Golden Age (27 page)

“I have a job,” said Nadie.

She seemed restless, so Richie put his leg over hers and moved her toward him. She was tense for a moment, then relaxed and kissed him. He said, “It wouldn’t be a job, it would be a charitable act.”

“To whom? When you describe him, Michael sounds like an asshole. Do you want me to declare that he is an asshole, or that he isn’t?”

“I want analysis. I want to know why he does what he does.”

“What you really want to know is why you care.”

“Why do I care?” said Richie. Maybe this was a way to get her to stay.

“I’m not staying,” she said, answering his real question. But then, when she saw that he looked disappointed, she said, “I’ll go to
What Dreams May Come
with you Saturday night, though.”

Richie was not a fan of Robin Williams, but he said, “Okay.” She eased herself out of the bed and got dressed. He walked her to the door. Her generation did not like to be accompanied home, he had discovered.

1999

T
HE NEW MAN
, Pastor Diehl, had a way of letting his gaze pass over Lois’s face without recognition. It happened every single time he stood in the doorway of the church, sending the believers away after the Sunday-morning or the Wednesday-evening services. At first, Lois said nothing to Minnie about this particular insult; she was, after all, Pastor Campbell’s most industrious and helpful congregant, had been for years now. But she vocally dismissed Pastor Diehl’s views about Clinton, liberals, homosexuals. There were ways in which Lois and Henry were two of a kind—careful, stylish, persnickety about details. She was not going to stand for any sass about homosexuals from a flashy kid who grew up in Missouri, and not even St. Louis or Kansas City, but Bucyrus! Where in the world was that?

First Lois talked to Cecilie Campbell about what she saw as a mutiny. She came home afterward—home to the big house, not to her own house—and made herself a pot of tea, then said to Minnie, who was reading, “That girl doesn’t know left from right!” Pastor Campbell’s wife was forty-two, Minnie thought, but said nothing. Lois said, “She’s glad Pastor Diehl has taken over the ten o’clock service as well as the Wednesday-night service, not to mention the youth crusade! She says Ralph is relieved! He’s so exhausted running the place that—”

“Administration is exhausting,” said Minnie—a neutral comment, she would have thought.

“Then a young man should do it!”

“Why let him control the money?” said Minnie. That shut Lois up.

She then had a talk with Pastor Campbell himself. He said that he felt out of touch with the latest “fashions,” and Lois told him that salvation was not a fashion, but of course it was—Minnie saw that all the time. He was sorry Lois felt that way, but the fact was that he had never considered his sermons much good, so he was happy enough to step back.

After that, Lois stewed for a few days. She went to Diehl, cornered him in the youth center, where he was putting up posters, and accused him of taking over. At first he advised her not to worry: there was no one he respected more than Ralph, and he had a perfect love of Cecilie, who was the ideal wife that he himself hoped for, a quiet, humble, but wise helpmeet, and the children…

She wasn’t going to stand for it. Lois walked out. He was a hypocrite! All he wanted was to run the place, and he was using politics to make people afraid, to consolidate his power, to ease out one of the best men of God Lois had ever known, a man who was inherently humble and kind but brilliant—

“These things aren’t really your business,” said Pastor Diehl.

After that, Lois didn’t feel comfortable going to the church at all, so she sat around her house, baking this, baking that, mastering cannoli at last. Minnie had seen it before: someone dies, and what had appeared to be peace and contentment explodes in frustration. Finally, on Lincoln’s Birthday, which Minnie noted because it was a holiday, Lois showed up at breakfast in her eight-year-old pickup truck and went down into the cellar. The mazelike brick house she and Joe had lived in now for fourteen years had a small cellar, but for real storage, she used this place. Minnie hadn’t realized how much was down there.

