Golden Age (34 page)

“He can’t marry her. He doesn’t want to marry her. I don’t think she wants to marry him, either. It was a mistake. Her parents are very traditional. She’s eighteen. They think that’s plenty old to get married. Her sister was married at seventeen, and there are a couple of adored grandchildren. I think Chance has been on the road for the last four weeks. She is terrified that her dad will find out. Or her mom. Someone.”

Janet said, “Where are they?”

“The ranch.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.” That was why she had called, Janet realized—she was the one who was supposed to come up with a plan.

Loretta said, “The hospital out there is out of the question.”

“Have you told Michael?”

Loretta said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“A, because he wouldn’t think twice about it, and, B, because he would swear to keep it a secret and then get mad about something and start shooting his mouth off.”

Everyone knew that everyone knew that women had abortions, had always had abortions. Possibly, rumor had had it, her great-aunt Eloise had had an abortion; possibly there had been abortions on the Bergstrom side, back in the ancient days of Queen Anne’s lace—her mom had always implied that if something bad could happen it would have happened to the Bergstroms.

“That,” said Loretta, “is what money is for.”

And Janet did not wonder aloud what the monsignor would think.

Finally, Janet said, “I’ll ask around. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Loretta said, “Nothing but the best, okay?”

“Of course,” said Janet.

The next day, when she called her gynecologist and asked the question, the first thing he said was “What is her medical insurance?”

“No idea,” said Janet, “but there is plenty of money.”

Dr. Fox said, “I like a place in Oakland. Very professional but very supportive. Here’s the number.” That afternoon, she called Loretta. That evening, she got an e-mail from Loretta. The plan was that Hanny would tell her parents that she’d been invited to San Francisco by Chance’s aunt, who understood that she wanted to go to a community college but hadn’t decided which one. The aunt had invited her to stay for a week, and promised to take her to visit several colleges and to show her around. She would come on the bus, which she would pay for; Loretta thought this would arouse much less suspicion than if Janet went to pick her up.

She was small and young-looking, pointed chin, luxurious hair. All she carried was a rather large tooled handbag that Janet recognized as American West and a raincoat. As she came down the steps of the bus, she wiped her eyes with a Kleenex. Her makeup was smeared. Janet plastered a big smile on her face and strode up to her. “You must be Hanny? How was your trip? Are you cold? The weather hasn’t been great. Sorry.” Why did she apologize?

It didn’t take her long to understand why she had apologized. Everything about this event felt to Janet like she was the one forcing the issue, the one requiring this “procedure.” Every story was plausible. The story about school—when Jared asked what Hanny wanted to study, she said, “Vet tech. Or I could be an accountant. I’d like that.” And who wouldn’t, if getting off the Perronis’ enormous Angelina Ranch and into the Bay Area was your choice? The story about Chance: “Oh, he’s doing great. The horses are perfect. He loves it all, everything about it. Of course, he travels most of the year.” The story about Loretta: “I can tell her anything. I think she’s so wonderful and kind. She sent me this bag I have for Christmas, and it was exactly the one I saw when we went to the mall in Salinas. I couldn’t believe it.” The story about her family: Her dad had come to California
as a child from Guadalajara, her mother with her family from Mexico City. They had met in L.A., and moved to the ranch because Chance’s grandmother loved her grandmother’s cooking. Her dad no longer worked at the ranch; he drove a truck for a waste-management company. She had a sister and two younger brothers. One of them, Alonzo, went with Chance to rodeos to help with the horses and the equipment. How much does he get paid? thought Janet, meanly.

Hanny went into her room after supper, after asking to borrow Janet’s copy of
Vogue
, which was lying on the coffee table, after both Jared and Jonah watched her go, then looked at each other and shrugged. Later, Janet heard her crying and didn’t do anything, but when she heard her crying again, just before bedtime, she knocked.

Hanny was sitting up against the headboard, in a pair of blue pajamas with a feather pattern. Janet sat on the edge of the bed. Hanny licked the tears off her lips. Janet said, “Would you tell me why you’re crying?”

Hanny nodded. “I’m really scared.”

Janet said, “Who knows?”

