Jane Smiley - Golden Age

FRANCIS LANGDON, PIONEERING DEFENSE CONTRACTOR, DIES AT 74

Francis Howard Langdon, who was known among the group of secretive defense contractors who came of age during World War II for his willingness to explore ideas that some among his colleagues considered more in the realm of science fiction than of usable weaponry, died Tuesday in Ames, Iowa, where he had flown with a friend. Local officials say that he was struck by lightning while standing at the edge of the airfield.

Francis Langdon was a veteran of World War II, where he served in the European Theater as a sniper, a rare thing in those days. He fought in the North African Campaign in 1943, the Sicilian Campaign, and at the Battle of Anzio. He was a great admirer of General Jacob “Jake” Devers, Commander of the North African Theater of Operations, who, he sometimes said, “gave me my first experience of St.-Tropez.” After the war, Mr. Langdon, who was born in Iowa to an English-German farm family and was bilingual, spent time in Ohio translating captured German technical documents for the U.S. government, then worked for Courtyard Oil. But his great love was for unorthodox weaponry, and he spent many years trying to develop a weapon known as the supercavitating underwater missile, to be used against submarines. It had a concave nose, shaped to create a vacuum in the water just in front of the missile, allowing the missile to speed up rather than slow down. Forward Weaponry, from which he retired in 1986, was located in Secaucus, New Jersey.

Francis Langdon was married to Hildegarde Andrea Bergstrom Langdon, who was for many years a prominent figure on the Manhattan social scene, known for her elegant style and her ethereal beauty.

U.S. Congressman Richard Langdon, Democrat, of Brooklyn’s 9th district, is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Langdon. Francis Langdon is also survived by another son, Michael Langdon, a Wall Street entrepreneur known for innovations in computer trading, and by a daughter, Janet Langdon Nelson, of Palo Alto, California. Francis Langdon’s funeral was held in Denby, Iowa, where he grew up, and where he was interred.

Janet hadn’t known that her mother’s given name was “Hildegarde,” much less these generalities about her father’s career. When she showed the obituary to Jared, his eye fell immediately upon the underwater missile, which he said might have worked, might still work, but they would never know — probably it had been mothballed when the Soviet Union collapsed; it was fascinating. He gave her a hug. And of course the lightning strike was amazing, but, try as she might to generate some sort of grief for her father, she could not. He had been imposing, absent, frightening, threatening, every day of her childhood. There was no evidence in her memory that he had ever liked her, or that he was capable of love (though he seemed to have grown fond of her mother in the last couple of years). Nor did she, given her political views, admire his life work. But probably, she thought now that she’d read all those books about child care and the infant mind, he had simply never bothered to bond with her; she was forty-four and she didn’t care.

The envelope in her hand would be the payoff, her compensation for getting Frank as her father rather than, say, Uncle Arthur, whom she had adored when she was a child, or Papa Rudy, Jared’s dad, who was kind and told truly funny jokes. She slipped her fingernail under the flap and ripped the envelope open. Judging by everything Janet knew about her parents, her legacy could be sizable — she and Jared had already skirted the issue of paying off their house, or maybe looking for something on Kauai, or starting a trust fund for Emily and Jonah. She skimmed the letter, turned to the next page. Her father’s will, it turned out, had been a simple one — the house to Mom, the farmland in Denby to Cousin Jesse, a hundred thousand dollars each, more or less, after taxes and fees, to Janet, Richie, and Michael. Janet turned the letter over in confusion. A hundred thousand dollars? Even Jared, from Minnesota, would be surprised that this constituted Frank’s fortune. And nothing for her mom? What was she going to live on? She laid the letter on her desk, put the obituary back in the drawer, and looked at her watch. It was almost three, time to pick up Emily and take her to her dance class, which she was now taking twice a week to build her abdominal strength so that she could better sit the trot. Fiona considered this a good idea and wished she’d thought of the same thing years ago. The next step, said Fiona, was “a more competitive horse” (that was twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars right there), but Emily herself wasn’t saying that yet — she loved Pesky and she loved Sunlight, and she thought a successful equestrian career was about friendship.

Janet rummaged around on the kitchen counter for her car keys and went into Jonah’s room. Jonah was sitting cross-legged on the floor, doing his sixty-piece fish puzzle, which he preferred to the dinosaur puzzle. He didn’t look up. He picked up a piece, touched it gently to his lower lip, positioned it, tapped it with his fingertip, and picked up another one. There was no mystery to the puzzle any longer, just some sort of pleasure that Janet didn’t quite understand. He also liked to lay out playing cards, plain old playing cards, in patterns. Jared remembered doing the same thing. She said, “Ready, Jonie-boy? Time to go in the car and pick up Emmy.”

He sighed, stood up. Although she had raised him perfectly and he was always cooperative, he was a strange boy. It was as though every solved set of parental difficulties revealed a whole landscape of unimagined difficulties beyond, a set of syndromes or conditions that could be active or could be incipient, or might not even exist. It was easier, Janet thought, just to think that they were bad or good, obedient or disobedient. She gave Jonah a hug when she lifted him into his car seat, and all the way to Emily’s school she could not help glancing in the rearview mirror at red lights, just so that she could wonder why he was so quiet.

—

RICHIE KNEW what was in the letter before the letter arrived, because Michael had called him in a rage to tell him that the hoped-for millions were not going to materialize — they had probably been left to that little shit, Jesse.

“What did the letter say?” said Richie.

“A hundred fucking grand,” said Michael.

“What do you care?”

Richie expected him to say something about losses — there had been a rash of losses in the big banks, including Michael’s bank, articles in the WSJ , the FT , and the Times , and discussions in the Financial Services Committee — but Michael said, “It’s the principle of the thing. Loretta is spitting mad.”

Richie set the phone down on his desk and laughed for a second. When he picked it back up, Michael was still talking, hadn’t even realized that he had lost Richie’s absolute attention. “Her folks spent a pile refurbing the kitchen at the ranch, and they had to install ground-fault-indicator receptacles, and when they got into the walls to fix some of the wiring, they saw that rats had eaten the insulation every fucking where, it was all just bare wires waiting to burn the place down….” Richie put the phone down again, and picked it up again as Michael was saying, “Five hundred grand, and she said she would cover it because she…” He put the phone down again, then disconnected.

When he called Michael back after looking in the mail (nothing at that point), he said, “Sorry. Don’t know what happened. Anyway, Dad didn’t have all the money. Mom did.”

Michael said, “What?”

“Dad had his salary and his pension. That’s all he ever had. Mom is worth, like, four million, maybe more.”