Middle Age (8 page)

Marina said, uneasily, “He didn’t designate any heirs?—relatives?” “He did not.” “But we have a moral obligation to locate them, don’t we? I mean,

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Adam’s relatives? To notify them of the—funeral.” “We can try to locate them. We’ll drive over to his house this morning, and see what we can find, if you’re comfortable with going through his papers so soon after, well, what happened yesterday, but Adam himself never supplied me with the names of any relatives, and you can be assured that I asked him, I asked him more than once, so I doubt very much that we’ll find what we’re looking for.” Marina objected, not liking Roger’s preemptory, lawyerly tone, “But we have to make the attempt. It’s our moral obligation. Even if Adam wanted to cut himself off from his past, his relatives have a right to be informed of his death, don’t they? He was only in his early fifties, at least one of his parents might be still living. From remarks Adam would sometimes make, without knowing what he said, when we were hiking especially, I have the idea he spent his childhood in a western state like Montana or Wyoming.” Marina considered, but decided against, telling Roger about
the gift;
she felt uneasy, guilty over it, and the secrecy of the transaction; the moral thing might be to return the property to Adam’s estate, somehow—but was it possible to give something to a dead man?

Roger was saying, “This is more important, Marina. Adam’s will.”

Roger had opened the document to its final pages where Adam’s characteristic scrawl
Adam Berendt
had been signed above
testator
. But other spaces, above
witness
and
notary public,
were blank. Marina said, “Adam has signed the will, but no one else? Why?” Roger said, “There were circumstances.” Marina said, “Why didn’t you get witnesses to his signature, at the time?” “Because, as I said, Marina, there were circumstances.” Marina blinked, not understanding. The night before had been such a misery, she’d returned home from her futile search for Apollo to fall onto her bed exhausted, too demoralized to remove most of her clothing and her brain racing on the edge of madness; no wonder now she was having difficulty understanding simple things. There were Roger’s evasive eyes, and Roger’s small bruised-looking mouth, a curious mouth for a predator, what was he saying? Something about the will being “not quite complete”—“not quite fully executed.”

“Marina? Look here.”

Roger was sounding annoyed. He explained to Marina that though this was the will Adam had wanted, in every detail, yet Adam had postponed having Roger draw it up for years; after Roger prepared it in April, Adam had postponed coming in to sign for weeks, and then months, until it was too late. “But isn’t this Adam’s signature?” Marina asked naively. A moment later realizing
He has forged this signature. That’s it!
Roger was say-Middle Age: A Romance

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ing, with the air of a man arguing a case, “It was the damndest thing.

Adam would make an appointment, then fail to come in. We’d have used, of course, witnesses from this office. For an intelligent man he could behave very stupidly. Stubbornly. Well, you know Adam.”

M  the final pages of the will, seeing how the scrawl Adam Berendt on page twenty-one closely resembled, but wasn’t identical with, the scrawl Adam Berendt on page twenty-two. The signature was skillfully executed but hadn’t been traced. For some time she contemplated the signatures, and the blanks above witness, not knowing, yet certainly knowing, what was expected of her. Why Roger Cavanagh had so urgently called her in. Roger said, “Legally speaking, Adam has died intestate. This will isn’t binding. It would be sent to probate court to languish for years.

Much of the estate would go to death taxes, and since Adam’s next of kin may never be located, the bulk of it would go to the State of New York.

Adam’s special wishes would be completely thwarted, do you see? Marina?

For Adam’s sake, not for our own, we have to help him.”

“Isn’t this—illegal? Criminal?”

The question hovered in the air unanswered. Roger sighed, and smiled his quick mirthless smile.

“But you’ve done it, the signature, for him. For Adam.”

“Someone has done it.”

“Am I to be a witness, then? And who will be the notary public?”

Roger said, “I’m a notary public.”

“And the date today is—?”

“June twenty-second, a Wednesday. The date of Adam’s most recent appointment, which is in the firm’s computer.”

“Roger, this is—a criminal act?”

“We have no choice, Marina. You know that Adam would be desperate for us to do it.”

“What would happen if you, a lawyer, were—”

Roger said sharply, “Marina? Will you sign?”

