Golden Age

1997

ACROSS THE TABLE from Richie, Chance sat still, looking at his plate. Next to Chance, Bea (whom Richie still called Binky) was unabashedly rolling her eyes. Tia had already asked to be excused, been granted permission, and then bestowed a smile upon everyone, including Richie, including Monsignor Kelly, including Binky (though there was the usual touch of contempt in the smile she bestowed on Binky). The topic under discussion was where Chance would be going to boarding school. He had applied to only two and gotten into both, one to please his dad, the Stevenson School, in Pebble Beach, California, about a hundred yards from the site of Michael and Loretta’s famous wedding, and one to please his mom and the monsignor, Woodside Priory School, about a hundred yards from Janet’s house (okay, from where she kept the three horses, wherever that was). Dangers abounded. Chance did not want to go to boarding school, but the alternative was Regis, a Jesuit academy uptown, not, perhaps, far enough for Chance, who appeared restive. Like Richie and Michael, like their dad, Chance was tall and looked maybe two years older than he was (and, Richie thought, acted two years younger than he was). Whatever Perroni was in there made itself felt on the back of a horse or in the cab of a truck: Loretta reported, with some pride, that over Christmas Chance had gotten his grandfather to teach him to drive; it had taken a day, and then he had driven all over the ranch the rest of the vacation. Woodside Priory was all boys, the Pebble Beach school coed. When Michael called Richie to warn him that the monsignor would be there, he’d said, “The whole meal is going to be about the fact that Chance was caught in the hall making out with Patty Malone; he had his tongue in her mouth. So the monsignor is pushing the boys’ school to give him some focus.” When Loretta called a day later to make sure he was coming, she said, “I need your input. I know military school was good for Michael. But he’s got his heart set on Stevenson. Twenty thousand a year! I mean, Michael can afford that, but I’m afraid they’ll just baby him.”

Now Richie said, “I think military school retarded our development.”

Monsignor Kelly gave him a kindly look and said, “About education there are only theories, never actual experiments. You have to go with your instincts.”

“My instinct is that military school made me aggressive and angry.”

“And look where you are now,” said the monsignor, still endlessly benign. “I’m sure you need real toughness in the political climate we have.”

“More like the capacity to ignore almost everything,” said Richie, but he made sure it sounded like a joke.

Michael said, “Military school felt safe to me.”

“The guns were not loaded,” said Richie. Then, “Well, they were loaded with blanks. That did make it easier.”

“It was orderly,” said Michael. “Nothing wrong with orderly.”

“Orderly is a beginning,” said the monsignor.

Richie said, “Which one has more athletic facilities?”

Chance now looked at him. He said, “Stevenson.”

Richie said, “Swimming saved my sanity. If I hadn’t learned to swim, I wouldn’t have met my best friend, Greg, and I would have had to listen to your dad tease me about how I ran like a girl, every day of my life.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Loretta. “Michael wouldn’t do that.”

There was a silence. Binky was staring at Michael, Loretta was shaking her head, the monsignor was looking like he’d seen plenty of boys over the years. Michael said, “I did say that, I admit.”

“Boys will be boys,” said Loretta.

Michael looked at Chance and said, “Chance, I’ve said a lot of things that I regret. Better not to say them, since you can’t apologize for all of them.”

Richie noticed that Michael didn’t apologize, even now, for that old insult.

“Sin,” said the monsignor, “is always with us.” And he looked right at Richie, as if Richie were the embodiment of that idea.

Loretta said, “Boys learn differently from girls. They need more structure and they need to learn how to get along with one another. For heaven’s sake! When they’re ready for girls, the girls will get along with them. And the weather is much better in Portola Valley, sunnier and not as damp. No one loves Pebble Beach as much as I do, but it is worth your sanity to drive out there half the time. My mom said it’s a wonder all those rich people rattling around in those huge houses don’t kill themselves whenever they get the chance.”

“I’ve never been to California,” said the monsignor. “No further west than St. Louis, actually.”

