Jane Smiley - Golden Age

He had mentioned his anxiety to his mom, and she’d said, in her idle way, “It passes so quickly. If they live, you don’t influence them at all. But they do need to earn enough money later for the psychiatrist, or the mind reader, or whoever they choose. So be sure you save them a little something.” He laughed, but when he pressed her — when he said, “What if I drop it?”—Andy said, “Oh, goodness, my great-aunt Ingrid was so afraid of dropping Cousin Helga that she left her in her cradle day and night. And look what happened to her!”

Richie said, “What happened to her?”

“That! Well, she died in a car crash up in Wisconsin — where was it? — north of Eau Claire somewhere.”

He almost abandoned the subject right then, but he couldn’t resist. “What’s the connection?”

“She was running away from home! Couldn’t stand Aunt Ingrid, ran off with the first boy who ever liked her or showed her any affection. Brakes failed.” And Richie left it at that, thinking not of the brakes on the imagined car, but of the brakes on Helga’s impulses. It was, of course, easy for his mother to take a fatalistic view, since, as Ivy said, she and his father hadn’t done a thing right with any of the children, but never had he felt quite as clearly as he did now, at thirty-six, taking his seat on the train, that he was too young for what was to come.

—

FRANK WAS SURE he’d left the light on, because he’d fallen asleep reading, sitting with his back against the headboard, his book resting on his knees. The book was one he bought when it was on the Times best-seller list, The Great Depression of 1990 . It had been sitting beside his bed for two years now, and Frank hadn’t felt enough anxiety to read it, but here it was, July, and 1990 only six months off. He picked up a few things leafing through it before he dozed: that the fall of the Soviet Union was inevitable (that one looked true) and that if 1 percent of the U.S. population controlled more than 25 percent of the wealth, a depression would be on the way. Then Frank had gotten to thinking about Black Monday, when, briefly, his own son Michael (according to Michael) had been worth more than Frank, and then his head had fallen back. But now the room was dark; he was lying down, emerging from a dream about people at a party at what looked like Bergdorf’s staring at him, and he opened his eyes to see a wavering figure in the corner of the room, white. He didn’t gasp or anything — he retained the sense he’d had in the dream that if he was patient every strange thing would resolve itself. Then the figure approached, and it was Andy, in the antique silk slip she used as a nightgown, her white hair completing the ghostly impression. He woke up, and she sat on the bed. She hadn’t been in his room for years except to clean it when he wasn’t home. He thought maybe she was drunk, but she hadn’t had a drink now in a decade, and then he thought he should be offended that she hadn’t knocked, but he wasn’t. She put her fingertips on his left temple and ran them under the wisps of hair that remained there.

The room was light, and the moon out his window looked like a pale, startled face, glancing downward. He could see Andy perfectly. She said nothing; Frank felt himself unable to speak. He could hear her breathe, in, out, not anxious or quick, and then he could feel his own breaths synchronize with hers. He closed his eyes. Some time passed, and then he felt the covers, which were light because it was summer, rise. He moved over toward the center of the bed, only out of curiosity (he told himself). But when she slipped in beside him, the fifty- or sixty-year-old silk of her gown cool and smooth against his skin, it stunned him how his body curved to conform to hers, and how familiar her body still was, supple, thin. The texture of her skin, too, was familiar. Her arm went across his chest, and he lay still, voluntarily pinned. How did he feel to her? Hairy and paunchy, for sure. She gave off a deep sigh, more like an emanation than a breath.

Frank did not usually sleep on his back, but pretty soon he was sleeping, or something — no dreams, and still a sense that he was in his own room, but the figures from the Bergdorf’s party reappeared, staring and smiling. Then nothing. Then his eyes opened, and he was looking upward at the beams above his bed, thinking he was strapped to a gurney. Andy’s voice said, “What in the world!” and the bed dipped as she sat up. Frank looked at her, and then sat up himself.

Andy said, “What am I doing here?” She pushed her hair out of her face with both hands, a gesture he remembered from years ago; then she lifted both her shoulders and rolled them; then she opened her mouth as wide as it would go and cracked her jaw. Even when they’d shared a bed, he hadn’t seen her wake up since her hair was blond — she always got up before he did. Frank said, “You tell me.” Then, “I thought maybe you were making a play for me.”

She smiled. She was kind. She said, “Only in my dreams, I guess.”

“Well, you turned out my light, put my book on the shelf, sat on my bed, and stroked my forehead. I woke up. I saw you.”

“I must have been sleepwalking. Were my eyes open?”

Frank thought for a moment, and said, “I didn’t notice. But I think sleepwalkers’ eyes are open. There was a sleepwalker in our barracks at Fort Leonard Wood. We would wake up and watch him, and I remember everyone whispering that his eyes were open, and then one of the guys stepped in front of him and waved his hand, but he didn’t react.”

“What did he do?”

“Twice he went over and sat in a corner of the barracks, curled up in a ball. That’s all I remember.”

He put the tip of his finger on the hem of her silk gown. The fabric was so fine that some roughness on his fingertip caught and released. Then he sat forward and drew her to him. He was so old, he thought, and then he regretted that thought, because, as always, it was about himself. To muffle it, he said, “I’m glad you came, even if you didn’t want to.”

She said, “Darling, I must have wanted to.” And her good-humored, half-distracted tone struck him as charming rather than as empty-headed. But he didn’t dare kiss her. He was so used to demeaning her, both in his mind and to others, that he was almost afraid that she would turn out not to be the Andy he thought he knew, that he’d been married to for forty years. If she was not herself, he thought, then who was he?

—

HENRY WONDERED if having his sister stay with him all these weeks was what marriage might have been like. Over the summer, Claire had gotten herself hired at Marshall Field’s, in the main office, as a buyer of household goods. Supposedly, she was looking for an apartment downtown somewhere, but she’d been staying in Henry’s place now since the first of August. Henry, away much of the summer, over in England and France, continuing his lackadaisical but alluring pursuit of the inner essence of Gerald of Wales, had sent her a key. She’d made herself right at home for two and a half weeks; when he got back, many things were out of place, and she had concocted a little framed display box, into which she had put a picture of the two of them from sometime during the war (he looked ten and she looked three), along with her lace handkerchief from the 1830s (Henry couldn’t remember which virginal great-aunt had made it) and his gold dollar. And then she had placed this display box on the mantel, smack in the middle, not an interesting spot at all. But in the end, he didn’t move it, nor did he remove his mother’s pink-and-green afghan from the back of the couch. And he ate what she cooked, including the lamb shanks and the shepherd’s pie made with ground beef. They watched the nightly news! Henry hadn’t watched the nightly news, or even had the sound of conversation in his place, for years, but now they deplored Hurricane Hugo and remembered tornado near-misses and told each other tales about mythic snowfalls. By mutual agreement, there was nothing in their present world west of DeKalb; each of the three times he had referred to Des Moines, she had shaken her head and said, “Where in the world?” in an exact imitation of their mother’s most skeptical voice. Claire maintained that, because she had spent her entire marriage listening to Dr. Paul (this is what she called her ex-husband) analyzing his childhood — painful but worth it in the end because of the result, himself — and also because she was fifty years old now, her uprooting had to be thorough and ruthless. She was in Chicago, and she only looked east. When she took him with her to check apartments, it was Henry who was dissatisfied and hard to please.