Middle Age (71 page)

Augusta shook her head emphatically. She was naked, and now slipped into a white terrycloth robe, tightly knotting the sash. “Owen loves his idea of ‘wife’—he doesn’t love
me
. Only one man loved me in my lifetime, in the sense of knowing me, respecting me, and that man has died.” Elias West felt a stirring of jealousy, of which he gave no sign.

“And who was this man, this paragon of perfection?” he asked ironically, and Augusta said, smiling, ignoring the irony, “Oh, Adam wasn’t perfect.

Far from it. He wasn’t even very attractive. He had an ugly battered face and one blind eye. And you know,” Augusta lowered her voice, playfully stroking West’s face, “I love handsome men.” “He was a fantastic lover, eh?” West asked, annoyed, and Augusta said, “Lover? Yes. I suppose so. I mean, he would have been. Possibly. We weren’t lovers . . . exactly.” “Yet you loved him?” West asked, surprised. Augusta said, “Of course I did!

Adam was the most powerful, the most romantic masculine presence in my life, including even my father. If you asked me to explain, I couldn’t.

I can’t. Adam was just . . . the man he
was
. I left Salthill because I couldn’t seem to bear living in that place, without him. But now I think I’ll try to trace him. His origins, I mean.” An idea had come to Augusta, inspired by the presence of Elias West in her life. Her eyes brightened as she looked up at him. “Maybe you could help me, Elias? For your regular fee, of course.”

To this proposal Elias West allowed himself to say yes.

Within days, to Augusta’s surprise, West reported to her what he’d been able to discover by way of telephone calls, faxes, and the Internet, about the late Adam Berendt in those years prior to  when he came to New York. “Before he came east your ‘Adam Berendt’ was living in Detroit, Michigan, where he worked for a multi-millionaire real estate developer; before that he was living in Muskegon, Michigan, on Lake
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Michigan, where all I could find out was he became acquainted with this real estate developer who was building lakefront properties, and the guy must’ve liked your ‘Adam Berendt’ and brought him to Detroit. At some point he seems to have gotten a license to sell real estate. Before that—if we work our way backward in time, contra-chronologically—Berendt was living a much different life in Minneapolis, where he drove a truck and took night courses in the business school at the University of Minnesota. (Yes, I tried to get his transcript faxed to me but the registrar wouldn’t release it.) Before that, in 6, he was living in a place called Red Lake, in northern Minnesota, where he worked odd jobs including seasonal labor across the border in western Ontario. But prior to that,”

West said, frowning, “the trail is cold.”

Augusta thought
Prior to that
“
Adam Berendt
”
hadn’t existed
.

She would tell West nothing about “Francis Xavier Brady.” Only she, Augusta, would know of “Francis Xavier Brady.”

Augusta asked West if there was any record of Adam Berendt having been married, and West said, “No. Not that I’ve discovered.” No family?

No relatives? West said, “For more detailed information I’d have to go there, of course. Want to hire me? We could go together.”

“No! No, thank you. This is all I need to know.” Augusta spoke quickly, almost frightened. She didn’t want to share Adam Berendt with anyone, certainly not with a stranger. “How much do I owe you?”

West kissed Augusta, and stroked her shoulders through the terrycloth robe. “My fees are always negotiable.”

On the eve of Augusta’s departure from Miami Beach, Elias West tossed her handbag over the fence of a hotel construction site a few miles from the hotel. Handling the bag, West wore gloves. All that remained in the bag were used tissues and cosmetics and a wallet emptied of everything except a Salthill-on-Hudson, New York public library card issued to Augusta Cutler,  Pheasant Run. The bag, Italian-made, of beautiful hand-tooled leather, had been scratched and dirtied so that the individual who found it wouldn’t be tempted to keep it; yet, beautiful as it had once been, and obviously expensive, it would strike the finder as worth reporting to police.

Elias West was in contact with Florida police, in particular Dade County police, in his search for the missing Augusta Cutler. When he checked with them the following day, the handbag had been reported, by which time Augusta had begun her long drive north, alone. The scheme

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had worked! But Elias West felt little satisfaction, telephoning his employer to tell him news of the “lead”—the first solid lead they’d had yet.

He was missing Augusta, he had to admit. He’d never known anyone quite like her in all his years as a professional.

