Golden Age

2015

CLAIRE KEPT HER EYE on Carl’s responses to things in order to gauge whether she was being reasonable or crotchety. This was the current example, where to go after her seventy-sixth birthday. Chicago wasn’t unbearably cold, but it was, well, Chicago. There had been torrents of rain in August, then the “bomb cyclone” of cold in November, though, as Carl pointed out three times, “no billion-dollar weather disasters, according to the ‘Catastrophe Report.’ ” Carl felt that they should be pleased that November was catastrophe-less, since each of the previous thirty-three months had seen at least one. “Of course,” Carl said, “a billion dollars is only a hundred million in 1960 dollars.” 2013 had hosted forty-one billion-dollar events. Carl said “Florida”; Claire said, “Rick Scott makes my skin crawl.” Carl directed her to a Web site that rented condos by the week around Melbourne. Claire remained skeptical until the morning after their arrival, when the pleasant weather, the neat furniture, and the well-maintained landscaping won her over, at least for the time being. Her mother had died when she was seventy-four. Seventy-four was quite young these days — she had met a group of seventy-four-year-olds on a plane a few years ago who were going kayaking in Australia. But, really, you lived all your life in the present — memories that accumulated randomly in your mind did not convince you of the passage of time. When your son kissed you kindly on the hair, or your step-daughter spoke extra clearly, that was when you saw yourself as you had once seen your mother. It didn’t even matter that the children were hardly children anymore; her automatic response to their getting taller, filling out, sharpening their personalities was much like sitting in a movie theater and watching a film — it had nothing to do with her sense of herself.

The vacation — two weeks — was a break, especially since Claire chose not to bring her computer and they opted to not watch the news. If it wasn’t floods in Arizona, then it was drought in California, refugee crises in Italy, algae blooms in the Great Lakes, trains carrying bitumen going off the tracks and exploding in…

She tapered off after about an hour, let Carl have some peace, and then watched Yankee Doodle Dandy on TCM, casting sideways glances at Carl, enjoying his laughter and his pleasure in Cagney’s odd but exhilarating dancing style. When Carl said that if he had been short he might have been a dancer, Claire made him get up and spin her around the living room of their very modest condo, which he did, humming “Singin’ in the Rain.” She thought, but did not say, that Carl could have done anything he wanted, dancing included. She had said that often enough, and she knew the reason, an egotistical one — she wanted everyone in the world to appreciate him the way she did.

Once they were in bed, in the dark, the condo bedroom was a little disorienting, since the bed, which was against the west wall in their house, was against the east wall in the condo, and if she woke up to use the bathroom, she had to pause long enough to direct herself so as not to walk out onto the balcony and over the railing (she made herself not think this thought). The walls of the bedroom were yellow, which was pretty during the day. Her own walls Carl had repainted four times, finally settling on a restful shade called “Coastal Vista.” Nor did she especially like the sheets, which were cotton (hers were bamboo), but the coverlet was perfect — light enough to be cool without air conditioning, and heavy enough to stay put. Finicky. She was so like her mother now. The mattress was a little too firm—

Carl rolled toward her. He put one arm under her neck and laid the other one across her, and she snuggled backward toward him. They sighed simultaneously, and she felt him go to sleep. He always fell asleep before she did, which she found reassuring — it was as if he were the guide, leading her toward sleep and whatever they might find there. As with everything, he went there willingly. She could not say that Carl was never afraid, but he had always approached fear as systematically as he approached laying tile or putting together a cabinet, or, indeed, growing those vegetables in the backyard that he now adored — he would be planting the seeds in paper cups as soon as they got home.

Her own thoughts were more difficult to put to rest. Her knee itched, hair was tickling her nose, her leg jerked suddenly. Who was that who had restless-leg syndrome? Gray’s mother-in-law, it was. She took something for it.

Her bladder woke her up, as it did every night. She tried to exit the bed as quietly as she could, made herself turn left rather than right, did not look at the night-light in the bathroom or think about the paragraph in the lease that released the owners from all accidents. She thought she stepped down two steps, which startled her and woke her up — there were no steps. When she got back to bed, the sheets were cool again. Carl was sound asleep, but then he woke up, sat up, blew his nose, lay back again. He groaned softly as he settled in. She tickled the back of his head, which was the only spot within easy reach. She heard him yawn, and yawned herself. He was a little awake, because he squeezed her hand.

