Jane Smiley: Golden Age

WHEN HIS TWIN BROTHER, Michael, started yelling at their cousin Jesse about farm subsidies, Richie saw with amusement that Loretta’s immediate reaction, though her hands were full with Binky, six months old, who was burping or something, was to knock Michael’s bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon off the table, surely an effort to distract him. Richie licked his lips and took a bite of potato salad to hide his smile. Michael and Loretta had been married for almost eight years now, and Loretta had informed Richie that sometimes distraction did work with Michael: The last time he was in California, the Labrador retriever had taken Michael’s dirty undershorts and was found rolling on them out in one of the horse paddocks. When Loretta came upon Michael holding the Lab by the collar and taking off his belt, she rammed the corner of a box she was carrying into his side, as if by accident, and when he jumped out of the way, no doubt shouting, “What the fuck fuck this fuck that!” he lost his grip on the dog, who ran off. Loretta said that they ended up laughing about the undershorts. She said Michael had a good sense of humor. Yeah, right, thought Richie. She had also said — with perfect sincerity, as far as Richie could tell — that she and her mother agreed, if you wanted a man with some fire in him, and who didn’t, you had to deal with getting burned every so often.

Jesse was shaking his head. “I think you have to accept that farming doesn’t fit easily into the free market—”

“Bullshit!”

“The free market doesn’t control the weather—”

“Externals can be accounted for, and would be, if the government would allow it. The subsidies are what destroy the market, and let bad farmers keep farming!”

Jesse’s good-natured wife, Jen, was breathing a little hard. She said, quietly, “Why do you care? Why is it your business?”

“Because I don’t want to pay taxes to keep you in your fucking house if you aren’t competent enough to keep it on your own.”

Richie reached for another piece of the pork, happy not to be involved, then kissed his own wife of one year, Ivy, on the cheek. Ivy made a face and squeezed his knee affectionately. They were in complete agreement that this reunion would count as one of the four times per year that they had to see his brother, Loretta, and the kids.

The real problem, Richie knew that Loretta knew, was that Michael’s mistress, Lynne, had kicked him out two weeks ago, and, worse than that, it had been a surprise — Michael had thought he was set until someone he preferred came along. It was pretty obvious to Richie that Lynne had taken up with Michael mostly to get connected to his Wall Street friends as clients for her remodeling business. Loretta wasn’t supposed to know this, of course.

Now Michael got himself together. In their whole life, possibly even in the womb, Michael had been good at getting himself together, though often his initial go-to strategy had been hammering Richie a few times. Michael coughed and said, “Okay. Okay.” Then he leaned forward and poked Binky lightly in the chest. He smooched at her, “Peek-a-boo, you!” He held out his arms, and Loretta put their still-fussing daughter into them. He stood up. “I think we need a little walk.”

Nothing about this persuaded Richie that it would be good to have a kid.

THE PERSON Charlie reminded Arthur Manning of was not Tim as much as his own father, and not his father as he’d known him, but his father in old black-and-white photographs from the 1890s — he had short pants and long hair, and had been told to be still but wasn’t quite able to accomplish that; the ghost of a smile fluttered around the child’s mouth, strangely predicting the ebullient Brinks Manning, who spent a lifetime not going into battle, but procuring things for going into battle, not caring for his son, but making sure that his son was cared for by kind and amusing nannies, teachers, principals. There was no one more useful, and in some sense more self-assured, than a practical young man, and Charlie Wickett was a practical man who, by his own account, had been solving this problem and that problem for as long as he could remember. (When is the best time to escape the house? When Mom is taking a shower. When is the best time to talk your way into the high-dive class? When they are fed up with you but can’t resist your smile. When is the best time to ask a girl out? When she thinks her new haircut makes her look bad. When is the best time to tell your parents you are leaving St. Louis for Colorado? When they are delirious with relief that you actually graduated from college and have a job, even though it is with some sort of wilderness rafting company. When is the best time to dive out of the raft? Just above a waterfall that looks dramatic but really isn’t — gives the customers a frisson of excitement and is quite refreshing on a hot afternoon, especially good if the other rafting guides are coached to shout, “Hey! Hey! Oh my God!”)

Charlie made Arthur laugh, and he made Arthur grateful that he had missed those early years. After dessert, Debbie sat down next to Charlie, and she and Arthur did the thing that maybe they were destined to do: they alternated telling him stories about his mother, Fiona — fox hunting, jumping huge jumps in shows, standing on her horse’s back and racing down the hill — but sweeter ones, too, Fiona teaching her horse to push a little tire with his nose, Tim hiding raw eggs all over the house one Easter, playing in his band, the Colts, going to a used-car dealer with his best friend and paying sixty dollars for a ten-year-old Dodge with sawdust in the engine that managed to roll down the hill out of the dealer’s yard but got no farther. “And,” said Arthur, “those are only the stories we know. They were pretty good at keeping secrets, Tim and Fiona.”

“So good we never realized that your parents knew each other,” said Debbie.

Arthur had told Charlie that Tim had been killed in Vietnam, but none of the details, and that Tim’s mom, Lillian, universally adored (Debbie nodding), had died of a metastatic brain tumor—“She would have loved you”—but none of the details about that. What had Arthur done before he retired? Charlie wanted to know. Debbie looked away; Arthur said that he worked in the federal government, waving his hand as if he meant the Department of Agriculture, certainly giving no details about what he had really done, the agency he had really worked for. All three agreed that Arthur and Debbie should meet the Wicketts.

FRANK HAD DONE his best. He hadn’t said anything impatient, cutting, sharp. He had prevented his foot from tapping irritably under the table. He had spoken when spoken to, smiled when he had to, bounced his grandson Chance on his knee. When he finally fled, he did it smoothly, with a congenial nod, not saying, or even implying, that the clamor of voices was driving him crazy. He strolled as if idly, as if only admiring the straightness of Jesse’s rows, out toward the bean field. He put his hands in his pockets and looked west and north, pretending to care about the weather. Twelve more hours and he could leave, whether the others went with him or not. Yes, he was too old to find his origins maddening. Yes, he was too mature to be hurt that Jesse hardly spoke to him. (How many letters had he written to Jesse? More than to anyone else he had ever known, for sure.) Walking along the lilac bushes, remembering his mother, Rosanna, clipping the flowers (they had grown so much that she wouldn’t be able to reach them now), he took some long, intentional deep breaths, clenched and unclenched his fists, turned around at last, stared at everyone. Everything was easier to take if he couldn’t hear them. It mattered less that Andy was gazing into the trees, that Emily was jumping up and down, that Janet kept wringing her hands without even knowing it, that Richie was practically entrapping Ivy in his bearlike embrace, that Michael was flexing his muscles. Charlie was the prize, but he was Arthur’s prize. Charlie was a restless one — huddling with Arthur and Debbie, nodding and laughing, then bouncing from his chair. The person Frank saw in him was not himself anymore, not Tim, not any Langdon, but Arthur, the only truly charismatic human being Frank had ever known, the one who could get you to do whatever crazy thing he wanted you to, not because he had a good argument, or made you an offer you couldn’t refuse, but because he wrapped you in a story, filled you with pleasure, dared you to do it. Frank saw Charlie ask Jesse a question, and saw Jesse lean forward, intent upon answering thoughtfully. His mother would have said, “Well, pick of the litter. No two ways about that.”