Middle Age (22 page)

The Madonna of the Rocks
. Suddenly, Abigail remembers.

On one of their Manhattan excursions Adam took her to the Frick Museum, that beautiful setting, a setting for romantic love, where Beauty and the Beast (both were Adam’s wry terms) might wander in their gilded fairy tale, untouched by Real Time; for Adam loved her, or seemed to love her, while keeping a certain distance from her, unworthy of love he’d claimed, he was unworthy of love, and of happiness, it was wrong of him to tangle himself in another’s soul he said, but there Adam was pulling Abigail by the hand to position her before
The Madonna of the Rocks,
by an unknown Florentine artist, circa ; forcing her to gaze at the ethereal, waxy-skinned, somewhat fretful and peevish-looking Virgin Mary clutching a squirmy Holy Infant in her rather large hands; against a curious Magritte-landscape of rocks, boulders, sea cliffs, and a dramatically darkened sky; the Holy Infant’s head was disproportionately large for his small shoulders, and his halo was alarmingly metallic, as luminous as the Virgin’s. Abigail stood astonished and staring, before the centuries-old oil painting as before a mirror only just slightly distorted. Adam nudged her in his chummy way. “So, who’s she remind you of, dear?” Abigail’s first instinct was to laugh. “But I’m not—am I—like that? Her?” Abigail stammered, “—clutching at her baby with those
hands?
And that desperate—

fanatic—look in their faces.”

Virgin Mary and Holy Infant, gigantic figures in a rock-landscape.

Virgin Mary and Holy Infant, bathed in holy—or was it unholy?—

light.

Beneath the Virgin’s bare foot, a writhing, defeated, wicked-eyed serpent.

Adam said, “See? The snake? The Madonna of the Rocks has the power to subdue Satan. And so do
you,
Abigail.”

The caressing-melting sound of
Abigail
in Adam Berendt’s roughened voice. In memory, as at the time, Abigail feels a shiver of something like dissolution; her eyelids quiver shut.



J C O

But what does it mean, she wonders: the power to subdue Satan?

She drains her glass of wine. It’s another time. This unexpected place.

And Jared glaring at her as if he can read her dazed erotic mind. “Hey, Mom? How’s about dessert?”

Jared dials room service to order for himself. Abigail is impressed, as she is at such times, by her son’s capable manner. He can talk to desk clerks, airline personnel, taxi drivers, in mimicry of adult authority. More relaxed now, actually smiling at his mom.
Hey
.
We get along O
.
K., it’s weird!

But how long can Abigail hold on to her son, here? It’s not even eight

.. He will want to get back to the campus by nine. As usual Jared devoured his meal swiftly. Abigail hardly touched hers.

Day before yesterday, pondering this trip, Abigail went to the Salthill Bookstore under the pretext of buying some paperback novels to take along (she hasn’t read Jane Austen in years, feels it’s time to reimmerse herself in that sentimental-astringent seriocomic world of triumphant female will), but really she wanted to speak with Marina Troy; Marina, Abigail’s most elusive Salthill acquaintance, whom she hadn’t seen since the morning of Adam’s cremation. Abigail hoped to commiserate with Marina, yes, she’d heard that Marina had been ill, was going to invite her to lunch to ask her, with some embarrassment, if as Adam’s personal executor Marina had yet come upon any of Abigail’s personal letters to Adam.
Yes,
I’m ashamed! Love letters written to a man who didn’t respond
.
But—I couldn’t
help it
. But this was a surprise, something of a shock, as soon as Marina Troy saw Abigail step into the store, the little bell tinkling over the door, she turned away, rigid and white in the face, distracted, nearly rude, flee-ing from both Abigail and another customer—“I’m sorry, I can’t help you now. I’m too busy.” Marina Troy in one of her ratty jumpers, bare-legged, unshaven legs, rust-red hair straggling down her back. Amid stacks of unsold books, some of them piled on their sides, on the warped-tile floor.

Those eyes! Brimming with tears of alarm and fury. In that instant Abigail saw the eccentric woman as a sister-mourner, a sister-widow. And a rival.

Is Marina jealous of me? And I, of her?
Adam would have shaken his head at their folly, laughing.

Abigail says suddenly, as if this were the solution to a riddle she and Jared have been puzzling over, “ ‘Thwaite’ was the name.” Jared is eating pecan pie and vanilla ice cream, skimming TV channels. Mostly local Vermont news, which interests him not at all. He won’t like it that the Mountain View Inn doesn’t have cable, Abigail steels herself for his scorn.

