Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “We are borrowing the money you gave Judson,” her father said. “I’ve also obtained a loan from the church, which will help with the legal and medical expenses. But we still have a large shortfall.”

  “And Clem? It’s not like he even wanted my money.”

  Her father sighed and looked at her mother.

  “Your younger brother is very seriously mentally ill,” her mother said. “At some point, in the course of his illness, he emptied Clem’s account as well.”

  Becky stared at her. She was the victim, and her mother didn’t even have the guts to look at her.

  “Emptied,” she said. “Don’t you mean stole?”

  “I know it’s hard for you to understand,” her mother said, her eyes on the floor, “but Perry was too disturbed to know what he was doing.”

  “How do you steal without knowing what you’re doing?”

  Her father gave her a look of warning. “Our family has a very pressing need for money. I know it’s hard for you, but you’re part of this family. If the situation were reversed—”

  “You mean, if I were a thief and a drug addict?”

  “If you had a serious illness—and, make no mistake, Perry has a very serious illness—then, yes, I think your brothers would make any sacrifice we asked of them.”

  “But it’s not even for his treatment. It’s just for the Navajos.”

  “The loss of the farm equipment was devastating. It’s not the Navajos’ fault that your brother destroyed it.”

  “Right. And it’s not his fault either, because he’s so seriously ill. Apparently it’s my fault.”

  “Obviously,” her father said, “it’s not your fault, and I know how unfair it must seem to you. But we’re only asking for a loan, not a gift. Your mother will be looking for work, and I will be looking for a better-paid position. By this time next year, we might be able to repay some of what we’ve borrowed. We’ll also be more eligible for college financial aid.”

  “It’s only for a little while, honey,” her mother said. “We’re only asking to borrow what Shirley gave you.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, Shirley gave me thirteen thousand dollars.”

  “You’ll still have your own savings. If you want to start college in the fall, you can go to U of I for a year or two. Then you can transfer anywhere you like.”

  Becky had received her acceptance letter from Beloit three days earlier. The idea of being a transfer student there, missing the freshman experience, entering a class whose social order had long since coalesced, seemed worse to her than not going at all. Of the thirteen thousand dollars she’d inherited, she’d given away nine with the assurance that the remaining four were hers alone to spend; that she still had special things coming to her. But her parents had disapproved of the inheritance from the start. They’d disapproved of Shirley, and now they’d gotten what they’d wanted all along, which was for Becky to have nothing. It was as if they were in league with God Himself, who, knowing everything, knew that beneath her Christian charity was a tough little core of selfishness. Her cheeks burned with hatred of her parents for exposing it.

  “Fine,” she said. “You can have all of it. It’s fifty-two hundred dollars—take all of it.”

  “Honey,” her mother said. “We don’t want to take your own savings.”

  “Why not? It’s not like they’re enough to do me any good.”

  “That’s not true. You can still go to U of I.”

  “As long as I don’t go to Europe. Right?”

  Her mother, knowing what Europe meant to her, might at least have expressed some sympathy. Instead, she deferred to her husband.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “If you go to U of I, you’ll need money for room and board. I know you were looking forward to Europe, but we think it’s better if you postpone that plan.”

  “The two of you. That’s what the two of you together have decided.”

  “This is hard for all of us,” her mother said. “We’re all having to give up things we might have wanted.”

  There was nothing more to say. When Becky returned to her bedroom, she didn’t even feel like crying. A bitterness had entered her soul, and there it stayed. She could forgive the injury of being dispossessed, because Jesus promised a reward to those who gave away everything and followed him, but the insult of it only grew deeper: her parents cared more about her amoral brother, more about each other, more even about the blessed Navajos, than they did about her. When, at dinner, on the day she’d transferred four thousand dollars, her father raised thanks to the Lord for the gift of family and the gift of his daughter, Rebecca, her bitterness was so intense she couldn’t taste her food. Although her mother was courteous enough to thank her directly, she failed to say, as she’d said so often in the past, that she was proud of her. She knew very well what she’d taken from her daughter, the injustice she’d been party to; it would have been obscene to speak of pride. Only in Tanner was there relief from the bitterness. He was too kindhearted to join Becky in hating her family, but he understood her as no one else did, understood both the goodness and the selfishness in her. She’d surrendered the last of her inheritance, she’d lost Beloit and the future it stood for, she was looking at a year of full-time waitressing or a shitty high-rise dorm room in Champaign, and Tanner had understood why she had to go to Europe.

