Golden Age

2008

FELICITY AND JESSICA, Richie discovered, were two of a kind. Jessica, like Felicity, had been a pudgy, earnest girl in glasses that were always slipping down her nose, and then boxing had given her purpose, strength, and contact lenses. Felicity had grown into a willowy young woman (though strict). Over Christmas, when Richie, Jessica, and Leo made their postmarital promenade to Chicago, Denby, and Montana to demonstrate their familyhood, Jessica did with Felicity what she did with everyone in Richie’s family: she showed a sincere interest in Felicity’s yakkety yak about the personalities of animals, and she went with her one day to the local animal shelter to look at cats. They also compared their biceps and their quadriceps, and Jessica gave Felicity tips about stretching before and after stall cleaning. Richie thought that Felicity didn’t look like any of the Guthrie women or Aunt Claire, or the sainted Aunt Lillian — more like he himself might have looked as a girl. In the meantime, he and Leo went jogging with Guthrie. Richie huffed and puffed in the back while Guthrie and Leo pressed ahead, talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, too far away to ask him any questions about Robert Gates or Merrill Lynch — a good thing.

Felicity, now nineteen, was registered and planned to caucus on January 3 with the Denby — North Usherton Democrats, who numbered exactly eleven. Felicity grilled Richie: Had he ever met Hillary Clinton? Yes, of course. Barack Obama? Yes, he had seen his keynote at the 2004 convention, and sometimes he saw him in the Capitol — they had a nodding acquaintance. John Edwards? Yes. Bill Richardson? Yes. Dennis Kucinich? Yes, Richie offered that he admired Kucinich (and he did, the way you admire someone who is the guy you dare not to be) but he might be a little too pure. Felicity stared at him. Richie shrugged. Jesse and Jen had never caucused. Richie had never caucused. It was a strange process.

He did not say what he truly thought of the candidates: apart from Kucinich, they all looked better than they were, according to Lucille’s inside dope. Only Kucinich, who was short and not physically appealing, looked worse than he was, and so would never get anywhere. Lucille’s view was that you could be an ugly Republican and wield enormous power, but that didn’t work for Democrats. She wasn’t sure why.

In the summer, after their minimal June wedding, Jessica had moved out of her place in Stanton Park and into his condo, bringing her bike, a newish couch, and a Therapedic mattress. She didn’t even bring the book she was reading — she finished it the night before the move and gave it to a homeless man they passed on Constitution Avenue. To the Brooklyn co-op, she brought nothing but a Waterpik and some spare underwear. She had never been to Brooklyn before. She liked wandering around, and could end up anywhere, calling him on her cell and asking how to get back to “your place.” When Loretta heard about the secret wedding, she insisted on giving a reception at the Langdon establishment on the Upper East Side. Jessica ignored the insistence for two weeks, then said, “Oh, shit! I forgot!” called Loretta, and said that, before anything like that could happen, she and Michael would have to come to Brooklyn for supper. That was the end of the reception idea. She did whatever she wanted in a completely disarming way, and Richie planned to get through the election year by having her walk in front of him into every gathering, a female bodyguard, a female spirit guard. He had never been so happy.

After the caucuses, Felicity wrote to say that her caucus had met for two hours and twelve minutes, and voted seven times. One person voted for Kucinich, four went for Vilsack, four for Hillary, and two for Obama. Edwards was considered suspiciously good-looking — not a single vote. Felicity had voted for Hillary six times. She had made a case that, as the youngest person in the caucus, she needed a good role model for being a strong, intelligent, and well-educated woman. However, since the women in the caucus outnumbered the men seven to four, and all of them were at least twice as old as Felicity and one had been caucusing since Truman, they seemed to feel that Felicity was putting them down. One of the Obama supporters said that she had caucused in the eighties in Ames — did Felicity go to Iowa State? — and their precinct had been the only one in the whole state to go for Jesse Jackson. The four who went for Vilsack never shifted their votes, but when Felicity finally switched from Hillary to Obama, he got a majority and won. Jen told Jessica that Felicity was electrified by the whole process, and now viewed the congressman as her personal seat warmer for when she would go to Washington as the first female veterinarian/politician. Richie told Jessica that it couldn’t come soon enough, and laughed when she kissed him and began unbuttoning his shirt — there was that relaxed and agreeable and passionate part, too.

—

RICHIE WANTED TO believe that the House of Representatives was less corrupt than the Senate, but he knew that this was not true, that, for all of U.S. history, the public had assumed that the House was a swamp of dirty money, nefarious influence, and continuous armtwisting. Maybe only Jessica still had faith, but Richie could see that her faith was fading fast when they drove to the Hut for a weekend with his mom. She reached into the glove compartment, helped herself to a peppermint Altoid, and said, “Do you think seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money?”

Richie said, “No.”

“Would you take seventy-five thousand from Exxon to stop working on solar?”

“Only if I didn’t mind being shot by Riley. Well, not shot, since she doesn’t believe in firearms, but decapitated with her Wüsthof six-inch cleaver.”

“It just seems so small to me. Isn’t Dodd rich? He’s from Connecticut.”

“I don’t know if he’s rich. He’s been in Congress his entire adult life. His dad was a senator.” He thought for a minute, then said, “He dresses pretty well.”

She said, “My parents’ mortgage is from Countrywide. They just refinanced last year.”

Dodd had proposed a housing bailout, then admitted that he was best friends with Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide. Richie didn’t know if the surprise was in the scandal or in the fact that it was being seen as a scandal. Angelo Mozilo had never approached Richie, and Richie had been too lazy to refinance his mortgage on his own. Riley had asked him about it two weeks before — some other senator had gotten a good loan from Countrywide. Both Dodd and the other senator were Democrats, which was why Riley had gotten nervous: she was always worried that Richie might slip the leash and get in trouble.

Richie preferred to take Route 202, though it was somewhat slower than 95. Jessica was looking out the window. Sometimes, while they drove, she made fists, flexing her forearm muscles and her biceps meditatively, and she breathed in an even, deep, oxygen-enriched rhythm. She worked out three days a week these days — she had stopped doing even practice bouts, but she still trained. Other days, she watched movies on TCM while running the treadmill.

When they got to the Hut, his mom was on the porch, digging her forefinger into one of her pots of lavender. She was so enamored of it, and had so much of it, that its fragrance seemed to envelop the Hut. When he pulled up, she trotted down the steps like a fifteen-year-old and embraced Jessica as soon as she was out of the car. Richie kissed her on the cheek. It was nearly time for supper, but Richie and Jessica had made sure they were prepared for anything by eating ribs and fries for lunch and stashing the leftovers in a cooler in the back seat of the Subaru.

It was easy to imagine his mom lost in space as well as time — Spring Street was so quiet and so green and so architecturally archaic that he expected The New York Times sitting on the kitchen counter to be dated 1985, if not 1955. When his mother handed him his tonic water and lime, he sipped away the rumblings of Washington, D.C., in 2008, the anxieties of trying to get a black man with a Muslim name into the White House, the price of oil inching toward $140 per barrel (how much had Michael invested in oil?). He was in fact dozing off, listening to Jessica and his mom discuss underwire brassieres, when suddenly she said, “Say, do either of you know what a CDO is?”

And Jessica said, in her customary even tone, “Oh, that’s a type of financial instrument. A bank bundles together a big pile of mortgages and sells them as a bond to investors. The investors get a larger or smaller rate of return, depending on the amount of risk in a particular bundle.”

His mom said, “What if I am getting ten percent?”

“That’s high-risk,” said Richie.

“Oh,” said his mom.

After that, they had dinner. She had made something of an effort — a large Cobb salad, neatly constructed. Richie didn’t even have to exchange a glance with Jessica to know that they would take a nice walk down to the fairgrounds or over to Moorland Farm around nine, and stop at the cooler, where they would devour the rest of the ribs.

The windows were all open, and the air was humid and thick, but fragrant, of course, with the scent of lavender. Moths kept landing on the screens and fluttering away. His mom said, “Michael was here. Have you seen him lately?”

Richie said, “I thought they were in Chile, trout fishing.”

“It’s winter in Chile,” said Jessica.

“Well, then, Scotland.”

His mom poked for bits of hard-boiled egg in the salad. “I think Loretta is in Scotland. She’s having some kind of spa retreat where they hike for a couple of hours, then get salt rubs and massages for the afternoon.”

“Have you ever had a salt rub?” said Jessica.

“Oh, yes,” said his mom. Richie tried not to imagine it. “It’s invigorating. Richie’s dad liked them, too.” Richie closed his eyes.

His mom said, “Michael looked a little hollow around the eye sockets. I thought maybe it was just age, because I remember your dad looked a little the same way when he was your age. But you look fine. Something is worrying him.”

“Something is worrying me.”

“But, you see, you’re used to it.”

In a nutshell, thought Richie.

“Oh, heavens,” she said to Jessica, “Frank nearly lost his mind when Janet joined that cult in California. We both did, really, but nothing surprised me in those days.”

“What cult?” said Jessica, pleasantly.

“The one where they all killed themselves.”

“Waco?” exclaimed Jessica.

“No. Before that.”

Richie said, “The Peoples Temple. It’s not clear that the Branch Davidians killed themselves.” It was amazing to Richie that he hadn’t thought of David Koresh or Janet Reno in years. When he was first elected to Congress, he had thought about them every hour of every day.

“There have been so many,” said his mom, shaking her head. “You can’t count them all, really.”

Jessica glanced at him. He knew she was thinking, as an Irish person was welcome to think, of the Catholic Church. And he wondered, but didn’t dare to ask, why nothing surprised his mom in those days. He had thought she was the paradigm of innocence.

He said, “Why do you bring this up, Mom? Has Binky or Tia or Chance joined a cult?”

“No, they’re fine, according to Michael. He said he was just feeling lonely, and it didn’t take him long to get here — once he crossed the GW, not much more than half an hour.”

That was something like fifty miles.

Jessica’s eyebrows lifted. Richie said, “Oh, that Ferrari, always getting out of hand.”

“He wasn’t driving the Ferrari,” said his mom. “He was driving the Lexus. He said he sold the Ferrari.”

“Then maybe he was feeling lonely,” said Richie. He smiled at his own joke, but neither his mom nor Jessica did. Jessica’s response when he said things about Michael did make him feel mean. He and Jessica had cleaned their plates, and Jessica was scraping the salad bowl with the serving spoon. His mom had selectively eaten her tomatoes, her hard-boiled egg, and her bacon, but only bits of her chicken and her avocado. He looked at her. She was five seven; she might weigh 120 pounds.

He said, “Why did you ask about CDOs?”

“I don’t know. I asked him what he was working on, and he gave me so many letters of the alphabet that my head started to spin.”

He said, “As long as I’ve known him, he’s managed to get through the slamming door without catching his tail. When I talk to him, he seems upbeat.” But he hadn’t really talked to him in months.

“Isn’t that the truth,” said his mom. She got up, took their plates, returned with pineapple sorbet from her favorite shop in Bernardsville. By common agreement, it seemed, they stopped discussing Michael. The evening progressed with pleasant conversation about weather, flowers, Montana, clothes. At nine, his mom went to bed, and Richie and Jessica went out for their snack. They walked for forty-five minutes, all around the fields, in the humid grassy warmth.

—

RICHIE WAS at the kitchen table, drinking the last of his coffee, half listening for Jessica and reading a review of The Dark Knight. He was perhaps the only person in the world who had enjoyed that wreck of a movie, Batman & Robin—George Clooney as Batman. Even Leo had disdained it when Richie took him — what was that, ten years ago now? The city in the picture with the review did look like Chicago, rather than New York — there was something Michigan Avenue — y about the shot of Heath Ledger in the middle of the empty street. And then his Mac mail seemed to beep with extra insistence. He clicked on Riley’s link (subject line—“!!!!!”), which was to Bloomberg.com. Merrill Lynch; Goldman Sachs; BlackRock. He scrolled down. Then there it was, toward the end, “Banks and brokers have taken more than $435 billion of writedowns and credit losses since the beginning of last year as mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, leveraged loans and other fixed-income assets lost value.” Richie stared at this for a moment, then went to his Dashboard and tried to type out the number into the calculator, 435,000,000,000. The calculator wouldn’t take it by three decimal points, but he remembered enough arithmetic to do the division anyway. That kind of debt was worth $145,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, though only $60 for every man, woman, and child in the entire world. He took a sip of his coffee, and comprehended that that was a lot of money in a way that he never had before. He understood instantly that there were only two things that that amount of money could do — it could go somewhere, into some sort of money Grand Canyon, say, or it could disappear. According to the Bloomberg article, this was the amount of money that had disappeared.

