Middle Age (11 page)

There was a distinct comfort in this, and the satisfactions of custom.

For this man and this woman were the offspring of families of Custom.

(Meaning good breeding and good money, though not a showy excess of money, on both sides of the marriage.)

Strange!—that the burrow, the house, was spacious and much admired and very expensive on four acres of prime Rockland County real estate, and yet remained a burrow. Strange that it was so confining and airless, though the present owners as well as previous owners had expanded it, and refurbished it, and spent a good deal of money on making it a showcase.

(“It’s like a dream, living here. Sometimes I worry I’ll wake up suddenly—

and all this happiness will have
gone
.”)





J C O

The oldest part of the house, made of wood, was kept freshly painted, oyster-white shingles that glowed like radium in early dusk. And there was fieldstone, and there was faded red brick so aged it looked as if it might crumple at the touch, and there was practical white stucco like exposed bone. So many windows upstairs and down, but the windows were small and narrow, Colonial-style; the glass was so old it looked wavy. In the festive holiday season, which in Salthill-on-Hudson was taken up with Christian exuberance, each window visible from Old Mill Way was lighted with an electric candle, and strings of chastely white, glittering lights twined across the facade of the house and wrapped like cobwebs in adjacent trees. The shutters were dark green, a familiar patriot hue, and the sturdy front door was old oak, adorned with a brass American eagle knocker forged in colonial times. Through the summer, clay pots of bright red geraniums were placed on the front steps, and through the autumn, clay pots of chrysanthemums were placed on the front steps; the pots were carefully roughened with sandpaper, for a “countrified” look.

“It’s hard to believe, such happiness. Not that we haven’t worked for it, of course! Lionel is embarrassed to speak of such things, you know how a man like Lionel
is
. So we never speak of it.”

The original house had been built in 6 by a prominent Manhattan tradesman named Elias Macomb. Little was known of Macomb except that he’d been a Tory converted in  to Federalism and to a generous financial support of the Revolution against Great Britain by the expedient threat of being tarred, feathered, and publicly lynched from a “liberty pole”; in 8, the house would come into the possession of General Cleveland Wade, intimate friend and aide of President George Washington, and numerous rooms would be added, and the roof raised, and a barn and outbuildings constructed. With equal authority you could refer to the property as the “Macomb House” or the “Wade House,” as subsequent owners felt obliged to explain in that earnest, animated way of homeown-ers who take their guests’ polite questions about their property seriously, and have memorized passages of local history to be recited like sacred script. Beyond the house was the barn, of weathered wood, with a high stone foundation; at the peak of its roof, a brass rooster preened in unchanging profile. In front of the picturesque barn was a pond bordered by cattails, the rich sickly green of pea soup, and exuding a powerful odor; in April, dozens, hundreds! of vivid yellow daffodils bloomed and “danced”

in the hilly lawn and at the roadside. Beneath this picture,
Happiness
dwells here
.

Middle Age: A Romance



This was the showcase home of the Hoffmanns, Camille and Lionel.

Their children were grown and gone. Their marriage persisted like a brave boat caught in an eddy. It was a classic vehicle so pridefully crafted and maintained, it would never break into pieces. Camille, the wife of the house, was naturally the more sensitive to the burden of History, the privilege of living in such a house; she’d furnished it with antiques, whenever possible, and had long been one of the local amateur experts in Revolutionary-era New York State history. Lionel was an enormously busy man, a senior vice president of Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., his family-owned firm, and one of the most successful of American publishers of medical textbooks and manuals, headquartered in Manhattan. Still, the Hoffmanns were intensely social like most Salthill residents. Now that their children had departed, in middle age they required another family, a more expansive and in a way more reliable family, close at hand, sociable as they, intimate without being familiar; they were rich, but not wealthy; they knew enough of wealth to understand that a true fortune involves the potential for tragedy, and tragedy was not a concept with which they felt comfortable.
We love Salthill because it’s a true American
melting pot
. Few in their large circle of friends had much interest in what had been known in an earlier, more primitive era as “social climbing”; for where, after all, was there to climb
to,
when you lived in Salthill-on-Hudson? Serious golfers belonged to the Salthill Golf Club, and boaters belonged to the Hudson Valley Yacht and Sailing Club, and there was the Lost Creek Tennis Club, but most members of the resplendent Salthill Country Club were the suburban
nouveaux riches
. (True, there were a dismaying number of these in Rockland County, and each year brought more as high-rise condominiums and $-million tract homes were being constructed along the scenic river or gouged out of rolling farmland.) The Hoffmanns and their circle were sensitive about being characterized as

