Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  Perry is polite to us and seems to appreciate our help, but he has no energy and very little “affect.” He says the electroshock harmed his powers of recall, and he hates the side effects of his new medication. Even if he could finish high school (he hasn’t completed a course in almost two years), I don’t yet see how he could go away to college. For the moment, I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done but watch over him and pray that he gets better on his new medication. Dear Clem, I know your feelings about the efficacy of prayer, but if you could ever find it in your heart to say a little prayer for your brother, even if you don’t think it will change anything, it would mean a lot to your mother, and to your father too.

  Judson remains a joy. He’s starring in the sixth-grade “musical” and reading at tenth-grade level. He feels for Perry and he understands how burdened your father and I are, but he never seems to brood about it. When Perry had his calamity, I worried it would take away Judson’s childhood and he would lose that innocent capacity to enjoy things. I can’t tell you what a blessing it is, when I’m having a bad day (I won’t bore you with that), to see him playing outside with the Erickson girls or watching the news with your father (he’s tape-recording all the Watergate news for a social-studies report) or just eating his dinner with so much gusto. Perry says the medication makes everything taste the same to him, and if there’s something Judson is especially enjoying, Perry passes his plate and lets him take more of it. Since he came back from Cedar Hill, the only real glimmers I’ve seen of his old self are when he’s with Judson. David Goya stopped by twice at Christmas (he’s a sophomore at Rice now), and Larry Cottrell, God bless him, comes over every week (his mother left the church, but he’s still in Crossroads), but Perry doesn’t seem to care much either way. The fear that he’ll try to harm himself again is with me night and day, and I’m afraid it always will be.

  We continue to see your sister and Tanner in church. They sit at the back in case Gracie starts crying and Becky needs to step out. I make an effort to talk to her after the service, but it’s like talking to a locked door—she will not take her eyes off Gracie. I think I told you they have their own apartment now, above the record store, and I offered to come by with some things, some old linens and baby blankets and toys, because I know money is tight. Becky didn’t get her back up, she just smiled and said no thank you, they didn’t need anything. Everything is done with a smile—declining my invitations to dinner, excusing herself from the holidays, refusing to let me hold her baby (and then I turn around and see a parishioner holding her). Lord knows, she has reason to be angry with me, but her coldness just breaks my heart. Tanner is as nice as ever but gets nervous when Becky sees us talking to him—she pretends to be immersed in Gracie, but she’s obviously watching him. She says she’s very happy, and maybe she is. I imagine she’ll be even happier when we leave for Indiana.

  There’s a search committee for the new associate minister, and we hear that Ambrose is at the top of the list. I think, if he takes the job, it will help your father close the door on New Prospect. He’s been so changed since the calamity, so chastened and humbled, I honestly think he could have wished Rick all the best, if only Rick hadn’t officiated at Becky’s wedding. (It was her choice, but, really, what was Rick thinking?) My hope is that having his own church, with no Rick in the picture, will give your father a fresh start, because he still has so much to give. I’m enclosing a sermon he wrote about coal mining on the Navajo reservation, after Keith Durochie died. It was so good, I sent it in to “The Other Side,” and now your father is a published author. He wasn’t happy I submitted it without telling him, but I don’t think he’ll mind me sending it to you.

  Dear Clem, you mustn’t think your father doesn’t write to you because he isn’t thinking of you. He thinks about you all the time, and you should see the way he talks about you—the way he shakes his head with admiration. I’ve begged him to write and let you know how proud he is, but he’s convinced that he let you down as a father, and he’s afraid a letter would be unwelcome. I don’t want to burden you with a second request, but, if you’re ever inclined, you might let him know that you’d be happy for a word from him.

  It’s cold and late here, and I want to put this in the mail in the morning. Your father just went upstairs to bed and asked me to send you his love. You needn’t worry about us—God never asks for more than we can give. Just know that nothing in the world could bring us more joy than to see you again. Please take very, very good care in the mountains.

  All my love,

  Mom

  P.S. Now that I have a good safe address for you, I’m sending a very belated little Christmas present and the last of the money from your savings account, which might help with your trip home. (Do you know when that will be?)

  Maybe it was the twenty-dollar bills in the envelope, the impending return they represented, or maybe the image of his father broken and remorseful, his weakness merely pitiable, not embarrassing, but the letter didn’t anger Clem. It made him very anxious. The feeling was like something from a dream, a dreamer’s panicked sense of needing to be somewhere else, of being late for an important exam, of having forgotten he had a train to catch. How absurd that he’d thought he needed to prove himself stronger than his father. He’d been fighting a battle long since won, in an irrelevant sector of the dreamworld.

  Whatever else Becky was, happy or unhappy, she’d always been straightforward—sincere to the point of naïveté. It was hard to imagine a person so clearhearted giving phony smiles to her mother, a person so naturally guileless calculating how to stab her parents without leaving prints on the knife. Ever since he’d learned of her marriage to the lightweight, Clem had done his best not to think about her; a baby was a baby, and there was nothing to be done. He’d been disappointed in her, but he’d lacked the empathy to imagine her own disappointment. How miserable she must have become, to be cruel to a person as harmless as their mother. And this, yes, was the source of his anxiety, this was the thing he was late for, this was the vital matter he’d forgotten: he loved Becky.