“Mrs. Langdon. I think my mom has an idea, but—”

“But?”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

She had washed her makeup off, and without it, she was prettier, but also younger-looking. Janet said, “Are you eighteen?”

Hanny didn’t say anything for a moment, then shook her head just a little bit.

“Does Chance know how old you are?”

“He thinks I’m eighteen.”

Janet had read about the parental-consent amendment in the papers, maybe five years before, and had been glad when the California Supreme Court struck it down, but now she wished she had some ally who actually knew this girl. She said, “Tell me the truth, Hanny. Do you want to do this?”

Hanny nodded, but she did pause before she nodded.

Now for the hard part—did she love Chance, what were her hopes?

Chance, she said, was a silly boy, not serious, an overgrown kid. When he wasn’t working with the horses or the cattle, he drank and smoked weed and did some other things that Hanny wasn’t sure of.
He was moody. Hanny didn’t trust moody men. And she didn’t trust handsome men. And she didn’t trust Anglo men, either.

Why was she crying?

Because she was embarrassed, said Hanny. Humiliated. Because she was a girl who did all of her homework every day, and she was missing school. Because she was a girl who had always kept her half of her room much neater than her sister had, and now the same thing was happening to her that had happened to her sister. Because she was a girl with a rosary in the top drawer of her chest, and maybe she could never touch it again. Because she was afraid.

Janet reassured her that a vacuum extraction was a very safe procedure, especially at eight and a half weeks.

Hanny nodded.

Janet said nothing about what she always remembered as “the flutters”—that first sense she had had of Jonah’s presence, of the love it had set off in her. She saw right then that those sensations didn’t have to arouse love: they could as easily arouse fear and rage.

That night, Janet got up about twelve-thirty, put on her robe, and went out onto the patio, wishing she was a smoker or a drinker or could go to an AA or an SLAA meeting right now, this minute, and ask her fellow contemplators what to do. She hadn’t brought this up at the last meeting because she had mistakenly assumed that, although she was involved, it wasn’t her business. On the one hand, she thought as she stared at the thin sliver of moon that was visible through the branches of the largest oak tree, thank goodness Hanny’s view of Chance coincided with Janet’s own, and her griefs were appropriate for her age. On the other hand, she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t think, she was beginning to obsess about whether she would be too tired to drive safely to Oakland. When she was finally freezing cold, she went inside and drank a shot of Jared’s Limoncello, which seemed to mildly electrocute her as it froze its way past her tongue and down her throat. But it did, if not put her to sleep, at least put her into a trance. She lay quietly next to Jared.

Who was that? Janet thought the next day when she was walking around the block in Oakland, passing the time while Hanny had her “procedure.” Some friend of hers whose husband had left her had booked a reservation to the most frightening and remote place she could think of—Port Arthur, Tasmania. It took her thirty-six hours
to get there (from Philadelphia), by train, plane, and boat, and when she did, just as she was congratulating herself on being adventurous and exotic, an American couple walked by, from Pittsburgh. They had just arrived from New Delhi and Johannesburg, and would be returning to New York through Hong Kong. The man was wearing a Pitt T-shirt and the woman white sneakers. Janet’s friend told her—oh, it was Eileen Grogan, now she lived in Montreal—that she had lost all sense of her own adventurousness instantly, and in fact felt oddly comforted. That was how Janet felt after checking Hanny into the clinic. Oh, she realized. She was not the first. Oh, she realized, it happened many times a day. Oh, she realized, life continues.

Hanny was cramping on the ride home, but she looked less pale and happier than she had getting off the bus. Janet decided to believe the evidence of her own eyes and accept that they had done the best thing.

It was Loretta who had no doubts. When Janet saw her over Easter (she and Michael came into the city and vacationed for two days at the Mark Hopkins), Loretta embraced her, kissed her, thanked her, gave her an antique platinum brooch that looked like a dragonfly and was encrusted with amethysts and tourmalines. A commemoration? Hush money? All Loretta said was “I love you. You are the greatest.”