  Like all of Edoardo’s guests (it was evidently a requirement), the German couple, Renata and Volker, were notably good-looking. Volker, who resembled a blond Charles Manson, had lived in Morocco and traveled as far east as India, exploring non-Western ways of being. Renata had amazing blue eyes and a style that Becky envied. Nowhere in America were there pants and tops like Renata’s, cut simply and practically without being masculine, their fabrics faded but durable, or leather sandals so elegant and obviously comfortable. Becky had grown very sick of her own sneakers and Dr. Scholl’s.

  The night before they left for Tuscany, Tanner stayed up late with Edoardo and the Germans while she retired to the stifling ballroom. Worse than the smell of rot were the voices coming through the window, young men yelling in Italian perhaps the very same vulgarities they yelled at her in English. Even the fainter sound of Tanner in the kitchen, singing “Cross Road Blues,” was oppressive to her in her condition. Stopping her ears with her fingers, she lay sweating on her sleeping bag and focused her entire will on bleeding.

  It was like trying to will a heat wave to break. She awoke to an even hotter day, a sensation of menstrual operations firmly shut down, which was to say an absence of encouraging sensations. Her body had always performed its duties without being asked, and the flip side of this, now, was its perfect indifference to her entreaties. After she and Tanner had helped themselves to stale cornetti from the kitchen, they gathered their luggage and found the Germans in a room darker than theirs, perceptibly less hot. They were rolling up air mattresses, another thing to envy.

  Down on the steaming street, around the corner from Edoardo’s building, Volker led them to a large, low-slung Mercedes, parked halfway up on the sidewalk, and opened the trunk.

  “This is your car?” Becky said.

  Volker extended a hand for her backpack. “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know, a van or something. I thought you guys were more— I don’t know. Poor.”

  “We love Edoardo,” Renata said. “He brings together such interesting people—like you.”

  “You don’t mind that there’s no furniture?”

  “We visit with him three times now,” Volker said. “He is a really great guy.”

  “I wonder why he doesn’t have any furniture.”

  “Because he’s Edoardo!”

  The back seat of the Mercedes was so roomy that she could stretch out her legs and Tanner could open his guitar case. He immediately began to play, because playing was what he did, day and night. Becky was so used to the sound of his Guild that she only paid attention when other people were listening, as Renata was doing now, fr
om the front seat, her body angled toward him, her blue eyes more fervent than Becky cared to see. Where the harassment she’d endured in Rome was strictly about her as a sex object, Tanner’s fascination to women seemed more romantic, and she’d come to resent that other women felt free to imagine romance with her boyfriend. It occurred to her that Renata had invited Tanner to Tuscany because she was very into him.

  Hanging on a string from the car’s rearview mirror, lurching and spinning with Volker’s brakings for rude Italian drivers, was a painted plastic Buddha. Along the narrow streets were tiny trattorias, inviting but unaffordable, and bars with colorful bottles doubled by the mirrors behind them, and long, unpainted walls gouged by trucks and plastered with posters for a circus, for an automobile show, for FOLKAROMA, 29–31 Agosto. Wider avenues offered glimpses of churches and ruins and monuments, pastel in the haze, that Becky might have visited with Shirley, or with her mother, but hadn’t with Tanner, because theirs was not that kind of trip.

  There ensued an uglier Rome, more sprawling than the pretty Rome. They passed scooters in buzzing packs of twenty, apartment blocks bedecked with drying laundry, pyramids of car tires, gas station after gas station. Tanner was improvising and the Germans speaking German, Renata consulting a map, while Becky monitored her condition. For four and a half years, her period had arrived as reliably as the thunderstorms that ended a sweltering Midwestern day. Now she felt nothing in her belly, no change at all, an ominous stasis. Even before the last of ugly Rome fell away and they reached the autostrada, a dread had taken root in her.