  He went back to the postal clerk and parted with some coins. Standing at the end of the counter, with a pen borrowed from the clerk, he covered an aerogram with tiny handwriting. He apologized to Becky for having criticized her, he described his daily life in the hamlet, and then he paused. He was in the same position as his father, afraid that an avowal of love would be unwelcome. It might seem inflated to Becky after such a long silence, and so he went at it sideways. Using terms in which he hoped love would be implicit—she was a person of strength, clear of heart, a shining star—he asked her to consider the trouble their parents were in, consider her many advantages, and try to be a little kinder. Without rereading the letter, he wrote his parents’ address and PLEASE FORWARD on the aerogram and gave it to the clerk. Then he put on a pair of new socks (much needed) and walked back up the valley.

  It was generous of his mother to suppose he’d developed greater empathy in South America. Empathy was a luxury a day laborer couldn’t afford. When a truck pulled up at dawn and fifty men fought for space on it, empathizing with the man trying to yank you off the tailgate could result in having nothing to eat that day. If Clem had developed anything in Tres Fuentes, it was simply admiration for the men who tilled the unforgiving puna, the women who rose at the night’s coldest hour to boil their mote and their mate. He didn’t have to empathize with Felipe Cuéllar. It was enough to know that he was durable and trustworthy.

  Having taken action against the anxiety, Clem returned to his elemental existence. He woke and worked, drank chicha and slept in a shed with the Cuéllars’ donkey. The month of March brought finer weather, dense nitrogen-fixing growth on the bean slopes, alpacas fattening themselves with ceaseless chewing. Lacking the finer skills of farming, he earned his keep by rebuilding a pen for the hamlet’s livestock, repairing stone walls, and gathering firewood. The donkey was old and tolerant, and he did it the favor of leading it up to the forest, rather t
han riding it. He was amazed that hardwoods could survive at all at such an altitude, far higher than a temperate tree line, and he felt bad about hacking at them with a machete. They had small, silvery leaves, twigs encrusted with lichen, branches hairy with epiphytes and tortured in their angles, as though they’d been thwarted at every turn by the harshness of their environment. He suspected they grew too slowly to keep up with the demand for firewood, but the hamlet had no other source of fuel. He tried to cut judiciously, taking only dead limbs, but every branch seemed half dead and half alive. Even as the bark peeled away, exposing xylem to the weather, it managed to convey nutrients to an outpost or two of fresh leaves. Each tree, indeed, was like a miniature of the highlands. The branches resembled the ancient, gnarled pathways that led to the patches of arable land, leaf-green, that were scattered among stony fields and bogs of tannic standing water. The half-dead trees recalled the human settlements as well: for every dwelling in good repair were several in a state of ruin, some no more than heaps of rock, possibly dating from the Incas; the birds he flushed from the trees were like the ponchos of the women of the hamlet, gold and blue, black and crimson. When he’d cut as much wood as he and the donkey could carry on their backs, they made their way down a slope already cleared of trees. He noticed that its soil was badly eroded, less water-retentive, than the loam in the forest, but the nights here were frigid and the almuerzo waiting for him at the Cuéllars’, a thick soup he never tired of, could not have been cooked without firewood.

  In hindsight, he wished he’d come to the Andes a year earlier, instead of wasting his time in cities. And yet maybe it was for the best. Maybe he’d needed to serve a term of hard labor, to work off the shame of his mistake with the draft board, to punish himself for the pain he’d pointlessly inflicted on Sharon and his parents, in order to earn his reward in the highlands. The labor here was even harder, but he felt restored to a self he’d misplaced for so long that he’d forgotten it, restored to a world of earth and plants and animals, restored to his curiosity and his ambition to do something with it. The excitement of returning to school and pursuing a career in science propelled him through his days and kept him awake at night. It was a very long time since he’d wanted something larger than his next meal.

  The afternoon he got Becky’s letter in Tres Fuentes, the page of the postal clerk’s calendar was gravid with x’s. It was the twenty-seventh of March. Clem went out to the dry fountain and tore open the envelope eagerly.

  Dear Clem,

  Thank you for your apology, thank you for bringing me “up to speed” on your travels (it all sounds very interesting), but please don’t tell me what to do. You made a choice not to be here, and it’s pretty late in the day to suddenly play the peacemaker. You were off on your adventure, you don’t know what M & D did to me, you don’t know how obsessed they are with Perry (I know he’s sick but he’s unbelievably selfish and deceitful and has cost them well over ten thousand dollars, no end in sight), you have no idea how unbearable they are, you haven’t had your stomach turned. I’ve forgiven their financial debt to me, I don’t want or expect anything from them, and whatever Mom tells you, I’m always friendly to them. I don’t wish them ill, I just don’t enjoy being around them. The Bible doesn’t tell us to like our neighbor, because a person can’t control who she likes. I do struggle with honoring one’s parents, but in fairness they don’t give me much to work with. Dad is more grotesquely insecure than ever, the whole church knows about his affair with a church member (did Mom happen to mention he nearly got fired for that?), he’s grown a goatee that looks like pubic hair, and Mom acts like he’s God’s special gift to the world. Try honoring that. I’m perfectly cordial to them, but no, I don’t invite them over and no, I don’t go there for holidays, because A, I’m part of Tanner’s family too, and B, I want Grace to grow up in a house of peace and harmony and I’m afraid of what would happen if I spent more than fifteen minutes with them. I’m married to a wonderful, talented, generous man and I have the most beautiful baby, I’m really overwhelmed with what God has given me, I wake up every morning with a song in my heart, and I would ask you not to blame me for trying to keep it that way. Some people are lucky enough to like their parents, but I’m not one of them.

