Golden Age

2002

ARTHUR WASN’T DEAD by Christmas, but he was dead by New Year’s Day. On the 3rd, Richie and Nadie took Riley and Uncle Henry to the service. The funeral was at a funeral home in McLean, easy to get to. As they drove past the neighborhood that Tim had roamed around, and then past Arthur and Lillian’s old place, Riley stared out the window but didn’t ask to stop or say anything; Charlie himself had no connection to this landscape. Uncle Henry, too, seemed small and quiet. But Richie remembered Tim vividly here — how grown up he’d seemed when Richie was just a kid. He and Michael hadn’t been there when Tim did some of his more legendary things, like jumping off the roof of the house into the pool, but, merely sitting at the supper table or teasing Janet, he had had an air of danger that Charlie, with all of his good nature, had never had.

They were the first to arrive at the funeral home. The casket was sitting forlornly in “The Memorial Center,” a large, dim, empty, greenish room. Tina arrived next, having taken a cab from Dulles. Richie introduced her to Riley and Nadie, and Tina gave Riley a heartfelt hug, then kissed her. Richie hadn’t realized that they had had much of a relationship before Charlie died, but afterward, Riley mentioned that they exchanged letters or e-mails every month or so — she had sent them a beautiful carved panel after their wedding, medieval-looking and ornate, but the faces of the couple were the faces of Charlie and Riley as Adam and Eve; Charlie was laughing, and Riley was looking pensively at the apple in her hand. Then Dean and Linda showed up, after them Debbie, looking pinched and sad, Hugh, looking bland, Kevin and Carlie, looking like the twenty-somethings they were (unsure of themselves). Except for Tina, the Mannings stood together in a bunch, while Richie, Riley, Uncle Henry, and Nadie stood in a line, space between them. Janet’s plane had been delayed for so long out of San Francisco that she had decided in the end not to come. After the chat about Arthur’s end (“peaceful”) had subsided into an uncomfortable silence, the director of the funeral home walked in and out a few times, asking if everyone was all right, and looking at his watch. Finally, Debbie stepped up to the casket, put her hands together, and said, “I asked my dad several times what he wanted for his service. He said, ‘Small, secret, out of the way.’ So — here we are.”

Just at that moment, the door opened and Richie’s mom slipped in. Debbie stopped speaking, looked at her, smiled. Andy, who was wearing a perfectly cut black wool coat with a tight waist and wide skirt that was probably as old as Richie was, glided down the aisle between the rows of empty chairs and took his hand. The service was indeed short, and maybe, in some sense, it was for Riley. There had been memorial services for the victims of all four 9/11 disasters, and the remains of many of the victims had been identified but not, so far, any of Charlie’s. (Riley had spent a week in November trying to convince him that Charlie hadn’t actually been on the plane, until Nadie finally said, “So he’s using this as an excuse to leave you?” which shut her up about that.) Richie hoped that you could add up memorial services like interest on investments, until they finally produced a payoff — comfort, acceptance, hope, especially if you were pregnant and due in May. (It was Nadie who insisted that Riley confess — was she pregnant or not? Yes, she was, and although she had thought about it, she could not bring herself to have another abortion, even in spite of the nature of the world she saw everywhere. Nadie had put her hands on Riley’s shoulders, looked her in the eye, and said, “Do you love me?” Riley nodded. Nadie said, “My mother lived in a much more horrifying world than you do, and abortion was routine there. I am a good reason not to have an abortion.” She said it lightly, and Riley said, “We’ll see about that in the future,” but took what she said to heart. Nadie had reported this to Richie at the office Christmas party.)