Middle Age: A Romance



“—the child in the river. The eight-year-old girl whom Adam tried to save.”

Jared says, not looking at her, clicking fiercely through the small cycle of channels, “ ‘Tried to’—? He
did
.”

“Well, he did. But—”

“What you sent me, in the papers, they’re saying he
did
.”

“Well, yes. He did.”

“Mr. Berendt was, like, a hero. And those asshole kids, fooling around in a fiberglass sailboat, on the Hudson River!” Jared is almost speechless with disgust.

“It was,” Abigail says slowly, conscious of the pitiful inadequacy of her words, “—an accident. Oh, God.”

Jared says, “Some people think there aren’t any accidents.”

“Well, when you get older, you see, honey, there
are
. In this case the conjunction of—unsupervised children in a sailboat, and Adam, and Adam’s personality, and his—cardiac condition.”

Jared doesn’t want to hear about Adam Berendt’s cardiac condition.

Any discussion of the physical conditions of his elders, including even their ages, makes him squirm in adolescent mortification. To acknowledge that such old people have bodies—! Jared says disdainfully, “There’s a

‘Thwaite’ at Preston, a guy. I don’t know him.” Almost inaudibly he mutters, “
He’s
an asshole, too.”

Abigail, who despises the Thwaite parents, the ignorant selfish strangers whose parental neglect precipitated a tragedy, feels she should defend them, as one erring parent might defend another, to lighten the charge against herself. “The parents are very—stricken. They’ve said so, publicly. The little girl, Samantha is her name—you wonder what she’ll be told. That a man died for her.”

Jared says, sharply, “Mr. Berendt didn’t die for
her,
jeez, Mom! You exaggerate all the time. He didn’t know who the hell she was, or any of them. He just did it. You know what he’s—he was—like.”

Was
. Abigail shivers at that word, in Jared’s mouth.

Abigail has had dreams of
Thwaite,
not that pretty little blond-haired girl whose picture was briefly in the local media, but
Thwaite
as an impersonal force like electricity, mud; a substance into which you fall, and sink, even as you struggle to escape; the muck into which Adam fell, and sank.

Unworthy of love, why? Unworthy of happiness, why?
For a long moment, staring blindly at her angry-looking son surfing TV channels, punching at



J C O

the remote control with childish violence, Abigail can’t speak. She feels how close she is to that dissolution, herself. A sudden turn of the car’s wheel as she’d sped north along the interstate, oblivion in flaming wreckage against a concrete overpass upon which fading red graffiti proclaims

    .. ’.

Well, Abigail Des Pres did not succumb. And will not.

Pouring herself another half-glass of this quite good, tart, thrilling burgundy.

For the fifth or sixth time Jared clicks onto a baseball game being played in some luridly bright-green space. “Fucking Mets. Those shits.”

Clicks onto an overloud overbright advertisement for razor blades. Clicks onto an overloud overbright advertisement for—

Abigail cries, exasperated, “Jared, God
damn
. Turn that damned thing off.”

Jared clicks the set off and tosses the remote control down onto the carpeted floor with enough violence to break it.

Abigail laughs.

“Apollo! You should see that poor dog.”

“What about Apollo?” Jared asks, immediately concerned.

Jared who has never had a dog of his own, loved Apollo. Walking with Adam above the river and in Battle Park, and Apollo trotting ahead. The husky-shepherd invariably barked excitedly at Jared’s approach. Jared hugged the dog, buried his face in the dog’s silvery coat. Once, appalled, Abigail witnessed her son who shrank from her kisses as from a bad taste, turn his face to Apollo’s lavish tongue-stroking kisses, letting the dog lick even his eyes, his grinning mouth.

Abigail says quickly, “Apollo is—all right. He’s heartbroken, of course.

He keeps turning up. People’s houses. Early in the morning. Before we’re awake. He brings us things of Adam’s, an old glove, a shirt.” Abigail has saved the old gnawed gardening glove, a talisman from the other world.

She recalls the mysterious scratching beneath her bedroom window: how could the dog know precisely where Abigail’s bedroom is, in the sprawling house with six bedrooms upstairs, and a guest wing?
Not Apollo, it’s Adam
.

But did Adam know the location of Abigail’s bedroom?

