Golden Age

2010

HENRY HAD TRIED to avoid but in the end had not been able to resist interpreting the crisis in literary terms. Right when it all came out, he had been reading about the hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold that some average Joe had unearthed in Mercia (well, Staffordshire), bigger than Sutton Hoo, and that had shaped his response. For Riley and Alexis, it was the long-awaited comic plot-twist: the faithful lieutenant promoted to colonel, given charge of her own little regiment of climate-change soldiers, consorting with Bill McKibben on a friendly basis, frequently quoted in The New York Times, an occasional column in The Guardian, and periodically vilified on Fox News, where, when she appeared, she did not allow herself to be interrupted even once. They had not moved out of his house — Riley said that if Henry constituted the sole member of Alexis’s village, then that was fine. So Henry spent a lot of time with Alexis, who was almost eight, went to the local public school, but was enrolled in piano lessons and an after-school Spanish class. Henry sometimes read aloud to her (right now, Black Beauty), and she sometimes read aloud to him (right now, Como nasceram as estrelas) and liked to go on Saturdays to a climbing gym and shimmy her way up rock walls (but she was not yet Charlie: she always scuttled downward when she got about twelve feet off the ground).

Richie was Sisyphus released from his endless task of pushing that stone up the mountain, and every time Henry saw Richie, he saw the relief — no more fund-raisers, no more fake smiles, no more pretending to know what he didn’t know, no more listening to the cacophonous demands roaring around him. But Sisyphus had rolled that stone up that mountain for such a long time that he was conditioned to do nothing else. Month by month, Henry had seen Richie slip into pure idleness — go to the gym (well, that tapered off), read a book (never had before), learn to cook (cut himself chopping vegetables, burned himself braising a pot roast), do housework (disorder was not visible to him). Richie’s skills were social ones: he was articulate, charming, graceful, witty, self-effacing. He had actually done something for the Congress while he was there in not being obstinate, loud, and ugly, in appearing to be the last remaining representative willing to listen. Sisyphus was going to have to reassemble himself, take on another thankless task, but he didn’t know how.

Henry knew that everyone in the family was inclined to see Loretta as the evil queen, staring into the mirror and reciting incantations against her enemies, exercising and expanding her powers so relentlessly that her very own son had to disappear in order to escape the curse, not of being her enemy, but of being her friend. Claire maintained that, though Michael had always been difficult, his problem was impetuosity more than anything else—“Frank without brakes.” Whatever intelligence Michael had was a sort of cunning — not introspective, but calculating. Loretta had put his energy, looks, and impetuosity to work for her own purposes. There had been so many girls; why had he picked her? Well, she had picked him — that much was obvious — and then enlisted that priest, what was his name, to keep Michael in line. That was the Catholic way of doing things; Catholicism was about power; there were scandals going back to the beginning of the Church. Claire clucked and clucked. In Chicago, it was all coming out — that choirmaster stabbed in the eighties, the arson at the All Saints church. Andy was not quite so ready to put all of the blame on Loretta. She said, “If she was a witch, then she never cast a spell that worked, did she? No, I haven’t talked to her, but how much advice did she ask from me over the years, how to win him, how to persuade him, how to rein him in, how to get his attention? She was always arranging her weapons, making her preparations. I think she was glad he didn’t kill and eat the children.” Ah, thought Henry, Saturn. Or, if you preferred the Greek version, Kronos, the most interesting of the gods, who hadn’t required that his sons be sacrificed by humans, but simply ate them himself.

His own views were not so mythological, though. In fact, Michael was the one he almost never thought about. He was the accident of nature or the irresistible force that simply had to be endured or avoided. Sometimes, watching Alexis choose a pair of socks or stand on a chair beside the stove making popcorn the old way (she was also allowed to scramble eggs and knead bread), he marveled at how like herself she remained every minute of the day, remembered that his mother had always said he was born already formed and she had had nothing to do with it. So it would be with Michael, testosterone incarnate. And, yes, Henry did remember Michael playing nicely with Tia, singing a song with Chance, tickling Loretta on the top of the head and kissing her cheek, and now he was separated from those loved ones. But why was this not a tragedy, the Story of Michael? Had all of the inner life really gone to Richard, none of it to Michael? There was something about Michael that made that question not worth asking, Henry thought.

