“Country’s not going anywhere. It’s only the economy you have to Humpty-Dumpty together again.”
“Oh, no problem, then.” Carter had grown flippant.
“Alvarado’s trouble is, he still thinks he’s president of the United States,” GGM said, pronouncing the title sonorously. “The fellow who strides in with a retinue, and everybody trembles. Hispanics have a big investment in flag-waving, land-of-the-free exceptionalism. Otherwise, they’ve merely emigrated from one Spanish-speaking third-world dump to another Spanish-speaking third-world dump, and what’s the point of that?”
Jayne said, “Lots of Lats are going back. Mark my words, we’ll miss them.”
“Everyone says we’re in a ‘depression,’” Willing said. “But it’s emotional depression, too. Like you guys. Why is the ‘American experiment’ over because this isn’t the greatest country in the world anymore? Maybe it never was the greatest country in the world. Lots of other places used to be empires. Now they’re not. The people who live there are careless with that. It seems like everyone’s being babyish.”
“They’re going kill me,” Luella stage-whispered in Willing’s ear. “Tell Mimi that Douglas was unhappy in his marriage before we met! It’s not my fault!”
“It’s never anyone’s fault when you fall in love,” Willing told her solemnly.
Perhaps hungry for the coherent conversation that Willing had imposed, Jayne looked annoyed that he was engaging Luella at all. “Americans aren’t depressed,” she said. “They’re in denial. Everyone thinks the crisis is temporary, and any day now we’ll all be sipping lattes at cafés again. Every other economic crisis has come to an end. So at the worst you worry about a ‘lost decade.’ The notion of a lost everything, a permanent, irreversible decline—it’s alien to this country’s psyche.”
“I don’t know why,” Carter said. “The place has been falling apart since I can remember. Crumbling highways, collapsing bridges, decrepit train tracks. Airports like bus stations. I’ll be damned why foreigners have kept piling in here, or why it’s taken them so long to think twice and turn around.”
“You people have a bad attitude,” Willing said sadly. “Maybe you deserve this.”
“Whole school of thought agrees with you,” GGM said. “Brought this on ourselves. Tried to butter both sides of our bread. Raised our children soft. Took supremacy for granted, with nothing to back it up. Evangelicals in the Midwest claim this is the day of reckoning. Except nobody’s being selected for the right-hand-of. We’re all chaff.”
“You know I’m chaff! I’m chaff! You know it!” Luella sang, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Bad.”
Willing surveyed the tableau. In a dingy striped nightgown, strapped to a straight-back with her wrists duct-taped to its arms, Luella recalled a victim of the early electric chair. Her wide eyes showed excess white, as if the current had been switched on. Her teeth were long and yellow, with the retracted gums of peritonitis. Draped in the floor-length black gown of a fairy-tale witch, his gaunt grandmother was once again tearing at her cuticles until they bled, then dabbing at the red beads with a napkin. In times past, his grandfather had always struck Willing as fairly fit, and boringly normaclass="underline" considerate, unassuming—everything his sister Nollie was not. But now what seemed to give Carter a workout was sheer animus. He sat there glaring, arms bunched, hands clenched around his biceps. His metacarpal tendons stood out like the strings of a tennis racket. Meeting his eyes was like looking down the twin barrels of a shotgun.
Still exuding a tattered nobility, GGM was at least back in one of his cream suits, but the garb was crushed. His uncombed white hair shocking willy-nilly in arbitrary directions betrayed a fatalism beyond coiffure. It was discouraging how reduced the patriarch became once you stripped away the cravat, the manicure, the props—the crystal decanters, the platinum Mont Blanc fountain pens clipped nattily to an outer pocket. Even his steamer was now filled with a cheaper e-bacco, which smelled like disinfectant. Yet coming up on two years of the Great Renunciation, one thing hadn’t changed: Great Grand Man was enjoying it—albeit in that confounding way that adults got a taste for espresso. Willing had a sip of real coffee once. The stuff was vile. But it was clearly the murky liquid’s most awful qualities for which the drink was prized.
You could see it, in this kitchen. There were too many old people. They all had a bad attitude. They all relished this ongoing calamity—the implosion, the sucking vortex, the vertigo. They thought they were going to be able to take everything with them, like pharaohs buried with their treasure. Willing stood up. “I’m not chaff.”
“Will, don’t get the wrong idea,” Carter said, though Willing was certain he had the right idea, and he’d never cared for Will. “This just isn’t the way I pictured my seventies.”
“Baby, be honest,” Jayne said. “You never pictured your seventies, period.”
“Being able to eat, that’s important,” Willing said. “And having a place to live. But what else is so important that now you can’t buy? You guys just seem so bitter—”
“Bitter is better than butter,” Luella babbled. “Bitter batter. Badder bitter butter.”
“At least you’ve got each other,” Willing finished.
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Jayne quipped, ripping another cuticle.
“Being robbed,” GGM said, “is an emotional experience. One much more intense than suddenly not being able to buy a boat. And we haven’t been robbed by marauding outsiders, but by our own government. The Renunciation has severed the bond between Washington and the American people—which was tentative at best to begin with.”
Willing shrugged. “All governments rob their people. It’s what they do. Kings and stuff. They did it, too. The president did it all at once this time. Maybe that’s better than little by little. At least you know where you stand.”
“In the gutter,” GGM said.
“The badder bitter gutter,” Luella said.
“But you explained to me before,” Willing told GGM. “The national debt got too big to pay back a long time ago. You said if it weren’t for foreign creditors demanding to be repaid in bancors, they’d have had to inflate the debt away. Which is the same thing, you said. It’s still welshing on the debt. It’s still a form of default. It’s still cheating. It makes you just as ‘feckless’ and just as dishonest. The Renunciation was what was going to happen anyway, over sneaky years and years, except the scam was fast-forwarded overnight. Big deal. You predicted this. So I don’t see why you’re upset about it.”
“Simply because you see a train coming doesn’t mean it can’t broadside your car,” GGM said.
Mischievously, Willing had also described the conventional erosion of sovereign debt with inflation as “dishonest” to Lowell, and had enjoyed watching his uncle turn purple. Money, Lowell explained scathingly, has no moral qualities but is simply a “fuel,” and all that matters about an economy is that its engine turns over. An economy is a set of “mechanisms” that work well or badly, and to get hung up on irrelevant concepts of “justice” or “honesty” or “fairness” is to condemn those mechanisms to working badly. The only “good” that pertains, Lowell said, is the greater good of an efficient machine, from which all cogs benefit. It was one of Lowell’s finer moments, and once Willing decoded the tirade to mean that both government and capitalism were fundamentally unscrupulous, his uncle’s point seemed well taken.
“I should have clarified,” GGM went on. “Alvarado has only stolen from the Americans who saved something, and that excludes over half the country. So, yes, I am bitter. I’m being punished for not spending the entire family fortune when I had the chance. For not slugging down a three-grand Lafite Rothschild at every meal. For trying to ensure that the likes of you, my boy, eventually profited from my prudence.”