Middle Age (12 page)

He’d fallen in love and married, young. He could remember Camille as a bride, but not himself as a bridegroom. Sometimes he had difficulty remembering Camille precisely, for she’d looked like so many young women in those years, and he was inclined to confuse her with—who was it?—

one of his Colgate roommate’s girlfriends? Kitzie, or had it been Mimi?

The one who’d wept in his arms, and surreptitiously wiped her nose on the shoulder of her dress.

No man in the Hoffmann family was likely to be jealous for no man in the Hoffmann family was sexually insecure. You were a man, and thoroughly a man, and good-looking, and intelligent, and you worked for Hoffmann Publishing, Inc., the most successful American publisher of medical texts and reference books, and there was no ambiguity in this.

Life was not a riddle for the Sphinx to answer (unless it was the Sphinx that asked the riddle), but something like a printout. Numerals, equations.

Once married, the Hoffmanns remained married, and had no further romantic inclinations. (But was this entirely so? True, Lionel Hoffmann in his poised, remote and whimsical way was drawn to the wives of certain of his friends, but never would he have approached them; nothing was more repugnant to him than the mere thought of an intimate relationship, a messy sexual relationship, with a social acquaintance.
Never foul your own
nest
was Lionel, Sr.’s, most eloquent advice to his sons.)

“Jealous of—who?
Him?
Never.”

Adam Berendt, a local oddball artist. Sculptor. With one missing eye.

Or maybe blind eye. Built like a fireplug. Before the New Year’s Eve party, Lionel hadn’t been introduced to Berendt though he’d been hearing of him, in Salthill, for several years.

If Camille was romantically attracted to Adam Berendt, Lionel was obliged to feel a husbandly possessiveness, like a dull toothache. She was his wife, and vulnerable; and under his protection.
If she makes a fool of herself, O God
. Salthill was insular as an island.

(Most Salthill men commuted to work in Manhattan, and were often

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away five full days a week; many, like Lionel, maintained apartments in the city, and were frequently away overnight; you could imagine that the work life of a Lionel Hoffmann occupied most of his waking hours, not out of greed for more money but out of a genuine perplexity about what, other than work, a responsible adult man was meant to do? In the absence of their devoted husbands, which might one day be tabulated as an absence of years, Salthill wives were inevitably “drawn” to men not their husbands. Rarely were these catastrophic love affairs that resulted in divorce and remarriage, but rather romances of an indefinite nature: there were discernible cyclical patterns in which a woman might imagine herself in love with the husband of a friend, and when that infatuation dissolved she might imagine herself in love with the husband of another friend, and, in time, with another; and yet another; over a period of years in a social circle as constricted as the one to which the Hoffmanns belonged, a woman would eventually come round to imagining herself in love with a man, or men, with whom she’d imagined herself in love at an earlier time. So long as a woman didn’t become involved with a man outside her social circle, such behavior was perceived by husbands to be harmless. This was Salthill-on-Hudson, where marriages, families, property were sacrosanct, and it was not the seventies.)

At the New Year’s Eve party, Lionel covertly observed this “Adam Berendt” whom his wife had invited, and of whom he’d been hearing rumors. Lionel was discreet as Lionel was always discreet. (Where another host would have winced at the salmon-satin coat, Lionel maintained a deadpan expression.) But over the course of the long, gay, champagne-enlivened evening, Lionel concluded that Adam Berendt was nothing more than warmly courteous to Camille; he didn’t appear to be in love with her, nor did he encourage her to be in love with him. You could see, through Camille’s pained eyes, how much more enlivened Adam was dancing, disco-style, energetically if not very skillfully, with Owen Cutler’s opulently fleshy wife, Augusta, than with sweet-faced Camille Hoffmann.

Lionel concluded,
He’s crude. But a gentleman
.

And later that night, at about two .., when most of the Hoffmanns’

guests had departed, and after a reckless kiss for both her husband and Adam Berendt, the hostess herself had disappeared upstairs to bed, the two men sat before a smoldering fireplace, and quietly talked. That is, Lionel talked. Pleasantly drunk on champagne, and stimulated by the occasion. Both men had removed their coats, and their ties were loosened.