“Well,” said Loretta, “you can come along when I take him. My dad will be happy to meet you, and I’m sure he’ll get you on a horse inside of a day.”

The monsignor lit up like the Irishman he was.

Afterward, when Richie went over the evening in his mind, he could not figure out when the decision was made for Woodside over Stevenson. Nor could he figure out why he was there, unless it was he who was meant to articulate, and therefore define, whatever Loretta would decide against. It was pretty clear to him, though, that Loretta now had Michael surrounded. She had decorated their place entirely to her own taste — blanched colors, abstract paintings on the walls that evoked seascapes, an antique carved oak sideboard that looked like an altar, until you realized that the objects grouped among the lit candles on top of it were just plates, saucers, and cups, though ornate. She had Michael pinned between herself and the monsignor, who ran a charitable foundation that she contributed tens of thousands to every year. She took Michael to Mass on Sunday; she had him driving a Lexus LS. Richie wondered how long it could possibly last.

—

CHARLIE THOUGHT of his uncle Henry not as a father figure (he had one of those) but as a teacher figure (something he had never really had). Uncle Henry didn’t mind answering questions; in fact, the more questions the better. Charlie was reading a book Uncle Henry had assigned—A Tale of Two Cities. Some teacher or other had assigned this book many times over the years, but Charlie had only read the Classic Comics edition. As a result, and because he made himself read for forty-five minutes every day — sometimes fifteen pages, sometimes twenty — he was following the story, learning about the French Revolution (which he had heard people talk about), and enjoying the very strange Evrémonde brothers. Riley did not see Uncle Henry as a teacher figure (she’d made good use of many of those), she saw him as the embodiment of the Medieval Warm Period. Had he read the Saga of the Greenlanders? Yes. Did he really think there had been birch trees in Greenland? Yes. Had he read the Saga of Eric the Red? Yes. Where did he think they got to when they came to the Western Hemisphere? Uncle Henry gave her his copy of Land Under the Pole Star, which Charlie read, too, since it was about a Norwegian man and his wife who went from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Newfoundland in a rowboat, just to prove you could do it, so, yes, Eric the Red had indeed contemplated settling Newfoundland around the year 1000, until the native population drove him off. She quizzed him: How historically based were the Sagas? Grapes in Maine? Or was it Martha’s Vineyard, maybe? The Medieval Warm Period was an unfortunate conundrum that Riley did not like, because people who knew about the Medieval Warm Period were more likely to challenge the concept of man-made global warming, but she did her usual thing. She looked more deeply into the arguments, and discovered ways to understand the Medieval Warm Period — less volcanic activity, more sunlight, strengthened tropical currents. At first, Charlie was afraid that Riley would offend Uncle Henry, but she invigorated him.

Unlike her parents and his parents, Uncle Henry never asked when they were going to have a baby. Every few weeks (more frequently in the winter), he would come to D.C., put himself up at the Capitol Skyline Hotel, and do some work in the Library of Congress. On the Saturdays of these weekends, Charlie, and sometimes Riley, would meet him at the Smithsonian or the National Gallery, and they would go to various shows. He took Charlie to the Folger Library, and introduced him to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He took him to Constitution Hall and the Art Museum of the Americas. Charlie asked a lot of questions, and if Henry couldn’t answer them, he bought a book, which he read quickly and Charlie read slowly. Henry didn’t seem at all surprised by this overwhelming plenitude of objects to look at or ideas to think about, but Charlie was. It seemed to him that he had spent thirty years circling neighborhoods and buildings without even wondering what was inside. And each building was a Fabergé egg, pleasant on the outside, a treasure trove within. Henry said, “Books are like that, too.”

