Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  Because he was working hard, for people who could use the help, he didn’t feel guilty about his official mission, but George Ginchy had told him that if he wasn’t back by August he would send a search party. Accordingly, at first light on the thirty-first of July, he packed and fueled the Willys and took his leave of Keith and Stella, who were the only others awake. Stella ran up to him and wrapped her arms around his leg. He picked her up and stroked her head.

  “I’ll come back,” he said. “I don’t know when, but I will.”

  “Careful what you promise, Long Wrench.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you. Was I, Stella?”

  She squirmed bashfully. He set her down, and she went to her father. Ever unsentimental, Keith was already walking away.

  Russ still knew hardly anything about the Diné, but at least he knew how much he didn’t know. The desert had only strengthened his belief in God, but he was no longer certain that his ancestral faith was the truest version of the one true faith. After he returned to the service camp, where Ginchy, not punitively, simply out of practicality, had found another worker to be his aide-de-camp, Russ began to investigate the many ways there were to skin a cat. He now worked for the quartermaster and could safely take an extra hour, on a Flagstaff supply run, to stop at the library and read books shelved in the Dewey decimal 290s, world religions. At the camp, on Sunday mornings, he tried worshiping with Ginchy and the Quakers. Their silences, though agreeable to him, seemed shallower than Navajo silences, less embedded in a comprehensive way of being. But he could never be a Navajo; their coffee wasn’t for him to drink.

  One Sunday morning in November, continuing his investigation, he drove the old Willys to the Catholic church in Flagstaff. He’d detected, in a book about Saint Francis, an appealingly uncompromising spirit. From a pew at the rear of the church, amid the fragrance of burning tapers and the feeble light from colored windows, he could see the mantillas and gray braids of old Mexican women, the more modern American dress of middle-aged couples, and the pale nape of a woman whose head was deeply bowed. The priest, who was elderly, with a serious tremor, spoke a language as unintelligible as Navajo, and the service wasn’t short. Russ’s eyes kept returning to the pale neck in front of him. It aroused a sensation he’d formerly misapprehended as queasiness and now associated with pleasure in secrecy. The woman was small and delicate, her hair cut in a bob.

  In Lesser Hebron, Communion was a major semiannual event taken in full fellowship, using bread that the women had communally kneaded and baked. Catholic Communion seemed almost as alien to Russ as a Navajo sing. The priest invited sacrilegious comparison to a doctor with a tongue depressor, the congregants to children queuing up for lunch. Only the woman with the pretty neck received her wafer with visible feeling. She kneeled with a quaking vulnerability, reminiscent of his mother’s intensity of faith. As she returned to her pew, he saw that she was full-mouthed and dark-eyed, possibly no older than he was.

  After the service, he asked the priest if he could come again and receive Communion as a visitor. The priest explained why he couldn’t, but he said that Russ was welcome to observe and worship. Russ duly revisited Nativity the following Sunday, but this time he was defeated by the Latin of it all. The church’s thick walls, which a week earlier had felt sheltering, now struck him as a monument to a living faith gone dead, a once-molten spirit congealed into cold stone by the passing of centuries. The dark-eyed young woman was there again, alone again, but the fervor of her faith now seemed to exclude him.

  Abandoning his experiment, he returned to worshiping with his fellow Mennonites in camp, but he felt no great fellowship with them. The truth was, he missed the mesa, the immanence of God in every rock, every bush, every insect. He took to hiking up the forest road, alone, on Sunday mornings. There he did sometimes sense God’s presence, but it was feeble, like sun hidden by winter clouds.

  One afternoon in March, while he was at the library in Flagstaff, abusing his camp privileges, leafing through a book of photographs of Plains Indians, a young woman sat down across the table from him and opened a math textbook. She was wearing a plaid cowboy shirt and had her hair in a bandanna, but he still recognized her. In the library’s better light, she was easily the most handsome woman he’d seen since his eyes were opened by a Navajo dancer. Embarrassed to be looking at a picture book, as if he were illiterate, he stood up to fetch a different book.