Middle Age: A Romance

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Lionel wasn’t a man to speak easily, especially at one of his own parties.

His sense of being a host was something like a conscience. But now that the party was more or less over, he was speaking with animation, almost warmly. He liked Adam Berendt! A man so different from himself as to belong to another species. The subject was politics, morals, “human values.” Lionel had been a boy in the sixties and disgusted by much of what he saw. Outside his family and relatives, that was. The “deterioration” of America as a serious moral nation. Then he’d gone to college—at Colgate, where his father had gone—and his life had been changed. His inner life.

Though possibly Lionel hadn’t so much as glanced into a book of philosophy or poetry since graduation, it was his fervent belief that in certain of his humanities classes, his soul had been “forged.” Of course, he’d gone on to the Wharton School as planned, and he’d made his way steadily enough in the world of business—“But what I remember best is ‘Know thyself.’

That’s Socrates, isn’t it? And the Greek tragedies, I remember. A man makes a mistake, he owns up to it: puts out his eyes, or hangs himself.

There was no self-pity and pleading for justice or mercy. It was all a weird kind of justice. If you were guilty, you paid. Even if you weren’t guilty. Because sometimes it wasn’t clear what the crime was. And that’s how life
is
.

What a world! I’m a Christian, but—you know. ‘The meek will inherit the earth’—I wonder! It’s more like winners and losers. Isn’t it? People turning into birds, or trees, or rivers; a woman who’s turned into a swan and she’s raped by a—bull? Or is it the other way around? But really a god. The bull, I mean. And sometimes the gods were invisible. It was all a kind of parable, I guess? It sure wasn’t Christian. This hunter who’s torn apart by his own hunting dogs because he’d seen a goddess bathing naked in the woods. Just by accident he saw her, what’s the blame? But he’s punished anyway. He’s turned into—what? I forget.”

“A stag.”

“A
stag
.” Lionel pondered this fact. His voice was slightly slurred but steady. “What he’d been hunting. He’s turned into it, and he’s killed, and there’s a weird justice there, yes?”

So he and Adam Berendt talked. Lionel talked. In the early hours of the New Year he was seized by nostalgia he hadn’t known he’d felt; it was nostalgia for a lost youth, that in fact he’d never had. These things he would confess, almost!—to Adam Berendt.
My friend
.
Adam is my friend
.

Afterward he would recall with a vague glowing happiness the conversation he’d had with Adam Berendt that night. He would tell Camille that

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he liked her art instructor “very much.” He would thank Camille for introducing them. He would tell friends how “sensible, solid” Adam Berendt was; “down-to-earth,” “no bullshit.” It was certainly Lionel’s intention to see Adam again soon, and to cultivate a friendship with him, for the truth was that Lionel hadn’t many friends, in Salthill or in Manhattan; it might even be said that since college, and his early bachelor days, he hadn’t any close male friend. He had numerous “friends” in Salthill but no actual friend. (For in Salthill as everywhere, women kept the wheels of social life moving. Continuously these wheels move, up and down the familiar rutted ways.) Yet months passed after that New Year’s Eve, and years. And Lionel Hoffmann who was so immersed in work never sought out Adam Berendt in quite the way he’d hoped to. And Adam, tactfully, didn’t approach him. Their handshakes were brisk and matter-of-fact. And their greetings, standard Salthill-style, uttered with smiling good cheer: “How are you, Adam?” and “Lionel, how are
you?
”

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Adam, how’s a man to live when he knows he must die?

I   -  , the sixties. When Lionel was ten years old and a dependable boy. An A-student in the fifth grade at Broom Hills Country Day School, Westchester County. When Lionel saw his first dead body, in fact two.
And never never told!

The sixties. Drugs! Long unkempt hair and slovenly clothes! Even such old, settled villages as Broom Hills, Bedford Hills, Katonah were not immune. Even revered families like the Thayers, the Briscolls, the Listers (neighbors of the Hoffmanns in Broom Hills Heights on spacious wooded lots overlooking the man-made Broom Lake) were not immune.