“suburban”; they thought of themselves as very different, another type of American entirely, Village-dwelling, or country-dwelling.

The Hoffmanns and their circle were as likely to be friendly with odd, independent, quirky types like Adam Berendt the sculptor and Marina Troy of the Salthill Bookstore as with neighbors on Old Mill Way, Old Dutch Road, Sylvan Pass, Wheatsheaf Drive, Deer Link, Derrydown Lane, Pheasant Run, Sparkhill Pike. They were as likely to be friendly with the founder of the Salthill Pro Musica, and the elderly Frenchwoman who taught ballet to children, and the minister of the Unitarian Church and his poet-wife, and with the bearded editor of the
Salthill Weekly



J C O

Gazette,
and the retired merchant marine officer who raised orchids in his tiny Village rowhouse, as they were with people who owned National Historic Register houses like the Hoffmanns’, and in whose sloping pastures Thoroughbred horses, pedigree cattle, and black-faced sheep peacefully grazed as in a dream of Old Europe. Just possibly there was a sharp class distinction between Salthill residents whose property was bordered by old stone walls and those whose property was bordered by mere fences—redwood, chain-link, picket, post and rail—but this was not a distinction that seemed to matter much, in terms of friendship.
We need our friends. Constantly. Why, we don’t know
.

In their spacious burrow furnished, for the most part, with period antiques or precise reproductions, the Hoffmanns were known for their hospitality. The quaint old barn had long ago been converted into a wholly modernized guest house, and the Hoffmanns often had guests.

Even their guests had guests. They gave numerous parties, reciprocating parties to which they’d been invited. By custom in their circle, the Hoffmanns hosted a New Year’s Eve dinner-dance party to which about forty of their closest friends were invited. Black tie for the men, long dresses for the women. The locally famous house would be lighted with candles.

The fifteen-foot Christmas tree in the two-storey front foyer would be ornately decorated. Banks of poinsettias, fires burning companionably in each of the several downstairs fireplaces. The first time Adam Berendt was a guest at this annual party he’d lingered outside on the flagstone steps in a lightly falling snow as other guests streamed past. He’d joked,

“I’m afraid to cross that threshold. It looks like perfection inside.” This was seventeen years, six months, and one week before his death. In the prime of young middle age, Adam was stocky, but not heavy; twenty pounds lighter than he would be in his fifties; with hard-muscled broad shoulders that made him look like a manual laborer, a homely-handsome face less battered and creased than it would become, and hair that was thick and spiky and only just laced with gray. For the formal occasion he wore not black tie (as the invitation had suggested) but a salmon-colored satin coat, and a black-and-white-checked silk shirt, and black dress trousers with satin trim. His bow tie was so white it appeared luminescent and just slightly oversized. Adam Berendt hadn’t been so well known in Salthill at this time, not yet a “character”; he’d surprised only a few residents by buying the old Deppe House on the river, moving there from a rented carriage house on an estate in the hills. No one who saw him at
Middle Age: A Romance



the Hoffmanns’ that night knew with certainty if the man was being ironic, or playful; if he was mocking the Hoffmanns’ New Year’s Eve party, or all New Year’s Eve parties; or if, in his bluff social innocence, rough-hewn as a frontier type, Adam imagined that this costume was appropriate attire.

