Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Sometime in the middle of the night, she awoke when a nurse was changing her bag. The room seemed hot, and her sheet felt sweaty, and in her half-stupor, she was convinced that they had tied her wrists and ankles to the corners of the bed, that she had been screaming, but she had no memory of any dreams at all. Something came out of her mouth, and the nurse said, “Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up! May I get you some water, or anything? I can help you to the bathroom.”

Janet said, “No, thank you,” and her hands came up and touched the base of her neck, not tied to the bed at all. That was the worst moment, at least in her opinion.

But the doctor’s opinion was different. She might have been lying there, thinking of her old house, trying to calculate exactly how far it was from this bed, or wondering what restaurants were still at the Stanford Shopping Center — was that where she had eaten for the first time at the California Pizza Kitchen — but the doctor said that she had skated on the edge of a real crisis, had she heard of MRSA?

Janet did not say, “Of course”; she only nodded.

Well, she didn’t have that, but he had thought she might. It took forty-eight hours to grow out the pathogen, but after thirty-six, she did seem to be responding to treatment. And now look at her: her leg was still red, but almost back to normal. Get up and walk around a bit, let’s see how your foot feels. Not bad. Thank your immune system; it really drove him bananas the way everyone had turned antibiotics into candy over the last fifty years; he was a vegetarian himself, but what good did it do you? The damage was done. He’d lost a fourteen-year-old boy ten days before, wrestler on the team up in Belmont, lesion on his forearm.

Janet kept quiet. She did not say, “I wouldn’t have minded going instead of him.” It would not have been a lie.

But she was glad when Mary picked her up and drove her home, when Antaeus jumped into her lap and licked her face, when Emily called and asked her why her phone was dead. Four days, not such a long time.

—

LATE IN AUGUST, Jesse got a letter that said that his mortgage had been sold to a company based in Delaware called Piddinghoe Investments. He was given instructions about how to go online and order a payment booklet for his payments. His payments would now be due monthly, not, as before, when the harvest was in and sold. He told Jen that had its benefits; he wasn’t going to complain about that. His official level of debt was $356,893—not much, he privately thought, compared with the value of the farm. The letter actually left him feeling not bad. At 5 percent interest, his monthly payment wasn’t even fifteen hundred. He thought that would be no problem; the crop was poor, but 125 bushels an acre would be enough to get them through the year, and the beans, at least, were better off than the corn. He followed instructions, sent off for his booklet, went about everything with his usual method. He also called Northern Iowa Bank and asked to speak to Ralph Coester. Ralph had left, he was told. Taken a job in Chicago. Ted Kugelhaupt was the loan officer now. Jesse had never met Ted Kugelhaupt, or even heard of him. He said he would get back to them. On August 28, he mailed in his payment and forgot about it.

The first foreclosure notice came in mid-November, a week after he sent in his third payment, a week after he sold his crop, a week after he breathed a sigh of relief because the corn yield was 135 bushels even though the weeds had been a nightmare and an eyesore, causing the harvest to last an extra two weeks, a week after the disastrous presidential election (but he was too distracted to care about that). What he would do in the spring he had no idea, since there was no real replacement for glyphosate, and the Monsanto reps were still scarce on the ground. But that was months away. He went to the Piddinghoe Investments Web site and looked through all the options. There was one, “Have a Problem? Contact a representative,” that gave a phone number (877 877-6543), a chat option, and an e-mail option. He tried the phone number three times and never got through to a “banker.” He tried the chat option, and wrote back and forth for a while with “Kathy,” who said that she would look into the issue and get back to him within twenty-four hours. He e-mailed the manager, the repayments department, and the customer representative. Nothing. Finally, he drove into Usherton and spoke to Ted Kugelhaupt, a nondescript thirty-year-old who sucked his lips and nodded his head the whole time Jesse was explaining his problem, then said that the bundle had been sold, two bundles had been sold, that was all he knew about it, there was no recourse through this bank. And he knew nothing about Piddinghoe Investments — had Mr. Langdon sent his checks by registered mail, and had the checks cleared? Yes, they had. Must be a paperwork problem, then, said Ted. He should try that angle. Otherwise, Ted — suck, suck, nod, nod — couldn’t help him. And he didn’t know where Ralph Coester was. Maybe Cleveland? He had heard something about Cleveland. When Jesse got home, he realized that since Northern Iowa Bank had sold the bundles of mortgages the paperwork problem was theirs, but when he tried to call Ted Kugelhaupt back, Ted could not be reached.

It was rather like the week in Vancouver followed by his mother’s death — it took Jesse and Jen a very long time to assimilate what was happening, ten days for them to go from “Maybe we should call a lawyer,” to calling the lawyer, then another five days to get an appointment. The lawyer had another case with stacks of discovery to be done. Better for Jesse to sort through the paperwork that he had in his files, and refrain from paying the December payment, sending along by certified mail a notice seeking all paperwork appertaining to the mortgage. After that, silence. Jen said, “Well, no news is good news.”

They went to D.C. for Christmas. The day they left, Jesse got a letter stating that their “complaint(s) was being looked into. We request your patience.” Guthrie couldn’t go with them because the mall’s busiest season was Christmas, but he promised to come on the 26th. Perky said he would be there, but then his leave was canceled because of the new crisis in Ukraine. They all knew that this might be Uncle Henry’s last Christmas. It turned out that he had had what he called “a mini — heart attack” right around his birthday in October, and only Riley knew about it; even Richie didn’t hear about it until he and Jessica went there for Thanksgiving. Henry wrote everyone a letter saying that he was fine and not to worry; then Richie wrote everyone a letter saying that Henry was not fine, and Christmas in D.C. was the best option. What with deploring Lois’s “accident,” meeting Ezra for the first time, making their way around D.C. in the ice and snow, and trying not to seem alarmed about Uncle Henry, who smiled a lot but never got out of his chair, there were enough spurs for general anxiety. It was difficult enough to relate the tale of Vancouver two times to many oohs and ahs and jeezes: the foreclosure problem seemed to have subsided enough to go unmentioned. The interesting thing was the pile of presents from Andy — they dwarfed the tree. Among them were a new MacBook for Felicity, a new piano for Alexis, a beautiful brown shearling coat for himself, and the most stylish black Gucci boots for Jen that he had ever seen. Felicity allowed as how Andy had requested sizes, and Felicity of course knew them. Felicity said, “She buys all sorts of presents, but she told me the most expensive ones go to the youngest recipients.” That, Jesse thought, explained the piano, which was a baby grand, a Yamaha.

After Christmas, they were stuck in D.C. for an extra two days because of ice, snow, and hail at both O’Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson.