Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

Flush with the likelihood of possessing it, of carnally penetrating it, commingling with it, he went to look for Perry. As he passed the Rough Rock bus, he saw Ambrose staring at him. His lip was curled with impotent disgust. There was no more pretending that the two of them weren’t enemies. It was frightening but also thrilling, because this time Russ had won.

  Inside the Many Farms bus, kids were piling onto seats already taken, clambering over backrests. At the door stood Kevin Anderson, a second-year seminarian with a deep-pile mustache and the soft brown eyes of a seal pup. Before Russ could ask him if he’d seen Perry, Kevin asked him the same question. Apparently Perry had not been seen since he checked in.

  Russ’s intuition of warning signs ignored, of necessary actions not taken, returned in force. The sun had sunk behind the church’s roofline but was still shining on the bank clock, which showed eight minutes past five. Except for Perry, the buses appeared to be fully loaded. Car engines were starting up, a few determined parents lingering to wave good-bye. It occurred to Russ that they could simply leave without Perry—let Marion deal with the fallout. But Kevin, whose heart was as soft as his eyes, insisted that they look inside the church.

  Spring-smelling air followed them in through doors still propped open. Kevin ran upstairs, calling Perry’s name, while Russ checked the ground floor. Not just the air but the emptiness of the hallway, which minutes ago had teemed with activity, had a flavor of Easter. In the middle chapters of the Gospels, crowds of people followed Jesus everywhere, gathering around him on the Mount, receiving fishes and loaves by the five thousand and the four thousand, welcoming him with palm fronds on the road into Jerusalem, but in the late chapters the focus narrowed to scenes of individual departure, private pain. The Last Supper: clandestine and death-haunted. Peter alone with his betrayals. Judas going away to hang himself. Jesus feeling forsaken on the cross. Mary Magdalene weeping at the sepulcher. The crowds had dispersed and everything was over. The worst thing in human history had happened sickeningly fast, and now it was another Sunday morning in Judea, the first day of the Jewish week, a particular spring morning with a particular spring smell to the air. Even the truth revealed that morning—the truth of Christ’s divinity and resurrection—was austere in its transcendence of human particularity, in its own way no less melancholy. Spring to Russ was a season more of loss than of joy.

  In the first-floor men’s room, even before he saw Perry’s feet in the farther stall, he sensed an airless stickiness, a male adolescent anxious to be left alone.

  “Perry?”

  The voice in the stall was muffled. “Yeah, Dad. One second.”

  “Are you not feeling well?”

  “Coming coming coming.”

  “A hundred and forty people are waiting for you.”

  On the rim of the sink were Perry’s wire-framed eyeglasses, newly prescribed for astigmatism. The frames weren’t the least expensive or most rugged that Marion could have let him choose, and indeed he’d already broken them. Finer wire was tightly wound around the damaged bridge.

  The toilet roared, and Perry banged out of the stall, went to the sink, and splashed water on his face. His corduroys, though belted, were halfway down his hips. He no longer had any bottom to speak of; had altogether lost a lot of weight.

  “What’s going on?” Russ said.

  Perry violently pumped the paper-towel dispenser and tore off a yard-long sheet. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Everything is A-OK.”

  “You don’t seem right to me.”

  “Just pre-road nerves. A little episode of you-know-what.”

  But there was no smell of diarrhea in the air.

  “Are you on drugs?”

  “Nope.” Perry put on his glasses and snagged his knapsack from the stall. “All set.”

  Russ gripped him by his scrawny shoulder. “If you’re on drugs, I can’t let you on the bus.”

  “Drugs, drugs, what kind of drugs.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, there you go. I’m not on drugs.”

  “Look me in the eye.”

  Perry did so. His face was blotched with crimson, clear mucus seeping from his nose. “I swear to God, Dad. I’m clean as a whistle.”

  “You don’t seem clean to me.”

  “Clean as a whistle and frankly wondering why you’re asking.”

  “David Goya is worried about you.”

