Jane Smiley - Golden Age

And then the dinner went off without a problem. Richie gagged down the seitan, not because it tasted bad, but because he couldn’t stop thinking about what it was, and Ezra and Felicity hit it off. Ezra was not smooth and eloquent, but Felicity was — Ezra looked at her, listened to her, and lost every iota of self-consciousness. When they were doing the dishes afterward, Jessica said, with a straight face, “She is a Scorpio, and he’s a Cancer. That’s good, as long as she accepts being the boss.”

Richie said, “I’m sure she accepts being the boss. Do you accept being the boss?”

She said, “Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them.”

It was only later, after Jessica had gone to sleep, that Richie thought about Felicity’s mentioning that Michael had appeared at the farm, allegedly visiting. Her dad and mom had told her about it — Jesse over the phone, Jen by e-mail. Her dad said that Michael had called him from Usherton, said he was passing through. He thought he would come by to say hello, if they didn’t mind — it had been so long. Jesse had some free time, since the corn was in and the beans couldn’t go in because of a week of steady thunderstorms after corn planting, so Michael came by, wearing his Bogs and his yellow slicker, and they tramped here and there. Jesse thought Michael looked older than he was; must be the worries. It was mildly strange, but then Michael went on to Minneapolis, where he was meeting someone. Jen had written that he seemed friendly, had asked, not about the big house, the nice house, but about the Maze — he had run his fingers over those handmade bricks. After Jesse went back to work, Jen took Michael up there and waited while he looked around — its rooms so small, but charming in its way. Jesse and Jen were not suspicious — who in the world would not want to stop by the farm if he or she was in the neighborhood? — but Richie knew by the way that Felicity had glanced at him that she was suspicious, and wondered if he was, too. He was, of course, but he had said only, “I would like to see the farm. Jessica, we should take a little road trip — visit your mom and see some of the country. Ezra tells me it’s going to be a desert in a year or two, so now’s the time.”

“Not a year or two,” said Ezra.

Then he and Felicity talked about how the frackers in California were using and contaminating two million gallons of water a day. And all of that fracking was up in the air now, anyway, with the oil glut. Ezra didn’t have much hope. Yes, the overextended drillers might bail on the fracking, but they would leave an epic mess behind them for someone else to clean up — or not. Ezra loved Pennsylvania, had hated to see it sacrificed, thought maybe the lesson had to be learned, but what the lesson was, was constantly changing. After that, they disagreed about water restrictions in California, and Felicity said that it was a mistake to focus on almonds.

Under the table, Jessica tapped Richie’s knee with her fingertips. After the two young persons left, she threw out the remaining seitan Bolognese and they dove into some leftover short ribs.

Before Felicity went back to Boston, she ate Indian food with Ezra at Rasika.

The main thing Richie thought about Michael’s visiting the farm was, So that’s where he’s been. He certainly hadn’t been around D.C. much, though when he was in the area he stopped by, brought food, helped with the dishes. Sometimes Richie drove past the Shoebox; the lights were on, but that could easily be a timer.

—

IN THE YEAR since the first deposit, many more had come into Andy’s account, all the same amount, $9,999. As far as she could tell by lurking about the Internet, transfers of $10,000 were what banks were required to report. She said nothing to anyone, but she did remove her own funds from that account and put them, about $134,000 altogether, into two other banks, ones that she told no one about and did no business with on the Internet; to make a deposit or withdrawal, she went there in person (she had, in fact, passed her driving test over the summer with an excellent score — the man who tested her guessed she was eighty). Where the leak was, she had no idea — had he hacked her computer somehow? But she knew that, as the money was flowing in, so it would flow out, $460,000 minus $46. Sometime around Christmas, she’d set about spending it, and she was still spending it—$10,000 to the local high school’s band program, which was about to be cut, according to the weekly paper; another $10,000 to the middle school for art-program supplies. She had bought Jonah a used Honda Civic, paid for Janet to repair her roof when a storm damaged it, bought Emily a Sleep Number bed, a new stove, and a French saddle. She didn’t dare buy Richie anything, but she bought Jessica a painting they saw one day at a gallery, a watercolor of the Rocky Mountains, $9,000, which she told Jessica was $900. Jessica seemed to believe her. She was a little foggy on IRS gift-tax rates, but she was sure $10,000 was okay. She donated $10,000 apiece to the Sierra Club, the Save the Children Foundation, The Nation Foundation, the Smithsonian, and Direct Relief. She donated $15,000 to the Salvation Army and $5,000 to her local public library. At $100,000, she quailed for a few weeks — he was certain to find out — but when Richie and Michael’s birthday came round, she’d called Michael on his cell. He asked how she was, whether she needed anything, had the shipment of fruit arrived, it was the only valentine he could think to give her. After talking to him, she knew that he would never say anything, no matter how much money disappeared, and he apparently wasn’t keeping track — the deposits flowed in regularly, unaffected by what was paid out. Save the Whales. The Nature Conservancy. The Audubon Society (spring put her in an environmentalist mood). If he ever challenged her, she thought, she would express complete surprise — was he not paying her back for the money he stole from her, was this not her income? The $460,000 was about 3 percent of what he had taken. And she did declare it, and she did pay her income tax.

In the meantime, she sold a few more items: the pearl necklace she’d thought she lost that miraculously turned up went for twenty-three thousand. The pearls were from the west coast of Australia, old ones, and large. The man who bought it confessed after he paid that he had gotten it much more cheaply than he expected to. She had responded, “I’m 95. Value is relative.” The world seemed to be awash in money again. Andy had given up trying to understand it.

Nor did she understand how she had gotten so old — of course, there was that story about Cousin Gerta, who died at sixty-five of breast cancer though her mother lived to be 104. Once, when Aunt Sigrid was ninety-nine (or so Andy’s mother had always said), Gerta came home and couldn’t find her anywhere, but eventually she heard noises from the attic — her mother was up there with a flashlight, looking for a frock she’d bought in 1885, so much fabric in the skirt, she hated to see it go to waste; she was going to piece it out for a new dressing gown. The attic stairs were lethally steep, but Aunt Sigrid wasn’t fazed. Andy’s mother had lived to be eighty; her father, seventy-three; Sven had died young, but he smoked a pipe. The history of the Bergstroms and the Kristjansons was littered with accidents, so Aunt Sigrid might actually have been the norm, not an outlier.

What Aunt Sigrid must have experienced, as Andy did, was the acceleration of the passage of time. She might have been bored, and not only with the news, where the ever-more-childlike newscasters put forth ever-more-childlike theories about passing events. She watched movies, but every announcer, every filmmaker, every actress, every actor she watched on TCM eventually became younger than she was by a generation or more; every writer of every great novel died before he or she learned what he or she had set out to learn. She tried Dombey and Son , she tried In Search of Lost Time , she tried Clarissa , she tried Ulysses , which was not as long but much more difficult. As she read these (and she read every word), even the most carefully observed passions and problems seemed to Andy to be those of youth and only fleetingly important. But at least they were there to read; she was endlessly grateful that she had been so stupid for so long, saved some pleasures for these days she had never expected to experience.