Abigail sighs dreamily. Thinking of how a few days before his death she’d seized both Adam’s hands in hers and kissed them and when he tried to escape she laughed and pressed his hands against her breasts saying, teasing
Oh, what an old prude you are, you’re ridiculous
and she’d kissed
Middle Age: A Romance



Adam Berendt full on the lips, laughing even as she kissed him, feeling his sexual arousal, and Adam grunted, his face flaming red, and grabbed Abigail’s elbows, and—

Jared is asking, incensed, “But where is he? Where does he
live?
”

“Who?”

“Apollo!” Jared glares at her.

Abigail shakes her head to clear it. It’s as if her head is a glass paper-weight, filled with snowflakes and a mysterious transparent liquid. “Oh, yes—Apollo. I think he stays with Camille Hoffmann most of the time.

Sometimes Marina Troy. I’ve tried to keep him, I feed him in the kitchen.

And he sleeps, sort of fitfully. Then he whines and sniffs around looking for—Adam, I guess. He has actually growled at me. When he can’t find Adam, he scratches to be let outside, and I let him out, and he trots off sniffing. Poor thing.” Abigail doesn’t want to tell Jared that Apollo now limps, his left rear leg was injured.

Jared says with childish hurt, “I hope you guys aren’t gonna let Apollo be put down by, like, the Humane Society. Or shot by some cop.”

“Camille Hoffmann wants to keep him. She’s quite emotional about him. And she’s gotten into this strange state where you can’t talk to her about Adam being
dead;
you can only talk about Adam being
gone
. ‘I think of him as traveling,’ poor Camille says, ‘and he’s out of touch right now.

But he’ll be back.’ Unfortuntely Lionel Hoffmann has, I guess, allergies.

Dog hairs give him asthma.”

A telling little gossipy detail, Salthill adults would want to know more, but the adolescent Jared twitches with indifference.

“Look,
I
can take Apollo. He can live with
me
.”

“Oh, honey. You’re away at school most of the year.”

“Fuck it, if he’s
lonely!
He’ll get hit by a car, on the road. He’s looking for—something he can’t find.” Suddenly Jared sounds frightened.

Surreptitiously, with one of the linen napkins, Abigail wipes at her eyes. A smudge of mascara. Oh, she’s tired of tears! It’s laughter she wants.

“If you took in Apollo, he would be living with
me,
” Abigail points out with a mother’s tedious logic. “And he doesn’t seem to want to live with
me
. He stays overnight, and drifts on.” Suddenly this seems a mistake, such an admission. Why doesn’t Apollo want to live with Abigail Des Pres? She has rushed out to buy hefty cans of dog meat, dog biscuit. To no avail.

Jared says with sudden wistfulness, “Where is Mr. Berendt buried?”



J C O

How many times Adam had asked Jared to call him “Adam.” But it’s

“Mr. Berendt.” Like Jared’s friends at Preston, who call her “Mrs. Tierney.” Or nothing at all.

“Honey. I told you, he isn’t.”

“He isn’t?” Jared looks alarmed. “But where is—”

“His remains, I told you— He requested— He wanted to be cremated.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Jared swallows hard, shifting his shoulders inside the baggy black T-shirt. Abigail has been able to decode, she thinks, the words on the front:  floats inside the black cloud . Meaning, what?— ? That sounds right.

Abigail says, trying to smile, “You know Adam, honey! The most practical of men. And funny. Not that he expected to die anytime soon, he was in perfectly good health, but he told Marina Troy that when he did, die I mean, he wanted—‘to be burnt to a crisp.’ Isn’t that just like Adam?”

Abigail tries feebly to laugh.

Between mother and son, what heaviness of emotion. The Madonna of the Rocks clutching with claw hands at her squirmy big-headed baby who knows, God damn, he’s the son of God, not just his mother’s son.

This weight between Abigail and Jared that’s so much more palpable here in the Mountain View Inn outside Middlebury, Vermont, than it is back in Salthill where Jared can creep away to his room, to his computer and TV and the telephone, and escape. This weight that has begun to seep and spread, like something leaking from a paper bag. Jared says, hesitantly, “So he’s—it’s just, like, ashes?—in a vase or something?” and Abigail says, “He requested his ashes be spread, honey. In his garden.” Abigail doesn’t want Jared to know that she hadn’t attended the small private ceremony. Just a few friends, people who’d loved Adam. But not Abigail Des Pres who out of terror, cowardice, smallness of soul stayed away. “His garden, you know how much he loved it. Always a lot of weeds, tall thistles, but so lush and beautiful, pole-beans, and tomatoes, and peppers, sunflowers, goldenrod, that exquisite little orange wildflower that grows like a vine, in the fence—