The men commuted faithfully to New York City on early trains, and in fall and winter never returned before night; the women dealt with domestic servants, sent out handwritten invitations to parties and personally addressed and signed upward of five hundred Christmas cards each, each year. The Vietnam War waged on the far side of the moon. Why it mattered so much, so suddenly, wasn’t clear. If you didn’t switch on the TV except for New York and local news, and again after eight .., and just rapidly skimmed certain newspapers, you could mostly avoid it. Children
Middle Age: A Romance

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who attended Broom Hills Country Day were protected from it. In Broom Hills, as not everywhere else, life remained serene and more or less controlled. Moral control, and aesthetic control. Up-zoning was the vot-ers’ most passionate issue. Boundaries had to be drawn, Custom had to be maintained. For if Broom Hills was not the ideal, there could be no ideal; and the human spirit cries out for the ideal, not in a faraway place and time but here and now. Yet, in Broom Hills as in less scrupulously zoned parts of the country, there were sometimes problems. Some of these were

“drug problems.” The legacy of the “hippie culture.” For had not a hippie guru threatened America’s parents with the terrible prophecy
We’ll get you
through your children!
And when children grew up but remained children, there was danger. When children left the protection of Broom Hills to attend college (in urban areas especially) there was danger. So it happened in the heat of August 66 that the twenty-year-old Yale dropout son of the Listers, the Hoffmanns’ neighbors in the prestigious area known as Broom Hills Heights, injected his girlfriend and himself with a powerful amphetamine, and somewhere in the night they wandered barefoot in the woods behind the Listers’ sprawling contemporary house, and they’d lain down to make love by moonlight, unless it was simply to die, and their bodies wouldn’t be found for three days. Three days! The Listers would claim to believe that their “troubled” son had returned to New Haven where he lived with friends, they’d had no idea that he and the girl, who was sixteen, from Katonah, were anywhere nearby. In the heat of August, bodies decompose rapidly. These would be discovered in the woods about twenty feet from the mirror-smooth man-made lake, by several young boys who ran shouting for help.

Lionel Hoffman, aged ten, was not one of these boys. But Lionel’s secret was, he’d discovered the bodies himself the previous day, drawn by the terrible smell, and had run away in terror, and an obscure sort of shame, and said nothing. And would say nothing. That stench! And the horror of what he’d seen: what his eyes had fastened upon. He’d gagged and nearly vomited, and forced to eat at mealtimes he’d gagged and vomited, right in the dining room, and it was attributed to the “flu”—this was an era, and it continues to the present time, in which much that’s unspeakable within families can be attributed to “flu.”

To Lionel, this was the sixties. This was what threatened, and awaited, when you brought into the scrupulously zoned villages of Broom Hills, or Salthill, foreign toxic agents.

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Of Lionel it would be said by the women in his life, he was “sensitive”

about food, mealtimes, odors. He had a “sensitive stomach” which surely indicated a sensitive soul.

S, , to dog hair. And cat “dander.” His sinuses clogged up as if with wet, wadded tissue. His brain ached and eyes watered.

Through the seemingly interminable years of their growing-up in the eighteenth-century restored burrow on Old Mill Way, Lionel’s children, a boy and a girl, would pine loudly for a pet. For it was a fact that all their friends had pets, a dog or at least a cat, everybody’s mom had cats, why couldn’t they? why were they different? why was Daddy so selfish? Camille intervened in snatches of dialogue overheard by Lionel, approving when she was reasonably stern, hating her when she was apologetic, or plaintive as the children themselves. “Your father is
allergic
. You know that. He’s so sorry. I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing to be done about it.”

Eleven-year-old Graeme protested, “Couldn’t Daddy live in the barn?

It’s all fixed up.”

In the barn
forever afterward he imagined himself. And smiled. While in the beautifully restored eighteenth-century Colonial on Old Mill Way with his wife and children, he was really
in the barn
. Or maybe
in the
woods
.

He’d never told his parents or anyone in Broom Hills about discovering the hippie couple (
hippie couple
was the formula phrase he’d settled for, derived from a news item about the drug deaths in a Westchester newspaper), nor would he tell his wife, Camille, whom he never told anything that might disturb; or might provoke in that alarmingly maternal way of even the least erotic women, to embrace a man passionately and comfort him.
Oh, Lionel. How terrible for you. Ten years old. Oh!—I can imagine the
smell.