Yet in Carter’s case, the self-interest was crassly pecuniary. Did he keep in his father’s good graces with monthly runs to the Wellcome Arms only to safeguard his inheritance from, say, a rash or spiteful late-life impulse to endow a chair at Yale? He’d never know. Worse, his father would never know, and might not ever feel confidently cherished for himself. A family fortune introduced an element of corruption. While Carter might sentimentalize the ideal world in which he spent as much time as possible with Douglas E. Mandible because he loved his father, and enjoyed his father’s company, and was resolved to make the most of his father’s blessedly extended lifespan while he still could, the money was an inescapable contaminant, and it wasn’t going to go away.
Or in theory it wouldn’t go away.
For this was not the most ordinary of times.
While it was certainly usual for Carter to chafe that by the time he came into the legacy he’d be too old to spend it, this afternoon that exasperation rose to a frenzy. He and Jayne still lived in the same modest, increasingly disheveled Carroll Gardens row house—brick, not brownstone. It was finally paid off, but for years the mortgage was a stretch. He and Jayne did get to Tuscany in 2003—a first proper vacation, in their early forties! But they’d always planned on Japan. Now that Jayne was so fearful that she’d rarely leave the house, adventures farther afield than Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue were out of the question. On one charge, newer cars would make it to Canada; this ten-year-old BeEtle couldn’t get past Danbury. Once he got that post at the Times he was already sixty, by which time America’s shrinking “paper of record,” having already stooped to selling creative writing courses and colonial knickknacks, was snarfing up desperate aging journalists for pocket change. His pension was farcical. If they might free up some equity by downsizing in the brief window during which their youngest had pretended to leave home, that meant finding someplace smaller and meaner and more depressing. Great.
Yet a breezy, no-cares existence had been in the pipeline all his life. The money was stuck further up the system, like a wad of the disposable diapers you’re told never to flush. Meanwhile, awaiting his birthright had suspended him in an extended adolescence. This state of decades-long deferral presaged when his real life would begin. He was sixty-nine. Real life would be short.
What Carter craved was not so much furniture and electronics, cruises and wine-tasting tours—whatever he might buy—but a feeling. A sensation of ease and liberation, of generosity and savor, of possibility and openness, of whimsy and humor and joy. Granted, he expected too much from mere money, but he’d be happy to find that out, too. Relieved of this endless waiting, he would embrace even a reputably adult disillusionment. Because he still felt like a kid. And now that theoretical Valhalla in which he and Jayne could leave the heating jacked up to sixty-eight the whole night through, or make an airy fresh start on a wide-skied ranch in Montana where Jayne might get over the terror she associated with Carroll Gardens, well—in the last few days, that future had, very probably, gone to hell.
For this last week was the most historically savage of his experience, and that was counting 9/11 and the Stone Age. As for the latter, sure, the power went out, and there was looting of course, including of Jayne’s chichi delicatessen on Smith Street, from whose gratuitous destruction she had yet to recuperate. Traffic lights going black resulted in a host of dreadful pile-ups. He could skip rehearsing all those airline disasters again, the train wrecks, the poignant human-interest packages about cardiac patients whose pacemakers began beating double-time, like an invigorating change-up in a Miles Davis recording. Parts of the country had no water, though that was good practice for the dryouts to come. Telecommunications and national defense systems ceased to function, even if in Carter’s view America’s vaunted “defense” had long put the country in the way of more munitions than it deflected. Understandably, then, for Florence, Avery, and Jarred, 2024 constituted the direst of calamities. But Carter hailed from a different generation—one raised locating phone numbers in scrawled paper diaries and tracking down zip codes in fat directories from the post office, painstakingly diluting encrusted Liquid Paper with plastic pipettes from tiny overpriced bottles of thinner and later upgrading with outsize gratitude to the self-correcting ribbons of IBM Selectrics, flicking through yellowed rectangles in the long wooden drawers of card catalogs and looking up articles in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in the library. There was only so gravely he was likely to rate going without the internet for three weeks.
Albeit eerily invisible, eerily silent, this last week’s turmoil was of another order. The Stone Age produced immediate, palpable consequences: the lights wouldn’t go on, food rotted in the fridge, and none of the few stores remaining open carried milk. Throughout this latest mayhem nothing changed. A conventional number of cars on I-84 were doing the usual five miles per hour over the speed limit. The sky was mockingly clear. Exiting for a recharge, Carter didn’t have to swerve around bodies littering the ramp, or duck to avoid gunfire. Its lot half-full, Friendly’s was continuing to sell maple-walnut cones and SuperMelts. Strolling between chargers and convenience stores, none of Carter’s fellow motorists appeared hurried or flustered. This whole placid commercial stretch testified to the fact that the folks most affected by the week’s historical bad weather weren’t temperamentally inclined to pitch rocks through plate glass. One such under-violent character was bound to be his father.
If you believed its literature, the Wellcome Arms was the most luxuriously equipped assisted-living facility in the United States. The high-tech gym was really a come-on for prospective tenants, promising retirement as renewal, as the unfettered free time to step into the trim, fit incarnation you’d always been too busy to manifest—until the shine wore off and residents were confronted with the odious exertion of using the machines. The joint actually kept horses, though Carter had never seen anyone ride one. Replete with water therapists and massage jets, the pool saw more traffic, since a proportion of the residents could still float. It went without saying that the home provided the medical facilities of a top-flight private hospital; given Wellcome’s astronomical charges, it was worth the institution’s while to keep its clients, however nominally, in this world.
Although Douglas Mandible would not commonly be parted from his fleX before the 4 p.m. close of the New York Stock Exchange, pulling into Visitor Parking, Carter spotted his father on the nearest tennis court. Douglas was once a hard-hitting, cutthroat singles player, who would risk stroke or seizure to retrieve a skittering down-the-line—in the same fashion that as an equally cutthroat literary agent he had pulled out all the stops to score celebrated novelists. Yet in advanced age he’d refined a very different game, whereby he ran this much-younger opponent (late seventies, Carter guessed) from corner to corner. Barely returning the shot, the other guy would blob his own right to Douglas’s feet, and Pop could keep the ball in play without moving more than five inches in any direction. It was the same hyper-efficient, energy-conserving manipulation that Douglas could employ to effortlessly control his family without leaving his chair.
With a wicked crosscourt sharding out of the service box, Douglas dispatched the point in the spirit of simply having had enough. Carter didn’t flatter himself that his father had cut the point short because he’d spied his son in the parking lot. Having given notice of this visit, Carter was right on time. Had Pop given a damn about not keeping his son waiting, he wouldn’t have been playing tennis in the first place.