Golden Age

1993

ANDY AND DEBBIE ARRANGED that Frank would invite Arthur to Englewood Cliffs after the inauguration. He would come for a week and at least be a little distracted. No one north of the Tappan Zee Bridge had seen the sun in twenty-six days; Debbie could tell Arthur was sinking. Debbie’s husband, Hugh, was sinking, too. Hugh tried not to complain, but he thought, if the four of them could just get away to Stowe for a long weekend (away from Arthur, that was), then everyone would be fortified and ready to take on the ninth anniversary of Lillian’s death. Hugh’s unspoken opinion was that people die — his grandmother had died; his aunt had died; his grandfather had died. In his family, this was accepted as natural. He had spent nine years treating Lillian’s death as a larger event than he felt it was. Andy said, “I understand completely.”

Because Arthur might not answer the phone, and even if he did he would decline the invitation, Frank proposed that they drive up to Hamilton (Hugh was tenured at Colgate now) and kidnap him. They would take the kid, Charlie, with them. Andy asked Richie, who asked Riley, who asked Charlie, who said yes. Riley was in Washington, helping Richie organize his congressional office. But Arthur was happy to see them and not at all reluctant to accompany them to New Jersey.

He kept up conversation for maybe half an hour, then dozed off with his head against the car window, snoring for a while; then he seemed to suck air and gag, which was alarming. And even though the Mercedes was hot, Arthur shivered periodically as Frank drove.

Once they got back to Englewood Cliffs and Arthur had gone to bed, Andy, Frank, and Charlie huddled around the table in the kitchen. “He at least needs a warmer coat,” said Charlie. “I can find him something.”

“He must weigh a hundred and twenty-five pounds,” said Andy. “And he’s so hunched over. I can’t believe he’s our age.” She turned to Charlie. “I’ll be seventy-three in the summer, and Frank turned seventy-three on the first of January, but Arthur looks ninety. His father was still walking several miles a day the last year of his life. Was he eighty-something when he died?” Andy had bought tickets to Jelly’s Last Jam and planned to take Arthur to simple things, like Central Park to watch the skaters at Wollman Rink, brunch at a deli, maybe to the Guggenheim for half an hour; but, judging by the way he had changed even since the fall, she wasn’t so sure now.

Frank said, “He’s tougher than we think,” and it was true that Arthur had endured things that none of the rest of them had had to endure, but even if Frank was discounting his own good health by 50 percent, Andy thought he was overestimating what Arthur had become.

Andy said, “Maybe I should take him to a doctor.”

But could kidnapping accomplish that, too?

When they were settling into bed, Frank said, “You know, it’s okay with Arthur if he dies. I don’t think he ever tried it after that one time, but he told me he thought about it. And thought about it.”

Andy said, “You have to be brave and resolute to do it.”

Frank tightened his arms around her and kissed her.

In the morning, Arthur was already up when Andy entered the kitchen. Charlie had toasted him an English muffin and made both of them some hard-boiled eggs and coffee. Arthur was sitting up straight and cracking the shell of his egg. Charlie was saying, “You can get used to your indoor temperature being sixty-two if you’ve weather-stripped the windows to take care of the drafts. Warm socks and a sweater work for me. We’re lucky to have heat at all — we have friends who’ve never turned on the furnace. Even Riley dreads going to their place.”

Arthur gazed at him with a fond smile and said, “Some indigenous peoples are built to retain heat. Thick around the center, thin at the periphery. But you don’t look like one of them.”

“I have the luxury of a six-thousand-calorie diet.”

Andy wrapped her robe a little more tightly around herself and said, “Everybody sleep well?”

Charlie said, “I did get up to open a couple of windows, but I set a rolled-up towel against the threshold of the door so no cold air would leak into the house.”

“Comfortable bed,” said Arthur.

Andy offered them some Familia, which she liked with a little yogurt every morning, but they shook their heads.

