Golden Age

2014

LEO’S SECRET WAS that he was unusually lucky. Over the years, and more than once, he had had the thought, “I need money for the subway, and I left my wallet at home,” only to look down and see a dollar bill or a five blowing past him on the sidewalk — never a twenty or a hundred, but just enough. Or he would have a lonely thought — a party he hadn’t heard about until too late, or a table of interesting-looking people across the room at a restaurant — and then some friend would text him from the party and tell him he had to come, they were waiting, or someone at the table would recognize him and wave him over; it would turn out to be a guy he knew from freshman year. But the item of luck that he valued the most was that, at the last minute, his boss at the museum, Tanya, had decided last September that she could not go to Venice for the Biennale by herself, and so she would fund Leo to go along and help her see to the return of “The Encyclopedic Palace,” which was seven feet by seven feet and eleven feet tall. It had not been his job to dismantle or pack it; Leo didn’t know what his job had been, except to stay at the Locanda Antico Fiori for a week, explore Venice as he wished, and keep quiet about the recurring visits of a French sculptor named André to Tanya’s breakfasts. The acqua-alta flooding had not been as bad as the year before, which was also a piece of luck, because if the weather had been wonderful he would now, in January, be distracted by fantasies ofm moving to Venice rather than focusing on his present job, which was to help five-year-olds pat together clay figures in the crafts room after their very brief tour of the folk museum.

The crafts room did not have a window, so Leo couldn’t see whether the promised blizzard had materialized yet, but of course it did have a door, and one of the three boys (there were seven girls) had his eye on it. He was quick, and his mother was not, so it was Leo’s task to interfere with the escape. Having spent years on the run himself, Leo recognized the first shudder of energy — the boy’s gaze would flick toward the door; then, before his hand even lifted off the clay, Leo was there, bending down, saying, “Jack! Here you go. Just pat it like this, then push a little.” The wet clay seemed to have a natural attraction almost as strong as the door, because the boy dug his fingers into it with pleasure long enough for Leo to praise two of the girls and answer a question about next month’s program.

Another piece of luck, Leo thought, was that he had no artistic talent, no musical talent, no literary talent. Every attempt he made was pedestrian and dull; even his mom agreed with that. (When he had showed her two stories that he had written in his creative-writing class junior year, she’d said, “Well, it’s early yet, don’t give up.” So he gave up.) His talent, and a good one for his job, was appreciation. He saw the boy flutter again; that’s what it looked like to Leo anyway, a flutter of energy over the child’s hands, arms, face. He was on the other side of the room, but he got there in time to take the child’s hand smoothly as it touched the doorknob, to turn him back smoothly to the little table, to slide him past the tantrum that might have popped out. “It looks like a truck to me,” said Leo. “Trucks are cool. See? We can install the headlights right here.” He poked one end of the piece of clay.

Five minutes later, the class was over. The mom waited until everyone had left, and picked up her son. She got right inside Leo’s personal space, and smiled up at him. She said, “I am taking Jack to Maialino. Have you heard of it? It’s an Italian place in the Gramercy Park Hotel.”

“I live down there,” said Leo.

“Come with us!” said the woman, and so he did, and so they waited for him to straighten up the crafts room. By three, they were walking into the wind toward the Lincoln Center subway station (no snow yet, but the clouds looked like bags ready to tear open). Leo noticed that the mom was graceful and good-natured, maybe a few years older than he was. He said, “I was a runner. When I was six, my mom had me in San Francisco, at a hotel in Union Square. She went to the bathroom in our room, and I was outside and down to the corner before she realized I was gone.”

“It is a nightmare,” said the woman. “I’m Britt, by the way. Not Brittany.”

“Leo. Leo Langdon.”

The kid said, “I’m Leo, too.”

Leo said, “I didn’t know that. I’m terrible with names. I thought you were Jack.”

“I used to be Jack.”

“When were you Jack?” said Leo.

“This morning.” The kid held out his hand. Leo shook it. All three of them laughed.

—

EMILY DID GO to Gail Perroni’s funeral, and she did stay that night at the ranch, and she did have a long talk with Chance, and she did report it to her mom when she got back to Pasadena two days later. The first thing Janet asked was whether Loretta had been there.

Emily said, “No. She sent flowers, but she didn’t come. Binky came with her husband — what’s his name? — Chris. They live in San Francisco. He said that he put a house in Atherton on the market for four and a half million, and it sold within two days for five. All of the bidders were Chinese, from China, not just half of them.”

“Where was it?”

Emily took a deep breath. “Stockbridge Avenue. Near Sequoia. Four bedrooms.”

