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...
“So, ah,” he said, when he’d safely braked for a stoplight. “You had a good talk with Rick?”
“I did.”
“I don’t suppose he mentioned that he and I are not on speaking terms.”
“No, I already knew that. Everybody knows that.”
So much for his hope that their feud wasn’t universal knowledge.
“Why do you ask?” she said. “Am I not allowed to talk to him if I want to be friends with you?”
“Of course not. You can talk to whoever you like. Just be aware that everything with Rick Ambrose is always about Rick Ambrose. He can be very seductive, and you might think he’s your friend. But you’d better watch your back.”
“Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said with a lilt. “I do believe you’re jealous.”
The traffic light turned green, and he nudged the gas pedal. The rear wheels squealed and fishtailed a little.
“I mean jealous of Crossroads,” she said. “Rick’s got a hundred and fifty kids adoring him every Sunday. You get eight old ladies twice a month. I’d be jealous, too, if I were you.”
“I’m not jealous. There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now than here.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“I mean it.”
“Okay. But then why the hard feelings about Rick? I guess it’s none of my business. But if he’s great at what he does and you’re great at what you do—I don’t see the problem.”
Even on a straight stretch of road, the car was subtly bucking, wanting to spin.
“It’s a long story,” Russ said.
“In other words, none of my business.”
Russ’s refusal to forgive Ambrose, which for nearly three years had organized his interior life and received daily support from Marion, seemed silly when he imagined explaining it to Frances. Worse than silly: unattractive. He saw that, to have a chance with her, he might need to let go of his hatred. But his heart didn’t want to. The loss would be huge, would waste a thousand days of nursing his grudge, would render them meaningless in retrospect. There was also the danger that, if he made peace with Ambrose, Frances would feel even freer to admire Ambrose, and that he, Russ, would end up with nothing—neither his righteous pain nor Frances as his private reward for bearing it. He and Ambrose would still be competing, and he would lose the competition.
“Not to be all Mrs. Fix-It,” she said, “but Crossroads has been so good for Larry, and you’ve been so good for me. It seems like there ought to be some solution.”
“Rick doesn’t like me, and I don’t like Rick. It’s just a natural antipathy.”
“But why? Why? It goes against everything you say in your sermons. It goes against what you said to me about turning the other cheek. I can’t stop thinking about that. It’s the reason I wanted to come along with you today.”
The spot on his hip where she’d kicked him was still buzzing. He understood her to be saying that she was attracted to his goodness, and that, in order to do a very bad thing, to break his vows of marriage, he was now required to practice goodness.
“It means a lot to me,” he said. “That you came along today.”
“Oh, pooh. It’s an honor.”
“You mentioned getting involved in Crossroads yourself.” A tremor in his voice betrayed his anxiety. “Were you serious about that?”
“God, you really are jealous.”
Again—again—she prodded his upper leg with her toe.
“My only job,” she said, “is being a mother. I only get to work with you and Kitty twice a month, so, yes, I asked Rick if I could work in Crossroads as an adviser. He didn’t seem too enthusiastic, but they always take a couple of parents on the Arizona trip, and he put me on the list for that.”
“For the spring trip,” Russ said, aghast.
“Yes!”
Arizona was his place. The thought of her being there with Ambrose was atrocious.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I know I shouldn’t try to save the day. But you should be going on those trips yourself. You obviously love the Navajos, you lived there for however many years. If you and Rick could patch things up, we could all be there together. Wouldn’t that be fun? I would love that.”
She bounced on the seat, so lovely in her energy that Russ became confused. Lo, I bring you tidings of great joy—peace on earth among all men. The opposing headlights on Archer Avenue were tightly bunched, in every car a stewing driver. There was nothing of Christmas in the mess the weather was making. The joy of the season was in Frances, in her childlike questioning of the strife between Russ and Ambrose, and a tendril of her joy was reaching into Russ’s hardened heart. Was it possible? Might he finally forgive Rick Ambrose? If his reward on earth were Frances? A week in Arizona in her hopeful, playful, eye-delighting presence? Or maybe more than just a week—maybe half a lifetime? Was she the second chance that God was giving him? The chance to entirely transform his life? To joyfully make love with a joyful woman? He’d been hating himself and Ambrose for a thousand Marion-darkened days, imagining that he was close to God, while all along, every second of every day, a simple turn of his heart toward forgiveness, which was the essence of Christ’s message to the world, the true meaning of Christmas, had been there to be freely chosen.
“I’m going to think about that,” he said.
“Please do,” she said. “There’s no earthly reason you and Rick can’t get along.”
In medieval romances, a lady set her suitor an impossible task to perform, the retrieval of the Grail, the slaying of a dragon. It seemed to Russ that his fair lady, in her hunting cap, was requiring him to slay a dragon in his heart.
Mayor Daley didn’t plow Englewood until the streets of white neighborhoods were cleared to bare pavement. Russ zigzagged through side streets, where the snow was more powdery and gave better traction, and maintained his momentum by rolling through stop signs. By the time the Community of God came into view, the hour was approaching five o’clock. To get home by seven, so that the trip didn’t become a thing that Marion might comment on to Kitty Reynolds, he needed to unload the Fury quickly.
The door to the community center was locked, the light above it off. Russ rang the bell, and they waited in the invisibly falling snow, Frances stamping her feet against the chill, until the light came on and Theo Crenshaw opened the door.
“I’d almost given up on you,” he said to Russ.
“Yeah, pretty serious snow.”
An impression that Russ had had before—that Theo was reluctant to acknowledge Frances’s presence—deepened when Theo turned away and kicked a wooden wedge under the door.
“I’m Frances,” she said brightly. “Remember me?”
Theo nodded without looking at her. He was dressed in a saggy velour pullover and ill-fitting stretch trousers. He seemed immune to the vanity that had led Russ to wear his favorite shirt and his sheepskin coat for Frances. The poignancy of an urban preacher, beloved on Sundays to the women of his congregation but otherwise so very alone in his church, with no support staff, no associate, his annual salary paltry, his primary sustenance spiritual, was especially keen on a raw December evening. Russ thought there might be no one he admired more than Theo, no one he knew more authentically Christian. Theo made him feel as privileged as Rick Ambrose made him feel disadvantaged, and he could imagine how Frances, showing up in her suburban blond loveliness, might be an unwelcome apparition to Theo.