Ethan Canin - America America

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Im 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. Im 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 texts medical inaccuracies, as well as its aeronautical ones, are my own.

E.C.

ALSO BY ETHAN CANIN

Emperor of the Air

Blue River

The Palace Thief

For Kings and Planets

Carry Me Across the Water

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ETHAN CANIN 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.

ONE

I

2006

WHEN YOUVE BEEN INVOLVED in something like this, no matter how long ago it happened, no matter how long its been absent from the news, youre fated, nonetheless, to always search it out. To be on alert for it, somehow, every day of your life. For the small item at the back of the newspaper. For the stranger at the cocktail party or the unfamiliar letter in the mailbox. For the reckoning pause on the other end of the phone line. For the dreadful reappearance of something that, in all likelihood, is never going to return.

I wouldnt have thought, in fact, that I would be the one to bring it back now, after all this time. That I would be the one to finally try to explain it. What I know of it, at least, even if thats only a part. I can only guess at the other parts. But Ive been guessing at them for half my life now, and I think Ive made some sense of it.

Honestly I dont know what will come of thiswho will find pain in what I say and who, in a certain manner, solace. It isnt only that Senator Henry Bonwiller is dead. His death was melancholy news up here, of course, but its not the only reason Ive set out to tell this. The other part is my children. Thats something Im certain of. We have three daughters, and one of them is just past the age I was when these events took place, and I must say I feel a certain relief that nothing similar has shadowed any of their days; but I also know that you never stop worrying that it will. After all, if children dont make you see things differentlyfirst bringing them into the world and then watching them go out into itthen God help you.

The crowd at Senator Bonwillers funeral was even bigger than I expected. Probably six hundred people at the morning eulogymore if you count the uninvited crowd on the sidewalk in front of St. Annes, standing under the shade of the sycamores and fanning themselves with their newspapers. And at least a thousand at the burial, which was open to the public that afternoon at St. Gabriels Cemetery, not too far away and not much cooler than in town. St. Gabriels is in Islington Township, and although no other famous men are buried there, Islington Township is where Senator Bonwiller was born and where he lived until ambition moved him along: I suppose it must have been his wish that he rest there in the end. Its also where his parents and brothers lie. His wife is buried a thousand miles away, in Savannah, Georgia, with her own parents, and there was no doubt some whispering about that fact. Henry Bonwiller was a complicated man, to say the least. I knew him to a certain degree. Not well enough to know what he would have felt about the grave arrangements, but more than well enough to know he would have been happy about the crowd.

It was a Saturday in late September. A heat wave had killed lawns all across the state, and the smell of rotting apples was drifting up from the meadow. The graveside service had just ended, and we were still crowded beneath the shade of the great bur oaks, whose grand trunks rise evenly across the cemetery lawn as if by agreement with one another. There seemed to have been agreements about other things, as well. The New York Times gave the news an above-the-fold headline on page one and a three-column jump in the obituaries, but their story only included a single paragraph on Anodyne Energy and not much more on Silverton Orchards. The Boston Globe ran an editorial from the right-hand front column, under The Country Mourns, and ended with this is the close of a more beneficent era. But it didnt do much more with either bit of history.

I didnt cover it for The Speaker-Sentinel, because I was at the funeral for my own reasons, but I helped one of our young staff members who did, the high school intern who arrived underdressed in her own ironic way and probably had no idea of half the personages she was looking at. Senator Bonwiller was eighty-nine when he died and hadnt been in the news for almost fifteen years, but the crowd included more than a dozen United States senators, two Supreme Court justices, the governors of New York and Connecticut, and enough lawyers and judges and state representatives to fill the county jail. I also saw what looked like an entire brigade of retired state police officers, decked out in their old satin-striped parade uniforms. But so many of them were leaning on canes or sitting in wheelchairs that you might have thought Henry Bonwiller had been a small-town slip-and-fall lawyer and not a man who, if certain chips of fate had fallen certain other ways, might once have been president of the United States.

The intern from The Speaker-Sentinel was named Trieste Millbury. Trieste and I have had our share of go-arounds since her arrival at the paper, and to tell you the truth I was wishing that afternoon that I worked at a bigger outfitperhaps one where the publisher wouldnt find himself at a funeral with the intern. But thats the way The Speaker-Sentinel is: we like to send our own people on stories, even if the wire services have us bound and tied. Were the last of the local dailies not to have sold to McClatchy or Gannett or Murdoch, and though we recently stopped publishing on Sundays we still put out a very good morning edition the other six days of the week, a paper that we write ourselves and have for more than a hundred years. Im proud of that.

Though I suspect that it, too, is coming to an end. Thats just the way it is up here in Carrol County. Its been ten years now since the hardware store had the name Delaney & Sons on it and the bakery had the name Cleary Brothers, and fifteen since the Starbucks in Carrol Center convinced the descendants of Dutch root farmers to speak Italian at the cash register. Senator Bonwiller was the one who lured IBM up here in the first place, and once IBM arrived it wasnt long before DuPont and Trane and then Siemens followed. And that was the beginning of the way things have turned out now, with our Crate & Barrel and our Lowes and the news of an Ikea opening by spring, all the way up here in what used to be lonely country. Plenty of people are grateful to Henry Bonwiller for that. And plenty are not.