Middle Age (78 page)

emotion, maybe. The passing of, not youth, for her youth had long since passed, but the passing of the attitude, the expectation, of youth. “Yes.

Here I am.”

Owen was grateful for Augusta’s return as a man dying of thirst would be grateful for a mere wadded cloth soaked in water, he demanded no explanation from her. “All that matters, darling, is . . . this.”

To Augusta’s adult children, to her numerous relatives and friends, she would provide not a hint of where she’d gone, or why. Had she been



J C O

traveling with a lover? Had she hidden away, with relatives, or friends, who’d kept her secret?
Where
had she been? And why such a radical change in her appearance, and even in her voice? (Augusta noticed no change in her voice. Was it flatter now, less nuanced? Did she speak more abruptly? And with fewer smiles?) Seeing her look of bemused defiance, no one wished to confront her. When her eldest son Mark stared at her disapproving, and began to say reproachfully, “Mot
her
. We were desperate about you. For God’s sake how could you do such a—” Augusta raised a warning forefinger, like one raising the barrel of a gun, and the indignant young man ceased speaking.

(To others in the family Mark complained: “Mother is totally changed.

Not that she’s selfish and stubborn, she’d always been selfish and stubborn.

But now she’s a woman I don’t know. No makeup, and that ugly wild hair, and her legs are
muscled
. Jesus! She looks like she’s been living with Indians on a reservation out west.”)

Eventually, because she was proud of it, Augusta would show Owen and a few Salthill friends her porfolio of photographs.
Red Lake,
Minnesota & Beauchamp, Montana
was the mysterious title. They would remark upon the singular, strong images, as many as fifty or sixty prints, all black-and-white, without knowing what to make of them. (Why Minnesota and Montana? Why had Augusta felt the need to go so
far?
) But Augusta, though clearly fascinated by her own photographs, would volunteer no information about them other than identifying their locale.

“This? A prison?” Beatrice Archer asked, mystified. “So ugly! And this grave marker, ‘Elsie Brady. Holly Brady.’ Where was this taken?”

“Beauchamp, Montana.”

“But why? I mean—why did you take so many pictures of this one grave, Augusta, and not any others?”

Augusta said, matter-of-factly, “Because I wanted to.” She closed the portfolio, and the discussion.

A   no one what she’d learned of Francis Xavier Brady. She would keep Adam Berendt’s secret as if it were her own.

M     yet they were shy and self-conscious as newlyweds, alone together.

Middle Age: A Romance



And how like a bridegroom Owen Cutler came, bearing a large ripe honeydew melon from his garden, for Augusta.

The honeydew smelled of autumnal sunshine, and rich warm earth, and a sweetly pungent rind-odor. With a long-handled knife Owen cut thin crescent-slices out of the melon, to be eaten by hand. “Owen, how beautiful your melon is. And how delicious.” Augusta bit into the fleshy pale-green fruit that was just slightly overripe, and made her mouth water alarmingly though honeydews were not her favorite melons. Juice ran down her fingers, and down her bare forearm.

Owen said, pleased, “It is delicious, isn’t it?”

In a patch of fading, though still warm autumn sunshine they were sitting together on the flagstone terrace, at a white wrought-iron table they’d had a very long time. Augusta was surprised at her appetite, and quickly devoured several melon slices. Owen watched her with an adoring look that made her want to laugh at him, and hide her face. “This is like my dream, Augusta. That I would plant my garden, and harvest it, and you would return. ‘A year and a day’—somehow, I knew this. Though I didn’t dare hope it would actually happen.”

Augusta smiled hesitantly. “You didn’t give up on me, Owen.” It was a question in the form of a statement, she would not have wished to ask directly.

“Never!”

Then, amending: “Well, yes. In weak moments. I had faith that you would return, but I had to acknowledge that you might not. That something might have happened to you.”

Augusta said slowly, “Much has happened to me, Owen. But I’m back.”

Owen cut another melon slice, and held it for Augusta to eat; Augusta cupped his hand in hers, and ate. Their mood was suddenly playful, flirtatious. “Owen, you amaze me. I mean that sincerely.”

“You amaze me, Augusta. Those photographs! You’ve become a woman with secrets.”

