Jane Smiley - Golden Age

No, thought Andy.

“Like Richie might have been,” he added.

Without us, thought Andy.

“Without Michael,” said Frank.

In the morning, they found their car and driver. The day was blustery and the sky gray. The landscape was steeper and more intimidating than they had seen before, and it put Andy in a dark mood — not sour, not irritable, but strangely Nordic (and that thought made her laugh). There were switchbacks and precipices, and it took half an hour to get to the town, which, at least today, did not seem like a sunny Mediterranean Greek town, even though the buildings were pleasantly white with tile roofs. Once at the shrine, they got out, left the driver, and started walking.

The Temple was built on a slope facing down a valley that ran between steep, dark, upthrusting mountains. A brochure they’d gotten said that the Greeks believed this was the navel of the world, and Andy could understand that. She did have the sense that everything else she had ever seen was peripheral to this spot, these ruins, this view. Here, the brochure said, the Earth goddess, Gaia, lived. As so often happens, a self-confident newcomer, a muscular, aspiring young man, made his way straight to this spot, and he killed the son of the goddess, possibly out of revenge, possibly just to demonstrate that a new world had come to pass. His name was Apollo, but it could have been anything, and once he had done the deed, he laid claim to the most central and the most intimidating location, the one most difficult to get to, the one with the greatest view. He then installed an old woman, not so different from Andy herself. The woman sat on her three-legged stool, inhaled the gases, and said her piece, and her words were taken as prophecy. For her efforts, she got to remain in this spot, to be cared for, to forget all the rest of the world. She also, Andy thought, came to perceive herself, every day, as smaller and smaller, a black hole at the center of the universe, a dot in time where time stood still.

They walked around the theater and the stadium and looked through the museum. She touched blocks of stone and rough standing columns with her finger and appreciated that the Greeks allowed weeds and wildflowers to grow in every crevice, to give life to every vista. She stood quietly and felt the breeze, took off her sweater and let the particular Delphic sunlight brighten her arms. She thought of everyone in order — her father and mother and Sven (“Hyperboreans,” according to Frank’s book), then Frank, Joe, Lillian, Henry, Claire, Janet, Richie, Michael, Jared, Ivy, Loretta, Emily and Jonah, Leo, Chance, Tia, and Binky. She laid each thought of them upon the stones of the spot where the oracle was said to have been. She knew that the oracle had not prophesied only good fortune: many supplicants had been told of doom and despair, and as she breathed each name, Andy accepted that. But she suspected that the seer, in speaking, had always prophesied something meaningful — something that struck those who sought her, that stayed with them, that gave them, if not hope, then corporeality, the extra intensity of watching their own feet stepping away from the oracle, their own eyes gazing across the stadium, their own hands reaching up to push back their hair, which was tangling in the wind. Death might be worth that. Frank came up behind her and put his arm around her waist.

THE FIRST TIME Ivy and Loretta had stopped speaking was the year before, when Ivy, Richie, and Leo were at Michael and Loretta’s place. The food was on their plates, Ivy was helping Leo with his fork, Chance was kicking Richie under the table (thinking, Richie knew, that he was kicking Tia), and Loretta said, with just a twitch of the eyebrows in Richie’s direction, “Can you believe that they kept the planes circling over LAX so that Bill Clinton could have a Beverly Hills haircut?” She tossed her head back and laughed what Richie considered a fake laugh, and Michael said, “He is ruthless. He’ll do anything.”

Ivy said, “No, I don’t believe it,” and there was nothing in her voice — she was preoccupied with Leo for the moment.

What she didn’t know was that Loretta had already taken Richie aside about “the health-care mess” in the kitchen, when all he was doing was having a look at the pork tenderloin she was making, and informed him that she considered his work on health care to be a bona-fide un-American activity. In his best I-am-your-congressman-and-am-happy-to-listen-to-your-views, he had said, “Why is that, Loretta?”

“If I want to move to Europe and wait in line to have my heart attack attended to, I will, but right now, right here, I want actual good health care.”

“Well, you can afford it,” said Richie.

“And why is that?” said Loretta.

And Richie did not say, Because your great-grandfather showed up in the right place and the right time and bought good land, well-located land, cheap from the Mexicans, who, by the way, had to vacate. He said, “I don’t know.” Just so he might hear what she had to say.

“Because Michael is an innovator and a thinker. He’s made his way by being smart and ahead of the game. Who realized that stocks were finished and bonds were the way to go? Michael. Who now has his own trading operation when no one had the balls to try it before? Michael.”

Richie had known that Michael was casting about for something riskier to do, but he hadn’t known the result. He filed away this bit of information, but he said, “So everyone else should suffer and die?”

“Don’t be so aggressive,” said Loretta, stirring the polenta. “It’s not becoming.”

And Richie backed down, the way Congressman Scheuer advised him to do, saying, “Now, this is how you do it: you listen, you nod, you maintain your focus, and you recognize that many of your colleagues are crazy or dumb. You are the tortoise, you are the bulldog. You keep holding on and you will win, but don’t go at them. That way, you kill yourself in the end.” Of course, Congressman Scheuer had also advised him to get himself onto the committee that was working on health care, a “can’t lose” way to start his political career, and he had said that campaigns were wild and sometimes vicious but that after the election everyone accepted that those who won, won, and they got down to business. It had taken Richie two months to realize that those were the old days, the old days of 1990, and those days were already gone.

And so they started eating, and then Ivy said, “That item of bullshit was made up by Bill Kristol and parroted by the L.A. Times , same as Travelgate, same as the idea that Hillary is simultaneously a controlling superhuman bitch and an incompetent hag,” and it was her tone, mocking and self-confident, that propelled Loretta from her chair into her bedroom, while Tia said, “What’s wrong with Mom?” and Ivy said, “What’s going on?”

Michael said, “She hates the Clintons. We were at a party last week and someone said she thought they were a breath of fresh air in Washington at last, and Loretta threw a bowl of chips in the woman’s face.”

After that, no invitations or phone calls for two weeks; then the two women had lunch and agreed not to talk politics.

The second time they stopped speaking came in the summer, around the death of Vince Foster, a decent guy who had come with the Clintons from Arkansas and had not been able to handle politics in Washington — and how could he? Richie thought. Loretta went straight from the discovery of the body to convicting the Clintons of murder in less than a day, and in fact told Ivy that her mother, in California, had proof that hired goons from New York City had done it, people so experienced in getting rid of potential truth-tellers that they had murdered hundreds of law-abiding Republicans over the years. Ivy laughed so hard that Loretta hung up on her, and that silence lasted a month.