Her mom said, “Where the Cornells used to live, with the fake teahouse?”

Emily hadn’t remembered that place, but now she did. She said, “Probably.”

“Five million?”

Emily had not felt that she was betraying Chance, telling her mom about the funeral — Chance never said not to talk. But maybe, she realized, she was betraying her mom.

“That’s what he said.” Then, “Sorry.” She pressed on. “Anyway, I guess part of the reason Loretta didn’t come, even though they have spoken a few times in the last year, and they met in L.A….”

“Neutral territory.”

“Not quite,” said Emily. “The Beverly Wilshire, which was more Gail’s stomping ground than Loretta’s. Anyway, she didn’t come because Gail insisted on being cremated and sprinkled around the ranch, and so part of the funeral was a long walk, where we all distributed some ashes. They were put in a bowl, mixed with wildflower seeds, and there was a little scoop, and we took turns.”

“I loved the lupine all along that hillside a few years ago,” said her mom.

“No lupine this year. The hillsides were already brown.”

Silence.

Emily went on: “Anyway, cremation is against Catholic doctrine, so Loretta wouldn’t countenance it, and Chance told me that she called him four times, and Uriel, who manages the ranch now, four times, to try and stop it. But Chance said that he was always going to have it the way Gail wanted.”

“Isn’t Ray buried on the ranch?”

“Well, he is. Supposedly, the little chapel out behind the house is consecrated enough for that. But Gail told Chance that that place was suffocating and she wouldn’t have it. Those were almost her last words. No priest would officiate, so they had a funeral director up from Salinas who agreed to do it her way. She’d already set it up with him.”

“Please don’t tell me she had a horse killed and his ashes mixed in with hers.”

“No, but maybe she thought of it. Chance said he helped her go down to the corrals every day. She had a chair there, and she would sit and watch him work the Appaloosa. They call her Ray.”

“Oh, good Lord,” said her mom. “Now you’re going to tell me they think she’s Ray Perroni reincarnated.”

“She’s a nice horse,” said Emily. “Chance let me ride her bareback. She was good.” And it had been heavenly, Emily thought, bareback, lead rope, perfect obedience. It made every item of horse tack she had ever used seem awkward. She said, “Here’s another thing.”

“What?”

“Chance says he’s going to grow hemp on some of the pasture land. Legalizing it was in the farm bill. It depends on the legislature. I guess he has to get some kind of license. And he’s becoming a vegetarian.”

“A calf-roping, cattle-raising vegetarian?”

“Well, Gail didn’t know this, but the cattle herd is way down — I think less than a hundred — and he might get some bison.”

“Bison in California?”

“There are plenty of them. They sell to Whole Foods. And he knows this woman who breeds hogs for restaurants. Her male is a wild boar that she caught as a piglet. With a net. She sells to restaurants in San Fran. He thought that might be a good idea, too.”

“Is he even related to Michael?”

Emily said, “Gail would say no. She said no quite often.”

Her mom laughed.

“Loretta told Chance that a poll she heard about asked if people thought that there was going to be an armed revolution within three years, and three out of ten said yes. Get this, not only does she agree, but Tia’s husband gave a talk at the NRA convention about how to get ready.”

Her mom said, “Good Lord.”

Now Emily felt she could say, “How are you?”

Her mom said, “Jeez, I was such an idiot. I bathed Birdie with some old Cowboy Magic shampoo, and she got bumps all over her shoulders and across her back. So much hair fell out. Did I tell you about this?”

“No.”

“Well, I must have been too ashamed. It’s been two months. One woman at the barn said she would be fine, it was like blistering her — you know how they blistered racehorses’ legs in the old days, during the winter; nobody does it anymore. But, anyway, the woman said her hair would come back shinier than ever. I haven’t ridden in weeks, though.”

“How’s Antaeus?”

“He killed a rabbit.”

“No! I thought he wasn’t very predatory.”

“It was a stupid rabbit. It ran across his path trying to get to the warren, and he grabbed it and played with it until it had a heart attack. He was kind of disappointed when it died.”

Emily said, “He is a strange dog, but so cute.”

“He sits on my lap while I watch TV. Makes it hard to knit.” Then, “Have you seen Jonah?”

Emily said, “No news is good news.”

That was always true with Jonah, who at the moment was pursuing his studies in massage at the Monterey Institute of Touch and living with his girlfriend, whose job was to house-sit a very beautiful estate somewhere back in Carmel Valley so that the owners would feel at home when and if they came to visit for a week or two every year. Jonah didn’t even have to mow the lawn — a crew in a truck came and tended the landscaping every week, the irrigation system ran on its own, lights turned on and off, and there were figures in the windows that looked like inhabitants. Her mom said, “How is Corey?”

