Middle Age (33 page)

Augusta knew, she shouldn’t pursue the subject. But she couldn’t resist.

Were others injured in the fire, Adam?
It was a sudden terrible hunger in her, almost a mother’s hunger, to know! But Adam drew away, and seemed not to hear, swimming to the far end of the pool.
Swimming away from me
.

Swimming to his death
.

The quaking bright water through which Adam Berendt swam with short choppy splashing strokes, wet head lifted and alert like an otter’s, seemed to float in a distant reflected sky. Only a single time, mildly medicated, had Augusta returned to Adam’s property on the River Road. To contemplate in horror-awe the soil in which her lover’s ashes had been raked. It was late July, the garden was overgrown with weeds, tall thistles and blossoming vines, life was teeming here, sun-baked and except for the sounds of insects and birds utterly silent. Adam’s tomatoes were stunted, black-blistered from heat and no rain; the pole beans were withered, stricken by some sort of disease. Everywhere were aphids, Japanese beetles. Sunflowers drooped along the back fence, not nearly so tall as they’d grown under Adam’s care in the past.
Life devours life,
Adam had said,
but

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J C O

man breaks the cycle, man has memory
. But was that so? How trustworthy was memory? How ephemeral, how doomed to oblivion? Augusta, wandering in the garden, a full-bodied woman one might have mistaken for a much younger woman, a still-questing, still-yearning woman, slapped at flies and gnats with increasing exasperation, and began suddenly to cry.

Then she laughed. Oh, it was ridiculous! Why was she here! Staring at the crumbly earth beneath her expensive sandals, looking for—what? Grains of powder, Adam Berendt’s lost being? Adam himself would be laughing at her.
Gussie! Christ’s sake, go home
. He was a God-damned prude, Adam Berendt; always advising Salthill women to go home to their husbands, families; easy for him, the bastard, who had no wife, no family. She might have defied Adam, for Augusta, years before, had had lovers; not many, but a few; carefully chosen lovers who were not Salthill residents, but were men of her social class; men who knew, if only distantly, her husband; men who respected her husband, and by extension beautiful Augusta Cutler; yes, the penises of numerous men had been taken into her soft sensuous desirable body, yes and given her pleasure, though an intermittent and er-ratic pleasure, and Owen had never known. (
Had
Owen guessed?

Suspected? Sometimes seeing his gaze drift onto her in social gatherings, that strange impersonal look of possession, and pride in possession, she’d felt a thrill of fear, and she’d wondered.)

Not long after the visit to the garden, there came in the mail, addressed to .  , a plain manila envelope marked -

, no return address, postmarked Salthill, and inside the envelope were the six or seven nude photos Augusta had taken of herself with a timed, tripod camera, lying nude on a sofa in the pose of Manet’s Olympia, opulent-bodied Augusta wearing only pearls, a flower in her hair, with her pug-nosed snowy-white Persian cat at her bare feet—the photos she’d given to Adam, as a joke. (Well, not entirely as a joke. The poses were glamorous, sleazy, lurid, lascivious, and inviting.) How they’d roared with laughter. Adam had loved the photos of his pal Gussie, he’d put them away for safekeeping. But he’d died. You never quite think: my lover might die. And then? Another woman was executor of his personal estate. The photos had been found. No note accompanied them but Augusta surmised they’d been sent by Marina Troy. Such a tactful gesture was typical of the quiet red-haired youngish woman. Augusta was deeply grateful to Marina, for the photos might have been used to blackmail Augusta; she’d left herself open for such a predicament, such a scandal; at the
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same time, Augusta was deeply embarrassed, even mortified. God damn: what business was it of Marina Troy’s, that Augusta Cutler had been in love with Adam Berendt? (Even more she dreaded the younger woman knowing that Adam hadn’t quite returned Augusta’s love.
That
was the true insult.) Yet Augusta, a generous woman, a good-sport sort of woman, visited the Salthill Bookstore on Pedlar’s Lane, and in a typical flurry of buying purchased more than three hundred dollars’ worth of books in a short period of time. Augusta was an avid reader of romances so long as these were disguised as “serious”—“literary”—novels; otherwise, prose failed to grip her imagination, she fell into a romantic-erotic reverie that no fiction could penetrate. But, that day in Marina’s bookstore, Augusta was disapppointed that Marina hid in her back office while a young college-girl assistant waited on her.
Please tell Marina hello from her friend
Gussie
.
I’ll be calling her soon for a dinner party
. Yet somehow, Augusta never called Marina; she’d planned to return to the quaint little store on Pedlar’s Lane soon again, and buy more books, yet somehow she had not; the summer slipped away; she began to avoid Marina Troy, whenever they chanced to meet; the very sight of the lanky melancholy red-haired youngish woman became an annoyance to her; and in the fall she heard from mutual friends that Marina had abruptly left Salthill, leasing her house, hiring a manager to supervise the store; rumor was, Marina had gone to live in the Catskills, unless it was the Adirondacks, or the Poconos, on property Adam Berendt had left her in his will. This news was devastating to Augusta, for Adam had left her nothing. She instructed herself
Don’t be jealous, you don’t know the circumstances
.
Adam felt sorry for
her
.
You are the one he loved
.

