2007
THE PARKING GARAGE was not full at all. Claire found a roomy spot in a corner, got the kids out, and assembled them in two columns in front of her, Lauren with Dustin, Ned with Dash. She took Rhea’s hand and Petey’s hand, and said, “Think about what you want to buy. The slower you go, the more you get.” What she was really curious about was what, when given the choice, each of them might pick.
Yes, being a grandmother was a wonderful thing. With her own mother as a model, she hadn’t expected that. Frank had always said that Rosanna appraised her offspring with an eye to their market value. Though Claire hadn’t actually believed him, she’d seen no evidence of the adoration she felt for her grandchildren. No faults in them, and she didn’t take credit for it, either, since she found plenty of faults in Gray and Brad, and certain faults in Angie, Doug, Lisa, and Samantha. The children walked into the atrium and paused to stare at the fountain, then up at the ceiling. They kept going, though, and stepped carefully onto the escalator. They looked around, pushed their hoods back; their voices were low; they held the hands they were instructed to hold. In the eyes of her fellow customers, only admiration.
She had enjoyed working here before her party business took off, and agreed with irate customers that they could have retained “Marshall Field’s”—not every department store in the United States had to be called “Macy’s.”
The toy floor was bigger than Claire remembered, and she felt a little intimidated, but upon arrival the kids all stopped and looked up at her. What next? She walked down one aisle and halfway down another, stopping in front of the Legos. She said, “Petey and Rhea and I will stay here. Look at the display at the end of the aisle. Dustin, what’s that?”
“Elmo. They’re all Elmo,” said Dustin.
“Okay. We are right by Elmo. You guys stick together, and come back to me when you find something. Don’t go away from the toys, and don’t talk to anyone, okay?”
All at once, and involuntarily, she remembered an occasion at Younkers—when was this? The late eighties, anyway. A woman was trying on a coat, and she turned around to discover that her daughter was missing. She alerted Colleen—Colleen was the manager of Women’s Wear back then. Colleen wasted not a second, and had the store doors locked. The woman estimated that it had been at the most two minutes since she lost sight of the four-year-old. Then everyone who worked there combed every corner and room and aisle of that Younkers, and they did find the child, one floor up, in Children’s Clothing, curled in one of the dressing rooms. Claire remembered Colleen talking about it; the girl seemed okay, but she was not wearing the clothes she had worn into the store. It was creepy. Everyone knew that whoever had taken the child was still locked in the store, but there was no way to find him (or her). Claire stood on her tiptoes and watched the kids as best she could, but they were good. Petey rummaged among the Legos, and Rhea walked to both ends of the aisle, playing with the Elmos at one end and the Doodle Pros at the other. Lauren brought a leftover Holiday Barbie to Claire for safekeeping; she was dressed in elaborately embroidered, fur-edged black, with a thick braid falling over her shoulder. She looked as if she had come straight to Chicago from Salzburg, and was not quite what Claire would have picked. Samantha disapproved of Barbie, so Claire said, “Very lovely, sweetheart,” and set it on the floor beside her. As the toys accumulated, she would take them to the counter.
