Middle Age (15 page)

Meaning—what? Lionel was annoyed as hell.

Next, Marina Troy came forward to speak. Always, there was something enigmatic and unpredictable about this woman; she was one of the younger women in the Hoffmanns’ circle, but you’d have characterized her as an older-young woman, a girl who’d grown up missing her youth. Or so it had always seemed to Lionel, who dropped by the Salthill Bookstore sometimes to purchase books he’d seen reviewed enthusiastically, mainly history, biographies of financiers, statesmen, and other men of the world,

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rarely did Lionel read these books through, but he meant to, someday; in the meantime, he was accumulating an impressive library; and he liked, as he said, to support poor Marina in that store. What was striking about Marina was that you never quite knew what she might say or do, as she seemed not to know herself. “Th-thank you for coming, on this sad occasion. Adam would be—would be—oh, you know how Adam would
be
—

so happy to see you, and only just s-sorry that, that—” Marina was breathless, radiant-faced and strange to her friends, who stared at her as if they’d never seen her before, in dread of what she might say next. The shock of her friend’s (lover’s?) death seemed to have devastated her; to have rendered her young, as if the layers of her brittle personality, carefully constructed in adulthood, had been peeled violently away. She was deathly pale, with the redhead’s translucent skin; faint bluish veins quivered beneath that skin, like wires. Her eyes were enormous, damp and blinking.

Her pale mouth resembled an animated wound. Like a sleepwalker she seemed but dimly aware of her surroundings. She wore black, but a curious iridescent-purple black, loose and indefinable, crinkled, possibly a tunic over a long skirt, a black knit shawl wrapped around her shoulders; she was visibly shivering from the cold air, and from excitement; as she spoke, she glanced repeatedly at the plain pine coffin a few yards away, that seemed to glow in the indirect lighting, as if she expected—what? Some sort of response from it, or from the man inside? Lionel saw to his disgust that Marina was bare-legged; on her naked feet were old, water-stained sandals. What poor taste! Obviously, the woman had no husband to oversee her public apparel, or her grooming. The red-glinting hair that Lionel in his remote way admired, and often found himself gazing at, had been plaited so tightly that the corners of Marina’s eyes looked slanted; its crownlike bulk was covered in a black lace mantilla, and affixed to this was, improbably, a black satin rose with floppy petals. It was the sort of cloth rose you’d find on a woman’s hat. It had a cheap theatrical look, of showy excess; pinned to Marina’s head, it bobbed distractingly, disfiguring as a growth. Lionel frowned in disapproval as, years ago, he’d often frowned in disapproval of his children when they embarrassed and displeased him. Marina was speaking in a deceptively calm voice of Adam Berendt, their “beloved mutual friend”; of the “terrible loss” of such a good, generous man, in their community; of his “heroic”—“sacrificial”—

death. She paused, as if she’d lost her way. She smiled in confusion. She regarded the coffin almost coquettishly. “What we all want to know,
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Adam, is, why?—why did you throw your life away, if that’s what you did, and what does it mean for
us?
” In the startled silence, no one moved; Lionel had a sense of everyone in the chapel, some fifty or sixty people, including Mr. Shad and several ushers at the rear, remaining very still.

But Marina, staring and blinking and smiling, like a sleepwalker managing to wake, if only for a few seconds, to get her bearings, went on to speak in a more normal manner, telling her listeners that the cremation service was what Adam had requested; he’d told her, once when they were out hiking, and they’d come upon the carcass of a dead creature, that what he wanted, when he died, was to be “burnt to a crisp.” At this, there was an eruption of nervous laughter in the chapel. Marina’s lips twitched, too.

She glanced at the coffin as if in approval of Adam’s wit. “And so, Adam,”

she said, almost merrily, “we will honor your request.” Marina ended by taking out of the folds and layers of her curious costume a battered paperback book,
Great Dialogues of Plato
Lionel was able to read, for he was far-sighted in middle age, and with schoolgirl earnestness Marina read a short passage from the
Phaedo
which, as she explained, recounts the death of Socrates by state-mandated suicide, in the company of a few followers who were his disciples, and loved him. Asked on his deathbed how he would wish to be buried, Socrates said, “How you like, if you catch me and I don’t escape you . . . I shall not be here then with you; I shall have gone away . . . Be confident; and bury my body as you please and as you think would be most according to custom.” Having read these words, Marina ceased abruptly as if someone had jabbed a knife against her spine. “Oh!