As for Janet, well, everyone thought the split was a terrible shame, but there must be some way that she had brought this upon herself. Why had Jared left her? Well, everyone knew she was difficult to live with. Why had she lost the house? She’s not the only one; at least she has something to live on. Janet’s troubles were an exercise in realism, belonging to her alone. Why did she always flee when something went wrong? Pride, that’s what it was, always had been. Head shake, less said about that. Maybe something would turn up. Some deus ex machina, thought Henry, ironically. He did try to call Janet every few weeks. She said that she was fine.

—

AND MAYBE JANET was fine, since she and Birdie and her new puppy, Antaeus (Jack Russell — poodle mix) were as far west as they could go without falling off the edge of the continent. Thanks to a discussion she had while getting her hair cut the day after the Haitian earthquake, she knew that the chances of the San Gregorio Fault’s producing a 6.7 or greater earthquake were considerably less than for the San Andreas. Birdie was living on pasture (and it was pretty green, not like anything Janet had seen in Silicon Valley); Janet was paying the ranch $350 a month and supplying some extra feed. Janet herself was living in a one-bedroom condo in a complex that would probably go into foreclosure, but the laws were so complex that she gave herself six months’ breathing room, and at her age, that was enough. The nicest person in her life was Emily. It was Emily who had given her Antaeus, who had taken over supervising Jonah and was doing a pretty good job of it; she drove up to see him in Santa Barbara every month or so, anyway. She had met the roommate, walked around the campus, made sure he changed the oil in the old Prius, and bought him a membership to Costco. She hosted him for a weekend in L.A., where he went to a Lakers game and a show by a band called Steel Panther. He asked after Janet, Emily said.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said you were fine, lying low, he can call you anytime.”

He asked after Jared.

“What did you tell him?”

“You don’t want to know, Ma.”

No, she didn’t. It was easier to imagine that Jared was the mess, the one to be pitied, the one who had lost everything, the one who was stuck in Minnesota, where the snowpack was heading for a record. She knew from two letters she’d gotten from him that their marriage had done that thing she had seen with her friends’ marriages over the years — flipped from white to black in a heartbeat. As soon as one spouse was ready to get out, then there had never been anything right about it, he had never seen anything in her, she had gotten pregnant and suckered him. This breakup had been coming for a long time. Her flaws turned into impossibilities. Remember the Josephs? Same thing happened, but neither would move out of the house; every day for Laurie Joseph was a lacerating catalogue of not only her character flaws and failures, but her physical defects, too.

The few people she saw around Half Moon Bay and out at the ranch were much more forgiving. At the ranch, they traded funny horse stories or bits of advice. New Leaf, Orlando’s, the fish market — she came in with her dollar bills and went away pleased with her sole or her basil or her can of fagiolini beans and bag of spinach. She learned to knit, and the ladies sitting around the yarn shop advised her but asked her no questions — she was becoming one of those silent types, and everyone accepted it so far. What she didn’t expect was a call from Loretta. The first thing she said was “How did you get my number?”

Loretta ignored this. She said, “I need you to go to the ranch.”

“No. My car is a wreck. It won’t get me that far and back.”

“I’ll rent you a car.”

“So — you still have plenty of money. Many of us don’t.”

“I have enough to pay you to find out whether my mother is still alive.”

“You can fly there.”

“If it’s me that shows up and she’s still alive, she will slam the door in my face.”

“You deserve it. I know someone who bought one of those houses at the ranch. He made eight dollars an hour, and his wife had a cleaning service. Now they have nothing.” Janet did not in fact know what had happened to Marco, but she could guess. And his house was only near the ranch, but what was the difference, really?