It was useless, she said to her friends and to Carl, to remark about their own childhoods that when they were ten or eight or six they were heading over hill and dale with only a cracker and an apple, six miles to school and back. Why should children do that? thought Claire. Did it toughen them up, as her friends asserted, or simply prove to them that the world was a cruel place, and so ensure that they would prolong that cruelty when they themselves were grown? Even a young child could tell the difference between circumstances and intentions. Claire could see, when she was growing up during the war, that their house was old and uninsulated, and therefore she was cold, that there was no extra gasoline, and therefore it was a long walk to school, that all scrap, all cloth, all extra provisions went to the war effort, and therefore her mother reknit sweaters and patched clothes and had meatless Wednesdays and Mondays (though never Friday). But if a child lived in the midst of plenty and got none of it, then he would quickly learn to blame his parents for neglecting him or teaching him a lesson—take your pick. Paul had gloried in his success, and so showered Gray and Brad with more belongings than their friends had. They seemed fine, modest in their display of wealth; they had learned a lesson from watching Paul, and not the lesson he had meant to teach them. Dustin brought a video game and set it next to the Barbie. After sitting cross-legged with the Doodle Pro for a while, Rhea put it back on the shelf, then brought Claire a board game based on a labyrinth. She went back and found another one, by the same company, called “Castles of Burgundy,” a game Claire thought quite seductive. Petey turned away from the Legos and chose a stuffed lion and an actual book, Millions of Cats, and Ned returned with a set of what looked like lethal weapons but turned out to be spinning tops. Claire did not like or approve of the case full of fake makeup that Lauren chose next, but maybe, she thought, it was better than a toy stove with toy pots and pans. Dustin found another video game, and Dash, who had more or less disappeared, suddenly turned up with a transparent gun that shot soap bubbles, a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with a rock-and-roll theme, and a magic set. All the kids seemed happy. They did not look half drugged by greed, they looked intent and interested. Claire felt pleasantly vindicated.
After only half an hour, the kids started acting bored, and Dash said, “Can we get something to eat?”
They took the toys to the cash register, and Claire was especially friendly to the rather brusque sales associate while she bagged the toys in six separate bags. Claire asked her to staple them shut (there was a stapler on the counter). The kids were agreeable even to losing access to their toys until they got home. They ate in the Marketplace. Lauren ate only gelato, Ned only French fries, Petey only the toppings off his slice of pizza. All in all, when they got home, Claire decided that she had been an ideal grandmother, and that all six of the kids would remember this day, at least for a while.
—
AROUND EASTER, Henry sent out a mass e-mail. It read,
Dear All,
Happy Easter. I hope you are well, especially those I haven’t talked to in a while (this means you, Claire—I miss you. I will try to call sometime soon). I am enjoying my life and my house in Washington, D.C. The weather is so strangely different from the weather in Chicago. I’m not sure I deserve it! Anyway, my work is going well, and I’m off to Ireland this summer for about two months—six weeks working with some materials at the University of Dublin, and two weeks in the west, driving around (with a friend! I would not attempt to drive in Ireland on my own).
My real news is that I have asked to adopt (though it is more complicated legally, it amounts to the same thing) Alexis Wickett, Charlie’s little girl, who is soon to turn five (May 11, to be exact). From “in loco parentis” to “legalis parens.” Charlie’s folks have agreed to this—I get along with them quite well when they come for their twice-yearly visits, and they agree with Riley and me that she needs some sort of safety net (will she be taking me to court for child-support someday? We shall see). Anyway, Alexis is very dear to me. I never thought I would become a father at 74, but it’s a very medieval thing to do.
Love to you all,
Henry
Obviously, this was a good thing, but it prodded at a point of contention that Claire thought she’d put aside, her discomfort at the way everyone in the family seemed to go crazy when Charlie died. Claire had liked Charlie—he was a charming boy—and the circumstances of his death were horrifying, but, still, he was only peripherally their child, and he had become the family obsession. At least, that’s how Claire saw it. Carl didn’t agree, but when she pressed him, he did his Carl thing, smiled and shrugged, leavin
g her to understand that, however crazy she acted, he had learned to live with it.
Claire put on her coat and went for a walk around the block. The daffs were blooming and the tulips had thrust up beside them. It had been a strange winter—sinister warmth over Thanksgiving, then, two days later, ten inches of snow, an inch of freezing rain, plummeting temperatures. Carl, whose business had dropped off, was suddenly overwhelmed: he spent long days for two weeks at a house in Evanston where a huge tree limb had fallen through the roof of the solarium. Then, after the calm over Christmas and New Year’s, more snow, more work. Claire had felt the same flutter in her customers—doubt because of strange happenings in the markets, followed by a surge of what Carl called “Spend-it-while-you-have-it” parties, Friday, Saturday, Sunday afternoon, Thursday, caviar, sterling silver, Cristal champagne, best orchestra you can find, is Elton John available. In her pockets, Claire crossed her fingers.
Why was the family not obsessed with Guthrie, who had returned from Iraq and was, Claire thought, just barely holding it together? Or with Perky, who had joined the marines over his mother’s loud objections, as if to say, You think the army and Iraq is something, try the marines and Afghanistan! And no one said a word about Chance, who was on the road nine months out of the year, as if he didn’t even have a wife and child. (And did he? Apparently, Delie had moved back to Texas.) Jonah, she had heard through the grapevine, had several “diagnoses,” but she hadn’t heard exactly what they were and was a little afraid to ask—Janet was Frank’s real failure, because she mistrusted not only him but anyone connected to him. Emily seemed to be emulating Tina and hiding out in Idaho. Tia and Binky were supposedly going to school, Tia at Georgetown, Binky on a year abroad in Paris (a likely story, thought Claire).
Richie had ceased being in the news. When Claire looked him up in The New York Times, there was nothing, not even a wedding notice when he married the girl, what was her name, Jessica Montana. Michael was quoted in the Times once, not with the frequency of two or three years ago. His quote was typically slippery: “These innovative instruments are revolutionizing the landscape and bringing about an era of steady prosperity that really isn’t like anything we’ve seen before. Risk should be spread around! It makes for a more stable world economy and a better balance between all parts of the market.” But whether that slipperiness was his own or was just jargon belonging to his Wall Street world, Claire didn’t know. A month ago, Carl had brought home a copy of the Financial Times he’d noticed in a trash can down by the Board of Trade; there was Michael’s photograph, looking spiffy and sinister and just like Frank, with the caption “Michael Langdon, CEO of Chemosh Securities, in London for a meeting with Barclays Bank.” She hadn’t heard from Debbie in ages—Claire didn’t know what Kevin and Carlie were doing. How your world was cast when you were young seemed not to matter at all as you aged. What was it like for the firstborn or the second? Claire could not imagine. But for the fifth and last, it was like walking onto a stage where the lights were up and the play was beginning the third act, gloriously permanent, soon to close, but always a lost world. No one would ever seem as handsome and dashing to her as Frank, as kind as Joe, as beautiful as Lillian, as smart as Henry, as reassuring as her father, as strict as her mother, and, maybe for entirely coincidental socioeconomic reasons, people these days didn’t have those Greek choruses of relatives, freely offering their opinions about everything that happened. Maybe she had tried to reproduce it all, imagining in Dr. Paul the very man for the job, an aspiring playwright with a grandiose sense of himself, but she had failed in her production—hadn’t she walked out just before the curtain went up?
Carl was a wonderful gardener; her mother would have told him what to do, loved him all the same, and given him all her best bulbs. Truly, she and Carl had made this harbor here, this Midwestern island of peace and prosperity, and Claire couldn’t take much credit for it. Carl didn’t live onstage, he lived in a workroom, putting the finish on this, sanding the edge off that. He was still the happiest man Claire had ever met, a saint of tremendous patience whose greatest pleasure, other than a good dinner and some friendly sex, was the neat fit between mortise and tenon.
—
PONIES HAD BEEN KNOWN to live to the age of forty, and though Janet didn’t think Pesky would get there, he was almost thirty, turned out in a grassy refuge for elderly equines down near Big Sur—she visited him every couple of months with some apples and carrots. Jared didn’t mind going along, because he liked to have dinner in Carmel. Sunlight had lasted a long time, too—the summer he was twenty-three, she had come to the barn to find him lying in his stall with his eyes open, quiet and stiff. No horses after that until now, two years later: in February, she had agreed to buy Jackie Milkens’s retired event horse, fourteen, very experienced, mostly sound, good at dressage. Her name was Bluebird. Since no one at home seemed to require her maternal services and the house seemed to clean itself, Janet’s enthusiasm for the equestrian life had resumed—she showed up at the barn every day, stayed for two or three hours, went on trail rides, and kept her tack clean and oiled. The barn was full of all sorts of people who engaged their horses in all sorts of disciplines, and everything was fine, until the man who had owned the place since the seventies decided he was done, and another group bought it. These were people from out of state—Arizona or somewhere, rich people who wanted an equestrian facility in a vineyard, or near a vineyard, or with its own vineyard. Janet tried to stay on their good side.
