Middle Age:.

A Romance.

Joyce Carol Oates.

To my Princeton friends, who are nowhere in these pages.

. . . I was trying to find out the meaning of certain dreams . . .

-Socrates speaking in Plato's Phaedo.

Life devours life, but man breaks the cycle, man has memory.

-"Adam Berendt'

Prologue:.

Fourth of July.

I* * You leave your home in Salthill-on-Hudson on the muggy afternoon of July Fourth for a cookout (an invitation you didn't really want to accept, but somehow accepted) and return days later as ashes in a cheesy-looking funeral urn: bone chunks and chips and coarse gritty powder to be dumped out, scattered, and raked in the crumbly soil of your own garden.

Fertilizer for weeds.

Y , with the highest intentions. No suicidal urges!

Anything but. Securing your faithful German shepherd to a lengthy sliding leash in the back lawn, leaving him a big bowl of water spiked with ice cubes and his favorite dry food with a promise you'll be back by midnight at least, by which time fireworks will have been bursting into the sky above the Hudson River for hours, by which time you will have been dead for hours, declared dead of a burst heart, your body temperature rapidly cool-ing in the Jones Point Medical Center morgue. You (or the body you've become) present the usual problem for professionals. Whom to notify?

Who's this man's next of kin? "Adam Berendt" is the name affixed to the body, if the ID in his water-soaked wallet is correct.

What to do with "Adam Berendt," the man of mystery.

J C O*

I * "Adam Berendt." For so long a period of time, I came to believe he was my life.

Y , you drive up the river to Jones Point, New York.

You find yourself among people you don't know, and will not know.

Invited to join your host and several others on a dazzling-white twenty-five-foot sailboat, The Albatross.

On the river you hear children's cries. You're panicked, thinking you hear children's cries. Then in fact you hear: children's cries. For help?

N I was born, which I've long forgotten. Or where I would die, which I would not know. But where I lived, where I was known. The Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, New York. Where by a sustained act of will through twenty-one years I created ADAM BERENDT as you might fumble a human, or humanoid, figure out of such materials as clay, earth, dung. Rotted wood and driftwood salvaged from the river. Bits of glass, plastic. Crude materials to be shaped by crude fingers.

ADAM BERENDT: if you glanced at this guy once, you'd possibly glance twice. One of those ugly burly fellows you can't imagine other than middle-aged. A big jaw, Cro-Magnon head, thinning steel-colored hair he's shaved close to the skull so the baldness will seem intentional. Even aesthetic! He has a flushed oniony skin, a peeling-flaking skin, of varying textures, but generally coarse, scarred-looking. A single functioning eye, the left, often bloodshot from strain; the right eye, amid scar tissue, glazed over like marble and glaring white, blind. (This eye, I'd explain, had been injured in a childhood accident. Which was, more or less, the truth.) ADAM BERENDT, the body. Not a work of beauty. Not monumental. Not heroic! Nor even (in my own opinion) especially brave. Only just impulsive. Stubborn. Maybe reckless. What I do, I do on principle. The hell with the rest.

Because I was a sculptor. Or tried to be. And even mediocre sculptors are not easily discouraged or dissuaded.

Middle Age: A Romance

Help! Help us! Save us! The cries tore at his heart, he turned to see a small sailboat capsizing, children sliding overboard, screaming and thrashing.

And no life jackets.

This was about thirty feet from The Albatross, itself about thirty feet offshore. The drunken careening speedboat, a luxury Chris Craft item, continued on its way.

No time to think, only to act. The hell with the rest!

One of the children was a little blond girl and it was this child he swam for, this child he was determined to save.

ADAM BERENDT, whose official age would be a matter of speculation among his Salthill friends. For no birth certificate would be found among his papers. His closest friends, one of whom was his attorney, had no absolute knowledge of ADAM BERENDT except what he'd told them, carefully. It was generally conceded he was in his early or mid-fifties. It was generally conceded he'd been born somewhere in the Midwest. Or the West.

