Middle Age (3 page)

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Thwaite
was the bearer of Adam Berendt’s death. She would learn.

An ugly name, isn’t it? Though the child’s name, Samantha, is beautiful.

It was
Thwaite
that would stick in Marina’s brain like a burr.
Thwaite
that became her obsession, she who would have defined herself as a woman free of obsession. A reasonable intelligent unemotional woman yet how
Thwaite
lodged in her brain as suffocation, choking, tar-tasting death.
Thwaite Thwaite
in her miserable sleep those nights following Adam’s death. Sobbing aloud, furious: “If I’d been there with him on the boat, I wouldn’t have let Adam die.”

In the derangement of grief Marina Troy quickly came to believe this.

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J C O

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L TV   How Adam would have been embarrassed, if, just maybe, secretly proud.

Good Samaritan. Adam Berendt. Resident of Salthill-on-Hudson. July
Fourth accident. Hudson River. Rescue of eight-year-old
. Adam’s face on the glassy screen: squinting his blind eye, smiling. That big head like something sculpted of coarse clay. A mere moment on the TV screen. Swift cut to the much younger Thwaites, parents of the rescued child.
Thwaite.

Harold and Janice. Jones Point residents. Devastated by. Tragic episode. So very
sorry. So very grateful. Courageous man sacrificing his life for our daughter. Our
Samantha. Our prayers will be with Adam Berendt. We are hoping to make
contact with his family, his survivors. Oh, we hope
. . . Marina switched off the TV in disgust.

How could she bear it, the banality of Adam as a “Good Samaritan.”

The banality of the Thwaites’ emotion, how disappointingly ordinary they were, and young, stammering into microphones thrust into their dazed faces.

“Well. I must learn to bear it. And more.”

She was an adult woman, she knew of loss, death. She was not a naive, self-pitying person.

Her mother was chronically ill, and her father had died three years ago at the age of seventy-nine, so Marina knew, Marina knew what to expect from life, every cliché becomes painfully true in time, yet you survive until it’s your turn: you don’t become middle-aged without learning such primitive wisdom. Yet, when Marina’s father had died, Marina had not been taken by surprise. That death had been not only expected, but “merciful.”

After cancer operations, and months of chemotherapy, the fading of Marina’s father’s life had been a slow fading of light into dusk and finally into dark. And there you are: death.

Not like Adam’s death.

“Adam, God damn you.
Why
.”

She was desperate to recall the last time they’d spoken. She shut her eyes, rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands: Adam’s face!

A doctor at the Jones Point Medical Center had prescribed a sedative for Marina Troy. (Did that mean she’d become hysterical? She’d lost all dignity, and collapsed?) Next morning staggering from her bed that was
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like a grave, at the top of her house on North Pearl Street. Her storybook house, as Adam had called it fondly. As Marina Troy was a storybook creature to be rescued. (By him?) In sweat-smelling nightclothes, a strap slipping off her shoulder, tugging at a window to raise it higher
must
breathe! must breathe!
There was some fact that plagued her with its cruelty, its injustice: what?
The last time we spoke, I didn’t know
.
If I had known
. The ceiling careened over her head with an air of drunken levity. Lilac fleur-de-lis wallpaper of subtly mocking prettiness.
Thwaite
mixed with the church bells.
Thwaite Thwaite
clamoring jeering in her head.

Marina’s bedroom was a small charming room with small charming windows of aged glass, dating to the mid-8s, windowpanes badly in need of caulking, overlooking St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church with its heraldic spire floating in the night sky, and its ancient bumpy churchyard.

(In which Adam Berendt would certainly not be buried. Adam had been pagan, not Catholic; and Adam had wanted to be “burnt to a crisp” when he died.) North Pearl Street was one of Salthill’s oldest streets, hilly and very narrow, and it dead-ended with three charming woodframe houses, one of which was Marina Troy’s.

Somehow it had happened (when, exactly?) she’d become thirty-eight years old.

Young enough to be his daughter, Adam Berendt used to joke.

Don’t be ridiculous! You’re, what?—fifty? Fifty-two?

Marina, to be perfectly frank, I’ve lost count.