“I did not give Michael investment advice. I did not know he was shorting the market, or, rather, I did not know what shorting the market was. I did not know he was so desperate for funds. I knew about the development on the ranch, but I didn’t approve of it, I thought it was too far from town, I said it was a shitty idea. But no one believed me. I need an emissary. I need someone to find the body. She really would hole up and not lift the phone if she felt ill. She’s eighty. She’s not like your mom, just immortal. She’s got all sorts of conditions.”

“No.”

“I really will pay you. I know you’re broke. I will pay you ten thousand dollars.”

“How about seven hundred fifty thousand? Then I can get my house back.”

“I can’t afford that. I really can’t. I mean, he ruined us, too. Don’t you know that?”

“I’ve heard it, but I don’t believe it. I’m sure you’ve given the money you owe me to some Super PAC dedicated to buying Congress.” Janet felt herself getting a hot flash — sweat along the back of her neck, panting, waves of heat rising to the top of her head. She put her hand on her forehead.

Loretta said, “Congress isn’t that expensive,” then, instead of laughing, burst into tears.

Janet tried to imagine this. After Loretta’s sobs had subsided a little, she said, “You send me a money order for fifteen thousand dollars, and when it is safely stashed in my bank account, I will go to the ranch. Not before. Your choice.” She hung up.

The day she did go was a glorious one — the perfect day to draw her out of her new shadowy landscape and into the sun. There had been plenty of rain, so the hills rose everywhere toward the brilliant sky, wave after wave of thrilling green, as if no water shortage would ever be possible again. Across the hillsides, swaths of lupine had draped themselves, and they shivered in the very breeze that brought their fragrance through Janet’s partially open window. Of the fifteen thousand, she had spent fifteen hundred on the Highlander, very practical, and a hundred on eight skeins of bamboo yarn, “Persimmon.” She had sent a thousand to Jonah and a thousand to Emily.

She could have passed her old neighborhood, but she went down Route 1 and through Santa Cruz. In Gilroy, she dawdled at the outlet mall, ate a burger at In-N-Out, investigated the Le Creuset store, then made herself get in the car by reflecting that, if she were to find a dead body, better to find it when the sun was high in the sky. She plugged the cord of her phone into the charger, in case she had to call someone.

But the fact that Gail Perroni was not dead was the least of surprises at the ranch. The second-greatest was the way Gail threw her arms around Janet when she saw her, and hugged her with considerable strength, and the greatest was Chance, just behind her as she opened the door, also smiling, picking his teeth from their lunch of tamales and spinach salad.

Janet must have looked surprised, because Gail said, “Honey, go ahead and pry.”

They stepped back and welcomed her in.

What was Chance? she thought. Only twenty-nine? But years of sun had polished his skin and the angle of his chin. Maybe it had whitened his teeth, too — his teeth practically gave off light. He looked, how to think of this, at home. They led her into the back sitting room, a room she had never been in. It had a series of three French doors facing northwest over a pasture that had been left fallow. It rolled gently upward, lifting its purple wave of lupine with it.

Janet said, “The lupine are amazing this year.”

Gail said, “They are amazing every year.”

Chance went over and opened one set of the doors, and the fragrance billowed in.

Janet said, “What shall I pry into first?”

Gail said, “After Ray died, I asked Chance to come stay with me and run the ranch for a year while I decide what to do with it.”

“Only I know this?”

“My lawyer knows it. The bank knows it. The hands know it. The cattle know it. They run for cover when they see him coming. Ask something else.”

“Does Loretta know it?”

“Not so far.”

“What if someone were to tell her?”

“Like you?”

Janet nodded.

Chance said, “Please don’t, Aunt Janet.”

There was a long pause, and finally Janet said, “She paid me to come and find out whether you were still alive, Gail.”

Gail said, “No, she can’t have the ranch. Not now, not ever.”

