Golden Age (12 page)

And she did trot! She did not grab mane. Her posting was good!

“Now just go around me here, in a small circle, to the left, that’s right. Well, there were four bridesmaids, and me, and we all went
very solemnly down the aisle, and I wondered why there was such a long pause, with the minister not saying a thing, and then there was this sound, and here came the hounds right down the center aisle, running to beat the band! Giving voice, loud as you please! Very good, now turn and go to the right. Give him a little pop with your legs, just a pop-pop, right along with his steps, so he moves out. Very good.”

Pesky stretched his neck and put his head down. Emily could feel his back end curling and stepping a little more.

“Let the rein out. That’s his reward. Peter spun around and stared. I was just laughing. Then the side entrance of the church opened; Sally had stationed a whipper-in there, and the hounds ran out the door. Everyone was roaring with excitement, and I must say it did make the local paper. Now just pop him a couple of times with your right leg so that he will bend inward and make a larger circle—there you go. You are only signaling him, not punishing him. Pesky knows that.”

Pesky was walking fast now; his head and neck were moving from side to side and his ears were half pricked, which, Emily knew, meant that he was paying attention to her, not to the two riders who were passing the gate. Walking, walking, and in the next stride, he rose into the trot, and his trot itself lifted her out of the saddle. She posted again, this time more smoothly. It didn’t feel fast or scary, but easy, and just what someone riding a horse would like to do, even Emily.

Mrs. Herman kept talking. “At the reception, they all told me that they’d planned to use a fox! Can you imagine? But foxes are elusive—they never did catch one. Now, that
is
a good trot. Just loop outward to the rail, and then turn toward me. Very good!”

What was really strange was how different the landscape looked when she was on top of Pesky rather than walking beside him. It looked brighter and broader. Mrs. Herman would say, “Right over there we had a lovely gallop last winter, that’s a beautiful spot,” or, “You can’t see it from here, but behind that stand of oaks, there’s a trail that’s perfect in the summer, very shady. Next summer, we’ll go out there. Barkis likes a good long walk, two hours at least.” Emily believed that in a year they would do all sorts of things, because Mrs. Herman knew just how to do them.

—

JANET HAD ALWAYS
sneered at Stanford Hospital as the only hospital in the world with its own upscale shopping mall, but there she was, standing in Handbags at Saks, actually thinking of her mother telling her that Saks was fine if you had to go there, but if you needed to really spend money, she preferred Bergdorf’s. It was a week before her due date, and that morning she’d gotten on the scale and wondered if she was going to hit thirty pounds, which some expert or other had recently declared to be the optimum weight gain. It had been an uneventful pregnancy; the day before, Jared had stoked her vanity by saying that, from the back, you couldn’t even tell she was pregnant.

The waters didn’t splash, she didn’t make a scene, and she was wearing jeans, which soaked up the mess without showing it. She turned on her heel, walked right out the door, and said to the guard, “I’m in labor”; one of the mall managers got her car and drove her the five minutes to the hospital. One moment she was standing at the entrance, and the next she was flat on her back on a gurney, and the contractions were two minutes apart, and the public-address system was calling for her doctor, Dr. McLarey. They rushed her down the hallway. She heard the doctor and the nurse who were with her say that all the delivery rooms were full, they were going to have to use a recovery room; then Dr. McLarey was told to go to Room Something Something Something. No one asked her how she felt, but she felt fine; a contraction was a contraction, after all, and better to have them come over you all at once than to build and build.

Dr. McLarey, who was five years younger than she was, was sweating when he appeared, tying on his mask, and, apart from looking at her, she supposed to make sure that she was Janet Nelson, he focused his attention on the very spot that she, of all of them, could not see. All she could see was that he held out his hands, and the next thing she knew, he was standing up and Jonah was in his arms, Jonah Timothy Nelson, eight pounds, eight ounces, labor exactly forty-six minutes by the watch she still had on her wrist, every pain overwhelmed by a sense of speed and urgency. The doctor laughed and said to the nurse, “Talk about sliders!”

