Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“But,” said Frank, “what would they tell each other? My parents were from the same town — different churches, but they had lived the same lives. What would they bring to a conversation? Nothing exotic, you can be sure.”

“My parents and their relatives talked in code. Someone would nod and say, ‘Ah, you know what happened to Inga!’ And then everyone else would nod, and Sven or I would ask, ‘Mama, what happened to Inga?’ and, more often than not, she would say, ‘You don’t want to know.’ It wasn’t until we were much older — high school, really — that we began to put all the parts together.”

“Or they would talk German,” said Frank. “  ‘Ja!’ and then blah blah blah, so fast that we could only pick out a word here and there. I would ask Eloise, and she would tell me, but I got to wondering after a while if she wasn’t making things up just to frighten me.”

“I was very fond of your aunt Eloise,” said Andy.

“I went through a period where I agreed with Eloise’s analysis,” said Frank. Andy thought he was joking, but then he said, “I mean, I was fifteen. I was very impressed by Julius. He was a communist. He had that accent that said, ‘I know things you will never even think of.’ It’s so ghostly now.”

“What?” said Andy.

“Soviet immortality.”

Their conversations made Andy think of things she hadn’t thought of in years — her time in Kansas City, for example. Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she’d ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn’t very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). Her boss at Halls had seemed imposing, too, all of thirty-one, possessed of his own apartment just north of the plaza, on the third floor! He was a sharp dresser, talked about jazz, and implied that he was close personal friends with Count Basie and Charlie Parker. What was his name? She thought for a morning, and over her tomato soup remembered — Martin Sock or Scott. She had been shy, not really carrying a torch for Frank, more like frozen up. She read a lot; that was where she learned all those stories that she’d told her various psychiatrists in the early years of their marriage, tales from a book of saga translations, and Giants in the Earth, The Emigrants, Kristin Lavransdatter , anything cruel and resonant in her mind with the Decorah/Albert Lea axis. But Martin took her out — sometimes to a movie, once to a club, once to dinner — and one of those times, not the last one, he took her to his apartment, into the bedroom, where he started fondling her. Fondling was not easy, given her armor of girdle and hosiery and bra and petticoat, not to mention the tight belt around her waist and the long zipper down her side and the hooks and their eyes. But he had been patient, and pretty soon she was half dressed on the bed with him, him still in his trousers and socks and neatly pressed shirt, and somehow he had his knee between her legs and he was pressing her and rubbing her, and at the same time kissing her, and something happened, there seemed to be an explosion where his leg was that seemed to burn through her body, making her shake and tremble and stiffen and cry out so that he smothered her face against his side. And then they were both so embarrassed that she jumped off the bed and put her clothes back on as best she could. She didn’t know what had happened to her, and he wasn’t saying. After she got back together with Frank, in preparation for their marriage, she found a book in a used-book store in Chicago by a woman named Ida Craddock, called Right Marital Living . She’d been amazed to discover that what had happened to her was fairly routine. She knew that if she told this to Frank, while lying softly in his arms in the dark in their very own bed in the house they had owned now for thirty-three years, he would be amused and affectionate and see it as an exchange for his tale of Corsica, but she couldn’t do it. She did wonder what had happened to Martin Sock. He would be almost eighty now.

—

GREECE WAS a place that people their age, Andy thought, could never understand why they had waited so long to get to. Certainly, standing on the uneven paving in front of the Parthenon, looking outward to the city beyond, Andy felt herself to have finally arrived at the apex of something, but not something so crass as civilization. Frank was good — he had been reading all summer. He supplied her with all sorts of information and helped her not to stumble, but he didn’t care if she asked questions (she didn’t), and he didn’t imply that if she’d paid more attention in school she would know who Socrates and Plato were. At Mycenae (but they pronounced it “Mikinna”), he stood with her at the gate into the city, the Lion Gate, where, after gazing at the carving of the two headless lions standing on their hind legs, facing a column, they marveled for quite a long time at the grooves in the paving, where there had been a rectangular stone in the portal, as wide as the space between the wheels of a chariot, to help the charioteers orient their vehicles so that they could get safely through the gate. These three-thousand-year-old ruts were the ghosts of uncountable momentary thoughts on the part of uncountable lost charioteers. As they walked up the hill from there, Frank told her a little about the Trojan War, the Achaeans (the Myceneans) and their friends and enemies. They followed a narrowing passageway and peered into one of the beehive tombs. The orange color of the local soil made the landscape seem especially abandoned. Mikinna, Andy thought, was much more haunting than the Acropolis, not white but brownish gold, as if the light of 1600 B.C. were cooler and duskier than that of 500 B.C. Olympia she found flat, busy, and boring, as if the labor of the gods had been, not great doings, but gossip, bookkeeping, and shipments here and there of olive oil and flax. Andy strolled along, looking at the ruins and the sky, taking in the fragrance of the vegetation. Although it was impossible to stay in Greece forever, she had the feeling that you could remain, lifetime after lifetime, floating here and there very quietly, and with plenty of company. She’d never felt this way about New Jersey or Iowa.

It was the assistant cook on the Flyboy , the yacht where they stayed for three nights, who said that, after they looked at Knossos and Agia Triada, they should not miss Delphi. It was out of the way, and Frank had planned to skip it, but since Andy had expressed no desires at all so far, he was eager to do whatever she so much as mentioned.

Almost October now. They got to Itea late in the afternoon, nearly dark, and decided to take a room in a regular hotel there, rather than continue up to Delphi. They ate in the dining room, spanakopita and roast lamb. Frank did an unusual thing — he took a glass of ouzo, and ordered Andy one, too. They sipped quietly, and she enjoyed the sharp anise flavor, but not, as it turned out, the tingle of the alcohol. Their two little glasses, half full, sat side by side on the table, and Frank said, “I miss the kids.”

He said this naturally, as if he had said it before, but he never had, at least to her. Andy almost said, “What kids?” but then she said, “Do you mean ‘miss,’ or ‘missed’?”

Frank looked at her, and then at the two little glasses. He said, “What’s the difference?”

There was a long silence, not uncongenial. If there was anything Andy knew, it was not to push something. Finally, Frank said, “I know that was a nightmare with Arthur, but I enjoyed getting to know—”

“Charlie.”

“He’s a little like Richie.”