Middle Age (50 page)

I J , Thor. In March, Fancy.

“Fancy is my darling, and my orphan-to-be, I’m afraid. Let’s speak frankly, dear.”

Mrs. Florence Ferris of Lost Brook Farm, a twenty-acre estate bordering upon Old Mill Way, summoned Camille to her enormous Tudor home, and to her bedside. The old, ailing woman was somewhere beyond ninety, and badly incapacitated by strokes and other maladies of age.

Along with her late husband the admiral, a golf-playing friend of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mrs. Ferris was known for her charitable works and contributions to such organizations as the Salthill Pro Musica and the County Historical Society. Camille had met the renowned old woman only a few times, at fund-raising events. She was conscious of the honor of being invited to Lost Brook Farm, but uneasy; what did Mrs. Ferris want of her? A curly-haired French poodle, very white, was sprawled across the
Middle Age: A Romance



quilted bedspread beside Mrs. Ferris’ shrunken doll-body. Camille thought
Not another dog! I will not
. Mrs. Ferris said, “My dear, I’m so sorry I never got to know you in life. And now—” Mrs. Ferris laughed sadly, yet forcibly. Camille was moved to protest but Mrs. Ferris continued, “Let me be blunt, dear. I have heard such good things of you. Will you adopt my darling Fancy? I love her so, I’m desperate for her to have a good, loving home not too many miles from here. She is eight years old, no longer young, possessed of a highly sensitive soul, and I don’t want her uprooted and traumatized any more than she will be when I . . . depart.” Camille smiled weakly, thinking
No! I swear, I will not
. The previous night she’d had a vivid dream of Lionel, not as the stiff, guilt-wracked man she’d last seen, but as he’d been fifteen or twenty years before, dark-haired, robust, often affectionate; in the lovely Technicolor dream they’d been ice skating hand in hand, beneath an incongruous Caribbean sky, and so innocently happy . . . Mrs. Ferris was saying briskly, “Poodles, you know, are the most intelligent of all the breeds. And Fancy is devilishly intelligent, I must warn you. And yet so sweet. And something of a mind-reader! She will snap, and I’m afraid she will bite, but only if provoked. Don’t let fretful children anywhere near her, Camille!” Mrs. Ferris laughed fondly. “And Fancy is an heiress, too. Aren’t you, Fancy?”

The curly poodle, with widened watery shrewd eyes, barked at Camille sharply, three times, like Morse code.

Camille said reluctantly, “Mrs. Ferris, I wish I could adopt your beautiful dog. But my husband is allergic to dogs and it’s only a matter of time before—”

Mrs. Ferris commanded, “Fan-cy! Stop groveling and cringing and show some spunk. Here is your new, young mistress.”

Fancy peeked at Camille over the quilted edge of Mrs. Ferris’s bony hip. The Morse-code bark came again, and a growl deep in the throat.

“Mrs. Ferris, thank you so much for your trust. But I—”

“Fancy
is
an heiress, and it’s never been said of the Ferrises that they are likely to
stint
.” Mrs. Ferris winked lewdly. Camille blushed. She said, stammering:

“Oh, but I, I—I don’t require money, Mrs. Ferris. I have more money than I can use, truly. Except to help out unfortunate animals, of course. In which case—”

“In which case, Fancy will be residing in just the right home, yes? And her mistress can ‘retire’ in peace.”



J C O

Somehow it happened, Camille wasn’t certain how, that Fancy was delivered over to her; and Mrs. Ferris thanked Camille profusely, squeezing her hands and weeping. Fancy, too, whined, and squirmed in Camille’s arms. “Fancy, good-bye! You will leave me. You will live from now on with Camille, my dear friend and neighbor. You will be a good dog, and you will obey your new mistress. If you think of me, think of me kindly.

Away!”

A uniformed nurse and a uniformed housekeeper helped Camille with the quivering, whimpering dog and its cushioned wicker bed, its wardrobe of little sweaters and coats and booties, and its cans and sacks of special diet food. In protest, and yet passively, Fancy leaked urine onto Camille’s clothing, but did not bark hysterically as Camille feared she might on the way home, and did not bite. Not just yet.

A  A, ten days before Easter, there came Belle to live in the house on Old Mill Way.

