Golden Age (23 page)

She was curious to see which of these perennial topics would come up first.

She said, “How’s your sandwich?”

“Crispy.”

“I like that. That’s one of my favorite words.”

He said, “Mom. Why are you so strange?”

Andy laughed out loud.

“No, I’m not kidding. You are the ghost that the child reaches toward, who disappears the very instant he touches her.”

Andy had thought that was Frank.

She ate the last bite of her sandwich and wiped her lips. She wanted, above all, to give a serious answer. She said, “I’m not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.”

Now Richie laughed.

She went on, “How old were you, do you think, the first time you thought you might die?”

“I don’t remember. But when I hit Michael on the head with that hammer that time, I thought he might die. I guess we were seven or eight. Nedra brought him back to life with a stick of butter.”

“Well, I was four. My cousin Helga told me. She was seven. They had come over from Prairie du Chien, and she told me about a boy in her class at school who drowned in the river. She swore she saw him go under the ice and not come up. His name was Lonnie. I remember it so clearly. I was terribly stupid, and so she had to explain every little bit to me over and over, and so it got wedged in my mind. When I asked my mom about it, about death, she said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!
Jeg kommer ikke til å snakke om det, det er en solrik dag!
”

“What did that mean?”

“Something like ‘I’m not talking about that on such a beautiful day!’ We never did talk about it. But I thought about it. It was like all the details Helga told me made deep paths in my brain, and everything else that happened, or that anyone said, confirmed it and etched it deeper.”

Richie said, “I never thought I might die, but I often thought Michael might die.”

“Did you hate him?” Andy decided at the last second not to put this question in the present tense.

“What happens if I say yes?” said Richie.

“There are a lot of different theories about that.”

“Mom!”

“Well, there are. But we’re here alone. You are forty-three, I’m seventy-six, and you can say whatever you want.”

“Because you’ll forget it.”

“Chances are.”

But he ate his salad instead of saying it, which Andy thought was unfortunate. The past tense was for declaring that something was over, and Richie hadn’t noticed that. She said, “How’s Leo?”

“He got into Allen-Stevenson.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s near where Ivy’s living now. All boys. ‘An Allen-Stevenson Boy is a
Scholar
and a
Gentleman
.’ He’s a handful, so it’s good they have twelve years to work on him. Lots of music. Ivy thinks he likes music.”

“How’s the campaign going?”

“I seem to be up by three points. I think the Republicans overplayed their hand. They think so, too.”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“How’s Michael?”

“I think he found religion.”

“How so?”

“There was a monsignor when I went to dinner the other night. Monsignor Kelly. He seemed very comfortable around Michael, and he was good with the kids. I’m guessing a baptism is in the works.”

Then they were both quiet.

After he left, she sat in her attic bedroom, with all the books she had yet to read, looking out the window. The brouhaha of Frank’s death had settled down, and she had come to understand her own reaction, that sense of fatality and almost relief. She had not cried, had thought that maybe he would have been disappointed in her if she had cried. Sometimes, when she was alone, she talked to him: Was he happy to have gone in such a sudden and dramatic way? Was this better than Arthur’s decline, or his own father’s youthful heart attack (only fifty-eight—old then, young now)? More than anyone she knew, he had simply skipped old age—had he understood that? Her only regret was that the children had not forgiven him, although, she thought, he had forgiven them, but every time she broached this topic, they looked away, made a joke, didn’t believe her. Well, the lesson of almost sixty years with someone was that no one but you remembered that darling boy, the stranger walking toward you down Lincoln Way. You were standing on the corner, at Welch, and out of the morning sunshine (Lincoln Way ran due east, due west) emerged this lithe, tall figure, his gaze hooded but avid, taking in every building, every other student, every tree, and you, too. And so you turned and followed him back to Hayward, and stood beside him on that corner, and when he cocked his head to look you up and down, waiting
ever so long to smile but finally doing it, it did not mean that you were beautiful, it meant that you had a chance, just a chance, to see this being again, to find out what was in there, and it didn’t matter what you found out, in the end, because no one on earth would ever flash through you and light you up like he did.