  “I know you,” she said. “I saw you at Nativity.”

  He turned back. “Yes.”

  “I only saw you twice. Why?”

  “Do you mean why only twice, or why was I there at all?”

  “Both.”

  “I’m not Catholic. I was just—observing.”

  “That explains it. Young Catholic gentlemen are few and far between. I notice you never came back.”

  “I’m not Catholic.”

  “So you just said. If you say it a third time, I’ll think you’re warding off some hex.”

  Her sharpness surprised him, as did the directness with which she proceeded to question him. Having sensed a resemblance to his mother, he might have expected softness and modesty. While learning nothing more about her than her name, which was Marion, he told her where he came from, why he was in Flagstaff, and how the Navajos had led him to explore other faiths.

  “So you just took a truck and disappeared for a month?”

  “A month and a half. The camp director was very generous.”

  “And you weren’t scared to go there by yourself?”

  “I probably should have been more scared. Somehow it didn’t occur to me.”

  “I would have been scared.”

  “Well, you’re a woman.”

  The noun was innocuous and everyday, but he blushed to have spoken it. He’d never engaged in conversation with a woman he consciously found attractive—wouldn’t have guessed how taxing it would be. That she seemed impressed with his story made it all the more taxing. He finally, awkwardly, said he ought to let her get on with her studying.

  She regarded her textbook sadly. “The mind so drifts.”

  “I know. I struggle with math myself.”

  “It’s not a struggle, it’s just dry. I get hungry to be with God.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if God were a sandwich.

  “I do, too,” Russ said. “That is—I know what you’re saying. I miss being with the Navajos. They get to be with God all day, every day.”

  “You should come back to Nativity. You might find what you’re looking for. I didn’t even know I was looking till I went there.”

  Another man might have been put off by her religiosity, but to Russ it was no more than a version of what he’d grown up with. Less placid, but familiar. It no longer disturbed him that a girl called his mother to mind. It had dawned on him that his mother wasn’t simply his mother, wasn’t merely a figure of sacred devotion. She was a flesh-and-blood woman who herself had once been young.

  When he returned to the Catholic church, the next Sunday, Marion sat beside him and whispered brief explanations of the liturgy. He tried to connect to Christus, as the priest called him, but he was thwarted by the proximity of her little self. She wore a coat dyed bright green and collared with darker green velveteen. Some of her nails were chewed, the torn cuticles edged with dry blood. She knit her fingers together so tightly in prayer that her knuckles whitened, her breath faintly rasping from her open mouth. Because her passion was directed at the Almighty, Russ felt safe to be excited by it.

  After the service, he offered her a lift in the Willys.

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I have to walk.”

  “I like walking, too. It’s my favorite thing.”

  “I have to count the steps, though. I did it once, a couple of years ago, and now I can’t stop, because … Never mind.”

  Two old, slow women had emerged from the church speaking Spanish. Cherry Avenue was so quiet that pigeons were camped out in the middle of it.

  “What were you goin
g to say?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s embarrassing. I have to start at the door of the church and make sure it’s the exact same number of steps every time, because that’s how I know God is still with me. If I ever counted one step too many, or too few…” She shuddered, perhaps at the thought, perhaps with embarrassment.

  “My number of steps wouldn’t be the same,” Russ offered, although she hadn’t invited him to join her.

  “That’s right, you’re tall. You’d have your own number—except you shouldn’t have a number. I shouldn’t have a number. I’m too superstitious already.”

  “The Navajos have all sorts of superstitions. I’m not sure they’re wrong.”

  “It’s an insult to God to think that counting steps has any bearing.”

  “I don’t see the harm in it. The Bible is full of signs from God.”

  She raised her dark eyes to him. “You’re a kind person.”

  “Oh—thank you.”