Janet crossed her legs and looked out the French doors. Finally, she said, “She told me that she was against the development.”

“She may have been, but I suspect that she did know that when the fellow paid us for the land we got five hundred thousand, and, we later found out, your brother got a million and a half. That little fact went undisclosed, although Loretta’s signature was on the papers.”

“I have never understood my brother,” said Janet.

“What’s to understand?” said Gail. “He is a psychopath.”

Janet glanced at Chance, who looked interested but unmoved by this assertion. Clearly, it had been asserted before. Janet said, “Look, Gail. She wasn’t putting me on. She sounded worried.”

Gail bumped around on her end of the couch for a moment, then said, “I never liked Frank Langdon. The first time, in that restaurant, I said to Ray that he was the coldest man I had ever met in my life. I told Loretta she was making a mistake marrying the son of such a cold man, because someone like that would have no idea, not only how to love someone, but that love exists in this world. Your mother was strange, too. I liked her, actually, but she was more like a plant than a person.”

Janet opened her mouth, but she was not the one to defend her father, was she?

Gail went on, “And I for one don’t care that your mother has got it together now, and everyone loves her. At the very time when she should have done her job, when those twins were babies, she was missing in action.” Then she said, “But weren’t we all. However, here we have Chance, and for me, that’s the reward.” She reached over and pressed her hand into Chance’s. He gave it a small squeeze. Where was the wife? Janet thought. Where was the baby? She was uncomfortable enough to sit quietly for a moment or two, then lean forward, saying, “I guess my mission is accomplished, then. I won’t say anything, just that you’re fine, and not to worry.”

Gail said, “I trust you.” She held out her hand, and Janet shook it. Chance followed her to, and then out, the door. There was more to say, but she sensed him pulling away, as if fine threads were stretching between them. At the last moment, as he was opening his mouth to wish her goodbye, she said, “Got any new horses to show me?”

“Well, the last horse Grandpa Ray bought was an Appaloosa yearling. Two-year-old now. I’ve been working with her. Haven’t mounted her at all, but she’s pretty sturdy. I guess I’ll be on her by summer.” He headed toward the barn, and Janet followed him.

The filly was in with two other horses, a bay and a gray. They were standing in the far corner of the pen, playing with a plastic bucket. The gray would pick the bucket up and drop it; then the other two would nose it and push it over. When it fell over with a rattle, the Appy and the bay sprang into the air as if surprised, and trotted away, tails in the air. There was whinnying and snorting, and then the three youngsters returned to the bucket and started over. Chance put his fingers to his lips and whistled. All three spun around, and then trotted up. Chance palmed them each a lump of sugar.

The Appaloosa was not like any Appy Janet had seen before — rangy, with a chestnut coat that was overlaid by what looked like a blanket of snow, across the haunches, mainly, but with a splash up the neck, and then around the nostrils. She was a striking animal. Chance said, “Last thing Grandpa Ray needed was another horse. He paid twenty-five grand for her. Grandma said she was beside herself. I guess they were barely speaking even by the time he passed away.”

Janet reached out cautiously to pet the horse, but the horse was friendly. She sniffed Janet’s hand and presented her forehead to be tickled. Janet said, “Chance, I don’t know that your grandmother should be so, I don’t know, blunt with you.”

“She doesn’t tell me I have to agree with her. She’s willing to live with an Obama supporter.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“You don’t have to know what you think about everything in order to get the work done. That’s what I think about most.”

“You don’t mind being stuck out here?”

“I don’t mind. Given what I like to do, I’m going to be stuck out somewhere. I like here better than Montana or New Mexico.”

“What do you do for fun?”

“We have Internet.”

“I still think you’re too young for this.” Then she said, “What about Hanny? Was that her name? You dated her.” Janet could not remember if Chance had known anything about the pregnancy or the abortion.

“She’s in Phoenix. She’s married. She hasn’t come around since I’ve been back. How do you know Hanny?”

