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...
Not until the previous spring, when Perry had had his sleep troubles, his problems at school, had she opened the mental door again, to compare his symptoms with what she remembered of her own, and not until her first visit to Sophie Serafimides, in the clinically scented little room, did she experience real nostalgia for her Catholic years. She remembered how soothing the transactions of the confessional had been and how she’d loved the immensity of the Church’s edifice, the majesty of its history, which had made her sins, grievous though they were, feel like tiny drops in a very large bucket—richly precedented, more manageably antique. Christianity as Russ preached and practiced it laid very little stress on sin. Marion had long been inspired, intellectually, by Russ’s conviction that a gospel of love and community was truer to Christ’s teachings than a gospel of guilt and damnation. But lately she’d begun to wonder. She loved her children more than she loved Jesus, whose divinity remained something of a question mark, and whose resurrection from the dead she basically didn’t believe in, but she absolutely believed in God. She could feel His presence inside her and around her all the time. God was there—no less now, when she was fifty, than when she’d been twenty-two. And to love God even a little bit, even only when she happened to ask herself if she did, was to love Him more than she could love any person, even her children, because God was infinite. She wondered if good Protestant churches like First Reformed, in placing so much emphasis on Jesus’s ethical teachings, and thereby straying so far from the concept of mortal sin, were making a mistake. Guilt at First Reformed wasn’t all that different from guilt at the Ethical Culture Society. It was a version of liberal guilt, an emotion that inspired people to help the less fortunate. For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God. He’d seen her eat six sugar cookies, and the name of her sin was gluttony.
As she marched through the Pirsig Avenue business district, she tried not to look at the store windows, whose displays of merchandise reproached her for the gifts she was giving her kids. It was true that Russ opposed the commercialization of Christmas and had set a meager budget for it, but this was hard on the kids, especially Judson, who was growing up in such a prosperous suburb. She’d bought him a football game that a toy-store salesman had assured her every boy wanted but Judson was probably too bright to enjoy for long. For Becky she’d bought a cute suitcase that had been marked down in price, probably because it was the wrong size to be useful. For Clem, as a token of his scientific ambitions, she’d bought a secondhand microscope that was probably obsolete in comparison with the ones at his school. And for Perry—oh, Perry wanted so many things, and would have made creative use of all of them, and was so considerate of her, so much on her wavelength, that he’d hinted only at presents he knew she could afford. She’d bought him the cheapest of cassette recorders, the kind of thing that an appliance store displayed to assure the buyers of other cassette recorders that they weren’t getting the worst one. And all the while, at the back of her hosiery drawer, all the while she’d had an envelope containing the eight hundred dollars in cash she hadn’t yet spent on her sessions with Sophie Serafimides, whom she was paying to be her friend.
Beneath this selfishness lay deeper circles of guilt. She lied and she stole, and once upon a time she’d done far worse than that. She’d lied to her husband from the moment she met him, and she’d lied to her daughter not fifteen minutes ago, on her way out the back door—“I’m late for my exercise class.” She was late, all right. Two hours late for a one-hour class! The dollars in the pocket of her gabardine coat were twenty of the fourteen hundred she’d received from the Wabash Avenue jeweler to whom she’d taken the pearls and the diamond rings she’d set aside when she emptied her sister’s apartment in Manhattan. At the time, as the executrix, she’d told herself that she was redressing an injustice perpetrated by her sister; that Becky already had too much money coming to her and didn’t need costly jewelry. The theft might still have been forgivable if Marion had followed through on her intention to spend the money on Perry and Clem and Judson, to whom Shirley had left nothing. But after her first “hour” with Sophie, in June, when Sophie had suggested that weekly counseling would be more valuable than a sleeping-pill prescription, and had explained her sliding fee scale and asked Marion if she could afford, say, twenty dollars a week, and Marion had replied that she did, in fact, have a small personal fund at her disposal, there was no more denying the evil of her theft.
Thanks to her running on Maple Avenue, she arrived at the dental office just five minutes late. The parking lot was emptier than usual, the waiting room occupied only by a mother and a boy reading Highlights for Children, apparently unconcerned about the oral discomforts awaiting him. That the mother and her son were Black spoke to the liberalism of the Serafimideses, whose educations had taken them not only to the suburbs but also, as Marion knew, because she’d asked, out of the Greek Orthodoxy of their childhoods; they belonged to the Ethical Culture Society. The receptionist, a paragon of discretion, sixtyish and Greek herself, gave Marion a silent nod of permission to go straight to the sanctum.
Sophie Serafimides was a chair-filling dumpling of a woman with beautiful olive skin and a great volume of crinkly white hair. Although Marion had been struck by her angelic surname when she found it in the Yellow Pages, she’d chosen Sophie for her given name. The attending psychiatrists who’d treated her in Los Angeles had been men of such insufferable male condescension that it was surprising she’d recovered her sanity at all. To have found a female clinician in New Prospect was something of a miracle, and if she’d “transferred” onto Sophie any of her issues with her unloving, reality-avoidant mother, who’d died of liver disease in 1961, fully estranged from Marion, she had yet to become aware of it. Sophie Serafimides was all about reality. She radiated—exemplified—Mediterranean warmth and good sense, which itself could be insufferable, but not in a way for which Marion could blame her.
Nothing pleased the dumpling more than to be brought a fresh dream, but Marion didn’t have any dreams for her today and preferred confession anyway. After hanging up her coat, she sat down and confessed that she was wearing her exercise clothes because she’d had to lie to Becky about where she was going. She confessed that she’d gobbled up—crammed into her mouth, stuffed herself with—six sugar cookies. Sophie smiled pleasantly at these confessions. “Christmas comes but once a year,” she suggested.
“I know you think I’m too obsessed with this,” Marion said. “I know you think it’s beside the point. But do you know what I weighed this morning? A hundred and forty-three pounds! I’ve been starving myself since September, doing my knee bends and my sit-ups, avoiding sweets, and I’ve lost six pounds in three months.”
“We’ve talked about counting things. The way we use numbers to punish ourselves.”
“I’m sorry, but, for a person my height, a hundred and forty-three pounds is objectively a lot.”