Everyone said something. His mom was last. Her voice was soft and vaporous, almost like memory itself. Richie could see how, once upon a time, her voice had been taken to indicate that she was dumb or thoughtless, and even she said that she had been both, but now listening to her talk was like feeling a light breeze that made you wake up to something, maybe your own existence, for a moment. She said, “I always thought my dear friend Arthur’s great tragedy was that he knew what love was better than anyone else in the world, and he could feel it wavering and swelling or dissipating and flowing away as no one else could. It was a terrible burden for him. It was as if he had an extra sense, the way dogs hear sounds that we can’t. That’s why he did what he did, that’s why he loved Lillian as he did, that’s why he put up with me and Frank, that’s why Tim’s death and Charlie’s death tormented him so. If he took you in, then he saw something in you that was worth caring for, sort of like a vibration in your surface, and so he tried and tried, but we all slipped away from him, because that’s what life is. So many times he would say to me, Andy, I give up, but he could never give up; something or someone would pull him back. I am eighty-one now, and so Arthur would be almost eighty-two, and the last time we saw each other”—here she looked at Debbie, who was crying, but she went on anyway—“he said, ‘When do I break out of this joint?’—you know, the way he had of always making a joke — and I do believe I said, ‘When you’ve given up on us, darling,’ and we laughed.” She laid one hand on the casket and then the other one. Then she said, “I know you are not supposed to say this at a funeral, but I’m nearly as old as he was, so I am going to be a crazy old lady and say, ‘I am glad that he did.’ ” Now she looked at Debbie again, but Debbie was, in fact, nodding, just a bit, even if she didn’t realize that she was nodding.

Well, she looked sixty, that’s what Nadie and Riley agreed as they drove back to Washington after the interment. Graceful and unlined. Richie joked and said, “I’m not sure she has actually used her body much over the years. My dad might have had two hundred thousand miles on his, but Mom has been driven very little.” Uncle Henry said, “It isn’t that. It’s the Norwegian bloodlines. Survival of the most efficient.” Riley unconsciously put her hand on her belly. At the brunch, Debbie and Tina had both made much of the fact that they were going to be great-aunts, and at such a miraculously young age; they couldn’t wait to give Riley all sorts of unnecessary advice, how exciting, many kisses, much holding of hands, many reminders to stay in touch, until Riley had begun to reciprocate. When they were back in D.C. and had dropped her off at her place, he, Nadie, and Uncle Henry watched her for a few extra moments before waving one last time and driving away. Then Nadie said, “Maybe that did the trick. She seems more like her old self. Her old self can handle anything.”

—

WHEN SHE PICKED UP her phone and Loretta’s voice said, “I didn’t know who else to call,” Janet knew that this was literally true. There were things that no one Loretta was close to — her mother, the monsignor, either Tia or Binky — was allowed to know. But Loretta had to tell someone, so Janet was allowed to know these things. Janet did not understand why Loretta thought that she, Janet, could be trusted to keep a secret, but in fact she hadn’t told any of the secrets. In her own mind, she threatened to tell them. If, for example, Loretta said one more word about how easy the “victory in Afghanistan” had been, and how “Al Qaeda has been routed” and “I expect to see Bin Laden’s head on a pike any day now,” she, Janet, would spill all the beans about Chance’s girlfriend, who was the eighteen-year-old daughter of illegal immigrants, about how Loretta’s dad was drinking and driving (if only around the ranch), and that he would put the two Australian shepherds and the German shorthair in the bed of the truck and then take off. When he started driving erratically, the dogs would jump out and head home. Twice her mother had had to go find him, and one of those times he had driven into a ditch and fallen asleep, leaning against the wheel, his door wide open.

Janet said, “Where are you? Are you around here?”

“No, we’re home.” Then, “Well, I’m home in New York. Michael is in Vermont at some hunting club.”

“What is he hunting?” said Janet, meaning, deer, bear, elk.

Loretta said, “Democrats.”

Janet felt her hackles rise.

“Listen,” said Loretta. But she did not go on. Instead, she put the phone down and, apparently, went to close some door. Who would be home? thought Janet. It was the middle of the semester. Loretta picked up the phone. She said, “Has Emily ever had an abortion?”

Now it was Janet who closed the door, not because Emily had ever had an abortion (that she knew of) but because Jonah and Jared were watching the Super Bowl and shouting. To Loretta, she said, “No. I don’t know. Not that I know of. I’ve never even met a boyfriend.” As if that made a difference, but in fact Janet had always, she now realized, relied on Emily’s pickiness to keep her out of trouble.

