Middle Age (13 page)

He didn’t want his wife, or any woman, touching him in such sympathy. Sympathy was too damned close to pity.

In the barn
was his place of refuge at home. In the city, in the two-bedroom apartment on East 61st, where Lionel stayed two and sometimes three nights a week, in the grip of long hours at the office and an unex-Middle Age: A Romance

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pected liking for the anonymity of city life, he required no place of refuge.

But he felt a tinge of guilt in Manhattan, for his burrow, his home, was in Salthill after all.

When Lionel’s younger brother, Scott, died unexpectedly, of an aneurysm, at the age of thirty-six—
thirty-six!
—Lionel had been stunned beyond grief by the news. For days after the funeral, in Broom Hills, he’d been unable to speak. He was forty-one at the time and obsessed with the thought
Is it beginning so soon?
He saw Death as the glistening mirror-lake of dark water near where the hippie couple had died, and rotted, their young exposed flesh swarming with maggots.
So soon! Our ending
. Camille was sick with anxiety, fearing that her husband, too, had had a stroke of some kind, impairing his speech and hearing, and leaving his face frozen into a kind of pained grimace, like a handsome death’s-head. She cautioned the children to be quiet in their father’s company, for he’d had a shock, and was feeling sad. It was a fact that Lionel had sometimes resented Scott, but he’d loved him, too.

Loved him! Never. You’re damned glad he’s dead
.

That isn’t true! That is not true
.

Now Scott can’t have a better time than Lionel. Now people can’t like him
better than they like Lionel
.

That is not true!

So grief paralyzed Lionel. His hair that had only been touched with gray at the temples was now riddled with silver. His manner was sombre, preoccupied. Weeks passed, he moved like a sleepwalker. The children avoided him. He carried with him the very spores of mortality, decay.

Camille went to parties and gatherings by herself, a brave, shaken woman, nervously smiling as she assured friends that Lionel was fine and would be seeing them again soon. (“Fine” had long been the most popular of Salthill adjectives, used in a great variety of contexts.) But inevitably there came the sun-spangled April morning when driving to the Village to catch the :8 train to Manhattan, in a procession of new-model gleaming luxury cars (his own was a cream-colored Lexus with four-wheel drive, sunroof, CD, and tape deck), passing along daffodil-lined Old Mill Way, and Old Dutch Road, and crossing the scenic woodplank bridge at Lost Brook and cruising south along Wheatsheaf Drive to Pheasant Run, and so to Fox Pass, through Battle Park to Linden Lane, West Axe and Depot, Lionel felt his gargoyle mask relax at last, and heard wild hyena laughter filling the interior of his car.

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Laugh, laugh! It burst from his pursed lips, out of his tight constricted throat. He hadn’t felt so good in twenty years.

Requiescat in pace
. The Latin was a consolation, grave and sonorous. You knew, but half-didn’t-know, what it meant.

But the Hoffmanns were Lutheran, not Catholic. They’d been Lutheran for centuries. Camille, who’d been Presbyterian, had joined the Lutheran church when she’d married Lionel, and they’d exchanged vows in the First Lutheran Church of Broom Hills, New York. In Salthill, Camille attended Sunday services more frequently than Lionel, and while the children were young and tractable she’d brought them; Lionel tried always to observe Christmas and Easter though he had difficulty during services keeping his mind on what the minister was saying so earnestly, and when the congregation sang hymns or joined together in prayer he had to clench his jaws tight to keep from uttering—what, he didn’t know.

Or maybe it was wild hyena laughter threatening to spill out.

Those Sunday mornings waking early with that sense of sick dread to be expiated by driving his family to the First Lutheran Church of Salthill.

A community of churchgoing folk, Sunday-morning Christians. The good news of the Gospels is that Jesus is your savior if you let Him into your heart, won’t you let Him into your heart? Lionel had done so, numerous times.

But did Lionel truly
believe?

He imagined himself speaking with Adam Berendt. Lionel at his most rational, sincere. “There is—must be—something greater than just
us
.

Something beyond—
us
.”

But there was no Adam with him, Lionel was alone. He paused. He listened. Distant as thunder at the horizon, or earth-gouging machines in the new tract development off Wheatsheaf Drive, that laughter.

