Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  “You know why I stopped for you?” he said. “When I saw you with your thumb out—the reason I stopped was I thought you might be an angel.”

  Clem had wondered about that. He was the antithesis of a hippie, but in his hooded Peruvian sweater, his beard and long hair, he looked like one. He’d been surprised when the Riviera pulled over.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Morton said, “but they exist. Angels. They look like ordinary people, but after they’re gone you realize they were angels of the Lord.”

  Clem was still getting used to speaking English, the remarkable fact that he could do it. “I’m pretty sure I’m not an angel.”

  “But that’s the way God works. That’s how He takes care of us—by having us care for each other. When you refuse a stranger in need, you might be refusing an angel. You know the day I got the message? It was the twenty-seventh of June, four years ago. I was a mess, my second wife had just left me, I’d lost my job at the high school, and my car broke down in a thunderstorm. Not far from here, actually. It was a county road, rain coming down in sheets, and the alternator shorted out. I was as low as I ever was in my life. I sat there in the car feeling sorry for myself, soaking wet, and right behind me, in the mirror, I see this figure walking towards me. You’ll think I’m making this up, but he’s a young man about your age, dressed in white. I roll down the window, and he asks me what the problem is. He’s as wet as I am, but he looks under the hood and tells me to try the ignition. And damned if the car doesn’t start right up. I let it run for a second and then I get out to thank him, maybe give him some money, and he’s gone. We’re in the middle of the cornfields, flat as can be, and, poof—he’s nowhere. Gone. And just like that, the rain stops, and you’ll think I’m making this up, but there’s writing all across the sky, and I can see that it’s numbers. Numbers horizon to horizon. I realize there’s a number for every day of my life—the angel is showing me my entire life, past and future. And then, for a split second, the numbers line up in perfect formation, and I see it. I see eternal life in Jesus Christ. I hadn’t set foot in a church in years, but I got down on my knees, right there on the road, and poured out my heart to Jesus. That was the day my new life started.”

  There was no denying Morton’s Christian kindness, no arguing with flapjacks and syrup and whipped butter, and he’d told his story with impressive conviction, but the story couldn’t begin to withstand objective scrutiny. In Peru, Clem had worked alongside men with all manner of superstitions. There was a crucifix in the Cuéllars’ hut, and he’d seen Felipe cross himself outside the church and the cemetery in Tres Fuentes. But those had been simple working folk. Morton was an educated American, by his own account the top seller in his territory, the owner of a Buick built on scientifically verified principles. Stranger yet, the other adults in Clem’s own family, his mother and his father and now Becky, modern people of high intelligence, spoke of God as though the word referred to something real. Being the nonbeliever among believers was even lonelier than being the gringo in Tres Fuentes. A gringo was different only on the surface and could look for common ground. Science and delusion had no ground in common.

  Morton would have taken him all the way to New Prospect if he hadn’t been collecting his daughter in Aurora at ten o’clock. He dropped Clem at the train station and gave him a five-dollar bill. Leaning across to the glove compartment, he produced a card densely printed with devotional matter.

  “You’ve been incredibly generous,” Clem said, taking the card. On the front side was a halftone Jesus, on the obverse a halftone Paradise.

  “I hope you have a blessed Easter with your family.”

  Alone on the train platform, Clem dropped the card in a trash can. While he was at it, he ditched his filthy knit shoulder bag and the filthy clothes in it, keeping only his passport. Today was the day his own new life was starting. An inbound train was waiting with open doors.

  That he recognized New Prospect and had a claim to it, knew every building and street name, seemed as remarkable as his command of English. He could have called his parents from the road, to let them know he was coming, but the discomforts of hitchhiking were best survived by not looking ahead, and his parents weren’t the reason he’d left Tres Fuentes anyway.

  The air on Pirsig Avenue was heavy with spring, its smell unlike anything in Peru. In the window of Aeolian Records were sun-damaged jazz and symphonic albums, seemingly untouched since he’d last been in town. Inside the store, under the owner’s untrusting eye, two long-haired boys were flipping through the Rock bins. Clem went around to the alley behind the store. At the bottom of the stairs to the second-floor apartment, he hesitated. He remembered similarly hesitating on the landing below Sharon’s room in the hippie house.

  Tacked to the apartment door, at the top of the stairs, was a file card on which someone, surely Becky, had written Tanner and Becky Evans ornately, in cursive, and drawn little flowers to either side. Eyes filling, Clem knocked on the door. He couldn’t remember Becky ever playing house as a girl. In Indiana, where he’d had her all to himself, she’d followed him wherever he went. He’d taught her to throw a baseball, taught her to watch it into the glove (his glove, their only glove) when he threw it back. She’d chased him with a dried-out piece of dog crap, screaming, “Petrified poo! Petrified poo!” And the gleeful savagery of the tortures she’d devised for a toy rabbit that had fallen out of favor, the giggling wickedness with which she’d enumerated its transgressions: since when had that girl wanted to play house?