Augusta had always been a woman with secrets. But by her silence she acknowledged, what Owen said was so.

“And will you never tell me . . . your secrets?”

Owen spoke lightly, yet wistfully. His stony-smooth face was softened about the jaws, he’d freshly shaved. His eyes seemed to Augusta strangely raw, lashless. You looked into them, and not at them. (And her own eyes?



J C O

Without makeup? Naked and raw, too, she supposed.) With the edge of the knife Owen scooped sticky, fibrous seeds out of the honeydew’s interior. His hand holding the knife trembled just slightly.

Augusta smiled. “Never, Owen.”

“You were with a . . . man? Were you?”

Augusta laughed, heat rising into her face. She was eating a thin slice of melon, juicy melon, biting into it with her strong teeth as, ardently, Owen watched. His breath was quickened, his fingers nervously rubbed against one another.

He said, “But I hope, at least, you did love him. That it was . . .”

Owen’s smile was brave, wavering. “ . . . a profound experience.”

Augusta stroked her husband’s hand, running her fingertips over his bony knuckles. How surprised she’d been to discover that, yes, the palms of his hands were callused. It was nearly dusk. A warm, secretive sort of darkness rose from the gardens, their vivid colors and particularities now obscured by shadow. In a while, the Cutlers would go inside their house; they would light lamps, and prepare a meal in the kitchen; later, they would retire upstairs to their bedroom. How long it had been since they’d shared the same bed, let alone lay in each other’s arms! Their kisses would be shy, and hopeful. Their lovemaking would be tender and forgiving.

Augusta’s eyes filled lavishly with tears, but these were not tears of pain.

“But I came back to you, Owen. And I will never leave again.”

Enchanted Places

Enchanted places! We all have them, or maybe they have us, in their mesmerizing grip. As deeply imprinted upon our memories as our own identities. And some of these enchanted places predate our identities.

Our earliest memories are likely to be of our earliest space: the first room of childhood. How vast it must have seemed, when we were infants, gazing up at a ceiling as immeasurably distant as the sky; being lifted by god-like creatures, possessed of powers beyond our comprehension. We carry the imprint of this memory through our lifetimes, and in times of stress, it’s said, we are likely to dream of it recurringly. The adult self and the child-self eerily converge, as if time had no palpable existence but was a construct of the imagination. The poetry of architecture is the giving of myriad forms to the elemental fact of space, which precedes our comprehension of it and of our place within it.
Homo sapiens
isn’t the only species to create complex habitations, of course, but we are the only species capable of an infinite variety of habitations. The forms to which we bend private space reflect our species’ ingenuity, as well as our individualism.

My most emotional recurring dream is of my first childhood room, under the eave of my family’s farmhouse in Millersport, New York, in the early 1940’s. This room, which I can “see” as vividly as I see the airy, glass-walled room in which I’m writing this essay so many decades later, was a small rectangular room with a high window; a window my father Frederic Oates had built, where there’d been a solid wall. My bed took up nearly half the room. On the floor was dark blue linoleum tile in some pattern that suggested the swirl of water, and of night. The walls of the room were painted a pale blue. In the right-hand corner of the room, near the bed, were six glass shelves cleverly fitted into the walls, to hold tiny, fragile glass animals: my “glass menagerie.” (It must have been my grandmother, my father’s mother, who started me collecting glass creatures as a little girl. My favorites were cats, horses and elephants. These intricate objects, and not dolls, were the early figures that populated my imagination; I never learned to play with dolls, and seem never to have developed a “maternal” nature. A maple-wood chest-of-drawers, a child-sized rolltop desk and a small rocking chair were my furniture. Upstate New York, north of Buffalo and south of Lake Ontario, is a region of violent summer thunderstorms, and my memories of this “safe” space are also bound up, paradoxically, with lightning flashes and deafening thunder waking me in the night, and with gale-force winds rattling my windowpanes. Our power was often out during such storms, and my parents lit kerosene lamps: the smell of kerosene, and of the burning wick, returns to me in dreams, signaling the return of the past.