So Charlie read books on the train. He would get on at his station, read and ride to Dupont Circle, then get out and run three miles to the store where he sold hiking boots, kayaking gear, climbing gear. Henry was good for Riley, too, though not because he made her spend a couple of hours every so often walking around in the presence of art and artifacts. And he didn’t mind her talking about global warming — he was born in 1932, and his first memories were of the winter of ’35–’36, when the downstairs windows were blanked by snow, and his brothers, who would have been thirteen and fifteen, would jump out the upstairs windows (and Frank out of the attic window) and slide down the snow mounded against the house. Then Frank disappeared, and that snow-enshrouded season turned into a terribly dusty, hot summer, when, his mother later told him, he lay in his crib covered with hives, sweating and miserable. It was so hot that she had to spread wrung-out wet cloths over him — he sort of remembered that, too, though not as clearly as the snow. In ’56, another drought year — oh, ’56! And his stories wandered away from the weather to how he fell in love with his cousin Rosa, unrequited of course, and how the big scandal in the family was the reappearance of Minnie’s father, a ne’er-do-well drunk who had disappeared years before. Walked into the house while Lois was away and Joe was out cultivating one of the fields, and fell down the basement stairs and died. Henry said, “Frank would whisper in your ear that Lois pushed him, but that was Frank. Yes, it was a drought year, but scandals overwhelmed the weather for me.” Charlie felt his unknown past vibrating. He said, “Our family seems to have a lot of those,” and even as Henry was smiling and shaking his head, Riley burst out, “My grandfather proposed to my great-aunt, and then, behind her back, he married her younger sister, who was my grandmother. And she lived with them for the rest of her life.”

After he went back to Chicago that time, Henry sent Charlie a nicely bound notebook and a pen.

—

“LISTEN TO WHAT Warren told me,” said Emily. Janet was stirring the penne so that it wouldn’t stick. Emily had become a vegetarian, so they were having a mushroom sauce with it, and Jared had told her that, although he would miss Emily once she was off to Mount Holyoke with Pattycake, her jumper, he would not be sorry to go back to guilt-free meat eating. Jonah was doing something noisy in his bedroom — maybe jumping on his bed, which Janet would allow for a minute or two. Warren was the farrier at the barn. Emily liked to encourage him to tell sixty years’ worth of stories while he shod the horses.

“I’m listening,” said Janet.

“Did you ever meet Melvin Case? He was one of Mrs. Herman’s whippers-in.”

“No,” said Janet. She stirred the penne again.

“Warren said that he lives in a railroad-style house. I guess that’s long? Anyway, he heard the phone ringing in the middle of the night, so he got out of bed and staggered to the living room to answer it. When he staggered back to bed, a eucalyptus tree had split in two, and half of it had fallen on the house, right through to the bed; the whole end of the house had collapsed.”

Janet’s spoon jumped in the water. She sensed what was coming — didn’t you always?

“So listen to this. It was a friend of his who had had a dream that Mel had died, and the dream was so vivid that he had to get up and call him, just to make sure he was all right. He said that he was fine. The guy apologized for getting him out of bed. Warren said that, the next day, Mel called his friend and told him always to call him if he had any bad feeling about him.” Then, “Do you believe that? I wish I had that kind of friend.”

Janet thought, yes, I believe it, but she said, “I’m more than a little skeptical.”

“I think it’s creepy.”

“It’s definitely creepy.”

When she woke up in the middle of the night, it was to thoughts about that phone call. Had it happened? Their farrier had plenty of stories, and Janet had listened to her share. Mostly she did believe him — peacocks in his trees; a woman mounting her horse, the horse slipping, landing on her, killing her; a trainer forcing his horse against its will (and Warren’s advice) into a stream, the horse and man going under, the trainer’s cowboy hat popping out of the water like a bubble (the horse saved the man). What Janet wondered about was the fact that this story didn’t scare her, that it didn’t trigger any personal reaction, either about eucalyptus trees or about psychic friends. It pinpointed her realization that she wasn’t afraid anymore — something, since she had kept her fears so secret for so long, that no one else would notice.

