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 the hallway, standing with her back to the party and popping a whole cookie into her mouth, was the Lutheran pastor’s wife—Jane. Definitely Jane Walsh, not Janet. On her dessert plate were four more cookies, and she was even heavier than Marion.
“Hello, Jane. Marion Hildebrandt—Russ’s wife.”
One greeting down, a million to go.
“This party is a lovely tradition,” Jane said, “but Doris’s cookies are not what I need at this time of year. I always seem to overdo.”
Marion herself preferred the meatballs. The cookies here, though impeccably Swedish, were dry and flavorless. She was on the verge of expressing this judgment, on the theory that she was done with censoring herself, when the sociable din in the living room died down suddenly. She wondered if Dwight Haefle might be making a little speech. Instead, she heard another familiar voice rising. It was Perry, shouting something about … being damned?
She hurried past Jane Walsh and pushed through the party’s margins. Perry was standing by the fireplace, his face extremely red, a Haefle to either side of him. Everyone else in the room was watching them.
“What’s going on?” Marion said.
Perry swallowed a sob. “Mom, I’m sorry.”
“What is it? What’s happening?”
“Son,” Dwight Haefle said, putting an arm around Perry. “Let’s, ah. Let’s take a little walk.”
Perry bowed his head and let himself be led away. Marion tried to follow, but Doris Haefle arrested her. Her expression blazed with triumph. “Your son is intoxicated.”
“I’m very sorry to hear it.”
“Hm, yes, this is what happens when children aren’t supervised. Did you only get here now?”
“A few minutes ago.”
“It’s quite unusual that your children came without you.”
“I know. The weather is just … Perry was trying to do a good thing.”
“You didn’t tell him to come?”
“God, no.”
“That’s good, then, dear.” Doris patted Marion on the shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just need to take him home now.”
Doris Haefle had a grossly inflated sense of the importance of a pastor’s wife, was sensitive to every slight to it, and therefore, because the world didn’t share her regard for the role, existed in a state of perpetual grievance. Among the crosses she bore was being married to a pastor who ironically deprecated his own role. For Marion, the miserable thing was that she, too, was a pastor’s wife and thus, in Doris’s view, worthy of the highest respect. She had to endure not only Doris’s unsolicited suggestions on how to comport herself, in her exalted role, but the unfailingly tender manner in which she offered them. It was awkward to be called dear by a person you felt like calling insufferable bitch.
Perry was slumped forward on a chair in the dining room, his hair draping his face. Dwight came over to Marion and spoke in a low voice. “He does seem to have been drinking gløgg.”
“I’ll take care of it,” she said. “I apologize for this.”
“Should we be worried about Russ?”
“No, he’s on a date with Frances Cottrell.”
The widening of Dwight’s eyes amused her.
“They’re delivering toys and canned goods in the city.”
“Ah.”
“But listen,” she said. “Judson’s in the basement watching Miracle on 34th Street. Would you mind if I left him here and came back later?”
“Not at all,” Dwight said. “If you don’t want to come back, I can run him home.”
How often a marriage consisted of nasty paired with nice. If her own marriage didn’t strike people this way, it was only because they’d never met the real her. She needed to go down and tell Judson that she was taking Perry home, but the scene in the basement had left an unsettling aftertaste, and so she asked nice Dwight to do it. When he was gone, she went to Perry and crouched at his feet.
“Sweetie,” she said. “How drunk are you? A lot, or not very?”
“Relatively not very,” he said, his face still hidden. “Mrs. Haefle overreacted.”
The word relatively didn’t surprise Marion. She herself had done her first drinking when she was his age. Then again, look how she’d turned out.
“What were you thinking?” she said. “You brought Judson here. You were responsible for him—did you not think of that?”
“Mother. Please. I am very sorry, all right?”
“Sweetie, look at me. Will you look at me? I’m not angry with you. I’m just surprised—you’re always so considerate of Judson.”
“I’m sorry!”
The poor boy. She took his hands and kissed his head.
“Jay was fine,” he said. “He was playing Yahtzee, and I wasn’t that buzzed. Everything was fine until…”
“You picked the wrong woman’s house to get drunk in.”
He gave a little snort. Her opinion of Doris Haefle was known to him. She’d told him all sorts of things she didn’t tell the other kids. And now she had new things to tell him. The hotness of his hands, the reality of the boy she so especially loved, was burning a hole in the tissue of her fantasies of Bradley. “Let’s get you home,” she said.
When she returned from the closet with their coats, Perry was eating from a plate of meatballs. They were tempting, but so were cigarettes. The old cycles of nicotine, of hunger and its suppression, of anxiety and relief, were coming back to her. Leaving Perry to get some food in him, she stepped out onto the front stoop.
She was only halfway through the Lucky when he opened the door. She had a red-handed impulse to drop the cigarette, but it was important that he see her as she really was.
He goggled in cartoonish astonishment. “What, may I ask, are you doing?”
“I have my own contraband tonight.”
“You smoke?”
“I used to, a long time ago. But it’s a terrible habit and you must never try it.”
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
“Exactly.”
He shut the door and stepped into his rubbers. “Can I try one anyway?”
Too late, she realized her mistake. At some point, she was sure of it, he’d take her smoking as permission to smoke himself, and it would be yet another thing to feel guilty about having done to him. To quell this new anxiety, she sucked hard on the cigarette.
“Perry, listen to me. There’s one thing you can do that I will not forgive. I will never forgive you if you become a smoker. Do you understand?”
“Honestly, no,” he said, buckling his rubbers. “I don’t think of you as being a hypocrite.”
“I started smoking before anyone knew how dangerous it is. You’re too intelligent to make the same mistake.”
“And yet here you are, smoking.”
“Well, there’s a reason for that. Would you like me to tell you what it is?”
“I want you not to die.”
“I don’t intend to die, sweetie. But there are some things you need to know about me. How are you feeling now?”
“The buzz no longer buzzeth. Buzzeth buzzeth buzzeth—see?”
In the story she began to tell him, as they made their way home, there was nothing of Bradley Grant, nothing of any man except her father. The snow, deep on the ground and still falling, gave her voice a curious distinctness while dampening its carry, as if the world were an enlargement of her skull. Perry listened in silence, wordlessly offering her a hand where the snow had formed drifts. Until now, she’d kept the suicide a secret from her kids. Even to Russ she hadn’t spoken of it in many years; she had the sense that it frightened him, or embarrassed him; as did, for that matter, everything else related to her innermost self. Perry’s face was hidden by the hood of his parka, and as she proceeded to describe her own mental disturbance, following the suicide—the dissociation, the episodes of slippage, the months of insomnia, the weeks of catatonic lowness—she had no idea what he was making of it.