Middle Age (31 page)

I   they drove in the direction of Washington, D.C., in pelting rain. Wind rocked the car, Roger seemed to know they would never get to their destination.

The previous day had been autumnal, beautiful. This day was a raw churning cloud-mass, spewing rain like gunfire. Breakfast at the Colonial Hanover Inn had not been a pleasant experience. At first Robin refused to order anything, screwing up her pug-face in a juvenile mimicry of nausea.

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J C O

“I never eat breakfast.” Reprovingly Roger said, as any parent must, “You should, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” Deardeaddad’s lips moved numbly. He had no idea what he was saying. Deardeaddad-speak. As if simply needing to be courted, Robin was easily won. “O.K. If you insist. I’ll eat!” With grim satisfaction then ordering an enormous breakfast of eggs, sausage, waffles which she ate greedily, at times lowering her head toward her plate. Roger, skimming
USA Today,
which was provided free for hotel guests, tried not to observe. He had no appetite himself except for black coffee, fresh-brewed, as many cups as he dared. In the BMW, lurching through rain, Roger’s heart leapt and thudded in his chest. Robin complained of the “gross” meal she’d had, rubbing her belly, blaming Deardeaddad, which was only logical. She began to fiddle with the car radio. No CD in the glove compartment was to her liking. They were bound for the nation’s capital to see, mostly, museums. Such great museums! On the phone planning their weekend, their first father-daughter weekend in more months than Roger cared to recall, Robin had been excited as a young child. Especially, she was enthusiastic about the Air and Space Museum. A few years before, in eighth grade, she’d announced that she intended to study space; the “universe”; she would be an astronomer, or an astrophysicist; possibly, she’d even travel in space.

Earnestly she told her parents, “Space travel will be common, in the twenty-first century. We can all go!” Roger had smiled, hearing his daughter, thirteen at the time, make such a proclamation. Maybe the young are gifted, to see into the future?

While the middle-aged are captives of the past.

Midway to Washington, at about ten .., Robin was suddenly stricken with what seemed to be stomach cramps. Diarrhea? “Dad, exit
please
. I need a rest room
fast
.” She moaned softly, rocking in her seat beside him; sweat beads were forming on her forehead. Roger exited immediately, at an interstate fast-food restaurant and gas station, and Robin climbed out, groaning, and stumbled through the rain to the entrance, bent over with stomach cramps. Anxious, dazed, Roger followed Robin into the building. Now what? What now? He didn’t want to think that his daughter had made herself purposefully sick, gorging at breakfast. Or, was it the case, once she’d begun eating, her hunger was such she hadn’t been able to keep from gorging . . . Roger waited, guiltily.
Whatever this is, it’s
your fault
.
And you know it
.

After some minutes, Robin emerged from the women’s room. Her face was the color of paste and her lips chalk white. Tears shone in her eyes
Middle Age: A Romance

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with an odd sort of elation. She approached Roger shakily, smiling. As he was about to touch her gently, to ask how she was, Robin murmured with pitiless candor, “Morning sickness, Dad.”

Teenaged rock music was being piped into the lobby, loud. Roger cupped a hand to his ear. “I—didn’t hear you, honey?”

“You heard me, Dad. You heard me exactly.”

Robin pushed away from her stumbling Deardeaddad, baring her teeth in a grin, and stalked out of the restaurant. Numbly, a man in a dream, yet not a dream he recognized, Roger followed.

Morning sickness.

Morning sickness?

He had not heard. Yes, but he’d heard.

He felt as if his head was trapped inside a giant clanging bell.

“Robin! Honey, wait—”

He was sure it was a misunderstanding. A joke. Robin was a clever mimic, a gifted satirist. She was not the kind of girl who . . .

Roger tried to help Robin, who was swaying as if faint, walk to the car, but she shrugged away. In the car she hunched far over, arms crossed over her stomach. A sharp odor of vomit lifted from her like a befouled breath.

Roger slid into the seat beside her, trying to remain calm. “Honey, you said—morning sickness? Does that mean—?”

Robin said flatly, “You know exactly what that means, Dad.”

“Does—your mother know?”

“No.”

“Does—
he
know?”

“Who’s
he?
”

“The, the—” Roger couldn’t bring himself to speak the word, it seemed in that instant an obscene word:
father
.

