Jane Smiley - Golden Age

He said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m making a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich for an early supper, then I’m going to read the latest issue of The New Yorker , then I’m going to bed.”

“Your front door is unlocked.”

“You tried it?”

“Of course I did.”

“Were you going to just walk in?”

“Only after I looked in the window and made sure it was yours.”

“What if I was out?”

“Then I would see what was in the refrigerator.”

She gave him a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich, too — Emmentaler cheese, Black Forest ham — and a crunchy bowl of romaine lettuce with some olive oil from Spain and some balsamic vinegar from Italy. They sat across from each other at her very modest kitchen table in her very modest chairs; none of the Englewood Cliffs furniture had fit in here, so she’d sold it (some for very good prices), and bought all new.

She did not ask him about the campaign.

She did not ask him about Leo.

She did not ask him whether he was seeing anyone.

She did not ask him about Michael.

She was curious to see which of these perennial topics would come up first.

She said, “How’s your sandwich?”

“Crispy.”

“I like that. That’s one of my favorite words.”

He said, “Mom. Why are you so strange?”

Andy laughed out loud.

“No, I’m not kidding. You are the ghost that the child reaches toward, who disappears the very instant he touches her.”

Andy had thought that was Frank.

She ate the last bite of her sandwich and wiped her lips. She wanted, above all, to give a serious answer. She said, “I’m not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.”

Now Richie laughed.

She went on, “How old were you, do you think, the first time you thought you might die?”

“I don’t remember. But when I hit Michael on the head with that hammer that time, I thought he might die. I guess we were seven or eight. Nedra brought him back to life with a stick of butter.”

“Well, I was four. My cousin Helga told me. She was seven. They had come over from Prairie du Chien, and she told me about a boy in her class at school who drowned in the river. She swore she saw him go under the ice and not come up. His name was Lonnie. I remember it so clearly. I was terribly stupid, and so she had to explain every little bit to me over and over, and so it got wedged in my mind. When I asked my mom about it, about death, she said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Jeg kommer ikke til å snakke om det, det er en solrik dag! ”

“What did that mean?”

“Something like ‘I’m not talking about that on such a beautiful day!’ We never did talk about it. But I thought about it. It was like all the details Helga told me made deep paths in my brain, and everything else that happened, or that anyone said, confirmed it and etched it deeper.”

Richie said, “I never thought I might die, but I often thought Michael might die.”

“Did you hate him?” Andy decided at the last second not to put this question in the present tense.

“What happens if I say yes?” said Richie.

“There are a lot of different theories about that.”

“Mom!”

“Well, there are. But we’re here alone. You are forty-three, I’m seventy-six, and you can say whatever you want.”

“Because you’ll forget it.”

“Chances are.”

But he ate his salad instead of saying it, which Andy thought was unfortunate. The past tense was for declaring that something was over, and Richie hadn’t noticed that. She said, “How’s Leo?”

“He got into Allen-Stevenson.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s near where Ivy’s living now. All boys. ‘An Allen-Stevenson Boy is a Scholar and a Gentleman .’ He’s a handful, so it’s good they have twelve years to work on him. Lots of music. Ivy thinks he likes music.”

“How’s the campaign going?”

“I seem to be up by three points. I think the Republicans overplayed their hand. They think so, too.”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“How’s Michael?”

“I think he found religion.”

“How so?”

“There was a monsignor when I went to dinner the other night. Monsignor Kelly. He seemed very comfortable around Michael, and he was good with the kids. I’m guessing a baptism is in the works.”

Then they were both quiet.

After he left, she sat in her attic bedroom, with all the books she had yet to read, looking out the window. The brouhaha of Frank’s death had settled down, and she had come to understand her own reaction, that sense of fatality and almost relief. She had not cried, had thought that maybe he would have been disappointed in her if she had cried. Sometimes, when she was alone, she talked to him: Was he happy to have gone in such a sudden and dramatic way? Was this better than Arthur’s decline, or his own father’s youthful heart attack (only fifty-eight — old then, young now)? More than anyone she knew, he had simply skipped old age — had he understood that? Her only regret was that the children had not forgiven him, although, she thought, he had forgiven them, but every time she broached this topic, they looked away, made a joke, didn’t believe her. Well, the lesson of almost sixty years with someone was that no one but you remembered that darling boy, the stranger walking toward you down Lincoln Way. You were standing on the corner, at Welch, and out of the morning sunshine (Lincoln Way ran due east, due west) emerged this lithe, tall figure, his gaze hooded but avid, taking in every building, every other student, every tree, and you, too. And so you turned and followed him back to Hayward, and stood beside him on that corner, and when he cocked his head to look you up and down, waiting ever so long to smile but finally doing it, it did not mean that you were beautiful, it meant that you had a chance, just a chance, to see this being again, to find out what was in there, and it didn’t matter what you found out, in the end, because no one on earth would ever flash through you and light you up like he did.

ACROSS THE TABLE from Richie, Chance sat still, looking at his plate. Next to Chance, Bea (whom Richie still called Binky) was unabashedly rolling her eyes. Tia had already asked to be excused, been granted permission, and then bestowed a smile upon everyone, including Richie, including Monsignor Kelly, including Binky (though there was the usual touch of contempt in the smile she bestowed on Binky). The topic under discussion was where Chance would be going to boarding school. He had applied to only two and gotten into both, one to please his dad, the Stevenson School, in Pebble Beach, California, about a hundred yards from the site of Michael and Loretta’s famous wedding, and one to please his mom and the monsignor, Woodside Priory School, about a hundred yards from Janet’s house (okay, from where she kept the three horses, wherever that was). Dangers abounded. Chance did not want to go to boarding school, but the alternative was Regis, a Jesuit academy uptown, not, perhaps, far enough for Chance, who appeared restive. Like Richie and Michael, like their dad, Chance was tall and looked maybe two years older than he was (and, Richie thought, acted two years younger than he was). Whatever Perroni was in there made itself felt on the back of a horse or in the cab of a truck: Loretta reported, with some pride, that over Christmas Chance had gotten his grandfather to teach him to drive; it had taken a day, and then he had driven all over the ranch the rest of the vacation. Woodside Priory was all boys, the Pebble Beach school coed. When Michael called Richie to warn him that the monsignor would be there, he’d said, “The whole meal is going to be about the fact that Chance was caught in the hall making out with Patty Malone; he had his tongue in her mouth. So the monsignor is pushing the boys’ school to give him some focus.” When Loretta called a day later to make sure he was coming, she said, “I need your input. I know military school was good for Michael. But he’s got his heart set on Stevenson. Twenty thousand a year! I mean, Michael can afford that, but I’m afraid they’ll just baby him.”