Golden Age

1994

THE FIRST TIME Ivy and Loretta had stopped speaking was the year before, when Ivy, Richie, and Leo were at Michael and Loretta’s place. The food was on their plates, Ivy was helping Leo with his fork, Chance was kicking Richie under the table (thinking, Richie knew, that he was kicking Tia), and Loretta said, with just a twitch of the eyebrows in Richie’s direction, “Can you believe that they kept the planes circling over LAX so that Bill Clinton could have a Beverly Hills haircut?” She tossed her head back and laughed what Richie considered a fake laugh, and Michael said, “He is ruthless. He’ll do anything.”

Ivy said, “No, I don’t believe it,” and there was nothing in her voice — she was preoccupied with Leo for the moment.

What she didn’t know was that Loretta had already taken Richie aside about “the health-care mess” in the kitchen, when all he was doing was having a look at the pork tenderloin she was making, and informed him that she considered his work on health care to be a bona-fide un-American activity. In his best I-am-your-congressman-and-am-happy-to-listen-to-your-views, he had said, “Why is that, Loretta?”

“If I want to move to Europe and wait in line to have my heart attack attended to, I will, but right now, right here, I want actual good health care.”

“Well, you can afford it,” said Richie.

“And why is that?” said Loretta.

And Richie did not say, Because your great-grandfather showed up in the right place and the right time and bought good land, well-located land, cheap from the Mexicans, who, by the way, had to vacate. He said, “I don’t know.” Just so he might hear what she had to say.

“Because Michael is an innovator and a thinker. He’s made his way by being smart and ahead of the game. Who realized that stocks were finished and bonds were the way to go? Michael. Who now has his own trading operation when no one had the balls to try it before? Michael.”

Richie had known that Michael was casting about for something riskier to do, but he hadn’t known the result. He filed away this bit of information, but he said, “So everyone else should suffer and die?”

“Don’t be so aggressive,” said Loretta, stirring the polenta. “It’s not becoming.”

And Richie backed down, the way Congressman Scheuer advised him to do, saying, “Now, this is how you do it: you listen, you nod, you maintain your focus, and you recognize that many of your colleagues are crazy or dumb. You are the tortoise, you are the bulldog. You keep holding on and you will win, but don’t go at them. That way, you kill yourself in the end.” Of course, Congressman Scheuer had also advised him to get himself onto the committee that was working on health care, a “can’t lose” way to start his political career, and he had said that campaigns were wild and sometimes vicious but that after the election everyone accepted that those who won, won, and they got down to business. It had taken Richie two months to realize that those were the old days, the old days of 1990, and those days were already gone.

And so they started eating, and then Ivy said, “That item of bullshit was made up by Bill Kristol and parroted by the L.A. Times, same as Travelgate, same as the idea that Hillary is simultaneously a controlling superhuman bitch and an incompetent hag,” and it was her tone, mocking and self-confident, that propelled Loretta from her chair into her bedroom, while Tia said, “What’s wrong with Mom?” and Ivy said, “What’s going on?”

Michael said, “She hates the Clintons. We were at a party last week and someone said she thought they were a breath of fresh air in Washington at last, and Loretta threw a bowl of chips in the woman’s face.”

After that, no invitations or phone calls for two weeks; then the two women had lunch and agreed not to talk politics.

The second time they stopped speaking came in the summer, around the death of Vince Foster, a decent guy who had come with the Clintons from Arkansas and had not been able to handle politics in Washington — and how could he? Richie thought. Loretta went straight from the discovery of the body to convicting the Clintons of murder in less than a day, and in fact told Ivy that her mother, in California, had proof that hired goons from New York City had done it, people so experienced in getting rid of potential truth-tellers that they had murdered hundreds of law-abiding Republicans over the years. Ivy laughed so hard that Loretta hung up on her, and that silence lasted a month.

