Golden Age Read Free Page B

kissed his own wife of one year, Ivy, on the cheek. Ivy made a face and squeezed his knee affectionately. They were in complete agreement that this reunion would count as one of the four times per year that they had to see his brother, Loretta, and the kids.
    The real problem, Richie knew that Loretta knew, was that Michael’s mistress, Lynne, had kicked him out two weeks ago, and, worse than that, it had been a surprise—Michael had thought he was set until someone he preferred came along. It was pretty obvious to Richie that Lynne had taken up with Michael mostly to get connected to his Wall Street friends as clients for her remodeling business. Loretta wasn’t supposed to know this, of course.
    Now Michael got himself together. In their whole life, possibly even in the womb, Michael had been good at getting himself together, though often his initial go-to strategy had been hammering Richie afew times. Michael coughed and said, “Okay. Okay.” Then he leaned forward and poked Binky lightly in the chest. He smooched at her, “Peek-a-boo, you!” He held out his arms, and Loretta put their still-fussing daughter into them. He stood up. “I think we need a little walk.”
    Nothing about this persuaded Richie that it would be good to have a kid.

    THE PERSON Charlie reminded Arthur Manning of was not Tim as much as his own father, and not his father as he’d known him, but his father in old black-and-white photographs from the 1890s—he had short pants and long hair, and had been told to be still but wasn’t quite able to accomplish that; the ghost of a smile fluttered around the child’s mouth, strangely predicting the ebullient Brinks Manning, who spent a lifetime not going into battle, but procuring things for going into battle, not caring for his son, but making sure that his son was cared for by kind and amusing nannies, teachers, principals. There was no one more useful, and in some sense more self-assured, than a practical young man, and Charlie Wickett was a practical man who, by his own account, had been solving this problem and that problem for as long as he could remember. (When is the best time to escape the house? When Mom is taking a shower. When is the best time to talk your way into the high-dive class? When they are fed up with you but can’t resist your smile. When is the best time to ask a girl out? When she thinks her new haircut makes her look bad. When is the best time to tell your parents you are leaving St. Louis for Colorado? When they are delirious with relief that you actually graduated from college and have a job, even though it is with some sort of wilderness rafting company. When is the best time to dive out of the raft? Just above a waterfall that looks dramatic but really isn’t—gives the customers a frisson of excitement and is quite refreshing on a hot afternoon, especially good if the other rafting guides are coached to shout, “Hey! Hey! Oh my God!”)
    Charlie made Arthur laugh, and he made Arthur grateful that he had missed those early years. After dessert, Debbie sat down next to Charlie, and she and Arthur did the thing that maybe they weredestined to do: they alternated telling him stories about his mother, Fiona—fox hunting, jumping huge jumps in shows, standing on her horse’s back and racing down the hill—but sweeter ones, too, Fiona teaching her horse to push a little tire with his nose, Tim hiding raw eggs all over the house one Easter, playing in his band, the Colts, going to a used-car dealer with his best friend and paying sixty dollars for a ten-year-old Dodge with sawdust in the engine that managed to roll down the hill out of the dealer’s yard but got no farther. “And,” said Arthur, “those are only the stories we know. They were pretty good at keeping secrets, Tim and Fiona.”
    “So good we never realized that your parents knew each other,” said Debbie.
    Arthur had told Charlie that Tim had been killed in Vietnam, but none of the details, and