Since Richie wasn’t on the Banking Committee, he had done what most congressmen did, which was to study up on his own subject and hope that the others were studying up on theirs. He did wonder why Michael had stopped hanging around, why Loretta had gone to California for the summer rather than to their new house in Burgundy. His one specific financial thought about Michael in the last week had been to wonder whether he could borrow some of the twenty-two thousand he would need to finance Leo’s first year at Brown, since Ivy was complaining, too, about the book business. Part of the problem, he now realized, was “illions”—once you were counting in the “illions” your mind got hazy about the real amount. When was that article in the Post—Riley would have it filed in her forebrain — that declared that the Iraq War had cost three trillion? A perfect example of the “illion” problem. Richie had looked at the “three,” lost interest in the “trillion.” “Three” didn’t seem like much. They should have printed it out—$3,000,000,000,000. He might have taken it seriously. And here he thought he was doing okay, a co-op in Brooklyn that was worth about a million, a condo in D.C. that was worth about $750,000, $158,000 in salary, and $376,000 in investments (Edward D. Jones, thank you — a name you never saw in the paper). Was Michael worth ten times what he was? Probably more like fifty or a hundred. But, looking at the Bloomberg article, he realized that everyone, really, was worth nothing — the numbers were a story people told about themselves, were told about themselves. He was fifty-four years old! How had he not realized this before? He shook his head and closed his laptop. He felt a little dizzy.

Jessica came into the room. She was wearing a pair of shorts she had bought for him — silk with a leopard-skin pattern — and a shirt buttoned with a single button. Her hair was flipped here and there; clearly, she hadn’t looked in the mirror before going in search of her coffee. She was worthless, too, a momentary occasion in the history of the universe when matter happened to coalesce in a being as ephemeral as a smile or a turn of the head. Richie thought that there was nothing he could do to save her, and his eyes got wet. She said, “I woke myself up laughing. Isn’t that funny? I have no idea what I was dreaming about, but the first thing I heard was this giggle. I wish it would happen every morning. I am in such a good mood!”

Richie grabbed her hand and pulled her down on his lap, then kissed her and said, “Do you remember that Foreigner song, ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’? All the howling at the end, ‘I want you to show me!’ ” She kissed him back, fully, richly, with fervor. She murmured, “Sort of,” and closed her eyes. Richie remembered it as if it were on the radio right now, that desperation that had gobbled up his own and screamed it back at him. Jessica said, “I can’t believe how you love me. I never met anyone like you.” But Richie knew that he was the lucky one.

—

ANDY’S FIRST URGE when her money disappeared again was to look for a set of pearls she’d mislaid months before. She had checked everywhere when she realized they were missing — under the seat of the car, under the bed, behind the couch, in the canisters in the kitchen, in all of her suitcases and handbags. The Hut was clean and neat, but she tore it apart, remembering how nice those pearls were — not terribly valuable, plain and old-fashioned, but they could be reset in a more stylish way, interspersed with something semi-precious, like tourmaline. She didn’t know why she wanted them; perhaps they had simply slipped off her neck at the movies or something, and, in her inattentive way, she hadn’t noticed. But she was newly certain that they had to be somewhere. It took her most of the afternoon, but she didn’t find them when she was thrashing around in every box, she found them when she was picking a coat up off the floor in front of the closet by the back door — and they slipped out of the pocket and landed with a rattle on the tiles, arranged in a graceful curve, as if in a store window. She bent down, picked them up, pulled them gently through her fingers, touched them to her cheek, carried them into her bedroom, and put them in her jewelry case.