It went like that all day: Charlie and Arthur sitting here and there, chatting, while Andy eavesdropped. Charlie was a good listener, and so was Arthur. Arthur didn’t talk only about Tim, but he did tell Charlie about the time that Tim went with his friends the Sloan brothers when they sneaked out one night in their father’s work truck. They were driving along a country road at about 1:30 in the morning. Two other boys were in the back, and the truck went off the edge and rolled into a field. The boys in the back were thrown clear, and everyone was fine. They went to the Sloans’ place, and took the truck out behind the garage, found hammers in the workshop, and hammered out the dents. The dad, according to the older Sloan boy, didn’t notice a thing.

Charlie told about how, when he was seven, he walked out of the house and took the bus to the pool without telling anyone. His mom had figured out where he was headed by the fact that his trunks and towel were gone. Instead of punishing him, she got him a bus pass and made sure that the driver for that route knew his name.

Arthur told about his boarding school — Andy hadn’t known that Arthur went to boarding school. His favorite history teacher was a fellow from Belfast, who spoke with a liquid Irish accent. Instead of talking about whatever was in the textbook (though he did test them on that), he would give them poems to memorize—“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “O Captain! My Captain!” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” And Arthur said he could remember them still, all the verses, word for word; sometimes when he couldn’t sleep he recited them to himself. When he then, at Charlie’s urging, said a few lines from “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”—“And on my breast in blood she died / While soft winds shook the barley”—Andy’s eyes filled with tears, and she went out the back door.

When she returned, they were laughing. Charlie was talking about how he would not be allowed to dive until he could show the coach that he had read his ten pages of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or whatever the book was. He was required to read them even if the book happened to slide off the diving board and into the deep end.

Then Arthur told a story Steve Sloan had told him after Tim died, about how they would ride their bicycles to the local lovers’ lane, crawl along the drainage pipe to the manhole, and set off firecrackers under the lovers’ cars.

They lulled her. She gave them sandwiches and drinks in the living room. Charlie went out for a run in the mid-afternoon, but came back after an hour (“Only six miles, but I can make it up,” he said). Arthur appeared to take a nap. It was Frank who noticed when he got home before supper that when Arthur stood up from his chair to go to the bathroom, he stumbled to one side, caught himself, and then stood there as if he was too dizzy to go any farther, and it was Frank who suspected what they discovered at the emergency room — he was having a little stroke, or what the ER doctor called “a transient ischemic attack” from a blood clot in his left carotid artery, and would need to stay in the hospital for at least a few days.

—

FRANK WAS NOT SURPRISED that the few days of Arthur’s stay at the hospital turned into something much more lengthy and dramatic. He was not lulled by day one, when Arthur seemed back to normal, sitting up in his bed, chatting with the nurses and the orderlies as if he’d known them for years, telling Charlie about how their house in McLean had so many doors and gates that it took him half an hour every night to make sure everything was locked up. He went along with Arthur’s refusal to call Debbie, but not because he thought Arthur was going to be all right. When Frank arrived on the morning of day two to find Arthur dressed, and busily, but quietly, getting his things together, he didn’t help him. He said he had to find the men’s room, then went to the nurses’ station and asked if Mr. Manning had been discharged. The nurse, very slowly, Frank thought, went through Arthur’s chart, and said, “No, sir. Mr. Manning is scheduled first thing tomorrow morning for a carotid endarterectomy.”

“What is that?”

“Apparently, Mr. Manning has about a seventy-five- or eighty-percent atherosclerotic plaque blockage where the left carotid artery forks. The right artery is not clear, but the blockage is only about thirty-five to forty percent, which is not critical at this point. Dr. Marcus will open the left artery and clear out the plaque. It’s a delicate operation, but not terribly—”

“Does Mr. Manning know what the doctor’s plan is?”

“They had a consultation about an hour ago, sir.”

He told her that Arthur was ready to leave.

Considering how thin he was, Frank discovered that Arthur was pretty strong. It was Frank who had to grab his elbow as he rushed the door, and retain his hold while Arthur tried to twist out of his grasp. The nurse kept exclaiming, “Mr. Manning! Mr. Manning! Please, sit down!”

