"Yes."

"Frank would be-what?-a pretty old guy by now? Mid-fifties?"

When Augusta didn't reply, Hewitt said, leaning across the table, "Frank had a hard time in those foster homes. You can't blame an excitable kid for protecting himself."

"Yes. I mean-no."

"He'd always say he was God-damned lucky, not just the eye, but that the guy he assaulted hadn't died. That makes a big difference in the system, ma'am, let me tell you."

Augusta was frightened of Hewitt now. His maleness, his insinuating tone. His eyes on her, his wish to know her. She thought You brought this on yourself. You have only yourself to blame.

"Excuse me, please-I must leave." Augusta slid out of the booth awkwardly, and nearly lost her balance, and Hewitt stood with the agility of a young man. Augusta said, panting, "No! I'm going now. I'm leaving.

Please don't follow me." Hewitt followed her out of the noisy tavern and into the parking lot, he was carrying her handbag which she'd left behind-"Say, ma'am? You forgot this." Augusta had no choice but to take the handbag from him, and to thank him, and to fumble inside for the car key as he watched closely. (But which of these cars was her rental?

She couldn't remember.) Terror beat in her chest like a trapped, maddened bird. The white-haired, coarse-faced sheriff of Ogden County was saying, in a low, insinuating voice, "Any more questions about my old friend Frank Brady, ma'am, I'd be happy to help you out. You're staying at the Bull's Eye Motel, eh? You're feeling O.K. to drive back there by yourself?"

Augusta managed to locate her car. Hurriedly she checked out of the motel and drove south out of Red Lake and by midnight was checking into a Days Inn, smelling powerfully of disinfectant, outside Bemidji.

Middle Age: A Romance

" H * a wild kid. Not bad, not mean, but unpredictable. This terrible thing that happened-it was an accident. But Frankie caused it to happen.

That was a fact."

Mrs. Maudie Creznik of the Canyon Creek Mobile Home Campground spoke sadly but vehemently. This was all fresh to her, you could see. More than forty years ago and vivid as last night's nightmare.

Now in western Montana. In summer. Augusta in jeans and T-shirt, her ashy-silver hair plaited in a single stiff braid at the nape of her neck, found herself seated in a green plastic lawn chair having coffee with Mrs.

Creznik, proprietor of the campground six miles west of Beauchamp, Montana, and approximately twenty-five miles west of the small city of Helena. It was the American West: where everything is oversized except the people. The women were seated on a rectangular strip of cement ("my patio" Mrs. Creznik called it) bordered by blood-red geraniums, in the shadow of Mrs. Creznik's mobile home, which was a bullet-shaped aluminum vehicle the size of a trailer truck, with complicated TV antenna, window boxes and shutters. The moble home was solidly set upon concrete blocks, there were tall grasses surrounding it, which suggested to Augusta that it had been rooted in this place for a long time, like others she'd noticed in the campground. Why then, she wondered, were these mobile homes? Why not cottages, bungalows? Beyond Mrs. Creznik's fussily tended plot of lawn were rows of similar mobile homes, as in a residential housing development. Children were everywhere, and dogs. Young mothers were hanging laundry. In the distance were the densely wooded slopes of the Helena National Forest and several high, ice-capped mountain peaks. This was the legendary Rocky Mountain range, of which in all their years of friendship she'd never heard Adam Berendt speak, though he'd been a boy in literally the shadow of those mountains. At her motel in Beauchamp she'd had pointed out to her the highest peak in the vicinity- Scapegoat Mountain, , feet.

On her map of Montana, Augusta was intrigued to discover "Berendt Pass," ,6 feet, north of Scapegoat.

" 'Berendt'! That's where he got the name from."

Adam. Berendt. Born here.

Augusta herself was "Elizabeth Eastman." This disguise now coming to an end.

