Golden Age

2003

THE DUPLEX Henry shared with Riley and Alexis was in Northwest. It was an attractive, faintly Colonial brick cube with two entrances and a pleasant lawn that looked out onto trees in three directions. It was about as unlike Chicago and northern Wisconsin as you could get without palm trees, Henry and Riley agreed. Downstairs, there was a living room, a largish kitchen, a dining room, a sunroom, two bedrooms, and two baths. Upstairs, there was a bedroom, a bathroom, a room “formerly known as the kitchen,” as Riley said, and stacks and boxes and shelves of books. One of the last things that Charlie had done before 9/11 was drive Henry’s U-Haul full of books from Evanston to Washington. Henry had bought the house, but had planned to rent out part of it. After Charlie died, the plan changed.

Henry didn’t see Riley and Alexis very often. His entrance went to the garage and the driveway, her entrance out the front door to the sidewalk; she and Alexis usually took the bus to Tenleytown Station, then the Metro to work. He didn’t hear her often, either; the insulation was so good between the two apartments that he would have said that Alexis didn’t cry at all.

Henry did cry, though, and surely Riley did. He liked Riley, he liked Charlie’s parents, who had visited twice, and he liked Alexis, for a baby, but it was painful to discover how they receded in his affections now that Charlie was gone. He had known that he liked, or even loved Charlie in an avuncular way. Sometimes joked that, had he produced his ideal son, that boy would have been like Charlie, unlike himself, a throwback to the regular Langdon/Cheek/Vogel/Augsberger stock. Charlie had said, “What about the mom?” but smiled as he said it, and Henry had to admit that he hadn’t thought to imagine Fiona. Henry didn’t think Riley liked him much, but living here was convenient, cheap, and pleasant for her. He could be relied upon to look after Alexis if Riley went out, and to talk to her, and even hold her (carefully, gingerly) if he had to.

When Claire had visited in December, she was astonished at the mess, and congratulated him: he was loosening up! But it wasn’t that — the boxes of books were not unpacked, but they were neatly stacked and out of the way. It was that he was on to something new, and most of his days were spent at the Folger. What he was interested in was not Shakespeare, though he had started by looking at archaic origins for some of the plays, just out of curiosity. But then he saw, lying on a table in the reading room, a manuscript in Gaelic, and he realized that he had missed his calling. His calling was Ireland — the strange mix of Gaelic, Viking, Anglo-Saxon, and indigenous inhabitants that the English and the Icelanders and the Scots and the French only thought about when they had to. He felt Gerald of Wales inside himself, lifting his gaze and looking across the Irish Sea, toward Waterford.

Henry had always been amused at the Langdon/Vogel attitude toward the Irish — that they didn’t exist. When his aunt Eloise moved to Chicago, his mother had muttered to his father that now she would undoubtedly marry an Irishman, and what would they think about that? When she married a Jew, his mother had breathed a sigh of relief. Jews, at least, were intelligent, not cunning. Henry realized that he had imbibed this prejudice when he studied Anglo-Saxon rather than the Celtic languages. The Celtic languages were far more interesting, and a much greater puzzle than the Germanic ones. And, yes, the Vikings had been all too familiar with Ireland — they had raided and marauded and enslaved; a study of Icelanders after the Second World War had shown that they were as Irish as the population of South Boston.

But his real pleasure was in the mystery of the Celtic languages — Irish, Breton, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish. Gerald of Wales would have been fluent in at least one. Celtic speakers may have lived at the periphery of Europe, but their language was closer to Italic than to German — the Irish word for wheel was roth, akin to the Latin rota—eventually to show up in modern English as “rotate,” whereas the Old Norse hvel and the Old English hweohl had evolved into plain old “wheel.” The Irish had split off the common Indo-European trunk half a millennium before the Germanic languages. Henry imagined those Celts — cunning, handsome, leading small but spirited horses, telling each other stories and myths that made no sense to anyone else, making their way to the edges of the Continent, then being driven farther west. The only things interfering with his plan to spend the summer in Wexford and Waterford were that he was seventy, and was thus rather nervous about driving on the left side of the road, and that George W. Bush, that craven pig, was about to start a war that could end anywhere. Henry and Richie had had a screaming argument about Richie’s vote for the Iraq Resolution and his apparent support for the imminent invasion. Henry had, in fact, been more violent in his opposition than Riley was.

