Golden Age (33 page)

However, Lucille said that Riley wasn’t crying in the bathroom—or not
only
crying. She was also throwing up. Richie did not understand what this meant until Lucille said, “Well, Congressman, open your eyes. She’s pregnant.”

Richie said, “I don’t think that’s our business.”

“If you say so,” said Lucille.

“I say so,” said Richie. What was their business? That was the question. Just after they heard about the Trade Center attack, it had been decided that everyone should evacuate—Richie was arriving at the Capitol building with his new press secretary, Alia, when they saw Hastert being whisked away, and knew that they should leave, too. Richie sent Alia home—she lived in College Park. Then he found Lucille in the office and told her that the Secret Service said everyone had to leave, walk south. Right then, it would have been, at that very moment (Richie pictured his feet, brown loafers, green socks, stepping across the pavement), Charlie’s plane was arrowing into the Pentagon. That evening, Richie joined the others on the Capitol lawn, when everyone agreed to stand behind the president. Since then, though, their job had not been as clear. The perpetrators were dead, and there were all sorts of theories about who was behind them. Most of the Congress was eager to fund some sort of reprisal, or at least investigation. Although his district did not include Ground Zero, as they called it, it did include parts of Lower Manhattan, so he helped Jerry Nadler author a bill that would give grants to businesses around there, to keep them running.

But it was a nightmare, trying to figure out how to get to the neighborhood, who should go there (a day-care business?), what to do with the site. He was the only congressman he knew of who was related to a victim. He hadn’t mentioned it to the papers, and so no one knew it
—how
he was related could be a problem. Only Cheney and Rumsfeld seemed not overwhelmed. They came, they talked, they promoted strict policies and aggressive laws, and though Richie didn’t like them, he was foggy about why—he needed Riley, he discovered, and Nadie and even Ivy, to get him organized. But the only person he had was Michael, and Michael wanted to kill them, whoever they were, no matter what, no matter where, no matter how.

2002

A
RTHUR WASN
’
T DEAD
by Christmas, but he was dead by New Year’s Day. On the 3rd, Richie and Nadie took Riley and Uncle Henry to the service. The funeral was at a funeral home in McLean, easy to get to. As they drove past the neighborhood that Tim had roamed around, and then past Arthur and Lillian’s old place, Riley stared out the window but didn’t ask to stop or say anything; Charlie himself had no connection to this landscape. Uncle Henry, too, seemed small and quiet. But Richie remembered Tim vividly here—how grown up he’d seemed when Richie was just a kid. He and Michael hadn’t been there when Tim did some of his more legendary things, like jumping off the roof of the house into the pool, but, merely sitting at the supper table or teasing Janet, he had had an air of danger that Charlie, with all of his good nature, had never had.

They were the first to arrive at the funeral home. The casket was sitting forlornly in “The Memorial Center,” a large, dim, empty, greenish room. Tina arrived next, having taken a cab from Dulles. Richie introduced her to Riley and Nadie, and Tina gave Riley a heartfelt hug, then kissed her. Richie hadn’t realized that they had had much of a relationship before Charlie died, but afterward, Riley mentioned that they exchanged letters or e-mails every month or so—she had sent them a beautiful carved panel after their wedding, medieval-looking and ornate, but the faces of the couple were the
faces of Charlie and Riley as Adam and Eve; Charlie was laughing, and Riley was looking pensively at the apple in her hand. Then Dean and Linda showed up, after them Debbie, looking pinched and sad, Hugh, looking bland, Kevin and Carlie, looking like the twenty-somethings they were (unsure of themselves). Except for Tina, the Mannings stood together in a bunch, while Richie, Riley, Uncle Henry, and Nadie stood in a line, space between them. Janet’s plane had been delayed for so long out of San Francisco that she had decided in the end not to come. After the chat about Arthur’s end (“peaceful”) had subsided into an uncomfortable silence, the director of the funeral home walked in and out a few times, asking if everyone was all right, and looking at his watch. Finally, Debbie stepped up to the casket, put her hands together, and said, “I asked my dad several times what he wanted for his service. He said, ‘Small, secret, out of the way.’ So—here we are.”

