Middle Age (56 page)

“Harry was our unconscious. Mine, and Salthill’s. I don’t love him but I do miss him. Almost as much as I miss you, Adam.”

Now you’ve said a daring, profound thing
.
What an insight, for a Salthill
resident!

“But, Adam, is it true?”

Silence.

“Adam, please tell me.
Is
it true?”

Silence. God damn Adam where is he, playing his
if you can catch me
game as always.

“Adam? Hey, c’mon.” Abigail is on her feet managing to keep her

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balance. Once, she’d been a lithe, floating girl-dancer, now there are weights attached to her ankles. She’s staggering—swaying—careening through empty rooms. A vertigo-sequence, as in an infinitely reflecting mirror, of empty empty empty beautifully furnished rooms.

A    from a man who mumbles his name, apologizing if he’d “upset” her, saying he would “very much” like to see her again or at least speak with her “sometime soon, I hope” and Abigail quickly punches “” for erase.
No more cripples!

I  S P L on this fine May morning there’s a sudden commotion near the entrance, just beyond the turnstiles.

Abigail, drawn by curiosity, approaches to see a middle-aged woman with flushed cheeks and short-trimmed graying hair, in a denim coverall with sunflower pockets, confronted by one of the librarians—“Mrs. Hoffmann, please! You know that dogs are not allowed in the library.”

It’s Camille Hoffmann!

Abigail stares at her friend from a short distance. And keeps her distance.

How incensed Camille is! How firm she stands, legs like tree trunks.

Camille’s maternal-mammalian softness seems to have yielded to a tougher, more obdurate substance. Her voice is controlled, with an undercurrent of threat. “Excuse me. These are not
dogs
. These are not dogs
merely
.” Camille is gripping, on leashes, two large, handsome dogs: Adam’s Apollo, who has obeyed his mistress’s order to sit; and a lean, sleek young Doberman pinscher, too skittish to stay in one place, tugging at the leash and growling deep in his throat. Abigail recognizes Apollo immediately, of course, but the Doberman is new to her.

A number of library patrons have gathered to observe the confrontation, discreetly. Such public-commotion scenes, in Salthill, are rare. Abigail feels a duty to intervene, but—what could she say? (“Frankly,” Abigail would confide in Beatrice Archer afterward, “I was afraid of that Doberman pinscher.”) The embarrassed, uneasy librarian insists that Camille must leave her dogs outside the library; Camille repeats that the dogs “are not dogs merely”; the librarian threatens to “call security”; at last Camille turns, with dignity, murmuring, “Apollo! Thor! We will not stay where we
Middle Age: A Romance

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are not wanted. And we will cease all financial contributions, believe me, where we are not wanted.
Come
.”

In Camille’s wake, a furtive outburst of applause, in which Abigail Des Pres, who is Camille’s friend, does not join.

A sudden scratching at the door of her bedroom
.

Boldly the door is pushed open before Abigail can rouse herself fully from
sleep
.

A furry animal! Apollo! Trotting into the darkened room
,
bearing in his
strong jaws what appears to be an old red flannel shirt
. Adam’s gardening shirt, soiled with earth.

Abigail is out of bed, and tugging at the shirt
.
Apollo will not release it
.

Abigail persists
.
Apollo shakes his head, and growls in warning
.
Abigail persists, growing desperate
.

Through the long panting night the struggle continues
.

“ I    . I am thrilled. As an undergraduate at Bennington College . . .”

As an undergraduate at Bennington College in the late seventies, an idealistic “arts” major, Abigail Des Pres frequently fell in love with older, unattainable men; and one of these, when she was a nineteen-year-old sophomore, was the Irish-American poet Donegal Croom. At the time, Croom had just published his first collection of poems,
SeaChange,
and was being hailed in the United States as an heir of Dylan Thomas and “a more lyric” William Butler Yeats. Amid a pack of excitable, admiring young women in a white woodframe barn on the college campus, Abigail listened with a quickened heartbeat to the darkly handsome Croom read his passionate, incantatory poetry, which was less obscure than Thomas’s and Yeats’s poetry but lush, sensuous, “toughly eloquent” and

“elemental, mesmerizing” (as reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic praised). Abigail wept with happiness. She’d never been so deeply moved by any public performance. Immediately after the reading she bought Croom’s book, and waited in a long line of eager girls for the poet to sign it.

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J C O

(He’d spelled her name wrong!—added an “r”!)