I   of anticipation and apprehension “Elizabeth Eastman”

drove north and west through the states of Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin . . . The drive took her a long time. She wanted, and did not want, to arrive at her destination: Red Lake, Minnesota. She wanted, and did not want, to know: the truth of Adam Berendt’s life. By the time she arrived in Minnesota, and began her drive through that long northerly state, her hairline glinted with silver like wires, and wiry hair sprouted in her underarms. She was again wearing polyster elastic-waist pants, T-shirts, and pullovers. She’d taken off her rings, and hidden them in the lining of her suitcase. The polish was chipped from her nails. Her rented car was a sparrow-gray Honda Civic.

The glamour of Miami Beach was behind her, the romance of Elias West rapidly fading. For the first week she’d missed him—how well matched they were, sexually and temperamentally!—then she began to forget. West had given her his cell-phone number urging her to call him at any time, he’d come to her, but Augusta threw away the number. Loving Elias West would be a betrayal not of Owen Cutler but of Adam Berendt.

Augusta had purchased a camera in Florida, and now took photographs of the approach to Red Lake, Minnesota, as if transcribing Adam’s interior life. He’d left this small, not very prosperous place more than thirty years before, but except for a scattering of newer houses and a few fast-food restaurants and mini-malls on the highway, Red Lake didn’t seem to have changed much in a long time. The lake itself was enormous, beautiful in the sun. Its wind-rippled surface drew Augusta’s eye, and made her shudder. Adam had died, or had begun to die, in such wind-rippled water. Almost, at times, Augusta imagined she’d been a witness.

Not in Red Lake but thirty miles away in Hannecock, the county seat, in a ground-floor township clerk’s office, Augusta would discover the document she sought: the legal notice, dated September , 6, stating that Francis Xavier Brady had officially changed his name to “Adam Berendt.”

(No middle name! Why, Augusta wondered, hadn’t Adam wanted a middle name?) Attached to the document was a badly faded copy of Brady’s
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birth certificate, which Augusta could only just decipher. She held it to the light, her fingers shaking. Francis Xavier Brady born March , , in Beauchamp, Montana. Son of Morton and Elsie Brady. Her breath caught. This was it! The clerk who’d located the document for her, a middle-aged woman whom Augusta charmingly inveigled into undertak-ing the search (“I’m checking the background of this ‘Adam Berendt’ who wants to marry my sister, my sister is newly widowed and very lonely”), asked Augusta if she was all right, and Augusta stammered yes, “I’m just—

suddenly—surprised.” For a $ fee Augusta was allowed to photocopy both documents.

Maybe I should stop now. Maybe this is enough?

Yet curiosity pressed her forward. There was the unconscious hope that, seeking Adam Berendt, venturing ever farther into the past, Augusta would somehow be united with the man, in person.
The young Adam. A boy
named Francis
.

No one in Red Lake with whom she spoke seemed ever to have heard of “Adam Berendt,” which led Augusta to conclude that he’d left the area soon after changing his name. It was as “Adam Berendt” he’d moved to Minneapolis and then to Muskegon, Michigan, and finally to Detroit where, it appeared, he’d become involved in money-making. In Red Lake, he’d been “Francis Xavier Brady,” whom a number of people recalled to Augusta. A local librarian, a woman in her sixties, remembered him as

“Frankie Brady, a friendly but lonely-seeming young man with one blind eye, he said he’d injured in a hunting accident,” who dropped by the library all the time, sometimes in his work clothes, dirty and sweaty-smelling, wanting to take out books and to talk about them; this rawboned young guy was a loner, said he’d come from Montana, worked at a lumberyard, and drove a truck, and was taking classes at the high school at night, to get his diploma—“Frankie put a lot of emphasis on education.

You could tell, the way he chose his words, he was trying to be the smartest he could be. As if he’d come from someplace where people didn’t talk, only grunted and shoved one another around.” Augusta asked what sort of books did Frankie Brady withdraw from the library, and the librarian said, warmly, he’d been a boy who read “almost everything, anything.”