“Mom, Corey is not in my life anymore.”

“He was nice. He stood up to you.”

Emily did not say that it was unlikely that she would ever get married at this point, that teaching kids to ride made her not want any of her own, that she valued her vast quantities of free time — even at the gallery, she mostly sat there when she wasn’t smiling at browsing tourists.

They did not talk about her dad. It was only after Emily hung up and was running her bath that she realized that, once again, her mother hadn’t answered that question about how she was.

—

THEY HAD STOPPED talking about ISIS and gone into the kitchen. There could be no talk about ISIS in front of Alexis — Riley’s rule — because she would ask questions (always did), then, if you answered honestly (have to do that, another of Riley’s rules), she would have nightmares. Henry had to admit that he and Alexis had cooked up a bit of a mess, but Richie was good about eating whatever they happened to serve. Now he was holding his plate out for seconds. Riley left meals to Alexis, and with Henry’s help, Alexis made the most of her opportunity. This week, they had eaten pasta for four nights, followed by chili, then nachos, now this dish that vaguely resembled chilaquiles. If she wanted a steak or pork chops, Henry was called upon to do the grilling, which he did in the broiler with a grill pan. He was a better chef now than he had been half his lifetime ago, because Alexis liked to eat, and she was particular. She was only twelve, but she didn’t say, “I don’t like that,” she said, “The flavor isn’t very complex, is it?” or “The texture of those potatoes should be lighter. Do you think Mom would mind if I ordered a potato ricer?”

Over the last couple of years, Henry thought, Richie had seemed to sort himself out, to relax. He was a little redeemed, too. His Wikipedia entry said that he had been honest, had worked hard for his constituents through difficult circumstances, was known for his sense of humor. “Now working on environmental issues at an unorthodox nonprofit, the ReNewVa think tank.”

Alexis spooned herself another small helping and said, “The fried tortillas could have been crispier. I don’t understand that part yet.”

Richie said, “Three days a week, thirty dollars an hour, I’ll pick you up after school, do your homework for you.”

Just a nanosecond of shock passed over Alexis’s face before she realized Richie was ribbing her. Alexis had never been teased — maybe a mistake there. But she laughed and said, “I am worth more than that.”

Riley said, “Oh, yes.”

Henry often wondered what Riley would be like if Charlie had never been on that plane, if that plane had never crashed into the Pentagon. It was like teasing yourself with alternative-history questions: not only what if no Iraq War (they had talked about that on the porch — no Iraq War, no ISIS, said Riley), but what if the Supreme Court had declined to weigh in on Bush versus Gore, and what if Kennedy had backed the CIA on the Bay of Pigs invasion, what if the Nazis hadn’t seen quantum mechanics as a Jewish plot, thereby losing the chance to build an atom bomb, but also what if Harold II, the Anglo-Saxon king, had not had to force-march his troops to Yorkshire, to fend off Harald Hardrada before heading 275 miles south to Hastings? Riley might have gotten fed up with Charlie, never told him that she was pregnant, never produced Alexis, and never found that side of herself that could spoil a child, and could also be patient, contemplative, explanatory, yielding. As for himself, his alternative history without Alexis would have been a drying up, a shutting down — his death just a book being closed and put back upon the shelf.

Alexis got up and began to clear the plates. Richie burped, on purpose. Alexis said, “I know that’s supposed to be a compliment.”

Riley said, “Have you seen the documents from the ICIJ tax-avoidance investigation?”

Henry said, “What’s that?” even as Richie said, “Not all of them. There’s hundreds of them.”

Riley looked at Henry. “Investigating tax avoidance through offshoring and money-laundering schemes. The documents turned up two years ago, but they are complex. Anyway, there’s our boy, Michael Langdon. He’s got money stashed in the Caymans, Monaco, and, for heaven’s sake, the Cook Islands.”

Richie said, “I guess that’s the part Loretta doesn’t know about.”

Henry said, “How much?” He didn’t know what he was expecting, but when Riley said, “Thirty million,” he wasn’t startled, hardly impressed.

Richie said, “Well, he bought that house for cash.”

Henry said, “How much does he owe Janet, or Andy, or any of his other investors?”

“Who knows?” said Richie.

Henry thought his nephew’s reaction was surprisingly mild, almost indifferent. Maybe, he thought, this money was not news to Richie. And never had been.

The conversation moved on to Alexis’s music camp in Virginia; she was leaving in four days. Henry couldn’t help watching Richie for the rest of the evening, though, just to see. Nothing. Well, he thought, sometimes even academic rivalries died down after sixty years.

