Golden Age

2017

THEY GOT HOME to discover that the propane tank was empty and the house freezing cold — all of Jen’s houseplants were dead, even her favorite, the peace lily. But the propane supplier was there within an hour, and the house was warm by suppertime. They agreed that the death of the plants was a smallish price to pay — if the gas had run out a day later, the tanker truck might never have gotten out of Usherton. The blizzard was another “storm of the century,” except that it really was — thirty-four inches in one twenty-four-hour period, followed by off-and-on accumulations for the next ten days of another twenty inches. Neither Jesse nor Jen was used to being impressed by snowfall. They had seen plenty, especially in the early eighties, and they had heard about even more: Uncle Frank getting out of the second-story window and sliding down a snowdrift on the west side of the old house; tunnels from the house to the barn, where the draft horses and the cows and the chickens huddled in the cold, waiting for three strands of hay and a handful of corn kernels. Oh, yes, popcorn kernels. They made light of it for a few days — the house was warm, no kids to get to school, no problem closing off the upstairs and shutting down those radiators. The house was too large for the two of them, anyway.

The electricity went out, but there were plenty of candles, plenty of books; in France, according to a book Felicity had read, the usual way people got through the winter in the countryside, all the way until the 1950s, had been a sort of hibernation — sleeping from sunset to sunup (some fifteen hours) saved heat and food. For three days, they were really cut off — no Internet, no TV, no recharging the cell phones, no mail. Sun came up after seven-thirty, went down before five — not quite as bad as France. Jen decided to read Middlemarch, and Jesse went through every New Yorker that Felicity had stacked in her room. They ate mostly out of the pantry, put the cuts of meat from the freezer in a box sunk into the snow by the northwest corner of the house, where, in spite of the fluctuation in temperatures, it had a chance of staying chilled. It was Jen’s idea to surround the meat with bags of frozen peas and beans as a gauge. They talked fondly of Lois, who would have cooked every roast and stew the first day before burying them outside — not just survival, but gourmet survival.

The morning after the blizzards had stopped, the electricity came back on and the road was finally plowed. The full results of the November election still weren’t announced; after eight years of Obama, everyone was certain there’d be a Republican sweep, and it looked like the Senate and House were going dramatically in that direction. But even the presidential tally wasn’t in. Because of the twenty-three-state Election Day power outage, there was no telling how many votes were lost, or worse. Rumors abounded that the grid had been hacked, since the polar vortex alone could not have caused the complete electrical shutdown — in, say, Los Angeles.

There was a knock on the door. It was Sheriff — what was his name? — Bill Jenks, standing on the front porch. Jesse thought that there must be some disaster, that the county was sending people out to see if everyone was okay, so he opened the door with a smile, and Sheriff Jenks handed him a paper: Request for a donation? Tickets to some fund-raiser? But it was a copy of a notice of sale, and the property being sold was this very farm — Jesse recognized the parcel number. Sheriff Jenks said, “Shoulda given you this ten days ago, but no one could get here. You can appeal that, and put off the date.” The sale date on the paper was February 1. Jesse didn’t say anything, he was so thunderstruck. Sheriff Jenks handed him a pen, and for a moment Jesse thought of refusing to sign, but he did sign — intimidated by the uniform, no doubt. Sheriff Jenks said, “Well, then,” and made his way carefully down the icy steps and over to his vehicle, which still had three inches of snow frozen on the roof. But the sky was clear, brilliantly clear, almost blinding, in every direction.

Jen was in the kitchen, enjoying the hot water, humming to herself. He set the paper beside the sink and walked out the back door. It was freezing cold and he didn’t feel a thing, he was so enraged. Moments later, the door slammed open behind him, and Jen said, “Is this what I think it is?”

“If you and I both think it is a notice of foreclosure, sale, and eviction, then we agree on what it probably is.”

“How can that happen?”

“I think the real question is, how can it happen this fast, without any response from goddamned Piddinghoe Investments, or the bank.”