Richie found the death of Vince Foster, whatever the circumstances, uniquely eerie because he had been driving through McLean the evening before the body was discovered. He had gone out of his way to drive past Uncle Arthur and Aunt Lillian’s old place, noticed that it was repainted and updated, and then started thinking about what Uncle Arthur might know about various things, and then he started wondering about his dad and Uncle Arthur, what sort of friends they had always been, and what did they know about one another that they would never reveal. The whole idea made him feel a little dizzy, so he pulled to the side of the road for a few minutes, admittedly not at Fort Marcy Park, where the body was found the next day, but near there — he would not have been an eyewitness to anything — but when the discovery of the body appeared in the papers, he found himself confusing the two mysteries and deciding that, no matter what, he would never live in McLean.

When Richie brought this up with his mom, she had said, “Your uncle Arthur is a tragic figure, but your father is not,” in her usual distracted voice. Was that Andy’s way of not taking sides? He knew that she considered him a tattletale, always had as long as he could remember, but he considered himself a genuinely confused person. The same thing was true in Congress — he was genuinely confused. It was not like the old days in Brooklyn, talking to this person and that person about the congressman and his associates and enemies; in New York, everyone had been blunt about their motives. In Washington, he had discovered, you never knew. There was one senator, and a famous one, who kept on his staff a certain chatty young woman who was from a certain state. Whenever the senator needed help from the equally famous but very different senator from that other state, he would send the young woman to “gossip him down,” which meant that she would get him in a good mood by talking about all of their mutual acquaintances, and not leave until she got a promise that he would help her boss on something or other. The entire building, all the buildings, the Capitol and the office buildings, buzzed with hidden agendas, and it took years to learn all the languages that were spoken. Some congressmen hated to be interrupted, for example — they saw it as a sign of disrespect. Others expected to be interrupted — if you didn’t interrupt, you weren’t paying attention (Congressman Scheuer had been like this). For just these reasons, Riley Calhoun was not a good staffer. She would argue vehemently about the greenhouse effect even with those who agreed with her — no one was ever as worried about the greenhouse effect as they should be (though now Riley said he was to call it “global warming”). Was insistence a Wisconsin trait? But Riley was a dynamite researcher, so Richie more or less paid her a legislative assistant’s salary to keep quiet and keep investigating. He also got himself on the Energy and Commerce Committee, and for that he had to thank her, since his real first choice had been Foreign Affairs, and if he were on that committee, he would have to have an opinion about Bosnia and Serbia right now. He was glad that he didn’t have to take responsibility for anything other than funding solar initiatives and counteracting the greenhouse effect.

His office had been running smoothly for almost a year. His “spokesmodel,” as she called herself, or “communications director,” named Geneva Nicoletti, was from Greenwich Village but dressed like she was from Cleveland, always wore a belt that showed off her narrow waist, and never stopped smiling. Richie liked both Riley and Geneva. They were in their twenties and seemed to accept the strange idea that he knew what he was talking about. Two people that he suspected knew that he did not know what he was talking about were Marion, his chief of staff, who had worked for Congressman Scheuer, and Lucille, his scheduler, who had been the congressman’s scheduler. She was black. She owned a house in D.C., and liked working for congressmen, though she’d been disappointed to move from Rayburn, where the congressman had his office (“I am the congressman!” thought Richie, every time Lucille referred to Congressman Scheuer as “the congressman”) to Cannon, much tighter quarters. Richie expected Lucille to take immediate advantage of the next congressional heart attack if that congressman happened to have an office in Rayburn. Italian, black, Native American, Hispanic (Marion’s assistant’s parents were from Cuba) — Richie privately thought of his staff as a Rainbow Coalition that legitimized his election every single day.

He had also found that he didn’t mind staying in Washington during the week and coming home on weekends. His apartment in Washington was a one-bedroom in the basement of a townhouse, with a futon, a TV, and a toaster oven, within biking distance of the Capitol building, and not only did he enjoy biking, but he wore a helmet and encouraged photographers from newspapers to take pictures of him standing beside his trusty Dahon. He was not, at forty-one, the youngest congressman, but he didn’t mind looking like he was. The apartment was bracingly basic, and the more basic it stayed, the more he didn’t have to share it with anyone or invite anyone over.