Then she went back to cleaning up. First she gathered up everything she had thrown down, rearranged everything she had dug through, set back the cushions that she had tossed on the floor, lined up the shoes she had pulled out of the closets, straightened the rugs she had looked underneath, made the beds, unloaded the dishwasher, put the books back on the bookshelves, organized her cosmetics, threw out some shirts and pairs of jeans that were out of style. Only after all of that did she let herself wonder where that money had gotten to and whether it was a bigger deal, since it was a bigger sum. In 2000, when the absconding broker transferred his clients’ money to Venezuela, she had been worth ten million. Since then, she had gone up to twenty-five, but recently she had settled temporarily at seventeen, or thereabouts. She’d been tempted to buy this investment and that investment, but for two years now, it had been rather like the old days, when she’d gotten over the first flush of having money — say, when the twins were three or four. She would leave them with Nedra and go into Manhattan and wander around Bergdorf’s or Bendel’s. Her eye would see something, her hand reach out. She would try it on and be told by the saleswoman that it looked wonderful, and indeed it did, but as the moments passed she would find it, whatever it was, more and more awful. She could have those two thoughts at the same time — it suited her, but it was awful — and she would shake her head and walk away. Once, a saleswoman ran after her and said, “Madam! Please! I always lie, but this really was made for you, it really was. The designer ought to give it to you!” She had thanked the woman, regretfully shaken her head. She couldn’t buy it.

Thinking of this, she knew she would do nothing about the money. She knew it had gone to Michael somehow, though she didn’t know how. She was eighty-eight, she had no desires, she had found her pearls. Some abyss, perhaps, gaped around her, but it looked like a vista up in the Catskills, hills receding, orderly and green, into the distance. She could not make herself afraid of it.

—

November 10, 2008

Dear Janet, Jared, Claire, Carl, Jesse, and Jen,

I understand that it has fallen to me to write a little history of the last two months, in order to explain what has happened. I admit that all of this was as much of a shock to me as it must have been to you, and for several weeks I did not know how to address, or, perhaps, want to address it, but Riley Calhoun, Charlie’s widow, my housemate, and my fellow parent (and Richard’s former aide), has impressed upon me the need for clarity. Whether we will be able to put any of this behind us, I sometimes wonder, but history says that we will.

Riley has assembled a timeline that I am using to relate all of this. She is a very dedicated and organized young woman. At any rate, let me get started.

It now appears certain, that on or about September 15, Michael did forge papers that transferred his mother’s trading account to his own firm. For most of the end of September, no one understood this. When Andy’s broker asked her if she had authorized the transfer, she said that she had, but the broker was, let’s say, both suspicious and disappointed, and he called a friend of his in the Manhattan DA’s office and asked him as a favor to look at the papers. It turned out that there were a few errors in the wording of the transfer, and that, when they had a forensic handwriting expert examine the signatures, there was reasonable uncertainty about Andy’s signature. She continued to resist pressure to admit that she had not signed the papers, but in the end, they noticed, she could not say that she HAD signed the papers. I guess she kept saying, “The signature is fine. It looks fine.”

When the realization hit that Michael’s company had gone bust right at the end of September, the coincidence was just too great, and so the DA’s office began investigating Michael. There was that picture in the Post, you will remember, of Michael in handcuffs, with the caption, “Is this the only financier who will pay the piper?” Of course, Michael only spent one night in jail, and maybe, if the picture had been in the Times rather than a more populist paper, it wouldn’t have had such an impact. He was very well dressed in that picture, which I think turned out to be a disadvantage. I believe the immediate motive for the forgery was that Michael was, as they say, “short” on some investments, and that he was trying to maintain payments on them, so that if they crashed he would benefit and repay his mother’s account. However, this did not work out. I do not know when his trial date is, and I don’t think he does, either.

At any rate, the newspapers were now on to him in a way that they were not on to other traders that perhaps behaved even worse, and of course Michael always has a certain facial expression we are all familiar with, which I suppose is best described as “haughty,” and it does no good to explain to the average person that he has always had that expression, Wall Street or not.