For instance, he’d read his way through the shelf of
Reader’s Digest
con-densed books in a few weeks. Week after week he took out a hefty anthology titled
The World’s Greatest Philosophers,
which he joked about, saying he was “working his way through the centuries, but slow.” Frankie favored

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poetry anthologies, and books on popular science, and self-improvement books like Dale Carnegie, and picture books on art, and histories of the American West. There was a single book in the library on the Korean War, and this book Frankie withdrew often, for, he said, his dad had died in that war, and was an “unknown hero.” For a young man of nineteen or twenty he seemed younger than his age sometimes, but other times, when he was in a melancholy mood, and you couldn’t get more than a few words out of him, he seemed much older. “One of those young people with an

‘old soul.’ That was Frankie Brady when we knew him.” The librarian provided Augusta with other names to contact in Red Lake, and, before Augusta could ask, gave her directions to one of the places Frankie Brady had lived. It was a boarding house near the railroad yard: a ramshackle old shingled building, still standing, evidently still inhabited, though very derelict, with a sign on the sagging veranda—   -

  —and guinea fowl picking in the grassless front yard.

Augusta stared hungrily.
Adam lived here! Long ago
.

She would go to the front door, boldly. She would knock. She would ask to see—what? Which room?

Instead, Augusta kept a discreet distance, and took photographs.

Next day Augusta called upon the wife of the owner of the Red Lake Marina in the part-brick, part-aluminum “ranch” house at the lakeshore, but the hard-faced, dyed-blond woman (of about Augusta’s age, but looking older) regarded her suspiciously, and visibly stiffened when Augusta asked her about Frankie Brady, and told Augusta she was sorry, she couldn’t talk to her—“See, I’m too busy. I’m bus-sy, see.” The woman’s voice trembled with anger, her eyes were fierce with dislike. Augusta went away shaken.
She loved him
.
Like me
.
We could be sisters
. What had it been, thirty-two years at least, and the dyed-blond woman still felt the hurt, the loss. What this meant for Augusta, she didn’t want to think.

Next, Augusta called upon the white-haired wheelchair-bound former principal of Red Lake High, a courtly gentleman in his late seventies who brightened seeing Augusta’s face, and was happy to talk at length about Frankie Brady, the young man he’d taught in night school in—was it 68?

’6?—a bad time in the United States, with the war in Vietnam going all to hell, and local boys, Red Lake graduates, dying there, or coming back hurt. “Frankie Brady was one in a thousand. It was like he’d only just discovered reading—books—the ‘life of the mind,’ where most people don’t live, ever. For sure, folks in these parts don’t. Frankie was like a young dog
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that’s been starved, grateful for anything you give him.” Of Frankie Brady’s private life he’d never known much except “he’d had some trouble behind him, in Montana. That was why he showed up in Red Lake, out of nowhere. He felt guilty, he wasn’t fighting in Vietnam, couldn’t get in any branch of the armed services because of his eye. And then he disappointed some of us, the way he left.” “How did he leave?” Augusta asked. “Ma’am, Frankie just
left
. He was managing a lumberyard here, a pretty big responsibility for a kid in his early twenties, but there was pressure on him, maybe from a girl, or maybe he just got bored here and had to leave.

Frankie always had a sort of expansive personality, you know. Even when he didn’t say much he’d listen hard, and stare at you with that eye of his, like you felt the specialness of the moment, whatever it was. He could make you happy when he wasn’t happy himself, which was a lot of the time. So when Frankie left Red Lake, people missed him, and some were hurt. Not that he owed anybody anything, or made any promises that I know of, but a few months after he earned his diploma, which he’d worked hard for, and was proud of, he told just a few people good-bye, I wasn’t one of them, and left Red Lake and nobody ever heard of him again.

There was some talk he’d changed his name and gone to live in—maybe Michigan.” Augusta could see the puzzlement and hurt in the old man’s face and wanted to take his hands in hers and comfort him. “Do you have news of him, ma’am? He’s dead now, isn’t he?”

Quickly Augusta said no, she knew little of Francis Brady, she was making inquiries on behalf of a relative, she’d never herself met the man.

Days passed. “Elizabeth Eastman” in her dreamy fugue-state, underarms sprouting hairs in the luxury of no one knowing her in this place, this left-behind lakeside town of no distinction where memories of Adam Berendt still rankled, after decades. Augusta drifted about the town and its outskirts taking photographs, telling herself
I will make of his lost life
art, he’d be proud of me
. She rented a rowboat at the marina, and rowed along the shore of the lake until her soft hands blistered and her face smarted with sunburn though she was wearing a straw hat. Always keeping in sight of the shabby little marina, making her slow, weaving way past rows of cottages and bungalows, she was thinking
Now he will see me, he
will come to me
. Augusta knew, yet didn’t wish to know, that life isn’t a sequence of posed, “brooding” photographs; life isn’t a movie in which a scene must come to a dramatic culmination, or any culmination at all.