She removed her sweat-soaked nylon nightgown and wadded it into a ball to toss onto the floor. She’d have liked to peel off her sticky itchy skin and do the same. In the silence following the church bells came the echo
Thwaite! Thwaite
. The sound of death, those hateful people, negligent parents, youngish, scared, reading off prepared statements to TV re-porters, uncertain whether they should smile, or not smile, but one should always smile on TV, yes?—if only fleetingly, sadly? In truth, Marina didn’t detest these people. It was
Thwaite
that had insinuated itself into her head.
Thwaite
snarled like her long crimped dark-red hair, which by day she wore plaited and twined about her head (“like Elizabeth I”) but by night it snagged and snarled, snaky tendrils trailing across her mouth.

Thwaite
a mass of such snarls no hairbrush could be dragged through.

Thwaite
that was the fairy-tale riddle: what is my name, my name is a secret, my name is your death, can you guess my name?
Thwaite
the helpless tenderness she’d long felt for Adam Berendt, who had been neither her

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J C O

husband nor her lover.
Thwaite
powerful as no other emotion Marina had ever felt for another person.

And the anger.
God damn how could you. Without saying good-bye. Did
you know, did you wish to know, why didn’t you let me tell you, how I felt about
you. And now!

A boating accident. So many, each Fourth of July. Across the United States. Boating and traffic accidents. And accidents with fireworks and firecrackers, especially illegally purchased firecrackers, Marina found herself listening in a trance to—what?—a stranger’s voice, a radio voice this time, before switching it off and pounding at the little plastic radio (on her kitchen windowsill) with her fist. Oh, what did she care for the accidents of strangers? Even their “senseless” deaths.

Now Adam was gone, it was going to be difficult for her to care about much.

The official diagnosis was that Adam Berendt had died of
cardiac arrest
. His skull had been badly fractured, as well. He’d died, evidently, within minutes of being lifted out of the river; in the speeding ambulance.

At approximately 6: .. of July Fourth. Marina hoped that he’d died unconscious, unknowing. But she hadn’t dared ask.
Thwaite, death
. Nothing to be done. A tragedy. If an accident can be a tragedy. You heard yourself utter that word
tragedy
as others did. It was a way of speaking, a way of attempting to assuage pain. You would not say of a good man’s death that he’d died accidentally, and therefore stupidly.
Tragedy
was the word for there was no other.
Never kissed me. As I’d wanted him to
. Never her breasts, her belly, between her thighs. That not-touching and not-kissing was her secret. She would ponder it in the night for a long time. She would ponder it in the bookstore, knowing that Adam Berendt would never drop by, not again. If the telephone rang it would not be him, and if someone knocked at her door it would not be him. Through the barbiturate haze that slowed her heartbeat almost to stopping she would ponder these simple facts.

The Thwaite family had expressed a public wish to meet with Adam Berendt’s family. His “survivors.” To thank them for Adam’s sacrifice.

Anyone other than Adam’s immediate family, a wife or a blood relative, wouldn’t qualify.

Hypocrite sons of bitches. I was as close to Adam as anyone who knew him
.

But she wouldn’t hate them. She wouldn’t become obsessed with an illusory enemy. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thwaite of Jones Point, New York.

Within twenty-four hours they’d received their share of public media
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attention and censure: newscasters hadn’t accused them of being “negligent parents” but there’d been that implication, and police were going to

“investigate” the accident in which the Thwaites’ eight-year-old daughter, Samantha, and ten-year-old son had gone out onto the Hudson River in a neighbor’s sailboat manned not by an adult but by a thirteen-year-old boy.

The boat had been equipped with child-sized life jackets but none of the children was wearing one. Yes, it was stupid. It was negligence. Possibly criminal negligence. But how much more merciful, simply to forgive.

She would hear her voice on the telephone, commiserating with friends, “Being bitter won’t bring Adam back. And Adam was the most logical of men.”

And again, “Wasn’t it just like Adam! If—he had to go—without warning, suddenly—he would have wished for—something like this.”

But was this true? There came
Thwaite Thwaite
to taunt her, when she was being most rational, responsible.
Thwaite
the tarry black phlegm of death.

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M    to Jones Point because, in Adam Berendt’s wallet, there was no information regarding next of kin.
In case of
emergency
had been left blank.