Henry would have said that he was gifted at taking the long view — he enjoyed taking the long view. Yes, the Roman Empire declined and collapsed, and you could put the turning point at any one of several places; Henry himself thought the conquest of the Germanic peoples by Julius Caesar had been a mistaken use of resources, both military and natural, and that Caesar’s assassination was a testament to the instability the Gallic Wars had caused. The British Empire had collapsed much more quickly, and not that long before Henry’s own birth, but he felt a good deal of equanimity about that in spite of his long history of Anglophilia. Libraries had a way of smoothing over the pain of convulsive change. But he was having difficulty taking the long view about intervention in the Middle East. His particular bête noire was Tony Blair.

Tony Blair was three months younger than Michael and Richie, and, given what Henry knew of those two, he had very little faith in the depth of Tony’s analysis of the pertinent issues. According to Tony’s biographer, he had been quite like Michael and Richie — always in trouble, a student whom his teachers “were glad to see the back of,” someone whose main desire in life was to emulate Mick Jagger. At the press conference Blair held with Bush, a reporter had asked the question (noted only as “Q” in the Times), “Mr. President, Bob Woodward’s account of the White House after Sept. 11 says that you ordered invasion plans for Iraq six days after Sept. 11. Isn’t it the case that you have always intended war on Iraq, and that international diplomacy is a charade in this case?” Neither Blair nor Bush had addressed the question — all tough questions (including the question of whether there was any evidence of direct links between Saddam and Al Qaeda) were avoided. But Henry really understood what he was seeing only this morning, when the Times reported that Blair’s most recent report in support of the war in Iraq, which Colin Powell had used to support invasion, had been cribbed from various magazines rather than resulting from independent research.

And so the boy who got through Yale because he was a legacy had as his biggest ally the boy who cheated on his papers and passed others’ work off as his own. How many times had Henry seen that over the years? Was this why he took the invasion personally? Why it made him physically uncomfortable? Why, during his work in the Folger reading room, deciphering Scéla Muicce Meicc Da Thó word by word (and, slow as it was, enjoying it as a form of rejuvenation), he felt the White House over his left shoulder, reminding him how quickly empires fall apart, and how much, perhaps, that collapse hurt even those who tried to take a long view?

—

DURING THE FIRST IRAQ WAR, Jesse remembered his dad telling him a funny thing — that, after missile silos were installed near Omaha, in the fifties, he would be doing something in the field behind the big house, which ran east-west, and he would be okay going west, because he could keep his eye on the horizon, but he would be nervous going east, because he kept sensing a mushroom cloud behind him. He would tell himself not to glance around — to hold off until the end of the row — but more than once he could not resist and looked over his shoulder. And one time he nearly fell off the seat of the tractor: there was a cloud, which he at first saw as a mushroom, that turned out to be a tornado at that moment reaching down. Yes, he had jumped off the tractor and headed toward the house, but he had been more relieved than frightened, not a normal reaction to a funnel.

Jesse never thought that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons or biological weapons. Somehow, the very expanse of the world around him — flat, huge, time-consuming to cross — had dispossessed him of those fears. And anyway, if Saddam had them, Jesse had said to Jen, why didn’t he use them when the Americans threatened invasion? He might have said, “You come any closer and my representative carrying a dirty bomb in his briefcase will emerge from his hiding place in London (or New York City), and take revenge.” But Jesse did think that Saddam had been foolish. He should have put his hands above his head, metaphorically, and said, “I surrender.” Then Bush and Blair would have had no excuse to invade with tanks and bombs and depleted uranium. Jesse was no pushover. He was skeptical about the war, he was skeptical about the peace, and he was skeptical about the skeptics.

But he was especially skeptical when he was sitting at the supper table, listening to Perky and Guthrie discuss whether to join the military.

Guthrie said, “The war is over. Bush said so. The rest is cleanup.”

Perky said, “Not everyone gets sent there, anyway. There’s other places to go.”

“Like Afghanistan,” said Jen. But that was the closest she would get to attempting to dissuade them. She still believed in the Socratic method of child rearing. For both boys, joining the military was an alternative to farming, and the one thing they agreed on was that any alternative to farming was better than farming. Felicity rolled her eyes, adjusted her pony tail, cut a piece off her pork chop, and ate it — chewing it ten times, the optimum for swallow-ability. She was fourteen and disdained her brothers’ views, but welcomed them — she had told Jesse around Valentine’s Day that he could leave the farm to her and she would be one of those women farmers like Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, which she had read over Christmas for a school report. She had also said that if he, Jesse, died young (because men always died at younger ages than women, and farmers died younger than other men — it was statistics), she would make sure that her mother had everything she needed, including going to Phoenix for the winter, where she was more likely to find a nice retired man than she was around Denby. Jesse had ceased taking anything Felicity said personally, because she would say anything at all: it depended on what she was reading on the Internet and elsewhere. And she didn’t have many social skills. (Where did that come from? All the Guthries had social skills.)