Blinded in one eye in a childhood accident, he said. And scar tissue, burn-scar tissue, lightly tattooing his body, on his burly hairy chest, and elsewhere. (More private. A few women have seen.) It was a shame, it was tragic, ADAM BERENDT wasn't in better condition when he dived into the river to swim to the capsized children's sailboat, maybe he was being reckless, maybe it was poor judgment, he didn't pause to think, only just to act; maybe this qualifies as heroic, maybe just reckless, a man who acts before he thinks; a man who, having acted, will have abrogated forever the possibility of thinking.

But won't give in. God damn, will not. The terrified blond child is only a few feet away, Adam Berendt will save her.

E - * in the floating paradise of Salthill-on-Hudson I lived what people thought was beyond his means.

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Because I was an impoverished-looking and -behaving sculptor with no reputation beyond the local. Because I threw together my junk-art with a disdain for how it might better be done, more professionally, more permanently. ADAM BERENDT living for the moment. And never quite completing anything, never achieving perfection. Like my fellow-eccentric Albert Pinkham Ryder, who so poorly prepared his canvases, painting and repainting untreated surfaces, that his beautiful dreamscapes are flaking and peeling away into Eternity.

Beyond his means because somehow I'd gotten together enough money to purchase one of the township's picturesque ruins. An old stone house on the river north of the village. In the *s the building had been a mill owned by a Dutchman. After the Revolution, it saw service as a tavern, and later as a brothel. In the mid-*8s it was purchased, with fifteen acres of land, and rebuilt by a well-to-do farmer named Elias Deppe, and the Salthill Trust lists the property as Elias Deppe House. Not a distinguished house by local standards but there's an air of nostalgia and romance about it. Two storeys, steep shingled roofs, pewter-colored stone that exudes damp in all weather. Built on a promontory above the river where the sun rising in the east floods its interior as if with flame.

Living beyond his means, no one exactly knew how. He'd die beyond his means, too.

Y one afternoon, you never return as yourself.

Leaving home, you don't anticipate not returning as yourself.

The home you've left ceases to be a home once you've left. If you fail to return. It reverts to being a house, a property. An estate to fall into the hands of others who survive you.

ADAM BERENDT, the recluse. ADAM BERENDT who was sociable, gregarious. ADAM BERENDT, who was living alone at the time of his death but for Apollo (whose formal name was Apollodoros), the mongrel husky-shepherd with beautiful melancholy eyes and coarse silver-tipped hair. ADAM BERENDT, who was frequently seen hiking into the village along the River Road. Or riding his bicycle (English racing style, purchased secondhand). Or driving his Ford station wagon or his *

Middle Age: A Romance

Mercedes-Benz. ADAM BERENDT, who occasionally taught sculpting and figure drawing in the Salthill Adult Program. ADAM BERENDT, who gave blood in the annual Salthill Blood Drive. ADAM BERENDT, the volunteer fireman. ADAM BERENDT, who canvassed through Rockland County on behalf of education, environmental, and gun control bond issues. ADAM BERENDT, who'd been invited to run for local office himself on the Democratic slate. (And politely declined.) ADAM BERENDT, who confessed to friends in an unguarded moment that he had never traveled outside the United States but had a hope of doing so before he died: to Athens, Greece, where Socrates had lived more than two thousand years ago; and to the Far East, that region of Buddhist mystery.

Socrates was his hero. He'd first discovered the philosopher when he was a boy of sixteen, a lifetime ago. Already blinded in his right eye and yearning for a higher knowledge, a knowledge not of the body but of the spirit; craving not religious faith but faith in reason. Know thyself ! Socrates taught. And through knowing the self, knowing the world. Socrates had been an ordinary-seeming ugly-burly man. A common man, a stone mason. By a vote of the Athenian court he was sentenced to death at age seventy. (Why? For asking penetrating questions and for inspiring young people to ask questions of their elders.) Yet it was a death of Socrates' own choice, for he refused to flee into exile. It was a death of his own choice for he chose the exact means of dying. (Drinking hemlock.) The philosopher is one who practices dying, practices death, continuously, but no one sees it.

