Middle Age (6 page)

Marina put
the gift
away for safekeeping. She dared not try to return it to Adam. After this, though she continued to love him, she feared him, too, and rather resented him. No man should be so powerful, meddling with another’s soul.

And a year and six weeks later, Adam was dead. Marina was herself the personal executor of his estate. With a pang of dread she supposed
the gift
was still hers?

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How death enters your life
. Following Adam’s death, and that stranger’s body in the morgue, things began to loosen and unravel. Marina was a passenger in a careening vehicle that at high speed begins to shudder. Your instinct is, hide your eyes.

But in fact she was a responsible woman. The owner of the last independent bookstore in the village, widely admired as a still-youngish woman of independent means. Adam Berendt’s friend, and the “personal executor”

of Adam’s estate.

Marina would make arrangements for Adam’s body to be cremated, by way of a funeral home in Nyack. She must try to notify his relatives. (But who were Adam’s relatives?) Somehow, his car would have to be driven
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back to Salthill. And there was the emergency matter of Adam’s dog: what had happened to Apollo? When Marina returned to Salthill in the evening of July Fourth, groggy and exhausted from her ordeal at the medical center, she drove directly to Adam’s house on the river thinking,
I
alone am responsible for that dog
. But at Adam’s house, where was Apollo?

When Adam was away for brief periods he usually left the dog outside, on a long leash, but Marina couldn’t find Apollo in his usual place, had he slipped his leash, knowing somehow that his master was in distress, and run away? The silver-tipped husky was nowhere on Adam’s property, Marina called and called for him until her throat was hoarse, tramping through the tall grass, through a wooded area, at last along the River Road wild-eyed and disheveled, crying, “Apollo?
Apollo!
” How furious she was, at both the dog and his dead master! Her drawn white face was illuminated in oncoming headlights that flared up, blinded her, and mercifully disappeared. Salthill was such a small community, Marina dreaded one of these drivers recognizing her, but no one did, nor did any residents of the River Road at whose houses she stopped to report having seen the lost dog. No one had heard “unusual barking.” Marina thought
Apollo knows
that Adam has died
. Marina reported the missing dog to the Salthill Animal Watch, and went home, staggering with exhaustion.

Envy Apollo!
Adam once said.
Of all of us, Apollo alone doesn’t know he
must die
.

A   of Adam’s death, Marina had been living for seven years, contentedly enough, in the magical Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, where everyone was middle-aged.

She’d noticed immediately: Salthill residents who appeared to her young—“youthful”—in some cases strikingly attractive, in their late twenties or early thirties—were in fact middle-aged. Well into their forties, fifties, sometimes sixties. Salthill residents who looked frankly “middle-aged” were elderly. The only really young couples who could afford to live in Salthill were sons and daughters of the rich, and these had about them a vigorous, health-minded, resolutely “upbeat” American-middle-aged aura.

Adolescents and even children in Salthill, staggering beneath the weight of their parents’ ambitions for them like overburdened camels, were middle-aged in spirit. The most commendable thing you might say of such offspring was that they were
wonderfully mature for their ages
even as the most

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commendable thing you might say about the elderly, if you could identify them, was that they were
wonderfully young for their ages
. No matter the demographics of Salthill and its environs, the median age had to be fifty.

It was possible, Adam Berendt refuted these observations. He was believed to be in his early fifties, and he looked exactly that age. But of course, he
was
middle-aged—“The very essence of that state of the soul.”

Marina Troy, who on her last, startling birthday was thirty-eight, could console herself at least, if consolation was what she wanted, that she looked “much younger” than her age. If one didn’t look too closely, in too unsparing a light.

Long she’d imagined herself as a girl, not quite a woman, with a curse blighting her maturity. Though in fact she wasn’t a virgin, she’d long led a virginal life. She’d become, in Salthill, a “character” in others’ imaginations. Like Adam Berendt, though Marina wasn’t so strong, nor so popular, a “character” as Adam had been.
A minor character
.
An eccentric
. All communities are myth-making, and none more so than communities of the privileged and the sequestered, like Salthill.
Where some of us have
turned to salt, like Lot’s wife?

The Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, population ,, was less than an hour’s drive north of the George Washington Bridge; by train, you arrived at Grand Central Station in twenty-eight minutes, at least ideally. It was both a “historic” region—an old Dutch community founded in 6 on the west bank of the Hudson River, rebuilt and enlarged in 8 by devout members of the utopian Salthill Community under the messianic leader-ship of Captain Moses Salthill, who would in time, overwhelmed by angelic and demonic voices in “fiercesome contention,” take his own life—

and zealously, vibrantly contemporary. Here was
community spirit
in an almost literal sense. Even Salthill Republicans, it was fondly (if not altogether accurately) claimed, voted liberal. There was a palpable community
self,
a
soul
. You couldn’t avoid it. Owner of the landmark Salthill Bookstore on Pedlar’s Lane, in the heart of the “charming” historic district, Marina Troy could not avoid it.

Adam had said, of Salthill, that it was a place that, lacking legends, except for the long-dead early settlers, had to invent its own. And maybe this had become true, since World War II, of America itself. There were no true “heroes”—for there could be no “heroics.” Yet the instinct for

“heroes”—“heroines”—“legends” remained undiminished. At any time, a number of individuals must be designated as “legendary” by the media; a
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number of individuals must be designated as “local characters” in their communities. The wish to believe that Adam Berendt had been a recluse, for instance, a man of mystery, could not be borne out by any actual behavior on Adam’s part over the years; though Marina sensed it would be intensified after his death. And there was Marina Troy, a “character” on a smaller scale.

The unmarried, never-married, virginal-appearing and “fiercely independent” Marina Troy. A figure of romance, to others at least, in this green suburban world in which everyone was married, or had been married. “They speculate about us,” Marina’s friend Abigail Des Pres told her,

“—I’m the lonely, sexually rapacious neurotic divorcée, forever in quest of a man; you’re the mysterious maiden, with the long glamorous hair like what’s-her-name in the fairy tale. Not Rumpelstiltskin—” “Rapunzel?”

“—a sort of unconscious temptress. Men are drawn, intrigued, but frightened away.” “Are they? How?” “The collective sense is there must be some secret in your life, Marina. So they think.” Marina laughed, though this disclosure alarmed and annoyed her. Her true secret, her repudiated hope of being an artist, she intended not to share with anyone (except Adam, who would never betray a secret).

“But, Abigail, who is this ‘they’?”

“ ‘They.’ Who surround us.”

So tales were told of Marina Troy. Those beautiful somber stony-gray eyes! Her face in repose, so melancholy! Marina could be made to laugh, but silently. Though she was the daughter of a high school science teacher in unromantic Pike River, Maine, north of Bangor, and a woman who’d been briefly a registered nurse, yet her Salthill legend was of a “patrician New England” family who’d lost their fortune (shipbuilding? banking?) in the Depression. Though Marina frequently traveled back to Maine to visit her mother in a Bangor nursing home, and an older, married sister, it was widely believed that Marina’s “patrician” family had disowned her. (Surely the estrangement had to do with sex? And maybe politics? Marina Troy was “very left, very liberal.”)

Marina protested none of these tales, for they were never told to her directly. But she was aware of them as we’re uneasily aware of reflections of ourselves in mirrors or shiny surfaces at which, in the company of others, we don’t want to glance. Except with Adam, Marina knew better than to speak of her private life to Salthill friends. She knew how the most reluctantly uttered confidence was soon taken up by the Salthill circle,

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tossed into the air and batted about, as a pack of dogs might take up a hapless creature, tossing its body into the air, yipping and barking excitedly until nothing remained but a patch of bloody skin or a few beautiful, bloody feathers.

