Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“How’s Antaeus?”

“He killed a rabbit.”

“No! I thought he wasn’t very predatory.”

“It was a stupid rabbit. It ran across his path trying to get to the warren, and he grabbed it and played with it until it had a heart attack. He was kind of disappointed when it died.”

Emily said, “He is a strange dog, but so cute.”

“He sits on my lap while I watch TV. Makes it hard to knit.” Then, “Have you seen Jonah?”

Emily said, “No news is good news.”

That was always true with Jonah, who at the moment was pursuing his studies in massage at the Monterey Institute of Touch and living with his girlfriend, whose job was to house-sit a very beautiful estate somewhere back in Carmel Valley so that the owners would feel at home when and if they came to visit for a week or two every year. Jonah didn’t even have to mow the lawn — a crew in a truck came and tended the landscaping every week, the irrigation system ran on its own, lights turned on and off, and there were figures in the windows that looked like inhabitants. Her mom said, “How is Corey?”

“Mom, Corey is not in my life anymore.”

“He was nice. He stood up to you.”

Emily did not say that it was unlikely that she would ever get married at this point, that teaching kids to ride made her not want any of her own, that she valued her vast quantities of free time — even at the gallery, she mostly sat there when she wasn’t smiling at browsing tourists.

They did not talk about her dad. It was only after Emily hung up and was running her bath that she realized that, once again, her mother hadn’t answered that question about how she was.

—

THEY HAD STOPPED talking about ISIS and gone into the kitchen. There could be no talk about ISIS in front of Alexis — Riley’s rule — because she would ask questions (always did), then, if you answered honestly (have to do that, another of Riley’s rules), she would have nightmares. Henry had to admit that he and Alexis had cooked up a bit of a mess, but Richie was good about eating whatever they happened to serve. Now he was holding his plate out for seconds. Riley left meals to Alexis, and with Henry’s help, Alexis made the most of her opportunity. This week, they had eaten pasta for four nights, followed by chili, then nachos, now this dish that vaguely resembled chilaquiles. If she wanted a steak or pork chops, Henry was called upon to do the grilling, which he did in the broiler with a grill pan. He was a better chef now than he had been half his lifetime ago, because Alexis liked to eat, and she was particular. She was only twelve, but she didn’t say, “I don’t like that,” she said, “The flavor isn’t very complex, is it?” or “The texture of those potatoes should be lighter. Do you think Mom would mind if I ordered a potato ricer?”

Over the last couple of years, Henry thought, Richie had seemed to sort himself out, to relax. He was a little redeemed, too. His Wikipedia entry said that he had been honest, had worked hard for his constituents through difficult circumstances, was known for his sense of humor. “Now working on environmental issues at an unorthodox nonprofit, the ReNewVa think tank.”

Alexis spooned herself another small helping and said, “The fried tortillas could have been crispier. I don’t understand that part yet.”

Richie said, “Three days a week, thirty dollars an hour, I’ll pick you up after school, do your homework for you.”

Just a nanosecond of shock passed over Alexis’s face before she realized Richie was ribbing her. Alexis had never been teased — maybe a mistake there. But she laughed and said, “I am worth more than that.”

Riley said, “Oh, yes.”

Henry often wondered what Riley would be like if Charlie had never been on that plane, if that plane had never crashed into the Pentagon. It was like teasing yourself with alternative-history questions: not only what if no Iraq War (they had talked about that on the porch — no Iraq War, no ISIS, said Riley), but what if the Supreme Court had declined to weigh in on Bush versus Gore, and what if Kennedy had backed the CIA on the Bay of Pigs invasion, what if the Nazis hadn’t seen quantum mechanics as a Jewish plot, thereby losing the chance to build an atom bomb, but also what if Harold II, the Anglo-Saxon king, had not had to force-march his troops to Yorkshire, to fend off Harald Hardrada before heading 275 miles south to Hastings? Riley might have gotten fed up with Charlie, never told him that she was pregnant, never produced Alexis, and never found that side of herself that could spoil a child, and could also be patient, contemplative, explanatory, yielding. As for himself, his alternative history without Alexis would have been a drying up, a shutting down — his death just a book being closed and put back upon the shelf.

Alexis got up and began to clear the plates. Richie burped, on purpose. Alexis said, “I know that’s supposed to be a compliment.”

Riley said, “Have you seen the documents from the ICIJ tax-avoidance investigation?”

Henry said, “What’s that?” even as Richie said, “Not all of them. There’s hundreds of them.”

Riley looked at Henry. “Investigating tax avoidance through offshoring and money-laundering schemes. The documents turned up two years ago, but they are complex. Anyway, there’s our boy, Michael Langdon. He’s got money stashed in the Caymans, Monaco, and, for heaven’s sake, the Cook Islands.”

Richie said, “I guess that’s the part Loretta doesn’t know about.”

Henry said, “How much?” He didn’t know what he was expecting, but when Riley said, “Thirty million,” he wasn’t startled, hardly impressed.

Richie said, “Well, he bought that house for cash.”

Henry said, “How much does he owe Janet, or Andy, or any of his other investors?”

“Who knows?” said Richie.

Henry thought his nephew’s reaction was surprisingly mild, almost indifferent. Maybe, he thought, this money was not news to Richie. And never had been.

The conversation moved on to Alexis’s music camp in Virginia; she was leaving in four days. Henry couldn’t help watching Richie for the rest of the evening, though, just to see. Nothing. Well, he thought, sometimes even academic rivalries died down after sixty years.

—

THE FIRST PERSON to have lied about Andy’s birthday would have been her mother, who wanted her to be off to school and out of her hair, and so she had said she was born in August — August 4, to be exact — and so that was Andy’s official birthday all through college, August 4, 1920. Or, rather, that was Hildy’s birthday. When she was living in Kansas City during the war, she had gone back to her real birthday, October 3, but she had gotten into the habit of telling people different days — the 4th, the 10th, the 6th — to avoid birthday attention. As a result, perhaps, of that (Frank, she thought, had been truly uncertain, and so had eventually fixed upon the 6th, and maybe he had told the kids that when they asked), she faced no greetings, not even any communications of any sort, on her ninety-fourth birthday. The e-mails when she opened her account were from Orbitz, Lucky Brand, Hanes, and Tusk. She clicked on a Salon story about Citibank and Goldman Sachs complaining about the heavy hand of government regulation under the Obama regime, which, as far as Andy understood, had not regulated anyone, and had dropped the case against Michael. Then she deleted all new e-mails and sat staring at her computer. Ninety-four years old! From the outside, ninety-four years seemed like quite a lot. Over the summer, she had let that number intimidate her — although she was in pretty good shape, she had had her bedroom furniture moved from the upstairs space to the downstairs former study. She often went upstairs, to open all the windows and enjoy the breeze.