Another reason he didn’t mind staying in Washington and going back and forth on the train was that Ivy was ready to try for another, which was fine in theory, but Leo was ill-tempered, fast, strong, and dictatorial. Ivy said it was the Terrible Twos just lingering a little, even though a book she herself had edited about child-rearing techniques said that three (he was three years, seven months, now) was supposed to be an oasis of calm between two and four. Leo was how Richie remembered Michael being when they were children, and when the thought occurred to him that maybe Michael had, indeed, tried the pregnancy experiment some night when he was in Washington and Loretta was in California, it was so debilitating that he had to force it out of his mind. Leo was better with Allie than he was with either of his parents — she had a way of standing quietly when Leo was misbehaving, as if he had turned her to stone and he had to become good to give her life again. Richie had tried this himself, but Leo’s nervous system shot bolts of lightning into his own, and any quietness he managed felt and looked fake. As for running in the park, Leo still liked to do that — but he was better with Charlie, who sometimes came and walked with them (or circled them, running), than he was with Richie.

The reason Ivy and Loretta were not speaking for the third time in just over a year had nothing to do with the Clintons or the Serbs. The last time they had traveled to Eighty-fourth Street for dinner (and, yes, Ivy was already in a bad mood), Binky, who was sitting beside Leo in the highchair, held out her hand for the Barbie (her Barbie) that Leo had brought to the table. Binky said, “Please, Leo? Barbie doesn’t eat with us.” Leo had seemed to be giving her the Barbie, and so she had grasped it, but Leo had not been giving her the Barbie — when he pulled his hand away, it seemed to him that Binky was grabbing it, and he shouted “No!” at the top of his lungs, and then began pounding on the tray of his highchair and screaming “No! No! No!” his face turning red and his whole body contorted with rage.

It was Chance who calmed him down, by getting out of his seat and jumping around, making faces. The chicken stew was delicious, and it seemed as though everyone was going to forget about it, but then Loretta handed Ivy a child-raising book that promoted beating the child until he finally submitted to the proper authority for his own good, and as soon as Ivy saw what book it was, it was Ivy who said “Never again.” Never again dinner at Michael and Loretta’s, or even on the Upper East Side, never again Christmas. (She was Jewish! Didn’t they realize that this Christmas crap was offensive to her? She didn’t even know what day Christmas was!) She had afforded Loretta the benefit of the doubt for fifteen years now, and if she ever heard the words “Ronald Reagan” again, she would not be responsible for her actions. All in all, the chaos in Washington wasn’t as difficult as the chaos in Brooklyn — the moratorium on even mentioning Loretta’s name was only nine days old at this point, but since Ivy had been the one to make the first move the previous two times, Richie did not think this was going to end quickly.

—

FRANK ACTED ON impulse more often now that he had no career to focus on, but even Andy didn’t see how he could resist this opportunity. Their trip to Greece had been such a success that it had given him a renewed taste for flying. He’d sat in the copilot’s seat between Athens and Crete and between Olympia and Athens, and decided that, yes, the best view was always up front. He didn’t want to buy another plane — the thought was so bittersweet and seductive that he made himself contemplate it as long as it took to recoil from it once again — expense, inconvenience — but he did contemplate it every few days.

And then Jim Upjohn, who, even though he never left the cranberry farm in South Jersey, seemed completely up-to-the-minute about everything, called and said a cousin of his, Jack Upjohn, maybe forty, who had an old twin-engine four-seater, was heading for the West Coast, where he lived, which was why Frank had never met him, but he was making several stops. Frank needed to get out, said Jim — he should go along for at least part of the way. One of the stops was Pittsburgh, one Chicago, one Ames, one Denver. Andy could go on ahead to Palo Alto, and Frank could join her. He was eager to see Janet and Jonah, and Emily and Jared, too, for that matter — Andy didn’t need to laugh behind her hand at him, he was willing to admit that mistakes had been made, should be unmade. Frank would join her; they would stay for a week at the Stanford Inn and fly back together.