Guthrie did wolf his food down — his plate was clean, and he was still wiping a piece of bread over it as he talked. He could eat anything in any quantity and never gain a pound, unlike Jesse himself, or Jen, for that matter. Jen said, “You want the last chop? It’s a little overdone.”

Guthrie said, “Like a hundred and fifty soldiers have been killed the whole time. That’s less than one-tenth of one percent.”

Jesse smiled, not about the troops, but because Guthrie had done the math. Guthrie had graduated from high school, just barely, having played on every team with tremendous enthusiasm but not much strength or skill. There was no sport at Iowa or Iowa State anymore that was just fun, because every team was expected to win and to bring in funding. Jesse had heard that the football coach at one or the other of the two was earning a million dollars a year, but the farmers at the Denby Café tended to exaggerate these sorts of things, especially if they themselves were not raking in a million dollars a year — those who were didn’t eat breakfast at the Denby Café. Perky hadn’t graduated yet, but he was doing somewhat better than Guthrie had, with a B average in all subjects, about the same as Jesse at the same age. Guthrie didn’t have Uncle Frank as an inspiration. College sounded boring to him, more classes, more reading, more papers that started with an introduction, continued with a main body, and then ended with a conclusion at the bottom of page two. He hadn’t applied to ISU or UI. When Jen brought it up (only in her Socratic, you-might-consider-this way), he said that there were four community colleges within forty miles — he would decide later. At least every other day, the two boys talked about the military.

When the war started, Jesse had gone to his box of Uncle Frank’s old letters and read a few about the Second World War. When he’d read them as a kid, they’d seemed weird and exciting: swimming beside a water moccasin in the Ozarks had seemed right out of the movies, not to mention the anecdotes about Anzio, the Rapido River, and Sicily. He didn’t think that Uncle Frank had been nostalgic for the war; he was too unsentimental for that. But he had appreciated the way that his life developed out of the war — the German papers he had translated, that he understood the dangers of the world and how they must be confronted head-on. Why had Jesse grabbed his soil testers and mapped his own little world? Because, if you were going to make it as a farmer, you had to do it right, and Uncle Frank was all about doing it right. After supper, while Jen and Felicity watched a rerun of Unsolved History concerning the death of Princess Diana, Jesse reread a letter Frank had sent him about the farm. It had come not long after Frank gave him the acreage that he’d bought from Cousin Gary. He wrote, “Dear Jesse, Imagine my surprise when I looked into it and found out that I could have gotten this three hundred fifty acres at half price a few years ago. I’m not telling you what Gary charged me, but I will say that in ’73, he would have charged me $750 per acre and been taking me to the cleaners. Anyway, the lesson for you, as a twenty-year-old owner of real property, is that land is only a commodity once in a while. Keep your eye on the price of gold, the price of land. Just telling you right now, land is about $1,600 per acre, gold is $144 per ounce. Get back to me in twenty years. Love, Uncle Frank.”

Jesse went into the kitchen and got the morning paper out of the trash. Gold was $355 an ounce. Land, he knew, was about twenty-two hundred. He passed through the living room and said, “Felicity, can I use your computer for a moment?”

Felicity nodded, her eyes glued to the TV set.

The computer was turned on; in fact, it was never turned off. A fire hazard? He searched about for an inflation calculator. When he found it, he saw that both his land and his fictional gold had lost plenty of value since 1976. His land should be worth almost five thousand per acre, and gold should be worth almost $450 per ounce. He stared at the computer for a long minute, then went to a site he enjoyed about wild plants and herbs. He must have gotten his taste for roadside chamomile from his mom, he thought.

That night, just after Jen got into bed, she said, “Honey, I have to tell you this. David is selling the farm.”

David was her brother. He had 640 acres up near Grundy Center, a whole section (worth, Jesse now knew, $1.4 million, or four thousand ounces of gold). Jesse frowned and said, “Why now?”

“Because the debt is driving him bananas. The buyers said they would take it and the equipment for the price of the debt, and he could keep the house and live in it and work the land for them. It’s some corporation. They will pay him to work the land.”