Since beginning this essay I’ve asked friends about their “enchanted places,” and nearly everyone speaks of recurring dreams of the first bed, first room, the first precious possessions. Before we have any coherent idea of who we might be, we establish a sense of coherent space; the perimeters of our being are identical with the space we inhabit. This primitive, visceral knowledge predates language and is always emotionally gripping in a way no words can evoke.

In the family living room, the predominant piece of furniture was a stately old upright piano. Here was a true enchantment, like an altar! I was drawn to worship at the piano as a very small child. My father had bought this battered but still handsome Steinway second-hand from one of his music teachers in Lockport. As a boy he’d played violin from the age of ten to sixteen, and as an adult he played piano often, at least once a day. He had a natural, inventive, talent, a facility for sight-reading and rapid memorization; he could as easily improvise as play familiar pieces, an ability unfathomable to me. My father would impart to me an intense love of music, and an emotional dependency upon music. Every day of my life, hour upon hour, whether I’m alone or with others, my head is filled with music æ classical, popular, folk æ a bizarre Muzak that never ceases even when I sleep. (Not that I hear this phantom music, exactly; I seem to think it. Often, my fingers are playing it on an imaginary key-board. Frequently I’ve been tempted, speaking before an audience, to suddenly ask: Does anyone share this peculiar habit with me?) I never had Frederic Oates’s natural talent for music but I began taking piano lessons at the age of ten, and I too would quit at sixteen, having reached the inevitable glass ceiling: months of arduous practice yielded the ability to play, with schoolgirl emotion and imprecision, certain works of Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven (astonishing to me now, I’d actually memorized both the Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, erroneously known as the
Moonlight
, and the Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, the
Pathetique
), but the effort was Sisyphean.

Yet the piano as a numinous object, an image of beauty, mystery and desire is strongly imprinted upon my consciousness: the rich, evocative smell of a piano, the contemplation of its design, the arrangement of white and black keys, the touch of those keys, the gentle depression of a chord, the furtive strum of its interior strings… (I love the curiously ghostly piano music of Henry Cowell, explorer of piano interiors in such works as “The Banshee” [1925] and “Sinister Resonance” [1930].) In later years my father would acquire a second-hand grand piano, and even a small organ sold off from a local church; as soon as I lived in a house of my own as a young married woman, I bought an upright piano. In time, when we moved to our glass house in Princeton, I would acquire a gleaming white Kawai grand piano, which seems to me the most beautiful object in our household. The piano as an altar; the piano at which often I gaze in wordless reverie, from a distance; the piano that’s both a work of art and the most practical of instruments, at which you can sit and play, or try to play, some of the most profound works of the human imagination.

It’s the untalented among us who can truly appreciate genius.

My grandparents’ wood-frame farmhouse in Millersport had been built in 1888, with a solid stone foundation, a low-ceilinged, dank dirt cellar, a cavernous cistern of the sort to provoke childish nightmares, and, of course, minimal insulation. It was a typical upstate New York farmhouse of its era. Over the decades my father virtually rebuilt it; like many men of his generation, forced out of school and into the labor market young the Great Depression, Frederic Oates had to be carpenter, roofer, bricklay-er, painter, plumber. (He would supplement his income as a tool-and-die designer by professional sign painting. By the time I was in high school, I could recognize Fred Oates’s distinctive signs scattered throughout Niagara County.) In time the white, wood-shingled farmhouse was covered in a gritty-looking gray asphalt siding; the decaying barn was converted into a garage. My grandparents died, and my father, earning his income elsewhere, made no effort to continue the farmwork. My childhood memories, however, are steeped in this farm, and in surrounding fields and woods, a bastion of green in which I could loose myself for hours. As anyone who has grown up in the country knows, it’s a phenomenon of a vast liquidy silence permeated by myriad sounds (birds, insects, wind) and characterized my myriad particularities. Though we speak of a “field,” a “woods,” in fact each field and each woods is distinct.

Exploring a pebble-strewn creek, crossing the rusted girders of what had been a bridge, entering a decayed, abandoned house with a quickened heartbeat: these are rural adventures of childhood. Urban childhoods have their own romance, but it’s the romance of
other people
; the romance of a country childhood is
otherness
, and an acquired predilection for aloneness.