  He knocked again. Nobody home.

  Overcome, all at once, by the miles he’d traveled, he returned to the street. He’d wanted to see Becky before he saw his parents, to make clear that she was the reason he’d come home, but all he could think of now was his bed at the parsonage. The day was warm, the sun near the zenith. A nap on a real bed would be delicious. Already half asleep, he bent his steps homeward past the bookstore, the drugstore, the insurance broker.

  He was jolted awake when he came to Treble Clef. Behind the front window, Tanner Evans was showing an electric guitar to a middle-aged customer, someone’s mother. Clem stopped on the sidewalk uncertainly. Tanner glanced at him and returned his attention to the woman. Then he looked again, eyes widening, and came running out of the store. “What the hell?”

  “I’m back,” Clem said.

  “I’m thinking, do I know this person?”

  Tanner, for his part, seemed perfectly unchanged. Perhaps would always be unchanged. He spread his arms, as he’d done so readily in Crossroads, and Clem stepped in for the embrace.

  “This is fantastic,” Tanner said. “Becky will be so happy.”

  “Really?”

  Tanner’s face clouded to the extent his native sunniness allowed. “I mean—yeah. Definitely. She missed you.”

  “Congratulations on everything. Marriage, fatherhood. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks, it’s been amazing.”

  “I want to hear about it, but—where is she?”

  “Probably at Scofield, with Gracie. Jeannie Cross is in town.”

  After a second hug, from the man who was now his brother-in-law, Clem headed up toward Scofield Park. The trees of New Prospect were a hundred percent alive, gripped jealously by their unblemished bark, and every house looked like a palace. The wet, emerald grass that a man was removing from a lawn-mower bag, discarding as waste, would have been the sweetest meal for an alpaca. Clem stopped to take off his sweater and knot it above his hips, and the man looked up from his mower suspiciously. Maybe he sensed the comparisons Clem was making, the implicit critique, or maybe he just hated hippies.

  Becky wasn’t among the mothers at the Scofield playground, and she wasn’t at the picnic tables. Farther back in the park was a ball field with a backstop. Fully grown young men, several of them shirtless, were playing softball. The guy at the plate, connecting with a pitch and sending it high over the head of the left fielder, was a detestable jock Clem recognized from high schoo
l, Kent Carducci. He pumped his fist and gave a brute roar as he rounded first base.

  The girls—where there were boys like this, there had to be girls—were grouped along the first-base line, around a set of aluminum bleachers. Becky was seated on the lowest bleacher with Jeannie Cross. Taller than the others, her old aura intact, she might have been a queen holding court. Lesser girls sat cross-legged on the grass below her, one of them holding up the arms of a little child who’d achieved a standing position.

  Jeannie Cross spotted Clem first. She grabbed Becky’s shoulder, and now Becky saw him, too. For a moment, her expression was uncomprehending. Then she ran up behind the first-base line to meet him. He spread his arms, but she stopped short of hugging distance. She was wearing a corduroy jacket that had once been his. Her smile was perhaps more incredulous than joyful.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Came to see you.”

  “Wow.”

  “Is it okay if I give you a hug?”

  She didn’t seem to remember the joke, but she stepped up and put one arm around him, briefly, and pulled back. “Everybody’s home for Easter,” she said. “I guess you are, too.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about Easter. I only came to see you.”

  Kent Carducci shouted something abusive on the ball field.

  “So come and meet Gracie,” Becky said. She ran ahead of Clem and scooped up the little child. “Gracie, I want you to meet your uncle Clem.”

  The child hid her face in Becky’s neck. Clem probably looked to her like a hairy monster. He realized that, until this moment, he hadn’t quite believed that his sister had procreated. The child was perfectly formed, her hair fine and thin on top, thicker on the sides: a new little person, ex nihilo, with a mother scarcely past childhood herself. He could almost remember Becky as a one-year-old. His eyes filled again.

  “Here, you can hold her,” Becky said. “She won’t break.”

  Watched by Becky’s friends, he took Gracie in his arms. She was radiantly warm in her cotton sweater, squirming with vital energy, reaching back for her mother. He didn’t think he’d held a baby since Judson had outgrown being portable. He gently bounced his niece, trying to postpone the inevitable crying, but Becky’s gaze and smile were fixed on her, as if to remind her of where she’d rather be. She let out a wail, and Becky took her back.

  The physics of their reunion were nothing like what he’d imagined: a ball field populated with guys whose muscles had been developed by athletics, not hard labor, eight flavors of pretty girl arrayed by the bleachers, some of them from Crossroads (Carol Pinella, Sally Perkins’s younger sister), others from the cheerleading squad, most of them home from college, at least one of them still local, and none of them remotely capable of imagining the world in which he’d lived for two years. His shirt stank, his dungarees were stained with Andean mud, and his affinities were with the Cuéllars’ hamlet. New Prospect was still New Prospect, and Becky was evidently still at the social center of it, while he, who’d always been far from the center, had moved radically much farther. He would have liked to talk to Jeannie Cross, who was more sensationally desirable than ever, but his alienation was so extreme that he could only stand behind the backstop, watching people he disliked play softball, and wait for Becky to find a moment for him.

  Gracie had fallen asleep in the flimsy stroller that Becky wheeled over to the backstop. “Somebody needs her diaper changed,” she said. “Do you want to walk home with us?”

  “What do you think I want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re the reason I’m here. I came back as soon as I got your letter.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  She pushed the stroller toward the nearest pavement, and he followed her. “I’m glad to see you’re still wearing that jacket.”

  “That’s right,” she said, “it was yours. I’ve had it so long, I forgot.”

  Reaching the pavement, she crouched and inspected her baby.

  “She’s beautiful,” he offered.

  “Thank you. I love her like you wouldn’t believe.”

  She was right in front of him, the person he loved best, still matching his mental image of her, but his own sudden apparition was apparently unremarkable to her. As she proceeded out of the park with the stroller, peering down at her baby, he feared that he’d made another bad mistake; that he should have stayed in Tres Fuentes for the potato harvest.

  “Becky,” he said finally.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry I tried to tell you what to do.”

  “It’s okay. I forgive you.”

  “I don’t want to interfere in your life. I’m just asking for a chance to be a part of it again.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him, didn’t speak again until they were crossing Highland Street. He could see the taller of the parsonage oak trees in the distance. He didn’t feel especially forgiven.

  “Have you been home yet?” she said.

  “No. I wanted to see you first.”

  She acknowledged this tribute with a nod. “Mom showed up at my door the other day. She didn’t call, she just showed up. She wanted us to come to dinner tomorrow. She tried to lay a guilt trip on me, how it’s Dad’s last Easter in New Prospect.”

  “Well. She’s right about that.”

  “I already invited Tanner’s parents to our place. It’s Gracie’s first Easter. I bought a ham.”

  Clem could feel that he was being tested—being dared to point out that, unlike his parents, a one-year-old couldn’t tell Easter Sunday from Guy Fawkes Day.

  “So, uh. Why not invite Mom and Dad?”

  “Because that means bringing Perry, which doesn’t sound like a holiday to me. He uses up all the air in the room, even when he’s just sitting there. If you start talking about something that isn’t him, he’ll make some remark about how shitty he feels, or something completely random, whatever it takes to get the attention back on him, and they fall for it every time.”

  “He’s sick, Becky.”

  “Yeah, obviously. I get why they have to take care of him. But it isn’t fair to Tanner’s parents to have his sickness be their whole evening.”

  “Mom and Dad have to live with it every night of the week.”

  “I know. I’m sure it’s really hard for them. But he’s their son, not mine, and I already made my contribution as a sibling. I think I’m entitled to not deal with it on a holiday.”

  Clem suppressed an impulse to say more. Obeying her first rule, respecting her feelings about their parents, was going to be a struggle. At least there was no rule against being kind to them himself.

  As if she’d sensed his thought, she stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him.

  “So,” she said. “Will you have dinner with us?”

  “Tonight?”

  “No, tomorrow. Easter. I’m inviting you.”

  His heart leaped at the invitation; it couldn’t help itself. But it had leaped into a trap. He’d been away for so long, it would be cruel to leave his parents alone on Easter, and Becky knew it.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She looked away with an expression of not caring. All he’d asked for was a chance with her, and she was offering him that chance. Whether she genuinely wanted him in her life or was simply testing his loyalties, he couldn’t yet tell. But it was clear that, in his absence, far from having diminished herself, as he’d supposed, she’d become a dominating force. She had the grandchild, she had the absolutely loyal husband, she had her charisma and her popularity, and she needed nothing from him or their parents. The terms were hers to set.

  “Let me think about it,” he said, although he already knew what he would do.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN FRANZEN

  NOVELS

  Purity

  Freedom

  The Corrections

  Strong Motion

  The Twenty-Seventh City

  NONFICTION

  The End of the End of the Earth<
br />
  The Kraus Project

  Farther Away

  The Discomfort Zone

  How to Be Alone

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Purity, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Advent

  Easter

  Also by Jonathan Franzen

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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  Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan Franzen

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  First edition, 2021

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-71979-1

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  The author is grateful to Will “I Think This Answers Your Question” Akers, and to John Chetkovich and Anna Paganelli, for their help with facts and background.