They sat in a tense silence for what seemed a long time but was no more than two or three minutes, rain streaming down the windows of the new-model metallic-gray BMW. Roger’s mind was working rapidly.

Trying to recall if Lee Ann had ever mentioned that Robin had a boyfriend; that she saw boys. Trying to recall if at the school Robin had breezily introduced him to a boy whose face should have lodged in his memory. Trying to think how much a fifteen-year-old at a progressive private school would know about pregnancy, the option of abortion.

Panting, trying not to sob, Robin said, “You know who the father is, Dad. Don’t you?”

“I—do?”

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J C O

“Think!”

“I c-can’t, honey. Who?”

Robin turned on him, pushing out her lower lip in a monkey-like gesture of disdain. “ ‘Honey.’ How many females have you called
that?
”

Roger was stymied. He sat in a paralysis of indecision. He would have to telephone Lee Ann, immediately. They would have to confer. A decision would have to be made. It didn’t occur to Roger to ask his daughter how long she’d been pregnant; when
the baby
was due. He would recall afterward that the very concept
the baby
was no more real to him than the concept of eternity, or space travel.

Robin blew her nose extravagantly. Clearly she was enjoying her own misery as well as his. Again that morning she’d put on the ratty flannel shirt, buttoned halfway over her big breasts, the green T-shirt beneath.

Her thighs were bulky in the khaki pants, her feet like wedges in the filthy running shoes. What boy would have been drawn sexually to Robin Cavanagh! Almost, Roger sensed an air of pride in her.
You see, Daddy?

Somebody desires me even if you don’t
.

Then she turned to him, and spoke. Such words, Roger couldn’t comprehend. “
You,
Dad. You’re the one.”

Seeing the sick stunned look in Roger’s face, Robin laughed. Opened the car door again and climbed out, into the rain, leaving Roger staring after her. What was this? What was happening here? What had Robin said? Obscene, unspeakable! He would never forget, through his life.
You,
Dad
.
You’re the one
.

He’d begun to shake, his teeth chattered with cold. His daughter was accusing him of—what? Incest? Rape?

It wasn’t possible. Yes, but it was possible.

His daughter’s accusation, her hysteria. A fifteen-year-old’s revenge.

Even if no one believed her! Lee Ann, for one, would never believe her.

Sick with dread, his knees nearly buckling under him, Roger climbed out of the car and followed Robin behind the building, through chill pelting rain around a corner, beneath an overhang, close by a dumpster over-flowing with trash. He could not have said, if he’d been questioned, where they were; what place this was. Robin was huddled against the stucco building, arms folded tightly across her breasts, her round childish face curdled with spite, yet with a kind of dark ecstatic glee. Rain had darkened her clothing, droplets ran down her cheeks like cartoon tears. When Roger moved to touch her, gently to cup his hand on the nape of her neck,
Middle Age: A Romance

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she jerked from him like a nervous young horse. She laughed again, daringly. Slyly she said, “Hey, Dad: I’m
not
. I was just kidding.”

Roger required a long moment to absorb this new fact.

“You’re not—pregnant?”

“Whoever said that I was? God, Daddy: gross!”

“You mean—you’ve been joking?”

Robin made her pug-face. “You’d believe anything, Dad, I guess! Any low, nasty, disgusting thing about your own Robin.” Another time she giggled and ran from him, slipping by him as a skilled hockey player might slip by a clumsy player; she ran back to the car, where the door had swung open in the rain, and climbed inside. It was a game! This running in the rain, making Daddy follow. In a daze, another time, Daddy followed.

Robin announced, blowing her nose, “I guess I want to go back to school, Dad. This wasn’t such a great idea. I’ve got a lot of work to do, O.K.?”

“You don’t want to go to Washington after all? The museums—?”

“I guess not.”

“But, Robin, why not?—we’d planned.”

“I
said
. I have work to do, I’m failing two courses. And my roommate’s got some friends visiting today and tomorrow, these kind of weird, wild characters from Exeter.”

Blindly Roger jammed the key into the ignition. His daughter wasn’t pregnant. She was not accusing him of incest, rape. It had all been a joke, a prank. One day, possibly, they would laugh at it.