In Pittsburgh, he whiled away his time at the Carnegie Museum of Art, beguiled that you could find such enjoyment in a place you had never thought of before. In Chicago, he stayed with Henry and Claire — or mostly Henry, since after breakfast Claire went to her boyfriend’s place for the weekend. Frank and Henry walked along the lake; Henry seemed a little lonely, and talked primarily about some Welsh guy he was resurrecting, only a little about how Frank seemed relaxed, happy, not quite himself. Jack was delayed in his meeting, so they didn’t get away until after dinner, but they were only going to Ames, which wasn’t much more than an hour’s flight even in an old twin-engine.

They left out of Midway. Spying on planes parked in the field or those he could see in the hangars helped Frank give up his fantasy — it was rather like trading in the Mercedes for a Bentley; why would you, but how could you not? In some places these days, if you showed up in a Mercedes, they made you park in the servants’ lot.

After they put their headsets on and took off, Jack started talking about how being in the Midwest reminded him of a side trip he’d made with his wife to a place called “The House on the Rock,” in southern Wisconsin. Before he bought the plane, they had been driving from Madison to Minneapolis, where she was from, and decided to go past Taliesin, the place Wright had built near where his uncles lived, and where he had grown up. No getting into Taliesin, but then there was this parking lot full of cars, and a sign that said “The House on the Rock,” so they stopped. Craziest house you ever saw — perched on a two-hundred-foot-tall monolith, built in the supposedly Japanese style, and so full of junk and crap…

They were now out of Chicago, and this was the part Frank loved about a light plane: you flew fairly low. The earth rolled and bobbled beneath you; that you could see everything so clearly and yet pass over it so smoothly was a great gift to the senses. They were coming up on the river now, marking that line between Illinois and Iowa that Frank knew so well from every map he had ever seen but always found strange when he flew over it, as if a map had been given reality. The Mississippi was clear and attractive around here, almost blue. And then, past the greenery of the riverbanks and onward across the fields of corn — yes, he would talk to Jesse about the corn harvest and the bean harvest, but the rains were pretty good this year, not like the flooding the year before. Frank had sent Jesse a check for fifty grand in February; did Joe know about it? Frank was a realist about the farm: some years it paid for itself and some years it didn’t, and that was not Jesse’s fault, but Joe might be uncomfortable….

The storm cell appeared off to the northwest, as they were passing Cedar Rapids, at first an isolated fuzziness in the dusk — there were even stars to the west and southwest. It seemed unaccompanied by any associated cells, but they couldn’t really see — even Frank, whose eyes were if anything sharper now than they had been, couldn’t make out the edges or the shape of the cell. Jack said, “There could be more behind it; it’s hot here, and the line of storms usually runs northwest to southeast, especially across the plains.” He radioed Cedar Rapids. The tower there said they didn’t have much on the radar. They flew on, Jack changing course a little to the south.

When the cell hit, the plane jumped like a cat, up and to the side, and Jack leaned back, his hands tight on the yoke, which was quivering. He pressed down on the right rudder pedal to correct the yaw, which had been caused by the sudden turbulence. Night had come. Frank said, “How far are we from Ames?”

“About sixty miles is my guess.”

They would be over Tama, then. Forty miles southeast of the farm, where, he imagined, Jesse was glancing out the window, counting the seconds between flashes of lightning and the subsequent booms of thunder. He noticed that it was too dark to see much, and suddenly water was flowing horizontally over the windshield. He said, “I don’t remember there being a control tower or anything like that in Ames. You want to head to Des Moines?”

“That could be worse. Maybe this is just an isolated cell.”