Finally, Frank simply embraced him and held him until he went quiet. He could see the two of them in the bathroom mirror — himself half a bald head taller than Arthur now, Arthur’s white hair fluffing upward, his own bulky blue-shirted arm across Arthur’s narrow back. The nurse — her name was Ernestine — said, soothingly, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mr. Manning. Dr. Marcus is a wonderful surgeon, he’s done this a thousand times.” Arthur said nothing. When the nurse went out to get him “a little something,” Frank leaned over him and spoke in a low voice. He said, “I know you’re not afraid.”

Arthur shook his head. “That’s not it,” he said. “Why bother?”

“Because something could happen to you that would be a major pain in the ass for everyone else.”

Arthur sat down on the bed. Frank positioned himself between Arthur and the door, but Arthur didn’t make a move.

That night, in bed, Frank said to Andy, “When Arthur and Lillian ran off, it was Joe who drove to the soda fountain to pick Lillian up when she said she was getting off that night, at eight. When was that, ’45? I was still in Germany, anyway. The fellow who ran the drugstore was dumbfounded: he hadn’t seen her all day, she wasn’t assigned to come into work, he said. He went with Joe around behind the drugstore and looked in the weeds, down by the river, for her body! Joe was afraid to go home. But by the time he got there, my mom had gone into Lillian’s room, noticed the bed wasn’t made, and found the note. Oh, she was beside herself, she didn’t know whether it was from fear or rage. Then, two days later, I got another letter saying that Lillian had written home to say she was married. Postmarked Kankakee. They were on their way to Washington, D.C., she was as happy as she could be, goodbye!”

“Your parents never seemed to hold it against her.”

“They were all set to see Arthur with horns and a forked tail — stolen the darling! But she wrote about how his first wife had died in childbirth, and the baby, too, and my mom couldn’t resist that, and then Arthur sent her a Sunbeam toaster and a hand mixer. Lillian was so good at detailing everything about him that my mom came around by Thanksgiving — what was that, six weeks by then. I’m sure a baby blanket was half knitted by Christmas, whether or not Lillian had told them she was expecting.”

“He was born to deceive,” said Andy.

“No,” said Frank, “he was a genius at keeping secrets, but he could not tell a lie.”

After that, they lay quietly until Andy kissed him good night — two, three, four kisses, each softer and more searching than the last one, each one saying, We are old we are old, the end is nigh, yet each one so exactly like those kisses he remembered from when they were first married and living in Floral Park that he felt disoriented. Certainly, one of the punishments of old age was experiencing this decline, but with Arthur, Frank thought it was worse than that. He remembered Arthur more clearly from those early days than he remembered almost anything, because Arthur had been a peculiar phenomenon, almost sinister in his ability to be that affectionate, fun-seeking, all-American dad when he was near Lillian and the kids, and that ruthless, suspicious schemer when he was grooming Frank for some intelligence-gathering project that Frank only half understood but was always flattered by, always game for. If domesticity was quicksand for a real man (and who in the fifties had not thought so?), then, to Frank, Arthur had held out the occasional lifeline, his only remuneration the satisfaction of being useful, feeling a frisson of risk. Frank was two inches taller than Arthur and must have outweighed him even then by twenty-five pounds, but they both knew that Arthur was the more unpredictable, the more dangerous, or that was how Frank had felt at the time.

Had he liked Arthur? Felt real affection for him? Maybe, at first, only fascination, then dependence, then, now, yes, love. But Frank knew he wasn’t good at love. Andy was training him in their old age. That she was right this minute sleeping next to him was one sign that she was having an effect; that he had looked at the pictures of Jonah with pleasure when they came in the mail earlier in the week was another. He had appreciated Janet — there was one close-up of her face right beside Jonah’s, both of them grinning, that he had thought attractive, even affecting. Frank hadn’t expected to change at this age. Andy turned in his direction and put her hand on his shoulder. He thought again of Arthur as he was now, practically dead. The surgery would be over by the time Frank woke up. If he happened to fall asleep. But then he did.

