Middle Age (73 page)

How’d he think Elsie could live out here without a car?) Him, Morton Brady, I never knew well. Nor did my husband or father-in-law know him. Or trust him. They played cards a few times. He did just odd jobs in Beauchamp. He had a loud, gutsy laugh. You could see how a sweet trusting girl like Elsie could fall in love with him. Frankie would say later, at Helena, that his father had been a Marine killed in action in Korea, but that wasn’t so. That bastard was alive as you or me. He just wasn’t
here
.”

Mrs. Creznik paused, shading her eyes. She was panting slightly. Perspiration glistened on her upper lip. “See, where that Winnebago is parked?

That was the Bradys’ lot, more or less. They moved in sometime in early

. They’d been living in Beauchamp, different places. The boy Frankie was ten and the little girl Holly was four. I remember these facts well.

Everything from those early years, I remember. Things that happen

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J C O

yesterday, I can’t. Like there’s nothing important happening now, in my life, eh? That year, , I was only just married in January and we came out here to live with my husband’s folks, and it wasn’t an easy life, especially in the winter. I got pregnant right away and was sick a lot and then at the time of the fire I almost lost the baby at ten weeks, which turned out to be my son Timmy, now Timmy mostly runs the camp . . . The fire was April , . A Saturday night.
I will never forget that date
.” Mrs. Creznik spoke vehemently, clutching at Augusta’s arm with strong talon fingers.

“Like I said, the father was gone. Nor would he return for the funeral.

Where he went, nobody knew or would say. He had some cousins in Beauchamp and they claimed not to know. Lowlife bastards. There was a lower class of individual out here in those days . . .” Mrs. Creznik’s voice had grown tremulous.

She and Augusta were contemplating the lot where, forty years before, a secondhand mobile home owned by the luckless Bradys had been. They were trying not to be distracted by the bulky mobile home in its place with a dull-bronze aluminum exterior, window boxes and shutters, TV antenna, diapers hanging out to dry.

Augusta asked what had happened, exactly?

“ ‘Exactly’—we never knew. The boy himself did not know. He was drunk! A twelve-year-old, drunk on beer. There were teenaged kids around here, a pack of them, not just boys but a few girls, too, their parents couldn’t or wouldn’t keep them in line. They’d steal boats on the creek, they’d sic dogs on one another for the hell of it. They drank, when they could get six-packs. They didn’t smoke dope like kids today but they smoked cigarettes. Frankie wasn’t the worst of them, he was the youngest and what you’d call easy-influenced. Well, basically he was a nice, decent boy, he loved his mother and baby sister but he was weak, he took after the others. Like I said it was a hard time for me. Some of those older kids, fifteen, sixteen years old, I was scared of, frankly. It was a rough life. I was just twenty-two . . .”

“And this boy, Frankie Brady, he’d been drinking that night?”

Augusta spoke carefully, not wanting to agitate Mrs. Creznik.

“He was. Sure. Some of those kids were what you’d actually call alco-holics except you don’t think of it, in a kid that young. Eleven, twelve years old! We’d never allow that kind of behavior in this camp, today. But then, it was another time, you couldn’t pick and choose your tenants out here.

That night, Elsie and the little girl were in bed. It was late. The boy came
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in late, and he was drunk, and smoking, and he dropped a butt and it rolled under the sofa, and he couldn’t find it, or maybe didn’t look for it, too drunk to know what he was doing. So he falls asleep! At the kitchen table. And the smoke wakes him, around one .., and the curtains catch fire, and the place goes up in flames, and Elsie and the little girl are trapped in the back, there’s only the front way out. The mobile home next to them went up in flames, too, but that family got out, lucky for them.

But Elsie and the little girl weren’t so lucky. Frankie escaped, and then he tried to go back inside to help them, you could hear that poor terrified woman screaming, and the little girl. It was a horrible, hellish thing. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, I guess. This has got to be all I can tell you.” But Mrs. Creznik gripped Augusta’s hand hard and pressed it against her bony chest so that Augusta had no choice but to feel, appalled, the woman’s pounding heart.

On their walk back to Maudie Creznik’s mobile home, Mrs. Creznik asked if Frankie Brady was still alive?

