Middle Age (14 page)

The earth opened at Lionel’s feet, as it must have opened for Adam.

“ W  I console
her?
Adam was my friend, too.”

Prowling the darkened house. Like a nocturnal animal in its burrow.

Hearing, at a close distance, yet muffled, a woman sobbing. Through floorboards and layers of expensive Oriental carpets. As if in the history of the Macomb House, or the Wade House, numerous unknown women had hidden away to weep in secret for men not their husbands, and their accumulated grief was a harsh, heartrending music.

Lionel, downstairs in the room called the pantry, adjacent to the kitchen, unscrewed the top of a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and drank from the bottle, just a sip, to wet his parched mouth; and the taste and slow burn of the bourbon in his mouth, in his throat and beyond was deeply pleasurable. Lionel was not a drinker; Hoffmann men were not drinkers; or, if they were, they drank in moderation and in dignified secrecy; they did not call attention to themselves, ever. Lionel would take another small sip, and possibly another. But no more. “I’ll miss you, Adam. God
damn
.” But he wanted Adam’s death to be private, for himself alone. He hated the public ceremonial nature of Death. So much in Salthill was public, as if one’s soul had to be turned inside out, bared to the world. In his solitary moods on the commuter train, in his Manhattan apartment, on airplanes when he felt the plane shudder as if at the apex of
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a death dive, Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that
inward
was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it.
You
might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident
. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents. He recalled, not very precisely, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, from that forbidding book
The Republic:
mankind is imprisoned inside a cave of flickering shadows, mesmerized by illusion. But to be free of the cave is to risk blindness because the light of true day is dazzling. And to be free of the cave is to risk ostracism from those who remain blind.

Through the floorboards, the weeping continued. Lionel hardened his heart against the sound. His face froze in a half grimace of sorrow or of contempt for such sorrow.
Whatever you do, don’t laugh. At the cremation
service, don’t laugh
. He would not weep for Adam, he hadn’t wept for Scott. The Hoffmann men, on the whole, were not the sort for easy grief.

Wouldn’t seek out Camille hiding away in her bathroom, the hell with consoling a wife who’d committed adultery in her heart, with her husband’s closest and most trusted friend. Let the woman console
him
.

“Adam was my friend, too.”

He took another small sip of bourbon, replaced the top and hid the bottle away in the cupboard.

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust
.

There would be no funeral for Adam Berendt, and no church service.

Only the stark ceremony of “cremation” miles away in Nyack. Nyack! No one ever went to Nyack willingly. Lionel panicked at the thought of the cremation of Adam Berendt, but told Camille he didn’t want to attend for moral reasons, the very thought of cremation offended his Christian temperament, and Camille stared at him in distress, asking would he let his wife go alone? was he so heartless? had he cared so little for their friend Adam? and as her voice quavered on the brink of hysteria Lionel quickly acquiesced, for Camille was right, of course.
If she makes a fool of herself in
public
.

He loved his wife, he’d forgive her. But no man can bear public exposure.

Like a dream this was. On a weekday morning in July when Lionel should have been in his executive office at Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., on

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the fiftieth floor of one of the newer Park Avenue buildings, grateful to return from the overwrought four-day holiday weekend, instead he and Camille were turning into a large asphalt parking lot off ugly Route W.

Nyack Burial-Cremation Services, Inc. A number of cars—Lionel recognized friends’ cars—were already parked in the lot. “What a nightmare!”

Lionel shuddered. Except for the tall, ominously stained chimneys the crematorium resembled a suburban public library, low, flat-rooted, of cheap buff-colored brick. Inside, before they could get their bearings, the Hoffmanns were forcibly greeted by the crematorium director, Mr. Shad, a tall, dark-suited gentleman with a gravely twinkling eye and a skin that looked as if it had been lifted and stretched; Mr. Shad welcomed them on this mournful occasion in their lives, shaking hands vigorously with them both, gravely smiling, urging them to ask questions about the procedure if they had any, after the service perhaps, and the Hoffmanns said yes, yes, they would, eager to move on, for the gleam in Mr. Shad’s eye was fearful.