Frank nodded. He wasn’t worried: he was so used to being in an airplane after all these years that he was still perfectly comfortable. He said, “The first time Jim ever took me up, he said he loved planes because a house was like a tomb and a plane was like a passing thought.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d said. Frank elaborated, “In a plane you could vanish.”

“That sounds like him. My grandfather is fourteen years younger than him. All the brothers would do this when his name came up at parties”—he spun his finger around his ear—“but they loved him.”

“He’s a charming man,” said Frank. “You look a little like him when he was your age.”

“That’s a compliment.”

Turbulence buffeted the plane again, a harder smack this time, and the nose dipped. Jack leaned way back, gripping the yoke, and then turned it to counteract the roll. Above the whine of the engine, Frank could hear the thunder, the claps getting closer together. Outside the window, lightning strikes had devolved into a steady flare. He wanted to say some idle thing about the strangeness of the weather, something that would reassure both Jack and himself, but the noise was too loud now. The plane rocked again. In the glaring light, Jack began to look worried, then laughed. He had hundreds of hours of flight experience, but, Frank thought, glancing at his profile, maybe not this exact experience.

The next thing that happened was that lights on the ground appeared in the windshield and then disappeared again as Jack corrected the pitch of the plane.

“There it is,” said Jack, his voice steady.

Below and in front of them, the Ames airport, such as it was, stretched wetly to the northwest, dark, narrow, and short, a few trees to either side, but no tower, only two parallel rows of dim runway lights, nothing welcoming. Now the plane was rocking and rolling, or, as Janet might say about a horse, bucking.

Jack radioed the tower in Des Moines. Through crackling static, they said that the storm cell seemed to be right over Ames — where were they? Jack said, “Landing in Ames.”

The voice said, “Good luck.”

Frank kept his mouth shut and stared at the runway. He could sense Jack beside him, intent, holding tight to the yoke as the plane shifted and bobbed, as the approaching earth bounced and shivered. Frank shoved his feet forward and leaned back in his seat, as if he could counteract all of these forces with just his weight. They touched down, safe for a moment, but then the plane swerved and went skidding past the dark buildings out Frank’s window, not seeming to slow down at all, reminding Frank that there were many ways to die in a plane crash, and nose-first was only one of them. But the turf at the end of the runway caught them, and the plane shuddered, halted. They sat quietly within the noise of the pounding rain for a long moment. Jack said only, “Oh, shit,” as he cut the engines.

Frank said, “Jim will be proud when I tell him about this.”

Frank could see that Jack’s hand was trembling on the yoke. His own hand, which came up to wipe the moisture from his lips, was trembling, too. Jack took several deep breaths. Frank checked his watch. It was eight o’clock. They had left Chicago at six-fifty. Amazing how long those seventy minutes felt, thought Frank.

Then the storm seemed to let up, and it was true, there did not appear to be another behind it, or, at least, right behind it. Jack got out of his seat and unlatched the door. He said, “I told my contact that I would call him to pick us up. He can put you up, too. They live right in town.”

“Did I mention that I went to college here?”

“Really?” Jack was struggling into his raincoat.

After near-death, practicalities.

Really, thought Frank. They were only a mile or so from where, at seventeen, he’d pitched his tent beside the Skunk River.

Jack said, “Be right back. We’ve got to figure out a way to get the plane off the runway — but we may be stuck in the mud.” He disappeared. Frank stared out the window, watching as Jack, hunched over, ran toward the building where there probably was a pay phone. Then he decided to have a look around: the cabin was tight, and he needed to stand up straight and stretch his shoulders and hips. He had been tense. Yes, he was willing to admit that.

When he got to the bottom of the steps, he couldn’t see much — it was still raining fairly steadily. The fields to the south and west were not quite flat, and sloped away to a dark mass — probably trees and bushes along a creek. Frank walked toward the edge of the runway to take a piss, thinking how utterly familiar the landscape was to him, not only how it looked, but also the scent of the rain and the dirt and the summer vegetation. He unzipped his fly.

