... when it happened could never be determined precisely since the bodies were frozen and preserved from decay found together on a leather sofa made up as a bed pulled up to within a foot of a fireplace heaped with ashes in a downstairs room of the old clapboard colonial crowded with furniture and what appeared to be the accumulated debris of decades but which may have been materials for artworks or the very artworks themselves of the eccentric artist known as e.w. , the elderly waldman brothers in layers of bulky clothing must have fallen asleep in front of a fire in the otherwise unheated house , the fire must have burnt out in the night and the brothers died in their sleep in a protracted january cold spell : the brother to be identified as edgar waldman , eighty-seven , embracing his brother edward waldman , also eighty-seven , from behind , protectively fitting his body to his brother 's crippled body , forehead tenderly pressed to the back of the other 's head , the two figures coiled together like a gnarled organic material that has petrified to stone .