—

RICHIE
’
S TIME
in office had begun after Cheney’s was over, so he hadn’t known him as a fellow congressman. When Bush was elected, with Cheney vice-president, even some of the Democrats thought they would be fine with him. He had a reputation of being able to listen, at least, and of not saying “Fuck you” to every Democrat every time. Michael liked Cheney because he was “uncompromising” and “had principles,” which Richie considered a truer indicator than the faulty memories of his colleagues. However, he had not expected the onslaught of arm twisting that began after they came back from recess. And he hardly had Riley to help him. She came to work with the baby (Alexis Aurora Wickett), but she was ruthless: she would work on solar and wind and electric cars and some idea about harnessing the energy of the tides, but she had no opinions about anything else, not even whether Cheney should pony up documents to the General Accounting Office about conflict of interest among members of
the late and unlamented Energy Task Force. “Enron, Enron, Enron,” echoed in everyone’s heads, but Cheney brushed it off until, with the help of Richie, Congressman Dingell, and Congressman Waxman, the head of the GAO finally sued Cheney for the materials.

But you would not have known that Richie had ever said “boo” to anyone from the White House, or so much as frowned in Cheney’s direction, because, in preparation for the vote on the Iraq Resolution, the Capitol was swarming with them—Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, all the way down to Rod Paige, who was the secretary of education. They came to his office, they knocked on his door, they took him aside in the corridors, they sat down with him in the cafeteria. They talked to Lucille, Riley, Corrie, Leslie, Rudy, Ben, Sam, Jenny, everyone. His staffers pretended that he was inalterably opposed to giving President Bush the power to go to war, when, in fact, Richie had always planned to vote yes, in spite of what his constituents might desire. He did, in fact, expect to be thrown out of his seat on November 6, and to be showing up at Michael’s office on November 7, hat in hand.

He had stayed with Ivy and Leo in Sag Harbor in August, and Ivy was furious with him. She was right about everything: there was no evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to 9/11; Saddam Hussein was contained; Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction; the Middle East was a powder keg and so fate should not be tempted; Afghanistan was the point; Osama bin Laden was the point. Richie’s view was that the Resolution did not have to lead to war—it was meant to put the ball in Saddam’s court, to challenge him to clean up his act. It was a
resolution
, not necessarily a declaration of war, even though some of his colleagues thought it was. Ivy said that Richie was deluding himself, and maybe he was, but he felt Charlie like a weight on his conscience that got heavier every day.

No remains had ever been found. He was one of six. Perhaps, Richie thought, he had taken a window seat in the front of the plane, and that was the reason—the remains had distributed themselves in an airplane shape diagonally from outside of the first-floor Defense Intelligence Agency through the Naval Intelligence Agency and into the office of the administrative assistant to the army. There was bunching, scattering, and empty space. The empty space appeared to be where the wings had been, but perhaps that was an illusion.
Charlie and the five other ghosts (as Richie thought of them) had been included in a memorial at Arlington a year after the attack. After attending the ceremony with all of his staff and Nadie and Alexis (aged four months, born May 11), Richie had felt less at peace rather than more. Since then, he’d found himself saying words like “united front,” “strong response,” “hit back,” “gathering threat,” and “wake up and smell the coffee.” That he could agree with Cheney (and disagree with Jerry Nadler) in this, and yet go after Cheney about the Energy Task Force, made him feel schizophrenic and flexible, though not both at the same time.

It didn’t help that Alexis, whom he saw every day, was emerging into that stage of infancy that was maybe the cutest and most appealing. She was smiling; she was staring at her fists; she was grasping rattles and fingers and growing out her mop of hair (brown, like Riley’s); her gaze followed Richie as he walked away from her, saying, “Are you my dad? Are you my dad?” Nadie, too, was encouraging him to be more aggressive. And Lucille. And Ben and Sam. Enough had been had by all. If Saddam was allowed to do as he wanted, well, what about Iran? Those opposed to the Resolution brought up Iran all the time. Iran was our enemy. Iran was Saddam’s enemy. Saddam had been our friend all through that war—there was a photo of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand. But Cheney and his minions made the case that if Saddam had been our “ally” (and the word always had oral quotation marks around it), and he was out of control, then it was our job to rein him in, and, in the process, show Iran an example that they would do well to heed.