The dumbest thing they did was kick the stable workers off the property and tear down the little houses they had been living in since the property was built. This meant that Marco and his wife, Lucia; Chico and his wife, Anna; and Pablo (who was too young to have a wife, and went back and forth to Guadalajara, where he played piano in a band) had to find places to live in the most expensive rental market in America. Marco, who had been at the barn as long as Janet had kept a horse there, was now about forty-five, Janet thought. He had gotten a little set in his ways, and he was not happy when his hours were shifted so that, instead of working seven hours a day, six days a week, he had to work ten hours a day, four days a week; but he got used to that, and the grumbling subsided. Things were fine for about two months, and Janet could speak to the new owners politely when she saw them.
In May, on a beautiful day that had Janet singing under her breath, she was in Birdie’s stall, putting the saddle on, and she heard Marco say, “Sí, se acabó cerca de Los Banos.” When she led Birdie into the aisle, Marco was in the next stall over, cleaning it out. “Los Banos” had caught her ear, since that wasn’t terribly far from the Angelina Ranch, so she said, “Marco! Do you have friends over in Los Banos?”
“Sí, señora, but, really, I have bought a house near there.” He grinned.
She said, “You have! How wonderful!” She’d almost said “amazing,” since she knew for a fact that Marco made minimum wage or no more than a dollar above that. She said, “It’s so far away, though! Isn’t it like a two-hour drive? Are you leaving here?”
Marco stood up, leaned on his fork, and said, “No, señora. My wife stays there. I go for three days, come back. I am staying with my cousin in Los Altos four days.”
“What’s your wife doing now?” When they lived on the stable grounds, Lucia had run a cleaning business: she went around to people’s houses once or twice a week with an assistant. She called it “Mini-Maids.”
“She is cleaning, like before. But over there now, so she can live in the house.”
Janet had been through Los Banos, to the Perroni ranch, and a little bit around that neighborhood. She could not imagine that Lucia could prosper the way she could in Palo Alto, but she didn’t say anything except “Well, congratulations. Drive safely.”
“Sí, señora. Gracias,” said Marco. He went back to sifting shavings and tossing lumps of manure into his wheelbarrow. On the way over to the arena, leading Birdie, who walked along politely, she passed Marco’s truck, a huge Ford pickup. That
was pretty new, too—newer than Janet’s 1998 Chevy. Nothing made sense anymore, but it was too beautiful a day to care.
—
FELICITY WAS LOOKING FORWARD to ISU, but she didn’t think about it much. She could have started the year before, but she had decided to focus on her job at the vet clinic. Her mom said she was obsessed with that job, but Felicity would not have used the word “obsessed”—she was busy and happy, that was all. She cleaned cages, mopped floors, helped around the office, watered plants. Sometimes she pulled on latex gloves and helped Dr. Carlson by holding a cat or a dog. Most vets were women now, and she knew she could be one, but she hadn’t decided. What her dad considered a bad thing had happened: Lou Carlson, Dr. Carlson’s brother, had taken Felicity down to Des Moines, on a visit to the Great Ape place there. Her parents might have heard of the Great Ape place if they read The Des Moines Register, but they didn’t. Though she had told them all about it, she saw that they were not convinced that primate research was her destiny. She felt some despair about whether they would ever learn a thing. In an effort to sway her father (or maybe teach him), she had given him his own copy of Our Inner Ape, a book that Pastor Diehl would have found sinful and ungodly.