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...
They reached the parsonage before she’d finished. In the driveway were two sets of recent footprints, one coming, one going. Guessing that they were Clem’s, she called his name as soon as she and Perry were in the kitchen, but the house was obviously empty.
“I wonder if he went to the concert,” she said. “You probably want to get down there, too. We can talk more in the morning.”
Perry was eating a cookie. “If you have more to say, let’s hear it.”
She retrieved the Luckies from her coat and opened the back door for ventilation.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. This is hard for me to do without smoking.”
Her hands were too shaky to get a match lit. Perry took the matches and flared one for her. She was feeling somehow younger than he was; more daughter than mother. She gratefully inhaled the smoke and tried to blow it out the door, but the wind pushed it in.
“Put that out,” he said. “I have a better idea.”
“The front porch.”
“No. Third floor.”
In the gloom of the front hall, she was surprised to see two massive pieces of luggage. For a moment, as in a dream, she thought that they were hers—that she was leaving tonight, perhaps for Los Angeles. Then she understood that they were Clem’s. Why had he brought so much luggage?
Perry had run up the stairs. Huffing, with poisoned heart, she followed him to the third-floor storage room. No guilty secrets were buried here. She’d arrived at her uncle Jimmy’s with only one suitcase, and before she married Russ she’d burned her diaries in Jimmy’s fireplace, destroying the last evidence of the person she’d been. The oldest relics now were from Indiana—a crib and a high chair last used by Judson, an old movie projector, a cedar chest of blankets and linens not worth keeping, a wardrobe of fashions unlikely to return, a mildewed army-surplus tent that Russ had wrongly imagined the family might camp in. It was all just sadness.
Without turning on a light, Perry opened the mullioned dormer window. “The house has some kind of chimney effect,” he said. “Even with the door closed, there’s always a draft going out.”
“You seem to really know your way around up here.”
“You can use the outer sill as an ashtray.”
“Wait a minute. Are you telling me you smoke?”
“Finish your story. I thought you had more to say.”
There was indeed an outflowing draft. She could put her head out the window and still be in relative warmth—in the snow, feeling the flakes on her face, without being of it. Smoking but not in smoke.
“So, well, so,” she said. “I ended up losing my mind. I got picked up by the police when I was wandering around on Christmas morning. Thirty years ago tomorrow. They took me to the county hospital, and then I was committed to the women’s ward at Rancho Los Amigos, which is not the kind of place you ever want to be. Obviously, they couldn’t let me back out on the street, but to be locked up in a place with bars on the windows, surrounded by women even crazier than me—I still don’t really understand how I got better. The psychiatrists told me that my brain was still adolescent. The word they used was plastic. They said it was possible my hormones would settle down—that I’d stressed them by spending too much time alone, and by … other things. I didn’t really believe them, but there was a list of behaviors I had to exhibit before they’d let me leave, and I was so desperate to get out that I eventually exhibited every one of them. So. That’s another important fact about me. I was institutionalized for mental illness when I was twenty.”
She crushed her cigarette on the outer sill.
“Do you see why I was so worried about you in the spring? We’re so much alike—we’re not like the others. Your trouble sleeping, your mood swings, I think that’s something you get from me. From my side of the family. I feel terrible about it, but it’s something you need to know. I don’t want you to ever have to go through what I did.”
It was hard to turn away from the window, but she did it. The room seemed brighter now that her eyes had adjusted. Perry was sitting on the cedar chest, his own eyes on the floor. When she sat down in his line of vision, he lowered his chin to his chest.
“Your father doesn’t know about any of this,” she said. “I never told him I’d been in a hospital—because I got better. I’d been better for a number of years when I met him, and I want you to remember that. The psychiatrists were right. It was something I outgrew.”
This was to some extent a lie, so she repeated it.
“You don’t have to worry about me, sweetie. But I am worried about you. You’re still a teenager, and you’re so precious to me. You need to tell me what’s happening in your head. If there’s a problem, we can work on it, but you need to be honest with me. Will you do that? Will you tell me what you’re thinking?”
His breath was hot and she could smell the liquor on it. To have named, aloud, to him, the thing for which she felt guiltiest made it larger; realer; inescapable-seeming. She thought of her earlier hesitation at the door of the dumpling’s office—her sense that she had only two choices, either submit to God’s will and devote herself to Perry, or godlessly devote herself to herself. It was cruel how mutually exclusive the choices seemed to be. In the heat of her son’s breath, she could feel her elation evaporating, her longing for Bradley escaping her grasp.
“Sweetie? Please say something.”
With a breathy sound, almost a laugh, he sat up straight and looked around the room as if he didn’t see her at his feet. “What’s there to say? It’s not like this is any great surprise.”
“How so?”
He was smiling. “I already knew I was damned. Right?”
“No, no, no.”
“I’m not saying it’s your fault. It’s just a fact. There’s something bad in my head.”
“No, sweetie. You’re just intelligent and sensitive. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It can be a very good thing, too.”
“Not true. Here, you want to see?”
He stood up with surprising energy and stepped onto the cedar chest. From the top of the wardrobe, he took down a shoe box. He wasn’t reacting at all the way she’d expected. There was no distress on her behalf, no fear on his own. It was as if a switch had been flipped and he wasn’t reacting at all. And she knew that switch. It was the worst sort of punishment to see her son flipping it.
He removed the lid of the shoe box and held up a clear plastic bag that appeared to be filled with plant matter. “These,” he said, “are the seeds and stems from what I’ve smoked up here. They correspond to maybe ten percent of my total intake, counting other locations.” He rooted in the box. “Here we have my papers. Here’s the pipe I thought would be great but didn’t quite work for me. Trusty Bic lighter, of course. Roach clip. Miniature mouthwash bottle. And this—” He held up a gleaming apparatus. “You might as well know about this, too. This is a more or less serviceable hand scale. Useful if you’re in the business of selling pot.”
“Holy Mary.”
“You asked me to be honest with you.”
He put the lid back on the box. All business, no emotion. It occurred to her that the Perry in her head had been nothing but a sentimental projection, extrapolated from the little boy he’d been. She didn’t know the real Perry any more than Russ knew the real her.
“How did this all happen so quickly?” she said, meaning his becoming a stranger.
“Three years isn’t quick.”
“Oh my. Three years? I must be very stupid and very blind.”
“Not necessarily. It isn’t hard to hide a drug habit if you’re sedulous about the protocols.”
“I thought we had a close relationship.”
“We do, in a way. It’s not like I thought I knew everything about you. As, indeed, I’m now learning, I didn’t.”