Just at that moment, the door opened and Richie’s mom slipped in. Debbie stopped speaking, looked at her, smiled. Andy, who was wearing a perfectly cut black wool coat with a tight waist and wide skirt that was probably as old as Richie was, glided down the aisle between the rows of empty chairs and took his hand. The service was indeed short, and maybe, in some sense, it was for Riley. There had been memorial services for the victims of all four 9/11 disasters, and the remains of many of the victims had been identified but not, so far, any of Charlie’s. (Riley had spent a week in November trying to convince him that Charlie hadn’t actually been on the plane, until Nadie finally said, “So he’s using this as an excuse to leave you?” which shut her up about that.) Richie hoped that you could add up memorial services like interest on investments, until they finally produced a payoff—comfort, acceptance, hope, especially if you were pregnant and due in May. (It was Nadie who insisted that Riley confess—was she pregnant or not? Yes, she was, and although she had thought about it, she could not bring herself to have another abortion, even in spite of the nature of the world she saw everywhere. Nadie had put her hands on Riley’s shoulders, looked her in the eye, and said, “Do you love me?” Riley nodded. Nadie said, “My mother lived in a much more horrifying world than you do, and abortion was routine there. I am a good reason not to have an abortion.” She said it lightly, and Riley said, “We’ll see about that in the future,” but took what she
said to heart. Nadie had reported this to Richie at the office Christmas party.)

Everyone said something. His mom was last. Her voice was soft and vaporous, almost like memory itself. Richie could see how, once upon a time, her voice had been taken to indicate that she was dumb or thoughtless, and even she said that she had been both, but now listening to her talk was like feeling a light breeze that made you wake up to something, maybe your own existence, for a moment. She said, “I always thought my dear friend Arthur’s great tragedy was that he knew what love was better than anyone else in the world, and he could feel it wavering and swelling or dissipating and flowing away as no one else could. It was a terrible burden for him. It was as if he had an extra sense, the way dogs hear sounds that we can’t. That’s why he did what he did, that’s why he loved Lillian as he did, that’s why he put up with me and Frank, that’s why Tim’s death and Charlie’s death tormented him so. If he took you in, then he saw something in you that was worth caring for, sort of like a vibration in your surface, and so he tried and tried, but we all slipped away from him, because that’s what life is. So many times he would say to me, Andy, I give up, but he could never give up; something or someone would pull him back. I am eighty-one now, and so Arthur would be almost eighty-two, and the last time we saw each other”—here she looked at Debbie, who was crying, but she went on anyway—“he said, ‘When do I break out of this joint?’—you know, the way he had of always making a joke—and I do believe I said, ‘When you’ve given up on us, darling,’ and we laughed.” She laid one hand on the casket and then the other one. Then she said, “I know you are not supposed to say this at a funeral, but I’m nearly as old as he was, so I am going to be a crazy old lady and say, ‘I am glad that he did.’ ” Now she looked at Debbie again, but Debbie was, in fact, nodding, just a bit, even if she didn’t realize that she was nodding.

Well, she looked sixty, that’s what Nadie and Riley agreed as they drove back to Washington after the interment. Graceful and unlined. Richie joked and said, “I’m not sure she has actually used her body much over the years. My dad might have had two hundred thousand miles on his, but Mom has been driven very little.” Uncle Henry said, “It isn’t that. It’s the Norwegian bloodlines. Survival of the most efficient.” Riley unconsciously put her hand on her belly. At the brunch,
Debbie and Tina had both made much of the fact that they were going to be great-aunts, and at such a miraculously young age; they couldn’t wait to give Riley all sorts of unnecessary advice, how exciting, many kisses, much holding of hands, many reminders to stay in touch, until Riley had begun to reciprocate. When they were back in D.C. and had dropped her off at her place, he, Nadie, and Uncle Henry watched her for a few extra moments before waving one last time and driving away. Then Nadie said, “Maybe that did the trick. She seems more like her old self. Her old self can handle anything.”

