Golden Age (43 page)

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, leaving 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.

To tell the truth, Felicity had indeed been surprised to discover that there was a sort of ape she had never heard of, called a “bonobo,” a much more playful and less vicious ape species, in which the females were dominant and the males had sex all the time in preference to fighting. Felicity had read the book three times, though she still went to church with her parents. She passed the time there by imagining Pastor Diehl as an ape with a mask on—he was definitely from the chimp side, since he was prickly, aggressive, and loud. Felicity could easily imagine him patrolling the grounds of the Worship Center, Bible in hand, eager to wrestle nonbelievers to the pavement. He was already talking about the Iowa presidential straw-poll, which wasn’t until September.

Over supper, she told everyone about the personalities of the dogs she was caring for. Did a dog hang back, waiting for her to take her hand away from the food dish before he approached it, or did he eat as soon as the food was given out? When presented with a rope toy, did a dog immediately pounce and want to play, or did the dog have to be encouraged? Did a dog show sexual behaviors even after being neutered? These would include mounting, humping, masturbating (her parents exchanged a glance but didn’t say anything; Aunt Minnie smiled to herself). Felicity pushed her glasses up her nose and pressed on. Canute, her “boyfriend,” wasn’t much better, but he did ask her a question every so often. Canute had his own passions that Felicity respected—as he said, Canute Rose was his name, and brass instruments were his game. He was a year younger than Felicity, and played the trombone in the school orchestra. In the all-state orchestra, which had given a concert in the winter, he’d played the trumpet, because
there were six chairs as opposed to four. Sometimes Canute and Felicity had conversations that she knew were weird, him making remarks about mouthpieces and her making remarks about bonobo grooming behaviors. He was a wonderful musician, and he was good-looking, too. His folks had a farm—754 acres west of town—but Canute had no interest in it. None of their friends gave a shit about farming; they cared less than Felicity did, and she was only distantly interested now. What she imagined was that she would have a small-animal vet clinic somewhere very fancy, like New York City, not far from the alleged palace where the cousins lived, and she would specialize in shih tzus and Cavalier King Charles spaniels while Canute would play in brass quartets and, maybe, the New York Philharmonic. They would not have a shih tzu—they would have several rescue dogs, and parade proudly around Central Park. Iowa State could prepare you for all of that.