Of Camille’s dog-family, as she would come to call them, Belle was by far the most pitiful. She’d been brought into the emergency clinic at the shelter one afternoon when Camille was on duty, a female mongrel, visibly pregnant, with bulldog blood, mud-colored and weighing about thirty pounds, profusely bleeding. According to witnesses who’d brought her to the clinic, the collarless dog had been dragged from the rear bumper of a pickup truck by sadistic boys and left to die by the side of a country highway north of Salthill. The pads of her paws were torn away, her right shoulder was dislocated, several ribs were broken, her stomach, hindquarters, and the contents of her womb a bloody mess.

Of the numerous volunteers at the Rockland shelter, only Camille was eager to work with the badly injured dog during her slow recuperation.

Only Camille was patient enough to feed the traumatized dog, who had to lie on her side, her feet bandaged and her ribs in a cast. Camille fed her by hand, like a baby. Because there was the danger of the dog panicking and biting, Camille had to wear protective gloves to her elbows. She didn’t at all mind. She came quickly to love this trembling, courageous dog who, the day following surgery, tried to wag her tail at Camille’s approach.

“ ‘Belle.’ That’s your name. Because one day you will be
belle
. Don’t be frightened. You’re safe now.” Camille rocked the bandaged dog. “Belle, Belle! You will never be hurt again, Belle!
You will be revenged
.”

Middle Age: A Romance



T  the April morning, shortly after Camille brought Belle home to live with her and the other dogs, when the telephone rang, and Camille answered it expecting to hear the voice of one of her new friends, but it was a hoarse voice she scarcely recognized, with a quaver to it, like a nervous bullfrog at the bottom of a well. “Camille? It’s Lionel.” There was a pause. Camille’s heart beat painfully. “May I come home?”

As in her dreams Camille tried to speak, and could not. She felt herself falling, fainting. The telephone receiver slipped from her fingers. The dogs rushed to her, to lick her face and hands, gathering in a tight, jealous ring about her.

T G   R B

T
here she is:that woman.

Through the fall and winter and into spring the whispering was relentless! pitiless! like dried, torn leaves blown by clouds with manic bulging cheeks! A rustling murmurous mocking sound. Never to Abigail’s beautiful mask of a face but behind her back, of course.

There she is: the mother who lost her son. Whose son has repudiated her. She
tried to kill herself and him in a speeding car, can you imagine!
These were Abigail’s friends. Her Salthill neighbors. They knew her soul that was in tatters. They wished her well, as one wishes a convalescent well. Yet they shook their heads in bemused disapproval. Smiled in astonishment that one of their own could so misbehave. Smiled, appalled.
And had she been
drinking, poor Abigail?

You know the answer to that one.

S   in Vermont when the
demon hand
reached out to yank the steering wheel, to bring Abigail and Jared to their deaths, Abigail hasn’t had a single drink. She swears! Not even Salthill’s alcohol of choice, dry white wine, and that’s one of her problems: “Life, raw and sober, isn’t

‘life’ as we know it. It’s something else.” What else? An autopsy report.

Continuous traffic news over one of the breathless New York City radio stations. Or continuous MTV, if, middle-aged, not an American adolescent, you had to watch, trussed up like a turkey and your eyes taped open. Forever.



Middle Age: A Romance



And so she planned her suicide for April . With characteristic mod-esty choosing the slack, anticlimactic Sunday following Easter Sunday, which seemed to Abigail, a lapsed Episcopalian, a fitting day, since Easter itself would be too pointedly symbolic, an elbow in the ribs—
Got it? No
resurrection for this woman!
But inevitably something (a persistently ringing phone, her anxiety that the caller might be Jared who hasn’t spoken to her in months) happened to deflect it. And the following morning is May

, and maybe that means something?
The first morning of my new
,
posthumous life?