  “David should worry about his own pot dependency. As a matter of fact, I wonder what a search of his luggage might turn up.” Perry held up his knapsack. “You’re free to search mine. Go ahead and pat me down. I’ll even drop my pants, if you can stand the embarrassment.”

  He was giving off a very sour mildew smell. Russ had never felt more repelled by him, but he didn’t have hard enough evidence to send him home to Marion. Time was passing, and the responsibility was his. He made himself take it.

  “I want you in Kitsillie with me. You can have Becky’s place.”

  A laugh burst from Perry like a sneeze.

  “What?” Russ said.

  “Could there be anything that either of us wants less than that?”

  “I’m concerned that you don’t seem well.”

  “I’m trying to help you, Dad. Don’t you want me to help you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll stay out of your business if you’ll stay out of mine.”

  “My business is your welfare.”

  “Then you must be—” Perry snickered. “Very busy.” He shouldered his knapsack and wiped his nose.

  “Perry, listen to me.”

  “I’m not going to Kitsillie. You’ve got your business, I’ve got mine.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Really? You think I don’t know why you’re going on this trip? It would be too hilarious if I knew it and you didn’t. Do you need me to spell it out for you? She’s a total F-O-X. And I don’t mean some esoteric oxyfluoride salt of xenon, although, interestingly, they’ve synthesized some salts like that, in spite of the supposed completeness of xenon’s outermost electron shell, which you’d think couldn’t happen, and, yes, I realize I digress. My point in mentioning chemistry was that it’s not the point, but you must admit it’s pretty incredible. Everyone assumed that xenon was inert, I mean it’s such a credit to the fluorine atom—its oxidizing powers. Wouldn’t you agree that it’s incredible?”

  Perry smiled at Russ as if he believed he was following his nonsense and enjoying it.

  “You need to calm down,” Russ said. “I’m not at all sure you should be coming with us.”

  “I’m talking about a valence of zero, Dad. If we’re comparing your qualifications with mine, do you even know what a chemical valence is?”

  Russ made a helpless gesture.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Outside the bathroom, in the hallway, Kevin Anderson was calling Perry’s name.

  “Coming,” Perry shouted cheerfully.

  Before Russ could stop him, he was out the door.

  Glancing at the mirror above the sink, he was dismayed to see a father with responsibilities. What he wanted more than anything was to have nothing to do with his son. At the thought of letting Perry’s disturbance and his mildew stink be Kevin’s problem, he felt a melting warmth in his loins. The warmth, which also related to Frances, plainly told him that the thought was evil. But every other scenario—getting Ambrose involved, locating Marion and making her deal with Perry, forcibly removing Perry from the bus, forgoing the trip himself or dragging Perry to Kitsillie—seemed worse than the next. Each of them would grossly delay the group’s departure, and Frances was waiting on the bus. To have her even once seemed worth whatever price God might later make him pay.

  * * *

  After Jesus had returned to his friends, eaten breakfast with them, let them touch him, he ascended to heaven and was never on earth again in body. What followed, as recounted in Acts, was a radical insurgency. The earliest Christians had all things in com
mon—sold their possessions, shared whatever they had—and were militant in their counterculture. They never passed up a chance to remind the Pharisees of their hand in nailing the Christ to a tree. Their leaders were persecuted and forever on the run, but their ranks kept growing. It no doubt helped that Peter and Paul could perform miracles, but more crucial was Peter’s inspiration to extend his ministry to the Gentiles. From a fire that had started within the Jewish community and might have been safely contained there, sparks flew into the greater Roman Empire. Paul, who’d begun his career as the most zealous of persecutors, holding the cloaks of the mob that stoned Stephen to death, was the most tireless of the fire spreaders. When last seen, in Acts, he’d made it all the way to Rome and was living, unmolested, in a rented house. Unmolested but still an outsider, still an insurgent.