The nurse took him away, wrapped him up, and brought him back. Dr. McLarey petted her on the arm and ran off—he had another delivery. Now the nurse brought the baby to her, saying, “Here he is, Mama. His AP score was eight at one minute and nine at five. These quick ones, when there’s no anesthetic, they are bright from the first.” She removed Jonah’s little blue hat. “Thank the Lord his head is pointy. Came out like a fish.”

But he looked perfect to Janet; he looked handsome and debonair, his head slightly tilted and his chin lifted.

She hoisted herself up—truly, she felt fine—and held out her arms possessively. The nurse handed him over, then said, “Take a good whiff. That’s how you know you’re his mother. I’ll just leave you alone before the onslaught.” The nurse sashayed out, pulling the door closed behind herself.

Maybe Janet remembered the first time she saw Emily, but maybe not—she’d been drugged or panicked or tired from a long and painful overnight labor. She did remember that Emily had been a tight little bundle, self-contained, or self-sufficient, from the beginning. But now, when she sat up in the pale, brilliant California room where they’d sequestered her and brought Jonah to her, he relaxed. What it felt like was that something that had been cold was warming and softening. The effect of this on Janet was enormous, as if she suddenly sensed love coming at her, into her. How random this was! How dependent on the chance circumstances of labor! No story that anyone had ever told her, not her mother’s stories about being put to sleep in 1950 and 1953, not her grandmother’s dimly remembered tales of parturition on the farm (always terrifying), not even Debbie’s earnest parsing of Carlie’s and Kevvie’s moment-by-moment progress, had mentioned this little thing, what the child did in your arms, next to your body. And yet, perhaps, that was the magic bean that dictated the anatomy of the beanstalk. At any rate, Janet couldn’t remember ever in her life looking into anyone’s face with the pleasure she now felt looking into Jonah’s. She cradled him in her left arm, removed his little hat once again, and laid her right palm gently on his warm forehead.

And the nurse returned and said, “Want to try nursing? He does seem a sweetheart! Have you nursed before? Let’s see if we can get some colostrum into this boy. Mmm. Delicious? Ready, babe?”

1992

R
ICHIE WOULD NOT
have said that he had many political opinions, but once the Dems put him in the race for Congressman Scheuer’s seat, his mouth opened, and opinions came out. They were, he discovered, quite similar to the congressman’s own opinions, and not that much different from Ivy’s. In fact, they were pretty much standard opinions for someone living in Brooklyn (fortunately, his and Ivy’s co-op was just inside the line separating his district from the next one over), but he realized as he enunciated them that he actually felt them—his voice warmed to them, shaped them, emphasized them. When he spoke, images came into his mind of Ivy and Leo and their neighborhood, and how they fit into the larger picture (or, indeed, sometimes how the larger picture fit into them), and he waxed profound. It was true, though, that he didn’t want anyone in his family—certainly not Michael, but not Ivy or his mom, either—to come to rallies. He was convinced that if he saw them in the audience he would return to the shapeless being he had been before Leo was born, the same being he was only now emerging from.

He was thirty-nine, he was tall, he was friendly from all those years of showing properties, he had a good smile. He was called “Rick.” He was “the son of war hero and self-made defense industry innovator Frank Langdon,” and in this day and age Michael wasn’t as much of a liability as he might have been—their relationship appealed
to some of Richie’s voters in the Manhattan portions of the district. Richie had connections to the Italian community and through Ivy and her parents to the Jewish community. Once he started purveying these advantages, he was rather amazed at how it had all come together without his realizing it. And then there was Loretta, an avid supporter of Bush. She was a little prominent around certain parts of the city now, though still registered to vote in California; she was so eccentric that Richie knew that, if anyone brought her name up, all he had to do was smile and very slightly roll his eyes and he would get the I-have-crazy-relatives-too vote, hands down. The political landscape seemed to be changing—to be smoothing out almost everywhere. And Richie had more energy now than he had ever had before. It was in this that he knew that he really was related to that kid Charlie Wickett, who occasionally stopped by campaign headquarters on his daily run between Fort Tryon Park and Sag Harbor, or something as insanely breathtaking. Richie liked Charlie, and threatened to put him to work distributing leaflets. Charlie said that he was only allowed to distribute leaflets about the greenhouse effect, but Richie didn’t pay any attention to that—he just liked to see him. And, of course, he knew Charlie’s looks, fitness, and good-natured out-to-lunch quality would appeal to the youth vote.