Roger returned to the interstate highway, to take an exit that would allow him to reverse his course, to return north to Nicodemus, Maryland.

The rain had lightened, though it still ran in rivulets down the BMW’s windows. Overhead the sky was dense with clouds like mucus. Robin, shivering with delight, daring, barely suppressing a childish attack of the giggles, glanced sidelong at Roger. “Your face, Dad. You should see your face.” She pushed the rearview mirror in his direction, so he had no choice but to see the face reflected there.

F!



M
adness
.There came the morning,at last she drove up river to Jones Point. She located the Thwaite house. It was a redwood and brick ranch overlooking the river. This was a chill neutral day in October. He’d died in the heat of summer. It seemed a foreign country by now, the circumstances of his death. For a half hour she sat in her car, parked just up the road from the house, smoking a cigarette. Not a deranged neurotic woman, truly she didn’t blame the Thwaites for Adam’s death.

Yes but someone is to blame
.
A man is gone
.

She’d had no clear intention, setting out. She was a woman of lush emotions, of impulse and instinct; through her life as a vital, seductive woman, she’d “followed her heart”; this was the quality in Augusta Cutler that most characterized her. She feared that, without this quality, she’d have had no personality at all.

It was a Saturday, the child wouldn’t be in school.

Quaking with excitement, like walking onto a brightly lighted stage.

For weeks, for months she’d rehearsed this moment. Yet only in fantasy for she’d never truly believed she would do such a thing. Adam, for one, would not have approved.

Gussie! For God’s sake
.
Let me go
.

Quaking with excitement, which wasn’t like Augusta Cutler. A woman of calculated effects. A woman usually thrilled to be perceiving herself,

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Middle Age: A Romance

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admiring the beauty of her face, her body, her clothes, her style, through others’ eyes. Unless it was fear? Fear of what she might say, or do. As the door was opened at last, a harried-looking young woman stood in the doorway, staring at Augusta. She said:

“Yes? What do you want?”

This was the wife of Harold Thwaite. Augusta wasn’t certain of the name. Janet, Janice? Mrs. Thwaite seemed to the elder woman impudently young. There was a further insult here. Young Mrs. Thwaite wore a sweatshirt, jeans. She was slender, twenty pounds lighter than Augusta Cutler; her breasts were hidden inside the sweatshirt that bore the legend 

  . It was a Saturday morning, children’s voices were raised in the house behind her. A telephone rang. Mrs. Thwaite’s expression was tight with suspicion.

Quickly Augusta said, “Mrs. Thwaite? You don’t know me. I’m Augusta Cutler, I live in Salthill, I was a, a—” not knowing how to describe her relationship with Adam, disliking to claim intimacy, not wanting to sound sentimental, “—a close friend of Adam Berendt’s. I—wondered if we might speak? For just a minute.”

The young woman stared at the middle-aged woman with alarm and a growing revulsion. Yet something constrained her, a need to be courteous; she dared not shut the door in Augusta Cutler’s face.

Behind her a child’s voice lifted.
Mom
-
my?

Augusta said, a little stiffly, “Mrs. Thwaite? I think you know—who Adam Berendt was?”

Mrs. Thwaite said, “No. Not actually.” She was surprisingly prim, nervous. A nerve twitched in her left eyelid. “We didn’t know . . . that man.”

Augusta’s heart was beating rapidly. There were times, even before Adam’s death, when she’d felt faint; ascending even a brief flight of stairs, she might feel light-headed; her moistly radiant skin, her still-youthful beauty, maintained by moisturizers, creams, oils, facials, and collagen injections, was deceiving to her as to others, for she was fifty-two years old, and not a woman devoted to exercising.

“I understand. I realize. You didn’t know . . . him. And so I was hoping,” Augusta said, half-pleading, “you might want to? You, and Samantha? I’ve brought along a few things.” In her handbag, a packet of snapshots. Adam Berendt, with his Salthill friends. Adam Berendt, with some of his sculptures. Adam Berendt, alone. “May I come inside?” Some-

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J C O

thing was being exposed in Augusta, like the white flash of bone piercing skin. The raw white pain that accompanies it. Behind the woman, in a farther room, the child appeared. A little fluff-haired blond girl carrying a small object.