  “Maybe you can walk with me and distract me. I think, if I could walk even once without counting, I wouldn’t have to count anymore. Unless”—she laughed—“I get struck dead because I wasn’t counting.”

  She was a mysterious combination of sharp and odd. The delicacy of her neck, visible above her velveteen collar, continued to fascinate him. In Lesser Hebron, and at Goshen, too, female napes had been concealed by plaits or tresses. As he walked her home, he learned that she’d grown up in San Francisco and had dreamed, foolishly, of being a Hollywood actress. She’d worked in Los Angeles as a typist and stenographer before moving to Flagstaff to live with her uncle. For a short while, she’d considered entering a convent, but now she was studying to be an elementary-school teacher. Being small, she said, she’d found that children trusted her, as if she were one of them. She said she hadn’t been raised Catholic—her father had been a nonobservant Jew, her mother a “Whiskeypalian.”

  Each disclosure widened the vista of what Russ didn’t know about America. Although, by his calculation, she was only twenty-five, the place-names she dropped so casually, San Francisco, Los Angeles, were totemic of experiences more various than a woman from Lesser Hebron could expect in her entire life. As with Keith Durochie, he felt ignorant and inferior, and again the feeling was indistinguishable from attraction. It never crossed his mind that Marion might be attracted to him, too; that in her narrow Flagstaff ambit, with most of the country’s young men overseas, his apparition at Nativity had been as singular to her as hers was to him. Even if she hadn’t been significantly older, he had no concept of himself as an object of desire.

  Her uncle’s house, on the outskirts of town, was low and ramshackle, its yard overrun with prickly pear. In the driveway stood a Ford truck blasted paintless by Arizona sand. Marion ran up to the front door and stamped on the mat there, spread her arms, and raised her face to the blue, blue sky. “Here I am,” she called to it. “Strike me dead.”

  She looked at Russ and laughed. Trying to keep up, he managed a smile, but now she was frowning. Part of her oddness was how suddenly her expressions changed.

  “I’m terrible,” she said. “This could turn out to be the moment when my fatal cancer started.”

  “I don’t know that God minds a joke. Not if you sincerely love Him.”

  Still serious, she came back down the walk. “Thank you for that. I do believe you’ve cured me. Would you like to stay for lunch?”

  When he demurred—he was already derelict, owing to the length of Catholic mass, and he still had to retrieve the Willys—Marion insisted on walking back to the church with him. The taxation of being with her grew heavier as they retraced their steps. She admired his pacifism, admired his impatience at the camp, admired his compassion for the Navajos. Every time he glanced down, her brown eyes were glowing up at him. He’d never felt a gaze so unconditionally approving, and he lacked the experience to recognize the willingness it signaled. By the time they reached the truck, the stress of it had given him an actual headache. He offered to run her back to her uncle’s, but her face had clouded again.

  “What you said earlier—that it doesn’t matter what we do as long as we love God. Do you really think that’s true?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The Navajos don’t accept Christ, and I don’t know that they’re eternally damned. It doesn’t seem fair that they would be.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I don’t believe in an afterlife.”

  “You—really?”

  “I think the only thing that matters is the state of your soul while you’re alive.”

  “Is that—Catholic teaching?”

  “Definitely not. Father Fergus and I discuss it all the time. To me, there’s nothing realer in the world than God, and Satan is no less real. Sin is real and God’s forgiveness is real. That’s the message of the Gospel. But there’s not much in the Gospel about the afterlife—John is the only one who talks about it. And doesn’t that seem strange? If the afterlife is so important? When the rich young man asks Jesus how he might have eternal life, Jesus doesn’t give him a straight answer. He seems to say that heaven is loving God and obeying the commandments, and hell is being lost in sin—forsaking God. Father Fergus says I have to believe that Jesus is talking about a literal heaven and hell, because that’s what the Church teaches. But I’ve read those verses a hundred times. The rich young man asks about eternity, and Jesus tells him to give away his money. He says what to do in the present—as if the present is where you find eternity—and I think that’s right. Eternity is a mystery to us, just like God is a mystery. It doesn’t have to mean rejoicing in heaven or burning in hell. It could be a timeless state of grace or bottomless despair. I think there’s eternity in every second we’re alive. So I’m in quite a bit of trouble with Father Fergus.”