—

THE FIRST PERSON to have lied about Andy’s birthday would have been her mother, who wanted her to be off to school and out of her hair, and so she had said she was born in August — August 4, to be exact — and so that was Andy’s official birthday all through college, August 4, 1920. Or, rather, that was Hildy’s birthday. When she was living in Kansas City during the war, she had gone back to her real birthday, October 3, but she had gotten into the habit of telling people different days — the 4th, the 10th, the 6th — to avoid birthday attention. As a result, perhaps, of that (Frank, she thought, had been truly uncertain, and so had eventually fixed upon the 6th, and maybe he had told the kids that when they asked), she faced no greetings, not even any communications of any sort, on her ninety-fourth birthday. The e-mails when she opened her account were from Orbitz, Lucky Brand, Hanes, and Tusk. She clicked on a Salon story about Citibank and Goldman Sachs complaining about the heavy hand of government regulation under the Obama regime, which, as far as Andy understood, had not regulated anyone, and had dropped the case against Michael. Then she deleted all new e-mails and sat staring at her computer. Ninety-four years old! From the outside, ninety-four years seemed like quite a lot. Over the summer, she had let that number intimidate her — although she was in pretty good shape, she had had her bedroom furniture moved from the upstairs space to the downstairs former study. She often went upstairs, to open all the windows and enjoy the breeze.

As she was trying to decide if she had had enough of The New York Times for one day, another e-mail appeared, this one a notification from eBay — the auction for her size 6 Dior suit from 1948, black skirt (eighteen-inch waist), white peplum jacket, belted, soft shoulder, was continuing — up to $6,750 now, depending on authenticity (and, of course, she still had the sales slip and the receipt). The high bidder was “TheCollector,” a woman who had bought other items, only French ones, and who seemed to have all the money in the world; sometimes she outbid the second-highest bidder by 20 or 30 percent. Andy had never even seen a picture of her; she lived in, or, at any rate, Andy shipped the boxes to, Dallas, Texas. So far, Andy had resisted dragging the little Google boy to the woman’s address and having a look at her house (in the new version of Maps, he swung from her cursor like a child on a jungle gym, which made her laugh). Selling off her designer clothes had kept her in food and heat for six years, and she had, she thought, the best pieces still in her closet.

Another e-mail came in—“Deposit to your account.” At first she didn’t click on it, because she was thinking about the Dior suit, and that led her to think about the last piece she had sold, a pair of Boucheron crystal earrings for seventy-five hundred dollars, not to TheCollector, but to a woman in Seattle. But that money had gone into her account a week ago. She opened the e-mail. The deposit was for $9,999, a cash deposit. Her first thought was to wonder who in the world had her account information. But of course it was Michael. Richie had told her about the found money; it wasn’t an item of scandal, but only because so many others who had stashed their money in tax havens were far more famous than Michael. The government was pursuing a rather lackluster campaign to repatriate the money and claim the taxes. As far as she knew, most of the owners of the money and the properties and the corporations whose headquarters were mailboxes in Virgin Gorda had evaded those efforts. Time, she thought, to spend some of it. A birthday present, indeed!

But two hours later, when she got up and went to the kitchen for her English muffin, she saw that she was still the same as she had always been — the shopping was the pleasure, not the buying. She did buy a pair of colorful sneakers from Inkkas, and she did look at Amazon’s caviar collection before ending up with white anchovies in olive oil and Australian licorice. You could take the girl out of Decorah, but you couldn’t, after all these years, take the Decorah out of the girl. Frank had been that way, too. With their looks, and his ambition, and her addiction to style, they had immigrated to New York, and been taken on, like many immigrants, by kindly natives — the Upjohns. But once the energy propelling the effort dissipated, they fell back to what they had always been, stolid Midwesterners. The phone rang. She looked at the display; it was Janet. She pressed the “talk” button. Janet said, “You didn’t think I knew it was your birthday, did you?”

Andy said, “I did not.”

Janet said, “Happy Birthday, but I told everyone else it’s tomorrow. Expect a flood of intrusive calls and e-mails.”

Andy said, “I can take it.”

Janet said, “I know you can, Mom. That’s one lesson I’ve learned.”

Andy said, “You know, sweetheart, I am so old, I really don’t want anything. I think the thing for me to do is give everyone whatever they want, the first thing they think of.”

“No!”

“Yes. What is the first thing you’ve thought of?”

“New tires.”

“They are yours. Be sure you get Michelins.”

“Fur-lined,” said Janet, “with rhinestones.”