(Or was that a secret message?)

Abigail thanked the poet shyly and stumbled by. If Donegal Croom had given her so much as a second glance, a lithe, slender girl with gleaming dark hair to her waist, in black leotards and an oversized T-shirt, Abigail was too agitated to notice. She was of an age, still virginal, if only barely, and deeply romantic, to clutch the sea-green book to her heart.

She, too, wrote poetry, in breathless fragments, and envisioned one day that she might set her poetry to music, and dance; she would be poet, composer, choreographer, and dancer in one. (Her Bennington teachers, former sixties radicals with predilections for the more esoteric, inspira-tional drugs, encouraged Abigail as they encouraged her classmates, talented and otherwise.) For days after Donegal Croom’s reading, lines of poetry, musical, divorced from meaning, shimmered in Abigail’s head; like butterflies with fluttering wings; almost, she could see them; almost, she could catch hold of them; but they eluded her. And yet—how beautiful.

She knew!

Now, twenty-four years later, Abigail still has her copy of
SeaChange,
which has become in the interim a collector’s item. Croom has written a number of books of poetry, he has won a number of prizes including the Pulitzer, his reputation in some quarters is still very high. (Out of curiosity, typing in “Donegal Croom” on the Web, Abigail discovers that a signed first edition of
SeaChange
in mint condition is worth as much as $,. “Of course, I would never sell it.”) Rereading the slender book, Abigail feels a vestige of the old, visceral shock; not so strong as it had been, but palpable nonetheless. As the dust jacket claims, this is a poetry of magic and of Eros. “If only. When I held my book out to him, our eyes had met.”

Abigail visits the Salthill Bookstore to purchase other books by Donegal Croom. In the window there’s a display of a half-dozen books of his, as
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well as a publicity photo of the ruggedly handsome, long-haired poet in his prime. The face is older, but unmistakably Irish; the hair is coarsely threaded with gray, framing the weathered face. How old is Croom? In his mid-forties? Abigail has learned that Croom has been married three times but is unmarried, at least officially, at the present; this, she takes to be a good sign.
He’s available
.
Maybe he’s lonely
. The window display is in anticipation of Donegal Croom’s appearance at the Festival of Flowers, which is being advertised everywhere in Salthill. What a good cause it is!

Though for a moment Abigail can’t remember what it is. She pushes open the door to the bookstore, the bell tinkles quaintly overhead. She feels a welcome sense of sanctuary in Marina Troy’s old-fashioned quarters with its framed photographs of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and other icons of the past century on the walls, as remote to the new electronic-Internet age as the gods of antiquity. These are noble figures Abigail admires and intends to “reread”

sometime soon.

Entering the Salthill Bookstore, Abigail invariably glances about, with a tinge of guilt, looking for Marina Troy. (The guilt is because Abigail has tried, to a degree, to seduce Roger Cavanagh; and there’s a prevailing sense in Salthill that Roger and Marina Troy are in some way, however undefined and perhaps unconsummated, a couple.) Abigail misses Marina! For years she’s felt a one-sided attraction for Marina; as one might feel for an eccentric, difficult younger sister, or cousin; a solitary version of Abigail herself, bravely immune to the blandishments and temptations of men.

In her soul, she’s a virgin
.
No one can conquer her
. But Abigail hasn’t seen Marina for a long time.

“Mrs. Des Pres, hello!”

Abigail forces a smile as Marina’s assistant Molly Ivers greets her, as always a little too loudly. Molly is a hale, hearty Girl Scout type, in a bulky purple caftan and black nylon trousers; her straw hair falls in a childish fringe around her broad puppet-face. Where Marina was shyly welcom-ing, Molly loves to greet customers! It’s being said that, despite intense competition from mall stores and from the Internet, the little store on Pedlar’s Lane has been doing surprisingly well in Marina’s absence, the result of her intrepid manager’s relentless campaigning: readings by local poets and writers, receptions featuring gourmet appetizers, the Salthill String Quartet, Sunday and late-night hours. How does she do it, Molly Ivers is asked, and in an interview in the
Salthill Weekly Gazette
Molly confessed, “I never sleep!”

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In Salthill it’s begun to be rumored that Marina Troy will never return.

She’ll lease or sell the store to Molly.
So devastated by Adam Berendt’s death,
poor woman
.