So that was the answer.

“She came to look at colleges and stayed with us.”

“That was nice of you.”

“I liked her.”

“I liked her, too. She was a little ambitious for me at that point.” He laughed, then waved off the two-year-olds, who wandered back to the bucket but seemed to find it boring. Janet watched them for a moment, then turned to Chance and grabbed his arm. She said, “Chancie, I don’t have the feeling that you comprehend what is going on here, what has gone on. Your grandmother loves you, but she’s also using you to get back at your mother. Your father is in deep shit. He ruined me! He ruined my life!” Even as she said this, though, she thought that she was not quite speaking the truth — in spite of constant ripples of worry, she didn’t mind scraping an existence together in Half Moon Bay. The truth was too complex to speak, which was probably why she didn’t talk much anymore. She said, “Anyway, what he did isn’t about me. It’s about something bigger….Oh, I don’t know. Are you still married?”

“Sort of.”

That was all he said. In the end, Janet could only shake her head. As she drove home, she thought, a year and a half, and we’re all still dazed. We can make the first connection, but not the second one — take the first step, but go no further. And despite all her deep and ancient resentments, she would have defended her own father. Her muscles had twitched when Gail attacked him, even though Gail’s observation was right on. “Cold” was the perfect word for him. Here he was, dead for fifteen years, buried, his assets dissipated, his “work,” whatever that had been, finished, forgotten. There was a way he’d had of walking through a room…and then a scene flashed into her mind, long forgotten and now utterly present: Some summer house somewhere, a little ramshackle, she and her mom coming in the door from shopping, exhilarated by the damp weather and happy with something they’d bought. The twins were sitting apart, each on a sofa pillow, their hands in their laps, not looking at one another. As her mom exclaims, “Hello! We’re back!” her father’s beautiful head turns. He looks over his shoulder at them, and there it is, revulsion — not dislike or hatred, nothing so conscious — rather, an involuntary shudder, and Janet knows in her deepest being that they should not have come back, they should have stayed away, left for good. She also knows that her mother hasn’t noticed, bustling with the packages. She sees her father’s face mask over with some sort of fake normality, 1950s male patience. She goes up to him and reaches for his hand, but he avoids touching her, takes one of the boxes from her mother, and the two of them walk away into the kitchen. There is a moment of silence; then Michael reaches out and knocks Richie over. The ensuing brouhaha covers the moment, the look. The oddest thing in the picture in Janet’s mind is how young her father is — almost a boy, really. If she had been the age she was now, or even his own age at the time, she would not have taken it personally.

—

CLAIRE HAD PUT on three parties for the Jaspers, who lived in a stony palatial house on three acres in Lake Forest, a place that would have looked and felt like a tomb if Jed and Caroline Jasper were not the ebullient, generous folks that they happened to be. There had been a fourth party, too — at New Year’s — and Caroline had invited Claire and Carl as guests rather than as employees. Claire would have minded losing the business if Caroline hadn’t set her up with three of her other friends, five parties there, the most recent a Labor Day bash that had cost the Mordecais forty thousand dollars (10 percent to Claire, a nice addition to the bank account).

As Carl drove up to the Jasper house, Claire looked around — left, right, behind. She did not quite recognize the property. But there was the number, and there was the south tower. Everything else was different; the front yard had become a farm. They pulled into the driveway, and Caroline emerged from behind a stand of sunflowers, be-gloved and be-Crocced, a basket in her hand. She ran over and opened Claire’s door, handed her a speckled green tomato. Claire took a bite and gave the rest to Carl.

Caroline said, “Can you believe this? I have almost a bushel of sweet corn, and tomatoes coming out of my ears. I had to invite everyone I knew just to distribute the harvest.”

Claire said, “I feel right at home, except that on my folks’ farm the garden was out back.”

“Not enough sun! My gardener was very adamant. Front yard or nowhere. She was so hypnotic that I just nodded and let her put in the beds.”

