Jane Smiley - Golden Age

It wasn’t until Wednesday the following week that either of them mentioned Loretta. It was a short conversation that took place as they were walking down 13th Street, eating butter chicken wrapped in chapati bread, purchased from a food truck.

Michael: “Loretta found out where Chance has been.”

Richie: “Where is that?”

Michael: “The ranch. I told her, but she didn’t believe me. She never believes me.”

Richie: “What is he doing there?”

Michael: “Minding his own business and staying out of the way. Also roping cattle. But Gail was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis, and Chance got nervous and called Loretta. She hasn’t been invited to the patient’s bedside, though.”

They continued to walk. Richie finished his lunch and wiped his fingers on the three paper napkins he had taken from the food truck, then tossed them into a trash can. This took about four minutes. By that time, he had worked himself up to asking a question: “How long since you’ve talked to her?”

Michael looked at his cell phone, then said, “Two years, five months, and about four days.”

“How do you decide things?”

“She decides, the lawyer tells me.”

“No divorce?”

“Not permitted.”

They came to the corner of Farragut, and turned toward the park. It was too hot already to run, but Richie was rather looking forward to the walk. Michael said, “Every time I walk in Rock Creek Park, I think of murder.”

Richie said, “I can’t avoid thinking of massacres, I guess, but I never think of murder,” and to himself, he added, “anymore.”

—

HENRY WAS STARING out the window at the two linden trees in his front yard. They were both bright yellow, but the one on the left had red-orange leaves scattered through the yellow, and when the wind picked up, they fluttered in a pattern that looked like the profile of a face. He took a sip of coffee, and there was a knock that he recognized — Alexis — on his door. On Wednesdays, her school got out early. He called out for her to come in.

The Charlie in her was like the red leaves among the yellow ones — almost but not quite an illusion. Her hair was dark and straight, her eyes were brown, but she had Charlie’s nose and his personality — inquisitive and friendly rather than doctrinaire, like Riley. She said, “Today is your birthday.”

Henry was genuinely surprised. Yes, October, yes, changing leaves. But he hadn’t celebrated a birthday in so long that it had slipped his mind. He looked at his watch, but of course she was right — that she shared with Riley. He said, “Good Lord, I am seventy-nine! What in the world happened?”

Alexis came over and sat in the chair across from him. She said, “Tell me about when you were nine.” She had turned nine in May.

“I’m sure my mama made me an angel-food cake, which was a very dry, tall cake with a hole in the middle, and she would have frosted it with whipped cream, which I would have scraped off and left in a pile on my plate.”

“You were a poor eater.”

“That’s not a bad thing. Say ‘fastidious.’ ”

She said, “Fastidious. But Mom says it is a waste of good food.”

“The thing is to be choosy before you even start cooking or buying. You tell her that you will do the shopping.”

“She hates shopping,” said Alexis.

“We can do that today. For my seventy-ninth birthday, we can go buy only what you and I like, and she will have to eat it.”

Alexis giggled.

“For the rest of the day, we can do what you want to do. We didn’t do that on your birthday, so we can do it on mine.”

“I want to do my homework thing for one half hour.”

“Go get it, then. Arithmetic.”

Alexis ran out the door. Henry got out the pot and the wooden spoon.

A boy in Alexis’s fourth-grade class had been diagnosed ADD. His parents, instead of putting him on Ritalin, had decided to train him like a police horse: while he worked, one parent or the other would march around him, beating a pot with a spoon, and he would have to concentrate to do his work. He gave a report on it. Alexis had come home demanding to try it, but she had her own wrinkle. Since she was taking piano lessons, the pot beater had to use different rhythms—4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 7/8. Quite often the session devolved into chaos since Henry’s sense of rhythm wasn’t great, but she loved doing her homework now, and usually went from homework straight to piano practice.

She returned and put her arithmetic sheets on the table with two pencils, and Henry set the stove timer for thirty minutes. Then he picked up his pan and spoon. Alexis said, “Ready, set, go!” The song in Henry’s head was “Stormy Weather,” the Lena Horne version, which had a steady backbeat, one of Philip’s all-time favorites: “Can’t go on, everything I had is gone.” But he had gone on, hadn’t he?

Alexis shouted “Beep!” and he switched to “All Out of Love,” another of Philip’s favorites, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, a faster beat, a song he had listened to over and over after Philip left him, and then again, over and over, after Philip died. “What are you thinking of? What are you thinking of? What are you thinking of?” His eyes started to sparkle, so when Alexis shouted “Beep!” he went as far back as he could go—“Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette,” a song that had made him fall over laughing when he was fourteen — every word about something his mother deplored. “Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate / That you hate to make him wait….” After that, “The Tennessee Waltz,” and then Alexis said, “I’m done!” and waved her paper. Henry took a deep breath, set down his instruments, and flopped into his chair. The timer had not gone off. He said, “Seven minutes to spare! You’re getting good!”

“Check it!”

He did. Every answer was correct (and when she got to fifth grade, he would have to use a calculator). He said, “Hundred percent! I think you need a birthday present!”

Very seriously, Alexis said, “Can it be not educational?”

Henry leaned toward her and whispered in her ear, “Yes.”

—

FELICITY WAS NOT sorry that Max the math guy had faded out of her life, only to be replaced by the much more muscular Jason, who was an education major specializing in kinesiology, and, yes, his coursework included pocket billiards and racquetball, and weren’t schools all over the country cutting phys ed? But since she was in her first year of her M.S. in microbiology, she had no fears for her economic future, and he had taught her enough about billiards for her to realize that she had exceptional talents in that direction (he agreed). However, it was one thing to skip your racquetball class in order to Occupy ISU, and quite another to skip both your Insect-Virus Interactions: A Molecular Perspective class and your Foodborne Hazards class in order to join Occupy ISU in a drizzle. But Felicity considered herself even more of an observer now that observing was her vocation, and so she skipped class and went. She even carried a sign she had made out of the bottom of an Amazon shipping box, “We Are the 99.99 %” It did not make an iota of difference that the family farm was worth almost six million dollars if you dared not buy a new car and add to the debt because, however much the farm was worth, it was not cash. Felicity knew that, because of corn and bean prices, the value of the farm was bubbling again, the way it had in the eighties. She thought her father should be paid not to farm. Her father didn’t want to know what the farm was worth, and her mother didn’t care, since it would never be sold. The Occupy movement was not about farming, but if anyone had any sense, Felicity thought, it would be.

They got off the bus at the Union, walked up past Carver. There were about seven people standing by the Campanile, but then Felicity saw the group, maybe a hundred or more, standing on the steps of Beardshear. The wind was blowing from the south, so maybe the protesters were chanting something, but Felicity couldn’t hear it. Jason grabbed her hand and pulled her. He seemed excited.