"Beauchamp, Montana."

"But why? I mean-why did you take so many pictures of this one grave, Augusta, and not any others?"

Augusta said, matter-of-factly, "Because I wanted to." She closed the portfolio, and the discussion.

A* no one what she'd learned of Francis Xavier Brady. She would keep Adam Berendt's secret as if it were her own.

M * yet they were shy and self-conscious as newlyweds, alone together.

Middle Age: A Romance

And how like a bridegroom Owen Cutler came, bearing a large ripe honeydew melon from his garden, for Augusta.

The honeydew smelled of autumnal sunshine, and rich warm earth, and a sweetly pungent rind-odor. With a long-handled knife Owen cut thin crescent-slices out of the melon, to be eaten by hand. "Owen, how beautiful your melon is. And how delicious." Augusta bit into the fleshy pale-green fruit that was just slightly overripe, and made her mouth water alarmingly though honeydews were not her favorite melons. Juice ran down her fingers, and down her bare forearm.

Owen said, pleased, "It is delicious, isn't it?"

In a patch of fading, though still warm autumn sunshine they were sitting together on the flagstone terrace, at a white wrought-iron table they'd had a very long time. Augusta was surprised at her appetite, and quickly devoured several melon slices. Owen watched her with an adoring look that made her want to laugh at him, and hide her face. "This is like my dream, Augusta. That I would plant my garden, and harvest it, and you would return. 'A year and a day'-somehow, I knew this. Though I didn't dare hope it would actually happen."

Augusta smiled hesitantly. "You didn't give up on me, Owen." It was a question in the form of a statement, she would not have wished to ask directly.

"Never!"

Then, amending: "Well, yes. In weak moments. I had faith that you would return, but I had to acknowledge that you might not. That something might have happened to you."

Augusta said slowly, "Much has happened to me, Owen. But I'm back."

Owen cut another melon slice, and held it for Augusta to eat; Augusta cupped his hand in hers, and ate. Their mood was suddenly playful, flirtatious. "Owen, you amaze me. I mean that sincerely."

"You amaze me, Augusta. Those photographs! You've become a woman with secrets."

Augusta had always been a woman with secrets. But by her silence she acknowledged, what Owen said was so.

"And will you never tell me . . . your secrets?"

Owen spoke lightly, yet wistfully. His stony-smooth face was softened about the jaws, he'd freshly shaved. His eyes seemed to Augusta strangely raw, lashless. You looked into them, and not at them. (And her own eyes?

J C O*

Without makeup? Naked and raw, too, she supposed.) With the edge of the knife Owen scooped sticky, fibrous seeds out of the honeydew's interior. His hand holding the knife trembled just slightly.

Augusta smiled. "Never, Owen."

"You were with a . . . man? Were you?"

Augusta laughed, heat rising into her face. She was eating a thin slice of melon, juicy melon, biting into it with her strong teeth as, ardently, Owen watched. His breath was quickened, his fingers nervously rubbed against one another.

He said, "But I hope, at least, you did love him. That it was . . ."

Owen's smile was brave, wavering. " . . . a profound experience."

Augusta stroked her husband's hand, running her fingertips over his bony knuckles. How surprised she'd been to discover that, yes, the palms of his hands were callused. It was nearly dusk. A warm, secretive sort of darkness rose from the gardens, their vivid colors and particularities now obscured by shadow. In a while, the Cutlers would go inside their house; they would light lamps, and prepare a meal in the kitchen; later, they would retire upstairs to their bedroom. How long it had been since they'd shared the same bed, let alone lay in each other's arms! Their kisses would be shy, and hopeful. Their lovemaking would be tender and forgiving.

Augusta's eyes filled lavishly with tears, but these were not tears of pain.

"But I came back to you, Owen. And I will never leave again."

Enchanted Places.

Enchanted places! We all have them, or maybe they have us, in their mesmerizing grip. As deeply imprinted upon our memories as our own identities. And some of these enchanted places predate our identities.

Our earliest memories are likely to be of our earliest space: the first room of childhood. How vast it must have seemed, when we were infants, gazing up at a ceiling as immeasurably distant as the sky; being lifted by god-like creatures, possessed of powers beyond our comprehension. We carry the imprint of this memory through our lifetimes, and in times of stress, it's said, we are likely to dream of it recurringly. The adult self and the child-self eerily converge, as if time had no palpable existence but was a construct of the imagination. The poetry of architecture is the giving of myriad forms to the elemental fact of space, which precedes our comprehension of it and of our place within it. Homo sapiens isn't the only species to create complex habitations, of course, but we are the only species capable of an infinite variety of habitations. The forms to which we bend private space reflect our species' ingenuity, as well as our individualism.

