***
The next day took Olivia from Springfield, east past Decatur and Champaign and Danville almost on the state line, then slightly south, past Crawfordsville and south through Indianapolis, where she stopped for gas and a snack of double hash browns at McDonald’s—she hadn’t realized how many McDonald’s there were in the world. Or was there really only one McDonald’s, the same McDonald’s and it was leaping invisibly from behind her to ahead of her? Wouldn’t that have made a great old Twilight Zone episode?
Would McDonald’s follow her all the way to Russia?
East of Indianapolis, the terrain became more rolling and varied and land use became less agricultural. But if she thought the factory farms behind her had been grim, the shuttered factories and mills she saw broke her heart. So did the upscale housing developments, eating away at the farmland.
No reason to stop. She stopped for lunch anyway, and was back on the road by two, when she realized that she was accessing old, long-forgotten memories because she was going home. Home to her father. She’d spent most of the trip tranquillizing herself with food and despising what she saw. Now she no longer wanted anything, except maybe something her father might cook her, one time more before she…
The Mercedes suddenly seemed to go on auto-pilot. Inertial guidance. Internal. You know where you are by keeping track of where you’ve been. You know how far you still have to go by knowing where you are. Olivia offered a momentary thanks that her car knew more about where she was going than she did. A Mercedes can be a good companion.
She and her car drove through Columbus and crossed Wheeling Island in the middle of the Ohio River. Then through Wheeling, where Joe McCarthy had launched the phony anti-Communist crap that would eventually ruin him, and too many others who didn’t need or deserve ruination. The problem with McCarthy, she thought with real irony, was not that he was an anti-Communist, but that he had given responsible anti-Communists a very bad name. Then she remembered where she’d heard that line before. From her father, a Hungarian immigrant who’d survived the Nazis and the Soviets and who very rarely expressed any negative sentiment about America. She shuddered at the realization that she had not yet considered what she was going to tell him, then put the thought aside. No planning for this one. No games. Maybe the Mercedes could come up with something. It was smart.
I’m getting punchy. Long drive, too long. Too much…wrong.
She crossed the rugged neck of West Virginia in about twenty minutes, struck by the evident poverty of people in a state sitting on immense mineral wealth, not so very different from Western Pennsylvania. And then she was, at last, after three long, painful days of driving, heading home through the forested hills running north on 79, past Canonsburg and Bethel Park and Carnegie. She approached twice-blighted Pittsburgh, first by the steel industry that it had cradled and that had polluted so murderously, but also, thanks to a strong and sometimes violent union movement, provided real work at a family wage. Then by the willful self-destruction of that steel industry. Supposedly, something had taken its place. Now high-tech parks stood where mills had been; the downtown skyline gleamed. Or so her father, a retired engineer and professor of engineering who still consulted, had told her without much enthusiasm.
Then she was home.
Olivia pulled into the driveway and walked slowly up the poured concrete steps to the house her parents had built over and alongside a creek, in a nod to Fallingwater, the local Frank Lloyd Wright icon. The design had been her mother’s, and some of the manual labor had been as well. Clean-lined and peaceful, rather than austere and harsh, the building had aged gracefully into a modernist gem. Like her father.
No, not like her father. Oscar, a tall man who had once been immensely strong, now worn by age and grief, met her on the wide concrete pad of the front entrance. He stood looking at his daughter for a few seconds as she left the car, one of the alligator bags her mother had indulged such a weakness for, carried in the crook of her arm. “You look very much like your mother when she was your age,” he said, speaking softly across the few feet left between them.
Olivia remembered her mother as she had not for many years, looking at her father as his wife would never see him. Lavinia Lathrop had been the daughter of a prominent mainline Philadelphia family. There had never been a Philadelphia without a Lathrop. She had not married until she was nearly forty and established as an architect, at a time when few women did such things. And they certainly didn’t convert to Judaism to marry immigrant—Hungarian—junior engineers who were barely citizens. Lavinia and Oscar had their only child when Lavinia was forty-five, years after they had ceased to believe such a thing could happen. Thirteen years later, she was gone in six weeks, when what Lavinia had been told were migraines, supposedly brought on by the stress of finishing a major university commission, turned out to be a brain tumor, by then inoperable. She took a week to order her affairs, then spent the rest with her husband and daughter, until the full hideousness of the tumor began to make itself apparent. Then she chose the time and manner of her departure, in her own home, with her husband administering the lethal dosage and her daughter holding her hand. “My family,” were her last smiling words.
Oscar had never remarried. Olivia recalled him once saying that dusk had been her mother’s favorite time of the day and he often expected her to come ambling out of the woods as the sun went down.
Shaking off the sense of strangeness, not quite giving in to the fear, Dr. Oscar Tolchin came forward to embrace his daughter. In the driveway, beside her luxurious Mercedes, they held each other for a long time, then went in.