  What gave the new religion its edge was its paradoxical inversion of human nature, its exalting of poverty and rejection of worldly power, but a religion founded on paradox was inherently unstable. Once the old religions had been routed, the insurgents became the Pharisees. They became the Holy Roman Church and did their own persecuting, fell into their own complacency and corruption, and betrayed the spirit of Christ. Antithetical to power, the spirit took refuge and expressed itself in opposition—in the gentle renunciations of Saint Francis, the violent rebellion of the Reformation. True Christian faith always burned from the edge.

  And no one understood this better than the Anabaptists. They began as a rebuke to the Reformation in northern Europe, which had retained the practice of universal infant baptism. For the Anabaptists, the voluntary choice of baptism, as an adult, was decisive. The book of Acts, an account of Christians so original that some of them had known Jesus personally, abounded with stories of adults seeing the light and requesting baptism. The Anabaptists were radical in the strict sense, returning to the earliest roots of their faith. They were correspondingly feared by Reformation authorities, such as Zwingli, and cruelly persecuted—banished, tortured, burned at the stake—in the first half of the sixteenth century. The effect was to confirm the radicalism of the Anabaptists who survived. In the Bible, after all, to be Christian was to suffer persecution.

  Four centuries later, when Russ was a boy, memories of Anabaptist martyrdom were still vivid. The stories of Felix Manz and Michael Sattler, and of others killed for their beliefs, were part of the group identity of his parents’ Mennonite community, part of its apartness, in the farm country around Lesser Hebron, Indiana. The kingdom of heaven would never encircle the earth, but it could be approached on a small scale in rural communities that practiced self-sufficiency, lived in strict accordance with the Word, and pointedly removed themselves from the present age. The Mennonites chose to be “the quiet in the land.” To aspire to more was to risk losing all.

  The Anabaptists of Lesser Hebron weren’t Old Order—they used machines; the men wore ordinary clothes—and they weren’t as communist as the Hutterites, but Russ as a boy heard little of the wider world and saw little of money. When he was twelve, he worked a long unpaid summer for a couple who’d lost their son to influenza, Fritz and Susanna Niedermayer, milking their cows and shoveling their manure in the assurance that they’d have done the same for the Hildebrandts had their situations been reversed. His older sisters disappeared for months at a time, helping families with new babies and leaving Russ with extra duties on the small farm his mother owned. They had a few cows, a large garden and a larger orchard, and ten acres for row crops that must have earned a bit of cash.

  Like his own father before him, Russ’s father was the pastor of the church in Lesser Hebron. Unlike other men in the community, he wore a long, collarless coat that buttoned at the neck. In the parlor of the family’s house in town was a cabinet containing birth and marriage records, minutes of Anabaptist councils from more disputatious eras, and genealogies stretching back to Europe. Small groups of men could be found in the parlor at all hours of the day, conferring with his father and courteously accepting slices of his mother’s pies. There seemed to be no limit to their patience in maintaining their apartness, their nonconforming obedience to the Word. A dispute between neighbors or a fine point of worship could occupy them for weeks before his father effected a reconciliation.

  Blessed are the peacemakers: Russ was proud of his father but afraid of his seriousness, his forbidding coat, the sober male voices in the parlor. He preferred the kitchen and felt closer to God there. His mother worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day, placid in her plain dress and her hair covering. According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her. In the time it took her to listen, actively, with clear-hearted questions, to one story he had to tell from school or the farm, she could make dough for a pie crust and roll it out, core and slice apples, and assemble a pie. And then, neither pausing nor rushing, she was on to the next chore. She made emulating Christ seem effortlessly rewarding. It horrified Russ to think that, four hundred years earlier, a person so quietly devout might have been put to death; it filled him with pity for the martyrs.

  His other favorite place was the blacksmith shop of his mother’s father, his Opa Clement, whose work included the repair of automobiles and tractors. Clement showed Russ how to hold a glowing horseshoe with tongs, how to use tin snips to fashion cookie cutters (a Christmas present for Russ’s mother in 1936), how to rebuild a carburetor, how to hammer out a dented wheel and check its roundness with calipers. Clement’s wife had died before Russ was born, and although he had his daughter’s meditative way of working, her limpid rightness with the things around him, he’d become eccentric in his solitude. He subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, neglected his shaving and bathing, and sometimes omitted to worship with his brethren. At the end of an afternoon when Russ had helped him, he reached into the pocket of his pinstripe overalls, removed a fistful of money, and invited Russ to choose, from his blackened hand, any coin that had silver in it. Even as a teenager, Russ was too innocently devout to spend the money only on himself. It was unthinkable not to get his mother something, a package of gingersnaps, a bottle of peppermint extract.