—

WHEN SHE PICKED UP
her phone and Loretta’s voice said, “I didn’t know who else to call,” Janet knew that this was literally true. There were things that no one Loretta was close to—her mother, the monsignor, either Tia or Binky—was allowed to know. But Loretta had to tell someone, so Janet was allowed to know these things. Janet did not understand why Loretta thought that she, Janet, could be trusted to keep a secret, but in fact she hadn’t told any of the secrets. In her own mind, she threatened to tell them. If, for example, Loretta said one more word about how easy the “victory in Afghanistan” had been, and how “Al Qaeda has been routed” and “I expect to see Bin Laden’s head on a pike any day now,” she, Janet, would spill all the beans about Chance’s girlfriend, who was the eighteen-year-old daughter of illegal immigrants, about how Loretta’s dad was drinking and driving (if only around the ranch), and that he would put the two Australian shepherds and the German shorthair in the bed of the truck and then take off. When he started driving erratically, the dogs would jump out and head home. Twice her mother had had to go find him, and one of those times he had driven into a ditch and fallen asleep, leaning against the wheel, his door wide open.

Janet said, “Where are you? Are you around here?”

“No, we’re home.” Then, “Well, I’m home in New York. Michael is in Vermont at some hunting club.”

“What is he hunting?” said Janet, meaning, deer, bear, elk.

Loretta said, “Democrats.”

Janet felt her hackles rise.

“Listen,” said Loretta. But she did not go on. Instead, she put the phone down and, apparently, went to close some door. Who would
be home? thought Janet. It was the middle of the semester. Loretta picked up the phone. She said, “Has Emily ever had an abortion?”

Now it was Janet who closed the door, not because Emily had ever had an abortion (that she knew of) but because Jonah and Jared were watching the Super Bowl and shouting. To Loretta, she said, “No. I don’t know. Not that I know of. I’ve never even met a boyfriend.” As if that made a difference, but in fact Janet had always, she now realized, relied on Emily’s pickiness to keep her out of trouble.

“Well, she’s pregnant.”

“Who?” said Janet. She licked her lips. This was like a test, indeed: If it was Tia, then that was a sign that plain, bookish girls could have a wild side. If it was Binky, then that was a sign that the apple had rejected the tree—Binky and Loretta were very close and looked a good deal alike. Loretta said, “Hanny—Alejandra, the girlfriend.”

“Chance’s girlfriend is pregnant?”

“I guess about eight or nine weeks.”

“They told you?”

“She called me.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Janet. “But why would you think I know anything about this? I never had an abortion. The last person I knew who had an abortion was in college. Her parents sent her to Europe somewhere. Did you ever have an abortion?” Janet said this in a challenging way, knowing that Loretta would say, of course not, but Loretta said, “I didn’t have to. I had a miscarriage.”

“No shit,” said Janet.

“It was before I met Michael, and he doesn’t know about it.” Another secret to keep: everyone had assumed Loretta was a virgin on her wedding night. In the ensuing silence, Janet thought of Fiona. It was a week or ten days now since she had at last brought up the subject of Charlie. Janet had been too out of the loop to know that Charlie had been heading to L.A. to meet Fiona when his plane crashed into the Pentagon, and then nervous about referring to it, but someone had to say something, didn’t they? When she asked, “Didn’t it just kill you?,” though, it was she herself who started crying, not Fiona. Fiona said, “I was shocked, but, Janet, when he was born, I was out cold from the drugs, and they took him away. When the pregnancy started to show, they stuck me in a convent in Normandy—you know, around St. Louis somewhere. It was full of pregnant
nuns. It wasn’t torture—they didn’t make me scrub the floors, like in Ireland—but they did make me go to Mass every day and say maybe a hundred thousand rosaries, and I was just waiting to get back to the horses. All I thought about was the five-year-old Thoroughbred I’d been jumping and how I could manage to gain as little weight as possible. I think I gained twelve pounds. I was eighteen when he was born, and I walked away without a thought. I have no kids. I know what people think that says about me, but…” Then she said, “I’ve seen one snapshot. To be honest, I can hardly even remember Tim. It was all horses, horses, horses.” Then, at the same time that Janet said, “I loved Tim,” Fiona said, “But there was no one like Tim, really.” The last thing Fiona said about Charlie was “He sounded very good-natured.” Loretta was talking again; Janet made herself listen.