“Yes.”

Marina took up the pen Roger was offering her, and signed.

How Death enters your life. And all is altered hereafter
. In separate cars they drove to Adam Berendt’s house on the river, a mile and a half from Shaker

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J C O

Square. Marina’s new mood was elation, hope; floating upon the older mood of despair and desolation. For now she was a criminal, for her dead lover’s sake.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft shimmering gossamer trailing behind us.

When Marina turned up the long rutted gravel driveway between stands of slatternly trees, she felt her old quickening of excitement, coming to Adam’s house, though telling herself
No! not now
. Yet she watched anxiously for the silver-haired dog to come bounding out to greet her, as Adam’s dog would have done under normal circumstances if Adam were home, but no dog appeared, and she swallowed hard, and when she came into view of the house above the river, screened by evergreens Adam hadn’t gotten around to trimming after last January’s ice storm, the house that had always seemed so romantic to her, the weathered old burgundy-gray stone, the steep slate roofs and tall chimneys, looked to her now melancholy and abandoned. Beside the house was a field of overgrown grasses and wildflowers, predominantly chicory, not a tended lawn; Adam had laughed at, scorned, such suburban lawns; he never troubled to clear away fallen leaves, year after year. His garden grew among weeds, a lush hive of green. Moss grew on the roof of the old garage, formerly a carriage house. Parked at the rear of the house was Roger Cavanagh’s new-model American car, the wrong car. Marina would have to arrange to bring Adam’s car back from that place of death. She saw for the second time that morning Roger Cavanagh awaiting her in an opened doorway, except he was now looking at her in a way that quickened her pulse, and her unease.

My co-conspirator. For Adam’s sake
.

Her new mood! Marina smiled to assure Roger that she wasn’t upset, she was fine. That grimace of the mouth in smiling so closely akin to the grimace of the mouth in anguish. In sexual yearning.

When Marina stumbled on the front steps, Roger took her arm, and the sensation of his touch, his quick firm grip, stabbed through her.

“This is a strange thing we’re doing. But it has to be done.”

In silence they entered the stone house which was cool on even a warm midsummer morning. Marina was beginning to tremble. Wanting desperately to call out
Adam? Adam!
Still she was waiting for the noisy, excitable Apollo to appear, barking at them, and thumping his tail. But there was only silence. They stood in the vestibule in splotched sunshine and
Middle Age: A Romance

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shadow. A fiercer sunshine spilled into the large, cluttered living room, where you’d expect Adam Berendt to be greeting his visitors, since he hadn’t been at the front door to greet them; but the sunshine was blank and soulless. Marina moved slowly, staring at familiar sights with altered eyes. Adam’s battered leather sofa with mismatched cushions; the Shaker-style chairs he’d built carefully by hand, which matched the six chairs he’d built for Marina’s dining room; tables piled with books, magazines, newspapers, CDs; on the lofty fireplace mantel, the pair of antique pewter candlestick holders Marina had given Adam for one of his mysterious birthdays. (Mysterious because Adam never provided an exact date, only an approximate; and never specified his age.) Against the farther wall was a six-foot metallic and ceramic grandfather clock Adam had fashioned out of various idiosyncratic materials. Everyone who visited Adam admired this object, which had a working pendulum but no chimes, and no hands on the shiny ceramic clock face; Adam shrugged off the piece as “too lik-able, in the Rauschenberg mode”; he didn’t want to sell it. Marina saw with childlike relief that the pendulum was still moving. Its tinny heartbeat filled the room.

Marina said uneasily, “It’s wrong of us to be here. Adam wasn’t expecting visitors.”

Roger said, “There’s no Adam now. Adam is beyond all expectations.”

They moved through the house. Like phantoms, Marina thought.

As if they, not Adam Berendt, were dead.

They passed by the kitchen without entering, only glancing inside.

