America America (49 page)
December 20th, 1971
Dear Corey,
I have asked your mother to give this to you on the day you pass from the world you’ve known into the world beyond.
I envy you because you are going your way with a clear eye, having seen so much of what is noble in our own small sphere and also so much of what is venial and a little of what is mortal.
I’ve told your parents that we are adding a gift to your education. When my own father sent me away to school he said one thing: “The rest is up to you.”
So perhaps that is how I should leave this, as well.
As Ever—
L.M.
Mr. Metarey’s financial gift didn’t cover everything, as he easily could have; but it covered a good deal, and often over the next four years as I worked at the circulation desk of the student library to pay off what remained of my tuition, I thought of him, speaking to me from across the years. He would have told me that work is good. He seemed to have absorbed the lessons of every class, of my own then and of the one I am a member of now, and of his own, as well, which is beyond what I or even our children—his granddaughters—will ever know. He would have told me that it is perilous to be given too much, that fortune of all kinds weakens the spirit. He would have told me that a man cannot overcome his past but that he cannot not try; that, with care, the wounds of one generation are diluted in the one that follows, and again in the one after that, so that, if we are lucky, we can bring forth in our children the things for which we have strived ourselves. But we cannot make them want what we want. They, too, will strive.
And I suppose that I would have told him other things in return. That Henry Bonwiller was eventually brought down not by JoEllen Charney, as I imagine Liam Metarey feared, but by Anodyne Energy. Anodyne Energy because in the mind of the public, that accusation—which, even after the hearings, remained ill understood—never needed to be proved. The shady drilling leases, the backdated options, the shell corporations—not many people comprehended these things, but they served, finally, to fell a man whose country had turned against him. In 1976, he won his Senate seat for a fifth term, but he lost it in the midterm elections that followed. We were in a new political era then, and the whiff of what Anodyne represented, the old-school horse-trading and unvarnished arithmetic of personal gain, had become a killing weight to any politician who still pulled it.
The stories about JoEllen Charney would surface and resurface over all the years since then, but the Bonwiller family—aided, of course, by loyalists like my wife—would through sheer reach of its power simply tamp them down. Over and over again. Henry Bonwiller had her murdered for what she knew about Anodyne—it wasn’t long before that rumor was whispered over Scotches at Albany cocktail parties, and it wasn’t long—although I’m sure it’s not true—before it became the most widely believed of all. But there were a half dozen other versions as well, more minor but more damning: he ran her over with his car when she told him she was pregnant; in midwinter he got her drunk and left her in the woods; his wife had her poisoned and then dropped in the snow. And there’s even one I’ve heard lately that’s got my own attention again: that he didn’t lose control of the car at all but was intentionally run off the road by his enemies—but my mind stops when I consider it. If Liam Metarey were alive he’d have heard all of these conjectures by now, thrown about with what I consider a troubling lack of authority, and I must say I miss the possibility of what he might eventually have told me. I know I wanted—I still want—to tell him that Henry Bonwiller survived the whole affair, and that he himself would have survived it, too. But I can only guess, in the end, if this would have made a difference.
I am tied to that family and will never be untied. And now and then I see my own past—my past with my own parents, in my own house, among my own people—now and then I see my own past as being so distant it has nearly disappeared. Sometimes that seems like an unfathomable loss. But what is there to do about such feelings?
Clara and I live near Masaguint now—the old Dutch Downs—not far from the Millburys’ blueberry marsh, and in the evenings after dinner we can sit on the screened porch and not hear any cars. At least for the time being. We’re ten minutes from the border of Carrol County and a little less than an hour—without traffic—from Saline. Clara works full-time these days for the League of Women Voters, a position that puts her in contact with almost all the Democratic officeholders in this part of the state, and she still writes her letters to the editors of the
Courier-Express
and
The Times Union
and
The Plain Dealer
. And now and then she gives me an inkling that she plans to run for office herself. Around here that means a counselorship and then, if that works out, perhaps the statehouse. Whatever the case, she seems to like her job, and she works at it long hours, which means I usually stay at the paper myself till mid-evening, checking the morning’s stories and sorting through the piles of tips; when I’m through with that, I’ll stop off at Burdick’s—it and Gervin’s are the lone survivors downtown—and at home I’ll fix something with reasonable care for the two of us. Then I’ll send off an e-mail to one or another of the girls, and occasionally I’ll even write a letter. When Clara pulls up after dark in her Subaru, I’ll set both our dinner plates in the microwave to heat. That’s our life. We stay in touch fairly well with everyone.
What have I learned? The old verities, mostly: that love for our children is what sustains us; that people are not what they seem; that those we hate bear some wound equal to our own; that power is desperation’s salve, and that this fact as much as any is what dooms and dooms us. That we never learn the truth. When you’ve been involved in something like this, when in your memory there’s some marauding creature still alive, some fleeting, nightmarish beast always running up behind you, it’s in the nature of all of us, I think, to want to turn and see it, no matter how terrible or how mild it might be. But as in the childhood dream, you can’t ever really do that. There it is, spinning one way and then the other, exactly as fast as you do, always staying behind you somehow, always just managing to vanish from your eye.
June Metarey died last year, I’m sorry to say, walking one of Churchill’s grandpuppies. Other than the weekly dinners we used to have together, we hadn’t seen much of her toward the end, for no good reason, and this still saddens Clara. But she is grateful for the way her mother went, swiftly and without anguish. Christian never married but she has a daughter, adopted from Guangzhou, and the two of them are learning to farm organically, on a small but very pretty parcel near Putney, Vermont. Although Trieste Millbury continues to send me scribbled notes from coffee shops around Boston, I’ve seen her only once since the dinner at our house: her father made her resign the internship. And I have to say I can understand his view. But she did come by the office in the spring to thank me for the partial tuition scholarship that the Speaker-Sentinel Foundation—with Mr. and Mrs. Millbury’s approval, of course—had offered her when she was accepted at Harvard.
Gil McKinstrey has got to be close to seventy, but he’s still working as a finish carpenter for a developer who’s building some higher-end subdivisions around here. Carlton Sample retired twenty years ago and owns a share in a wine store in the Oaks mall—right beneath the boughs of the great tree, as it happens—and as far as I know, Glenn Burrant is still living in Canada. Vance Trawbridge, as everyone knows, died tragically in a fall, shortly after he finished writing his memoir but before it was published. That memoir shows a courageous man, but also a more melancholy and conflicted one than I think any of us thought. Holly Steen is the only one I’ve lost touch with completely, although I’m tempted now and then, out of a kind of tender curiosity more than anything else, to try to find her. Astor Highbridge is a professor of American studies at Berkeley, and he still spends a weekend with us every two or three years when he’s back in this part of the country.
My wedding to Clara took place twenty-six years ago this month, in a small adobe church in the mountains near Questa, New Mexico—Clara wanted to be as far from home as possible, in every way she could. It was a very small ceremony, just my father and Mrs. Metarey and, yes, Christian, who hugged me at the end, the way, I suppose, she might have hugged her brother.
I can understand why. The fall of my senior year at Dunleavy, Andrew Metarey was killed, in a rescue operation near Phu Cat, when his medevac helicopter came down under enemy fire. Three months later the Paris Peace Accords were signed. I took the train home for the funeral, and it was the last time I saw Christian and Clara before I went off to college. It was almost embarrassing to be there with the family that day, so great was their loss. I think everyone felt that way. Gil McKinstrey was a pallbearer again, along with Mr. Metarey’s cousins. Christian, I know, could not even speak.
The relatives of the other soldiers who died in that helicopter still gather at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington each October, and Christian and Clara and I go every year. We have a picture of Andrew over our sink, holding Churchill as a puppy, high up over his head. So we still see him every day, and we see that sweet white dog, too, and the younger version of his wistful eyes. I’ve never had a brother, so I don’t think I can really know how it feels for either Clara or Christian. And I don’t see how June Metarey could have lived through any of it.
That covers it, I think.
