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...
In a further flash, she saw that Laura did not like Tanner’s churchgoing; that it might be a fault line between them; that she, Becky, if she opened herself to the possibility of belief, might gain an unforeseen advantage; and that it therefore might be wiser, after all, not to put her letter in Tanner’s hand now, since this would suggest that delivering it was the only reason she’d come to church, but instead to keep coming on Sunday mornings.
They shared a hymnal for the singing of “For the Beauty of the Earth,” Becky’s hair touching Tanner’s shoulder as she leaned in, and then Reverend Haefle gave the sermon. During the one year she’d been obliged to attend entire services, Becky had sat still for her father’s sermons, for fear of making other congregants restless with her restlessness, which would have embarrassed her as a Hildebrandt, but Dwight Haefle’s interminable slabs of lyrical abstraction had defeated her. Listening to him now, hoping greater age might bring greater understanding, she followed him only as far as Reinhold Niebuhr before losing herself in admiration of Tanner’s hands. She had to will herself not to touch them. In his jacket and necktie, he looked like a boy dressed up for church by his mother. Haefle had moved on to the importance of humility, not Becky’s favorite subject, though one she would need to work on if she got more serious about religion, and it occurred to her that, for Tanner, leaving his fringed jacket and his Frye boots at home was exactly what Haefle was talking about. All but one hour a week, Tanner’s coolness was beyond question, but he humbled himself for church, and this struck her as extremely dear.
Rising with him to recite the Lord’s Prayer, she might already have been his girlfriend, not to say his wife of many years, and the trespass for which she asked their Father’s forgiveness her theft of him from Laura.
“You’re here,” he said, when the service was over.
“Yeah, everything’s changing. I’m trying new things.”
He was looking at her as if he couldn’t figure her out. This was good.
“I owe you a big debt of gratitude,” she said. “For making me try Crossroads. I’m learning to be more open with my feelings. And—” She faltered, her face hot. He kept looking at her. “Will you be here next Sunday?”
“It’s what I do.”
She nodded, too vigorously, and stood up. “Okay, I’ll see you then.”
On her way out through the parlor, she paused to be noticed by her father, hoping to take some free credit for having come to a service, but he was engaged with Kitty Reynolds and a petite blond woman whom Becky didn’t recognize. Her father was smiling, and the blond woman was apparently a magnet for his eyes. When they flicked up to Becky, his smile faded. When he returned them to the woman, it came back to life.
The message was unmistakable. He’d written her off and moved on. As she left the church, the word asshole popped into her head. Clem had uttered it, blasphemously, but it was new to her. Her growing interest in First Reformed, which ought to have pleased her father, was clearly of less consequence to him than his grudge against Rick Ambrose. And he a Christian minister.
“Yes Tanner was there,” she announced to her mother when she got home, before her mother could annoy her by asking.
“That’s nice,” her mother said. “He’s spoiling Rick Ambrose’s otherwise perfect record of turning young people off church services.”
Becky declined the bait. “I’m sure Tanner would be thrilled to know he has your approval.”
“I imagine he’d rather have yours,” her mother said. “As I’m gathering he does.”
“Not talking about it,” Becky said, leaving the room.
A few days later, she was felled by a cold so bad that she had to call in sick at the Grove and couldn’t go to church on Sunday. As soon as she recovered, she took the new step of hanging out at First Reformed after school, joining the girls outside Ambrose’s office, who kindly explained the stories behind their Crossroads gossip, helping her understand what was funny and what was appalling. When she tired of being the newcomer, she wandered down to the function hall and found a team of three boys, led by her own brother, silk-screening posters for the Christmas concert. In theory, she should have lent a hand, because she needed to start accumulating “hours” toward the Arizona trip—to be eligible for Arizona, you had to perform at least forty hours of service or paid work for the group—but Perry was the one thing about Crossroads she didn’t like. Perry was the brother who was brilliant at everything, including art (the poster design bore the mark of his hand), but lately the mere sight of him had made her scalp tighten and prickle, as if she were a dog in the presence of the occult; as if she shared a house with a psychopath whose brilliance was undergirded by all manner of dark doings. She knew about some of those doings but not, she suspected, all of them. He looked up from the silk screen, red-handed with Christmas ink, and smirked at her. She turned and fled.
When she finally gained admittance to Ambrose’s office and he asked her how things were at home, she found herself saying that she was worried about her mother. Even two weeks ago, she would have considered it treasonous to pass family information to her father’s enemy. Now she positively relished it.
“My mom keeps up a good front,” she said. “But underneath I get the sense she’s falling apart, and meanwhile Clem is convinced that my dad is going to leave her. It could just be an idea in Clem’s head, but he really harps on it.”
“Clem is smart,” Ambrose said.
“I know. I love him so much. But I’m worried about my mom. She’s so dependent on my dad, and the only time she ever stands up to him is when he criticizes Perry. She thinks Perry is a genius. Which, I mean, he is sort of a genius. But he does all this bad shit that she doesn’t have a clue about.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“She doesn’t know anything from me, that’s for sure.”
“You protect him.”
“It’s not him I’m protecting. I feel bad for her—she’s having a hard enough time already. But I also don’t want Perry to hurt her.”
“Do you think we can help him?”
“Crossroads? I think he only joined because his friends were in it, and then suddenly he’s like Mr. Gung Ho. I don’t know—maybe that’s good?”
Ambrose waited, his dark eyes on her.
“It’s just,” she said, “some part of me doesn’t believe it.”
“Me neither,” Ambrose said. “The minute he walked in the door, I said to myself, ‘That kid is trouble.’”
Becky felt breathless. She couldn’t believe Ambrose trusted her enough to say that. For a disorienting moment, her heart confused him with Tanner. His honesty with her was like an eighty-proof version of Tanner’s gentler brew. There was no wedding ring on his dark-haired hand, but she’d heard he had a girlfriend at the seminary where he was nominally still a student. It was a little like hearing that Jesus had a girlfriend.
A burst of female laughter outside his door reminded her that she was one of many. As if to preempt a rejection, to save her dignity, she excused herself hastily and ran from the church, reorienting her heart.
The following Sunday, after the service ended, she and Tanner sat in the rearmost pew and talked for more than an hour. When someone turned off the sanctuary lights, and the last distant voices died away, they stayed on in the more solemn light of the stained-glass windows. Becky was relieved that she did not, after all, need to do the Crossroads thing of telling Tanner she wanted to get to know him better.