Claire always dreamed in the morning; when she woke up, the first thing she thought of was the conundrum in her dream, why had she not made out the bill for her party clients, such a big party, all pink, and her mother’s voice said, “Pure laziness, you ask me.” Claire stretched and stood up — she hated this part about old age, always heading for the bathroom; it made chamber pots look good. Carl was still asleep. The room was already warm. She looked at the clock. It was nine-twenty-three.

In the bathroom, she washed her hands, blew her nose, took a drink of water. She couldn’t believe they had slept so long — hadn’t they gone to bed before ten-thirty? But she yawned. She went back into the bedroom. Carl was lying on his side, facing away from her, his arm outside of the covers, his hand resting on his hip. She said, “Sweetie, it’s late. What do you want to do today?” When she sat down on her side of the bed, his arm flopped awkwardly backward. He didn’t respond. She knew what was wrong — or, at least, her body did, because she avoided touching him, only got up, went around, squatted down in front of him. His eyes were closed; his face looked the way it always did when he was sleeping, handsome, with sculpted cheekbones and a smooth forehead. She ran her fingers through his hair and said, “Sweetie?” His body shifted away from her. She touched his carotid artery, then put her ear to his chest — no movement, no sound.

Claire remained where she was for a long moment. Her immediate thought was, So it’s happened again. Of course, the death of her father was sixty-two years in the past, but if all your life was present all the time, then, yes, the two events sat beside one another, proving something. She put her hand on his forehead again, and now she felt its coolness. She kissed his lips, and felt their thickness, their lack of response; that was, indeed, the very thing that convinced her, but also, in a way, reassured her. No need to panic — Carl had gone on ahead. At that thought, the tears began.

Even so, even so, the rest of the world was the enemy now, wasn’t it? People would bustle in, push her aside, carry him off. He would then go to the funeral home, after that the crematorium (it was in his will). She continued to stroke his forehead, kissed his beautiful lips again, thought briefly of knives in the kitchen — it might be easy, she could lie down beside him and do it. Why go on, really? But she didn’t; she was a good girl. She stroked him for a while, then turned around and sat beside him, her back against the side of the bed, her head resting against his bent knee. He felt present in the room. That was all that mattered.

The coroner’s diagnosis was cerebral thrombosis, a blood clot in the brain, often no symptoms ahead of time, came on at night or early morning, when blood pressure was low. No, he would not have felt distressed, would not have awakened. The coroner said he wouldn’t mind going that way, compared with what he’d seen over the years. The director of the local funeral home was kind and sympathetic; the owner of the condo let her out of the second week of their lease; everyone was so sorry. Angie screamed and dropped her phone when Claire told her, but called back, still crying, and said she was sorry, how was Claire? When she got back to Chicago, the flowers started coming, the first bouquet from Henry, along with a note that said how much he’d always loved Carl — remember the time in his old place in Evanston when Carl came over to see why the wall in the dining room was damp all the time, and when he cut through the wall he saw that someone had used a piece of garden hose to replace a water pipe? He had to replace the hose with real pipe, the wall, and part of the flooring. Never made a mistake, listened with interest to every one of Henry’s ideas about Pope Innocent III, then remarked that he had given up on religion when he was six. Claire kissed the letter.

She let Angie make the decisions about where the service would be and what would be done with the ashes. Angie chose a nondenominational parklike place a little west of her house that had been in the cemetery business for almost a hundred years, and was well cared for; Claire wondered if she would ever visit there. The next day, Claire went into the gardening shed (formerly the garage, and so not terribly cold). Neatly stacked were the cups, the medium, the packets of seed — Red Calabash and Arkansas Traveler tomatoes, Purple Beauty sweet peppers, Dark Star zucchini, sunflowers, parsnips, morning glories. She planted the seeds as she had seen Carl do, three to a cup, made sure they were moist, and covered the cups as she had seen Carl do, with an old blanket. It took her a couple of hours. A week since he died. Oddly, she did not feel terrible; she only felt that he was somewhere — in the back bathroom, perhaps, fixing the toilet so that it would not run, or down in the basement, straightening his tool closet. Wherever he was, he was present; she felt that, and so she wasn’t afraid.

—

AFTER THE IPCC ISSUED its report in October, Ezra taped a quote from it, written in red Magic Marker, just above the head of John Burroughs: “Warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally.” When the Republicans took over the Senate, Ezra told Richie that the United States would address climate change by saying, “Fuck you.” He told Richie that the interior areas of all the Earth’s continents were going to dry up and heat up—125 degrees in Denby, Iowa, in the summer and minus fifty in the winter would become the norm. There were a few safe places to be: Oregon, Washington State, parts of California, New England, Nova Scotia, parts of D.C. (though not Richie’s neighborhood — move now, to Columbia Heights, said Ezra). Richie said, “You sound like my second cousin — well, first cousin once removed. She is a font of statistical information.” Ezra, who, when they ate lunch in restaurants, never looked at the girls go by and also never looked at the boys go by, actually made eye contact, and said, “She is?”

“Ezra,” said Richie, “she’s four inches taller than you.”

Ezra said, “She is?”

Richie saw that he was going to do some matchmaking. He said, “She’s coming in a week, for the spring flowers and to go to some conference at Georgetown.”

Ezra shrank into his seat again. Richie would have to give some advice. He was an idiot compared with Ezra, and they both knew it, but Richie had a fine record as a man-about-town — two attractive wives, both of whom remained fond of him, and some old girlfriends who e-mailed regularly (Nadie, of course, the most interesting; she and her wife had each had a child, about three months apart in age, and very compatible). In his two years working with Ezra, Ezra hadn’t mentioned a girlfriend, or even, though Richie didn’t have the best memory, a date. He stared at Ezra, who was wearing a wrinkled blue plaid shirt, jeans, and orange sneakers. He said, “Wear what you have on, but wash it between now and then.” Ezra looked down at his shirt as if seeing it for the first time.

Jessica’s faith in Leo, Ezra, and the rest of their generation had only grown over the last few years. After watching Leo with Jack for a weekend, she said, “If I had met anyone like Leo when I was of breeding age, I might have had a kid.” Richie admired Leo’s skills, too. He kept Jack corralled and entertained while still discussing new exhibitions at the museum — he had a paid job there now, because an anonymous donor had dropped ten million into the museum’s coffers “for non — patchwork-quilt” exhibitions. He had declared to Richie (unasked) that hookup culture was over for him, and so he was living with Jack and Britt, who worked at Amazon Publishing on the marketing side. Britt’s apartment had a view of the East River. She was older than Leo, but that seemed to be a trend, too. Richie had said once to Jessica, “Do you think he’s noticed that Britt is black?” Jessica said, “African American,” then gave him one of those looks that said, “I forgive you, because you are old,” but that was before Ferguson, before Eric Garner — Richie felt that he was now maybe one degree more sensitive than he had been. As for Ezra, Jessica would take him for walks and he would tell her interesting anecdotes about how he spent his summers when he was in elementary school counting plants, birding, and stalking muskrats. Had he been bullied? she asked him. One year, maybe eighth grade, some kids had stolen his yearbook and written insulting variations on his name inside the cover—“Newfart,” “P.U.mark.” Ezra had been so out of it that he had glanced over them and not understood what was happening until one of the girls in his class took him aside and apologized for the others. Richie understood without being told that hookup culture had never even begun for Ezra.

Felicity stayed in their second bedroom, but she was out early and back late for the first two days, which gave Richie the ideal opportunity to survey her habits (neat) and her wardrobe (American-made, some Ohio company) before heading to the office for Ezra prepping. He knocked on Ezra’s door and walked in.

Ezra literally had his nose in a book: he had taken off his glasses and was leaning forward to make out the tiny type. Richie said, “You remember you’re coming tomorrow night for supper? Jessica bought the seitan. She’s making spaghetti with seitan Bolognese sauce and chanterelles.” This was, indeed, a measure of how kind Jessica could be, that she would cook with seitan. Ezra jumped, and the book fell with a smack on his desk. He looked pale. Richie said, “Ezra, don’t panic.” Then he had an idea. He went down the hall to Petra Rogers’s office. Petra was married and pregnant, but also game for anything. He whispered in her ear, got a laugh, and escorted her to Ezra’s office.

It was Richie who directed the play. Petra came in; Ezra got up and greeted her; Petra sat across the desk as across the dinner table; Ezra offered her food and made conversation; Petra showed interest; Ezra suggested they meet at the Natural History section of the Smithsonian later in the week; Petra glanced at Richie; Richie nodded enthusiastically. Then he and Petra critiqued Ezra’s performance — look her in the eye, but don’t stare until she looks away; don’t stand so close; be sure you shower before going to dinner, and use deodorant; get your glasses adjusted so they don’t keep falling down your nose; after you finish saying something, close your mouth; smile; if you have to shake her hand, do it firmly, warmly. Ezra put his forehead on his desk. They gave him a minute, and tried again. Richie had to admit he was a quick study. Maybe, he said to Petra when he walked her back to her office, no one had ever coached him before. Petra said, “Believe me, Congressman, they’re all like this.”