Soon, perspiring in the clamorous crowd, dancing with one beautiful woman after another, Adam removed the salmon-satin coat, and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

Adam Berendt the local artist, sculptor
. That was his identity in Salthill.

He’d been Camille Hoffmann’s instructor in a night school art class; like other women in the class, Camille had fallen under Adam’s spell. (There were few men in the night classes, and of these all were quite elderly.)
What was different about Adam, oh, how to say!
Certainly he was unlike other night school instructors of art, yoga, dance, pottery, creative writing, tennis, golf, and so forth, who shamelessly flattered their rich married-women students with the fervor of a freezing man tossing sticks of wood into a fire; nor did he charm, or seduce. He was friendly—but impersonally—to all. He was “inspiring”—cautiously. He spoke of genuine artistic talent as rare, and needful of cultivation; to be a professional was a commitment, and so to be an “amateur” might be preferable. Where he couldn’t praise a woman’s effort he stood silent and musing before it; there were evenings when he said very little, but communicated much with his facial expressions, the movement of his body. At other times he joked, teased. If a woman (never Camille Hoffmann, who was shy and uncertain of herself, especially in Adam’s presence) smashed her clay figure out of disgust with it, Adam laughed and said, “My dear, it takes guts to take yourself so seriously.” He seemed sometimes to speak in riddles. He paced about the room in clear enjoyment of his physical being, as one woman observed, like a steer on his hind legs, reciting poetry in a swinging cadence, to inspire and to disturb—Lucretius’
On the Nature of Things
.

Blake’s
Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
. For the remainder of their lives these Salthill women would recall the shuddering sensation in their loins engendered by Adam Berendt’s passionate baritone—

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.



J C O

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

He hired a mini-bus to take them into Manhattan, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where, like a brooding centaur, he led them, his herd of mortal women, through the echoing halls of the Greco-Roman world; forbidding them to speak to one another, or to him, even to think—“Only just
see
.” They saw so much! They were filled to bursting, like balloons being blown up beyond their capacity.

Adam Berendt gave off an odor, some evenings, of negligently washed male flesh. His clothes were often rumpled, and not very clean. He had only one “good” eye—the left—and this eye often gazed through them, and through their efforts at art, as if they didn’t exist. Or, merely existing, in finite space and time, could not compete in Adam’s imagination with another, more lofty and imperishable world. “The world of Forms. The world of Ideas. The world of the Soul. We know it’s there, even if we can’t always experience it.” (But did they know this? The Salthill women were hopeful but confused.) If they dared to ask Adam personal questions he gently rebuffed them, and there was something thrilling in being so rebuffed, as they rarely were in Salthill among their set. Never would they learn where Adam Berendt had been born, and where he’d been raised; if he had a family; if he’d ever been married; and—what had happened to his right eye?

In their imaginations grown fevered and romantic from disuse, Adam Berendt exuded a mysterious authority. But it was an authority he did not exploit.
Or so we believed
.

“A I   Certainly not.”

For he was Lionel Hoffmann and not by nature a jealous man. Tall, loose-jointed, taciturn, “very intelligent, and very rich” (as he’d once overheard a woman describe him, to his embarrassment); with a finely chiseled face that was handsome, or rather bland, depending upon the mood and taste of the observer; and dark hair that began to turn a distinguished gray at his temples when he was in his early thirties. On the commuter train, Lionel often glanced up from his newspaper to perceive numerous other men like himself; out of shyness, or chagrin, these others quickly glanced
Middle Age: A Romance

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away as Lionel did, concentrating on the earnest, data-surfeited columns of print that constituted the
New York Times
as if he were reading a bre-viary. As older men in the Hoffmann family were young-old men, active in the family-owned business well into their nineties, so younger men like Lionel, Jr., were old-young men, and even in boyhood Lionel had been a model of maturity, a reproach to his younger and more imaginative brother.
A boy you can depend upon
.