—

THE NEXT DAY, when Frank went with Andy to the hospital, they consulted first with Dr. Marcus, who said that he thought the procedure had gone well, a tiny bit more complicated than he’d expected, but almost every surgery was; he’d learned to live with that. He felt sure that they’d find Arthur in good condition in a day or two. Andy said, “What are the possible complications?”

“Well, we do look for signs that the wound is not closing properly. Should there be any hemorrhaging, that of course is very dangerous, given the location of the surgery.”

As he said this, Frank could feel the blood pounding in his own carotid artery, the right one. He didn’t even have to touch it.

“And there is another possibility that perhaps Mr. Manning could be vulnerable to, given his slenderness, and that is any sort of hematoma that might cause a compression of the trachea. But the staff here is very attentive, and I’m sure everything will progress without a hitch.”

It was as if the doctor had laid out the scenario of the next few days. There was a hemorrhage, and it did happen late at night, and Arthur did lose a lot of blood — he was asleep, and the night nurse discovered it only when she touched what might be a shadow on the pillowcase and the sheet and felt moisture. At that point, she turned on the light and saw that Arthur’s shoulder and hair were red, too. Back into surgery. The next morning, Debbie arrived, beside herself with the suspicion, Frank thought, that every doctor in New Jersey was a quack and every nurse an idiot, and there were no words for Frank and Andy that expressed Debbie’s fury at having all of this kept from her.

It was Arthur who realized, four days after the second surgery, that he was breathless, that he was, in fact, starting to pass out, that he only had time to put his fingers to his neck and realize that it was swollen and hot. He then aimed his hand in the general direction of the emergency button. The hematoma required a third surgery, and the doctor let slip to Frank that maybe 6 percent of patients who underwent the carotid endarterectomy did not survive, and then, of course, if there was that much plaque in the carotid artery, how much was there elsewhere? But that was another question that could be addressed later.

And so Arthur was in the hospital for two weeks, and when he was discharged, he and Debbie stayed with Frank and Andy for two more weeks (Debbie called Hugh about the children three times a day). When they left, it was well past the anniversary of Lillian’s death, something that, if anyone noticed, they did not mention, and, Frank thought, maybe that was a good thing.

Andy and Frank slept for three days to get over the stress of the visit. Then Andy noticed that Frank’s revelations (or reminiscences, Frank would call them) continued at a relaxed but steady pace. Frank, she thought, would not have admitted that Arthur’s medical problems had confronted him with mortality. But it was not death that came over him, it was life, his life, and, for whatever reason, he could not resist talking about it. There was that first train trip to Chicago—’36. Maybe the passengers had been in danger of freezing to death, but what Frank most clearly remembered was seeing his first black person, the bartender. Andy had had a similar experience when her parents took the children to Minneapolis; she was six. A black woman was walking down Hennepin in the swirling snow. Her mother jerked her arm and told her to stop staring. Were their parents racist? Andy and Frank agreed, how were they to know? Race was one of the things no one had ever talked about, at least in Denby, at least in Decorah.

Andy wondered if maybe this summer they should go back to Europe for the third time, and see something more out of the way — Crete, Tenerife, Corsica. Frank mentioned that he had been to Corsica, and before he said another word, Andy felt a tunnel-like space opening in her brain. He had told her about North Africa, and Sicily, about Anzio and Monte Cassino. When their friends talked about Normandy, he talked about landing at Saint-Tropez (he was teased for that). She had listened silently to arguments about Eisenhower and Devers, as if any of these former corporals, privates, and sergeants now shooting off their mouths had valid opinions. But in Corsica, there was peace, there was beauty, there was leisure. And, yes, there was a girl, and when Frank’s voice deepened as he talked about her, how she had called him “Errol Flynn,” Andy knew that whatever had happened there was a cherished and much-remembered experience, unmentioned until now. She said, “You fell asleep? That was all?”