  Volker’s acceleration pressed her back into her leather seat. He was driving so fast that the trucks they passed looked stationary. She saw the speedometer needle trembling at two hundred kilometers an hour, climbing higher. The sky was white hot and the windows were down, the roar of air so loud that she could hear only Tanner’s high notes. He was still immersed in his music, Renata gazing at him again, Volker serene at the wheel. The Buddha’s string tightened and tilted as he braked for a car going only recklessly fast, not insanely fast.

  Stiff with dread, barely able to raise her arm, Becky touched Tanner’s shoulder. He smiled and nodded in time with his strumming. She was too frightened to move again or speak. Beyond the dangling plastic Buddha, another nearly stationary car rushed up to meet them. Volker flashed his headlights, the Buddha smiled, and her dread branched out in all directions. What did she know about Volker, except that he looked like Charles Manson? Did he believe in Buddhist reincarnation? Was he trying to crash them to a higher plane, beyond the whiteness of the sky? And the weirdness of Edoardo, his thing for pretty houseguests, the vacancy of his apartment—was everyone perverted? Was this why Volker and Renata stayed there? Did they pay Edoardo to cruise the streets and find fresh meat? Was the farmhouse in Tuscany just a lure for unsuspecting Americans? She’d placed herself and Tanner in the hands of people she knew absolutely nothing about. She wanted to ask Volker to slow down, but her jaw was locked, her chest muscles petrified. The Mercedes was flying at airplane speed, meteor speed. It telescoped the passing trees and road signs, smashed them together in a blur of violence. Was this how she would die? She could see her death as clearly as if it had already happened. It filled her with sadness, but at least she’d had a chance to live in the world, at least she’d experienced real love and beheld the light of God. The unborn soul in her had never even seen the light.

  Dear God, she prayed, if this is the final test, I accept the test. If my time has come, I’ll die rejoicing in you. But please let it be your will that I live. If it’s your will that I live, I promise I will always serve you. If it’s your will that I be pregnant, I promise I will never harm my baby. I will love her and cherish her and teach her to love you, I promise, I promise, I promise, if you would only let me live. Please, God. Let me live.

  Clem met Felipe Cuéllar at a construction site where the work consisted of shoveling sand, under a sand-colored Lima sky, and pushing it up narrow planks in a wheelbarrow. For a month, they shared a corrugated metal lean-to near the water treatment plant, shared food and beer, awakened to the smell of each other’s farts. Like other young men from the highlands, Felipe had come to the city in the winter to earn some cash. When it was time for him to go home, in November, Clem offered to join him and work for his family in exchange for food and shelter. The nonweather of Lima, the identically beige-skied days, was oppressing him, and throughout his months in Peru he’d seen the Andes in the east, the sun reflected on their heights, without getting any closer. He knew so little of farming, it didn’t occur to him that planting season coincided with the arrival of the rains.

  He’d thought he knew what labor was. He’d carried tons of tar paper up six flights of stairs, a hundred-pound roll at a time, at a building site in Guayaquil, he’d stood in raw sewage outside Chiclayo and shoveled for ten hours, he’d raked hot asphalt under midday sun, but not until he was slipping and crawling in the mud of the Andes, in freezing fog and pelting hail, pulling out stones with cracked and swollen fingers, hacking at the earth with a dull-bladed implement, the altitude sharp-bladed in his brain, the blood from broken capillaries in his throat, did he put to rest the question of his strength.

  When he’d left New Orleans, a year and a half earlier, his only plan had been to have no plan. With a few hundred dollars and the Spanish he’d taught himself while waiting for a passport, he’d crossed the Mexican border at Matamoros and headed farther south, intending to be gone for two years, the same term he would have served in the army. When he’d exhausted his money, on a boat passage to Guayaquil, he’d become an itinerant day laborer, motiveless in every respect except the need to work. If he saw a bus packed with other workers, he squeezed onto it without caring where it was going, not because he wished to understand the underprivileged but simply because, if he didn’t work, he didn’t eat.