Andy said, “Don’t tell anyone that this is my plan. Just remind them to call me. Say my computer is on the fritz.”

Janet said, “Oh, Mom.”

On the sixth, Michael sent her a potted plant.

—

FELICITY’S INSTINCT had proved correct: if you wanted a job, there was nothing like microbiology. You could investigate bacteria and viruses everywhere, including in space, if your specialty happened to be geomicrobiology. She had been much courted, particularly by firms in Des Moines and Minneapolis that wanted her to run laboratories or contemplate milk. She did not get the job in San Jose, but, after three interviews and some nail biting, she did get the job in Boston, at Tufts Medical Center. She did not have the official supervisory experience the job description called for, but her adviser had told her new boss that she had “over twenty years steady practice telling everyone what to do, and she is good at it.” The first day on the job, she had suggested a new way of recording results. Now her boss, who was married, seemed to want to date her, but she pretended not to notice. The job was everything that her adviser had said it would be — well paid, and difficult. People were smart and friendly, as if they did not feel that they had been born in a state of original sin, had never conceived of that possibility. She had a tiny apartment in Back Bay, down the street from DeLuca’s market and La Voile. She had joined a book club that met in Cambridge. She noticed that the average age in Boston seemed to be twenty-seven, and the average man was good-looking. It was not herself she was worried about.

The guy she hung out with the most was someone she had met on eHarmony, a real assistant professor in the political-science department at BU. He should have been perfect for her, since he was up-to-date about Gaza, ISIS, Ebola, earthquakes related to fracking, congressional dysfunction, and the immigration bill, all of which, Felicity knew, should concern her more than the farm. She did not have to discuss global warming with him, because he wasn’t interested in the origins of global warming — that cake was baked. He thought only about possible socioeconomicpoliticocultural responses to global warming, as dictated by historical experience, in particular the effects of climate change (he always called it “climate change”) in the seventeenth century, which did not set a good precedent, and so he had several boxes of canned goods in his basement, and, indeed, his parents had stockpiled provisions for Y2K, and they had discovered, to their dismay, that canned goods didn’t hold up quite as well as they were advertised to. Felicity suggested that he buy himself a food dryer and a vacuum sealing machine, which he did.

But Gordie was not enough to keep her mind productively occupied, nor was her job or her three nice new girlfriends (UMass, Berkeley, Wellesley); she limited her calls home to one per week, and her calls to Guthrie to one every two weeks. He talked about ISIS, but not Ferguson. Did he do it more than other people she knew? Everyone talked about ISIS and/or Ferguson. Guthrie said that she was obsessing about the farm, because she kept comparing her dad’s harvest of corn and beans with the average for the county (beans 2 percent higher, corn 3 percent lower) or checking the markets and calculating in her mind what he might have made for the year, and how that stacked up against the value of the land, which had doubled since 2009 (forty-five hundred per acre to almost nine thousand — not a good sign). And how was he going to sell his crap when it couldn’t be shipped because of the railroad cars carrying the tar sands? The harvest was estimated at fourteen and a half billion bushels of corn alone. Her dad would store it. If the moisture content was high, it could crust over. If it crusted over, he could decide to break it up. If he climbed into the bin to break it up, he could sink into it and drown. Though he never had. Felicity truly hated corn. She said nothing about this to Gordie.

Megan from Berkeley said she needed a puppy. Charlene from Wellesley said she needed a cat, and Deanne from UMass said she needed to start running — look around, everyone in Boston ran and ran. She looked around. They did. Once in a while, when she was sitting up in bed with Gordie, both of them busy on their iPhones, she wondered aloud how it could be that, right when you were peaking, you didn’t feel the way you always thought you would. Gordie’s standard answer was “You feel the way you feel. It’s impossible to change that thermostat. I mean, even quadriplegics go back to feeling fairly upbeat, if they were always fairly upbeat.” Gordie was a good example of his own observation; every time she brought it up, he mentioned quadriplegics, and so, to avoid this, she stopped talking about it. But as a revelation, the idea that her lifelong project to shape her future had resulted in worry, worry, worry was utterly depressing, and Gordie, the ideal eHarmony male and, according to the algorithm, her perfect mate, had a mole on his upper lip that she didn’t like but couldn’t help looking at, a subscription to the Financial Times (in which he showed her an article about how the sudden drop in oil prices was bad news for wind and solar), and a certain odor that only she could smell — once she had even asked Megan if she could smell Gordie, and Megan had said, “God, no. Compared with every guy I’ve ever dated, he’s a summer breeze.” Felicity didn’t want to be amazed that, after all her efforts, she was doomed to disappointment, but she was amazed.