Golden Age

  Both Miriam and Tory looked at her, jaws dropped.

  “I thought he was in California.”

  “How old is he?” said Miriam.

  “Nineteen.”

  “He’s cute,” said Tory.

  Time to go, thought Emily. Chance left the arena, and three other guys in boots and hats ran to the calf and untied it; it stood up mooing and headed out the other end of the arena to its buddies. They watched a few more, then some of the bronc riders, including one kid who was tossed on his face. Disney World seemed bland by comparison.

  When she called her mom a day or so later about seeing Chance, Janet said, “I told you he was in Florida for a month. Then it’s Texas. Loretta bought herself a nineteen-foot camper van to stalk him with. I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”

  “He calls himself Chance Markham.”

  “That was some relative on her side who rode with the Texas Rangers.”

  “Did not,” said Emily.

  “Pony Express, then,” said Janet.

  The natural next question was “Dad there?” but Emily was afraid of the answer, so she said, “I’m sure Pattycake’s abscess will be fine when I get back.”

  “Keep him sound.”

  “I do, Mom!”

  “I wish he had more turnout.”

  “So does everyone!”

  And their voices rose.

  —

  ONCE SHE STARTED looking into it, Janet found out that there were Anonymous organizations for just about everything. The easy thing was to go to all sorts of meetings as—she told herself—an observer, or a contemplator of George W. Bush, who she quickly decided was a dry drunk. A person with her history was not going to accept the existence of any power higher than the power of the group itself to induce conformity. That was fine. What was not fine was that she was exceptionally sensitive to bullshit. Having known Pastor Jones at the Peoples Temple, she now found herself gripping her hands together or writhing in her seat when the Al-Anon people used certain words—“wayward,” “backslider,” “healing,” “God,” “we,” and, sometimes, “love.” Certain tones of voice—kind, generous on the surface, but hostile underneath—also drove her from the room.

  The meetings were held at a modern building that was also a yoga studio just past the light-rail station in San Carlos, not an area where she normally went. The yoga mats were rolled up and the shades drawn; overhead lights made the room dim and yellowish. The six tables pushed together for the group looked like old schoolroom tables, and the chairs didn’t match, either, but Janet knew it was her task to cultivate gratitude, and so she did, for about ten minutes of each session, until the revelations began to get edgy. It did not help that most of the participants were younger than she was—sometimes half her age. One who was her age—nearly fifty-one now—had only just emerged from his room in the last two years. He had been hiding out since his father beat his mother to death before being put in Soledad Prison. The father had died in 1987. Another of the terrified ones said nothing except “That’s not true” under his breath. He never said what was true. The majority of the participants were risk takers, though, not risk avoiders. One had started hang gliding in high school. He was now twenty-eight, and the sole survivor of his hang-gliding group of friends. He had broken both ankles in a ski accident on a closed slope in the winter of ’99 and decided that maybe he was out of control in the most literal sense. Several had had three or more car accidents, one regularly drove his BMW 1000 motorcycle at over a hundred miles per hour. One woman had, like Janet, married someone she hardly knew. Janet admitted that she had once joined a cult, but didn’t say which one, and implied that it was located on the East Coast. The problem was that the risk takers and the risk avoiders found each other deeply irritating, and each of the four meetings she dared to attend eventually devolved into arguments—after the fourth, she saw one of the risk avoiders pause outside the door of the building after the meeting and elbow one of the risk takers hard in the ribs. Janet ran for her car, avoiding risk, leaving the fracas to the more experienced members.

  However, she rather liked Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, because the participants’ stories were adventurous and sometimes funny, and she didn’t mind AA itself, though she could not speak honestly about her drinking habits, since she didn’t drink. By comparison with the offspring of alcoholics, the alcoholics were good-natured, often helpful, and eventually it got somewhat easier to say that she was powerless over the Bush administration, that she had come to believe that some power greater than herself would have to restore the nation to sanity, that she had been a pain in the ass to most of her friends and relatives for a long time, that she could give up her shortcomings rather than give up her marriage, that she was willing to make amends not only to Jared and Jonah and Emily, but also to her mother and Richie, if not to Michael and Loretta, that she could get in the habit of admitting she was wrong when she actually was, and that a few minutes per hour of silent meditation were better than none at all.

  Every time she picked up a newspaper, though, she saw Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld through the lens of AA, barreling out of control toward something she could not name, which they called redemption. The main thing she learned from AA was to shut up, even when Rove and Cheney admitted that they had stock in Enron, even when a government official confessed to being “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Defense,” even when Tommy Thompson decided to extend health care to “the unborn.” She got through the summer, though they had to sell Pattycake for sixty thousand dollars (they would have gotten $150,000 the year before). She and Jared got through the summer, though he had to fire a quarter of his staff. She and Jonah got through the summer—although he didn’t love his day camp, he made a friend there from two blocks away that he hadn’t known before, because the friend went to public school. She and Emily got through the summer, because Emily admitted that she preferred Sunlight to Pattycake after all—Pattycake was good in the show ring, but acted as if he didn’t know you from Adam when you arrived at the barn, and he could not go on the trail, which was what she wanted to do until she headed off to Idaho in August, to help Aunt Tina run her gallery.

