Jane Smiley - Golden Age

But you would not have known that Richie had ever said “boo” to anyone from the White House, or so much as frowned in Cheney’s direction, because, in preparation for the vote on the Iraq Resolution, the Capitol was swarming with them — Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, all the way down to Rod Paige, who was the secretary of education. They came to his office, they knocked on his door, they took him aside in the corridors, they sat down with him in the cafeteria. They talked to Lucille, Riley, Corrie, Leslie, Rudy, Ben, Sam, Jenny, everyone. His staffers pretended that he was inalterably opposed to giving President Bush the power to go to war, when, in fact, Richie had always planned to vote yes, in spite of what his constituents might desire. He did, in fact, expect to be thrown out of his seat on November 6, and to be showing up at Michael’s office on November 7, hat in hand.

He had stayed with Ivy and Leo in Sag Harbor in August, and Ivy was furious with him. She was right about everything: there was no evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to 9/11; Saddam Hussein was contained; Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction; the Middle East was a powder keg and so fate should not be tempted; Afghanistan was the point; Osama bin Laden was the point. Richie’s view was that the Resolution did not have to lead to war — it was meant to put the ball in Saddam’s court, to challenge him to clean up his act. It was a resolution , not necessarily a declaration of war, even though some of his colleagues thought it was. Ivy said that Richie was deluding himself, and maybe he was, but he felt Charlie like a weight on his conscience that got heavier every day.

No remains had ever been found. He was one of six. Perhaps, Richie thought, he had taken a window seat in the front of the plane, and that was the reason — the remains had distributed themselves in an airplane shape diagonally from outside of the first-floor Defense Intelligence Agency through the Naval Intelligence Agency and into the office of the administrative assistant to the army. There was bunching, scattering, and empty space. The empty space appeared to be where the wings had been, but perhaps that was an illusion. Charlie and the five other ghosts (as Richie thought of them) had been included in a memorial at Arlington a year after the attack. After attending the ceremony with all of his staff and Nadie and Alexis (aged four months, born May 11), Richie had felt less at peace rather than more. Since then, he’d found himself saying words like “united front,” “strong response,” “hit back,” “gathering threat,” and “wake up and smell the coffee.” That he could agree with Cheney (and disagree with Jerry Nadler) in this, and yet go after Cheney about the Energy Task Force, made him feel schizophrenic and flexible, though not both at the same time.

It didn’t help that Alexis, whom he saw every day, was emerging into that stage of infancy that was maybe the cutest and most appealing. She was smiling; she was staring at her fists; she was grasping rattles and fingers and growing out her mop of hair (brown, like Riley’s); her gaze followed Richie as he walked away from her, saying, “Are you my dad? Are you my dad?” Nadie, too, was encouraging him to be more aggressive. And Lucille. And Ben and Sam. Enough had been had by all. If Saddam was allowed to do as he wanted, well, what about Iran? Those opposed to the Resolution brought up Iran all the time. Iran was our enemy. Iran was Saddam’s enemy. Saddam had been our friend all through that war — there was a photo of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand. But Cheney and his minions made the case that if Saddam had been our “ally” (and the word always had oral quotation marks around it), and he was out of control, then it was our job to rein him in, and, in the process, show Iran an example that they would do well to heed.

Richie knew that there was some fuzzy background there that both his uncle Arthur and his dad had been involved in. His mom was not clear in her own mind what it was, only that, when he and Michael were about six months old, his dad had disappeared for four days and come home looking sun-swept and haggard. (Well, “jetlagged” was the real word, she said, but it looked like more than that. It looked as though his trip had taken him somewhere that even World War II hadn’t taken him.) Only when the embassy had been attacked in ’79 had he mentioned that he had once been to Iran, had helped to deliver cash to the…well, to someone. But she had noticed a change in their marriage that she dated from that summer: he was sharper, more ambitious, away more often. She’d thought at the time that he simply hated fatherhood, or her version of motherhood, but imagining that trip he’d taken gave her pause. She’d once mentioned it to Arthur, but he hadn’t taken the bait, said nothing.

And so the Resolution was passed — the New York vote split down the middle. Jerry Nadler stared at him when he cast his vote, maybe in disbelief, maybe in contempt. The balls were in the air now, Richie thought, as he sat in his seat and gazed around the Chamber at all the yakking, at DeLay, Gephardt, Pelosi, Hastert, Armey. Yes, many balls were in the air of all different colors, and Richie didn’t see anyone who could catch them.

THE DUPLEX Henry shared with Riley and Alexis was in Northwest. It was an attractive, faintly Colonial brick cube with two entrances and a pleasant lawn that looked out onto trees in three directions. It was about as unlike Chicago and northern Wisconsin as you could get without palm trees, Henry and Riley agreed. Downstairs, there was a living room, a largish kitchen, a dining room, a sunroom, two bedrooms, and two baths. Upstairs, there was a bedroom, a bathroom, a room “formerly known as the kitchen,” as Riley said, and stacks and boxes and shelves of books. One of the last things that Charlie had done before 9/11 was drive Henry’s U-Haul full of books from Evanston to Washington. Henry had bought the house, but had planned to rent out part of it. After Charlie died, the plan changed.

Henry didn’t see Riley and Alexis very often. His entrance went to the garage and the driveway, her entrance out the front door to the sidewalk; she and Alexis usually took the bus to Tenleytown Station, then the Metro to work. He didn’t hear her often, either; the insulation was so good between the two apartments that he would have said that Alexis didn’t cry at all.

Henry did cry, though, and surely Riley did. He liked Riley, he liked Charlie’s parents, who had visited twice, and he liked Alexis, for a baby, but it was painful to discover how they receded in his affections now that Charlie was gone. He had known that he liked, or even loved Charlie in an avuncular way. Sometimes joked that, had he produced his ideal son, that boy would have been like Charlie, unlike himself, a throwback to the regular Langdon/Cheek/Vogel/Augsberger stock. Charlie had said, “What about the mom?” but smiled as he said it, and Henry had to admit that he hadn’t thought to imagine Fiona. Henry didn’t think Riley liked him much, but living here was convenient, cheap, and pleasant for her. He could be relied upon to look after Alexis if Riley went out, and to talk to her, and even hold her (carefully, gingerly) if he had to.

When Claire had visited in December, she was astonished at the mess, and congratulated him: he was loosening up! But it wasn’t that — the boxes of books were not unpacked, but they were neatly stacked and out of the way. It was that he was on to something new, and most of his days were spent at the Folger. What he was interested in was not Shakespeare, though he had started by looking at archaic origins for some of the plays, just out of curiosity. But then he saw, lying on a table in the reading room, a manuscript in Gaelic, and he realized that he had missed his calling. His calling was Ireland — the strange mix of Gaelic, Viking, Anglo-Saxon, and indigenous inhabitants that the English and the Icelanders and the Scots and the French only thought about when they had to. He felt Gerald of Wales inside himself, lifting his gaze and looking across the Irish Sea, toward Waterford.