“Maybe that was what I needed at the time. She massaged my feet. She had all of my money in her hand, and she only took some of it.”

He did not say that he and the girl had had intercourse, but Andy understood that they had, which reminded her of that last fall semester in college; when Frank was telling her — Hildy, as she was then called — that he loved her, he was doing something with her friend Eunice that could not be called rape, because it was mutually sought, but was hateful and violent. She knew that Frank thought that she knew nothing about that, and it was on the tip of her tongue to repay him for Corsica by telling him that Eunice had died in 1989 from complications of emphysema — after being on a ventilator for three years. But she didn’t say anything, and then she woke up in the night; she remembered standing in the entrance of the Memorial Union, just beneath the wall of engraved names of Iowa State heroes of the First World War, blubbering about the German invasion of Norway, and Frank leaning toward her with such kindness and strength. The other students were passing and staring, and Frank hid her face against his shoulder so she wouldn’t see them, and they wouldn’t see her, a loving thing to do. Yes, he had run away to the war weeks afterward, but she had forgiven that long ago. Maybe, she thought, it had taken Frank these many years to know that love and sex could intersect.

One night, when they were laughing at the idea that there could be a street anywhere, even in Chicago, called “Wacker,” Andy said, “You know, that day, I saw you. I followed you for ten minutes. I was scared to get near you. You looked so old and hardened. My plan was, if you recognized me, I would say, ‘Hi, I’m Hildy, do you remember me?’ But I thought you might not recognize me, so I thought, if I introduced myself as Andy, we could start from the beginning. I would say that I’d gone to Iowa and my last name was Peterson.”

“I didn’t recognize you,” said Frank.

“No, you didn’t right at first, I saw it in your face, so I started in on my plan, but then you did, so I made up that story about changing my name. The next day, I had to tell everyone at the office and write my parents. I was Hildy until that moment.”

Andy knew that it would seem unbelievable to her children, especially Janet and Loretta and Ivy, that she and Frank had not shared these memories before, and it was not only, she saw now, that ever since she’d known him she, and perhaps he, had been afraid of what might be said — it was also that they had no model. One night she said to him, “Do you remember your parents talking about themselves to each other?”

“My father fell in the well out by the barn and didn’t tell Mama for ten years or something like that. When Cousin Berta went to the insane asylum, no one said a word about it. She was at home one day and not there the next day. I think Joe asked where she was, and Mama said, ‘She had to go up to Independence.’ I think I thought she had moved somewhere to be on her own.”

Andy said, “One time, my mother was really upset with my father for having the apple trees in the backyard cut down without telling her. She went out and drove the car around town for two hours rather than speak to him about it.”

“But,” said Frank, “what would they tell each other? My parents were from the same town — different churches, but they had lived the same lives. What would they bring to a conversation? Nothing exotic, you can be sure.”

“My parents and their relatives talked in code. Someone would nod and say, ‘Ah, you know what happened to Inga!’ And then everyone else would nod, and Sven or I would ask, ‘Mama, what happened to Inga?’ and, more often than not, she would say, ‘You don’t want to know.’ It wasn’t until we were much older — high school, really — that we began to put all the parts together.”

“Or they would talk German,” said Frank. “ ‘Ja!’ and then blah blah blah, so fast that we could only pick out a word here and there. I would ask Eloise, and she would tell me, but I got to wondering after a while if she wasn’t making things up just to frighten me.”

“I was very fond of your aunt Eloise,” said Andy.

“I went through a period where I agreed with Eloise’s analysis,” said Frank. Andy thought he was joking, but then he said, “I mean, I was fifteen. I was very impressed by Julius. He was a communist. He had that accent that said, ‘I know things you will never even think of.’ It’s so ghostly now.”

“What?” said Andy.

“Soviet immortality.”