“Well, she’s pregnant.”

“Who?” said Janet. She licked her lips. This was like a test, indeed: If it was Tia, then that was a sign that plain, bookish girls could have a wild side. If it was Binky, then that was a sign that the apple had rejected the tree — Binky and Loretta were very close and looked a good deal alike. Loretta said, “Hanny — Alejandra, the girlfriend.”

“Chance’s girlfriend is pregnant?”

“I guess about eight or nine weeks.”

“They told you?”

“She called me.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Janet. “But why would you think I know anything about this? I never had an abortion. The last person I knew who had an abortion was in college. Her parents sent her to Europe somewhere. Did you ever have an abortion?” Janet said this in a challenging way, knowing that Loretta would say, of course not, but Loretta said, “I didn’t have to. I had a miscarriage.”

“No shit,” said Janet.

“It was before I met Michael, and he doesn’t know about it.” Another secret to keep: everyone had assumed Loretta was a virgin on her wedding night. In the ensuing silence, Janet thought of Fiona. It was a week or ten days now since she had at last brought up the subject of Charlie. Janet had been too out of the loop to know that Charlie had been heading to L.A. to meet Fiona when his plane crashed into the Pentagon, and then nervous about referring to it, but someone had to say something, didn’t they? When she asked, “Didn’t it just kill you?” though, it was she herself who started crying, not Fiona. Fiona said, “I was shocked, but, Janet, when he was born, I was out cold from the drugs, and they took him away. When the pregnancy started to show, they stuck me in a convent in Normandy — you know, around St. Louis somewhere. It was full of pregnant nuns. It wasn’t torture — they didn’t make me scrub the floors, like in Ireland — but they did make me go to Mass every day and say maybe a hundred thousand rosaries, and I was just waiting to get back to the horses. All I thought about was the five-year-old Thoroughbred I’d been jumping and how I could manage to gain as little weight as possible. I think I gained twelve pounds. I was eighteen when he was born, and I walked away without a thought. I have no kids. I know what people think that says about me, but…” Then she said, “I’ve seen one snapshot. To be honest, I can hardly even remember Tim. It was all horses, horses, horses.” Then, at the same time that Janet said, “I loved Tim,” Fiona said, “But there was no one like Tim, really.” The last thing Fiona said about Charlie was “He sounded very good-natured.” Loretta was talking again; Janet made herself listen.

“He can’t marry her. He doesn’t want to marry her. I don’t think she wants to marry him, either. It was a mistake. Her parents are very traditional. She’s eighteen. They think that’s plenty old to get married. Her sister was married at seventeen, and there are a couple of adored grandchildren. I think Chance has been on the road for the last four weeks. She is terrified that her dad will find out. Or her mom. Someone.”

Janet said, “Where are they?”

“The ranch.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.” That was why she had called, Janet realized — she was the one who was supposed to come up with a plan.

Loretta said, “The hospital out there is out of the question.”

“Have you told Michael?”

Loretta said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“A, because he wouldn’t think twice about it, and, B, because he would swear to keep it a secret and then get mad about something and start shooting his mouth off.”

Everyone knew that everyone knew that women had abortions, had always had abortions. Possibly, rumor had had it, her great-aunt Eloise had had an abortion; possibly there had been abortions on the Bergstrom side, back in the ancient days of Queen Anne’s lace — her mom had always implied that if something bad could happen it would have happened to the Bergstroms.

“That,” said Loretta, “is what money is for.”

And Janet did not wonder aloud what the monsignor would think.

Finally, Janet said, “I’ll ask around. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Loretta said, “Nothing but the best, okay?”

“Of course,” said Janet.

The next day, when she called her gynecologist and asked the question, the first thing he said was “What is her medical insurance?”

“No idea,” said Janet, “but there is plenty of money.”

