America America (48 page)

He doesn’t look up from his task. “What kind of crazy question is that?”

“I don’t know. It occurred to me.”

“Of course we didn’t know. That’s ridiculous. If we’d known, we would have done something. She wasn’t sick a day in her life.”

I look at him. He’s already thinking of something else, I can see. He leans down and sets the knotted daisies alongside all the others, a carefully arranged stack of plant stems turning to transparent strings on the ground beside her.

“I’ve just always wondered,” I say.

“Well, that’s a silly thing to wonder,” he answers, and stands. “Okay,” he says after a moment. “I’m ready.”

And then we head up. Over the long, low slope running from the cemetery to the top of the hill, where the stone foundation of an old Dutch fire lookout still stands. It’s a primitive square of weather-beaten stone set in the dirt at the apex of the ridge, but if you stand on it and turn to the west you can still see thirty miles over the long shadows of the last unspoiled moraine in the county, the one that traverses its lowest valley. The valley where the Millburys live. At the far end a slice of Lake Erie glimmers. This is where Dad and I always come now. Perhaps for the way it brings up the memory we both have of the way this whole territory used to be. The land isn’t flat anywhere in Carrol County—you can hardly find a stretch of level ground large enough for a ball field—but the rises are barely taller than the houses that sit between them, and for now at least, the builders have left the hilltops alone. The farmer’s ethic of hiding from the wind. If you climb sixty feet vertically—as Dad and I do now, slowly, while the sun reaches its peak above us—and if you confine your gaze to the west, the way we do now, as well, you can still look out as far as you can see over land that you’d swear has been empty forever.

T
HE
S
ENATE HEARINGS ON
A
NODYNE
E
NERGY,
as some remember, didn’t start until the end of Jimmy Carter’s tenure in Washington, more than two full presidential terms after Mr. Metarey’s death. And even then the investigation was overshadowed by other events. Henry Bonwiller wasn’t the only one to appear before the panel. So did twelve members of Wyoming’s state House, four of North Dakota’s, and two from former president Nixon’s Atomic Energy Commission, along with United States Representatives Kyle Stennart of Wyoming and Madeline Blank of New York and the heads of half a dozen energy and resource corporations in the Midwest and Canada. To name only the first week’s witnesses. The proceedings, like the financial dealings themselves, seemed to have been designed to be confusing.

Late in the afternoon on Friday, November 2nd, 1979, in the waning hours of the week’s news cycle, Henry Bonwiller took a seat at the witness table in the Senate chambers to be questioned by a roomful of his colleagues, many of whose careers he had helped build as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He was only in his sixties then, but his arms shook a little as he lowered himself into the chair. A new network called C-SPAN had trained a camera on the proceedings, but I remember that even in the offices of
The Patriot Ledger
, in Quincy, Massachusetts, where I’d been hired for my first reporting job after college, I was the only one watching.

For an hour I listened to the Senator being questioned about a mystifying array of transactions. He’d been brought in as an investor in Anodyne Energy a decade before by an agent of another entity, the Buffalo office of a Canadian holding company that itself seemed to be mostly in the business of creating other, smaller companies, many of them offshore, to manage profits and losses on its books. Henry Bonwiller’s wife and sons were the owners of stakes in various drilling operations represented in those books, and in fact the family had apparently made a good bit of money from them. But the stakes turned out to be futures options granted retroactively, a clearly profitable but probably illegal arrangement that Senator Bonwiller seemed to understand only at the moment Senator Russell Long of Louisiana explained it to him, as the prelude to a question. “Senator Long,” Henry Bonwiller answered, chuckling in his basso undertone, “if I understood the details of that kind of stuff, I’d be working on Wall Street.”

To which Russell Long, chuckling himself, replied, “So would I, Senator, so would I.”

That was the last question of the afternoon, and two days later a mob of Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran, taking ninety hostages. After that, I couldn’t even find the hearings on C-SPAN.

But the Democrats by then were in the waning days of their legislative power, anyway, and there was a feeling throughout the nation that their nearly thirty-year lock on both houses of Congress was ending. People believed that President Carter and his concern with human rights had weakened the United States—the hostages would spend another fourteen months in captivity—and though the hearings ended without a censure, Senator Bonwiller’s stance against the military and in favor of the unprotected classes at home was beginning to fall under the shadow of a new, darker mood that was spreading across the country.

Dear Mr. Sifter,

I’ve been meaning to write for a long time to say sorry for what my father did, and also to thank you again for all the things you and the Speaker-Sentinel have given me, which, as I look out over the Yard (my father would cough loudly right now) seems just about exactly the thing he was afraid of. (Oh, well.) And the thing
I
was afraid of, too—at least, before I found myself on these strange but really sort of mild shores. I can finally sleep at night, in other words, which is a relief since my first few weeks in Boston I felt like I’d stumbled into an all-night boxing and car-honking match. But now I look out my window and it all seems normal. I’ve also realized that all the other freshmen in their fall sweaters are as harmless as I am and probably no less confused (or scared). I believe that’s something of a long lede, sir.

