Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “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.”

  “If you’re selling drugs, though. That is not at all the same kind of thing.”

  “I’m not proud of it.”

  “You mustn’t sell drugs.”

  “For the record, I no longer do. I’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf. You can thank Becky for that.”

  “Becky? Becky knows about this?”

  “Not the selling part, I don’t think. But otherwise, yes, she’s pretty well apprised.”

  At the vista that was opening, the image of her children conspiring to exclude her, Marion felt a dizzying resurgence of her disturbance. Evidently, she was anything but the indispensable, confided-in mother she’d imagined herself to be. She’d fooled Russ, but she hadn’t fooled her kids, and her feral intelligence was quick to recognize a kind of permission in this: if she ever managed to walk away, she might not be so missed.

  “I’m going to have one more cigarette,” she said.

  “Permission granted.”

  She went back to the window and lit up. There was still some juice in her; the old organs of longing still functioned. Ei
ther-or, either-or. It was almost comical to watch her mind flip back and forth between irreconcilable contraries, God-fearing mother, unregretting sinner. She leaned as far as she dared out the window, trying to escape the house’s leaking warmth and feel the winter air on her skin. She leaned out even farther and caught a little gust of wind. Snowflakes were melting on her cheeks. Everything was a mess, and it was wonderful.

  “Whoa, Mom, careful,” Perry said.

  The amplified harmonies of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” stripped of reverb by the density of the crowd inside the function hall, came through the open doors. Two girls in mittens and pom-pommed stocking caps were at a table in the vestibule. They wanted three dollars.

  “I’m not here for the concert,” Clem said. “I’m looking for Becky Hildebrandt.”

  “She’s here. But we’re not supposed to—”

  “I’m not giving you three dollars.”

  Inside, the heads of taller concertgoers were silhouetted by stage lights. Seated in a half circle, with dreadnought guitars, behind cantilevered mics, were the Isner brothers and a statuesque girl, Amy Jenner, whose hair was longer than her torso. Clem remembered Amy well. Two years ago, in a Crossroads exercise, she’d given him a note that said You’re sexy. The assertion was so absurd that he’d taken it to be a joke, but seeing Amy now, having learned from Sharon what the world was made of, he understood it differently. The prettiness of Amy’s voice, as she sang of hating to see her lover go, salted the wound he’d inflicted on himself in Sharon’s bedroom.

  On the bus to Chicago, he and the baby behind him had finally slept, but it hadn’t been worth the cost of waking up. Returning to his consciousness of the actions he’d taken, to his aloneness with the knowledge of them, was like the reverse of awakening from a bad dream. After a brutal portage to the train station, he’d caught the 7:25 to New Prospect, where a good Samaritan had offered him a ride. He’d dropped his bags at the parsonage and charged back out into the snow, lashing himself forward. He was determined not to sleep until he could wake up knowing he wasn’t alone.

  He moved into the crowd, looking for Becky, but the concert was also a reunion. He was immediately pounced upon by a mature edition of Kelly Woehlke, a girl he’d grown up with at First Reformed. They’d never been friends, and on any other night the hug she gave him might have seemed unwarranted. Tonight the touch of a warm body nearly made him cry. His few real Crossroads friends were too anti-sentimental to bother with a reunion, but other alumni were crowding around him, and despite how peripheral he’d felt in the fellowship, how unwowed by the trust-building exercises and the rhetoric of personal growth, he received their hugs gratefully, as if they were the condolences of family. He wondered what Sharon would make of all the hugging. Then he wished he hadn’t wondered, because every specific thought of Sharon, no matter how innocuous, triggered another wave of guilt and hurt.

  By the time he’d circled through the crowd, not finding Becky, the Isner brothers and Amy Jenner were rousingly singing of what they would do with a hammer at various times of day. Clem’s energy was spent, and the loudness of the scene had become somewhat hellish. He’d run aground by the stage, stalled out in front of a stack of speakers, when his friend John Goya’s little brother Davy approached him. Not only was Davy no longer little, he looked strangely middle-aged. “Are you looking for Becky?” he shouted.

  “Yeah, is she here?”

  “I’m worried about her. Did she go home?”

  “No,” Clem shouted. “I just came from home.”

  Davy frowned.

  “Did something happen?” Clem shouted.

  The singing mercifully stopped, leaving only a low hum in the speakers.

  “I don’t know,” Davy said. “She’s probably just lying down somewhere.”

  Into Clem’s ear came the amplified mellifluence of Toby Isner, the elder of the two musical brothers. “Thank you, all. Thank you. I’m afraid we only have time for one more song.”

  Toby paused for expressions of disappointment, and someone in the audience politely moaned. Toby had an unctuous sensitive-guy sincerity, a self-pleasuring way of smiling when he sang, that never failed to make Clem’s skin crawl. Now he’d grown a dark beard of biblical dimensions.

  “You know,” Toby said, “I love that we’re all gathered here tonight, so many amazing people, so many wonderful friends, so much love, so much laughter. But I want to get serious for a minute. Can we do that? I want us all to remember there’s still a war going on. Right now, right this minute, it’s morning in Vietnam. People are still getting slaughtered, and, man, we gotta put a stop to that. Stop that war. We need America out of Vietnam right now. You dig me?”