Dr. Fox said, “I like a place in Oakland. Very professional but very supportive. Here’s the number.” That afternoon, she called Loretta. That evening, she got an e-mail from Loretta. The plan was that Hanny would tell her parents that she’d been invited to San Francisco by Chance’s aunt, who understood that she wanted to go to a community college but hadn’t decided which one. The aunt had invited her to stay for a week, and promised to take her to visit several colleges and to show her around. She would come on the bus, which she would pay for; Loretta thought this would arouse much less suspicion than if Janet went to pick her up.

She was small and young-looking, pointed chin, luxurious hair. All she carried was a rather large tooled handbag that Janet recognized as American West and a raincoat. As she came down the steps of the bus, she wiped her eyes with a Kleenex. Her makeup was smeared. Janet plastered a big smile on her face and strode up to her. “You must be Hanny? How was your trip? Are you cold? The weather hasn’t been great. Sorry.” Why did she apologize?

It didn’t take her long to understand why she had apologized. Everything about this event felt to Janet like she was the one forcing the issue, the one requiring this “procedure.” Every story was plausible. The story about school — when Jared asked what Hanny wanted to study, she said, “Vet tech. Or I could be an accountant. I’d like that.” And who wouldn’t, if getting off the Perronis’ enormous Angelina Ranch and into the Bay Area was your choice? The story about Chance: “Oh, he’s doing great. The horses are perfect. He loves it all, everything about it. Of course, he travels most of the year.” The story about Loretta: “I can tell her anything. I think she’s so wonderful and kind. She sent me this bag I have for Christmas, and it was exactly the one I saw when we went to the mall in Salinas. I couldn’t believe it.” The story about her family: Her dad had come to California as a child from Guadalajara, her mother with her family from Mexico City. They had met in L.A., and moved to the ranch because Chance’s grandmother loved her grandmother’s cooking. Her dad no longer worked at the ranch; he drove a truck for a waste-management company. She had a sister and two younger brothers. One of them, Alonzo, went with Chance to rodeos to help with the horses and the equipment. How much does he get paid? thought Janet, meanly.

Hanny went into her room after supper, after asking to borrow Janet’s copy of Vogue, which was lying on the coffee table, after both Jared and Jonah watched her go, then looked at each other and shrugged. Later, Janet heard her crying and didn’t do anything, but when she heard her crying again, just before bedtime, she knocked.

Hanny was sitting up against the headboard, in a pair of blue pajamas with a feather pattern. Janet sat on the edge of the bed. Hanny licked the tears off her lips. Janet said, “Would you tell me why you’re crying?”

Hanny nodded. “I’m really scared.”

Janet said, “Who knows?”

“Mrs. Langdon. I think my mom has an idea, but—”

“But?”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

She had washed her makeup off, and without it, she was prettier, but also younger-looking. Janet said, “Are you eighteen?”

Hanny didn’t say anything for a moment, then shook her head just a little bit.

“Does Chance know how old you are?”

“He thinks I’m eighteen.”

Janet had read about the parental-consent amendment in the papers, maybe five years before, and had been glad when the California Supreme Court struck it down, but now she wished she had some ally who actually knew this girl. She said, “Tell me the truth, Hanny. Do you want to do this?”

Hanny nodded, but she did pause before she nodded.

Now for the hard part — did she love Chance, what were her hopes?

Chance, she said, was a silly boy, not serious, an overgrown kid. When he wasn’t working with the horses or the cattle, he drank and smoked weed and did some other things that Hanny wasn’t sure of. He was moody. Hanny didn’t trust moody men. And she didn’t trust handsome men. And she didn’t trust Anglo men, either.

Why was she crying?

Because she was embarrassed, said Hanny. Humiliated. Because she was a girl who did all of her homework every day, and she was missing school. Because she was a girl who had always kept her half of her room much neater than her sister had, and now the same thing was happening to her that had happened to her sister. Because she was a girl with a rosary in the top drawer of her chest, and maybe she could never touch it again. Because she was afraid.

Janet reassured her that a vacuum extraction was a very safe procedure, especially at eight and a half weeks.

Hanny nodded.