“No,” Augusta said. “He has died.”

“Died! It’s all over for him, then.”

“Yes. It’s all over for him.”

Now I know. Adam, forgive me!

She took photographs at Canyon Creek. The mobile homes, the creek at the rear in which Frankie Brady must have swum, the mountains in the distance, the enormous sky with its harsh sculpted clouds. She postioned herself near the Brady lot, to take photographs from that site, views that the boy Frankie Brady must have seen. In the small town of Beauchamp, she located the cemetery, and spent forty minutes tramping through the grass, fending off gnats and enormous horseflies, at last finding the small cheap flat marker nearly hidden by moss and weeds.  

‒   ‒ Of this she took photographs until her roll of film ran out.

 

Ever After

R

D C

T    she saw him.Her heart

leapt!

Who?

What you can’t believe yet you will one day come to believe
.
And how natural it
will be, on that day
. So Adam Berendt foretold.

And yet. There came an hour in late winter, when the snow was at last melting off the roof of the old stone house in Damascus Crossing, Pennsylvania. Then, several hours in succession. At last, in the March thaw, most of a day. Absorbed in her work, fashioning a sphinx-lynx by gluing together a playful assemblage of metal buttons, shiny knobs, bleached birds’ bones, shellacked moths and shellacked strips of newspaper, dolls’

hair, dolls’ glass eyes and other wayward materials, Marina Troy failed to think of her loss. And when she remembered, she was stricken to the heart.

“Am I forgetting Adam? Is that what will happen, I’ll lose Adam a second time?”

Never! I will never forget
.

I will never love another man as I have loved Adam
.

I will return to Damascus Crossing, to the old stone house
.

I will never part with this house Adam deeded to me
.
Never!



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J C O

In fact, she couldn’t wait to escape Damascus Crossing.

Shutting up the house, and Adam’s uncompleted, abandoned work in the rear room, draped in newspaper. Loading the Jeep, and driving back to Salthill on Labor Day. “At last! I’ve been so lonely.”

M   with the owner of the Open Eye Gallery near Shaker Square when her attention was drawn through the front window by a dark-haired man she would have sworn she’d never seen before, pushing a baby stroller past the gallery. The Open Eye was set back from the sidewalk; in its front lawn were abstract sculpted pieces and a stone bench. It was a bright September day. The dark-haired man was carrying a sport coat flung over his shoulder, and had rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt to his elbows; the baby in the stroller was protected from the sun by a little fringed canopy. Marina watched fascinated as the man paused to lean over the baby and to adjust its clothing, or to speak to it. Or was he kissing the baby’s forehead? Marina felt faint with longing. The dark-haired man was no one she knew—was he?

Marina was being informed that, yes, the gallery would like to exhibit her sculpted Dream Creatures sometime that winter. The owner, a friend of Adam Berendt’s who’d frequently exhibited Adam’s sculpted pieces, was telling Marina how much he liked her work, and how it had surprised him. There were twenty-two figures, birds and animals, none of them less than life-sized and several larger than life-sized, arranged before them, glittering and bizarre. The lynx in several postures, a seated German shepherd with a high head and pricked-up ears, a young white-tailed buck, a large rabbit, a large rooster composed of actual fowl feathers brightly painted: the creatures were dreamlike and surreal but not nightmarish, rather funny, witty, enigmatic. Recognizable shapes composed of number-less small shapes,
objets trouvés,
“found things.” The gallery owner confessed, “I don’t know what I was expecting from you, Marina. Tragedy, I guess.”

Marina laughed, to disguise her annoyance. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, then.”

“No, don’t apologize. These are pieces I know I can sell.”

He went on to speak with Marina of technical matters. He would draw up a contract for her to sign.