1997

A
CROSS THE TABLE
from Richie, Chance sat still, looking at his plate. Next to Chance, Bea (whom Richie still called Binky) was unabashedly rolling her eyes. Tia had already asked to be excused, been granted permission, and then bestowed a smile upon everyone, including Richie, including Monsignor Kelly, including Binky (though there was the usual touch of contempt in the smile she bestowed on Binky). The topic under discussion was where Chance would be going to boarding school. He had applied to only two and gotten into both, one to please his dad, the Stevenson School, in Pebble Beach, California, about a hundred yards from the site of Michael and Loretta’s famous wedding, and one to please his mom and the monsignor, Woodside Priory School, about a hundred yards from Janet’s house (okay, from where she kept the three horses, wherever that was). Dangers abounded. Chance did not want to go to boarding school, but the alternative was Regis, a Jesuit academy uptown, not, perhaps, far enough for Chance, who appeared restive. Like Richie and Michael, like their dad, Chance was tall and looked maybe two years older than he was (and, Richie thought, acted two years younger than he was). Whatever Perroni was in there made itself felt on the back of a horse or in the cab of a truck: Loretta reported, with some pride, that over Christmas Chance had gotten his grandfather to teach him to drive; it had taken a day, and then he had driven
all over the ranch the rest of the vacation. Woodside Priory was all boys, the Pebble Beach school coed. When Michael called Richie to warn him that the monsignor would be there, he’d said, “The whole meal is going to be about the fact that Chance was caught in the hall making out with Patty Malone; he had his tongue in her mouth. So the monsignor is pushing the boys’ school to give him some focus.” When Loretta called a day later to make sure he was coming, she said, “I need your input. I know military school was good for Michael. But he’s got his heart set on Stevenson. Twenty thousand a year! I mean, Michael can afford that, but I’m afraid they’ll just baby him.”

Now Richie said, “I think military school retarded our development.”

Monsignor Kelly gave him a kindly look and said, “About education there are only theories, never actual experiments. You have to go with your instincts.”

“My instinct is that military school made me aggressive and angry.”

“And look where you are now,” said the monsignor, still endlessly benign. “I’m sure you need real toughness in the political climate we have.”

“More like the capacity to ignore almost everything,” said Richie, but he made sure it sounded like a joke.

Michael said, “Military school felt safe to me.”

“The guns were not loaded,” said Richie. Then, “Well, they were loaded with blanks. That did make it easier.”

“It was orderly,” said Michael. “Nothing wrong with orderly.”

“Orderly is a beginning,” said the monsignor.

Richie said, “Which one has more athletic facilities?”

Chance now looked at him. He said, “Stevenson.”

Richie said, “Swimming saved my sanity. If I hadn’t learned to swim, I wouldn’t have met my best friend, Greg, and I would have had to listen to your dad tease me about how I ran like a girl, every day of my life.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Loretta. “Michael wouldn’t do that.”

There was a silence. Binky was staring at Michael, Loretta was shaking her head, the monsignor was looking like he’d seen plenty of boys over the years. Michael said, “I did say that, I admit.”

“Boys will be boys,” said Loretta.

Michael looked at Chance and said, “Chance, I’ve said a lot of things that I regret. Better not to say them, since you can’t apologize for all of them.”

Richie noticed that Michael didn’t apologize, even now, for that old insult.

“Sin,” said the monsignor, “is always with us.” And he looked right at Richie, as if Richie were the embodiment of that idea.

Loretta said, “Boys learn differently from girls. They need more structure and they need to learn how to get along with one another. For heaven’s sake! When they’re ready for girls, the girls will get along with
them
. And the weather is much better in Portola Valley, sunnier and not as damp. No one loves Pebble Beach as much as I do, but it is worth your sanity to drive out there half the time. My mom said it’s a wonder all those rich people rattling around in those huge houses don’t kill themselves whenever they get the chance.”