My most emotional recurring dream is of my first childhood room, under the eave of my family's farmhouse in Millersport, New York, in the early 1940's. This room, which I can "see" as vividly as I see the airy, glass-walled room in which I'm writing this essay so many decades later, was a small rectangular room with a high window; a window my father Frederic Oates had built, where there'd been a solid wall. My bed took up nearly half the room. On the floor was dark blue linoleum tile in some pattern that suggested the swirl of water, and of night. The walls of the room were painted a pale blue. In the right-hand corner of the room, near the bed, were six glass shelves cleverly fitted into the walls, to hold tiny, fragile glass animals: my "glass menagerie." (It must have been my grandmother, my father's mother, who started me collecting glass creatures as a little girl. My favorites were cats, horses and elephants. These intricate objects, and not dolls, were the early figures that populated my imagination; I never learned to play with dolls, and seem never to have developed a "maternal" nature. A maple-wood chest-of-drawers, a child-sized rolltop desk and a small rocking chair were my furniture. Upstate New York, north of Buffalo and south of Lake Ontario, is a region of violent summer thunderstorms, and my memories of this "safe" space are also bound up, paradoxically, with lightning flashes and deafening thunder waking me in the night, and with gale-force winds rattling my windowpanes. Our power was often out during such storms, and my parents lit kerosene lamps: the smell of kerosene, and of the burning wick, returns to me in dreams, signaling the return of the past.

Since beginning this essay I've asked friends about their "enchanted places," and nearly everyone speaks of recurring dreams of the first bed, first room, the first precious possessions. Before we have any coherent idea of who we might be, we establish a sense of coherent space; the perimeters of our being are identical with the space we inhabit. This primitive, visceral knowledge predates language and is always emotionally gripping in a way no words can evoke.

In the family living room, the predominant piece of furniture was a stately old upright piano. Here was a true enchantment, like an altar! I was drawn to worship at the piano as a very small child. My father had bought this battered but still handsome Steinway second-hand from one of his music teachers in Lockport. As a boy he'd played violin from the age of ten to sixteen, and as an adult he played piano often, at least once a day. He had a natural, inventive, talent, a facility for sight-reading and rapid memorization; he could as easily improvise as play familiar pieces, an ability unfathomable to me. My father would impart to me an intense love of music, and an emotional dependency upon music. Every day of my life, hour upon hour, whether I'm alone or with others, my head is filled with music ae classical, popular, folk ae a bizarre Muzak that never ceases even when I sleep. (Not that I hear this phantom music, exactly; I seem to think it. Often, my fingers are playing it on an imaginary key-board. Frequently I've been tempted, speaking before an audience, to suddenly ask: Does anyone share this peculiar habit with me?) I never had Frederic Oates's natural talent for music but I began taking piano lessons at the age of ten, and I too would quit at sixteen, having reached the inevitable glass ceiling: months of arduous practice yielded the ability to play, with schoolgirl emotion and imprecision, certain works of Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven (astonishing to me now, I'd actually memorized both the Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, erroneously known as the Moonlight, and the Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, the Pathetique), but the effort was Sisyphean.

Yet the piano as a numinous object, an image of beauty, mystery and desire is strongly imprinted upon my consciousness: the rich, evocative smell of a piano, the contemplation of its design, the arrangement of white and black keys, the touch of those keys, the gentle depression of a chord, the furtive strum of its interior strings... (I love the curiously ghostly piano music of Henry Cowell, explorer of piano interiors in such works as "The Banshee" [1925] and "Sinister Resonance" [1930].) In later years my father would acquire a second-hand grand piano, and even a small organ sold off from a local church; as soon as I lived in a house of my own as a young married woman, I bought an upright piano. In time, when we moved to our glass house in Princeton, I would acquire a gleaming white Kawai grand piano, which seems to me the most beautiful object in our household. The piano as an altar; the piano at which often I gaze in wordless reverie, from a distance; the piano that's both a work of art and the most practical of instruments, at which you can sit and play, or try to play, some of the most profound works of the human imagination.

It's the untalented among us who can truly appreciate genius.

My grandparents' wood-frame farmhouse in Millersport had been built in 1888, with a solid stone foundation, a low-ceilinged, dank dirt cellar, a cavernous cistern of the sort to provoke childish nightmares, and, of course, minimal insulation. It was a typical upstate New York farmhouse of its era. Over the decades my father virtually rebuilt it; like many men of his generation, forced out of school and into the labor market young the Great Depression, Frederic Oates had to be carpenter, roofer, bricklay-er, painter, plumber. (He would supplement his income as a tool-and-die designer by professional sign painting. By the time I was in high school, I could recognize Fred Oates's distinctive signs scattered throughout Niagara County.) In time the white, wood-shingled farmhouse was covered in a gritty-looking gray asphalt siding; the decaying barn was converted into a garage. My grandparents died, and my father, earning his income elsewhere, made no effort to continue the farmwork. My childhood memories, however, are steeped in this farm, and in surrounding fields and woods, a bastion of green in which I could loose myself for hours. As anyone who has grown up in the country knows, it's a phenomenon of a vast liquidy silence permeated by myriad sounds (birds, insects, wind) and characterized my myriad particularities. Though we speak of a "field," a "woods," in fact each field and each woods is distinct.

Exploring a pebble-strewn creek, crossing the rusted girders of what had been a bridge, entering a decayed, abandoned house with a quickened heartbeat: these are rural adventures of childhood. Urban childhoods have their own romance, but it's the romance of other people; the romance of a country childhood is otherness, and an acquired predilection for aloneness.