Janet said nothing about what she always remembered as “the flutters”—that first sense she had had of Jonah’s presence, of the love it had set off in her. She saw right then that those sensations didn’t have to arouse love: they could as easily arouse fear and rage.

That night, Janet got up about twelve-thirty, put on her robe, and went out onto the patio, wishing she was a smoker or a drinker or could go to an AA or an SLAA meeting right now, this minute, and ask her fellow contemplators what to do. She hadn’t brought this up at the last meeting because she had mistakenly assumed that, although she was involved, it wasn’t her business. On the one hand, she thought as she stared at the thin sliver of moon that was visible through the branches of the largest oak tree, thank goodness Hanny’s view of Chance coincided with Janet’s own, and her griefs were appropriate for her age. On the other hand, she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t think, she was beginning to obsess about whether she would be too tired to drive safely to Oakland. When she was finally freezing cold, she went inside and drank a shot of Jared’s Limoncello, which seemed to mildly electrocute her as it froze its way past her tongue and down her throat. But it did, if not put her to sleep, at least put her into a trance. She lay quietly next to Jared.

Who was that? Janet thought the next day when she was walking around the block in Oakland, passing the time while Hanny had her “procedure.” Some friend of hers whose husband had left her had booked a reservation to the most frightening and remote place she could think of — Port Arthur, Tasmania. It took her thirty-six hours to get there (from Philadelphia), by train, plane, and boat, and when she did, just as she was congratulating herself on being adventurous and exotic, an American couple walked by, from Pittsburgh. They had just arrived from New Delhi and Johannesburg, and would be returning to New York through Hong Kong. The man was wearing a Pitt T-shirt and the woman white sneakers. Janet’s friend told her — oh, it was Eileen Grogan, now she lived in Montreal — that she had lost all sense of her own adventurousness instantly, and in fact felt oddly comforted. That was how Janet felt after checking Hanny into the clinic. Oh, she realized. She was not the first. Oh, she realized, it happened many times a day. Oh, she realized, life continues.

Hanny was cramping on the ride home, but she looked less pale and happier than she had getting off the bus. Janet decided to believe the evidence of her own eyes and accept that they had done the best thing.

It was Loretta who had no doubts. When Janet saw her over Easter (she and Michael came into the city and vacationed for two days at the Mark Hopkins), Loretta embraced her, kissed her, thanked her, gave her an antique platinum brooch that looked like a dragonfly and was encrusted with amethysts and tourmalines. A commemoration? Hush money? All Loretta said was “I love you. You are the greatest.”

—

RICHIE’S TIME in office had begun after Cheney’s was over, so he hadn’t known him as a fellow congressman. When Bush was elected, with Cheney vice-president, even some of the Democrats thought they would be fine with him. He had a reputation of being able to listen, at least, and of not saying “Fuck you” to every Democrat every time. Michael liked Cheney because he was “uncompromising” and “had principles,” which Richie considered a truer indicator than the faulty memories of his colleagues. However, he had not expected the onslaught of arm twisting that began after they came back from recess. And he hardly had Riley to help him. She came to work with the baby (Alexis Aurora Wickett), but she was ruthless: she would work on solar and wind and electric cars and some idea about harnessing the energy of the tides, but she had no opinions about anything else, not even whether Cheney should pony up documents to the General Accounting Office about conflict of interest among members of the late and unlamented Energy Task Force. “Enron, Enron, Enron,” echoed in everyone’s heads, but Cheney brushed it off until, with the help of Richie, Congressman Dingell, and Congressman Waxman, the head of the GAO finally sued Cheney for the materials.

But you would not have known that Richie had ever said “boo” to anyone from the White House, or so much as frowned in Cheney’s direction, because, in preparation for the vote on the Iraq Resolution, the Capitol was swarming with them — Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, all the way down to Rod Paige, who was the secretary of education. They came to his office, they knocked on his door, they took him aside in the corridors, they sat down with him in the cafeteria. They talked to Lucille, Riley, Corrie, Leslie, Rudy, Ben, Sam, Jenny, everyone. His staffers pretended that he was inalterably opposed to giving President Bush the power to go to war, when, in fact, Richie had always planned to vote yes, in spite of what his constituents might desire. He did, in fact, expect to be thrown out of his seat on November 6, and to be showing up at Michael’s office on November 7, hat in hand.