And Abigail is driving into the Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, slowly (shakily!) along Pearl Street, a still young-looking woman in dark glasses wanly glamorous as a recovering-druggie rock star of another era, in her gleaming ghost-colored BMW sedan in a state of suspended animation waiting
to feel something! anything! since after all I’m alive, it’s spring and I
am NOT DEAD
. But her mind is blurred like the lipstick-smudged rim of a cocktail glass, since having failed to die the previous day she’s obliged to carry on with her absurd and exhausting life, a life that would seem to be enviable to most of the world’s billions, basically the life of a forty-three-year-old (yes, Abigail has acquired another birthday, during the winter malaise) suburban divorcée with a busy social calendar and no soul; a life of appointments, social events, and errands like beads on a rosary, and these beads looping continuously back upon themselves, now Adam is gone, now Jared is gone, now Abigail has failed to remarry, Abigail has failed even to stumble away from the wreckage of her marriage to find another man to love, and to love her; and for a weak moment on Pearl Street passing the Old Salthill Cemetery where patriots of the American Revolution are buried, and the Salthill Free Public Library in its restored-historic Neo-Georgian building, and a corner of Shaker Square, her mind has drained so blank she can’t recall if she has just driven into town to have lunch with the co-chair of the Friends of the Salthill Historic Society Annual Spring Festival of Flowers, or if she’s on her way back to Wheatsheaf Drive, and home; that beautiful house empty of life as a mausoleum; she can’t recall if, the day before, lining up her precious cache of barbiturates, painkillers, and Prozac on a kitchen counter, she’d decided to appeal to Jared one final time (just a single telephone call!) before washing everything down with vodka, or whether, with laudable magnanimity, she’d decided to spare the boy, who after all (she’s his Mom, she should know!) is only sixteen and wounded by his parents’ acrimonious divorce; when at the



J C O

intersection of Pearl and Ferry, waiting for the traffic light to change, Abigail happens to see the girl in the red beret . . .

“She must be lonely. Always, she’s alone.”

The girl appears to be Chinese, about eleven years old. She’s small-boned, with delicate features, a perfect petal of a face; dark gleaming-smooth straight hair to her shoulders, and straight-cut bangs across her forehead; carrying a cello case gripped tightly, and walking as if into a bracing wind. The girl wears a plain jacket, neatly pressed slacks, and the little red beret, a stab of bright color. By chance, Abigail has seen this child several times in Salthill, and her heart is touched . . . The girl is no one Abigail knows. And no one who knows Abigail. Sometimes she’s carrying the cello case, and sometimes not. Salthill is a small enough community in which, without wishing to, you recognize individuals without knowing their names. The girl in the red beret is a student at the Salthill Middle School on North Chambers Street; Abigail has seen her walking from the school, alone. Abigail has seen her in the Salthill Public Library, alone.

Surely there are other Chinese-American girls attending the middle school, but the girl in the red beret is always alone, or at any rate when Abigail has seen her, she’s alone. The first time Abigail happened to notice her, the girl was trying shyly to make her way through a rude, noisy gaggle of middle-school classmates loitering on the sidewalk outside the library, the diminutive Chinese girl confronted by girls and boys of approximately her own age who ignored her as if she didn’t exist, and jostled her as she tried to pass. The unconscious cruelty of young adolescents! Abigail was incensed and would have liked to come to the Chinese girl’s rescue, taking her hand and pushing the others aside. Such louts! Caucasians! She felt her face burn with a pleasurable racial shame. Since Caucasians are the majority race, you can castigate yourself with racial shame, and not be held to account in any way. Abigail had lingered on the pavement a few yards away, pondering what she would do if, for instance, one of the show-offy boys snatched off the Chinese’s girl’s beret; if anyone was actively rude, aggressive. Abigail was a Salthill mother, these kids would shrink before the authority of a mother. (Wouldn’t they?) As Jared’s mother, Abigail shouldn’t have been surprised or shocked, overhearing the language of these bratty spoiled Salthill kids, the casually tossed-off
shit, fuck, suck,
and the sexual innuendo of their banter
blow, eat out, fuck you, man!
But she was shocked, and dismayed. These were hardly more than children, after all. Girls of twelve and thirteen sharing cigarettes on the street. Garishly
Middle Age: A Romance



applied lipstick and eye shadow and tight-fitting little skirts. The boys in baggy rap-style pants from Banana Republic and Gap, their expensive jogging shoes unlaced. Privileged Salthill children whose fathers were multi-millionaires, emulating what they believed to be the gangsta-street-style of the black ghetto where fathers were likely to be in prison, absent, or dead. At least, Jared had passed through this phase. Abigail hoped Jared had passed through this phase.

So sad! Abigail’s son refuses to speak with her, let alone see her
.
She tries to be
brave but there she is carrying the deformity of her shame about with her, in
public, a giant goiter growing out of her neck
.