“So — he becomes a tenant farmer.”

Jen sniffed, was quiet, then said, though not resentfully, “Who isn’t, really?”

And, thinking of his own debt, Jesse said, “I don’t know.”

—

OVER THE YEARS, Richie had come to understand that the motto of the House of Representatives was “This, too, shall pass”—this campaign, this fund-raiser, this debate, this lecture from an irate voter, this two-year term, this bill, this item of paperwork that no one, least of all the congressman himself, had time to read. A year before, he had, indeed, truly thought his office-holding phase was also about to pass, but, alas, no. Enough of his constituents forgave him for his support of the Iraq Resolution so that he squeaked by. (And who was to say that Vito Lopez had not helped in that effort, just a bit? And, for that matter, Michael had, at last, contributed to his campaign, the largest legal amount.)

This latest “letter” that he had to read sat on his desk with a Post-it arrow and exclamation point from Riley. Richie tried not to understand what she was getting at. The letter was about funding for hightech solutions to low-tech threats: Iraqis would leave bombs along the roadside in cans, plastic bottles, the carcasses of animals, old cushions. American soldiers would walk or drive by, and the bomb would go off. The army maintained that they had foreseen this tactic all along; however, they now needed “tethered blimps with cameras” (almost forty million bucks), jammers against remote controls (no price tag), and seventy million more bucks for “new solutions” (read: “desperate measures”). The desperate measures were due for immediate shipment (after New Year’s, after Easter, maybe sometime next summer). Richie made no sarcastic comments in public. He only nodded and looked grave. Our soldiers were still dying, and Iraq had been conquered!

But Richie could not say that he had a solution, other than time travel. Sometimes, walking through the halls of the Capitol, he thought of The Terminator (who didn’t?) — Arnold Schwarzenegger returns from the future and guns down the Hammer and everyone else who asked Richie day after day if he was “on board.” Richie didn’t ask for that. He would settle for Galaxy Quest—just a few extra seconds to have changed one thing. But, he thought, what would that thing be? The moment he said yes when Congressman Scheuer asked him if he wanted to run? The moment he said yes when Alex Rubino said he should go over and work for the congressman, just to keep an eye on the old man? The moment he said, “You know, I think it would be interesting,” when Ivy made a face at the idea of his running?

It was worse because Michael showed him off now. He came to Washington at least twice a month and stayed at the Hay-Adams. Richie would go for breakfast or lunch, and they would eat so good-naturedly together, laughing at the same jokes, looking much the same (Richie had to make sure that he wore Michael’s least favorite colors on those days, just to be certain that they were not dressed alike). Twins weren’t supposed to look as much alike as they aged, but people would do double takes, even those who had known Richie for years. Richie always said, “I’m the left-hander,” to smooth over the moment. Michael seemed jolly and harmless and incredibly rich — no one in Washington objected to that anymore. Yes, he had a watch collection, something Richie, with his Timex, could not fathom. Yes, he now drove a Ferrari, but he drove it sedately. Michael grabbed his hand and smacked him on the shoulder when they parted.

When he was in New York, Richie went to Loretta’s dinners, which had transformed from family to society after Chance, Tia, and Binky made their escapes (the walls of their place were now plastered with pictures of Chance on his horses or astraddle the haunches of a terrified calf). The mix was financial, mostly — bankers, hedge-fund managers, stockbrokers, and their wives. They gave equally to both parties, were in general agreement that “strong measures” were necessary. (Even if that included leading a boy at Abu Ghraib around on a leash as if he were a dog? Rumors abounded in the halls of Congress, but it seemed that no one else had noticed the press coverage, and Richie was the last person who would say anything.) He was not the only politician, but he was the only one who looked exactly like the host, and whom the hostess came up to every time she thought of it and linked arms with. She made him feel like a beloved pet, and every time he voted with the administration, he felt himself inwardly licking her hand and asking for a treat. She took personal credit for “converting” him. Former Monsignor Kelly, who was now a bishop and head of a diocese in Minnesota, an outpost if ever there was one, was present in spirit, if not in person, she said, since she still sent a lot of money to his favorite charities, and also flew him in from Duluth whenever she could.

To go from the letter on his desk to dinner at Michael and Loretta’s felt, to Richie, like swimming in molasses. He wasn’t drowning fast enough; in fact, everyone told him he looked better than ever and seemed “to be coming into his own.” Even Leo, now fourteen, was more respectful. Loretta had gotten him into Dalton; he enjoyed it, and Ivy was not complaining. Younger members of the House gazed at him respectfully, perhaps the very way he had once gazed at Congressman Scheuer.