  Neither having nor seeking a larger motive, he’d been surprised to find one in the highlands. The fundamental equation of human existence—soil + water + plants + labor = food—was the most applied of sciences, nothing philosophical about it, but the Andean farmers’ way with their seedlings and their tubers, their wresting of sustenance from the harshest margins of arability, was a fulfillment of the plant physiology and genetics, the physical and atmospheric chemistry, the nitrogen cycles, the molecular jujitsu of chlorophyll, that he’d studied in school without appreciating their existential crux; and it had given him a plan. He would stay on through the potato harvest, complete his two-year term, and return to Illinois to study the impure science of agronomy.

  The Cuéllars lived in a hamlet an hour’s walk from the town of Tres Fuentes. Once a week, after the crops had been planted, Clem descended on a boggy track through the puna, past pockets of hardwood forest whose recession upslope made the gathering of firewood arduous, to a post office conceivably colonial in age. Unlike the Cuéllars, whose first language was Quechua, the postal clerk spoke perfect Spanish. He was Clem’s sole connection to the world beyond the highlands, his fútbol-themed calendar the only marker of that world’s chronology. Every week, Clem returned to find another line of days x-ed out.

  One afternoon, when x’s had consumed half of February, the clerk had a small package for him. He took it outside and sat down on the rim of a dry, ruined fountain. The air was scented with the smoke of kitchen fires, the sun hidden by a ceiling of pale cloud through which he could feel its warmth. In the package were three pairs of wool socks and a letter from his mother.

  There were two kinds of letters, the ones you eagerly tore open and the ones you had to force yourself to read, and his mother’s were of the latter kind. Others she’d sent him, in Guayaquil and Lima, had made him angry, especially at Becky. If Becky hadn’t been so bent on her religious do-goodery, Perry couldn’t have pissed away six thousand dollars and she could have gone to college, instead of getting herself pregnant and married, at nineteen, to an affable lightweight. But there was nothing he could do from South America, and h
is anger had passed in the daily struggle for bread, the dysentery he was prone to, the repeated theft of his spare clothes, the bother of acquiring new ones without resorting, himself, to stealing. Experience had taught him to live with nothing of value except his passport, and so it was with the news of Perry’s collapse and Becky’s disastrous choices, his mother’s sorrows: it was better to travel light.

  January 26, 1974

  Dear Clem,

  Your father and I were blessed to receive your letter from Tres Fuentes and learn that you are safe and well there. Even if you’re working hard, it must be a relief to be in the beautiful High Andes after all your time in cities, and I’m so glad to have an address where I know a letter is sure to reach you. (You didn’t mention the second letter I sent to the post office in Lima—I assume you didn’t get it?) It must be difficult to summarize so many interesting experiences in a short letter home, so many thoughts and impressions, and I understand you can’t write every week, but please know that every word you write to us is precious.

  We enjoyed your thoughts about agricultural science but of course I’m especially curious about the people you’re with. It warms my heart to hear of the interest you’ve taken in Felipe’s family and your willingness to share in their hardships, and I think your father is more than a little envious. If our lives had gone a different way, he would have liked to be a missionary—he has such deep empathy for people whose existence is a struggle. We miss you more and more with every day that passes, but it’s a comfort to know that you’re developing that empathy yourself. I can’t imagine a better reward for your two years of “service.”

  The big news here is that your father has accepted a new position, and we’re moving to—Indiana! The town is Hadleysburg, about an hour outside Indianapolis, and the U.C.C. there has a very engaged congregation. The interim pastor is leaving at the end of June, and we’ll relocate as soon as Judson finishes the school year. Hadleysburg is attractive for many reasons. The cost of living is lower, your father will finally have his own church again, and his pastoral duties will be lighter, so he can do other work for pay. Perry’s second stint at Cedar Hill was a terrible financial blow, and we haven’t been able to repay the money we borrowed from your sister, let alone the money of yours that was lost. Your father had talked about going back to Lesser Hebron (!) and petitioning the brethren for reacceptance in their community, because he wants a simpler life, but financially that’s no longer an option and Hadleysburg is plenty simple for me. Judson can go to a regular school and I can have a glass of wine without being excommunicated, but it’s a small and close-knit community, with fewer temptations for Perry. He swears he doesn’t have more drugs hidden away, but after his relapse I don’t know that I can ever trust him, and I won’t be sorry to leave this house—all I can see is places where he might have hidden drugs.