  —

  CHARLIE CONSIDERED HIMSELF a brash, or bold, or even brave person. Certainly Riley often said that he was ready for anything, but it wasn’t until his mom sat him down over the Fourth of July, when she and his dad came to Washington (for the first time!) to visit various buildings that they had heard about all their lives (and maybe also to see for themselves that no grandchildren existed or were forthcoming), and said that he needed to try to see his birth mother before it was “too late,” that he seriously considered contacting Fiona McCorkle. And so he got up from the table where his mom was sipping her iced tea, went to the Rolodex, found the number, and dialed it. Riley, who was at the stove, stirring half-and-half into the broccoli bisque, glanced at him and gave him a little nod. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his mom’s eyebrows lift and then lower, and he heard his dad say, “What is he doing?”

  “You dared him,” said Riley, reaching for the salt shaker, and Charlie was willing to believe that this was true.

  Charlie looked at his watch. It would be 10:00 a.m. in L.A. A voice said, “Over the Top Stables. This is Fiona.” It was a self-possessed voice, a bit distracted, the voice of someone in the middle of something. Charlie said, “Hi, this is Charlie Wickett,” in the exact same tone that people used when they called to ask you whom you were going to vote for. Fiona said, “Yes?” Then there was a pause, and she said, “Well, what do you know.”

  Charlie said, “Not much, to tell the truth,” and Fiona laughed.

  Charlie laughed, too. He glanced at his mom and then looked at the floor. With the Langdons and Arthur Manning, he had felt no competing loyalties, but now, unexpectedly, he did. He said, “I’m thirty-six. Oh, I guess you know that. Anyway, my mom says I should meet you.”

  Well, he had bungled that. He felt his face grow hot.

  “I
hear about you from time to time,” said Fiona. “It sounds as though I would like you.”

  Charlie said, “Now you have your chance.”

  “Where are you?” said Fiona.

  “We live in Washington, D.C. My wife works for Congressman Richard Langdon, of New York.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Right now, I go to nursing school, but since I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble over the years, I decided that I’m going to specialize in rescues.” Fiona laughed again.

  His dad was patting his mom on the shoulder, and his mom was looking away, toward the windows. Riley stirred the soup again, turned off the burner. Charlie said, “I just wanted to make contact. I need to get off now.” Awkward again.

  Fiona said, “We come to Washington from time to time. There’s a big horse show. We have a horse that might qualify.”

  “I’ll give you my number.”

  “I have it. It’s right here on the phone.” Then, “Oh, here’s my student. Sarah! Wait a second.”

  And then she said goodbye and hung up.

  After his folks left, Charlie grilled Riley about whether she thought he had hurt his mom’s feelings, and even brought the subject up one night when Uncle Henry took them to his favorite restaurant, Galileo. Uncle Henry said, “She’s always encouraged you.”

  Riley said, “She pushes him. She was glad.”

  “She didn’t look glad.”

  Uncle Henry said, “Sometimes when you first open the door to the attic, you aren’t sure. But then you’re happy to clean it out.”

  “Spoken like a hoarder,” said Riley.

  And Uncle Henry said, “You got me.”

  They all laughed and went on to a discussion of the casserole—celery root, onion, potatoes, wild rice, food originally from the Mediterranean Basin, Iran, Minnesota, and South America, according to Henry, and delicious according to all three of them. Riley said that the name “Menominee” meant “eaters of wild rice.” It was not what the Menominee called themselves, but what the Ojibwe called them. Uncle Henry looked impressed.

  At the beginning of August, Fiona called him when Riley was at work, taking advantage of what she called the Idiot Vacation. The apartment was quiet, and Fiona, as before, had a strangely pleasant voice. She said, “Is it Charlie? Charles?”

  “Always been Charlie.”

  “Good. Anyway, as soon as the vet diagnosed the injury, I thought, well, he’s out for the season, so I won’t get to see Charlie.”

  “What is his injury?”

  “Oh hell, he kicked the wall of his stall and fractured his coffin bone. What a dope. He’ll be fine next year, though. He’s only seven. You should come out here.”

  “I should.”

  “September would be good. I don’t have to put you on a horse. We can go to the beach, or take a drive into one of the wilderness areas. We can go up to Desert Hot Springs. There are a lot of weird little places around L.A. Death Valley.”

  Charlie said, “I would like to come.” And it was true.

  Riley said she could not go with him. The new congressional term would have started, and she had to prove to the congressman that she was more essential to him even than Lucille. Sometimes she got the sense that he was getting tired of her, which wasn’t surprising—she and Lucille were the only ones left of the original eight staffers. But now they would be moving into Rayburn. She didn’t want to miss that, and she didn’t think he would fire her as long as she was married to Charlie. But of course that wasn’t the only reason she remained married to Charlie. She kissed him smack on the lips. He knew it wasn’t the only reason, but they were an odd couple, he admitted that. He got himself a map of California, and imagined driving around—Pasadena, Indio, Twentynine Palms, Escondido (“Secret”)—the place-names were evocative of darkness and sunshine all at once. He began to get a little excited.