Lois brought up boxes of beans, lentils, peas, rice, quinoa, wheat berries. Cases of stewed tomatoes, her own canned vegetables, her own dried apple slices, pear wedges, cranberries. Bags of flour, wheat and rye. Bags of sugar, of course. Frozen cuts of pork and steaks; condensed milk. Dried pasta. Oils of various kinds. She was patient and
strong. She was pleasant to Minnie and didn’t ask her to help, but she did prop the door open. The day before had been warm, but today it was in the twenties again, so Minnie went up to her room, closed the door, and put on two sweaters. Sometimes she looked out the window. Loading the truck bed took two hours. Finally, Minnie saw her slam the tailgate, stand for a moment to regard her work, then turn toward the house. Minnie went down and met her at the door. Lois said, “Well, time to say goodbye.”

“Where are you—”

“I’ll stay with Annie for a few weeks.”

“You’re taking all of this to Milwaukee?”

“Heavens, no. I’m dropping it at the church. That Diehl may be telling them that the world is going to end on New Year’s, but I don’t believe it. Not anymore. Never did, really.”

“What about your house?”

“Oh, I’m all moved out of there.”

“What about Jesse and Jen and the kids?”

“I’ll visit,” said Lois.

Minnie said, “I mean, why are you giving all the food to the church and not to the kids?”

“They get the house.” She said, “Jen is good. She can take over.”

“Take over what?”

“Keeping up the garden. Making sure that you all don’t eat poison, I guess. I’ve had enough. Joe isn’t here anymore. Without him to care for, I feel overwhelmed with rage every time I look at the corn and beans or pass that Kum & Go. My heart sinks. It’s like I fell asleep forty years ago and woke up in hell. I don’t want to have to drive forty miles to Ames to go to Wheatsfield. The other night, in the middle of the night, I thought, ‘I am out of place. Just out of place. Diehl is right.’ ” Minnie didn’t dare say that she would miss her—she had that Lois sense of certainty still. Minnie was sorry to see her go, but she dared not object.

—

ALTHOUGH PART OF
Michael’s shtick (and as the representative of a district in Brooklyn, Richie could use that word with ease) had always been snickering at Richie’s “job,” he didn’t say a word about impeaching Clinton, didn’t say a word about NAFTA, didn’t say a
word about Bosnia. But when Phil Gramm and Jim Leach came up with their bill to loosen the banking regulations, Michael had plenty to say, all of it erudite and pleased. He started calling Richie on his home phone and his office phone after the Senate passed their version in May.

Richie didn’t consider himself any sort of expert on banking, and so was going to vote along party lines—that’s how the Senate had voted. Dingell, his colleague on the Energy and Commerce Committee, to whom Riley gave a B because he was from Detroit (“Gas-guzzler central,” as Riley said), was completely opposed to changing the laws, and gave Richie an earful every time he saw him in the Capitol building. Dingell always said, “Take it from me, Langdon, those banks are going to expand until they don’t know what in the world they are doing, and then they are going to come to us, hat in hand. How many staff do you have?”

“Ten, these days,” said Richie.

“And you let them do mostly what they want, right?”

Richie didn’t say anything.

“Well, who doesn’t? There’s only so many hours in the day. But your staff aren’t gambling for a living, are they? Doubling down, then doubling down again. Statistically, I’m telling you, sixteen percent of these investment boys are going to be doubling down, and sixteen percent of those are going to go bust on their biggest bets. No CEO or CFO who’s got his own life to live, now that he’s made it, is going to know a thing about it.” Of course, he had a point—he had been in the Congress for as long as Richie had been alive.

Michael said that the financial system would be much more efficient, both for investors and for savers, and that the banks would be safer, because when the economy was up the investors would carry the vig, and when the economy was down the savers would. This sounded reasonable to Richie, if not to Lucille, who didn’t have a real argument apart from “disaster in the making” and “inherent greed,” but, considering that most of Lucille’s insights came to her on the can, Richie had reservations about that, too.

Even apart from the Michael factor, Richie had come to like Jim Leach (R-IA), who reminded him of his cousin Jesse a little, if only in the way he talked. Leach understood derivatives, and he had broken ranks and voted against Gingrich and for abortion rights. Gramm
made him about as suspicious as Leach allayed his fears. And, said Michael, the president was for it.