First: my father was only trying to do what he thought was right. He had his own taste of fancy colleges when he was young (PhD, chemistry, Johns Hopkins, 1974) and fancy offices after that (E. I. duPont, 1975–1990) and fancy clothes for a while even, and for his own various reasons he’s still afraid of all of them, at least as far as his children are concerned. Which is to say, he’s an eccentric man but in a lot of ways a privileged one, and he was only trying to save me from a world whose false enticements he knew very well.

So here I am, staring down the same road he took, just about exactly. I do miss the duster, though, (when it’s not raining here it’s snowing, and all) and I even thought of asking you to mail it out to me but I know my dad would find out about that and take a trip down to your office. So we’ll skip that, shall we?

I’m pretty busy, naturally. I’ve been in town a good part of a semester now and am still waiting for the impostor police to knock at the door. Just like everybody else, I guess. The last thing Dad said when he dropped me off was that the brain isn’t the salve for the heart that I evidently hoped it was (his words). Well, that was a nice send-off, wasn’t it? (Be gentle, sir, when you part with your daughters.)

But we Millburys are a tough bunch (if nothing else), and as far as I can tell (from my first semester’s seminar reading, at least) Dostoyevsky and Virginia Woolf seem to agree with Dad. I’ve already come upon the fact plenty of times myself, in all the girls at the T stops in their black makeup and ripped jeans, not to mention in the glass of every darkened shop window in the rain. I used to take a secret pride in believing I was above it all. Gone. Gone, all of that.

I’ll keep this short. I hope it will be only the first of many letters, even though I know that’s presumptuous on my part and naïvely optimistic—naïve optimism, however, being a trait I’ve learned to respect and strive for.

That’s all for now.

Thanks always. You have meant a great deal to me.

—Trieste

T
HE MORNING AFTER
L
IAM
M
ETAREY’S FUNERAL,
it fell to Gil McKinstrey and me to remove what remained of the plane from the patch of burnt ground where it lay. The small fires in the fields had reached all the way to the drainage gullies, and a few had actually extinguished themselves in the gravel paths around the fly pools. Though it had been less than a week, green sprigs were already rising amid the stubs of charred grasses. Merciless nature, as Liam Metarey might have said. The plane itself was unrecognizable. Three broad, misshapen ingots of steel lay where the fuselage had been, and a few uncovered struts poked from the tip of a wing that had come to earth beyond the firebreak. A few other smaller shards lay here and there amid the black. But that was all. Gil looped the largest slabs inside a chain and used a block and tackle to lift them into the long cart behind the Ferguson. I went around collecting the smaller pieces and throwing them in. I was thinking of Mr. Metarey again, of course—he would have melted the salvage and cast it again as something useful. It didn’t matter if he could have bought a new plane to replace it—it didn’t matter if he could have bought a hundred of them. He would have done it himself: he would have read about it, or talked to an old-timer, or just invented the technique on his own, some way to make use of what had been left behind. It was one of the aspects of his character that in the end I most admired. We were both quieted, Gil and I, by the swiftness with which all of it—the man, the plane—could disappear.

“Humid out here,” I finally said.

“Barely keep my reefer lit,” Gil answered.

Then we were quiet again, working in the hot sun.

He didn’t speak again until the end of the morning. “Guess you’ll be spending the summers elsewheres now,” he said.

“You going to stay on?”

“Not up to me,” he answered.

He tipped his cap and went back to working. That was all we spoke for the rest of the day. I had wanted to say something to him, had wanted to for months, ever since the night I had teased him from the hood of the wrecked car in front of Mr. Metarey and Senator Bonwiller. He and I were more similar than different, without a doubt; but I noticed he wouldn’t let me guide the heavy blocks of burnt metal up into the cart as he stood in the flatbed and cranked the gripping chain with his wiry arms. Perhaps this was a mark of his respect for me; but more likely it was his dismissal of a callow boy who had once belittled him in public. Instead he leaned over the outrigger and steered the harness himself—he was doing the jobs of two men rather than permitting me to help him.

I let him. There was a divide between us now that I could no longer cross.

And of course it only widened again, a year later, when I graduated from Dunleavy and was accepted at Haverford. It was then that I discovered that Mr. Metarey had left a fund for my college education. My mother had known about it for quite a while, it turns out—a comfort to me now—but had decided not to tell me. I learned of it in a letter from Mr. Metarey himself, in fact, written right around the time JoEllen Charney died. My father gave me the letter at my Dunleavy graduation dinner, along with a wrapped package that contained, in accordance with Mr. Metarey’s long and carefully drafted will, his leather-bound copy of
The Jungle
. The timing of the letter, and the odd wording at the beginning, only add to my wonder: