Golden Age (16 page)

He did not say that he and the girl had had intercourse, but Andy understood that they had, which reminded her of that last fall semester in college; when Frank was telling her—Hildy, as she was then called—that he loved her, he was doing something with her friend Eunice that could not be called rape, because it was mutually sought, but was hateful and violent. She knew that Frank thought that she knew nothing about that, and it was on the tip of her tongue to repay him for Corsica by telling him that Eunice had died in 1989 from complications of emphysema—after being on a ventilator for three years. But she didn’t say anything, and then she woke up in the night; she remembered standing in the entrance of the Memorial Union, just beneath the wall of engraved names of Iowa State heroes of the First World War, blubbering about the German invasion of Norway, and Frank leaning toward her with such kindness and strength. The other students were passing and staring, and Frank hid her face against his shoulder so she wouldn’t see them, and they wouldn’t see her, a loving thing to do. Yes, he had run away to the war weeks afterward, but she had forgiven that long ago. Maybe, she thought, it had taken Frank these many years to know that love and sex could intersect.

One night, when they were laughing at the idea that there could be a street anywhere, even in Chicago, called “Wacker,” Andy said, “You know, that day, I saw you. I followed you for ten minutes. I was scared to get near you. You looked so old and hardened. My plan was, if you recognized me, I would say, ‘Hi, I’m Hildy, do you remember me?’ But I thought you might not recognize me, so I thought, if I introduced myself as Andy, we could start from the beginning. I would say that I’d gone to Iowa and my last name was Peterson.”

“I didn’t recognize you,” said Frank.

“No, you didn’t right at first, I saw it in your face, so I started in on my plan, but then you did, so I made up that story about changing my name. The next day, I had to tell everyone at the office and write my parents. I was Hildy until that moment.”

Andy knew that it would seem unbelievable to her children, especially Janet and Loretta and Ivy, that she and Frank had not shared these memories before, and it was not only, she saw now, that ever since she’d known him she, and perhaps he, had been afraid of what might be said—it was also that they had no model. One night she said to him, “Do you remember your parents talking about themselves to each other?”

“My father fell in the well out by the barn and didn’t tell Mama for ten years or something like that. When Cousin Berta went to the insane asylum, no one said a word about it. She was at home one day and not there the next day. I think Joe asked where she was, and Mama said, ‘She had to go up to Independence.’ I think I thought she had moved somewhere to be on her own.”

Andy said, “One time, my mother was really upset with my father for having the apple trees in the backyard cut down without telling her. She went out and drove the car around town for two hours rather than speak to him about it.”

“But,” said Frank, “what would they tell each other? My parents were from the same town—different churches, but they had lived the same lives. What would they bring to a conversation? Nothing exotic, you can be sure.”

“My parents and their relatives talked in code. Someone would nod and say, ‘Ah, you know what happened to Inga!’ And then everyone else would nod, and Sven or I would ask, ‘Mama, what happened to Inga?’ and, more often than not, she would say, ‘You don’t want
to know.’ It wasn’t until we were much older—high school, really—that we began to put all the parts together.”

“Or they would talk German,” said Frank. “ 
‘Ja!’
and then blah blah blah, so fast that we could only pick out a word here and there. I would ask Eloise, and she would tell me, but I got to wondering after a while if she wasn’t making things up just to frighten me.”

“I was very fond of your aunt Eloise,” said Andy.

“I went through a period where I agreed with Eloise’s analysis,” said Frank. Andy thought he was joking, but then he said, “I mean, I was fifteen. I was very impressed by Julius. He was a communist. He had that accent that said, ‘I know things you will never even think of.’ It’s so ghostly now.”

“What?” said Andy.

“Soviet immortality.”

Their conversations made Andy think of things she hadn’t thought of in years—her time in Kansas City, for example. Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she’d ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn’t very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). Her boss at Halls had seemed imposing, too, all of thirty-one, possessed of his own apartment just north of the plaza, on the third floor! He was a sharp dresser, talked about jazz, and implied that he was close personal friends with Count Basie and Charlie Parker. What was his name? She thought for a morning, and over her tomato soup remembered—Martin Sock or Scott. She had been shy, not really carrying a torch for Frank, more like frozen up. She read a lot; that was where she learned all those stories that she’d told her various psychiatrists in the early years of their marriage, tales from a book of saga translations, and
Giants in the Earth, The Emigrants, Kristin Lavransdatter
, anything cruel and resonant in her mind with the Decorah/Albert Lea axis. But Martin took her out—sometimes to a movie, once to a club, once to dinner—and one of those times, not the last one, he took her to his apartment, into the bedroom, where he started fondling her. Fondling was not easy, given her armor of girdle and hosiery and bra and petticoat, not to mention the tight belt around her waist and the long zipper down her side and the hooks and their eyes. But he had been patient, and
pretty soon she was half dressed on the bed with him, him still in his trousers and socks and neatly pressed shirt, and somehow he had his knee between her legs and he was pressing her and rubbing her, and at the same time kissing her, and something happened, there seemed to be an explosion where his leg was that seemed to burn through her body, making her shake and tremble and stiffen and cry out so that he smothered her face against his side. And then they were both so embarrassed that she jumped off the bed and put her clothes back on as best she could. She didn’t know what had happened to her, and he wasn’t saying. After she got back together with Frank, in preparation for their marriage, she found a book in a used-book store in Chicago by a woman named Ida Craddock, called
Right Marital Living
. She’d been amazed to discover that what had happened to her was fairly routine. She knew that if she told this to Frank, while lying softly in his arms in the dark in their very own bed in the house they had owned now for thirty-three years, he would be amused and affectionate and see it as an exchange for his tale of Corsica, but she couldn’t do it. She did wonder what had happened to Martin Sock. He would be almost eighty now.

—

GREECE WAS
a place that people their age, Andy thought, could never understand why they had waited so long to get to. Certainly, standing on the uneven paving in front of the Parthenon, looking outward to the city beyond, Andy felt herself to have finally arrived at the apex of something, but not something so crass as civilization. Frank was good—he had been reading all summer. He supplied her with all sorts of information and helped her not to stumble, but he didn’t care if she asked questions (she didn’t), and he didn’t imply that if she’d paid more attention in school she would know who Socrates and Plato were. At Mycenae (but they pronounced it “Mikinna”), he stood with her at the gate into the city, the Lion Gate, where, after gazing at the carving of the two headless lions standing on their hind legs, facing a column, they marveled for quite a long time at the grooves in the paving, where there had been a rectangular stone in the portal, as wide as the space between the wheels of a chariot, to help the charioteers orient their vehicles so that they could get safely through the gate. These three-thousand-year-old ruts were the ghosts of uncountable
momentary thoughts on the part of uncountable lost charioteers. As they walked up the hill from there, Frank told her a little about the Trojan War, the Achaeans (the Myceneans) and their friends and enemies. They followed a narrowing passageway and peered into one of the beehive tombs. The orange color of the local soil made the landscape seem especially abandoned. Mikinna, Andy thought, was much more haunting than the Acropolis, not white but brownish gold, as if the light of 1600
B.C
. were cooler and duskier than that of 500
B.C
. Olympia she found flat, busy, and boring, as if the labor of the gods had been, not great doings, but gossip, bookkeeping, and shipments here and there of olive oil and flax. Andy strolled along, looking at the ruins and the sky, taking in the fragrance of the vegetation. Although it was impossible to stay in Greece forever, she had the feeling that you could remain, lifetime after lifetime, floating here and there very quietly, and with plenty of company. She’d never felt this way about New Jersey or Iowa.

It was the assistant cook on the
Flyboy
, the yacht where they stayed for three nights, who said that, after they looked at Knossos and Agia Triada, they should not miss Delphi. It was out of the way, and Frank had planned to skip it, but since Andy had expressed no desires at all so far, he was eager to do whatever she so much as mentioned.

