BOOK REVIEW : Death Adds Complications to Eternal Triangle

Dying Young by Marti Leimbach (Doubleday: $17.95; 277 pp.).

Hilary is 27 years old, between jobs, romances and apartments, living in uncomfortably close quarters with her fussy mother, when she answers a help-wanted advertisement in the Boston paper.

A seriously ill young man needs someone to share his house and function as nurse-companion. She applies for the job and is hired on the spot. Her employer is attractive, patrician, and intellectual--more charming than anyone she has ever known.

Victor levels with her from the start, telling her he has leukemia and has decided to discontinue the drastic treatments that have been barely keeping his disease at bay. He’s taken matters into his own hands for the first time since the diagnosis, vowing to live independently for as long as he can.

He’s heard all the arguments, listened to the pleadings of his father and his friends, and his resolve is unshakable. The combination of courage and foolhardiness is irresistible.

Hilary doesn’t try to change his mind, but moves with him to a town on the tip of Cape Cod--”a discreet place to hide.”

They set up housekeeping, and Hilary quickly adapts to the difficult circumstances, keeping up a brave pretense of normalcy, taking her cues from Victor. Inevitably they become lovers, and though they’re both aware that there’s no future, the present seems enough.

The relentless progress of the disease is sporadic, and on Victor’s good days, anyone meeting them in the market or the local pub might take them for a pair of graduate students--sometimes tense, often apparently carefree.

Leimbach handles this delicate situation with extraordinary skill, offering vignettes showing Victor’s arrogance and tenderness, revealing Hilary as she struggles to reconcile her anomalous roles in his life.

By turns, she’s sweetheart, servant, guardian, and playmate, and on rare occasions, she’s simply herself, trying to resolve her own doubts and insecurities by walks on the beach or solitary excursions into the village.

On one of these ventures, she meets Gordon, also a Boston Brahmin, but hearty, healthy, and clearly interested in her.

For a while Gordon, Victor and Hilary maintain the illusion of being a friendly threesome, but Victor soon realizes that Gordon has fallen in love with Hilary, and that she is guiltily but powerfully drawn to him. At this point, the three facades begin to crumble.

Hilary finds herself unable to resist Gordon’s advances; Gordon presses for a confrontation with Victor, who of course has suspected that matters between Hilary and Gordon have gone far beyond mere palship.

Victor’s wit becomes corrosive; Gordon’s ruddy wholesomeness sours into cruelty, and Hilary begins to disintegrate under the strain of loving and being loved by two men.

As if this were not complication enough, Victor’s estranged father resurfaces, imploring him to resume treatment.

While this situation could easily slide into bathos, the author manages to avert--if often by a tiny margin--the inherent deadfalls.

The unremitting intensity is relieved by the introduction of a few superbly realized auxiliary characters and some effective diversionary incidents calculated to show us Hilary, Gordon and Victor by refraction.

Of the trio, only Victor remains steadfast; keeping his lofty detachment even in extremes. Gordon, so appealing when we first meet him, is revealed as a heartless hypocrite, who not only deceives Victor but is determined to gloat over his triumph.

Hilary, whom we had admired for her devotion to Victor, loses our respect when she cannot remain faithful to Victor even for the tragically short time left to him.

Though we can appreciate the tremendous strain under which she’s lived, her capitulation makes her seem merely a feckless opportunist instead of the life-affirming heroine we’d been admiring.

Despite the lyrical imagery and the restraint with which the bleak material is managed, “Dying Young” must constantly struggle against the enormous weight of its plot--one that has made and broken scores of writers before and since the invention of moveable type.