Jane Smiley - Golden Age

It took Arthur all afternoon to think these thoughts — his mind worked so slowly now. And other fragments cropped up among them, fragments that seemed connected, although the connections were only foggily apparent to Arthur: What about Bill Casey? When was it that he had been slated to testify about Iran and North and the Contras? At the last moment, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the operation left him unable to talk. But, thought Arthur, why so secretive about such a small thing? Secrets, thought Arthur, were the real problem. Due south two hundred miles from this porch was Havana — not as far as Manhattan was from D.C. Here we have lived with Castro now for thirty-nine years. That was the bargain Khrushchev had offered — live with him or die — and, indeed, living with him hadn’t been that hard. Living with secrets was what was hard.

And it wasn’t just because secrets led to lies and lies led to chaos; it was because secrets led to the assumption, on the part of those not in on the secrets, that there were many more secrets than there really were. Arthur had already retired when Casey was diagnosed and operated on, rendered unable to talk, but he had been instantly suspicious of the strange convenience of it all. Logical connections abounded between dangerous secrets and convenient secrets. Does the president have a mistress back in Texas? Who cares? But it has to stay a secret. Have we infiltrated the high command of our most lethal enemy? Maybe — that’s a secret, too. Has our operation gone wrong and resulted in tragic losses? It’s a secret. All secrets had a way of connecting to one another and evening out — the mistress becomes connected to the infiltration, which becomes connected to the failed mission, and a secret has turned into a theory, which then turns into a cause, blowback, fallout. All of this leads to more secrets, since admitting a single thing requires admission of other things, and the plan, or the agency, or the government unravels.

Once upon a time, Arthur had loved secrets. He loved breaking codes in the early days, seeing a narrative unfold, peering through a pinhole and viewing the scene in sharp relief. During that war, everyone knew the consequences, and, anyway, the secrets were rather few, while the crimes were very many. But after the war, the crimes were secret, and the secrets, quite often, were crimes. The thing was, Arthur realized at some point, being secret made them seem like crimes. And keeping secrets made one feel like a criminal. These days, he didn’t remember too many specifics, but he did remember that feeling, of telling himself that the necessary had to outweigh the good, that orders had been given, that someone, surely, was in control of the larger picture (though often that person was Frank Wisner, who Arthur thought was crazy, but maybe it was Arthur who was crazy — that had been his thinking).

Sitting in the hot Florida air, Arthur felt his temperature rise just contemplating these memories, anger and fear and shame. Eventually, the secret became the most important thing, didn’t it, more important than the crime, after all, more important than the damage and the failures and the tragedies. The secret sucked every one of those things up into itself — danger, danger, danger. Arthur leaned back suddenly, threw his hand out, and toppled his glass of water, which rolled across the deck. Then he fell out of his chair.

When he came to, lying in a patch of burning sunlight, he thought, I don’t want these to be the last things in my mind when I die. Am I dying? He was panting. He did not know. He did not know anything, and for the moment, that was a blessing.

—

AFTER JOE’S FUNERAL — on her way back to Chicago without Henry, who was staying for another three days, then flying to D.C. — Claire drove around assessing the decline of Denby. Frank’s death had been such a shock that, although events seemed to move very slowly at the time, afterward it seemed as though he had been whisked over from Ames and shoveled into the ground. Claire hadn’t noticed Denby then, only the faces of her relatives, blanched in the summer sun and eager to get the whole thing over with. But maybe because Lois had done such a good job preparing them, keeping everyone posted, calling them if they couldn’t come for a visit (Claire had come for Christmas and Valentine’s Day, pretending that she was just celebrating, though Joe wasn’t fooled, of course), Joe’s death seemed to rise like a tide and then recede, a matter-of-fact part of life to be understood and incorporated.

The grain elevator was still there, and the building that had been Crest’s, now a funeral home. The only “market” in town was a Kum & Go. The little motel had become a restaurant for a while, maybe in the seventies? The drugstore was gone, too — no soda fountain in years. At this time of day, the Denby Café looked dark and abandoned; they served breakfast until lunchtime, and locked up at two. Lois’s little antiques store was still in business; Claire peered in the window beside the “Closed for the weekend — please come back!” sign. Several couches, a table and chairs, two side tables, some dishes stacked on one of the side tables — all chintzy. The heavy, dark, ornate, beautifully made pieces that Lois had extracted from the dying farms of the seventies and eighties had been sold away. She had said at the wake that maybe she would close the business and move somewhere — or write a cookbook (twice she had overseen the Christmas cookbooks Pastor Campbell had issued for fund-raising purposes; Claire had both of those, and sometimes she gave recipes from them to her party caterers). Claire wondered if Pastor Campbell knew that Billy Sunday was born just south of Ames, if he knew who Billy Sunday was. Her mom had always spoken fondly of Billy Sunday, but he’d died before Claire came along.

Minnie had stared at Lois when she talked about moving to Milwaukee but not living with Annie. Minnie did live with Jesse and Jen — she had a pension, and she was useful. She had said to Claire that seventy-nine wasn’t that old if you kept active. Lois would be sixty-eight, Claire thought. She herself was fifty-nine, and her business was booming. She could ask Lois to come to Chicago. She looked across the town square at the vast Worship Center and dropped that idea. But it all brought to mind another thing that Minnie had said — when your parents died young, you had no idea what your own old age would look like.

The square was still green, and there were a few families making use of it, two of them Hispanic. The parents probably worked at the meatpacking plant out on Route 330, near where the hog confinement facilities were. Judging by the town, the people who worked there didn’t have enough money to buy anything. However, the daffodil bed in the center of the square was yellow and thriving — someone was caring for the bulbs. The Worship Center was at the opposite corner of the square from Lois’s shop — what Claire remembered as the Methodist church where her Langdon relatives had gone, now unrecognizably enormous and showy — buildings had been torn down on either side so that Pastor Campbell could add day care, parking, and offices. The Worship Center was the biggest business now. Denby itself could not possibly be supporting the Harvest Home Light of Day Church in such style, but Claire had not asked Lois where the congregants were coming from. And the Harvest Home Light of Day Church had no graveyard — no room for the dead, she thought meanly. St. Albans was gone, but the graveyard where everyone was buried remained neatly fenced, maintained by the county. Claire wondered where the Hispanic families went to services. She and Carl didn’t go to church.

Carl hadn’t come with her, at her request. She didn’t quite know why, since he’d been willing to come, but maybe this was the reason, some time alone on a spring day, getting used to the fact that funerals started proliferating when you got older, if you were lucky. She kept walking, looping down Rain Street (why had they named it that?), where the houses were sturdy and all the front porches had rockers. It was one of life’s treats, wasn’t it, paying a visit to your past, swinging like a ball on a string away from the person you loved, always knowing that the string must pull you back, and you would be oh so glad to get there.