“Can we get into town?”

“Not until Monday.” It was Thursday. “There’s no point going tomorrow, because the state and county offices are on four-day weeks. I’m not sure we would get there tomorrow, anyway. The sheriff’s car had chains. We don’t know what the roads are like.” Jesse called the lawyer there, but there was no answer.

It was a difficult weekend. Winds were so strong that they blew the TV dish off the roof of the house, and Jesse had to cover the west windows with plywood. No branches broke through any part of the roof, but they did fall all around, littering the surface of the snow, which, even after melting and freezing, came as high as the porch floor and drifted much higher in some spots. What had seemed to be an amusing adventure now became a test of patience, and since the upstairs was closed off to save on heat, there was no escape from one another, either. They agreed to blame Ralph Coester, for lack of anyone else, but Jesse felt blameworthy, too, though he didn’t know why: For going in debt in the first place? For not being a good enough role model to be able to bring at least one of his sons into the farm? For priding himself for so long on his clear-eyed and unsentimental approach? For not going into something else, anything else, and getting out when the getting was good? Even for marrying into a farm family instead of into, say, an engineering family? But Jen was the only girl he ever truly loved. There was another girl he’d asked out, but he now could not remember her name. So he was not going to blame himself for that. On Sunday morning, they had a spat about bacon grease — she had let the grease can get too full, Jesse spilled some when he went to dump it, and then she burst into tears, and he burst into tears, and that was that for rage. On Monday, right after breakfast, they went together into Usherton, to the county courthouse. The results were not good: the paperwork was there, filed by the county attorney on behalf of Piddinghoe Investments, signed by a judge. The old way of having a hearing was gone now, as of last July 1, because the state couldn’t afford to have a judicial hearing about every foreclosure; it took too long and clogged the system. If the papers were in order and the evidence went against the mortgage holder, that was that. As for putting off the date, the snow was an act of God, no provision in the law — the sale of the property would go forward as planned. Jesse asked what his recourse was, and the county clerk asked him if he had a lawyer. He named his lawyer. The county clerk said, “I’d get someone else, if I were you.”

The days progressed both slowly and quickly. Jesse did get another lawyer, and the lawyer was upbeat at first, but after Jesse had called him the fifth time to see what he thought, he got irritable, until he finally said, “Look, I am doing what I can, all right?” In the meantime, Jen started going into closets and opening drawers and getting boxes from a box store in Usherton (the roads were fine now). She was packing up to leave before Jesse had even admitted that they would have to leave. They said nothing about where they might go. Jesse went out to the machine shed and ran his hand over the tractor, the planter, the cultivator, the rest of the machinery, old and new. He stood and stared for a long time at the lister, which his grandfather had dragged along the rows of corn; once the plants got a foot tall, the machine would mound dirt along the stalks, supporting them. It was like looking at a hatchet and contemplating a wood stove.

After the sale went through — to Piddinghoe Investments — they were given a month to depart. The new owners would be doing the fertilizing and the planting. Jesse was not to go into the fields for any reason.

—

HENRY COULD NOT help brooding on the loss of the farm, though he hadn’t been there in decades. It was surprising how sharp the images and sensations from his childhood were. He had to keep reminding himself that the house he was in when he closed his eyes no longer existed; the house Jesse and Jen were losing was the Frederick place, not the Langdon place. Even so, that sense of lying on his back on the sofa, holding his book (which in his mind was The Bride of Lammermoor), seeing the sunlight cross the page in a triangle, moving the book, shading his eyes, thinking about his aching hip simultaneously with thinking about Edgar Ravenswood, who looks like Frank crossing the moor, and what is that, something like the back field. His mother is in the kitchen, talking to Claire and snapping beans for supper. He is planning his getaway. He turns his head and looks out the front window at the two leafy oak trees out there, and the rustling cornfield beyond. It is summer. The corn tassels are undulating in the breeze. He is idle, a pleasure.

