Jane Smiley - Golden Age

There was something about the letters organized by date in the box that gave him faith, not in Jesus, of course — that was a separate thing — but in thinking, organizing, staying rational, finding out. The world was full of terror and insanity, as this bombing in Oklahoma showed, but didn’t those letters he had prove that sense could be made of the senseless, that the cause and effect of things would eventually be found? That was Uncle Frank’s real legacy, not six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of farmland.

—

TO LOOK AT Carl Leroy, you could not tell he was fifty-nine, nor, thought Claire cattily, could you tell that he had been married to Ruth, once her best friend, then her worst enemy, after that an item of her past that she never thought of. Now that Carl was her boyfriend, she thought of Ruth fairly often, because Ruth wrote Carl letters demanding that he insist that their twenty-year-old daughter, Angie, call her or write her or visit her. Angie went to Beloit, which was a hundred miles from where Carl lived in Winnetka, but Ruth seemed to imagine that it was down the street, and that Angie’s relative distance from Winnetka compared with her distance from Des Moines was a calculated slap in the face, a choice of the parent who had left her over the parent who had raised her. Carl had moved from Des Moines to Winnetka when Angie was six, about a year after Ruth and he separated and divorced — fourteen years ago. The result was that Claire and Carl seemed, even to themselves, to have just met, just gotten to know one another, just fallen in love. Those younger selves they vaguely remembered might have been anyone.

Angie was admitted to Beloit (not St. Olaf, not Grinnell, not Carleton, and so, therefore, she had gone to Beloit). It seemed simple to Carl, and simple to Claire, and simple to Angie, but it was not simple to Ruth. Even though Angie was a junior, and therefore had been attending Beloit for two years, the first letter of the semester had already arrived, informing Carl that Angie had been in school for four weeks, and Ruth had heard nothing from her. Carl wrote back, “Dear Ruth, Hope you are well. Neither have I. I’m sure she is busy, Yours truly, Carl.”

There were several things Angie knew: she knew she was adopted; she knew she was mixed-race; she knew she was an only child; she knew she had a talent for languages and spoke French, Italian, and Spanish. There were several things Angie did not know: she did not know who her birth parents were, or where they were from; she did not know Russian (yet); and she did not know that her mother and her father’s girlfriend had ever been friends, or even that Claire had once lived in Des Moines. Claire only said that mothers were very hard for daughters to understand; one of the nice things about sons was that they didn’t even try. Even though Claire and Carl weren’t married, she operated on the stepmother principle, which was that an intelligent stepmother never takes the bait, never criticizes, and, if there is something that the stepchild really really wants but her parents won’t give her, then the stepmother gives it to her. Claire did not think Angie liked her, but she was always polite, which was enough.

But they had seen Angie, only because they had taken a rare weekend off from Claire’s party business and gone to Lake Geneva. Sitting on the dock of the house they borrowed, eating breakfast, they saw a pontoon boat go by, eight kids laughing and yelling, and Angie among them. Claire’s orange, which she was peeling, dropped right out of her hand into the water and sank. Carl hardly reacted, which was one of Carl’s charms. He just moved his folding beach chair closer to the end of the dock and kept watching the boat. It circled around the lake, disappeared from sight, reappeared, finally docked at a house about a quarter-mile down the shore. Carl took note of which house it was (A-frame, main entrance flanked by two tall cedar trees), then got in his truck and drove down there. When he came back, Angie was with him, and so was the boyfriend, named Tyler. Tyler was seven inches taller than Angie and seemed to know her quite well. It was Saturday. Claire suggested they come for French toast, bacon, and scrambled eggs the next morning — all the kids should come. Tyler’s eyes lit up — nothing like a good meal — and Angie didn’t say no.

It did turn out that the parents were in Europe and didn’t know the house was being put to use by the son, who they thought was safely ensconced in Beloit. Boys did outnumber the girls five to three, but the host boy, Tony, was twenty-three and had been driving the boat since he was sixteen. Liquor had abounded, but at 10:00 a.m. Sunday, everyone was awake, pink-cheeked, and hungry, no evidence of violent hangovers. Claire was in her element, serving these kids as if they were guests at one of her parties. (And a nice living it was—“Leave It to Claire!” said her flyers and ads in the Trib . “You should enjoy your own party, not be a slave to it! Contact Claire’s Party Central for information! References supplied!”) She served thirty slices of French toast and a pound and a half of bacon and ate a few bites herself — probably the reason she was now doing parties was that there were many more things she wanted to cook and taste than she and Carl could eat on their own. Three of the boys followed Carl out behind the house to look at his antique Ford pick-up, a ’47(!), painted grass green with a blue roof. Tony was glad when Carl offered to help him get the boat into the boathouse, hoisted out of the water, and winterized. Neither Claire nor Carl asked what Tony had planned to do if Carl hadn’t shown up. Everyone, it seemed, was lucky, and Angie had bestowed a reluctant kiss upon Claire’s cheek when they parted. Carl still said little, but all the way back to Winnetka, he was in a wonderful mood. Carl’s wonderful moods were not all that different from his terrible moods — he was an even-tempered sort of fellow, the kind of guy who could open the basement door and see six feet of dirty water and not be daunted. She loved him. Yes, Ruth had found him stolid (she remembered that), and Henry said, “When’s the last time he read a book?” and he could sit through supper on the farm without saying a word, not out of shyness but because he didn’t have a word to say. Claire had never met anyone else like him. She thought he was the rarest of rare birds, and reached across the console to touch his cheek.

—

MINNIE AND LOIS’S ARGUMENT had started in the kitchen, but, with her usual determination, Lois had eased Minnie out the back door by pretending that she had to get some fennel from the garden, and now they were under the old lilac trees. The argument was not about any of their real differences, such as religion (Minnie had declared herself an “Indifferentist,” and Lois had said, “That’s not something you say in front of the children”), or travel (Lois had asked her in all seriousness why in the world she wanted to go to Athens — it was dirty and full of feral cats), or even about making a piecrust with shortening rather than lard (not possible, said Lois).

No one other than the two of them would have known they were having an argument. Lois continued to dig up the fennel bulbs and also to smile. Minnie was nodding at her sister, as if she agreed with her — that was an old habit. Lois said, “But you have to let them know early that they are on the wrong path. It’s cruel not to.”

“I don’t think she is on the wrong path. She’s just curious.”

What Felicity had asked, at the supper table, was, what was that thing Perky had in his underwear? She had asked this in her usual matter-of-fact tone, and instead of someone saying, calmly, “It’s called a penis” (and here was yet another reason why farmers should be raising animals, Minnie thought: much easier to talk about penises belonging to horses and cattle), Grandma Lois had gasped, Papa Jesse had barked a laugh, and Mama Jen had said, “Shhh. I’ll tell you later.” Is this the nineties, thought Minnie, or the thirties? With her customary seriousness, Felicity said, “Why?”