J C O*

Still, she'd come this far. She would not be discouraged. More than eight hundred miles since Red Lake. What a long time the drive had taken her! Nearly as long, she was thinking, as the voyage out had been for Adam. Her compact car was buffeted by prairie winds. She heard in these winds the plaintive, hurt cries of her abandoned husband, even her children. She heard Adam's reasonable plea Why? Gussie for God's sake why?

Often she stopped by the side of the interstate, fatigued, a headache behind her eyes. Sometimes she discovered to her horror that she'd been driving without awareness. No memory. Hypnotized by the rushing mo-notonous pavement and the enormous sky overhead. *

the Montana license plate boasted. In the east, in Salthill-on-Hudson, there was virtually no sky. The sky was a painted ceiling. You glanced upward and saw mostly trees, buildings. In the West, everything was distant and what appeared near, often was not. It was a place to inspire trance.

Augusta supposed she was risking physical danger, a woman driving alone in this part of the country; a fanatic, deranged middle-aged woman driving such distances through the high desolate plains of North Dakota, then southward into the more populated, yet still sparsely populated, mountainous center of Montana. After being rebuffed at Helena she'd driven to Beauchamp, and in Beauchamp, where Adam Berendt had been born on March , *, in the local hospital, she'd made inquiries, Morton Brady, Elsie Brady, Frankie Brady . . . "Some of us would go to visit Frankie at the Helena camp," Mrs. Creznik was saying, "but you could see he was ashamed to see us. He must've been lonely but it was worse to see us, so we stopped going, finally. When? About *6, I guess. The last time I saw Frankie."

Maudie Creznik had a large, open, florid, and friendly face, like a sunflower. There were myriad lines, cracks, creases in her stained-looking skin and her teeth (or dentures) were startlingly white. She smiled often, nervously. She was not a woman accustomed to visits from strangers. Yet she had a story to tell she had not told in some time, and there was attractive busty "Elizabeth Eastman" to hear it, camera in her lap. The palms of Augusta's hands were perspiring. She swallowed hard, and asked where the Bradys' trailer had been? Mrs. Creznik laughed and said, chiding, " 'Mobile home,' dear. Not 'trailer.' These are not 'trailers' we live in, dear."

"Mobile home. Of course, I knew that. Sorry!"

"We'll walk over. Hand me my cane, dear."

Maudie Creznik would have been a robust older woman in her late Middle Age: A Romance

sixties except she had arthritis in hips and knees. She was cheerful in her complaints as a TV personality. Her hair was a frazzle of gray through which a pale scalp glimmered. She wore a floral pink polyester shift that fitted her lumpy figure like a tent, her pale, hairless legs were marbled with blue-ink varicose veins. Augusta liked her, yet was shy of touching her.

She had to help Mrs. Creznik heave herself up out of the lawn chair.

"It was over that way. I remember well."

Mrs. Creznik leaned on Augusta's arm, and on the cane, as she walked.

Augusta steeled herself against the woman's pungent smell but found it pleasant, comforting, a warm bisquity odor.

"Canyon Creek Campground used to be smaller. Always it extended back to the creek but wasn't so wide. We're on six acres now. Then, it was about half. There were just twelve lots. The homes, like the Bradys', were smaller then. The Bradys' was secondhand, and not in good repair. One of the camp eyesores. Elsie, Frankie's mom, was a sweet woman but overwhelmed. What happened to her, marrying so young, and her kids. She loved them but couldn't take care of them too well. The little girl, Holly, was born with a hearing impairment. Now, you'd get treatment for it easy, but then, I don't know how it worked out. She was a real cute, sweet, always smiling little girl, very shy, the other kids would tease, 'cause she couldn't always hear them and she didn't talk exactly right. Frankie loved his sister, he was a big clumsy kid for his age, husky, and a good swimmer, and he had something wrong with him, too, real restless in school they said, had trouble reading, which made him quick-tempered. Elsie was on the county rolls after her husband left. (That bastard! He took their car.

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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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 Middle Age: A Romance

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!

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 trouves, "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 Middle Age: A Romance

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 trouve. 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

J C O*