Oh, God.” The smooth taut girlish face shattered, Marina began to cry, anguished. In that instant, to the horror of all who were watching, Marina Troy aged thirty years.

In this way, the formal ceremony ended.

Mozart’s
Requiem Mass
was immediately resumed, in the midst of a phrase of music, pitched rather too high, and demented-sounding. Adam’s type of music? You wouldn’t have thought so: Adam was in the habit of whistling brisk tuneless tunes. He’d had few classical CDs in his possession, so far as Lionel knew. “What a nightmare!” At this point the plain pine coffin had begun to move. There was a cinematic quality to its departure. It was being tugged jerkily forward, then more smoothly, on its partly hidden rubbery hook; pulled out of sight through an opening in the velvet draperies as everyone, aghast, stared. What was happening?
Was
this happening? The tacky velvet drapes promised a theatrical experience but there

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would be no further revelation: Adam’s coffin disappeared, and the drapes fell back into place.

Gone! So quickly.

To be burnt to a crisp.

L   to flee to the men’s room. Where, locked in a stall, in dread that someone among his friends might come in, and hear him, and recognize his shoes, he vomited into a toilet bowl.

Not that he’d eaten much that morning. But there was the acid-bourbon, more fiery in its upward trajectory than in its downward.

T  , to escape. Yet no one could leave just yet. With no religious ritual to make an ending, how to make an ending? They were in the parking lot, amid their glittering cars. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cars. They were dazed by the action of sunshine on black asphalt. The sun glared and glowered from all directions. Lionel felt better for having vomited, he’d vomited up not only the hot little knot of bourbon in his guts but the nauseating smell of the chapel. Poor Marina!—her tears had provoked many of the women into fresh bouts of weeping, so that their meticulously prepared faces were beginning to resemble melting wedding cakes. Even a few of the more sensitive, or weaker, men. But not Lionel Hoffmann, who was stoic; determined not to betray emotion, in public; or in private. Hysteria disgusted him as it disgusted all Hoffmann men. And what was this in his hand: a stiff little ivory card, pressed upon him by Mr. Shad as he’d left the building, a business card Lionel tore into pieces, and tossed away. Had everyone been given these despicable little cards? “It’s no worse, is it, than a coffin lowered into the earth, I mean witnessing it,” Owen Cutler was saying, reasoning, “and clumps of dirt shoveled onto it, and we actually didn’t—

see. We saw nothing.” Augusta Cutler who’d hurriedly put on dark glasses, pointed above their heads, “Oh, but look.” Puffs of pearly-white smoke lifted from a chimney, trailing upward. “And what is that
smell
.” In a tragic voice Camille said, “This is the end of an era.” And burst into fresh tears.

Lionel looked at his wife for the first time in recent memory. That woman, his wife?
His?
The runny-nosed girl in the cloakroom at the Deke house, thirty years later. And she was thirty years older. The round childish softly
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pretty face was plumper, flaccid at the jawline; the pink-flushed skin was rubbery as a doll’s. Grief, and the anger of grief, had deepened lines in her forehead usually disguised by makeup, and bracketing her mouth. A pike’s mouth it seemed to Lionel, contorted by suffering. Lionel felt both tenderness and repugnance, seeing Camille like this. Exposed to the world.

He knew it was unfair to believe that only the young and attractive should display such emotion publicly, yet he wanted to hurry to Camille, literally with his arms, or his coat, to hide her from the laughter and pity of the world. But as he turned, blinking in the dazzling light, to take in the others, his friends, he realized his mistake. The change had come upon them all, all were middle-aged, and ravaged.
Camille Hoffmann was the world,
the world was Camille Hoffmann
.

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T , in the house on Old Mill Way, the Hoffmanns slept. In their burrow-marriage, the Hoffmanns slept. In the antique four-poster bed at the top of the old Colonial Macomb House, or was it the Wade House, a landmark of local history, the Hoffmanns, exhausted, slept. Always they slept in a single bed by custom; for their marriage was sanctified by Custom. (Except when Lionel was forced to be away overnight in Manhattan, or was out of town on business, which was frequently the case in recent years. Then they slept in separate beds.) Their intense, separate, far-flung bouts of sleep.