(It's in the presence of other people that I'm vulnerable to being lonely.

Aloneness and loneliness have very little in common.) In 1978, I joined the distinguished humanities faculty at Princeton University, and my husband and I bought our house-in a single, vertiginous hour-about three miles beyond the village, in a semi-rural, wooded area of Hopewell Township. The houses we love are relatively few in a lifetime, like the people we love; our emotional resources are limited. In each major phase of my life there was a predominant house which I admired, and idealized, from a distance; only in August 1978, house-hunting in the Princeton area, did I fall in love with a house at first sight and have the opportunity to buy it-almost immediately.

It isn't invariably true that wishes, fulfilled, are apt to be disillusioning.

The "enchanted place" in which we live has never ceased to exert its spell on me, every day for over twenty years. (If there's a disadvantage to living in an enchanted place, it's that you are very reluctant to leave. And when you must leave, especially on obligatory trips, you feel a terrible melancholy and a longing to return as quickly as possible.

Our house, built in 1962, is single story, primarily glass. The main body of the house consists of eight "modules" with cathedral ceilings, each measuring twelve by sixteen feet; these surround an open atrium, or court-yard, set in idiosyncratically matched flagstones. The several entrances to the house, like the atrium, are hidden from the driveway, and the house itself is hidden from the road, behind a dense stand of trees and a six-foot redwood fence. By local standards our house isn't large-we had not wanted a large house, in fact-but it has the feel of spaciousness, and it opens out expansively at the rear onto acres of township-owned land, a brook, a pond (which my husband, with varying degrees of good and ill luck, has stocked with frogs, snails, multi-colored carp), and woods.

Except for the more private rooms, the walls of most of our rooms are floor-to-ceiling glass, and each room has a sliding glass door to the outside. We've been accustomed to living, in a sense, outside; our former, more conventional houses would seem disorienting to us now. (As a girl, I'd admired English Tudor architecture, and fantasized about one day living in such a handsome, Old-World dwelling; now, I can't imagine how people live with so few windows, so little natural daylight, or why. Surely the great discovery of twentieth-century house design was the discovery of natural light?) There's something very comforting about being surrounded on all sides by green. About watching rain like a waterfall against the domed glass of a skylight, and hearing rain drumming by night. I am not an ascetic who works facing a wall, but rather a romantic individual who takes comfort and nourishment from gazing for long minutes out a window, losing myself in the contemplation of trees, sky, birds, the continuous play of light and shadow on the grass. In houses constructed primarily of glass, the eye is always drawn outward, away from the interior (and away from the self ); there is a fascinating panorama out there, and in here is less demanding. Deer pass close by our windows, and in season, speckled fawns on long shaky legs, with enormous eyes gazing toward our windows. There's a constant drama of birds and squirrels. I seem to have stepped into a dream of my lost childhood, yet one from which the anxieties and the sheer hard work of the farm have melted away. (People think it strange, even perverse, that I continue to write in long hand, and then with an electric typewriter. But I had a word processor for two intense years, and became somewhat addicted to it, hypnotized by its glassy screen into working twelve hours a day, and I so missed daydreaming out my window, I gave it up forever. Computers are certainly ideal for most people, but not for me. Life is too short and contains too much natural beauty, I thought, for me to be mesmerized by shimmering words on a glass screen.) What of the old, lost life of the farm have I retained, or replicated in this new life? I realize, preparing this essay, that consciously or unconsciously I have surrounded myself with images of the countryside. My husband and I collect American art, and on the walls of our larger rooms are: two oil paintings and two pastel drawings of landscapes by Wolf Kahn; a delicately executed watercolor barn by Charles Burchfield; an impressionistic watercolor of rocks, sky and water by John Marin; a small gem of a watercolor titles Summer Squall by Matthew Daub; a boldly enlarged photograph by the surrealist photographer Gregory Crewdson. There are watercolors and drawings of landscapes sent to me by lesser-known artists who have read my fiction, and feel a kinship with it, or with me. On the white walls of my study I've taped reproductions of dramatic landscapes (Albert Bierstadt, Caspar David Friedrich, Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, among others). There are nineteenth-century clocks throughout the house, their pendulums solemnly ticking with no relationship to real time. I no longer collect glass animals but somehow I've acquired, as gifts, quite a few stylish cats. And my father's violin, an exquisite work of art, is hanging on a wall at my back.

Our house was designed by Phillip Sheridan Collins of Princeton, whom my husband and I never met; since then, other architects have been involved in its expansion. Two years ago my study was extended, a second skylight added, and more large windows installed. Before that, we added a solarium at the rear of the house, overlooking the pond. Even as I compose this, cement is being laid for the foundation of the extension of our guest wing, itself converted from a garage. We seem to have become Americans of the sort who continuously "improve"- reimagine-their property, as if pursuing an elusive dream.

The old farmhouse in Millersport, New York has long since been razed.

My father who'd been a young, handsome, vigorous man for so long, died last May at the age of eighty-six. The first "enchanted place' of my life, my child's bedroom, exists now only in memory, and comes alive only in dreams. There is no other entry, and there is no way back.

Joyce Carol Oates.

About the Author:.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member since 1978 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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