Almost October now. They got to Itea late in the afternoon, nearly dark, and decided to take a room in a regular hotel there, rather than continue up to Delphi. They ate in the dining room, spanakopita and roast lamb. Frank did an unusual thing—he took a glass of ouzo, and ordered Andy one, too. They sipped quietly, and she enjoyed the sharp anise flavor, but not, as it turned out, the tingle of the alcohol. Their two little glasses, half full, sat side by side on the table, and Frank said, “I miss the kids.”

He said this naturally, as if he had said it before, but he never had, at least to her. Andy almost said, “What kids?” but then she said, “Do you mean ‘miss,’ or ‘missed’?”

Frank looked at her, and then at the two little glasses. He said, “What’s the difference?”

There was a long silence, not uncongenial. If there was anything Andy knew, it was not to push something. Finally, Frank said, “I know that was a nightmare with Arthur, but I enjoyed getting to know—”

“Charlie.”

“He’s a little like Richie.”

No, thought Andy.

“Like Richie might have been,” he added.

Without us, thought Andy.

“Without Michael,” said Frank.

In the morning, they found their car and driver. The day was blustery and the sky gray. The landscape was steeper and more intimidating than they had seen before, and it put Andy in a dark mood—not sour, not irritable, but strangely Nordic (and that thought made her laugh). There were switchbacks and precipices, and it took half an hour to get to the town, which, at least today, did not seem like a sunny Mediterranean Greek town, even though the buildings were pleasantly white with tile roofs. Once at the shrine, they got out, left the driver, and started walking.

The Temple was built on a slope facing down a valley that ran between steep, dark, upthrusting mountains. A brochure they’d gotten said that the Greeks believed this was the navel of the world, and Andy could understand that. She did have the sense that everything else she had ever seen was peripheral to this spot, these ruins, this view. Here, the brochure said, the Earth goddess, Gaia, lived. As so often happens, a self-confident newcomer, a muscular, aspiring young man, made his way straight to this spot, and he killed the son of the goddess, possibly out of revenge, possibly just to demonstrate that a new world had come to pass. His name was Apollo, but it could have been anything, and once he had done the deed, he laid claim to the most central and the most intimidating location, the one most difficult to get to, the one with the greatest view. He then installed an old woman, not so different from Andy herself. The woman sat on her three-legged stool, inhaled the gases, and said her piece, and her words were taken as prophecy. For her efforts, she got to remain in this spot, to be cared for, to forget all the rest of the world. She also, Andy thought, came to perceive herself, every day, as smaller and smaller, a black hole at the center of the universe, a dot in time where time stood still.

They walked around the theater and the stadium and looked through the museum. She touched blocks of stone and rough standing columns with her finger and appreciated that the Greeks allowed
weeds and wildflowers to grow in every crevice, to give life to every vista. She stood quietly and felt the breeze, took off her sweater and let the particular Delphic sunlight brighten her arms. She thought of everyone in order—her father and mother and Sven (“Hyperboreans,” according to Frank’s book), then Frank, Joe, Lillian, Henry, Claire, Janet, Richie, Michael, Jared, Ivy, Loretta, Emily and Jonah, Leo, Chance, Tia, and Binky. She laid each thought of them upon the stones of the spot where the oracle was said to have been. She knew that the oracle had not prophesied only good fortune: many supplicants had been told of doom and despair, and as she breathed each name, Andy accepted that. But she suspected that the seer, in speaking, had always prophesied something meaningful—something that struck those who sought her, that stayed with them, that gave them, if not hope, then corporeality, the extra intensity of watching their own feet stepping away from the oracle, their own eyes gazing across the stadium, their own hands reaching up to push back their hair, which was tangling in the wind. Death might be worth that. Frank came up behind her and put his arm around her waist.

1994