He had stayed with Ivy and Leo in Sag Harbor in August, and Ivy was furious with him. She was right about everything: there was no evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to 9/11; Saddam Hussein was contained; Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction; the Middle East was a powder keg and so fate should not be tempted; Afghanistan was the point; Osama bin Laden was the point. Richie’s view was that the Resolution did not have to lead to war — it was meant to put the ball in Saddam’s court, to challenge him to clean up his act. It was a resolution, not necessarily a declaration of war, even though some of his colleagues thought it was. Ivy said that Richie was deluding himself, and maybe he was, but he felt Charlie like a weight on his conscience that got heavier every day.

No remains had ever been found. He was one of six. Perhaps, Richie thought, he had taken a window seat in the front of the plane, and that was the reason — the remains had distributed themselves in an airplane shape diagonally from outside of the first-floor Defense Intelligence Agency through the Naval Intelligence Agency and into the office of the administrative assistant to the army. There was bunching, scattering, and empty space. The empty space appeared to be where the wings had been, but perhaps that was an illusion. Charlie and the five other ghosts (as Richie thought of them) had been included in a memorial at Arlington a year after the attack. After attending the ceremony with all of his staff and Nadie and Alexis (aged four months, born May 11), Richie had felt less at peace rather than more. Since then, he’d found himself saying words like “united front,” “strong response,” “hit back,” “gathering threat,” and “wake up and smell the coffee.” That he could agree with Cheney (and disagree with Jerry Nadler) in this, and yet go after Cheney about the Energy Task Force, made him feel schizophrenic and flexible, though not both at the same time.

It didn’t help that Alexis, whom he saw every day, was emerging into that stage of infancy that was maybe the cutest and most appealing. She was smiling; she was staring at her fists; she was grasping rattles and fingers and growing out her mop of hair (brown, like Riley’s); her gaze followed Richie as he walked away from her, saying, “Are you my dad? Are you my dad?” Nadie, too, was encouraging him to be more aggressive. And Lucille. And Ben and Sam. Enough had been had by all. If Saddam was allowed to do as he wanted, well, what about Iran? Those opposed to the Resolution brought up Iran all the time. Iran was our enemy. Iran was Saddam’s enemy. Saddam had been our friend all through that war — there was a photo of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand. But Cheney and his minions made the case that if Saddam had been our “ally” (and the word always had oral quotation marks around it), and he was out of control, then it was our job to rein him in, and, in the process, show Iran an example that they would do well to heed.

Richie knew that there was some fuzzy background there that both his uncle Arthur and his dad had been involved in. His mom was not clear in her own mind what it was, only that, when he and Michael were about six months old, his dad had disappeared for four days and come home looking sun-swept and haggard. (Well, “jetlagged” was the real word, she said, but it looked like more than that. It looked as though his trip had taken him somewhere that even World War II hadn’t taken him.) Only when the embassy had been attacked in ’79 had he mentioned that he had once been to Iran, had helped to deliver cash to the…well, to someone. But she had noticed a change in their marriage that she dated from that summer: he was sharper, more ambitious, away more often. She’d thought at the time that he simply hated fatherhood, or her version of motherhood, but imagining that trip he’d taken gave her pause. She’d once mentioned it to Arthur, but he hadn’t taken the bait, said nothing.

And so the Resolution was passed — the New York vote split down the middle. Jerry Nadler stared at him when he cast his vote, maybe in disbelief, maybe in contempt. The balls were in the air now, Richie thought, as he sat in his seat and gazed around the Chamber at all the yakking, at DeLay, Gephardt, Pelosi, Hastert, Armey. Yes, many balls were in the air of all different colors, and Richie didn’t see anyone who could catch them.