—

THERE WAS a car parked in the driveway, which Henry didn’t mind — he’d just awakened from a nap and wasn’t going anywhere. It was cold and damp, and he was tired. He’d finished his translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and was trying to decide whether there were any plausible connections between Cuchulainn’s transformation into a monster and Grendel or his mother. Monsters were an interesting study. There were plenty of them in Indo-European literature, and he was inclined to think of them as being a remnant of the indigenous peoples that the Indo-Europeans had overcome on their journeys west. Henry yawned. A woman came out of the front door and headed to the car. She got in and drove away. Henry looked at his watch. It was five-thirty-four. Riley would be cooking (she was strict about giving Alexis wholesome food). Henry thought he might sneak downstairs and hang around for an invitation.

He opened his refrigerator and pulled out a nice blue cheese that he’d picked up, and, yes, there was an unopened box of water crackers in the pantry. Riley was a sucker for blue cheese, and Alexis did love crackers. Thus he bribed his way into Riley’s kitchen.

Riley was putting an onion quiche into the oven, and Alexis was sitting in her usual spot, a small chair that hooked onto the table. She was patting her hands on her red placemat and saying, “Go go go go.” She was eighteen months old, which meant that Charlie had been dead for two years and two months. Alexis was like a small clock to Henry, measuring the period of his loss. He and Riley never talked about this. He set the cheese on the table and opened the box of crackers. He said, “May Lexie have a cracker?” Alexis said, “Yes!” Riley laughed, and said, “She’s good at giving herself permission to do whatever she wants.”

“I’ve never seen her want anything you wouldn’t want her to have.”

“That’s her genius,” said Riley.

“Who was here?” Henry sat down in his usual spot, put his hands on his cheeks, pulled them out, and crossed his eyes. Alexis stuck out her tongue. They both laughed. It was possible that, before Alexis, Henry had never played with a child. It was rather fun.

Riley said, “Bunny Greenhouse.”

Henry said, “Did you make that name up? It’s perfect for a friend of yours. Animals and global warming, all at once.”

“No, I didn’t, and I only hope she becomes my friend. I’m wooing her, or maybe she’s wooing me. She has the goods on Halliburton.”

“Who’s that?”

Riley spun around. She said, “Please go back upstairs and do your homework, Professor Langdon.”

Instead, Henry unwrapped the blue cheese and set it on one of the plates that were stacked in the middle of the table, then lined some crackers up beside it. It was cold, but it was fragrant. That worked. Riley took a knife out of the drawer, cut herself a sliver, and laid it on a cracker. She ate it and said, “That’s a nice one.”

“It’s a Stilton. I buy it in honor of the Mercians.” But she didn’t rise to the bait, so he held out his fingertip, with a tiny fragment of cheese on it. Alexis took it and put it in her mouth. Then she made a perplexed face that caused him to laugh.

“Bunny is in procurement for the Army Corps of Engineers. She knows what everyone is charging the taxpayers for gas in Iraq. Halliburton, which Cheney used to run, is charging two sixty-something per gallon. Everyone else, including the Kuwaitis, is charging around a dollar a gallon. The Halliburton contract was a no-bid contract — the DOD just rubber-stamped it because it had ‘Cheney’s Bank Account’ scribbled across it. I think it’s called extortion? Or maybe just fraud? Corruption? Like that. I want the congressman to do something about it.”

Then they exchanged a look that said, Oh, right. We’re talking about Richie here.

Henry said, “There’s always hope.”

Riley said, “I used to think that because I wanted to. Now I think it because I have to.” She leaned over and kissed Alexis on the top of her head. Henry said, “Has Michael captured him?”

“You tell me. I think he’s been obsessed with Michael since he was born. I wonder if that’s always true of younger twins.”

Henry said, “Richie is older. By something like four minutes.”

“Well, I wish he’d remember that. Anyway, Bunny is moving with all deliberate speed. Her younger brother is Elvin Hayes.”

“He was good,” said Henry. “He had a great jump shot.”

“She can handle herself.”

Now she opened the oven door and peeped in. From where he was sitting, Henry could see the top of the quiche, brown and crinkly. He got suddenly hungry. He said, “I can set a table very nicely.”

“Oh,” said Riley, “you are so like Charlie at worming your way into my affections.”

Henry said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”