Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“Which area?” said Richie.

“Delaware, almost to M Street, sir. Southwest?”

It seemed to Richie that he didn’t even know where that was.

After they called his mom and Janet to give them the news, and Jessica left for work, he went out and looked at his car, a nondescript silver Toyota. No dents, no scrapes, no hairs caught in the grille. At dinner, he said to Jessica, “I have been tired all day. I feel like I was up a lot last night.”

She said, “You know me, I sleep through everything, but I have this vague memory of you going to the bathroom. You groaned.”

He didn’t ask anything further.

Surely, Richie thought, this is all a hallucination, not something he remembered but something he had fantasized about for so long that it had now sprung into his head, a movie he’d finally bought the ticket to. He did not go to the morgue, and when the funeral director suggested a closed coffin, he agreed at once.

Janet called Chance and Loretta; Loretta called Binky and Tia. Claire said that she would come to the funeral, but Jesse and Jen didn’t think they could afford it — they did know about Piddinghoe Investments, because Felicity had told them. Loretta came; she was obese now, looked terrible in an autocratic way. Chance and Emily went to the Hut and got Andy. The obituary included the part about Michael being the victim of a hit-and-run, that the case remained open, but left out Piddinghoe Investments, the offshored millions, everything Richie had never told anyone about Michael’s small cruelties and invisible (to others) sneers. No one invited Lynne, and it turned out that, according to Loretta, she and Michael were not divorced, but Richie wasn’t sure exactly how Loretta meant the word “not.” Claire came — the last original Langdon. She gave Richie a hug and said that she couldn’t imagine what he must be feeling. She was right: she couldn’t. He would not say that he grieved, he would not say that he didn’t grieve. He thought maybe, if you had spent your entire life suffering from serious pains in your leg, and then that limb was amputated, those particular pains were gone, but other pains replaced them — that was the best way to describe how he was feeling. Jessica knew he was freed, but he said nothing to her about the regret, fear, anxiety, the sense of being lopsided and perhaps fatally out of balance. He looked around the service and saw tears — Tia and Binky for sure, Jessica because she was a kind person, but also Janet? Chance maintained his stoicism, Emily stuck close to Chance and squeezed his hand every so often, Leo explained the concept of death to Jack, and Britt walked around the room and out into the corridor hand in hand with Mona, just to keep her quiet. Felicity stayed away, Guthrie had to work, and Perky was in Moscow. After chatting with his mom and giving her a hug, Claire came back and stood next to Richie, put her arm around his waist, and leaned against him just a little bit. She said, “When you get to be my age, the deaths get quicker. It’s making me kind of crazy. Not only Carl and Lois and Henry, and now Michael, but three friends of mine in Chicago.” Richie said, “Felicity would say, Get used to it,” and he spoke in such a cold voice that Claire turned and stared at him. Then she said, “Well, I do know what you mean,” and moved away.

He did not dare spend any time with his mom. He felt like she would know the answer to his conundrum, and she would tell it to him in a single enigmatic phrase. He preferred to wait for the police to come up with something.

Loretta had the body shipped to Savannah, where she interred it in a family plot she had purchased. Richie thought that she had caged Michael at last, and no doubt the tombstone would read, “Loving husband of.”

—

CLAIRE WOULD HAVE put on a better funeral — more to eat, because you had to give the mourners plenty of time to get comfortable with one another. And you had to lay the food out in stages, so that they would eat plenty and feel their endorphins kick in. Strawberries dipped in dark chocolate, baguettes and an array of cheeses, ambrosia — her mother’s old standby (with sliced oranges, coconut, and chunks of banana) — small squares of bacon-Gruyère quiche, champagne. You had to bring it out and offer it around with a sympathetic look on your face, and people would take it and feel better, and then they would start to talk more openly, and stories would come out about the person who had died, and all of those stories would be funny or affectionate, and by the time the food was gone, everyone would have a positive feeling about the corpse. But Richie was in shock, and Jessica, lovely woman that she was, was never offended by reality, and so never thought of changing reality for the better. As they were driving back to the hotel from the funeral, Janet said, “That gave me the creeps.”

Claire said, “Worst I’ve ever seen. Chicago gangsters are buried with more affection.”

“Michael aroused passion, I suppose, but I doubt if he ever aroused affection, or even wanted to.”

“But,” said Claire, “you are supposed to paper that over at a funeral, or the death forever afterward seems to be roiling in anger and resentment.”

Janet said, “A fitting tribute, then.”

She stopped at a red light, and they exchanged a glance. Claire said, “So why did you cry at the service?”

“He was a cute baby. I was only three, but I remember that. I think I was crying for all the cute babies.”

Claire reached over and squeezed her niece affectionately on the knee. They were practically the same age now, weren’t they? The eleven years that separated them had dwindled to almost nothing.

Claire was dreaming that their hotel was attached to a hospital, and that she had gone into one of the hospital rooms and gotten into bed with a gray cat. She was snuggling up to him and thinking that the hospital bed was much more comfortable than the hotel bed when Janet woke her up, saying, “Do you think that we’ve lived through a golden age?”

Claire’s eyes opened on the clock face, which read “10:34”—she had been asleep for maybe seven minutes. She took a deep breath, then said, “Why would we think that? No one thinks that.” What she really thought was, Why would you think that, with everything that you’ve been through? She turned on her side. Janet’s gray bob was pale in the light from the hotel courtyard. Janet said, “Believe me, I never would have — my conviction that we as a species have fucked every single thing up is the most lasting thing about me. But I was looking at my mom open her handbag for a Kleenex, and that handbag is truly vintage—”

“Green vinyl,” said Claire. “I saw that.”

They both laughed.

“Anyway, I remembered telling her that I wished I had been born in 1787 and died in 1860, because there weren’t any wars then, so I must have been in sixth or seventh grade, because that was when we first studied American history.”

“Nineteen sixty?”

“Sometime around the U-2 incident. Francis Gary Powers shot down spying in the USSR. I wonder what ever happened to him. Jeez. It was like I learned what death was and that it was imminent at the very same moment. But it never happened. We’re still alive.”

“I know what happened to him,” said Claire. “After they traded him back from Russia, he got a job for some TV station, and he was doing fire recon in California when his copter crashed. I don’t think it’s been a golden age.”

“How long have I been convinced this country is doomed? I always thought it would be fossil fuels, corruption, guns, and climate change, Frank Langdon’s legacies. I thought racism was like a giant tapeworm, horrible and disgusting, that we just had to live with.”