He opened his eyes. Really, he was in his own chair, about eight feet from his bed. Through the doorway into the living room, he could hear Alexis playing the piano — she was practicing “Pictures at an Exhibition.” She was supposed to perform the whole thing in a recital at the end of May, and she had been practicing assiduously, which, it had to be said, drove Riley out of the house, but Henry didn’t mind — he liked the way the pattern of the notes was engraving itself on his brain. He did not think that Mussorgsky had intended his suite to be soothing, but Henry found it so.

The loss of the farm had been so quick that no one could believe it. Jesse had said nothing at Christmas, had seemed fine enough, considering the experience in Vancouver and Lois’s amazing end. He had complained only about the weather, but complaining about the weather was the friendliest complaint a person could make. Riley kept Henry fully informed about the blizzards in early January; Riley no longer talked about global warming or climate change, only “climate disruption.” Henry knew that she thought her career had been a failure, a beating of her head against the brick wall of capitalism. Often after she looked at Alexis, she looked away. How had she, of all people, invested in a future she knew would never happen? She even showed Henry an article on her phone that some archeologist had written about civilization collapse. The gist of it was that everything a civilization congratulated itself upon ended up precipitating collapse. Yes, Henry thought, Rome, Byzantium, Zapoteca.

Henry listened to the low throbbing accompanied by the melodious tune — da dah di da da da da; doo doo. Alexis was doing a mournfully good job with the music. Then the pounding chords of the next section; Henry didn’t remember what it was called. He imagined the Louvre, great halls of columns, marble, light, paintings. He imagined himself walking slowly from one painting to another. He wished he had bothered to go to St. Petersburg and visit the Hermitage. There were many things he had forgotten to do.

Now the tune started high and quickly deepened — the essence of being Russian, maybe. Who was that, Greg Stein, who had specialized in nineteenth-century Russian lit, lectured his students in a booming voice audible from the corridor, sounded and wrote as if he were six five and heavily bearded, but was actually five six and slight. Loved Gogol above all. He had quite a handshake, too. When Henry congratulated him on getting tenure, he had nearly broken Henry’s hand, his grip was so strong. Philly. He was from Philly.

People from cities hardly remembered the houses they grew up in. Greg Stein had kicked off the dust of Philadelphia and never looked back — Harvard was where he was born, at least in his own mind. Henry had tried that, but here it was. Every other memory was of the farm now. Walking to school at four with the adored Lillian, ten, wearing his mattress-ticking outfit, holding Lillian’s hand, looking up and closing his eyes, feeling her kiss him gently on the lips, hearing her say, “Don’t ask every question that you think of today, Henry. Just every other one.” Himself saying, “I promise.”

Now the finale, loud and a little discordant, drove all other thoughts out of his head. Bom bom bom bom bom. It was beautiful. Loud, then soft. Henry closed his eyes again.

A few minutes later, the Mussorgsky came to a measured end, and there was silence. He heard footsteps. He opened his eyes, and Alexis was standing in the doorway. Henry said, “Beautiful, darling. It’s almost there.”

“Maybe,” said Alexis. “Can I get you anything? I need to go through it one more time.”

“I’m fine,” said Henry. “I might get up today.”

Alexis smiled. She was so built like Charlie that he might as well have been in the room.

“Do it again, then we’ll see,” said Henry.

She turned, and disappeared.

He heard the bench scrape the floor; then there was a pause. A siren came and went in the distance. Henry shifted in his chair and licked his lips. He should have asked her to refill his water glass. He reached for the Kleenex, and the music began again, those simple notes at the beginning, then the chords, which always seemed so promising and patient, maybe the best opening measures of any music he knew of. That was when the pain came, a sharp but short pain. Henry writhed, clenched his fist, then relaxed, opened his mouth for a little air. The music swelled. Da da da da.