Their conversations made Andy think of things she hadn’t thought of in years — her time in Kansas City, for example. Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she’d ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn’t very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). Her boss at Halls had seemed imposing, too, all of thirty-one, possessed of his own apartment just north of the plaza, on the third floor! He was a sharp dresser, talked about jazz, and implied that he was close personal friends with Count Basie and Charlie Parker. What was his name? She thought for a morning, and over her tomato soup remembered — Martin Sock or Scott. She had been shy, not really carrying a torch for Frank, more like frozen up. She read a lot; that was where she learned all those stories that she’d told her various psychiatrists in the early years of their marriage, tales from a book of saga translations, and Giants in the Earth, The Emigrants, Kristin Lavransdatter, anything cruel and resonant in her mind with the Decorah/Albert Lea axis. But Martin took her out — sometimes to a movie, once to a club, once to dinner — and one of those times, not the last one, he took her to his apartment, into the bedroom, where he started fondling her. Fondling was not easy, given her armor of girdle and hosiery and bra and petticoat, not to mention the tight belt around her waist and the long zipper down her side and the hooks and their eyes. But he had been patient, and pretty soon she was half dressed on the bed with him, him still in his trousers and socks and neatly pressed shirt, and somehow he had his knee between her legs and he was pressing her and rubbing her, and at the same time kissing her, and something happened, there seemed to be an explosion where his leg was that seemed to burn through her body, making her shake and tremble and stiffen and cry out so that he smothered her face against his side. And then they were both so embarrassed that she jumped off the bed and put her clothes back on as best she could. She didn’t know what had happened to her, and he wasn’t saying. After she got back together with Frank, in preparation for their marriage, she found a book in a used-book store in Chicago by a woman named Ida Craddock, called Right Marital Living. She’d been amazed to discover that what had happened to her was fairly routine. She knew that if she told this to Frank, while lying softly in his arms in the dark in their very own bed in the house they had owned now for thirty-three years, he would be amused and affectionate and see it as an exchange for his tale of Corsica, but she couldn’t do it. She did wonder what had happened to Martin Sock. He would be almost eighty now.

—

GREECE WAS a place that people their age, Andy thought, could never understand why they had waited so long to get to. Certainly, standing on the uneven paving in front of the Parthenon, looking outward to the city beyond, Andy felt herself to have finally arrived at the apex of something, but not something so crass as civilization. Frank was good — he had been reading all summer. He supplied her with all sorts of information and helped her not to stumble, but he didn’t care if she asked questions (she didn’t), and he didn’t imply that if she’d paid more attention in school she would know who Socrates and Plato were. At Mycenae (but they pronounced it “Mikinna”), he stood with her at the gate into the city, the Lion Gate, where, after gazing at the carving of the two headless lions standing on their hind legs, facing a column, they marveled for quite a long time at the grooves in the paving, where there had been a rectangular stone in the portal, as wide as the space between the wheels of a chariot, to help the charioteers orient their vehicles so that they could get safely through the gate. These three-thousand-year-old ruts were the ghosts of uncountable momentary thoughts on the part of uncountable lost charioteers. As they walked up the hill from there, Frank told her a little about the Trojan War, the Achaeans (the Myceneans) and their friends and enemies. They followed a narrowing passageway and peered into one of the beehive tombs. The orange color of the local soil made the landscape seem especially abandoned. Mikinna, Andy thought, was much more haunting than the Acropolis, not white but brownish gold, as if the light of 1600 B.C. were cooler and duskier than that of 500 B.C. Olympia she found flat, busy, and boring, as if the labor of the gods had been, not great doings, but gossip, bookkeeping, and shipments here and there of olive oil and flax. Andy strolled along, looking at the ruins and the sky, taking in the fragrance of the vegetation. Although it was impossible to stay in Greece forever, she had the feeling that you could remain, lifetime after lifetime, floating here and there very quietly, and with plenty of company. She’d never felt this way about New Jersey or Iowa.