For sleep is not one, but many. These regions of the soul inaccessible to all others save the sleeper; and even the sleeper is helpless to determine the course of dreaming, the spillage of emotion. No matter how others press against us, or grasp us in their arms.
Take me with you
.
Where are you going?

Don’t you love me?

In their expensive burrow-marriage from which oxygen had leaked, leaving the air humid and stale as soiled bedclothes. Though the bedclothes on the four-poster bed were expensive linen, and scarcely soiled.

And the enormous pillows were stuffed with goose feathers, expensive and luxuriant. And the bedroom, the “master” bedroom as real estate agents call such rooms, was beautifully furnished in Revolutionary-era things; and the walls papered in a net of silken dove-gray fleur-de-lis and ser-pentine tendrils, an exact reproduction of the wallpaper in the bedroom of General Cleveland Wade and his wife. In such surroundings the

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Hoffmanns slept. In their burrow of thirty years the Hoffmanns slept. In the aftermath of grief the Hoffmanns slept. On opposite sides of the double bed they slept. They were spent, exhausted; like swimmers who have only barely made it back to shore, through a treacherous surf; swimmers who’ve survived a common wreck, and dread the knowledge of what happened, and what almost happened, in the other’s eyes.
No! I can’t look
.

Don’t make me look
.
I don’t know you
.

In the history of the Colonial house on Old Mill Way, how many wives and husbands had slept beneath the high ceiling of the master bedroom, such spent, exhausted sleep.

Camille, who lived now, understood that Lionel, her husband, was deeply disappointed in her. Her weakness, her tears. Her public breakdown. In the car returning from Nyack, he’d said virtually nothing to her except “Blow your nose, Camille. Please.” And in fear of him, his severe eyes, Camille had crept upstairs to bed while Lionel was in his downstairs study with the door shut against her; as years before he’d shut the door against the children whispering and giggling outside it. Their daring soft pummelings against it with the palms of their hands.
Daddy? Dad-dy?

Why are you hiding?
Camille had sometimes pressed the palms of her hands against that door and listened intently, and hearing nothing inside had not dared to speak; tonight, she hadn’t dared to approach the door.

The house was so large, you could be lost to another person for days. But Lionel was required to come upstairs to bed, in the “master” bedroom as Custom dictated. He was faithful to Custom, Camille knew. In gratitude she knew. She’d bathed luxuriantly, and put on a floral-checked flannel nightgown (though the night was hot, Lionel kept the house air-conditioned and their sleeping quarters were wintry), and lay on her side of the four-poster bed to wait for him; she’d left a dim light burning on the table by Lionel’s side of the bed. Her lips moved in a silent prayer for Adam Berendt, and for herself and her husband.
O God let us endure
.
Let us
be happy again!
She had not committed adultery except in her heart. She was not guiltless, neither was she guilty. Should she confess? That she’d loved another man? While continuing to love her husband, she’d been desperate with love for another man? Lionel in his remoteness could not know; he’d have had no idea. What an insult to his manhood! Must Lionel know the full truth, in order to forgive her, if he would forgive her?

O God, instruct me
.
Adam?
Camille had always been a religious person but her relations with God were formal and not very comforting. There were
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long periods when she no more thought of Him than she thought of the elderly white-bearded man who’d been her Grand-da-daddy, her mother’s own grandfather, who’d given her so many nice presents including a Shetland pony, who’d disappeared from her life forever before she was ten. (When she’d asked where Grand-da-daddy was, her mother always said, with a quirky little smile, “Grand-da-daddy’s gone back to the Highlands, where he came from.”) Camille squinted into the darkness.

She was in a wild place, approaching the mouth of a cave. She was alone, and in her nightgown, and frightened; but someone, perhaps Adam, was close by, protecting her. She couldn’t see him but knew he was there. As in life, he’d protected her. She was drifting downward to sleep, which was inside the cave. Yet at the same time she was fully awake, conscious of that sequence of creaks on the stairs. In fact, her mind was racing, like a rabbit chased by hounds! She was exhausted from these racing thoughts! Since that terrible telephone call of the other evening.
Camille, I have such sad
news for you
.
For us
.
It’s Adam
.
Adam has—in an accident, Adam has—died
.