—

IF FELICITY AND EZRA had been getting along better, they might have uncovered who was behind Piddinghoe Investments more quickly, but every time they got together, at least in person (Felicity was not moving to D.C. and Ezra was not moving to Boston), they would argue, not about the election (they agreed that the election was a bald-faced power grab by the Corporatocracy), but about an organization called Deep Green Resistance. Ezra hadn’t joined DGR, and how did you join? There were no dues or meetings. But he was infected (Felicity’s word) by DGR’s manifesto, and the infection caused argument outbreaks. It also festered in Felicity’s brain, giving her migraine headaches. Even at Uncle Henry’s funeral, they’d had a vicious whispering argument in the living room, when Ezra pointed his finger at the light switch as if to shoot it. Felicity knew that her least developed talent was a sense of humor, but still could not help herself.

The theory propounded on the Deep Green Resistance Web site and in books by the DGR founders was that the only way to save a modicum of civilization was to systematically destroy the energy infrastructure right now, and maybe right now was too late; 2013 might not have been too late, but the world had dithered itself into four more years of climate collapse. Felicity’s problem with these ideas was that she could see the logic of them — if the world were forced to go local by the destruction of airports, roads, oil and gas pipelines, transmission towers, banks, harbors, the Internet, then, yes, there would be a war, or many wars, but the population would decrease, and the humans who were left would be forced to live the best they could in the environments they found themselves in. Abstractly, Felicity understood the necessity for population collapse of humans in order that other species might have the ghost of a chance, but she thought Ezra skated around the deaths of millions, and seemed to imagine that the items of infrastructure to be destroyed (including windfarms) would be manned only by jerks and assholes who deserved to die. Had there not been a day care in the building that the Oklahoma bombers blew up in ’95? Well, yes, said Ezra, but…And then he would spout the perfectly logical argument against non- or partial resistance put out by DGR: As energy supplies diminish and get dirtier, one society after another is going to be taken over by ruthless dictators, determined to preserve privilege. The entire world is going to turn into Haiti or Pakistan, and not only will more people die in the end, more overall destruction will be wrought, so that the planet will not be able to recover. The boil of civilization had to be lanced right now. Of course, Ezra didn’t even have a gun, much less a store of fertilizer, and he didn’t kill flies or spiders — he always wanted to see what they would do, so he followed them around his apartment and then opened a window and shooed them out. Felicity considered herself the cold one — the coldest one. Her first thought when her parents lost the farm was “About time.” Hadn’t she told her dad to switch to organics in 2013? The market was there, and the links between conventional farming, obesity, starvation, and habitat destruction were unequivocal. But how could he afford to take the land out of production for the three years it would take to clear out the chemicals (maybe more)? The farm bill didn’t pay for that.

Her second thought was “Why am I crying?”

Nevertheless, they did uncover the primary shareholders in Piddinghoe Investments, and right at the top of the list was Michael Langdon.

—

ANDY KNEW IT all along, simply by the ebb and flow of money into her account. She kept track. On May 1, there were three deposits right in a row; on May 6, three more; and so on, all through May. As fast as she could, she sent it away — to school districts all over New Jersey and New York, to the New York Public Library, and to all the disaster-relief organizations she could find: floods in Maryland, Norfolk, England, and Denmark; hurricanes in Mexico, the Florida Keys, and Texas; earthquakes in Russia, India, and Italy; drought relief in Arkansas and Oklahoma; research into enterovirus D68. When Richie told her that the farm had been sold to Cargill for fifteen thousand an acre, about thirteen and a half million dollars, she had pretended to be shocked, but she hadn’t been. However, she had stayed up all night writing checks. She kept no records, gave little thought to the IRS — that little thought being, Come and get me, I am ninety-six years old. Her own accounts were down, though, so at the end of May she sold her best item, a Dior gown from 1957 that she had worn to some Upjohn gala for the New York City Ballet. It was cream-colored, with beading at the tiny waist and a silk band that wrapped around the shoulders, highlighting the face, the upswept hairdo, and, as she remembered, the sapphire necklace she had borrowed from Frances Upjohn. It was a beautiful piece, it still fit, and she sold it for forty-six thousand, throwing in the white calfskin elbow-length gloves for free. Michael hadn’t called her in a year, but he did send smoked salmon, champagne, and chocolates for Mother’s Day.