So ashamed!
she’d wept. He’d said,
Hey, don’t be, please
. How many times he and the girl in the pink chiffon repeated these words, Lionel wouldn’t recall. Quite a few times.

Not Kitzie or Mimi, in fact it had been Camille. The girl with the runny nose, mascara-tears streaking her face. She’d tried to wipe her nose on the shoulder of her dress as Lionel held her awkwardly, to comfort her.

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Poor Camille: he hadn’t known her last name. She’d stammered out

“Camille” as a child might, as if he must know her, she was the younger sister of a guy in Lionel’s freshman-year dorm. Now it was Lionel’s junior year and he lived at the handsome Deke house on the hill and homecoming weekend one of his drunken Deke brothers had ditched this poor shivering girl and it was ten .. and the house so blaring, you couldn’t hear yourself think. Couldn’t hear yourself speak. This girl, hiding in the cloakroom. A flushed flower-petal face that made Lionel blink hard, and swallow hard. The palms of his hands sweaty. By accident he’d discovered her crying. Pink chiffon, and breasts, and curly fair-brown hair like a doll’s hair cascading to her shoulders. Camille’s young figure in the pink chiffon was shapely yet her effect upon Lionel wasn’t sexual, he felt instead a brotherly compassion for her, a need to protect her from his crude fraternity brothers, and from further humiliation. Yet when she turned her damp, smeared face, her quivering lips, to him, wholly without disguise, without subterfuge, lurching into his arms, he wasn’t prepared. She’d come to Colgate from Ithaca College for the weekend, staying at a hotel in town, oh, it was only Friday night and what was she going to do, what was she going to do she wanted to die, so absolutely ashamed she wanted to die, she’d been insulted by that horrible person, treated like dirt and laughed at, yes and she’d been made to drink more than she’d wanted, and she was sure there was something in her drink, LSD maybe, her head was swirling, heart beating so fast, she was staying at a hotel in town but hadn’t any way of getting there, didn’t even know where the hotel was, how far from the Deke house, oh she was so ashamed! so ashamed! wanted to die!

how could anybody be so cruel, crude, treating her like this, he’d seemed so nice on the phone, and she’d been looking forward to this weekend, this was a new dress she’d bought for the weekend, her brother had arranged for the date, would he have something to answer for! would he, ever! she’d be telling their father about this insult, tomorrow morning! she’d come to the campus in a car with three other girls from Ithaca College, they wouldn’t be driving back till Sunday afternoon, how would she get home, oh, she was so ashamed! everybody at her college would know, everybody would be talking about her, pitying her, oh, she couldn’t bear pity, she’d never been treated like this by any date before, she wanted to
die!
absolutely to
die!
And Lionel told her please don’t be ashamed, for God’s sake it was his asshole fraternity brother who should be ashamed, Lionel was comforting this weeping shivering girl awkwardly, trying to remem-

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ber her brother’s last name, homecoming weekend at Colgate was frat parties like this, wild earsplitting drunken and not for sensitive girls like Camille, even her name was sensitive, delicate,
Camille
was to Lionel the most beautiful name he’d ever spoken, like music, he was helping her find her coat, would she like him to drive her to the hotel, he had a car, he’d like to drive her to the hotel, it was the least he could do, to try to make amends for how badly she’d been treated. And in Lionel’s car driving to the hotel as Camille’s tears subsided, as she dabbed at her heated face with a tissue (she’d found in her coat pocket), and blew her nose, Lionel felt that he was behaving well; he was behaving like a gentleman; his father would be proud of him; for once, he’d be proud of himself.
And it was so
easy. It all just happened
. Later he would learn that Camille’s family was rich: they owned extensive investment properties in Rhode Island, where Camille had grown up. She was two years younger than Lionel and three inches shorter, which seemed just right. A good Christian girl as unquestioning of biblical authority as of hair and clothing fashions; not an honors student, but a “dedicated” education major at Ithaca College. Her desire was to teach elementary grades, maybe join the Peace Corps first, oh, but she wanted to be married someday, of course, and she wanted to be a mother, of course!

In this way (though not immediately: Lionel went out with other girls after graduating from Colgate, moving to New York to work in Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., and sweet vulnerable Camille had “disappointments”) they were destined to marry, and to have two children, and to move to Old Mill Way in Salthill-on-Hudson where, as year followed year, they would be so happy.

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Adam was the only one of them I could talk to. Even if I couldn’t talk to him
.

One of the profound shocks of Lionel’s life in Salthill, that Adam Berendt was so suddenly and unexpectedly dead. And Lionel would never see him again!

“Adam? Dead? For Christ’s sake
how?
”—so it would be exclaimed through Salthill, by Salthill men.

The women reacted very differently. But then, women always reacted very differently. They stared, and burst helplessly into tears. The response was instantaneous, there was no defense, resistance, incredulity. Though
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they cried, “No! Oh,
no! Adam!
” there was immediate acceptance. Like Camille, the women were likely to instinctively cover their stricken eyes, their faces that were cracking like cheap crockery.

For the men the crucial death-question was
how,
for Adam had been in their aggrieved words
so much alive
. He’d been
filled with life,
and had seemed
indestructible.
And the next crucial question was
how old
.

Not even Roger Cavanagh seemed to know, exactly. Somewhere beyond fifty, presumably, but not too far beyond. Lionel thought of his own age, fifty-two (fifty-
two!
) with a tinge of anxiety. As a boy he’d been unable to imagine being even twenty-one. In his early twenties, he’d been unable to imagine being thirty. In his thirties, forty had seemed the absolute terminal point; and, in his forties, fifty had seemed the absolute terminal point. And now. Strange how Adam’s death shook Lionel more forcibly than even Scott’s death had shaken him. Though Scott had been so young, and Lionel’s own brother.

In the late evening of July Fourth and through the following day the terrible news of Adam Berendt’s death (by drowning? heart attack?) was relayed through Salthill. Lionel had learned when he’d walked into a room and seen his wife standing with a telephone receiver pressed against her ear, her face stricken, eyes welling with tears and shoulders hunched as if to ward off a blow, no more aware of Lionel than if he were himself a ghost, bodiless. Camille cried out, wounded in her heart. Bursting immediately into tears of grief, and so Lionel knew.

By quick degrees a narrative unfolded. An air of childlike reproach un-derlay it, as in a fairy tale in which even the innocent—especially the innocent!—are punished for behaving incautiously. For if Adam hadn’t left his Salthill friends to attend a fund-raising event in Jones Point, among strangers, having told not even Marina Troy where he was going, he’d be alive now; if he’d gone to the Archers’ annual barbecue, he’d be alive now.

If he’d had an urge to go sailing (but Adam hadn’t been much interested in boating, and he lived right on the river), why hadn’t he gone with Owen Cutler and others, that afternoon? It was understood, Adam had had a standing invitation from Owen, so how could you explain his behavior?

He’d accepted an invitation from strangers. He’d gone sailing with strangers. He’d died among strangers. Drowned in the Hudson River rescuing a woman when their sailboat collapsed, or drowned rescuing a child, or, no, a heart attack after he’d made the dramatic rescue, having dived into the river from a “dangerous” height. So the narrative was relayed

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through Salthill. By telephone, and in person. Not Roger or Marina but others had become bearers of the terrible news, and its amplification. Always the refrain was
Why did he—! Why, so reckless—!
It was said, it had become a tragic secondary theme, that Marina had driven to Jones Point,

“desperate” to see Adam in the hospital, but she’d arrived too late. It was said that Marina had “collapsed,” and was “under medication.” The refrain was
Poor Marina! What a loss to Marina!
Though not everyone believed that Adam and Marina had been lovers, there were dissenters on this point, and the dissenters were likely to be women. Lionel was repelled by such speculation. His strained nerves couldn’t bear it. He retreated, fled the house. He would drive in his Saab into the hills. Couldn’t bear Camille on the phone commiserating with one or another of their friends, weeping as if her tears were inexhaustible. And that hurt, shocked, plaintive-child voice, he’d first heard more than thirty years before in the Deke cloakroom.
That girl. Her runny nose. Oh God, my life—why?