how it might better be done, more professionally, more permanently. ADAM BERENDT living for the moment. And never quite completing anything, never achieving perfection. Like my fellow-eccentric Albert Pinkham Ryder, who so poorly prepared his canvases, painting and repainting untreated surfaces, that his beautiful dreamscapes are flaking and peeling away into Eternity.
Beyond his means
because somehow I’d gotten together enough money to purchase one of the township’s picturesque ruins. An old stone house on the river north of the village. In the s the building had been a mill owned by a Dutchman. After the Revolution, it saw service as a tavern, and later as a brothel. In the mid-8s it was purchased, with fifteen acres of land, and rebuilt by a well-to-do farmer named Elias Deppe, and the Salthill Trust lists the property as
Elias Deppe House
. Not a distinguished house by local standards but there’s an air of nostalgia and romance about it. Two storeys, steep shingled roofs, pewter-colored stone that exudes damp in all weather. Built on a promontory above the river where the sun rising in the east floods its interior as if with flame.
Living
beyond his means,
no one exactly knew how. He’d die
beyond his
means,
too.
Y one afternoon, you never return as yourself.
Leaving home, you don’t anticipate not returning as yourself.
The home you’ve left ceases to be a home once you’ve left. If you fail to return. It reverts to being a house, a property. An estate to fall into the hands of others who survive you.
ADAM BERENDT, the recluse. ADAM BERENDT who was sociable, gregarious. ADAM BERENDT, who was living alone at the time of his death but for Apollo (whose formal name was Apollodoros), the mongrel husky-shepherd with beautiful melancholy eyes and coarse silver-tipped hair. ADAM BERENDT, who was frequently seen hiking into the village along the River Road. Or riding his bicycle (English racing style, purchased secondhand). Or driving his Ford station wagon or his
Middle Age: A Romance
Mercedes-Benz. ADAM BERENDT, who occasionally taught sculpting and figure drawing in the Salthill Adult Program. ADAM BERENDT, who gave blood in the annual Salthill Blood Drive. ADAM BERENDT, the volunteer fireman. ADAM BERENDT, who canvassed through Rockland County on behalf of education, environmental, and gun control bond issues. ADAM BERENDT, who’d been invited to run for local office himself on the Democratic slate. (And politely declined.) ADAM
BERENDT, who confessed to friends in an unguarded moment that he had never traveled outside the United States but had a hope of doing so before he died: to Athens, Greece, where Socrates had lived more than two thousand years ago; and to the Far East, that region of Buddhist mystery.
Socrates was his hero. He’d first discovered the philosopher when he was a boy of sixteen, a lifetime ago. Already blinded in his right eye and yearning for a higher knowledge, a knowledge not of the body but of the spirit; craving not religious faith but faith in reason.
Know thyself !
Socrates taught. And through
knowing
the self,
knowing
the world. Socrates had been an ordinary-seeming ugly-burly man. A common man, a stone mason. By a vote of the Athenian court he was sentenced to death at age seventy. (Why? For asking penetrating questions and for inspiring young people to ask questions of their elders.) Yet it was a death of Socrates’ own choice, for he refused to flee into exile. It was a death of his own choice for he chose the exact means of dying. (Drinking hemlock.)
The philosopher is
one who practices dying, practices death, continuously, but no one sees it
.
Adam, please don’t go! You don’t know these people.
Of course I know these people. In essence, I know them.
Stay with us in Salthill. We’re having a barbecue, just a few close friends.
We’ll watch the fireworks over the river as night comes on. Say yes!
I gave my word, I’d go to Jones Point.
It will be a big event, won’t it? A fund-raiser? A hundred guests, at least?
No one will miss you.
I can’t, I gave my word.
W than a Fourth of July cookout to raise money for a liberal cause. What more trivial decision to make, which
J C O
Fourth of July event to attend.
It is trifles that constitute our lives. It is trifles
that kill us
.
N , as it would be generally believed, but
cardiac arrest
.
Not in the river but in the ambulance en route to the emergency room.
Though his lungs would be filled with river water. And his skull that looked concrete-hard would be severely fractured from striking the side of the rescue boat.
The Albatross:
a witty name!
You were inclined to be witty, ironic, self-conscious when you had money, when in fact you were rich, and involved in underdog idealistic causes like the National Project to Free the Innocent. (These “innocent”
were mostly black indigent death-row prisoners abandoned by the American criminal justice system to die for crimes they had not, in fact, committed.) Adam Berendt wasn’t known as rich, far from it, but he’d been taken up by rich people, liberal-minded rich people like those who’d organized the July Fourth cookout in Jones Point.
No, I hadn’t much wanted to attend.