Adam, please don't go! You don't know these people.

Of course I know these people. In essence, I know them.

Stay with us in Salthill. We're having a barbecue, just a few close friends.

We'll watch the fireworks over the river as night comes on. Say yes!

I gave my word, I'd go to Jones Point.

It will be a big event, won't it? A fund-raiser? A hundred guests, at least?

No one will miss you.

I can't, I gave my word.

W than a Fourth of July cookout to raise money for a liberal cause. What more trivial decision to make, which

J C O*

Fourth of July event to attend. It is trifles that constitute our lives. It is trifles that kill us.

N , as it would be generally believed, but cardiac arrest.

Not in the river but in the ambulance en route to the emergency room.

Though his lungs would be filled with river water. And his skull that looked concrete-hard would be severely fractured from striking the side of the rescue boat.

The Albatross: a witty name!

You were inclined to be witty, ironic, self-conscious when you had money, when in fact you were rich, and involved in underdog idealistic causes like the National Project to Free the Innocent. (These "innocent"

were mostly black indigent death-row prisoners abandoned by the American criminal justice system to die for crimes they had not, in fact, committed.) Adam Berendt wasn't known as rich, far from it, but he'd been taken up by rich people, liberal-minded rich people like those who'd organized the July Fourth cookout in Jones Point. No, I hadn't much wanted to attend.

But it was in a good cause, certainly. And I gave, for whatever it was worth, my word.

The injustice of the world depressed him, he must do his part to help.

Driving the traffic-slowed highway W north along the wide glittering Hudson River to Jones Point thirty miles above Salthill-on-Hudson. A town Adam didn't know, had never before visited. A riverfront home, quite splendid, contemporary glass-and-redwood split-level overlooking the river, with a dock, at which The Albatross was moored.

ADAM BERENDT, who lacked all capacity for the supernatural.

Who could believe only in man. Not God.

ADAM BERENDT, without wife or children. (Yet there would be speculation: surely he'd been married at one time? Surely he, the most masculine-paternal of men, had sired children? Somewhere?) ADAM BERENDT, who was known to be a "partner" of some ambiguous kind with a woman named Troy, Marina Troy of the Salthill Bookshop on Pedlar's Lane. (What was the relationship between Adam Middle Age: A Romance

Berendt and Marina Troy? Were they lovers, or only just friends? Or only just partners in the bookshop? And how much could Adam have invested in the doomed little store? For Adam had no income, no holdings except his house and land-did he? The subject of money, finances, business of any kind made him restless, uneasy; if he couldn't escape, he became irrita-ble; roused to repugnance.) ADAM BERENDT, who'd unconsciously taken for granted he would live forever.

T H* R at Jones Point was wide, rough, slate blue in reflected light, its surface like something metallic, shaken. The wind was ideal, steady at about fifteen miles an hour. There were clouds high overhead but these were not storm clouds. There appeared to be, late in the afternoon, no threat of lightning or rain. The men intended to sail to West Point and back, and this was a reasonable goal-wasn't it?

No, Adam Berendt hadn't been drinking. Amid many others who were. His quick stoic smiling response when drinks were offered: Thanks, but no! Not for me. Club soda?

Possibly his host, the owner of the sailboat, had been drinking. The other men on the sailboat had been drinking. Everybody on the river! It was that kind of festive American holiday.

Firecrackers detonating like maniacal laughter.

Adam Berendt gave his companions on The Albatross the impression, as they would afterward recount, of being a capable, calm sailor. He'd told them he lived on the river, at Salthill. He was a thick-bodied muscular man, very self-possessed, with powerful shoulders, arms, legs; of only moderate height, but he'd seemed taller. He wore a white visored cap, a navy-blue pullover sport shirt that fitted him tightly at the midriff, rumpled khaki shorts, and rubber-soled canvas shoes. These shoes, and the bulky shorts, would immediately become water-soaked when he dived into the river, the weight pulling him down. Pulling at his heart.

The medical examiner at Jones Point Medical Center would confirm that Adam Berendt had no alcohol or drugs in his blood at the time of his death.