Now she was packing her things, she would fly away, her heart lifted in exaltation. Since childhood she’d had such magical dreams! Even the eye of God looked upon her in loving approval.
Oh, Adam
.
My love
.
I will come
to you
.
I swear
.



The Search
. There came the husband seeking the wife, repentant, or seeming so, for perhaps in his heart he was still very angry with the hysterical woman, and he looked for her in the bedroom, but she wasn’t there; he looked for her in adjacent rooms, including her steamy-fragrant bathroom, but she wasn’t there; he looked for her in the guest wing of the

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J C O

house, but she wasn’t there; he looked for her downstairs in the formal living room, and in the informal family room, in the dining room and in the kitchen and in the solarium, but she was in none of these places; he looked for her in his own study, and he looked for her in the basement, and he looked for her on the rear stairs, and in closets, but she wasn’t there. “Augusta?” he cried, “Augusta darling?” the alarmed husband cried, but there was no answer, there would be no answer, his wife of almost thirty-two years had vanished, no sound in the house except the familiar ghost-echoes, mere vibrations of sound that, even as you strain to listen, fade.

 

. . . And I Don’t Escape You

R

T F  D



D
amascus County
,
Pennsylvania
.
Where I have come as a pilgrim to
discover
—
whatever awaits me, to be discovered
.

And here was the first surprise of her new life: in a rear room of the house Adam Berendt had deeded to her in the Pocono Mountains, she discovered a number of unfinished sculpted pieces, obviously Adam’s work. Pushing open a door to what she assumed would be another barely furnished bedroom and seeing, in this shadowy cave with tattered sheets of newspaper strewn on bare floorboards, in air that looked congealed with time, objects of about the size of stunted human beings, crude constructions of scrap metal and Plexiglas, plastic and aluminum foil, soft-rotted wood, dried bullrushes, pieces of clay and glittering glass. Marina’s first reaction was fright—were these things
alive?
But her second reaction was gratitude.

“Adam! You’ve left these for me.”

A   first hour of her new life. Already, taking possession of the stone house on this fine blazing autumn day. Already in the first flush of ownership, walking through rooms she scarcely saw. Already she was talking to herself. As she would never have done in Salthill. Even alone in her house at the top of North Pearl Street. For here in the foothills of the Poconos, in northeastern Pennsylvania, on forty acres of



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uncultivated fields and pine woods, in the handsome old stone house Adam Berendt had deeded to her, there was no one to hear. Silence like a glass to be shattered.

“All this? Mine? It’s beautiful.”

It was beautiful. Views of hills, pines, mountains from nearly every window. In a haze of first possession walking through the rooms of the old stone house. A roaring-in-the-ears like a distant waterfall. For this was so new, so utterly strange to her.
My house
. The gift her lover had bequeathed her, for no other reason than that: he’d loved her.

He’d loved the Marina Troy who was yet to be. The artist Marina Troy who’d abandoned her art a decade ago, out of cowardice. Out of terror.

Out of a very practical fear of failure. That Marina Troy, Adam Berendt had loved.

“Not the ‘anesthetized’ Marina. Of course!”

Now she had the documents of ownership to this property at 8

Mink Pond Road, Damascus County, Pennsylvania. She had the keys. She had the sketchy map Adam had left with her, and a list of names, telephone numbers. But these were years old, and probably outdated; Marina would make her own queries in town.