A youngish usher with dark sideburns and oily pompadour urged them into a fiercely air-conditioned lounge designated The Chapel, where there were rows of seats and, on a raised platform at the front, a plain pine coffin. Adam’s coffin! Lionel smiled in confusion, looking for his friends. The Chapel was windowless and shadowy as the inside of a lung. Numerous persons stood awkwardly, not wanting to sit down so soon; if this was a social gathering, it was one in which things had gone wrong. “There!—

our friends.” Like wraiths with the impediments of bodies they stumbled in the direction of Salthill faces. Their well-dressed friends and acquaintances were so out of place here as to seem like imposters. And there were strangers, persons at whom they would not glance. Camille was taken up in female embraces, blinking back tears. Lionel’s hand was vehemently shaken. “What a nightmare, eh?” “Christ. Isn’t it.” This was a gathering of individuals in which you’d naturally glance about for Adam’s good-natured battered face. His absence was conspicuous. And the time of day was wrong. Not yet noon, and Lionel had been awake for hours. He’d poured himself a half glass of bourbon to steady his nerves but it seemed not to have had any effect upon him, none; hadn’t even burned going down. And he’d gargled, and regargled with Listerine, that mouthwash he detested.

Camille, he seemed to know, though certainly he hadn’t been spying on her, had medicated herself with one or two of her “calming” pills. (What these prescribed pills were exactly, Lionel didn’t know. Hadn’t wanted to inquire. Antidepressants, probably. Antidepressants were all the rage now,
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said to be enormously popular in Salthill among the wives of Lionel’s friends as, several decades before, tranquilizers had been popular among the wives and mothers of Broom Hills.) How disoriented they were, these friends of Adam’s. His survivors. Mourners. Trying not to stare at the aggressively plain pine coffin on a raised platform at the front of the chapel.

Trying not to think the obvious thought
Adam is inside? A body?
What was the smell in this place, despite the frenetic frigid-air currents. Lionel’s sensitive nostrils pinched. He prayed not to become nauseated.

Mozart’s
Requiem Mass
was being piped into the chapel. The tape seemed to be just slightly defective, playing at an accelerated speed.

Lionel had never attended a cremation service before. He supposed it was a good, necessary procedure: burning, not storing the dead body; if you didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body at the Second Coming of Christ, what point in hoarding the dead? The earth was rapidly filling up, for sure. You read about cemetery-plot scarcity all the time. Worse than housing shortages. The Asian nations with their great surplus of humanity weren’t sentimental, knew what to do, funeral pyres, burning beside “holy”

rivers, of course, those people were heathens. Cremation offended Lionel’s sense of protocol. That behind those somber burgundy-velvet drapes there was a roaring furnace, or an oven, prepared to reduce a human body to ash.

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust
. The chapel walls seemed to press inward.

Covered in innocuous nature-murals of a nineteenth-century type, like the faux-primitive landscapes of that French painter Rousseau. Their over-done leafy veined green was muted, faded; the deep vibrancy of life’s green, of Adam’s actual garden, would be out of place here. “Please. Take seats.”

Camille had been whispering with women friends, and now turned to Lionel, her face dazed and melting. She stumbled in her impractical high heels and Lionel instinctively took her arm, to steady her. They sat in a middle row of seats, shivering. A woman directly behind Lionel startled him by leaning forward to growl into his ear, “It’s so perverse, Lionel, my God! Adam in that
box
. And us stumbling around like brain-damaged sheep.” The woman’s voice was husky, sexy; her breath smelled of something rich and ripe, like port wine. She’d been a lover of Adam Berendt, too, it was generally believed, though Lionel hadn’t ever quite believed it: Owen Cutler’s wife, Augusta, the smoked-ham heiress. It was flamboyant Augusta’s habit to murmur such intimate remarks into Lionel Hoffmann’s ear in the presence of his wife and others, for of their circle Lionel was the most stiff, the most reserved, the most easily embarrassed and offended;