She knew, lying there, that it had been her father’s death that erased her fears. That, and giving away her inheritance to Fiona’s favorite charity, the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation; Jared’s favorite, the Big Sur Land Trust; Emily’s favorite, the Jane Goodall Institute; Jonah’s favorite (after some coaching), PBS; and her own favorite, Save the Children. With each check she wrote, she could detect a snort in the empyrean, her father deploring this waste of his hard-earned cash (or maybe that snort was in her own mind). Her mother had said, “How good of you,” but it wasn’t goodness, it was a series of assassinations, and they had worked.

She and Jared had plenty of money, anyway. Their house had doubled in value, and Jared’s stock in his company was at an all-time high. Spending twenty-five thousand a year to send Emily (not to mention Pattycake) to Mount Holyoke seemed prudent, not profligate. People were coming to Jared all the time, asking him to join their start-up — computer animation for every purpose! Once, he was tempted, but when he went into the meeting, he jokingly grabbed the elaborate identifying plaque beside the door of the offices, and it came off in his hands. He took this as a sign and didn’t join them. The entrepreneurs were all twenty-two, anyway. They made him nervous.

But Janet did not think her fears had seeped away because of prosperity or age. Poverty and decrepitude were not what she’d always feared, it was Mutually Assured Destruction. Even after she did avoid Pastor Jones’s version of apocalypse, she worried that she’d only put it off (thinking about it now, she suspected that the knowledge that Lucas, too, had avoided it was what finally eased those fears). The marvel was not that she had dreaded the end of the world; it was that so few others seemed to. When she asked Jared if he remembered the Cold War “duck and cover,” the Cuban Missile Crisis, he shrugged — yes, but no, not really. What she saw now was that she had known all her life that if destruction came her father would not care enough to save her. Now he was gone, and she was safe.

—

JESSE WAS SITTING with his dad, who was propped up but slumping slightly to the right. Jesse hesitated to interfere, because his father seemed to resent the number of times that his mother asked him: Are you okay? Do you need anything? You want me to sit you up a little? You want to get up and sit for a while in the chair by the window? No, no, the answer was always no. He’d be gasping for air as he said it, and then his mother would purse her lips and say, “Well, okay, then. But don’t forget to ask.” Jesse knew that asking was not the same as not forgetting to ask. Farmers hated to ask for things, but they didn’t mind asking about things. Just now his dad said, “You scrape off the paint on the platform of that combine?”

Jesse had bought a new combine a week before, and harvest would begin in a few days. The cornstalks were tall, the ears huge. The kernels were down to about 28 percent moisture now, and the weather was clear and hot for the next couple of days. Jesse liked 26 percent — fewer lost ears. Once, he’d harvested a single field at 28 percent, but a lot of the kernels had been damaged by the equipment. Jesse said, “I did. It’s not at all slippery now.”

“Don’t forget to turn off the machine if the intake gets clogged.” Joe’s voice, once friendly and melodic, had become scratchy.

Jesse wanted to say, “I never do,” but he said, “I won’t.”

“And don’t try to get any twine out of there. Goes in faster than you can react. Don’t care who you are.”

“I know.”

“Who was that, Abel M—”

“I know, Dad. I always turn it off.”

“Make sure Guthrie and Perky stay away from the intake areas.”

“I will.”

“This thing got all the shields in place?”

“It does.”

“That rain we had, you be careful driving that thing through wet spots.”

“I walked the first two fields. The ground is good.”

“Even over above the crick there?”

“Even there.”

“Did you check the spacing on the”—he coughed—“cornhead stripper bars and the belts for wear?”

Jesse did not remind his dad that it was a new machine, that he’d known it was a new machine three minutes before; he said, “Yes.” Harvest made everyone nervous, even Pastor Campbell. How many stubborn men in a hurry does it take to harvest thirty million acres in a month and a half?

Joe said, “Harvest used to be fun. I loved the oat harvest. Now, some of the horses weren’t suited to it — they might take off, run through the fence line — but Jake and Elsa, they were patient. Grandpa Wilmer knew how to breed a horse. Percherons. Good horses, you ask me. We went all around to everyone’s farm and helped each other, and I’ve never eaten like that since.” It took Joe a long time to say this. But Jesse was patient, and when Joe was done he said, “Mom would be sorry to hear that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that the food was good. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. But the conversation was good. Not so much complaining as these days. More like, well, we made it another year, thank the Lord.”