She understood, though, that Salthill most admired Marina Troy for her “devotion” to the Salthill Bookstore. This cramped little store was situ-ated in a block of rowhouses that veered uphill from Salthill’s Main Street like steps, each of the woodframe buildings painted a different color, maroon, yellow, pale green, brick red, chalk white, like an illustration in a nineteenth-century children’s book. Of course, Pedlar’s Lane was cobbled, and one way, and so narrow that trucks moved along it slowly, like hunks of coarse thread pushing through the eye of a needle. Of course, no parking was allowed on or even near Pedlar’s Lane, which cut down on customers considerably. A gigantic Barnes & Noble store at the gigantic White Hills Mall twenty minutes away in Nyack, and Internet book sales, were gradually drawing off even long faithful customers of the store, yet there was romance in such doomed idealism—wasn’t there? Especially to the affluent who had no firsthand knowledge of it, as Marina did.

Salthill was intrigued, too, that in a gallant or quixotic gesture a few years before, Adam Berendt had invested in the Salthill Bookstore. Or he’d at least lent his friend Marina money. (How much, no one knew. No one supposed that Adam had much money. A sculptor who gave most of his work away, and seemed never to be working? Who drove a  Mercedes through the decades, and lived in an eighteenth-century stone house badly in need of renovating?)

Marina lived at 88 North Pearl Street, a brisk ten-minute walk from

 Pedlar’s Lane, or a five-minute bicycle ride, in a Victorian shingleboard painted lavender, beginning just perceptibly to peel, with purple grapevine trim; seen from the street, Marina’s house had a quaint storybook quality, like her store; its facade was so narrow, a man might almost encompass it by stretching wide both his arms as, in a playful gesture, a male visitor had once done. “Marina, you live in a dollhouse!” Marina felt obliged to plant purple pansies and petunias in the windowboxes of her house. Her small front yard was bounded by a three-foot wrought-iron fence; on her front step, there was a braided welcome mat. Inside the house were three rooms downstairs, and three rooms upstairs; the stairs were unnervingly steep, and warped; the floorboards of each room were warped; the old glass of the windowpanes was wavy as if afflicted with astigmatism. You could love
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such a house, and be terribly tired of living in it. As you could love books, and be terribly tired of the commerce of books.

Adam had visited Marina many times in the house at 88 North Pearl, but not once had he lain in her brass bed at the top of the house. The Salthill circle was curious about this possibility, and neither Marina nor Adam felt obliged to enlighten them. In fact, Adam had climbed the steep stairs, making their aged wood creak, and he’d entered the bedroom with its slanting ceiling, but only to help Marina paper the walls. He’d fixed drips in her bathrooms, upstairs and down. He’d offered to caulk the windows and would surely have done so before the first frost of that year, except he’d been killed in midsummer.

What is the romance of a Marina Troy, for her married female friends?

She supposed it must be her
aloneness
. Women who couldn’t bear a few minutes’ solitude in their lavish homes, who frantically telephoned friends through the day and filled up their calendars with dinners, cocktail parties, luncheons, tennis dates, excursions into the city, charitable organizations; women who collapsed when their children departed for college, or for summers abroad, or even for summer camp; women who panicked at the possibility of divorce, yet also at the possibility of spending a quiet weekend alone with their husbands; women who kept lengthy, annotated lists of individuals who “owed” them and whom they “owed,” and to what degree, nonetheless spoke of admiring Marina, and of envying her. Yet they were keen to contaminate her
aloneness
. They invited her to their continuous stream of parties, not minding that, though she owed everyone in town, she rarely reciprocated; they took care to seat her beside such eligible bachelors as Adam Berendt, who, it seemed, had never been married; and Roger Cavanagh, whose marriage had dissolved, leaving him witty and ironic, handicapped as with a wizened or missing limb. These women, most of them beautiful well into middle-age, spoke kindly of Marina’s

“unique” beauty; her “patrician” profile; for a woman prized by their circle could hardly be plain.

Marina wore striking clothes, quite unlike her Salthill women friends who shopped exclusively at designer stores; but these were “striking” perhaps by accident. Long hobbling skirts, often with alarming slits in the sides; velvet jackets wearing out at the elbows, and too tight in the shoulders; expensive but water-stained leather boots to the knee; curious carved-looking shoes with or without heels, or black running shoes with floppy black shoelaces. She was known to be one of Salthill’s “runners”; it