“I’ve never been to California,” said the monsignor. “No further west than St. Louis, actually.”

“Well,” said Loretta, “you can come along when I take him. My dad will be happy to meet you, and I’m sure he’ll get you on a horse inside of a day.”

The monsignor lit up like the Irishman he was.

Afterward, when Richie went over the evening in his mind, he could not figure out when the decision was made for Woodside over Stevenson. Nor could he figure out why he was there, unless it was he who was meant to articulate, and therefore define, whatever Loretta would decide against. It was pretty clear to him, though, that Loretta now had Michael surrounded. She had decorated their place entirely to her own taste—blanched colors, abstract paintings on the walls that evoked seascapes, an antique carved oak sideboard that looked like an altar, until you realized that the objects grouped among the lit candles on top of it were just plates, saucers, and cups, though ornate. She had Michael pinned between herself and the monsignor, who ran a charitable foundation that she contributed tens of thousands to every year. She took Michael to Mass on Sunday; she had him driving a Lexus LS. Richie wondered how long it could possibly last.

—

CHARLIE THOUGHT
of his uncle Henry not as a father figure (he had one of those) but as a teacher figure (something he had never really had). Uncle Henry didn’t mind answering questions; in fact, the more questions the better. Charlie was reading a book Uncle Henry had assigned
—A Tale of Two Cities
. Some teacher or other had assigned this book many times over the years, but Charlie had only read the Classic Comics edition. As a result, and because he made himself read for forty-five minutes every day—sometimes fifteen pages, sometimes twenty—he was following the story, learning about the French Revolution (which he had heard people talk about), and enjoying the very strange Evrémonde brothers. Riley did not see Uncle Henry as a teacher figure (she’d made good use of many of those), she saw him as the embodiment of the Medieval Warm Period. Had he read the Saga of the Greenlanders? Yes. Did he really think there had been birch trees in Greenland? Yes. Had he read the Saga of Eric the Red? Yes. Where did he think they got to when they came to the Western Hemisphere? Uncle Henry gave her his copy of
Land Under the Pole Star
, which Charlie read, too, since it was about a Norwegian man and his wife who went from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Newfoundland in a rowboat, just to prove you could do it, so, yes, Eric the Red had indeed contemplated settling Newfoundland around the year 1000, until the native population drove him off. She quizzed him: How historically based were the Sagas? Grapes in Maine? Or was it Martha’s Vineyard, maybe? The Medieval Warm Period was an unfortunate conundrum that Riley did not like, because people who knew about the Medieval Warm Period were more likely to challenge the concept of man-made global warming, but she did her usual thing. She looked more deeply into the arguments, and discovered ways to understand the Medieval Warm Period—less volcanic activity, more sunlight, strengthened tropical currents. At first, Charlie was afraid that Riley would offend Uncle Henry, but she invigorated him.

Unlike her parents and his parents, Uncle Henry never asked when they were going to have a baby. Every few weeks (more frequently in the winter), he would come to D.C., put himself up at the Capitol Skyline Hotel, and do some work in the Library of Congress. On the Saturdays of these weekends, Charlie, and sometimes Riley, would meet him at the Smithsonian or the National Gallery, and they
would go to various shows. He took Charlie to the Folger Library, and introduced him to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He took him to Constitution Hall and the Art Museum of the Americas. Charlie asked a lot of questions, and if Henry couldn’t answer them, he bought a book, which he read quickly and Charlie read slowly. Henry didn’t seem at all surprised by this overwhelming plenitude of objects to look at or ideas to think about, but Charlie was. It seemed to him that he had spent thirty years circling neighborhoods and buildings without even wondering what was inside. And each building was a Fabergé egg, pleasant on the outside, a treasure trove within. Henry said, “Books are like that, too.”