—

IN PALO ALTO, Andy was in the kitchen when the phone rang, squatting before the open refrigerator. She was supposed to be getting some blueberries for Jonah, but, really, they were just staring into the lighted space, and Jonah was telling her the names of things he liked: “Duce, mik, buberries.” He was a mild-mannered, systematic child. Andy pointed to the catsup and said, “Catsup?” Jonah had eaten a dab of catsup on his turkey burger that day for lunch. The phone screeched twice, and Andy went on the alert — she hadn’t heard Janet’s phone so clearly before. Then there was silence, and then she heard Janet say, “Oh my God in heaven! Oh!” Andy stood up, picked up Jonah, carefully closed the refrigerator door, and went into the dining room. She knew it was Frank. She had agreed to the plane idea, but she hadn’t been happy about it — old plane, long trip, unknown pilot. It didn’t help that she had watched Sweet Dreams the night before on TV, and thought of Frank the moment that plane hit the cliff. She said, “There’s been a crash.”

Janet whipped around and held out her arms for Jonah. This moment, when she handed Jonah over, was the last moment of her normal life, so Andy did it slowly, carefully, kissing Jonah on the cheek, as if she were kissing him goodbye. Had she kissed Frank goodbye? Or had she run to her gate at Newark, late as usual, just turning and waving? She couldn’t remember.

Janet said, “Mom, he was struck by lightning.”

Andy’s first reaction was a quick, rueful laugh, just at the rightness of it. Janet turned away, and Andy felt the rest of her life entering her body, along her nerve endings. So many times she had thought Frank could die — in the war, in his plane, in his restless perambulations here and there — and then he hadn’t, and now he had. She got dizzy; she placed the palms of both her hands against the wall and closed her eyes.

Andy agreed that they would have the funeral in Denby, that Frank would be buried next to his uncle Rolf, down the line from his mother and father, even though this meant that she would then be without him. Frank had never said whether he wanted to be cremated or interred, or where. When other people their age started talking about their burial plans (ashes tossed into the Atlantic, composted, marble slab, whatever), Frank always said nothing. Maybe, she thought, he really did think of himself as immortal, or maybe he just didn’t care.

Andy flew into Des Moines, then rented a car. She drove straight to the funeral home, walked in, and had an immediate argument with the funeral-home director about whether, that very minute, she would be allowed to see the body. The director said that it was not a good idea, that she would be too strongly affected. He was about forty-five, smooth, and good-looking. Andy said, “I am not leaving until you show me the body.”

He shook his head a little, but turned and walked toward the back of the room; she followed him through a door. Frank was lying on a triangular, tilted table, his head lower than his feet. He was naked, with a sheet over everything except his face. The funeral director stopped, expecting Andy to stop, too — wasn’t this enough for her? But, no, it wasn’t. She walked over and put her hand on Frank’s forehead. It was icy cold. She pushed away the sheet. He was not disemboweled or anything, if she had been expecting that. He looked like a wax effigy of himself, except that a fan of red lines proliferated, a slender tree, from his hairline above his right cheek, down the side of his face and his neck, then along his shoulder, and down his abdomen. Andy knew that most people survived lightning strikes, sometimes more than one, but the red vine seemed to encompass his entire body, to claim him for another world. The Upjohn boy, whom she hadn’t met before, said that he had heard the clap of thunder, seen the lightning, but not realized that anything had happened until he climbed back into the plane and saw that Frank was gone. He’d been looking out the windshield, and by the light of another flash, he saw Frank stretched out on the grass beyond the pavement of the runway. Why Frank had gone there, no one knew — there was nothing there but dirt. Andy ran her hand down the chilled corpse, head to toe, sensed with her fingers the fact that Frank was dead. She leaned over and kissed him. She thought, this is what a girl who grows up expecting Ragnarök, madness, freezing deaths on the prairie, who is not at all surprised by the Rwandan genocide, might consider a happy ending.