Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“Because?” said Michael.

“Because she got an inheritance after the war sometime, from a dead relative who hated everyone in his family, and he said that his money would be kept in a trust until everyone then alive died, including the babies. I don’t know how much she got, maybe ten grand or something like that. She did the investing. Well, Dad advised her. But I think when he bought out Uncle Henry’s and Aunt Claire’s shares of the farm, in ’76, that was the last time he had lots of money to invest. I think so. How should I really know? I’m telling you what Mom told me three or four years ago.” Then, “So — a hundred grand?”

He and Ivy could get themselves a bigger co-op, still in the district, but maybe facing the park. A hundred grand was a nice sum. And Ivy would appreciate it. Ivy hadn’t been terribly appreciative lately — brusque and busy. She was an executive vice-president now, and constant reading and editing had been replaced, she said, by constant meetings about other people’s books. She was getting a good paycheck, and there was no one in publishing who didn’t want to succeed, but authors were, in their idiosyncratic (she put it politely but affectionately) way, more fun than colleagues, and especially more fun than publishers, who worried all the time. Was she in line to become a publisher? If so, was that good? Was that bad? And if so, more important, how could she refuse? When she started talking like this, she would stare at Leo, Richie saw, wondering if she could betray him by leaving him an only child. About this, Richie, himself out of town from Monday morning to Friday evening, said nothing. The geography of their success seemed to be stretching the threads that connected them to spiderweb thinness. Almost always, while he was eating his crab bisque in the bar at the Hay-Adams, he thought of Ivy reaching for a stuffed mushroom at a fund-raiser at the Met or in Astor Hall at the New York Public Library, and Leo in Brooklyn, eating macaroni and cheese with Allie, and he wondered, how could you be related if you didn’t relate? He comforted himself with the idea of Michael and Loretta and their many kids, screaming at each other on the Upper East Side, but the idea wasn’t all that comforting. Ivy, who still said she would never go there, thought that they were officially crazy and that they were driving their kids officially crazy, and that it was a good thing that Loretta sent Chance and Binky and Tia to California every summer vacation and every Christmas vacation to hone their cattle-roping skills.

And then people would come by, because they saw his bike outside the door of the hotel, which meant he was inside, and they chatted with him, and he chatted with them — yes, the Republicans had taken over both houses of Congress, but Richie had beaten Kevin Moore’s successor candidate by eight percentage points. Fewer Democrats in Congress meant that those who were left had more gravity; Richie was no longer a hydrogen atom, more like an oxygen atom, someone to be sought out and won over. A life alongside Michael had given him a trustworthy quality — he looked like a guy who had survived many beatings. Anyway, he would sit and smile and chat. A colleague or two would wander in, offer, ask, confer, complain, shake heads, nod, pat him on the shoulder, smile again, and he would feel the pleasure of forgetting, just for the moment, Ivy and Leo.

—

JESSE MISSED Uncle Frank, and not because of the money, at least not this year. And he loved Uncle Frank, and not because of the bequest. Jesse had decided years before not to worry about who owned the farm. Chances were, in farm country, that the guy who farmed the farm did not own it, might never own it — the bank owned it in all but name. It might be that Jesse “owned” the farm now, but he thought of it as something he and his dad shared. Jesse missed Uncle Frank because Uncle Frank had been the most informative person Jesse had ever met, and Jesse loved information. When Aunt Minnie got the fax of Uncle Frank’s New York Times obituary right after the funeral in the summer, everyone had read it, everyone had said, “Oh, I didn’t know…” But Jesse did know, and he had a stack of letters to prove it. In that stack was the one about the supercavitating torpedo , not “missile.” Uncle Frank had come very close to not renewing its funding — it was expensive and going nowhere. But, as he had said in the letter, you could not decide what, in the end, might win a war, so you had to hedge your bets and put money into everything. The Russians in World War II had been a never-ending, apparently invulnerable stream, each one dying only to be replaced by two more. It might be that everyone back in the States saw victory as inevitable, a sure bet, and that if, in England, they were not so sure, they remained quiet about their doubts, but Uncle Frank had always seen it as a close thing — atom bomb versus V-2 rocket, Russian army versus German technology, Mountbatten sacrificing a battalion at Dieppe in order to see whether Normandy might work better. Why had the Germans focused their defenses on Calais rather than Dunkirk? That was a mystery Uncle Frank had always thought significant, but that no one talked about. How many other letters did Jesse have? A hundred? All of them were handwritten, all of them informative, all of them friendly. When he wrote Uncle Frank that he was going to marry Jennifer Guthrie, he got the whole story of the mousetrap by return mail — how those bullies at school made life a living hell not only for Uncle Frank, who was six, but even for Jennifer’s grandpa Donald, who’d been nine — once, they’d ambushed him on the way home and stolen his shoes, then thrown them in a ditch filled with rainwater. He’d had to wear them anyway, since in those days you ordered shoes by catalogue and only got one pair per year. And it wasn’t a mousetrap, it was a rat trap; Uncle Frank had noticed the blood both on Bobby Dugan’s fingers and on his lips, because he’d put his fingers in his mouth. Always bullies, those Dugans. “My first and possibly greatest achievement,” he’d written.

Jesse had seen Uncle Frank maybe a dozen times over the years, and they never talked much. And he had listened to the gossip about Uncle Frank, especially since the funeral — a naughty boy and a harum-scarum kid; Aunt Andy was crazy; and what about those twins? He knew that his own dad had forgiven Uncle Frank over and over, but those letters sat in a tin box in the glass-front cabinet beside the fireplace in the house, and they said something that Jesse would never deny — that Uncle Frank was the smartest guy he’d ever known. He said nothing to his dad about it, and nothing to his mom, who regretted that Uncle Frank hadn’t been saved before he died, but maybe there was hope for Aunt Andy. As for Minnie, he caught her crying in the barn a week after the funeral, her face all puffy, and she’d said, “Oh, heavens me, I thought I’d cried all the tears I was ever going to cry over Frank Langdon, and here I am!”

Jesse sat next to her and then put his arm around her, and she leaned against him and sobbed again (this was something he hadn’t told anyone). He said, “I always wanted to be like him.”

“I can’t imagine in what way,” said Minnie, maybe to herself, but he couldn’t explain without showing her the letters, and he couldn’t show her the letters without worrying that talk would begin about them and then someone would want to read them, and then they wouldn’t be his any longer.

Jesse sometimes drove past the graveyard; it was small, around to the side of the abandoned church, all grassed over. Most of the graves were old and the inscriptions on the headstones were flaking away — even Grandma Rosanna’s was hardly legible anymore. Uncle Frank’s looked almost mirrorlike in its brilliance by comparison (Jesse had overseen the installation). What flowers there were, were artificial, lying here and there. But Jesse appreciated that, too, that Uncle Frank had come back to them, that in death he wasn’t too good for them, that his uncle was, in some way, his possession now, rather than Richie’s or Michael’s. All of this he kept to himself as he tested the moisture in the soil and the moisture in the seed, as he planned his rotation, as he went to the bank and the seed company, when they went to church, when he ate a pancake or two with the guys in the Denby Café, listening to his dad and Russ Pinckard recall that fertilizer salesman coming through town — was that right after the war? — and before anyone said a word about it, the salesman jumped out ahead of them and went on about how sorry the company was that that ship carrying ammonium nitrate, the very thing he wanted them to put on their fields, had blown up in the harbor — where was that, Houston? Some hundred people were killed, and the ocean literally boiled. How could anyone be surprised by a fertilizer bomb? said his dad. It was an accident waiting to happen. No accident, said some of the others.