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and such was Augusta’s way of flirtation. Her eyes were slanted and sly as figs and she outlined them elaborately in blue-black ink that quickly smudged, so that her eyes looked blackened, as by a cruel lover. Her mouth was a perfect crimson heart, oozing blood. To kiss that mouth, Lionel often thought, was to invite hemorrhage.
Had Adam loved this woman, had
he rooted in her soft ample body?
There was something both arousing and repugnant in the thought. Augusta Cutler was of an ambiguous age, the mother of grown children, the wife of gentlemanly Owen whom everyone liked, to a degree; Adam had certainly liked him, and would not (would Adam?) have drawn his wife into adultery.
She’s too old for it. Too fat!
In fact, Augusta was a sumptuous female in the Rubens mode, big-boned, sensuous; with cascades of highlighted blond hair; though Lionel avoided looking at her when she was aware of him, he often gazed at her during long, slow dinner parties when she was involved with other men. Her necklines were tight and dipping and as hours passed, and Augusta drank and ate, her breasts became ever more engorged and tiny beads of perspiration glittered on her rosy skin. Once, at the Hoffmanns’ New Year’s Eve party, Augusta had pressed herself boldly against Lionel as they danced a fox-trot, peering at him sidelong, the tip of her pink tongue protruding between her moist lips. Her crimson nails dug into his arms like plastic claws. “Lionel. Someday. Yes?” Lionel, embarrassed, pretended not to hear.

The amplified dance music was very loud.

Lionel shuddered, passing his hands over his eyes. “What a nightmare!”

“Will you please
stop saying that
.” Camille nudged him, pleading.

Lionel hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. Someone was addressing the gathering of mourners: Mr. Shad. Explaining the service which would be brief. Shad’s black-dyed hair fitted his head like a shiny shoe. As he spoke, his lips lifted from his gums in a way that fascinated and repelled; his teeth, or dentures, gleamed very white, and gave a sort of dignified echo to his words. Lionel frowned in a pretense of concentration.
Adam? In that—

box?
The perversity of death swept over Lionel. It was a sickening sensation he’d had at his brother Scott’s funeral though his brother’s funeral had been beautiful, in the family church in Broom Hills; banks of flowers, and an excellent organist playing Bach with a light touch, and two hundred in attendance at least. It was a sensation he’d had most powerfully at the age of ten, on the grassy bank of Broom Lake, seeing the dead young couple entwined and softly rotting together in each other’s arms.
But I didn’t see! I
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saw nothing. I wasn’t the one
. Mr. Shad wanted the gathering of friends of Adam Berendt to know that, if they had any questions about the procedure, he would be very happy to answer them, after the service. And there was “educational” literature available. Lionel’s nostrils pinched. He could smell the hot oven. Just behind that wall of velvet drapes. Adam’s coffin, the most frugal Lionel had ever seen outside a film of the Old West, was cleverly hooked to a mechanism that would tug it forward, through the velvet drapes and an opening in the wall and into the fired-up oven and eternity. Lionel swallowed hard, and reasoned that this was what Adam wanted, wasn’t it? That gruff no-bullshit guy, who’d have said take my dead body and trundle it off with the trash, what the hell. Lionel was trying to listen to the second speaker: Roger Cavanagh. One of Lionel’s old Salthill friends with whom he exchanged perhaps a dozen words a year, and with whom he sometimes played squash, and tennis, both men killers on the court, seeking the jugular; but Roger had a reputation for shady behavior, cheating maybe, while Lionel was the quintessential good sport, gracious in defeat. This morning Roger’s eyes were ringed with fatigue as if he hadn’t slept in nights. His skin was coarse and pasty like something applied with a trowel. But he was wearing a handsome dark summer suit, his thinning hair brushed back neatly from his keen raptor’s face. Lionel hadn’t quite understood why his friend’s marriage had disintegrated years ago, and why Roger had been left behind in Salthill bereft, hurt, enraged, and of course he’d never inquired. The sexual lives of friends are best left unimagined, and unimaginable. Roger was speaking hesitantly of the suddenness and the shock of Adam’s death; there would be a memorial service in the fall; this ceremony had been delayed two full days as he and Marina had tried without success to locate relatives of Adam’s. In his flat, cryptic lawyer’s voice Roger said, “There seem to be no ‘Berendts’ who have heard of our Adam.” The remark was blown about in the churning air currents, like a stricken moth.