  —

  RICHIE WASN’T SURPRISED that Riley was crying in the bathroom—she was crying everywhere, and she wasn’t alone. His mom, of course, said, “I felt he shouldn’t take that flight. I even picked up the phone to call you, but I couldn’t do it. It is killing Arthur. Arthur will be dead by Christmas.” And then he could hear her voice shake, and then she said, “Oh Lord,” and hung up. Richie had done his share of crying, too, as had Uncle Henry, as had Charlie’s parents in St. Louis, who called Riley every few days. Richie put his head in his hands. Ivy had seen the towers fall from her new place in Brooklyn Heights—or so she said—it was all jumbled in her mind. He knew scads of people who had looked up, or looked over their shoulders, or seen something, or heard something, or sensed the ground shake upon impact, or saw the plume of fire when the plane, Charlie’s plane, hit, then plowed through the Pentagon. Michael and Loretta knew two men who had been in the second tower. Maybe one of them had jumped. Michael said that he would have jumped. Every thought about it was terrifying. Why would you jump? thought Richie, and then he stopped thinking.

  However, Lucille said that Riley wasn’t crying in the bathroom—or not only crying. She was also throwing up. Richie did not understand what this meant until Lucille said, “Well, Congressman, open your eyes. She’s pregnant.”

  Richie said, “I don’t think that’s our business.”

  “If you say so,” said Lucille.

  “I say so,” said Richie. What was their business? That was the question. Just after they heard about the Trade Center attack, it had been decided that everyone should evacuate—Richie was arriving at the Capitol building with his new press secretary, Alia, when they saw Hastert being whisked away, and knew that they should leave, too. Richie sent Alia home—she lived in College Park. Then he found Lucille in the office and told her that the Secret Service said everyone had to leave, walk south. Right then, it would have been, at that very moment (Richie pictured his feet, brown loafers, green socks, stepping across the pavement), Charlie’s plane was arrowing into the Pentagon. That evening, Richie joined the others on the Capitol lawn, when everyone agreed to stand behind the president. Since then, though, their job had not been as clear. The perpetrators were dead, and there were all sorts of theories about who was behind them. Most of the Congress was eager to fund some sort of reprisal, or at least investigation. Although his district did not include Ground Zero, as they called it, it did include parts of Lower Manhattan, so he helped Jerry Nadler author a bill that would give grants to businesses around there, to keep them running.

  But it was a nightmare, trying to figure out how to get to the neighborhood, who should go there (a day-care business?), what to do with the site. He was the only congressman he knew of who was related to a victim. He hadn’t mentioned it to the papers, and so no one knew it—how he was related could be a problem. Only Cheney and Rumsfeld seemed not overwhelmed. They came, they talked, they promoted strict policies and aggressive laws, and though Richie didn’t like them, he was foggy about why—he needed Riley, he discovered, and Nadie and even Ivy, to get him organized. But the only person he had was Michael, and Michael wanted to kill them, whoever they were, no matter what, no matter where, no matter how.

  2002

  ARTHUR WASN’T DEAD by Christmas, but he was dead by New Year’s Day. On the 3rd, Richie and Nadie took Riley and Uncle Henry to the service. The funeral was at a funeral home in McLean, easy to get to. As they drove past the neighborhood that Tim had roamed around, and then past Arthur and Lillian’s old place, Riley stared out the window but didn’t ask to stop or say anything; Charlie himself had no connection to this landscape. Uncle Henry, too, seemed small and quiet. But Richie remembered Tim vividly here—how grown up he’d seemed when Richie was just a kid. He and Michael hadn’t been there when Tim did some of his more legendary things, like jumping off the roof of the house into the pool, but, merely sitting at the supper table or teasing Janet, he had had an air of danger that Charlie, with all of his good nature, had never had.

  They were the first to arrive at the funeral home. The casket was sitting forlornly in “The Memoria
l Center,” a large, dim, empty, greenish room. Tina arrived next, having taken a cab from Dulles. Richie introduced her to Riley and Nadie, and Tina gave Riley a heartfelt hug, then kissed her. Richie hadn’t realized that they had had much of a relationship before Charlie died, but afterward, Riley mentioned that they exchanged letters or e-mails every month or so—she had sent them a beautiful carved panel after their wedding, medieval-looking and ornate, but the faces of the couple were the faces of Charlie and Riley as Adam and Eve; Charlie was laughing, and Riley was looking pensively at the apple in her hand. Then Dean and Linda showed up, after them Debbie, looking pinched and sad, Hugh, looking bland, Kevin and Carlie, looking like the twenty-somethings they were (unsure of themselves). Except for Tina, the Mannings stood together in a bunch, while Richie, Riley, Uncle Henry, and Nadie stood in a line, space between them. Janet’s plane had been delayed for so long out of San Francisco that she had decided in the end not to come. After the chat about Arthur’s end (“peaceful”) had subsided into an uncomfortable silence, the director of the funeral home walked in and out a few times, asking if everyone was all right, and looking at his watch. Finally, Debbie stepped up to the casket, put her hands together, and said, “I asked my dad several times what he wanted for his service. He said, ‘Small, secret, out of the way.’ So—here we are.”