Middle Age Read Online Free Page B

Jones Point, New York.
    Within twenty-four hours they’d received their share of public media Middle Age: A Romance
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    attention and censure: newscasters hadn’t accused them of being “negligent parents” but there’d been that implication, and police were going to
    “investigate” the accident in which the Thwaites’ eight-year-old daughter, Samantha, and ten-year-old son had gone out onto the Hudson River in a neighbor’s sailboat manned not by an adult but by a thirteen-year-old boy.
    The boat had been equipped with child-sized life jackets but none of the children was wearing one. Yes, it was stupid. It was negligence. Possibly criminal negligence. But how much more merciful, simply to forgive.
    She would hear her voice on the telephone, commiserating with friends, “Being bitter won’t bring Adam back. And Adam was the most logical of men.”
    And again, “Wasn’t it just like Adam! If—he had to go—without warning, suddenly—he would have wished for—something like this.”
    But was this true? There came Thwaite Thwaite to taunt her, when she was being most rational, responsible. Thwaite the tarry black phlegm of death.
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    M    to Jones Point because, in Adam Berendt’s wallet, there was no information regarding next of kin. In case of emergency had been left blank.
    Had the man no family? No one?
    What was found in the badly worn wallet was a water-soaked little white card:
    T S B, . 
     Pedlar’s Lane
    Salthill-on-Hudson, NY
    proprietor Marina Troy
    On the reverse of the little card was Marina’s home telephone number, scrawled in pencil, and it was this number authorities called.
    So Marina was summoned. By a voice of authority. Like a sleepwalker she obeyed. Too stunned even to think, It can’t be, can it? Not like this .
    In a calm sort of panic she was driving. She would not recall afterward getting into the car. Starting the motor. That suspension of time before
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    J C O
    she would see the irrefutable body. Yet she’d had a sense, for Marina Troy was a woman with an appreciation of bittersweet ironies, that this was a cruel time to be driving to Jones Point on such a mission. For dusk was the luminous time, the romantic time. At dusk, she’d often thought of Adam Berendt. At dusk, she’d often been with Adam Berendt. Now across the wide gleaming river was a scattering of lights like startled thoughts. On the river, there were ghostly sailboats and speedboats winking lights.
    Marina wondered: Was it safe to be boating on the river, as night came on? There were occasional freighters, enormous commercial barges beside which the pleasure craft seemed of no more substance than moths. Why had Adam been on the river, in a sailboat? Whose sailboat, where? Why at Jones Point? If I’d been with him . Why wasn’t I with him . Marina and Adam were planning to see each other, with Salthill friends, the following evening. That had been their plan.
    Why didn’t you call us, Marina. Let us go with you. What a shock for you.
    Are you sure you’re all right?
    She was sure. Oh, yes! Only just she was so furious, and so heartsick.
    Wanting to drive up to see him, alone. Not wanting any talk. Not even commiseration. Shared tears. Maybe he isn’t dead, it’s someone else? Another man? Marina had been told only the stark fact that Adam, or a man pur-ported to be “Adam Berendt,” had died a short time before of complica-tions resulting from a “boating accident” on the river.
    The river! Marina recalled how from Adam’s studio, at the rear of his house, you could stand staring across the river, those long mesmerized moments as light faded on the agitated waves, and dusk deepened at the edges of things; dusk, a quality of earth; while an eerie oily-glistening light remained on the water. In the west, the sun was chemical red