Had the man no family?
No one?

What was found in the badly worn wallet was a water-soaked little white card:

T S B, . 

 Pedlar’s Lane

Salthill-on-Hudson, NY

proprietor Marina Troy

On the reverse of the little card was Marina’s home telephone number, scrawled in pencil, and it was this number authorities called.

So Marina was summoned. By a voice of authority. Like a sleepwalker she obeyed. Too stunned even to think,
It can’t be, can it? Not like this
.

In a calm sort of panic she was driving. She would not recall afterward getting into the car. Starting the motor. That suspension of time before

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J C O

she would see the irrefutable body. Yet she’d had a sense, for Marina Troy was a woman with an appreciation of bittersweet ironies, that this was a cruel time to be driving to Jones Point on such a mission. For dusk was the luminous time, the romantic time. At dusk, she’d often thought of Adam Berendt. At dusk, she’d often been with Adam Berendt. Now across the wide gleaming river was a scattering of lights like startled thoughts. On the river, there were ghostly sailboats and speedboats winking lights.

Marina wondered: Was it safe to be boating on the river, as night came on? There were occasional freighters, enormous commercial barges beside which the pleasure craft seemed of no more substance than moths. Why had Adam been on the river, in a sailboat? Whose sailboat, where? Why at Jones Point?
If I’d been with him
.
Why wasn’t I with him
. Marina and Adam were planning to see each other, with Salthill friends, the following evening. That had been their plan.

Why didn’t you call us, Marina. Let us go with you. What a shock for you.

Are you sure you’re all right?

She was sure. Oh, yes! Only just she was so furious, and so heartsick.

Wanting to drive up to see him, alone. Not wanting any talk. Not even commiseration. Shared tears.
Maybe he isn’t dead, it’s someone else? Another
man?
Marina had been told only the stark fact that Adam, or a man pur-ported to be “Adam Berendt,” had died a short time before of complica-tions resulting from a “boating accident” on the river.

The river! Marina recalled how from Adam’s studio, at the rear of his house, you could stand staring across the river, those long mesmerized moments as light faded on the agitated waves, and dusk deepened at the edges of things; dusk, a quality of earth; while an eerie oily-glistening light remained on the water. In the west, the sun was chemical red and gorgeous, bleeding at the horizon like a burst egg yolk.

On both sides of the river fireworks erupted. Fourth of July: the American holiday celebrating gunfire, rockets, aggression, death to the enemy.

Across the river on the east bank of the Hudson, in the vicinity of Tarry-town, gaudy pinwheels of crimson, gold, blinding-white light were rising, soaring and falling soundlessly into the river. And a moment later replaced by more explosions, gaudy glittering colors rising, sinking soundlessly to extinction. “Stop. Stop.
Stop
.” This idiotic celebration, at a time of death.

As if in mockery of a man’s death. Even in Jones Point, where death awaited her. Lurid bright carnival colors pitching up into the now-darkening sky over the river. Exploding yellow calyxes, crimson eyeballs,
Middle Age: A Romance

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streamers of rainbow guts. Hideous, hellish. Marina recalled that fireworks are jokey symbols of sexual orgasm, and the thought repelled her.

Never us. And now never
.

In her state of suspended shock she located the Jones Point Medical Center. Not a large facility. Parked her car, and ran to the rear entrance.

She was breathless, breathing through her mouth. As, on their hikes in Eagle Mountain Preserve, Adam had cautioned her never to do. Inside, in a brightly lit lobby, Marina was met by strangers who’d clearly been awaiting her. She heard her name—“Marina Troy?” She who was the friend of Adam Berendt. These people not known to Marina, a half dozen of them, yet a crowd, introduced themselves as “friends”—“new friends”—of Adam’s, organizers of that day’s fund-raising cookout. (Fund-raising
cookout?
) Marina stared at these individuals, wordless. A weepy woman in her forties, raw-eyed, in a very young halter-top sundress with a shawl draped over her shoulders, dared to call Marina “Marina” and to embrace Marina’s stiffened shoulders as if they were two women linked by mutual loss; as if Marina Troy’s shock and mounting horror were to be so easily shared.