All of this was happening around the same time as the bailout, so there was a lot of chaos. Riley informs me that she did not allow Richard to vote for the bailout, either for the first bill or the second bill, but, as you know, neither his remarks concerning the unpopularity of the bailout (I guess Riley read that government purchase of toxic assets always has a deleterious effect on recovery, and stood next to him during both the votes) nor his vote had any effect (but see below).

You may have read the article in the Times about Richard. If not, I enclose a copy. I believe that this was a hit job, unwarranted by the true circumstances, but Riley says to me that, as soon as they saw it, Richard and the office staff started packing up to leave Washington. No one in Congress would sit with him at lunch, or even talk to him. The writing, as they say, was on the wall, written there by The New York Times. I have only spoken to Richard once since the election. He and Jessica are still in Washington, of course, because it takes a while to undo sixteen years of your career. Their condo is on the market. The housing market is pretty bad, but it may be that, once the new administration is inaugurated, the market will pick up.

There are many ironies here, but I will refrain from pointing them out, as even I understand that pedantry is sometimes out of place.

I look forward to seeing you all.

With love from Alexis, and your uncle

Henry

From The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2008,

New York and Region:

CONGRESSMAN HITS A ROUGH PATCH

Voters in Brooklyn may be forgiven if they find themselves confused by recent events involving their representative of the last sixteen years, Richard Langdon. His constituents are beginning to wonder if Congressman Langdon has been unduly influenced by his twin brother, Michael Langdon, a bond trader and manager of Chemosh Securities, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo Bank. Michael Langdon was recently arrested for forging papers that transferred his mother’s funds into his business’s account without her knowledge. Chemosh was shut down, and Wells Fargo has issued a statement saying that they are looking into “the last eleven years of investments managed by Michael Langdon for further irregularities.” How close have the Langdon twins been? And what influence has Michael Langdon exerted in Washington? When asked, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was willing to say only that “A look at the Congressman’s record shows that he has voted for Wall Street more often than he has voted against them.” She is right — even apart from the most recent financial bailouts, such as TARP, Congressman Langdon’s voting record is more closely aligned with that of the Republicans than with his next door neighbor in Congress, Jerry Nadler.

The word on the street (the street being Flatbush Avenue) is not so much outraged as perplexed. “Yes, I have always voted for him,” says Bernice Stein, a lifelong Brooklyn resident and Democrat. “But what’s the alternative? It seems like the Republicans just throw their silliest candidates up against him. It’s become sort of a race to the bottom.”

Congressman Langdon has presented himself for years as aggressively fighting for alternative energy solutions, but evidently to no effect. Vito Lopez, chairman of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, says, “Look, Richard is a decent person and his heart, well, at least he has one, you know? But he hasn’t filled Scheuer’s shoes, and that’s been a concern for all of us for years now. We have to eventually ask, what are we getting from this guy? His challenger looks pretty good this time around, though I bite my tongue before saying so.”

Richard Langdon is a twin, younger by four minutes than his brother Michael. Their father was a well-respected defense contractor and World War II veteran. When Mr. Langdon was first elected, in 1992, the outgoing representative, who was a much-decorated veteran and a real power in the House, said that he had great hopes for the young man: “He’s articulate, he has the right ideas, he’s a brilliant talker who knows how to keep a bargain and to make a deal. He has a real future doing right by our citizens.” Congressman Jerrold Nadler has said, “I think we all have to admit that making deals and reaching across the aisle hasn’t been a valuable skill during the Clinton administration or, especially, during the Bush administration, but I was surprised at how readily Richard Langdon caved.” Harold Rickman, a Brooklyn constituent, says, “Look, I’m sure he means well. But every time I heard about him going uptown to the brother’s place, I had to wonder. Your heart may be in the right place, but that doesn’t mean your hand isn’t in your pocket, too.”

In the end, Congressman Richard Langdon remains something of a riddle. He is well-liked by many among those he has served, but whether he deserves their regard is, at this point, still undecided.