And then the dinner went off without a problem. Richie gagged down the seitan, not because it tasted bad, but because he couldn’t stop thinking about what it was, and Ezra and Felicity hit it off. Ezra was not smooth and eloquent, but Felicity was — Ezra looked at her, listened to her, and lost every iota of self-consciousness. When they were doing the dishes afterward, Jessica said, with a straight face, “She is a Scorpio, and he’s a Cancer. That’s good, as long as she accepts being the boss.”

Richie said, “I’m sure she accepts being the boss. Do you accept being the boss?”

She said, “Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them.”

It was only later, after Jessica had gone to sleep, that Richie thought about Felicity’s mentioning that Michael had appeared at the farm, allegedly visiting. Her dad and mom had told her about it — Jesse over the phone, Jen by e-mail. Her dad said that Michael had called him from Usherton, said he was passing through. He thought he would come by to say hello, if they didn’t mind — it had been so long. Jesse had some free time, since the corn was in and the beans couldn’t go in because of a week of steady thunderstorms after corn planting, so Michael came by, wearing his Bogs and his yellow slicker, and they tramped here and there. Jesse thought Michael looked older than he was; must be the worries. It was mildly strange, but then Michael went on to Minneapolis, where he was meeting someone. Jen had written that he seemed friendly, had asked, not about the big house, the nice house, but about the Maze — he had run his fingers over those handmade bricks. After Jesse went back to work, Jen took Michael up there and waited while he looked around — its rooms so small, but charming in its way. Jesse and Jen were not suspicious — who in the world would not want to stop by the farm if he or she was in the neighborhood? — but Richie knew by the way that Felicity had glanced at him that she was suspicious, and wondered if he was, too. He was, of course, but he had said only, “I would like to see the farm. Jessica, we should take a little road trip — visit your mom and see some of the country. Ezra tells me it’s going to be a desert in a year or two, so now’s the time.”

“Not a year or two,” said Ezra.

Then he and Felicity talked about how the frackers in California were using and contaminating two million gallons of water a day. And all of that fracking was up in the air now, anyway, with the oil glut. Ezra didn’t have much hope. Yes, the overextended drillers might bail on the fracking, but they would leave an epic mess behind them for someone else to clean up — or not. Ezra loved Pennsylvania, had hated to see it sacrificed, thought maybe the lesson had to be learned, but what the lesson was, was constantly changing. After that, they disagreed about water restrictions in California, and Felicity said that it was a mistake to focus on almonds.

Under the table, Jessica tapped Richie’s knee with her fingertips. After the two young persons left, she threw out the remaining seitan Bolognese and they dove into some leftover short ribs.

Before Felicity went back to Boston, she ate Indian food with Ezra at Rasika.

The main thing Richie thought about Michael’s visiting the farm was, So that’s where he’s been. He certainly hadn’t been around D.C. much, though when he was in the area he stopped by, brought food, helped with the dishes. Sometimes Richie drove past the Shoebox; the lights were on, but that could easily be a timer.