Tears started in Marina’s eyes: Adam’s kitchen! Except for his studio, this was his favorite room. When he invited guests for dinner, which he did rarely, everyone would gather in the kitchen and help Adam prepare the food; if Marina visited Adam, by day, it was usually the kitchen in which they sat. His windows looking out upon the river. A vista that shifted constantly. He’d spoken to Marina of a strange absence of all desire, a profound peacefulness, in winter especially, as he leaned on his elbows on the counter, gazing out. “Not that I’m a happy man, nor even an unhappy man,’’ he’d told her. “But happiness, unhappiness, are too trivial to matter.

In such a place you become your own imagining. You feel nothing, or everything. You melt out into the sky.”

Marina said, trying for a brisk practical tone, “The refrigerator. I’ll come empty it, and the cupboards, some other time. Not now.”

Roger was walking swiftly ahead. But Marina, seeing a stack of books

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on the floor, beside a closet, its door partly ajar, paused to inspect them, and this was the first of her shocks: these books in their bright, glossy covers, newly purchased, were from the Salthill Bookstore. Marina swung open the closet door to see more books, a hundred books perhaps, stacked sideways on the shelves. Poetry, fiction, art, history. She stared at first without comprehension. Then the realization came to her, like a blow to the chest: Adam had purchased these books himself.

Since Adam’s investment in the bookstore and his frequent visits, especially when he took over in Marina’s absence, she’d noticed an increase in sales and profits. Some months, the increase was modest; at other times it was—well, heartening, exciting. “Adam, there’s good news: we’re
making
money
.” Marina had attributed this business upsurge to her new partner’s simple presence in the store: Adam was a popular Salthill figure whom other men liked to talk with and to whom women were attracted. Individuals who’d never entered the Salthill Bookstore dropped by when Adam was around. It was his idea to buy some rattan chairs, get a coffee machine, encourage customers to sit down in frank imitation of the big chain bookstores; he’d envisioned expanding into the adjacent store, where a picture framing business was on the wane; unlike Marina, he never worried about the future.
Because he was subsidizing the business
.
Our best customer
.

Marina recalled with a pang of embarrassment packing a box of unsold books back in January, mostly poetry books from distinguished small presses, and asking her assistant to return them to the distributor, and returning next day to the store to discover that the box was gone. Marina’s assistant reported that Adam had “sold” the entire box—to a “collector from New Jersey.” Janice hadn’t been in the store at the time of the purchase, and hadn’t seen this serendipitous customer, who was described as a retired English professor from a women’s Catholic college with a special interest in contemporary American poetry, but the sale was in the computer, an astounding $68.. How naive Marina had been, how desperately she must have wanted to believe! Seeing some of the titles now on Adam’s closet shelves, stuck away unread, Marina recalled how adroitly Adam had deceived her. Though she’d been mildly suspicious, in a teasing sort of way, about Adam’s special customers (“Women, obviously”) who only appeared when Marina was nowhere near.

When will I meet this customer, Adam?

Marina dear, she’s so much older than you are, have pity on her. We all must
have our romantic fantasies
.

Middle Age: A Romance

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“Marina, is something wrong?”

Roger, who’d gone on ahead, had returned to see why she wasn’t following him. Marina lifted angry tear-brimming eyes to his face. “Adam was humoring me. Buying books from the store, all
these
.” Roger frowned and seemed embarrassed. In a clumsy gesture of sympathy he picked up one of the poetry books and leafed through it as if seeking evidence to refute Marina’s suspicions. She said, “I wanted so badly to believe that . . .

business was improving.”
And a good man, a gallant man, had entered her
life, to change it forever
. “I suppose—everyone in Salthill knew?” Roger said, in his lawyerly, argumentative voice, “Knew what, exactly? There’s no proof that these books are from your store.” Marina wasn’t going to argue.

This man was humoring her, too. She shut the closet door hard and turned away.

In Adam’s office at the rear of the house, with its dusty latticed windows and stained flagstone floor that opened into Adam’s studio, Marina felt his presence keenly. And the tension between Roger Cavanagh and herself, tense as the electrical charge before a storm. She couldn’t bear it that this man might pity her as Adam Berendt had done.

“Where did Adam get his money, Roger, do you know?” Marina meant to sound indifferent, detached; as if money were the crucial issue, and not a man’s deception. As if Adam Berendt’s worldly identity had nothing to do with
her
. But the question sounded anxious, pleading.