  Toby was such a preening asshole that Clem almost pitied him. And yet quite a few people were clapping and whooping. Toby, encouraged, shouted, “I want to hear it from you, people! All together now! What do we want?”

  He cupped his ear with his hand, and a smattering of voices, mostly female, obliged him. “We want peace!”

  “Louder, man! What do we want?”

  “We want peace!”

  “What do we want?”

  “WE WANT PEACE!”

  “When do we want it?”

  “RIGHT NOW!”

  “We want peace!”

  “RIGHT NOW!”

  Although Davy Goya, God bless him, was coolly inspecting his fingernails, it seemed to Clem that every other person in the hall had taken up the chant. He’d done his share of chanting at various protests, before he met Sharon, but the sound of it now was so alienating that he felt ashamed of himself, ashamed of his weakness, for having hugged the other alumni. Not only were they safe and self-righteous, they weren’t appalled by Toby Isner. If they’d ever been Clem’s people, they definitely weren’t now.

  Toby lowered his fist, which he’d been pumping to the rhythm of the chanting, and hit the opening notes to “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A shout went up from the audience, and Clem couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed through the crowd and escaped into the church’s central hallway, where the bathrooms were. He opened the ladies’-room door a crack. “Becky?”

  No answer. He checked the other rooms along the hallway—also empty. He could still hear Toby Isner’s voice, could picture him simpering through his beard, when he reached the main church entrance. Sitting on the floor inside the door, smoking a cigarette, was a girl in a biker jacket. It was Laura Dobrinsky.

  “Hey Laura, good to see you. I wonder—have you seen my sister?”

  Laura took a sideways puff as if she hadn’t heard him. She looked like she’d been crying.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I’m just looking for Becky.”

  Between him and Laura was the social ease of having long ago established that they didn’t like each other. She took another sideways puff. “Last I saw her, she was stoned off her ass.”

  “She was—what?”

  “Stoned off her ass.”

  His vision swam as if he’d been punched. Now he understood why Davy Goya was worried. Leaving Laura to her private woe, he ran up two flights of stairs to the Crossroads meeting room. In the dimness of it, from the doorway, he saw a girl supine on a sofa, beneath a skinny boy. Both of them were clothed, and thankfully the girl wasn’t Becky.

  “Sorry. Have either of you seen Becky Hildebrandt?”

  “No,” the girl said. “Go away.”

  As he descended the stairs, he was hammered by his lack of sleep. He would have sat down for a smoke if he’d believed it would make him feel anything but worse. His eyes were fried, his head full of rottenness, his shoulders aching from carrying his luggage, his mouth sour from the cookies he’d grabbed on his way out of the parsonage, and the complication of Becky made it almost unbearable. He knew Perry smoked pot, but Becky? He needed her to be her shining, clearheaded self. He needed her on his side before he told his parents what he’d done.

  The second-floor hallway was dark, but the door of Rick Ambrose’s office was ajar
. Clem had always appreciated Ambrose for understanding his ambivalent relationship with Crossroads, and he appreciated him now for wanting nothing to do with the concert. On the chance that his sister might be in the office, safe, Clem peeked inside. Ambrose was slouched in his desk chair, reading a book, and appeared to be alone.

  Farther up the hallway to the sanctuary, Clem noticed a strip of light beneath the associate minister’s office door. Evidently his father, who would now be at the Haefles’ annual party, had forgotten to turn out the lights. As he walked past the door, he heard a laugh that sounded like Becky’s.

  He stopped. Did she somehow have an office key? He tapped on the door. “Becky?”

  “Who’s there?”

  His blood pressure jumped. The voice was his father’s. Clem hadn’t expected to see him—had counted on not seeing him—before he’d talked to Becky and gotten her blessing.

  “It’s me,” he said. “It’s Clem. Is Becky in there?”

  There was a silence, long enough to be unnatural. Then the door was opened by his father. He was wearing his old Arizona coat, and his face was strangely pale. “Clem, hi.”

  He seemed not at all happy to see his son. Behind him, in a hunting jacket and a matching cap, stood a clear-skinned boy who was, in fact, Clem realized, a short-haired woman.

  “Is Becky here?”

  “Becky? No. No, ah, this is one of our parishioners, Mrs. Cottrell.”

  The woman gave Clem a little wave. Her face was very pretty.

  “This is my son Clem,” his father said. “Mrs. Cottrell and I were just, uh—actually, maybe you can help us. Whoever shoveled the parking lot blocked her car in. We need to dig her out. Would you mind?”

  Mrs. Cottrell came over and offered Clem a hand. It was cool and firm.

  “Frances, don’t forget your records. I think—oh, Clem, I think I saw a couple of shovels by the front door. Mrs. Cottrell and I were late getting—we were down at Theo’s church and. So, and, yes, we had a, uh. Little accident.”

  Whatever it was that Clem had interrupted, his father couldn’t have been more nervous.

  “I don’t think I’m up for shoveling snow.”