Jane Smiley - Golden Age

The nurse took him away, wrapped him up, and brought him back. Dr. McLarey petted her on the arm and ran off — he had another delivery. Now the nurse brought the baby to her, saying, “Here he is, Mama. His AP score was eight at one minute and nine at five. These quick ones, when there’s no anesthetic, they are bright from the first.” She removed Jonah’s little blue hat. “Thank the Lord his head is pointy. Came out like a fish.”

But he looked perfect to Janet; he looked handsome and debonair, his head slightly tilted and his chin lifted.

She hoisted herself up — truly, she felt fine — and held out her arms possessively. The nurse handed him over, then said, “Take a good whiff. That’s how you know you’re his mother. I’ll just leave you alone before the onslaught.” The nurse sashayed out, pulling the door closed behind herself.

Maybe Janet remembered the first time she saw Emily, but maybe not — she’d been drugged or panicked or tired from a long and painful overnight labor. She did remember that Emily had been a tight little bundle, self-contained, or self-sufficient, from the beginning. But now, when she sat up in the pale, brilliant California room where they’d sequestered her and brought Jonah to her, he relaxed. What it felt like was that something that had been cold was warming and softening. The effect of this on Janet was enormous, as if she suddenly sensed love coming at her, into her. How random this was! How dependent on the chance circumstances of labor! No story that anyone had ever told her, not her mother’s stories about being put to sleep in 1950 and 1953, not her grandmother’s dimly remembered tales of parturition on the farm (always terrifying), not even Debbie’s earnest parsing of Carlie’s and Kevvie’s moment-by-moment progress, had mentioned this little thing, what the child did in your arms, next to your body. And yet, perhaps, that was the magic bean that dictated the anatomy of the beanstalk. At any rate, Janet couldn’t remember ever in her life looking into anyone’s face with the pleasure she now felt looking into Jonah’s. She cradled him in her left arm, removed his little hat once again, and laid her right palm gently on his warm forehead.

And the nurse returned and said, “Want to try nursing? He does seem a sweetheart! Have you nursed before? Let’s see if we can get some colostrum into this boy. Mmm. Delicious? Ready, babe?”

RICHIE WOULD NOT have said that he had many political opinions, but once the Dems put him in the race for Congressman Scheuer’s seat, his mouth opened, and opinions came out. They were, he discovered, quite similar to the congressman’s own opinions, and not that much different from Ivy’s. In fact, they were pretty much standard opinions for someone living in Brooklyn (fortunately, his and Ivy’s co-op was just inside the line separating his district from the next one over), but he realized as he enunciated them that he actually felt them — his voice warmed to them, shaped them, emphasized them. When he spoke, images came into his mind of Ivy and Leo and their neighborhood, and how they fit into the larger picture (or, indeed, sometimes how the larger picture fit into them), and he waxed profound. It was true, though, that he didn’t want anyone in his family — certainly not Michael, but not Ivy or his mom, either — to come to rallies. He was convinced that if he saw them in the audience he would return to the shapeless being he had been before Leo was born, the same being he was only now emerging from.

He was thirty-nine, he was tall, he was friendly from all those years of showing properties, he had a good smile. He was called “Rick.” He was “the son of war hero and self-made defense industry innovator Frank Langdon,” and in this day and age Michael wasn’t as much of a liability as he might have been — their relationship appealed to some of Richie’s voters in the Manhattan portions of the district. Richie had connections to the Italian community and through Ivy and her parents to the Jewish community. Once he started purveying these advantages, he was rather amazed at how it had all come together without his realizing it. And then there was Loretta, an avid supporter of Bush. She was a little prominent around certain parts of the city now, though still registered to vote in California; she was so eccentric that Richie knew that, if anyone brought her name up, all he had to do was smile and very slightly roll his eyes and he would get the I-have-crazy-relatives-too vote, hands down. The political landscape seemed to be changing — to be smoothing out almost everywhere. And Richie had more energy now than he had ever had before. It was in this that he knew that he really was related to that kid Charlie Wickett, who occasionally stopped by campaign headquarters on his daily run between Fort Tryon Park and Sag Harbor, or something as insanely breathtaking. Richie liked Charlie, and threatened to put him to work distributing leaflets. Charlie said that he was only allowed to distribute leaflets about the greenhouse effect, but Richie didn’t pay any attention to that — he just liked to see him. And, of course, he knew Charlie’s looks, fitness, and good-natured out-to-lunch quality would appeal to the youth vote.

Ivy was almost proud of him; she let him know this by telling him that her parents had decided that he was a “late bloomer.” They, of course, assumed that the blossom had a pinkish tinge (they continued to pay for his subscriptions to The Nation and Mother Jones and to refer to Herbert Marcuse and Raymond Williams), but Richie thought maybe those days were gone. Both sides had so sullied their reputations that what he had — a kind of get-it-done-and-shake-hands-across-the-aisle sort of openness — was the wave of the future. His Republican opponent was an obvious sacrifice, fifty-four, with the forgettable name of Kevin Moore; he had run against Congressman Scheuer twice, losing by twenty points and then twenty-four points. The Republicans had pretty much already conceded.

By early February, Richie hadn’t actually answered when people (people from the Times , the Post , the Village Voice , the Key Food weekly circular) asked him what he thought of the presidential race — Wilder, Kerrey, Clinton, Tsongas, Harkin, Brown — Virginia, Nebraska, Arkansas, Iowa, California, with a tragicomic touch of Massachusetts in Tsongas. He said nothing. They all had their advantages; the main thing was to pick the one who best combined intelligence, decisiveness, compassion, and the will to win. When Gennifer Flowers had appeared on the scene, he’d kept a straight face and said, “We should wait and see what’s really going on.” When everyone started talking about Clinton’s dodging the draft, Richie told his own story, about showing up to enlist in Boston, ending up on a bus full of antiwar activists, and having to wait and try to enlist again, but by then the war was over. This was a story that even Ivy had never heard — how Debbie had found him wandering around Boston, wondering what to do. He was so stupid that he’d thought he would sign up, they’d take him, and he wouldn’t have to come up with bus fare home, so he spent his last dollar on, not anything manly like a pack of smokes, but an ice-cream cone. Ivy thought it was cute and funny, so Richie learned how to tell it in a way that promoted an image of self-effacing patriotism combined with subsequent moral and practical growth.

Richie watched all the presidential candidates — not to see what they thought, but more to observe how they presented themselves. From Clinton, he took sheer brazen forward motion; from Harkin, the habit of smiling just before saying something; from Brown, an air of contained impatience at the bullshit presented by the other side; from Wilder, a trick of dropping into seriousness just at the right moment — the joking is over, let me lead you into a discussion of the issues. From all of them he took a willingness to speak to any size crowd. At the end of February, he was asked to a breakfast group at Lefferts Historic House. His audience numbered three persons, including the one who had arranged the breakfast; she apologized profusely for forgetting to put it in the paper. Richie spoke earnestly and at length, as if he had a full house. The only truly awkward part was the question-and-answer period — dead silence. But he kept smiling.