“Thank the Lord,” said Jesse.

Now there was a long silence. Joe’s oxygen tank was across the room, but he hated to use it. He called his condition “farmer’s lung,” as if that was a joke, but Jesse knew it was emphysema, caused by all kinds of dust (but do you really wear a mask when you are cultivating or plowing or closed up in the barn, maintaining equipment over the winter? To do so seemed both silly and frightening). When had the illness come on? If his dad had caught it early, what would he have done, moved to town? Gone to work in his mom’s shop? Now Jesse cleared his own throat, and then he wondered if he would start panicking every time he got a cold.

Suddenly Joe said, “She’s going to rope me into a big funeral and put up a headstone twice as tall and twice as wide as Frank’s.”

Jesse shifted in his chair. His dad hadn’t mentioned his funeral before.

“You make sure I get cremated. Pastor Campbell be damned.”

“I’ll tell her—”

“Yes, you do that. I put it in a letter and I put it in my will, but she’s going to ignore that, sure as rain. You know, when my dad died, I sat with him out under the Osage hedge there, and I knew in my heart that when I was going to die — and I thought that would be forever and a day in the future, or maybe never, you know how it is — I would make sure that I got buried under the Osage tree. I hated that old graveyard where they put Uncle Rolf and everyone. But here I go. Can’t do a thing about it.” He coughed again.

“I don’t think she’ll let me bury you under the Osage hedge,” said Jesse, “but I will sprinkle some ashes there. I will do that. I promise.”

His dad nodded.

It was funny how they talked about this, so matter-of-fact, Jesse thought. No tears were coming to his eyes, though he loved and respected his father. Nor did his dad pity himself. Death was death. If you went to church every Sunday, which they did, you had to accept that death was a release — they certainly told you that over and over, a harvest to be prepared for and then performed.

His dad said, “Don’t you let those boys ride along unless they’ve got a seat to sit on.”

Jesse said, “I won’t, Dad.”

“And don’t you let Pastor Campbell say that I’ve been gathered into the arms of the Lord. I nearly walked out when he said that about your uncle Frank. Frank would have punched him in the nose for that. You know, when my Opa first came here, if an old man died in the winter, well, they just put him in the cellar for a few months, until the ground thawed. That wasn’t a bad idea.”

The door opened. His mom said, “Hi, sweetie. You two have a nice afternoon?”

Jesse said, “We did.”

His mom said, “I roasted some extra Brussels sprouts and sprinkled them with olive oil and Parmesan. I made up a container for you to take home.”

“Thanks, Mom. Those are always good.” Jesse’s hand was resting on his dad’s hand, on top of the sheet, and now he looked down. So similar in shape — not beautiful or graceful, but strong and built for work. His dad’s hand felt dry, hard, cool, ready to fix something or plant something, as if it didn’t know that the system was shutting down. It was the hand of a kind man, a hand that had gently squeezed his shoulder or patted him on the back countless times. How did you deserve such a dad? he thought. But he said nothing, looked away. There would be some point when he would express all of this, but it frightened him now — bad luck, asking for trouble. He gave his father’s hand a squeeze and said, “I guess I’d better check the weather.”

“Could be good,” said Joe.

—

BEFORE SHE WENT to Kyoto for the Convention on Climate Change, Riley moaned incessantly about the carbon footprint of her flight, how could she justify it, why couldn’t they have the conference in…(but she couldn’t come up with a sustainable spot). After she got back (and Richie had paid for the trip, out of pocket, not in his official capacity), she showed no gratitude at all — simply came into his office at all hours of the day and continued arguing with him about the new treaty, about emissions, about money for wind and solar. As far as Richie was concerned, Al getting Bill to sign the treaty was a major victory. The strategy now should be to back off, let Clinton regain his footing and his cool, and move forward from there. But no promise was sufficient for Riley, or for the World Wildlife Fund, or for any other environmental group. He said to her, “Look. The Senate is not going to ratify it. And they would like to tar and feather him for signing it. Can’t you shut up for once?” What he did not say was that there was something else brewing, something that Riley might not care about in any way, but that the Republicans would certainly take advantage of.

Richie was not terribly fond of his scheduler, Lucille, but she had been working as a congressional staffer since the Johnson administration, and she was an accomplished eavesdropper — in the bathroom, in the lunchroom, in the gym, in the hallways, you name it, she had heard things everywhere. One of her strategies, she had told Richie, was to do a crossword puzzle on the can, her body movements stilled. He would not believe, she said, who was sleeping with whom, and where. Across the congressional office desk was the least of it. And now she had heard another thing, and if they got through Christmas without an explosion, they’d be lucky.

There was a girl, Lucille said. In her twenties, plain-looking, dumpy sort of girl. She had worked for Clinton in the White House. Lucille sniffed. Girls worked in the White House generation upon generation. Richie found this difficult to believe. Hadn’t girls in the nineteenth century been required to stay at home? Well, since the Kennedy administration, said Lucille. Someday, they would talk about that. What the girl had done, well, the girl had given in — either to temptation or to the president, what was the difference, said Lucille. But here was the kicker: she had decided to start talking about it. She talked and talked and talked about it. Other people talked about it, too — that was how Lucille heard the news, sitting on the can in the Capitol, quiet as a mouse, doing her puzzle. When the talkers walked along the row of stalls, looking for feet, hers were tucked in the shadows. But they would have talked anyway — everyone loved to talk. Washington ran on gossip. Here was the other thing.

“What?” said Richie.

The woman this girl talked to just happened to make hours and hours of recordings. Lucille was not a fan of Bill Clinton, but her findings were that whatever he did was the norm on Capitol Hill. And the girl was twenty-four, not nineteen.

The next person Richie heard something from was Michael, who had heard it from Loretta, who had overheard it having lunch in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. Someone at Time or Newsweek was already on it. “Everybody knows,” said Michael.

“About what, that a Democrat has balls?”

“Everyone but you,” said Michael.

“Mom wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” said Richie. “Nor would the monsignor.”

“I say nothing about Monsignor Kelly’s balls.”

“At least, not as long as he’s controlling the checkbook, right, Mike?” said Richie.

He saw that Riley had walked into his office yet again. He hung up without saying goodbye, and barked, “Where is Kenisha?” Kenisha was his press secretary.

She ignored him. “Okay, here are your notes for your speech about energy alternatives. I fixed them a little bit, since today is cold, so that they de-emphasize conservation and ramp up innovation and being ahead of the curve and all that. Just remember, natural gas is a stopgap; don’t talk about it too much. And I know nobody likes the doomsday stuff, but Kenisha was in the Chamber a few minutes ago, and she says there’s hardly anybody there, but we’ll get it into the record, anyway.”

She set the speech down on his desk, went to the coat rack, and got his coat, which she held out for him while continuing to talk. “And I have this friend. She just came to town last week.”

“What is her policy specialty?”

“She doesn’t want a job.”

He thrust his arms into the sleeves.

She handed him his gloves. “She’s willing to go out with you. I told her all about you.”

“She hasn’t seen me in the paper?”

“She has. That’s why I had to talk her into it.”

“Is she older than twenty-four?”

“She is thirty. She has a degree in engineering. She doesn’t say much.”

“I would like that,” said Richie.

“That’s what Charlie thought.” She put his speech in his briefcase, put his briefcase in his hand.

“What’s her name?”

“After the speech. I don’t want you distracted.”

Kenisha was waiting in the hall, with her coat already on. It was very important that a congressman never go to the Capitol by himself, as if he had no hangers-on, and Kenisha was good about seeming to talk without talking. Richie looked at his watch. It was after two. Kenisha was right: when he went to the Speaker’s Stand to give his speech, there were four congressmen in the Chamber, and one of them was sleeping.