  I owe you an apology in turn for saying hateful things when you couldn’t go to Vietnam. It was wrong, and I apologize, but there was something weird about the way we used to be together and maybe we needed to grow apart and become our own people with separate identities. I used to love talking to you about everything under the sun, and I do sometimes miss having a brother to look up to and tell things to. If you ever come home, maybe we can give it a try again. The second you meet Gracie, you’ll understand why I’m so crazy about her, and I want you to get to know Tanner as he really is. You never gave him a chance, but if you care about me you should care about the person in my life who’s best to me, best for me, best everything. I don’t mean to make rules, but if you want to be in my life again I guess there are some rules. Number one is respect my feelings about M & D. That one is nonnegotiable. But also, when you see the situation with Perry and what the two of them are like these days, you might understand better why I feel the way I do. I’m sorry they’re unhappy, but I can’t make it better, even if I wanted to, because I don’t matter to them enough. They made their choices, you made yours, I made mine. At least one of us is happy with her choices.

  Love, Becky

  The letter was like a match struck in the dark. In the light of it, he saw his old bedroom at the parsonage. It was there that Becky had come to him late at night, offered up stories, and, more than once, in her straightforwardness, fallen asleep on his bed. Why hadn’t he woken her up? Told her to sleep in her own room? It was because she’d meant too much to him. To know that she preferred his room, preferred him to anyone else in the family, was worth the discomfort of sleeping on the floor. And if she’d been embarrassed to wake up and see him on the rug, had apologized for appropriating his bed, or if it had happened only once, it wouldn’t have been weird. But when she’d done it again, and again—let him sleep on the floor without embarrassment or apology—the terms of their arrangement had been clear: he would do anything for her, and she would let him. To anyone else, it might have looked like she was being selfish. Only he understood the love in her consenting to be so loved.

  Then he’d gone to college and met Sharon, who’d wanted nothing more than to be so loved, and in his wretched honesty he’d admitted that he didn’t love her to the degree he knew his heart was capable of. In the light of the match the letter had struck, he saw that his heart had still belonged to Becky; that this was the real reason he hadn’t stayed with Sharon. But while he’d been sleeping with Sharon the terms had changed, Becky no longer needed him, and in trying to hold on to her, trying to recall her to their arrangement, trying to interfere with her decisions, he’d lost her love entirely. She’d been so angry with him, her hatred so unbearable, that he’d boarded a bus for Mexico without a plan. In the light of the match, he saw that he’d tried to displace one pain with another, the pain of losing her with the pain of hard labor, and this was the terrible thing about her letter: nothing had changed.

  Striding along the track to the hamlet, the incendiary letter in his pocket, he overtook Felipe Cuéllar, who was carrying a stout-handled hoe on his shoulder. Felipe was slight of build and a head shorter than Clem, but there was no physical task he couldn’t perform with less effort. Following him up the track, keeping clear of the hoe, Clem asked him when the potatoes would be harvested.

  When they’re ready, Felipe said.

  Yes, Clem said, but how soon?

  Always in May. It’s very hard work.

  Not harder than planting in the rain.

  Yes, harder. You’ll see.

  They walked in silence for a while. Clouds were building behind the mountain at the upper end of the valley, Amazonian moisture, but lately the rains hadn’t come down as far west as the hamlet. The track th
rough the puna was drying out.

  I have a question, Clem said. If I had to leave now—soon—could I come here again? I meant to stay through the harvest, but I think I need to see my family.

  Felipe stopped on the path and swung around with the hoe. He was frowning.

  Did you get bad news? Is someone sick?

  Yes. Well—yes.

  Then go right away, Felipe said. Nothing is more important than family.

  * * *

  His last ride, from Bloomington to Aurora, early on the Saturday morning before Easter, was a twice-divorced fertilizer salesman, named Morton, who drove a sleek Buick Riviera and wanted to talk about God. Morton had pulled over on a ramp outside the truck stop where Clem had casually lifted and eaten the leavings from a table in the restaurant, taken a shower, and caught a few hours of sleep behind the parking lot. The money his mother had sent had got him by plane to Panama City and by bus to Mexico, but from there he’d had to hitchhike, mostly with long-haul truckers. When Morton learned that he hadn’t had a proper meal in five days, he took an exit for a Stuckey’s and bought him a stack of pancakes with fried eggs and bacon. Morton had the sunken face, the stained skin, the reassembled-looking body, of a man with hard drinking in his past. It seemed to give him pleasure to watch Clem eat.