Abigail knows she shouldn’t inquire, she’ll only be rebuffed, but she can’t resist asking how Marina is, and Molly says, circumspectly, “Oh, Marina is very well, thank you.” Abigail wants to ask where Marina has been since last fall but already she has asked this question and been rebuffed, as others in her social circle have asked Molly, and been primly rebuffed; instead, Abigail asks when Marina is expected to return to Salthill, and Molly says, lowering her voice as if granting Abigail a special favor, “Oh, Mrs. Des Pres! Marina has been working on art, ‘sculpted pieces,’ and she’s very happy, she says. She hopes to return in the fall, and to have an exhibit of her work then.” Abigail is astonished by this revelation. She prefers to think of Marina Troy as a more neurotic, piteous version of herself. “
She’s
happy? You mean she’s—” Abigail pauses, not knowing what she’s saying.
She’s recovered from Adam’s death? How can that be?

Of course Abigail can’t ask such a question. And if she did ask, Molly Ivers wouldn’t have known how to reply.

Abigail buys several paperback books by Donegal Croom and drives to a park near the Salthill Middle School, to sit on a bench and read. She notes that cover photos of Croom depict the poet as virtually unchanging over the decades. His poetry, critics have marveled, is “elemental”—

“fierce”—“lyrical and savage”—“potent as a force of nature.” Abigail reads, enthralled, though not always with full comprehension, of the ancient Gaelic warrior-hero Cuchulain, and of the cruel god of the Mexican Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl, overseer of lavish sacrificial rites, flaying, and canni-balism. Croom’s poems are populated with falcons, snakes, panthers, sharks, stallions, and bulls. Abigail feels a shuddery identification with the eviscerated horses of Croom’s controversial poem, “The Bullfight”—

As the screaming horses’ entrails twist

in dust & Time

so my soul twists in mad resis-

trance to Oblivion.

Abigail admires the clever slant-rhyme (if that’s what it is) and the poet’s

“intransigent and stoic vision of nature ‘before God was love,’ to quote Croom’s mentor D. H. Lawrence” (a quote from the book cover).

Middle Age: A Romance

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Abigail glances up, hearing voices and laughter. Young teenagers on their way home from school. She feels a pang of loss: Jared is gone from her, and shows no sign of wanting to return. She hasn’t seen the Chinese girl in the red beret for—how long? Two weeks? For all Abigail knows the girl has vanished. Her family has moved away from Salthill. Or the girl had never been. Abigail feels a stabbing sensation in the region of her heart, the loss of a presence she never knew.

“ I    . I am thrilled. As an undergraduate at Bennington College . . .”

On the day of the Festival of Flowers, Abigail rises early. She anxiously rewrites, rehearses her introduction of Donegal Croom. What if the poet, notoriously “sensitive,” is offended by her fawning praise! She has an appointment with her hairdresser at nine o’clock. She makes her face up with elaborate, talismanic care.
The eyes especially
.
His poetry is filled with eyes
.

She changes her clothes several times, like a giddy young girl in another, more romantic era. At last, in a newly purchased Hermès suit of raw silk, champagne-colored, worn with a black silk scarf and a smart black straw hat and black Gucci pumps, Abigail arrives a half-hour early at the Salthill Inn, as Beatrice Archer has requested. So excited!
My destiny
.
My fate
.
Why
not? I’m still young
. Abigail has spent so many hours reading and rereading Croom’s poetry, writing and rewriting her five-minute introduction, the pupils of her eyes look as if she’s been mainlining belladonna and her brain hasn’t been so taxed since college, when she had to concoct twenty-page word-cocoons on such subjects as light and dark imagery in Joseph Con-rad’s
Heart of Darkness,
“original sin” in William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies,
the theme of the “double” in Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
. She sees, in the lobby of the Inn, her friend Beatrice with an older, slack-faced man in a denim jacket. “Abigail, come here!” Beatrice is anxious, and clutches at Abigail’s hand like a schoolgirl. The man in the denim jacket must be—Donegal Croom? Abigail stares, shocked. Of course she knows that the poet must be older than she recalls, but this is like meeting Donegal Croom’s father . . . His hair is wanly leonine, falling in putty-colored wings that frame his red-cobweb face; his nose is frankly swollen; his eyes are bloodshot and appear not quite in focus. Yet he wears a youthful denim jacket and black T-shirt and jeans; his stomach pushes out above the buckle of his hemp belt. In his left earlobe he’s wearing a single gold stud