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...
What providence it therefore was when, ensconced in his room with Judson, he’d heard Becky crying. His ensuing exchange with her had ended in a warm embrace, a sense of being rewarded for his resolution. This would have been entirely satisfactory if he hadn’t then felt so deliciously relieved of his worry about her. The relief, its selfishness, negated all the goodness he’d displayed, and it cast an unfortunate light on his feeling of being rewarded. Shouldn’t true goodness be its own reward? He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.
The parental alarm clock, which he knew to be two minutes slow, showed 6:45. His mother was now so bizarrely late that all bets on her arrival time were off. He considered a good action that would almost certainly bring him no pleasure: going to the Haefles’ without waiting for his mother. The action had only the faintest taint of self-interest, in the form of the credit he might get for ensuring that the Hildebrandt family was represented at the party. This credit would be too feeble to be fungible if he was accused of selling drugs, and so could be discounted.
He wrote a short note to his mother, on the scratch pad by the phone, and went to collect Judson. “Time for a walk in the snow.”
“I thought we were waiting for Mom and Dad.”
“Nope, just you and me, kiddo. We are the Hildebrandts tonight.”
A minor mystery of adulthood was that his parents referred to latex overshoes as rubbers. Even Becky, that vessel of purity, had been seen to suppress a snigger at the word. The parents surely knew its other meaning, and yet they persisted in using it, with a confounding absence of embarrassment: Make sure you wear your rubbers. Though Judson’s rubbers were innocent, Perry was ashamed of his. Ansel Roder and his moneyed friends wore alpine hiking boots in the snow.
It was still coming down heavily when he and Judson ventured out in their rubbers. Judson ran ahead, kicking up sheets and clumps of it, the interruption of Stratego forgotten in the excitement of a winter storm. Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he’d never experienced the grace of childhood. As he watched his little brother frolic, he felt another downward tug in his mood, stronger than the tug he’d felt while shopping but also less painful, because it was occasioned by a feeling of metempsychosis. More surely than before, he sensed that he was going down, was irredeemably bad in the head, but this time it seemed to matter less, because his soul was connected to Judson’s by love and fraternity, at some mystical level interchangeable, and Judson was a blessed child, literally born on a Sunday, and would always be okay, even if he, Perry, wasn’t.
On the front stoop of the Superior Parsonage, between rows of bushes with Christmas lights dimmed by snow, he crouched to brush off Judson’s parka and help him with the buckles of his rubbers, which were encrusted with ice and difficult to undo.
“I still don’t see why we’re here.”
“Because Dad is stuck in the city and Mom is AWOL.”
“What is AWOL.”
Perry rang the doorbell. “It means absent without leave. Dad said it’s important that the family be here. By process of elimination, that leaves you and me.”
The door was opened by a very large white bunny, Mrs. Haefle, in a red apron embroidered with holly leaves. Perry quickly and cogently explained why he and Judson were there, but Mrs. Haefle seemed slow on the uptake. “Do your parents know you’re here?”
“They were unavoidably detained. I left them a note.”
She looked over her shoulder. “Dwight?”
Reverend Haefle appeared in the doorway. “Perry! Judson! What a nice surprise.”
He ushered them inside and took their coats. Functioning home insulation being a perk of senior ministry, the house was hot and steamy. Clergymen and their spouses filled the living room, obeying the obscure social imperatives of adult life, apparently enjoying themselves. Reverend Haefle led the Hildebrandts into the dining room, which was acridly scented with the combustion of Sterno cans beneath a copper-clad pan of Swedish meatballs, a tray of potatoes in a sauce of cream and onions, and a cauldron of something fumingly alcoholic, with blanched almonds and bloated raisins floating in it. Through the open kitchen door, Perry saw wine jugs and a vodka bottle on a counter.
“Take a plate and load up,” Reverend Haefle said. “Doris’s heritage is Swedish, and she makes a mean meatball—don’t forget the gravy. The potatoes are a dish called Jannson’s Temptation. It wouldn’t be a Swedish Christmas without a lot of heavy cream.”
Judson, though he must have been starving, politely hesitated.
“Don’t hold back, lad. We can use a young appetite. If you’d like some company your own age, our granddaughters are in the basement.”
Thinking of the Crappier Parsonage’s appalling basement, Perry pictured the granddaughters clad in rags and chained to a filthy stone wall. Yes, we keep them in the basement …
“And what is this?” he said, indicating the cauldron.
“That is a Scandinavian Christmas drink for grownups. We call it gløgg.”
Left alone with Judson, who evinced his native moderation by taking three meatballs, a spoon of potatoes, a quantity of raw carrots and broccoli florets, and, from a triple-decker stand laden with homemade cookies, two dry-looking balls dusted with powdered sugar, Perry considered the incredible intensity of the alcohol fumes wafting off the cauldron. It was like sticking his nose in a bottle of rubbing alcohol. There was, he realized only now, some ambiguity in his resolution, some scenarios not explicitly addressed by its terms. To wit: Was he required to abjure alcohol? Perhaps one cup of gløgg, taken on an empty stomach to maximize its clout, might be permissible on a night when he had no other antidote to the sinking of his mood? With an unsteady hand, splashing a little, he ladled the wine-dark substance into a ceramic cup and glanced behind him. No one was watching.
Escaping to the hallway, he took a slurp of the most delicious drink he’d ever tasted. It was clovey and cinnamony, full of vodka. The ordinarily nauseating gastric sourness of wine was overwhelmed by sugar. His face went warm immediately.
“Where am I supposed to go?” Judson said, holding his plate and a fork.
At the end of the hallway, they found stairs leading down to a proper recreation room, shag-carpeted, paneled with knotty pine, and dominated by a pool table. Sprawled on the carpeting, near an empty but usable fireplace, was a pair of girls younger than Perry and older than Judson, playing Yahtzee. Perry as a boy, when asked to play with female strangers, had routinely been paralyzed by self-consciousness. He was impressed by how naturally Judson sat down with the girls and introduced himself. Judson truly was a blessed child, rightly sure that strangers would like him. Or maybe the lure of Yahtzee was so powerful that it simply swept away all shyness.
Somehow, though Perry hadn’t been conscious of drinking, his cup was already empty. He ate two sodden raisins from the bottom, extracting precious liquid. A thin line of spice scum marked the level of his tragically modest initial serving, and as he went back up the stairs he reasoned that, not having taken the entire “one cup” permitted by the loophole in his resolution, he was entitled to a refill. His face was flaming, but he hadn’t achieved a proper buzz yet.