My father, for his own part, is still at Walnut Orchards, going nearly as strong as ever. Preparing, I sometimes think, to live a century. He’s still reading several hours a day, as though he thinks there’s an exam coming up. That tickles me. His old friends don’t know what to make of it, but it’s turned Dr. Jadoon into a believer in something greater than physiology or brain anatomy. Recently, Dad has begun reading to Mr. McGowar, as well, during their afternoons together. Usually Dickens, he tells me, which seems to speak to both of them somehow. Then they’ll go out to check on the grounds.
Dad’s arthritis still bothers him, and recently we were told his heart is enlarged, but neither of these problems stops him if he wants to do something. Next week, for example, we’re planning to go together to a show of hand tools from colonial times, a traveling exhibit that’s stopping in the Carrol Fairgrounds on its way down to Cleveland. I’ll wear a tie, no doubt, since I’ll be coming from work. And he’ll wear his Red Wings. That’s just the way we are. We’ll have a pleasant afternoon together, even though he’s showing his cantankerous side more and more these days. With experience, I’ve learned how to soften it. I just step away for a minute. I’ll go use the restroom, or step outdoors to answer a message on my cellphone, and I know that when I return he’ll be sitting quietly on a bench somewhere, reading.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is that he recently threw a bag of apples, one by one, at a car that was parking outside his window at Walnut Orchards. But it was a BMW, and the logic of it—
his
logic, at least, which I could recognize—made me a little less concerned about him. I suppose I don’t know where this behavior is going to lead us in the end, but no matter what happens we still have our regular Sunday excursions together. These never fail to calm him, somehow. Every time we take my car to Greenhaven Cemetery and visit the hills around my mother’s grave, he is led back for a few hours to the graceful quiet of his early days. A man can range far in his life, but in the end it doesn’t really mean much: now that my wife is so busy, and our own girls have gone their way in the world, these hours with my father are among the most lovely of my week. That’s what it comes down to, I guess. We still like to walk in those hills, especially when it’s warm, and sometimes now we just stand in them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m deeply grateful to so many for their help in writing this novel. Most especially to my wife, Barbara, who spent almost as much time with it as I did, and to two trusted friends, my editor, Kate Medina, and my agent, Maxine Groffsky. But especially, also, to several others who read the manuscript so kindly and carefully: Joe Blair, Po Bronson, Chard deNiord, Michael Flaum, Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine, Bill Houser, Jon Maksik, Leslie Maksik, Lauren Reece, and Steve Sellers. I’m indebted to Fred Gerr and Tom Pitoniak, for their scrupulous and exacting work, and to many wonderful people at Random House, including Gina Centrello, Sanyu Dillon, Frankie Jones, Jynne Martin, Sally Marvin, Kate Norris, Beth Pearson, Tom Perry, Abby Plesser, Robin Rolewicz, Jennifer Smith, Beck Stvan, and Simon Sullivan. For assorted tidbits about journalism, dogs, and political primaries, thanks to Neil MacFarquhar, Jane Van Voorhis, and Dave Redlawsk, respectively. Thank you to my mother, father, and brother as well, for their patience and support, and to my children especially, for their long forbearance. For technical advice, I have relied upon the goodwill of two pilots, Kevin Malone and Chuck Peters, and four physicians, Michael Cohen, Marc Diamond, Chris Jensen, and Marcus Nashelsky. All the text’s medical inaccuracies, as well as its aeronautical ones, are my own.
—
E.C.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E
THAN
C
ANIN
is the author of
Emperor of the Air, Blue River, The Palace Thief, For Kings and Planets,
and
Carry Me Across the Water
. He is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa, California, and northern Michigan. He is also a physician.
ALSO BY ETHAN CANIN
Emperor of the Air
Blue River
The Palace Thief
For Kings and Planets
Carry Me Across the Water
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Ethan Canin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Curtis Brown Ltd. for permission to include “Musée Des Beaux Arts” from
Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1940 and copyright renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Canin, Ethan.
America America: a novel / Ethan Canin.
p. cm.
1. New York (State)—Politics and government—Fiction. 2. United States—Politics and government—Fiction. 3. Working class men—Fiction. 4. Rich people—Fiction. 5. Upper class women—Fiction. 6. Character—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.A495A83 2008
813'.54—dc22 2008002341
eISBN: 978-1-58836-717-4
v3.0