—

MICHAEL WAS ELUSIVE, indeed. No more dropping by Richie’s condo with bags of take-out, no more laughing with Jessica in the kitchen, no more unsolicited advice about how to get his act together. Their last real conversation had been about the election. Michael’s theory was that the Supreme Court had acted wisely — the right was much better armed than the left, so, although deciding for the Republicans had led to roiling protests, they were relatively peaceful. Deciding for the Dems would have triggered a disaster, “if you consider disunion a disaster,” which Michael did, at the moment. Then he shrugged, as, Richie had thought, a man with a flat in the Greenwich Peninsula development in the southeast of London might do. A nearby spot was called “Isle of Dogs,” which did give Richie a laugh. But as far as Richie knew, Michael still owned the Shoebox. No “For Sale” sign, and the furniture was still there (Richie peeped in the windows). He did not think that he, Richie, was being actively avoided; he thought Michael was back in business, but it was a new sort of business, more adventurous and piratelike, no longer based in having a respectable domestic establishment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. As soon as Ezra told Richie that Michael had somehow foreclosed on the farm and kicked Jesse and Jen out, it all clicked into place without Richie’s even pondering it — first and foremost, that look of rage every time Michael talked about inheriting only a hundred grand from the old man and then finding out that the portion of the farm that Jesse got was worth six times that, then the intermittent teeth-grinding references to Jesse he had made over the years, that the “kid” (Jesse was two years younger than they were) was making all kinds of mistakes, as if Michael knew the first thing about farming. That time — say, two or three years ago — when Felicity mentioned at the table that her dad had refused to try organics, Michael had actually blown his stack and gone on at length about the free market, and if the free market was on the side of Whole Foods, well, so be it — he had no more allegiance to Monsanto than he did to Pan American World Airways. It was the same with feminism, with nuclear power, with solar, with anti-virus vaccines. The truest gauge of the way forward was the free market. Jessica had said, “But the free market is always so late to the game, isn’t it?” and Michael had laughed out loud.

At first, the theft of the farm (for that’s what it was) didn’t bother Richie all that much. But he kept thinking about it. Jesse and Jen had moved in with her brother; he was helping with the farm work, she was looking for a job. They could end up anywhere. The thing Richie wanted most was to hear Michael’s side of it — not some slogan about “what’s done is done” but the details, what he thought when he was pretending to be broke, how he got off scot-free from the forgery, why it all happened, how he fucking felt now, whether he had been lying about every single thing — but Michael was nowhere to be found. Their mom hadn’t heard from him in over a year. Janet sometimes mentioned Chance, since he and Emily were good friends, but Richie couldn’t imagine Michael showing up at the ranch and having some tender father-son moment with the cowboy. Frankly, if Michael had ever felt anything for Chance, Richie thought, Loretta had put a stop to it, claimed him for her own until her mom took him away.

It went this way through the summer, into September, into October. Everyone was distracted by the Pakistan/India skirmish, but the president did what Richie thought he should do — he sat on his hands until the Chinese premier, Ji Ling, who was younger than Richie by twenty years, stepped in and told both the Pakistanis and the Indians that China would do the retaliating if a single atomic weapon was deployed, even by accident, since prevailing winds over Beijing were from the west. After the Chinese had disarmed Iran in December, they became the de-facto peacemaker of the world, but peace was getting harder and harder to make; even Richie could see that (they hadn’t disarmed the United States, had they, and Vice-President Cotton was still arguing for war).

Of course, Michael showed up at 2:00 a.m. Of course, he was banging on the door to the condo; of course, Richie jumped out of bed, his heart pounding, and ran out to quash the noise. He closed the bedroom door. Jessica was still asleep.