Carl took another tomato out of Caroline’s basket and said, “What in the world do the neighbors think?”

“They are so envious! I mean, I keep them plied with vegetables, and the two kids across the street have emerged from in front of the television to pick weeds and eat raw green beans, and almost everyone is talking about how much they hate grass now. I swear the Carnabys are going to buy goats. Or they say they are.”

Claire wondered why she hadn’t thought of this herself.

Caroline led them to the eggplants, and, really, Claire thought, they were the most beautiful and impressive, more self-contained and dignified than tomatoes, so densely purple and heavy. She squatted down and let one sink into her palm. Around her, the fragrance of the compost and the straw mulch blended with the damp scent of the plants.

Caroline was saying, “Jed saw one of those little posters — you know, with the phone numbers you tear off — and why he called them I can’t imagine. The girl must be forty, but she looks thirty. She is so bubbly, and the boy is darling. They make me feel very old and stick-in-the-muddy.” Caroline was fifty-three and looked forty. How did that make Claire feel, seventy-one now, deep into the age where everyone remarked about how well she was holding up? Caroline said, “We can die in peace. The younger generation is going to fix everything. Let’s go in. Jed is making mojitos with our very own mint, and he and Carl can discuss building a still for our reserved-label rum in that derelict backyard we’ve been maintaining all these years.”

The Jasper backyard was an acre and a half of beautiful old elms and oaks with a tennis court. Caroline said, “This is a totally locavore meal we are serving you guys, except the rum and the sugar.”

And it was delicious. All the way home, Claire and Carl disagreed, in their very agreeable way, about whether a nice raised bed or two would do well in their own backyard. Claire’s argument was that Carl needed something to build; he had redone the living-room moldings twice already and rewired the kitchen and put up enough shelves in the basement to last three lifetimes, especially since he was a vocal exponent of getting rid of everything. Once she had a crop, she would add that to her party offerings — seasonal, local, delicious menu — and raise her prices. Carl’s argument against was all about deer and squirrels and raccoons and gophers: he had spent years getting rid of the rodents who were turning their yard into a sieve, why go back now, when the deer were finally convinced that there was nothing to be had at 1201 Pine Street? Claire knew what she had to do — order the beams, have them delivered, leave them stacked beside the garage. They would find their way into Carl’s hands, and into the yard. She had gotten the name of the gardening girl. She would invite her for breakfast. Angie, too. Angie was working on the South Side, at a youth center. Claire remembered that Angie had even said that she set up some pots in the spring, of pepper plants, tomato plants, onions, garlic, herbs, but her charges, all in their teens, had shied away from touching them — they hated the feeling of dirt on their fingers. Two of the girls had washed their hands over and over after doing a little weeding.

Claire buzzed around with this plan for three days before she realized how it changed her mood, how the last time she had been this hopeful was before Michael’s crime hit the papers. When Rahm Emanuel became chief of staff, ambivalence about the Chicago election turned to real arguments — all the Emanuels had a talent for arousing controversy, and liked to do so. Claire had told Carl that she thought she had known despair before the election, but she had been wrong: Should your enemy misbehave, sadness ensued. Should your friend misbehave, desperation ensued, a deep feeling that nothing could be corrected or changed. Carl, of course, had never expected anything to change. But she saw him out the kitchen window, hands on hips, looking down at the beams in the late-fall sunshine. He leaned forward and scratched the wood with his fingernail, brought his hand to his nose, took a sniff. Cedar. Carl loved wood. Then he turned around and gazed out toward the back of the yard, where the most sunlight was, where the deer were worst, where they had let the fencing deteriorate because you couldn’t see it from the house. He began rubbing his chin with his hand, then pushed his hat back. He was thinking. Best let him think, say nothing. But she did look in the refrigerator to see how many of those Pink Lady apples she had left. Four — just enough for a galette, a two-person pie. With an oil crust. Some cranberries. She set the apples on the counter.