—

IN THE YEAR since the first deposit, many more had come into Andy’s account, all the same amount, $9,999. As far as she could tell by lurking about the Internet, transfers of $10,000 were what banks were required to report. She said nothing to anyone, but she did remove her own funds from that account and put them, about $134,000 altogether, into two other banks, ones that she told no one about and did no business with on the Internet; to make a deposit or withdrawal, she went there in person (she had, in fact, passed her driving test over the summer with an excellent score — the man who tested her guessed she was eighty). Where the leak was, she had no idea — had he hacked her computer somehow? But she knew that, as the money was flowing in, so it would flow out, $460,000 minus $46. Sometime around Christmas, she’d set about spending it, and she was still spending it—$10,000 to the local high school’s band program, which was about to be cut, according to the weekly paper; another $10,000 to the middle school for art-program supplies. She had bought Jonah a used Honda Civic, paid for Janet to repair her roof when a storm damaged it, bought Emily a Sleep Number bed, a new stove, and a French saddle. She didn’t dare buy Richie anything, but she bought Jessica a painting they saw one day at a gallery, a watercolor of the Rocky Mountains, $9,000, which she told Jessica was $900. Jessica seemed to believe her. She was a little foggy on IRS gift-tax rates, but she was sure $10,000 was okay. She donated $10,000 apiece to the Sierra Club, the Save the Children Foundation, The Nation Foundation, the Smithsonian, and Direct Relief. She donated $15,000 to the Salvation Army and $5,000 to her local public library. At $100,000, she quailed for a few weeks — he was certain to find out — but when Richie and Michael’s birthday came round, she’d called Michael on his cell. He asked how she was, whether she needed anything, had the shipment of fruit arrived, it was the only valentine he could think to give her. After talking to him, she knew that he would never say anything, no matter how much money disappeared, and he apparently wasn’t keeping track — the deposits flowed in regularly, unaffected by what was paid out. Save the Whales. The Nature Conservancy. The Audubon Society (spring put her in an environmentalist mood). If he ever challenged her, she thought, she would express complete surprise — was he not paying her back for the money he stole from her, was this not her income? The $460,000 was about 3 percent of what he had taken. And she did declare it, and she did pay her income tax.

In the meantime, she sold a few more items: the pearl necklace she’d thought she lost that miraculously turned up went for twenty-three thousand. The pearls were from the west coast of Australia, old ones, and large. The man who bought it confessed after he paid that he had gotten it much more cheaply than he expected to. She had responded, “I’m 95. Value is relative.” The world seemed to be awash in money again. Andy had given up trying to understand it.

Nor did she understand how she had gotten so old — of course, there was that story about Cousin Gerta, who died at sixty-five of breast cancer though her mother lived to be 104. Once, when Aunt Sigrid was ninety-nine (or so Andy’s mother had always said), Gerta came home and couldn’t find her anywhere, but eventually she heard noises from the attic — her mother was up there with a flashlight, looking for a frock she’d bought in 1885, so much fabric in the skirt, she hated to see it go to waste; she was going to piece it out for a new dressing gown. The attic stairs were lethally steep, but Aunt Sigrid wasn’t fazed. Andy’s mother had lived to be eighty; her father, seventy-three; Sven had died young, but he smoked a pipe. The history of the Bergstroms and the Kristjansons was littered with accidents, so Aunt Sigrid might actually have been the norm, not an outlier.

What Aunt Sigrid must have experienced, as Andy did, was the acceleration of the passage of time. She might have been bored, and not only with the news, where the ever-more-childlike newscasters put forth ever-more-childlike theories about passing events. She watched movies, but every announcer, every filmmaker, every actress, every actor she watched on TCM eventually became younger than she was by a generation or more; every writer of every great novel died before he or she learned what he or she had set out to learn. She tried Dombey and Son, she tried In Search of Lost Time, she tried Clarissa, she tried Ulysses, which was not as long but much more difficult. As she read these (and she read every word), even the most carefully observed passions and problems seemed to Andy to be those of youth and only fleetingly important. But at least they were there to read; she was endlessly grateful that she had been so stupid for so long, saved some pleasures for these days she had never expected to experience.

Ah, Frank. Vanished without a trace. The picture of him on her bedside table didn’t look like him; there was nothing in the Hut that smelled of him or held his shape. Nothing she did in the garden — separating and replanting bulbs, watering, fertilizing, taking in the fragrance of the lavender, the irises, the clematis, the Russian sage, weeding, watering — reminded her of him or of her former self. He was not to be found in books, or in the looks or demeanor of her children or grandchildren. Janet was getting more and more like Andy’s own mother; Richie and Michael more and more like Sven; Emily and Jonah, Binky and Tia, Leo, even Chance — whatever Frank had been had receded in them. Always elusive, he had at last eluded her. He was forever young, too, since what she remembered most vividly about him was the contrast between the boy she knew before the war — impulsive, selfish, enthusiastic, passionate, but not hard — and the young man she knew after — wary, ambitious, amorous, desperate. In honor of him, she sent something to Guthrie, an REI gift card for five hundred dollars. It was an involving project, offloading sums of money. It must not result in gratitude or suspicion or objects’ making their way into the Hut. She thought of Debbie. She thought of Claire. She thought of Henry and Jesse. Alexis! She had never met Alexis, but Richie spoke highly of her. A little college fund would be nice — say, twenty-five thousand this year and twenty-five thousand next year. After that, they would see.