Michael was happy, bouncy, and cheerful. Drunk? High? Not evidently. Flat-bellied and in good shape, neatly bearded — Richie noticed even as he invited him in that the white pattern in his beard was quite similar to Richie’s own.

What he wanted to talk about was not the farm; he had forgotten about the farm. Fact was, he was getting married again. Richie hadn’t even known that he and Loretta were divorced, and were they? Unlikely, Richie thought. When Richie said, “Why did you bother with the fucking farm?” Michael looked blank, genuinely blank, then said, “Shit! That was a sweet deal. Cargill and ADM were falling over each other trying to get that place.”

Richie said, “Do you know what an asshole you are? I’ve always wondered.”

“Do you know that land is a commodity, just like anything else? What do you care? It isn’t your farm. You never cared about it. I don’t believe you care now.”

Richie ignored this and said, “I know you did something underhanded.” He hadn’t known this a moment ago, but now the conviction flooded him. “Or illegal.”

Michael shrugged.

Assent.

Michael said, “I did not go looking for the fucking farm.”

“Actually, you did go there. I found out. Why did you go there?”

“Oh Jesus, Richie, I was in the neighborhood anyway. Look, irrigation is a thing of the past. The world population is eight billion. If we don’t have a vertically integrated food-production system, our kids are done for. There’s about three spots left on the planet — well, of course I’m exaggerating — where the food is going to grow, almost, but not quite, no matter what. Why should a bunch of guys go out every February and scratch their heads and say, ‘Wale, what’m Ah gonna do this ye-ah?’ ”

Richie clenched his fists. He could feel the back of his neck heating up. He said, “That isn’t Jesse. Jesse isn’t a rube, never was. He knows more about farming than you.”

“Well, so what? However smart he is, he isn’t equipped to do economies of scale. It’s no big deal. I, we, bought two bundles of mortgages from that bank. They weren’t the only ones, that wasn’t the only bank, and I am not the only investor. I was scrolling through the list, and there he was.” He shrugged again. Then he put his hand on his shoulder and cracked his neck and moved his jaw left, then right. There was something about this set of movements that told Richie that Michael was sure he would get away with it.

He said, “You foreclosed even though he had made all the payments.”

Michael said, “It’s been done before.”

“Remember that time at the farm? You were screaming about subsidies and how you, as a taxpayer, shouldn’t have to subsidize incompetence or stupidity, or whatever you—” Richie felt his back teeth grind together.

Michael smiled his old smile, the sly one. He didn’t need his own lobbyist in Congress, or his own bought-and-paid-for flack on the SEC; all he needed was chaos, and there was plenty of that to go around. The smile was still there, the smile that said, “You don’t care, really. Your loyalty is to me, really. I know it and you know it.”

Richie stared at Michael, then faked a yawn. After a few beats of silence, he said, “Who are you marrying?”

“Do you remember Lynne? She came to your wedding.” Michael smiled again.

“The decorator? Your mistress who was just daring Loretta to ask her why she was there?”

“Repurposer. Those days, it was lofts, but she’s done all sorts of things. She likes to find architectural gems from certain periods, mostly modernist, and put them back together. She’s done three Frank Lloyd Wrights. With the flat roofs and all the windows, they tend to deteriorate.” He palmed his iPhone and handed it to Richie. Plain woman, glasses, gray hair, practical look. No resemblance to any model or movie star ever. Richie stood up and said, “Get the fuck out.” He handed back the phone; then, softening, he made it sound like a bit of a joke: “It’s three o’clock in the morning, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fuck, yeah!” said Michael. But he hoisted himself out of the sofa, grabbed his jacket, and left, not forgetting to yank the door open so hard that it hit the wall and knocked into a framed photograph of Jessica and her brother and sister on the day Jessica graduated from high school, gowned in white that reflected in her face, her hair in a shiny bowl cut. Michael thumped down the stairs.