He’d been Adam Berendt’s principal dealer and knew of the unfinished, stored pieces of Adam’s in the house in Damascus Crossing; Marina
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had described these pieces to him. He believed it was most practical to leave them in storage for the time being, as Marina had done, since they were unfinished, and Adam clearly hadn’t wanted them to be seen, still less exhibited; since Adam’s death, there had been an increase in sales of his work, and prices were rising. Adam Berendt was one of those artists liked and admired locally but lacking reputation in art circles, and it would do his posthumous reputation no good to exhibit inferior work, even if, as Marina said, these were “promising.” But Marina was disoriented, and kept losing the thread of their conversation. The Dream Creatures surrounded her, vivid, intense, glittering with a mysterious animal vigor. The large, rather burly lynx, a feline thug, though handsome, with erect tufted ears and brass-button eyes that glared, was supine in the classic pose of the sphinx, forepaws tucked beneath its muscular chest. Its jaws were muscular, too, made for tearing and devouring; its glimpsed teeth were rhine-stones, with a sinister glitter; yet its stiff, conspicuous wire-whiskers gave it a playful look, you were meant to understand that this big cat wasn’t about to spring into life, wasn’t a dangerous predator but a work of art: in itself an
objet trouvé
. So with the hawks, the black bear cub, the coyote.

The Dream Creatures had turned out a surprise to Marina herself, not figures to provoke the viewer to frown, to step back, to steel himself against feeling, but on the contrary to provoke sympathy, smiles. Adam Berendt’s was the heroic mode, in ruins; Marina Troy’s the childlike, playful.

Marina’s, she was being told, would sell.

So strange! Marina Troy back in Salthill after her year in exile, and grateful to be back; Marina Troy at the age of almost-forty, finally an artist, a sculptor, after her years in exile . . . She was smiling at the gallery owner without hearing what he said. All she was wanting was to run impulsively after the dark-haired man pushing the baby stroller.

“ I ’  .
I’m
alive.”

W    when he saw her. What would he think.

Immediately, she would know. Always, a woman knows.

S’   of her heavy hair cut off. Gone! Good riddance!

At the start of summer in the Poconos, one day she decided. Shivering

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as swaths and clumps fell from her bowed head. The scissors’ skilled cutting, snipping. She’d come to intensely dislike the heavy wavy dark-red hair that turned greasy within a day or two of being shampooed, gathering heat at the nape of her neck; getting into her mouth as she slept, falling into her face as she worked. It was associated in her memory with night: with Night: the heavy furry creature climbing onto her chest, straddling her in her sleep. No more. She wore her hair trimmed short now as a boy’s. It was feathery-light, and exposed her face. A stylish bobbed cut that skimmed her cheekbones and the tips of her earlobes and would provoke her Salthill friends, when they saw her, and they hadn’t yet seen her, to cry,
Marina! We hardly know you, why did you do such a thing, your beautiful hair . . . But how lovely you look, Marina. Really
.

No one would now mistake Marina Troy for the young, white-skinned Elizabeth I.

I      to Marina, how beautiful Salthill seemed to her after her year away. She had wanted to loathe it, and she had ended missing it.

“Why do affluence, beauty, ‘order’ seem to us more superficial than poverty, ugliness, disorder; why does the human spirit seem dulled by the one, and enhanced by the other? Surely this is illogical? A delusion?”

Adam Berendt had chosen to live in Salthill, after all.

(But had Marina known Adam, really? Maybe he’d been her supreme delusion.)

In the Jeep, returning home, Marina drove along the River Road preparing herself for the sight of Adam’s house, its roof only just visible through a stand of trees, but somehow in her anxiety she failed even to see his driveway, and was past his property line without realizing. In the whitish sun of early autumn the Hudson River was wider than Marina recalled, glittering like the broad, restless back of a gigantic snake.

T   who’d leased Marina’s old Colonial house on North Pearl Street moved out on Labor Day, and on the following day Marina Troy moved in. She entered the house fearful of what she might
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find and found instead solace. She was home! The young couple had left the house in excellent condition. She’d liked them, and had trusted them, and hadn’t charged them nearly so much rent as the real estate agent had wanted, and her trust had not been misplaced. The carpets were worn but freshly vacuumed, the furniture was Marina’s familiar old furniture but the cushions had been plumped up and the wood gleamed with polish. Windows had been washed, at least on the inside. That tarry odor and taste
Thwaite Thwaite
had been banished, as with a powerful rug cleaner. On the dining room table was a vase and in it, a handful of blowsy but still gorgeous roses. Seeing these, Marina hid her face. She was terrified of breaking down, even with no one to see.