Crossroads
- Автор: Франзен Джонатан
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Crossroads». Краткое содержание книги:
Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in *Crossroads* , has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its...
“Ah—mandate?”
“It is a federal mandate and we have supplies for you. One of the women from the chapter has agreed to cook for you, as you requested in your letter. Her name is Daisy Benally.”
“Yes, I know Daisy. But Keith seemed to feel we’d be better off in Many Farms.”
“We know that a group is coming to Many Farms. All of the arrangements are in place.”
“Well, then, maybe, if you could accommodate two groups there, instead of one—”
“Russ, I am speaking to you in all respect. We are not expecting two groups in Many Farms. I will personally meet you here on Saturday and explain the work that we are hoping you will do at Kitsillie to conform with the mandate. I will look forward to meeting you.”
Russ felt powerless against Wanda’s plangency, all the more so as a bilagáana. He hoped she might be easier to talk to in person, or that Keith would be well enough recovered to overrule her.
On Thursday night, after a long effort to fall asleep, he dreamed he was alone and lost on the Black Mesa, trying to get down from a trackless mountain. Far below him, he saw sheep and horses in a rock-strewn paddock, but to reach the trail leading down he had to climb higher, on ever stonier and steeper slopes. The terrain was unexpectedly vast, and the direction he was climbing seemed wrong, but he had to keep going to make sure. Finally he reached a cliff impossible to scale. Looking back, he saw that he was on a slope too nearly vertical to be descended. He saw sheer rock and yawning space and understood that he was going to die. Coming awake, in the barrenness of his marital bed, he recognized his situation. No path with joy at the end of it could be as arduous and convoluted as attaining Frances had become.
But this was a wee-hour recognition. By the time the buses rolled into the First Reformed parking lot, twelve hours later, his path seemed clear again. If Frances would only show up, he could sort things out in Many Farms. A cold March breeze was blowing, daffodils blooming along the church’s limestone flanks, the sun bright, the air chilly. In his old sheepskin coat, a clipboard in hand, Russ directed seminarians and alumni advisers in their toting of Crossroads tool chests, cans of Ballerina Pink and Sunshine Yellow, crates of rollers and brushes, Coleman lanterns. A parent adviser, Ted Jernigan, pulled up beside Russ in a late-model Lincoln and suggested that he load the buses closer to the church doors. Ted nodded at the seminarian Carolyn Polley, who was struggling with a tool chest. “That little girl is going to get hurt.”
Russ held up his clipboard, to indicate his supervisory role. “Feel free to pitch in.”
Ted seemed disinclined. He was a real-estate lawyer, a soloist in the church choir, a beefy former U.S. Marine, and thought very well of himself.
“I’m concerned about drinking water,” he said. “Do we have drinking water?”
“No.”
“Why don’t I run down to Bev-Mart and buy us a bunch of five-gallon bottles. Darra said some of the kids last year had diarrhea.”
“I doubt it was from the water.”
“Simple enough to bring some.”
“A hundred and twenty kids, eight days—that’s a lot of bottles.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“The water on the reservation comes from wells. It’s not a problem.”
Ted made the face of a man unused to deferring. It was a mistake, Russ thought, to bring a male parishioner on a trip where he would be subordinate to a junior minister. Russ could well imagine Ted’s opinion of him and his pastoral impracticality, his feeble salary, his indetectable contribution to the general good. The opinion was subtly implicit in Ted’s offer to buy water—to open his fee-fattened wallet, to effortlessly exercise his spending power. Putting him in Russ’s group had been selfish of Ambrose, if not deliberately cruel.
As the family cars streamed in, releasing kids in their paint-smeared jeans and their dirtiest coats, with their Frisbees and their sleeping bags, Russ had eyes for only one car. From within the misery of his suspense he glimpsed the relief of being free of Frances, of receiving a definitive no and moving on, of being anywhere else but where he was. When he finally spied her car on Pirsig Avenue, his misery made the moment of reckoning—whether she was joining him or simply dropping off Larry—feel curiously weightless. Thy will be done. As if for the first time, he appreciated the peace these words afforded.
The peace lasted until she stepped out of her car, wearing her hunting cap. When he saw Larry open the trunk and remove not only a fancy backpack, suitable for alpine trekking, but a large and feminine fabric suitcase, he was flooded with voluptuous presentiment. It swept away his equanimity, exposed its falseness, stopped his breath. He was going to have her.
Secure in his presentiment, he busied himself with his clipboard, checking off the names of Crossroads members in the Kitsillie group. Unlike three years ago, bus assignments were now determined by destination, not by clique. Someone, presumably Ambrose, had drawn a heavy line through Becky’s name. Russ still half hoped and half feared that Becky would change her mind, but when he saw her and Perry pull up in the family Fury, without Marion along to drive it home, he knew she wasn’t coming. She didn’t even get out of the car while Perry retrieved his duffel bag.
As the Fury left the parking lot, Frances marched up to Russ. He pretended to consult his clipboard. “Oh hey,” he said.
Her eyes were glittering with drama. “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you. You didn’t think I had the guts. It looks like you’re stuck with me and my phony self-reproach after all.”
He struggled not to smile. “That remains to be seen.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to Kitsillie. Rick wants you in the Many Farms group.”
She drew her head back. “In Larry’s group? Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“Larry doesn’t want me anywhere near him. Why did Rick do that?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Does he think I can’t hack it on the mesa?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“That is extremely annoying. I hope you didn’t make him do that.”
Russ had won the fight against smiling. “No. Why would I?”
“Because you’re mad at me.”
“It was Rick’s decision, not mine. Take it up with him if you’re not happy.”
“The only reason I came was to be with you on the mesa. Well, not the only reason. But I am very, very annoyed.”
In her face was the disappointment of a spoiled child, a slighted VIP. Maybe she was thinking of the Acapulco trip that she’d forgone.
“Who took my place?” she said. “Who’s going with you?”
“Ted Jernigan, Judy Pinella. Craig Dilkes, Biff Allard. Carolyn Polley.”
“Oh great.” She rolled her eyes. Russ wondered if his jealousy-provoking gambit might actually have worked. As he watched her stalk away, the arduousness of the long path behind him felt like nothing. She wanted to be with him, and he’d managed to conceal his delight.
Echoes of Biff Allard’s bongo drums were bouncing off the bank across the street, cigarette smoke and Frisbees in the air, a black dog in a bandanna hurdling guitar cases and hand luggage, kids dashing in and out of the church on missions of adolescent urgency, mothers lingering to embarrass long-haired sons with loving injunctions, the three bus drivers and the swing driver conferring over a road atlas, Rick Ambrose standing in his army jacket beside Dwight Haefle, who’d come outside to behold the glory of it all. As Frances walked up to the two men, Russ averted his eyes (Thy will be done) and went looking for the Kitsillie kids whose names were still unchecked. They were due to leave in ten minutes, at five o’clock, and the buses were still empty. There were last-minute runs to the drugstore, tragic partings of friends on different buses, the suitcase in need of late excavation from a luggage bay, the forgotten sack dinner, and, as always, in Russ’s experience, the one or two kids who were late.