Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Two days later, she was brave enough to answer the phone even though she could tell the number was international. It was Loretta. But she wasn’t angry. She thanked Janet for “doing her best” and said her parents’ “united front” with Chance against her and Michael was like the Great Wall of China. Loretta knew better than to argue at her age.

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AFTER BILL BRADLEY dropped out of the presidential race in March, Riley stopped speaking to Richie. Riley’s support for Bradley had rather surprised Richie, since Gore said a lot more about global warming. But Riley’s mother had mentioned to Riley that when she was working in a factory of some sort in 1968, the minimum wage had been $1.60, and her mother had, in fact, been paid $1.75. Now the minimum wage was $5.15, but Riley calculated that, according to inflation, it should be $8.00. That $2.85 per hour times however many minimum-wage workers there were in the United States was the exact price of the Clinton administration’s failures of character and policy, and Riley thought Gore was a fraud, though with a small “f,” not with a capital “F,” like those sleazy Clintons (nor did she believe a thing the Republicans said about their activities in Arkansas). Nadie (whom Richie still saw once in a while, although she said that her relationship with him had convinced her that she was a lesbian, and he should take that as a compliment) said that they were living in a fool’s paradise if they thought that (a) Bradley had a chance and (b) Bradley was a real liberal, but Riley was nothing if not stubborn. Her attitude had hardened toward everyone except, Richie thought, Charlie. Charlie had had a revelation in the fall, on the Appalachian Trail, and was now getting ready to apply to nursing school after taking a few courses that he’d missed in college. He wanted to be a nurse and an EMT trauma specialist — one of those guys who fly to people who find themselves on narrow cliffs overlooking precipitous valleys and must be rescued by someone swinging from a rope underneath a helicopter. Riley was very enthusiastic — she said school would keep him occupied for at least three years. The nursing school wasn’t far from their apartment.

Ivy, too, found herself single again. The first thing that happened, around New Year’s, was that Ivy uncovered the fact that the billionaire was sleeping with a twenty-three-year-old M.B.A. student at NYU. When she confronted him, he asked her to marry him, and for about a week she considered this option, but then, at a party at the manse in New Rochelle, a woman she had met through him said, “Oh, heavens, Ivy, don’t you know Bob’s philosophy of the bedroom? ‘A wife, a mistress, and a bit on the side.’ ” According to Ivy, who came to Washington with Leo and spent the weekend on Richie’s couch, Bob had confessed that wifely duties were rather more arduous, and possibly less rewarding, than mistress duties, but he still considered marrying him to be a promotion, and so she let things go along, apparently congenially, until Valentine’s Day, when she sent him a breakup valentine. For Richie, as for many divorced men with no talent for being single, the fantasy of reuniting with Ivy persisted, but in fact that would mean weekends together with Leo. Leo was much easier one to one. Ivy said that it was her experience that the marriages that lasted forever were in fact the worst ones. Richie knew she meant Michael and Loretta, and he wasn’t about to disagree with her — the screaming matches about Chance (with the monsignor refereeing from the sidelines) were as loud as he’d ever heard. They did not argue about whether or not Chance was going to spend the next year or so trailering Bogey and Bacall from rodeo to rodeo all over the West (and maybe up to Calgary) — he was. Rather, they argued about who was to blame, either because of a failure of parenting styles or because of dysfunctional genes. Tia and Binky seemed to get the message, though: they got all A’s and did what they were told.

As for Richie’s reelection campaign, his seat was safe — his opponent this time was a thirty-year-old possibly being trained to do such basic operations as read, add, subtract, and sign checks. The boy’s main qualifications as a candidate were an aggressive posture and a readiness to say, “I would like to see what Congressman Langdon has actually done for the businessmen of the ninth district!” The national Democratic Party was on track to raise more money than the Republicans, and more money than they had ever raised before since the fall of Rome. It seemed to Richie that all he had to do to get funds was smile and say thank you; his coffers were at $560,000, including what he hadn’t spent the last time. Nadie found this worrisome, as did her girlfriend who ran a fitness gym in Arlington that was full of Republican women in leotards (“She has claw marks all over her body,” said Nadie). But Richie felt good — he felt that he, too, had survived, just like Clinton and Gore. What he said about Clinton on the campaign trail was that he admired the man. Watching him get through his presidency was like watching someone strolling along on the other side of a nice green hedge. He was smiling, he was chatting on his mobile phone, he was enjoying the landscape, and he seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing. And then there was a break in the hedge, and you saw that vicious dogs were attached to both of his ankles by their teeth, growling, biting, being dragged across the grass, refusing to let go. Riley was right in her way, but Richie thought he was also right, and the donations pouring into Democratic coffers seemed to demonstrate that the voters thought that anyone would be better than the Republicans.

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JESSE HAD DECIDED, with some input from Jen and her brothers, that it was better to raise GMO crops than not to do so, and the logic was simple: There was only so much land, and the world population was rising faster and faster. A farmer’s primary moral obligation was to avoid famine and soil loss, and, at least for now, GMO corn and beans were doing that. You had to be careful, you had to be precise, but Jesse was. His dad might have been a saint (every time he’d said this, his dad shook his head), but when he started farming in the 1930s ( and grew his own hybrid seed, according to an old story), things were much different. The GMO corn Jesse planted was Roundup-resistant, like his beans. He could and did make the ecological case.

It must have been mid-August, and hot, when Jesse was driving on the other side of Denby, past the Gorman place on Quarry Road, and saw three heads in the cornfield, just visible above the very green and very tall rows. He didn’t think anything of it; no one else mentioned it at the café. But after Labor Day, it came out that Bill Gorman had gotten some legal papers in the mail accusing him of stealing Monsanto property, and Jesse thought of those heads, in feed caps, looking down, pausing once or twice. He realized that those men had been taking samples of Bill’s plants — maybe leaves, maybe kernels — and then they must have tested the genetic material. At first, according to Russ Pinckard, Bill treated this as a joke — he really did think some prankster had forged some papers in order to tease him for not using Roundup Ready seed, which was expensive and picky. Then he had put off addressing it; there was too much else to do around the farm, around any farm, especially at harvest, to waste your time looking for a lawyer and dealing with something that was obviously crap.

Except that he then got a bill, or something of the sort, saying that he owed Monsanto money for stealing their property. Rumors abounded concerning the amount of money—$1,500, $15,000, $34,500. No one, least of all Bill, could take this seriously, and then he went to a lawyer in Usherton with the papers, and the lawyer had never heard of such a thing. However, a lawyer in Des Moines had heard of such a thing. When Bill pointed out (in a rather loud voice) that he did not use Monsanto seed and never had, it was suggested that pollen from the neighboring farm, which belonged to a big operation based in Omaha, must have drifted into his field — a kind of wave of Monsanto-related corn pushing into a larger population of unrelated corn indicated that possibly wind drift “accounted” for the “theft”; however, Monsanto asked permission to test the rest of the field, and to test the crop already harvested, before it was taken to the grain elevator.