Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Now Richie said, “I think military school retarded our development.”

Monsignor Kelly gave him a kindly look and said, “About education there are only theories, never actual experiments. You have to go with your instincts.”

“My instinct is that military school made me aggressive and angry.”

“And look where you are now,” said the monsignor, still endlessly benign. “I’m sure you need real toughness in the political climate we have.”

“More like the capacity to ignore almost everything,” said Richie, but he made sure it sounded like a joke.

Michael said, “Military school felt safe to me.”

“The guns were not loaded,” said Richie. Then, “Well, they were loaded with blanks. That did make it easier.”

“It was orderly,” said Michael. “Nothing wrong with orderly.”

“Orderly is a beginning,” said the monsignor.

Richie said, “Which one has more athletic facilities?”

Chance now looked at him. He said, “Stevenson.”

Richie said, “Swimming saved my sanity. If I hadn’t learned to swim, I wouldn’t have met my best friend, Greg, and I would have had to listen to your dad tease me about how I ran like a girl, every day of my life.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Loretta. “Michael wouldn’t do that.”

There was a silence. Binky was staring at Michael, Loretta was shaking her head, the monsignor was looking like he’d seen plenty of boys over the years. Michael said, “I did say that, I admit.”

“Boys will be boys,” said Loretta.

Michael looked at Chance and said, “Chance, I’ve said a lot of things that I regret. Better not to say them, since you can’t apologize for all of them.”

Richie noticed that Michael didn’t apologize, even now, for that old insult.

“Sin,” said the monsignor, “is always with us.” And he looked right at Richie, as if Richie were the embodiment of that idea.

Loretta said, “Boys learn differently from girls. They need more structure and they need to learn how to get along with one another. For heaven’s sake! When they’re ready for girls, the girls will get along with them . And the weather is much better in Portola Valley, sunnier and not as damp. No one loves Pebble Beach as much as I do, but it is worth your sanity to drive out there half the time. My mom said it’s a wonder all those rich people rattling around in those huge houses don’t kill themselves whenever they get the chance.”

“I’ve never been to California,” said the monsignor. “No further west than St. Louis, actually.”

“Well,” said Loretta, “you can come along when I take him. My dad will be happy to meet you, and I’m sure he’ll get you on a horse inside of a day.”

The monsignor lit up like the Irishman he was.

Afterward, when Richie went over the evening in his mind, he could not figure out when the decision was made for Woodside over Stevenson. Nor could he figure out why he was there, unless it was he who was meant to articulate, and therefore define, whatever Loretta would decide against. It was pretty clear to him, though, that Loretta now had Michael surrounded. She had decorated their place entirely to her own taste — blanched colors, abstract paintings on the walls that evoked seascapes, an antique carved oak sideboard that looked like an altar, until you realized that the objects grouped among the lit candles on top of it were just plates, saucers, and cups, though ornate. She had Michael pinned between herself and the monsignor, who ran a charitable foundation that she contributed tens of thousands to every year. She took Michael to Mass on Sunday; she had him driving a Lexus LS. Richie wondered how long it could possibly last.

—

CHARLIE THOUGHT of his uncle Henry not as a father figure (he had one of those) but as a teacher figure (something he had never really had). Uncle Henry didn’t mind answering questions; in fact, the more questions the better. Charlie was reading a book Uncle Henry had assigned —A Tale of Two Cities . Some teacher or other had assigned this book many times over the years, but Charlie had only read the Classic Comics edition. As a result, and because he made himself read for forty-five minutes every day — sometimes fifteen pages, sometimes twenty — he was following the story, learning about the French Revolution (which he had heard people talk about), and enjoying the very strange Evrémonde brothers. Riley did not see Uncle Henry as a teacher figure (she’d made good use of many of those), she saw him as the embodiment of the Medieval Warm Period. Had he read the Saga of the Greenlanders? Yes. Did he really think there had been birch trees in Greenland? Yes. Had he read the Saga of Eric the Red? Yes. Where did he think they got to when they came to the Western Hemisphere? Uncle Henry gave her his copy of Land Under the Pole Star , which Charlie read, too, since it was about a Norwegian man and his wife who went from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Newfoundland in a rowboat, just to prove you could do it, so, yes, Eric the Red had indeed contemplated settling Newfoundland around the year 1000, until the native population drove him off. She quizzed him: How historically based were the Sagas? Grapes in Maine? Or was it Martha’s Vineyard, maybe? The Medieval Warm Period was an unfortunate conundrum that Riley did not like, because people who knew about the Medieval Warm Period were more likely to challenge the concept of man-made global warming, but she did her usual thing. She looked more deeply into the arguments, and discovered ways to understand the Medieval Warm Period — less volcanic activity, more sunlight, strengthened tropical currents. At first, Charlie was afraid that Riley would offend Uncle Henry, but she invigorated him.

Unlike her parents and his parents, Uncle Henry never asked when they were going to have a baby. Every few weeks (more frequently in the winter), he would come to D.C., put himself up at the Capitol Skyline Hotel, and do some work in the Library of Congress. On the Saturdays of these weekends, Charlie, and sometimes Riley, would meet him at the Smithsonian or the National Gallery, and they would go to various shows. He took Charlie to the Folger Library, and introduced him to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He took him to Constitution Hall and the Art Museum of the Americas. Charlie asked a lot of questions, and if Henry couldn’t answer them, he bought a book, which he read quickly and Charlie read slowly. Henry didn’t seem at all surprised by this overwhelming plenitude of objects to look at or ideas to think about, but Charlie was. It seemed to him that he had spent thirty years circling neighborhoods and buildings without even wondering what was inside. And each building was a Fabergé egg, pleasant on the outside, a treasure trove within. Henry said, “Books are like that, too.”

So Charlie read books on the train. He would get on at his station, read and ride to Dupont Circle, then get out and run three miles to the store where he sold hiking boots, kayaking gear, climbing gear. Henry was good for Riley, too, though not because he made her spend a couple of hours every so often walking around in the presence of art and artifacts. And he didn’t mind her talking about global warming — he was born in 1932, and his first memories were of the winter of ’35–’36, when the downstairs windows were blanked by snow, and his brothers, who would have been thirteen and fifteen, would jump out the upstairs windows (and Frank out of the attic window) and slide down the snow mounded against the house. Then Frank disappeared, and that snow-enshrouded season turned into a terribly dusty, hot summer, when, his mother later told him, he lay in his crib covered with hives, sweating and miserable. It was so hot that she had to spread wrung-out wet cloths over him — he sort of remembered that, too, though not as clearly as the snow. In ’56, another drought year — oh, ’56! And his stories wandered away from the weather to how he fell in love with his cousin Rosa, unrequited of course, and how the big scandal in the family was the reappearance of Minnie’s father, a ne’er-do-well drunk who had disappeared years before. Walked into the house while Lois was away and Joe was out cultivating one of the fields, and fell down the basement stairs and died. Henry said, “Frank would whisper in your ear that Lois pushed him, but that was Frank. Yes, it was a drought year, but scandals overwhelmed the weather for me.” Charlie felt his unknown past vibrating. He said, “Our family seems to have a lot of those,” and even as Henry was smiling and shaking his head, Riley burst out, “My grandfather proposed to my great-aunt, and then, behind her back, he married her younger sister, who was my grandmother. And she lived with them for the rest of her life.”