“Who told you that?” said Richie. “His new best friend, Loretta?”

“I don’t consult Loretta about money, and she doesn’t consult me about morals.”

Appropriate division of labor, thought Richie.

“Listen, little bro,” said Michael—and, yes, Richie was a half-inch shorter and ten pounds lighter, though, as always, four minutes older—“it’s all a mess already. You’ve got Citicorp eating up Travelers even as we speak. The waitress has dropped the tray, everything has spilled and is running together in a mess. You can’t back it up, you have to go forward with it.”

“You are making the case that they broke the law against merging investments and savings, and now we change the law to avoid having to punish them?”

“No, I’m making the case that there’s a reason the law was broken—that the world is more complex now, and the law has to reflect that. Let’s say that in Montana there’s no one on the roads, so there’s no speed limit. Then let’s say that twenty years goes by, and now there are trucks and cars and school buses and motorcycles on the road, but there’s still no speed limit. Your job would be to recognize that times have changed, and to institute a speed limit.”

“Would you abide by it?”

“If I was driving my Toyota and didn’t know any better, yes.”

Richie smiled, and it was true that there was some irreverence, some self-conscious humor, in everything that Michael said. “I make no promises.”

“It’s a vote! Just vote! Who is going to hold it against you? Some fucking deli owner on Flatbush?”

“I’ll talk to you later,” said Richie. He hung up. Michael did not know when to stop. That was his perennial flaw.

Nadie and Michael, and, more important, Loretta, had now broken bread together. Michael was impressed by her youth, and Loretta thought she had a lot on the ball for someone her age. That was all they thought about her, as far as Richie understood. His mom liked her—she had driven up from what Michael called “the hut” in Far Hills and taken, first Richie and Nadie, then just Nadie, out to lunch. They talked about architecture, and Andy said that Nadie had “a
worldly manner,” and had read
Oblomov
. Nadie was the only person Andy had ever met besides herself who had read
Oblomov
, one of her favorite novels. Sometime after Nadie and Loretta met, Loretta told Nadie that appearances were deceiving—in spite of the hut and the old clothes, Andy was worth over ten million dollars these days, and she did all her own investing. Nadie’s own parents believed that all investments should be portable and kept at home, but Nadie was making good money, and since she saw how houses were built, she didn’t want to buy one. So all of that was going well, and, in fact, Leo didn’t seem to mind Nadie, either; but one result was that Nadie told Richie more than once that he was obsessed with Michael, everyone thought so, it was his problem. As the vote on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Bill approached, he could not ask Nadie’s opinion, because that would cause him to talk about Michael, and thereby reinforce her idea of his obsession, and she would extrapolate from that to general obsessiveness on his part, and she would be even less inclined to make up her mind to marry him, which he ardently desired and she may have been inching toward, but not very quickly.

In the end, it was because Michael went too far—called him from Biarritz twice in one day, when Richie was pissed that his air conditioner was on the fritz and Washington boiling. He stewed in his seat for an hour, trying to make up his mind, then decided that he needed psychiatric help of some sort, then voted in favor, then saw that 137 other Dems had voted in favor, apparently without the onset of any personal trauma at all. Representatives stood up, stretched, walked around, yawned. Business as usual, torment confined to Congressman Richard Langdon of New York’s 9th district.

—

HENRY
’
S BOOK
of essays on Gerald of Wales, which had been published by the University of Wisconsin Press, had elicited one review in an obscure English journal. Books that Oxford and Cambridge published these days were larger and more ambitious consolidations of material that crossed disciplinary lines. And no one was much interested in historical linguistics; some authorities didn’t adhere at all to the idea that there had been a Proto-Indo-European culture of the sort that his mentor, Professor McGalliard, had taught him about. Probably there had been a culture and a language, but who was to say
that it had spawned in a logical way? Maybe it had simply fragmented and re-formed randomly?