  Russ stared at the little green-coated woman. He might have just fallen in love with her. It wasn’t only the depth of her engagement with a question of urgency to him. It was hearing, in her words, a thought that had been latent in him without his being able to articulate it. His sense of inferiority became acute. Paradoxically, instead of making him shy of her, it made him want to bury himself in her.

  “I should go inside and pray,” she said. “It stinks to feel so close to God and not be a better Catholic. My progress has been stymied for quite some time.”

  “Can I come again next week?”

  She smiled sadly. “If you don’t mind my saying, you’re not the most promising candidate, Mr. God Doesn’t Mind a Joke.”

  “But you’re struggling with the creed yourself.”

  “I have good reason to.”

  “What—reason?”

  “I’d frankly rather—do you think you’ll ever go back to the reservation?”

  “Sometime, yes, absolutely.”

  “Maybe you can take me along with you. I’d like to see it for myself.”

  The thought of taking her to the mesa was like a reward in heaven, amazing but remote. For now, it felt more like a brush-off. “I’d be very happy to show it to you.”

  “Good,” she said. “Something to look forward to.” She turned away and added, “You know where to find me.”

  Did she mean that he could find her whenever he pleased, or only when he was returning to the reservation? As the words of Jesus were ambiguous, so were hers. He was still struggling to parse the ambiguity, two days later, when an envelope bearing only a Flagstaff postmark, no return address, arrived for him in camp. He took it to his cabin and sat down on his bunk.

  Dear Russell,

  I was remiss not to thank you again for curing me of my superstition. You were so lovely to put up with me—I felt as if the sun had come out after a month of clouds. I hope you find everything you’re looking for and more.

  Yours in God and friendship,

  Marion

  Here, too, in the farewell flavor of I hope you find, a doubting mind could see ambiguity. But his body knew better. The sensation that gripped it was familiar in its emanation from h
is nether parts, entirely novel in its suffusion with emotion—with hope and gratitude, the image of one particular person, her soulful eyes, her complicated mind. It was inconceivable that a person so fascinating might feel lesser, and yet there it was, in her own handwriting, unambiguously: put up with me. The words excited him so much, she might have been whispering them in his ear.

  The next day, when he requested leave for the afternoon, the quartermaster didn’t even ask what for. George Ginchy still enjoyed his roll calls and assemblies, but since the war ended the camp had only been going through the motions; Ginchy’s quest of the moment was to procure equipment for the football squad he’d organized. The old Willys was somehow still operable, and Russ drove it first to the public library and then, not finding Marion, to her uncle’s house, which he identified by its prickly pears. He was curiously unafraid to knock on the front door. He knew that the marriage of men and women was in the natural course of things, ordained by God, but in his mind, already, the world wasn’t full of women he might potentially someday meet, there was only one woman. In retrospect, their chance encounter at the library had had God’s seal on it. To knock on her door was no more than what God had intended when He created man and woman; which was to say that Russ was now conscious of being a man.

  She came to the door in dungarees and an oversize white shirt, knotted at her midriff. That she was wearing pants, like a man, was inordinately incredible to him.

  “I knew it would be you,” she said. “I woke up this morning with the strongest feeling I would see you.”

  Her lack of surprise reminded him again of his mother, her serenity. If Marion’s presentiment could be credited, it suggested that Russ’s coming to see her, which had felt to him like an act of personal agency, had merely been part of God’s design. She led him through a parlor hung with landscape paintings, all similar in style, and into a kitchen with a view of a mountain. At the rear of the back yard, which was strewn with rusty metal forms, perhaps sculptures, stood a tin-roofed structure.