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...
When he finally reached the parsonage, a large Oldsmobile, Dwight Haefle’s, was backing out of the driveway. He tried to go around it, but Dwight stopped at an angle and lowered his window. Russ could only lower his.
“We missed you at the party,” Dwight said.
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
“Marion mentioned that you and Mrs. Cottrell had some trouble in the city?”
Dwight’s expression was unreadable in the incidental light. What was he doing at the parsonage? How had Marion known that Russ was with Frances and not Kitty Reynolds?
“No, ah, no injuries,” he said.
“I brought you some leftovers, in case you’re hungry.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank Doris.”
Dwight’s window went up again, quickly and smoothly. The Oldsmobile, its power windows, its capabilities and newness, seemed emblematic of the senior minister’s invulnerability to temptations of the flesh. The Lord was with him; but so was Doris. Russ was a wreck at the wheel of a wreck, but he had Mrs. Cottrell.
Only when he’d pulled into the driveway and cut the engine did he recall that Clem might be at home. He wanted to see Clem as little as he wanted to see Marion, but he knew he needed to speak to him again. He needed to revise what he’d said earlier—take the same risk he’d taken with Ambrose and be honest, confess to the complications of his heart and forgive, as he had with Ambrose, the hurtful things his son had said. Nothing less was demanded of the man he was becoming.
Inside, in the kitchen, he found Marion and Judson at the table with a carton of eggnog. Judson was leaning back with a nog-smeared glass in his hand, coaxing the last viscous drops into his mouth. A faint scent of bacon was in the air.
“Good Lord,” Marion said. “There you are.”
“Hi, Dad,” Judson said.
“Hello, lad. You’re up pretty late.”
“Perry took me to the Haefles’. I got to watch a movie, and it was excellent, it was in New York City, and there was a gigantic department store, the one that does the Macy’s parade—”
“Judson, honey,” Marion said, “why don’t you run upstairs and get your teeth brushed. I’ll come up and tuck you in.”
“I’d like to hear more about that movie,” Russ said heartily.
Without seeming to hear him, Judson got up and left the kitchen. Only for Marion did his children have ears. He pried off the work shoes that Ambrose had earlier unlaced.
“I’m sorry I missed the party.”
“I’m sure you are,” she said. “It was a laugh a minute.”
From the chill in her voice, without looking at her, he gathered that his lie at breakfast hadn’t gone unnoticed. He was tempted to explain it away—to volunteer that Mrs. Cottrell had unexpectedly taken Kitty’s place. But this would have been the old Russ.
“Is Clem here?”
“No,” she said.
“He’s—have you seen him?”
“I sent him back to Champaign.”
Now he looked at her. Her face was as red as ever, her hair no better, but there was something steely in her eyes.
“One of us needed to do something,” she said. “I gather you did less than nothing.”
“He’s going back to Champaign? Now?”
“There’s a midnight bus and apparently a girl he’s involved with. I don’t know if he’ll change his mind, but it’s a start.”
Russ looked away from her. “That’s unfortunate. I was hoping to talk to him again.”
“If only you hadn’t been detained…”
“I already apologized for being late. I didn’t realize—”
“That he was having a major crisis?”
“I tried to reason with him.”
“And how did that go?”
“I—not well.”
She laughed at him. Laughed and stood up and went to the coat hooks by the door, removed something from a coat pocket, and shook it. Though small, the white object she extracted with her lips was so alien, had such a powerful charge, that it was like a third presence in the room. The bacony smell, he realized, was coming from his wife.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
“Smoking,” she said.
“Not in my house.”
“This isn’t your house, Russ. That’s a silly idea you need to let go of. The house is the church’s, and I’m the one who’s always in it. In what sense is it yours?”
The question took him aback. “It is part of my compensation as a minister.”
“Oh dear.” She laughed again. “You want to argue with me? I wouldn’t recommend it.”
He saw that she was angry, perhaps inordinately so, about his little lie. She lit a burner on the stove and leaned over it, holding her hair away from the flame.
“Put that out,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but put that out.”
With mirth in her eyes, she blew smoke in his direction.
“Marion. What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing!”
“If you’re angry with me about missing the party—”
“Truth be told, I was hardly even thinking of you.”
“I had an accident in the city. I ended up going with Mrs. Cottrell, by the way. Kitty couldn’t, ah. Kitty couldn’t make it. She, ah…”
He could feel himself being dragged down, by the inertia of marriage, into a well-established pattern of evasion. As long as he stayed with Marion, he would never change.
“You and I have a lot to discuss,” he said threateningly. “It’s not just Clem. There’s also a problem with Perry you need to know about. And— I went to see Ambrose. I thought it was—”
“Russ, really. I’m just having a cigarette.”
The sight of her smoking, in the middle of the kitchen, was uncanny. If she’d stripped out of her clothes and shaken her breasts at him, it wouldn’t have been any stranger. There was something of sex in the gasp of her drag on the cigarette.
“Although I do wonder,” she said, exhaling, “how you think it would work. Even at the level of fantasy, how do you picture it working?”
“How what would work?”
“You’d still have four kids to support. You’d still be making seven thousand dollars a year. Is the idea that you’d go and live on her charity? Forgive me for wondering how well you’ve thought it through.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Again Marion laughed. “I hope she’s good at writing sermons,” she said. “I hope she likes cooking your meals and washing your underwear. I hope she’s ready to have the relationship with your kids that you’re too busy saving the world for. I hope she’s up for dealing with your insecurity every night of the week. And you know what else? I hope she keeps a close eye on you.”
For the second time in two hours, he was being taunted. Although, in strict point of morality, he deserved it, he had a physical urge, stronger even than he’d had with Clem, to strike his wife. He felt like batting the cigarette from her hand, slapping her in the face, knocking the smile off it, so angering was the contrast between his family’s disrespect and Frances’s ingratiations.
“I didn’t realize,” he said stiffly, “that you resented helping me with my sermons.”
“I don’t, Russ. The help is freely given.”
“In the future, I will write them all myself.”
She took another puff on the cigarette. “Whatever you like, dear.”
“As for the rest of it,” he said, “I won’t dignify it with an answer. I’ve had a very long day, and I’m going to bed. I would only thank you not to smoke in a house where the rest of us need to sleep.”
In response, she made an O with her lips and blew a smoke ring. Her mouth stayed open.
“God damn it, Marion.”