It was the assistant cook on the Flyboy, the yacht where they stayed for three nights, who said that, after they looked at Knossos and Agia Triada, they should not miss Delphi. It was out of the way, and Frank had planned to skip it, but since Andy had expressed no desires at all so far, he was eager to do whatever she so much as mentioned.

Almost October now. They got to Itea late in the afternoon, nearly dark, and decided to take a room in a regular hotel there, rather than continue up to Delphi. They ate in the dining room, spanakopita and roast lamb. Frank did an unusual thing — he took a glass of ouzo, and ordered Andy one, too. They sipped quietly, and she enjoyed the sharp anise flavor, but not, as it turned out, the tingle of the alcohol. Their two little glasses, half full, sat side by side on the table, and Frank said, “I miss the kids.”

He said this naturally, as if he had said it before, but he never had, at least to her. Andy almost said, “What kids?” but then she said, “Do you mean ‘miss,’ or ‘missed’?”

Frank looked at her, and then at the two little glasses. He said, “What’s the difference?”

There was a long silence, not uncongenial. If there was anything Andy knew, it was not to push something. Finally, Frank said, “I know that was a nightmare with Arthur, but I enjoyed getting to know—”

“Charlie.”

“He’s a little like Richie.”

No, thought Andy.

“Like Richie might have been,” he added.

Without us, thought Andy.

“Without Michael,” said Frank.

In the morning, they found their car and driver. The day was blustery and the sky gray. The landscape was steeper and more intimidating than they had seen before, and it put Andy in a dark mood — not sour, not irritable, but strangely Nordic (and that thought made her laugh). There were switchbacks and precipices, and it took half an hour to get to the town, which, at least today, did not seem like a sunny Mediterranean Greek town, even though the buildings were pleasantly white with tile roofs. Once at the shrine, they got out, left the driver, and started walking.

The Temple was built on a slope facing down a valley that ran between steep, dark, upthrusting mountains. A brochure they’d gotten said that the Greeks believed this was the navel of the world, and Andy could understand that. She did have the sense that everything else she had ever seen was peripheral to this spot, these ruins, this view. Here, the brochure said, the Earth goddess, Gaia, lived. As so often happens, a self-confident newcomer, a muscular, aspiring young man, made his way straight to this spot, and he killed the son of the goddess, possibly out of revenge, possibly just to demonstrate that a new world had come to pass. His name was Apollo, but it could have been anything, and once he had done the deed, he laid claim to the most central and the most intimidating location, the one most difficult to get to, the one with the greatest view. He then installed an old woman, not so different from Andy herself. The woman sat on her three-legged stool, inhaled the gases, and said her piece, and her words were taken as prophecy. For her efforts, she got to remain in this spot, to be cared for, to forget all the rest of the world. She also, Andy thought, came to perceive herself, every day, as smaller and smaller, a black hole at the center of the universe, a dot in time where time stood still.

They walked around the theater and the stadium and looked through the museum. She touched blocks of stone and rough standing columns with her finger and appreciated that the Greeks allowed weeds and wildflowers to grow in every crevice, to give life to every vista. She stood quietly and felt the breeze, took off her sweater and let the particular Delphic sunlight brighten her arms. She thought of everyone in order — her father and mother and Sven (“Hyperboreans,” according to Frank’s book), then Frank, Joe, Lillian, Henry, Claire, Janet, Richie, Michael, Jared, Ivy, Loretta, Emily and Jonah, Leo, Chance, Tia, and Binky. She laid each thought of them upon the stones of the spot where the oracle was said to have been. She knew that the oracle had not prophesied only good fortune: many supplicants had been told of doom and despair, and as she breathed each name, Andy accepted that. But she suspected that the seer, in speaking, had always prophesied something meaningful — something that struck those who sought her, that stayed with them, that gave them, if not hope, then corporeality, the extra intensity of watching their own feet stepping away from the oracle, their own eyes gazing across the stadium, their own hands reaching up to push back their hair, which was tangling in the wind. Death might be worth that. Frank came up behind her and put his arm around her waist.