  Except for rendering taxes unto the government, as Jesus had sensibly advised, the community was quietly but firmly anti-state. They schooled their children separately, avoided polling places and courts of law, and declined to swear on the Bible if called as witnesses. Most central to their identity was their pacifism. On few points was the Gospel clearer than on the incompatibility of violence with love. As the community’s pastor, in 1917, Russ’s paternal grandfather had contended, on the one hand, with the anger and prejudice of non-Mennonite farmers—rocks thrown through windows of the Kaiser-lovers, a barn defaced with ugly words—and, on the other, with families in his congregation who’d permitted their sons to go to war. Two of the families eventually quit the community.

  Russ was seventeen when the country entered the Second World War. He would have been obliged to lodge an objection of conscience sooner if the president of the local draft board hadn’t grown up on a farm adjoining the Niedermayers’. Cal Sanborn liked and admired the Mennonites and did everything he could to protect their sons. Russ was among the last to be called up, in 1944, and by then he’d completed five semesters at Goshen College. He’d also had his first crisis of faith, not in Jesus Christ but in his parents.

  He’d enjoyed his classes at Goshen, but his only close friend was likewise the son of a pastor. In his ungainly tallness, as in the seriousness he’d inherited from his father, he felt uncomfortable with the earthier and more athletic boys, especially when their talk turned to girls. His father had told him that there would be girls at the college, and that he shouldn’t shy from fellowship with them, but Russ couldn’t look at a girl without thinking of his mother. Even to return a girl’s friendly smile was somehow to offend against the person he most loved and revered; it made him queasy. The cure was to take a walk of five or ten miles, in the country around the college, until his body was exhausted
and his soul open to grace.

  In his third semester he studied European history, and he was keen to hear what Clement, who paid attention to the world, had to say about the war. The blacksmith shop, with its bellows and its potbellied stove, was especially congenial at Christmastime. Each tool in it was known to Russ, each evoked memories of afternoons slowed and deepened by unspoken love. Each year at Christmas there was also a new tool, for Russ to keep as a gift, a hammer or a coping saw, an auger drill, a set of chisels. He felt bad about how little he’d used the gifts, but Clement assured him that someday they would come in handy. Russ’s experiences of grace seemed to presage a future as a pastor, like his father, and the only tool his father had any skill with was his letter opener, but he imagined that when he was settled, with a wife and family, he might take up woodworking as a hobby, a little eccentricity of his own.

  Lesser Hebron was buried in snow when he got home. His father took him into the parlor, shut the door, and told him that Opa Clement wasn’t coming for Christmas and that Russ was not to visit him. “Clement is a drunkard and an adulterer,” his father explained. “We’re resolved to avoid him in the hope that he’ll repent.”

  Greatly upset, Russ went to his mother for a fuller explanation and permission to see her father. He got the explanation—Opa Clement had taken up with an unmarried schoolteacher, a woman scarcely older than thirty, and had been drinking whiskey when his brethren went to reason with him—but not the permission. Although their community didn’t practice strict shunning, his mother said, a higher standard applied to a pastor’s family, and this included Russ.

  “But it’s Opa. I can’t be home for Christmas and not see Opa.”

  “We’re praying that he’ll repent,” his mother said placidly. “Then we can all be together again.”

  Her equanimity was consonant with the primacy of Christ in her life, the secondary nature of everything else. The commandment to honor one’s parents came from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, although the rejoicing at a sinner’s reclamation was hundredfold, the sinner was first required to repent. Never mind an offending parent—you were supposed to pluck your own offending eye out. His mother was only as radical as the Gospel itself.