Ivy was almost proud of him; she let him know this by telling him that her parents had decided that he was a “late bloomer.” They, of course, assumed that the blossom had a pinkish tinge (they continued to pay for his subscriptions to
The Nation
and
Mother Jones
and to refer to Herbert Marcuse and Raymond Williams), but Richie thought maybe those days were gone. Both sides had so sullied their reputations that what he had—a kind of get-it-done-and-shake-hands-across-the-aisle sort of openness—was the wave of the future. His Republican opponent was an obvious sacrifice, fifty-four, with the forgettable name of Kevin Moore; he had run against Congressman Scheuer twice, losing by twenty points and then twenty-four points. The Republicans had pretty much already conceded.

By early February, Richie hadn’t actually answered when people (people from the
Times
, the
Post
, the
Village Voice
, the Key Food weekly circular) asked him what he thought of the presidential race—Wilder, Kerrey, Clinton, Tsongas, Harkin, Brown—Virginia, Nebraska, Arkansas, Iowa, California, with a tragicomic touch of Massachusetts
in Tsongas. He said nothing. They all had their advantages; the main thing was to pick the one who best combined intelligence, decisiveness, compassion, and the will to win. When Gennifer Flowers had appeared on the scene, he’d kept a straight face and said, “We should wait and see what’s really going on.” When everyone started talking about Clinton’s dodging the draft, Richie told his own story, about showing up to enlist in Boston, ending up on a bus full of antiwar activists, and having to wait and try to enlist again, but by then the war was over. This was a story that even Ivy had never heard—how Debbie had found him wandering around Boston, wondering what to do. He was so stupid that he’d thought he would sign up, they’d take him, and he wouldn’t have to come up with bus fare home, so he spent his last dollar on, not anything manly like a pack of smokes, but an ice-cream cone. Ivy thought it was cute and funny, so Richie learned how to tell it in a way that promoted an image of self-effacing patriotism combined with subsequent moral and practical growth.

Richie watched all the presidential candidates—not to see what they thought, but more to observe how they presented themselves. From Clinton, he took sheer brazen forward motion; from Harkin, the habit of smiling just before saying something; from Brown, an air of contained impatience at the bullshit presented by the other side; from Wilder, a trick of dropping into seriousness just at the right moment—the joking is over, let me lead you into a discussion of the issues. From all of them he took a willingness to speak to any size crowd. At the end of February, he was asked to a breakfast group at Lefferts Historic House. His audience numbered three persons, including the one who had arranged the breakfast; she apologized profusely for forgetting to put it in the paper. Richie spoke earnestly and at length, as if he had a full house. The only truly awkward part was the question-and-answer period—dead silence. But he kept smiling.

People in his neighborhood began recognizing him. As the winter progressed into spring, they went from staring at him just a moment too long to saying, “Are you that guy, Rick Langdon? I saw your picture somewhere,” to “You know, I heard what you said, and here’s where you’re wrong.” It was both an advantage and a disadvantage that Leo’s absolute favorite thing to do was to go for a walk in the park; on Saturdays and Sundays, when Allie, their nanny, was off,
Richie would carry him across Prospect Park West to the entrance at the end of Ninth Street, and as soon as they neared the Lafayette Memorial, Leo would start bouncing in Richie’s arms, and then hit the ground running. The disadvantage was that everyone in the park recognized him, and most people had something to say. The advantage was that Leo had to be followed, because he wouldn’t stand still or allow himself to be held, and almost all of Richie’s interlocutors were left behind, while at the same time, Richie hoped, noting that the candidate was a responsible and involved father. He knew he could not let Leo (1) throw a tantrum, (2) appear to be in danger, or (3) eat dangerous (carrots) or suspect (Popsicles) foods. All in all, it was better to let the darling child go, staying right with him. In March, there was even a little squib on Page Six—“Eighteen-Month-Old Beats Candidate Dad by a Length,” with a very cute picture of Leo running and laughing, Richie right behind him, also laughing. Richie had expected the fund-raising and the meetings with constituents to be arduous, and the campaign to be time-consuming, but in fact the people funding his campaign were satisfied by his relationship to and near-identification with Congressman Scheuer, whom everybody liked.