The stone house, built in  by well-to-do Philadelphians, was at least a mile from its nearest neighbor on the unpaved, curving mountain road that dead-ended a mile beyond Marina’s mailbox. From the road you could see few dwellings, all were hidden behind thick stands of birches, pines, scrub oaks, and enormous clay-colored boulders. The nearest town—if you could call Damascus Crossing, population four hundred, a town—was seven miles to the west. Thirty miles to the nearest city, gaunt and bravely ugly East Stroudsburg, on the Delaware River. Marina was alone in this remote beautiful place breathing in air that tasted chill and stony as the air of a well sunk deep in the earth and she wanted to believe she’d made the right decision, not out of grief and despair needing to escape Adam’s death, the nightly morbidity of obsession thoughts, mourning like chewing the inside of her lips or, as in the later stages of starvation when the body begins to feed upon the protein of the very brain, self-devouring, lethal.
Marina
.
Go away
.
Save your life
.
One of us, drowned, is
quite enough
.

To save her life, then. That was why she was here.

“Oh, God, Adam! Don’t let me fail.”

With a clearer eye she began to see: the house was old, much work
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would have to be done to make a few rooms habitable through the winter.

Badly the house needed airing, and cleaning. Everywhere there were cobwebs, the floors were covered in stained sheets of newspaper, venetian blinds were broken and emitted a jocose sort of autumn sunshine. How entirely different from Marina’s tidy constricted Salthill house. Here, dust motes writhed in the air. Grimy sheets had been draped over the few pieces of furniture. Two floors to the house, a narrow stairway connecting.

Cramped bathrooms, plumbing that worked, but only barely. The kitchen was an ample room, modernized in an outmoded seventies style, pieces of loose linoleum on the floor, covered in grime. Marina tried to imagine Adam in this room, sitting at the plain wooden table that faced a window, stocky shoulders hunched forward as he peered out the window at a distant mountain but the vision eluded her, just yet. The truth was, Adam hadn’t lived here often. He hadn’t visited his “stone house in the mountains” for years. A local caretaker was hired to tend to it, and a local real estate agent rented it out to summer tenants.

Was there nothing of Adam here, would she discover nothing of him, how could she bear such solitude.

Marina was too restless to sit down. Nerved-up from her drive across northern New Jersey on I-8. This plunge-into-the-unknown. Walking another time through the house, counting rooms upstairs and down, but each time she counted a different number, like a fairy-tale heroine under a spell, for were there three bedrooms upstairs? or four? and downstairs, what?—the large open living-dining room, an aged fieldstone fireplace measuring perhaps twelve feet across to accommodate cross-sawed tree trunks, fireplace and stacked kindling festooned in cobweb like gossamer confetti. In the next room, overlooking a steep hill strewn with boulders, there were tottering bookshelves crammed with paperback romances, mysteries, crossword puzzles, and knitting patterns; the walls covered in a blinding poppy-red print Marina couldn’t imagine Adam tolerat-ing, let alone having chosen. For here was a stranger’s house, an unexpected house. And everywhere underfoot, tiny skeletons of birds and rodents; everywhere the desiccated husks of insects; a large number of silver-gray moths with wings beautifully marked in black, as with hieroglyphics.

What strange moths! Large as hummingbirds. Marina picked one up to examine closely. Its wings were covered in a fine luminous powder, its tiny black eyes shone like mica.

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“Adam, see here? A true work of art!”

Marina came to herself, and with a shiver let the thing fall.

Wiping her powder-smeared fingers unconsciously on her clothing Marina continued through her new house.
Her
house!
Her
possession, and her responsibility. She did not want to think that beneath her excitement was an undercurrent of something very like dread, panic. For this was an adventure out of her lost girlhood—wasn’t it? Each room was a surprise, floorboards creaked beneath her feet as if in warning. Strange: the view from one window seemed subtly different from the same view from another. Where was Mount Rue? She’d found it before: at just under three thousand feet, the highest peak in the Poconos. There was High Knob, a smaller peak. Or was she confusing them? Her view was obscured by vines growing over windows, grimy panes. She heard something overhead, a scuttling sound along the roof: squirrels? hawks?