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...
“I thought you were sad,” Becky said.
“She was my sister. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.” Her mother seemed to soften, but only for a moment. “I should have known that people don’t change.”
“What do you mean?”
“Shirley was the kind of woman who has no use for other women. All she wanted was men. And she had plenty of them in her day. Funnily enough, though, none of them stuck around. The good ones figured out in a hurry what kind of person they were dealing with, the bad ones disappointed her, and she was vicious on the subject of homosexuals. I never met the man she actually married, but I gather he had some family money. He left her an annuity when he was killed in the Pacific, and it was a good thing he did, because she wasn’t an actress. She was a pretty face who could memorize her lines. By the time your father and I moved to New York, she was ‘between roles.’ She was still between roles when we left. She lived in a fantasy world where nobody appreciated her talent and the men all either exploited her or disappointed her, but maybe the next man wouldn’t. She was one of the most miserable people I’ve ever known.”
The coldness of this speech shocked Becky. “But it’s so sad,” she said.
“Yes, it is,” her mother said. “That’s why I didn’t mind you going out there in the summer. You have a good head, a good heart, and God knows she was lonely.”
“If she didn’t like other women, then why did she like me?”
“I wondered that myself. But people like her never change.”
Eight months went by before Becky learned the reason for her mother’s coldness. It happened that her birthday, her eighteenth, fell on a Saturday. Jeannie Cross had organized a blowout party that everyone who counted was coming to. Everyone wanted to see Hildebrandt get drunk, which was Jeannie’s stated object and, God help her, Becky’s private intention. Unlike her dissolute younger brother, she’d always been sensitive to her father’s position as a man of the cloth, the unseemliness of a minister’s daughter getting shit-faced, but now she was old enough to vote, and her social instincts told her it was time to mix things up a little. After working the lunch shift at the Grove—she’d quit her florist job and taken a less dorky one, waiting tables—she hurried home to shower and dress and have an early dinner with her family. The parsonage seemed curiously empty. There were October sunbeams in the living room, a fading smell of baked cake. She went up to her room and was startled to see her mother seated on her bed. “You need to come upstairs with me,” she said.
“I need to shower,” Becky said.
“You can do that later.”
On the third floor, they found her father waiting in his home office, his windows open, cool autumn air filtering into the attic-like stuffiness. He motioned to Becky to sit down. Her mother shut the door and stayed standing. Becky was quite alarmed. It was as if she were facing punishment for the heavy drinking she hadn’t done yet.
“Marion?” her father said.
Her mother cleared her throat. “As you know,” she said to Becky, “my sister named me as the executrix of her will. What I have to say to you, I’m saying as the executrix. Your aunt left you a great deal of money. Now that you’re eighteen, the money is yours. The will doesn’t specify that it be held in trust. All it says is—Russ, will you read it?”
Her father unlocked a drawer and took out a document. “‘To my niece Rebecca Hildebrandt I will, devise, and bequeath the sum of thirteen thousand dollars for a Grand Tour of Europe, to be taken in my memory.’ That’s all there is. No mention of trustees.”
Becky was smiling broadly; she couldn’t help it.
“I put the money in your savings account yesterday,” her mother said.
“Wow.”
“I was legally obligated,” her mother said. “The lawyer said we could wait until your eighteenth birthday, but no longer than that. Shirley’s intentions were clear.”
“Wow. That’s so nice of her.”
“It’s not nice,” her father said. “It’s a foolish bequest, and we need to talk about it.”
“Thirteen thousand dollars,” her mother said, “is almost the entirety of your aunt’s estate. There were a few odd thousands left over for various museums, but you’re the main beneficiary. If you’d happened to predecease her, the money would have gone to the museums.”
Now Becky saw the problem. In case she hadn’t, her mother laid it out for her: not only had Shirley ignored Clem, Perry, and Judson, but she’d stipulated that Becky use the money for something frivolous. She’d lived in a fantasy world to the end, and beyond. “And she knew very well how I would feel about it. That was part of the equation.”
So everything is about you, Becky thought.
Her father might have had the same thought, because he suggested that her mother leave the two of them alone. When she was gone, he shifted into his gentle dad-to-daughter tone. “I can’t believe you’re eighteen already. It seems like only yesterday that we brought you home from the hospital.”
How many times had Becky heard that it seemed like only yesterday?
“But now here you are, eighteen years old, and I want you to think hard about this money. You’re not legally bound by the wording of your aunt’s will, and thirteen thousand dollars seems to me an awful lot to spend on a trip to Europe. Unless you’re staying at the Ritz, you could travel for two years on that.”
Staying at the Ritz, Becky thought, was exactly what Shirley had had in mind.
“I can’t tell you what to do, but it seems to me that you could honor Shirley’s intention by using a small portion of the money to travel abroad next summer. If you wanted to do something nice for your mother, you could bring her along. Again, I’m not telling you what to do—”
Really?
“But there’s also a question of fairness. I know you had a special fondness for Shirley, and she for you, but I do think she may have been trying to hurt your mother with this bequest. Your mother and I love all of you kids equally, and we think you should all be treated equally. For better or worse, we’re not a well-to-do family. Your mother and I want all of you to go to college, and a quarter of the bequest would make a real difference to each of you. I can’t tell you what the right thing to do is—”
Really?
“But I hope you’ll think carefully about how you want to proceed. Will you do that for me?”
“Yep,” Becky said.
“I know it’s not easy. Thirteen thousand dollars is a lot of—”
“I get it,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything else.”
“I just want you to know that I’m very—”
“I said I get it. Okay?”
She jumped to her feet, ran down to her room, and jerked open the top drawer of her dresser, where she kept her savings passbook. The balance had indeed been updated. It was $13,753.60. Christening money, birthday money, paychecks for the hours she’d spent in a stupid green florist’s apron, and tips and paychecks from the Grove added up to $753.60. Dear Aunt Shirley! She’d known what Becky wanted, and it was all the better for being unexpected. Becky had never, not once, wondered if her aunt had left her any money; the little suitcase of treasures had been enough. Only now, as she imagined the figure in her passbook reduced to a sad nubbin, did her mind spring to life with greedy rationalizations. Maybe she wasn’t legally bound to follow the letter of the will, but wasn’t she morally bound to honor the spirit? Wouldn’t it be an insult to Shirley’s memory to submit to her father’s wishes? And why should she give anything to her pothead little brother, who could probably get a full scholarship to Harvard anyway? Wouldn’t there be more money for Judson in the future, when her father got his own church and there were fewer mouths at home to feed? The only person she felt at all inclined to share with was Clem.
At the party that night, she quickly downed two Seagram’s and 7UPs, after which it was possible to slow down without being noticed. The main effect of the alcohol was to create a powerful but hazy sense of importance; of being on the verge of a great, warm insight. As her buzz began to fade, the sense of importance faded with it, leaving behind a small, cold insight: she was bored. She didn’t care who had a crush on who, what kind of prank was played on Lyons Township before the football game. The world was full of better places.