The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  It was bound to happen one of these years. The chief executive of a publicly held corporation couldn’t expect to continue running things forever. Buzz regretted only that he hadn’t stepped down before they forced him to. His failing grasp of the concept of profit should have tipped him off. How could he ever have made the mistake of letting his feelings for Asha and Martin influence his policy decisions? What had he been thinking this spring? At the time, to be sure, his actions had made sense. And now they didn’t matter. He was retiring on Friday. Of course, as the major stockholder, he’d surely be allowed to continue whatever personal projects he chose. If need be, he could liquidate a few assets and fund the research out of his own pocket. He looked forward to having more time for his dear friends, and better yet, in a way, to having time to devote to the queer assemblage that was his family. When the top priority ceased to obtain, all the lower priorities moved up a notch.

  He escaped headquarters in a company car without being accosted by the press. Rain was spattering the ground with forsythia petals. He’d long envisioned himself being retired on a different sort of day, a crisp and blue Novembery day, with a warm fire and brandy at the end of it. Spring was more the time of year when great men died.

  He drove first to the Hammaker complex to inquire after Asha. She hadn’t been seen at the office all day. He called the Hammaker estate once more, spoke with the same vague servant he’d been speaking with since 9:00 in the morning, who said that no, Asha wasn’t there yet either. She’d gone out with her maid. Shopping? Buzz drove home.

  Finding Bev’s Cadillac parked by the gatehouse, he smiled a small smile of gratitude, his lips joining like a fortune cookie. When all else failed, he could count on Bev. He went inside, called to her, went upstairs, and saw her lying on the bed. On her nightstand stood an empty Seconal bottle and an empty fifth of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.

  As soon as she saw that her father’s car wasn’t in the garage, Luisa lost interest. She inched back through the crowd. In the bad light, none of the neighbors recognized her, not even Mrs. LeMaster. Though she saw something familiar and significant in Luisa’s face, though she stared, screwing up her eyes until it seemed she might cry, Mrs. LeMaster was so unsure of her identification that she couldn’t bring herself to collar a cop and say: that’s no towhee, that’s Luisa Probst, she used to live here. Luisa turned and walked back up Baker. It wasn’t her mess.

  She thanked her luck that she’d moved all her favorite things into Duane’s apartment before this happened. She thought of various dresses and purses in her closet that were better off burned. She wondered what it would be like to move to another city and introduce herself using a different name. Her first name would be McArthur. Her last name would be Smith. She tried to imagine what kind of job she could get, and then for some reason she thought of her father’s National Geographics.

  She stopped on the sidewalk and set down her purse, turned to an oak tree and socked the trunk as hard as she could. She bit her lip and looked at her knuckles. Shreds of white skin were bunched up and hanging ragged from the edge of pits into which blood was starting to seep. She hit the tree again with the same hand. It stung more but overall hurt less. She hit the tree two more times, and with each blow she could feel how solid it was, how its roots went deep enough to hold it powerfully vertical. The smell of burned wood was strong in her nose.

  On Lockwood she sat waiting for a bus while cars rolled by, the commuting men shadowy in their interiors. Car after car, man after man, always one driver, starting up from the Rock Hill intersection. If you put together all the men in Webster Groves in the darkness of their cars at five o’clock, it added up to a mystery with the power of a crowd, but divided and more secret, a mystery like the business section of the newspaper and its esoteric concepts, like futures and options, which every day the men were privately assimilating. Did they understand it? In libraries Luisa had looked into just about every kind of field at least once, a psychotherapists’ journal, the bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, invertebrate morphology, the works, and the only kind of thinking she couldn’t begin to follow was the kind the men with their loosened neckties in their expensive cars were presumably involved in as she watched.

  The bus came. She threw a new cigarette into a puddle—you grew up to be a litterer—and got on, dropping her quarters into the box. She sat down across from the rear doors and looked forward at the black cleaning women sitting in the seats for the handicapped and elderly, returning home to their families. One of them leaned forward, her chin and hands propped on the handle of her umbrella, and spoke in a low voice to the others, who sat with their heads bowed to the no-slip floor and the collapsed umbrellas lying at their feet like drenched, docile pets. Lights in store windows on Big Bend drifted by, solitary and painful, burning in the greater darkness.

  Three hundred officers had been assigned to patrol on foot to ensure that St. Louis Night proceeded in an orderly manner, as a crowd in excess of 500,000 was expected to pour into the downtown area for the festivities. Sidewalk duty wouldn’t have been too bad if the weather was nice, but the rain was still coming down and a mean wind was kicking up. RC and Sergeant Dom Luzzi sat snug and lucky in their squad car, listening to the radio and skirting the main event, the authorized forklifts and vans plowing back and forth between the reserve parking zones and festival sites, the white tents on the Mall, the canopied booths and tables. The St. Louis skyline was lit up in sections, the floors like illuminated aquariums on shelves in a dark room. But where were the fish?

  At 5:25 RC and Luzzi responded to a call from the offices of KSLX, where a group of street people were harassing employees as they left for home. Luzzi pulled the car around the police line blocking the inbound lanes of Olive Street and sped to the scene. Their arrival scattered the street people. They saw the soles of shoes flying up the alleys. A crowd of KSLX employees, many of whom RC recognized, dispersed and headed for the parking lot. Whoever was working the lot would have his hands full for a couple of minutes. RC craned his neck and saw they now had a woman there doing the parking.

  Luzzi spoke with the security guard and got back in the car. “Something about a Benjamin Brown,” he said.

  “Huh.”

  “Are you familiar with the individual?”

  “It’s a name you hear.”

  “If these people stick around and make trouble in the crowd tonight, they’ll be picked up separately. They aren’t local.”

  “No, sir?”

  Luzzi shook his head and jotted on his pad. “East St. Louis.”

  “The root of all evil.”

  “We’ve had enough of your humor, White.”

  When Gopal failed to make his scheduled call at 4:00 and another hour passed without her phone ringing, Jammu began to worry, routinely. She wondered what had been going on in England in the last twenty-four hours. She wondered what was going on in St. Louis. If her phone didn’t ring she had no way of knowing. She called the Hammaker residence and found out nothing, called Singh’s place and got no answer. She tried Martin at his office.

  “No,” his secretary said. “He left a while ago with Mrs. Probst.”

  It took Jammu a moment to find her voice. “When was this?”

  “Oh, three o’clock or so.”

  “All right, thank you.”

  Things had been too quiet.

  Either Singh had released Barbara to destroy the operation, or else Devi had returned. Knowing Devi to be resourceful, Gopal to be punctual, and Singh to be loyal if not to her then at least to the operation, Jammu concluded that Mrs. Probst was Devi and that Gopal, her strong arm, quite possibly was dead.

  Where was her authority now?

  Jack came in the front door shaking his umbrella. His coat was a woolen carapace, a tall gray bell without tucks or flaps. Probst looked up from the sofa with a smile, aware that his presence here was surprising. But Jack only nodded. “Hello Martin.” The pitch of his voice rose on the last syllable. A hint of angry
tears.

  Probst crossed the room and extended a hand. “Hi, Jack.”

  “Good to see you.” Jack’s grip was weak. “What’s the occasion?”

  “No occasion. Just thought I’d drop in.”

  Jack wouldn’t look at him. “Great. Excuse me a second.” He swung around, and with a nonchalance undermined by little hitches in his stride, like the grabbing of a wet chamois on a windshield, he walked to the kitchen. He was obviously nursing a grudge. But perhaps he would abandon it. Probst sat down on the sofa again. He didn’t mind waiting. Waiting rooms were places in which it was impossible to think.

  In the kitchen, where melted cheese had joined the hamburger and onions, there were murmured consultations. Probst had already accepted Elaine’s invitation to stay for dinner, and her murmurs were placating. Jack’s were upbraiding. Then hers became more heated, and Jack’s more resigned. He returned to the living room composing his hair and adjusting the cuffs of his baby blue sweater. “Do you want a beer, Martin?”

  Again his voice rose as he spoke and cracked on the last syllable.

  “Sure, thanks,” Probst said. “I’m not interrupting anything?”

  Jack didn’t answer. He went to the kitchen and returned with a can of Hammaker, set it on the coffee table in front of Probst, turned on the television, and marched back to the kitchen. Probst was amazed. He never got the silent treatment from anyone but Barbara and Luisa.

  “Oh, for pete’s sake, Jack.” Elaine was angry.

  “…tonight as fire fighters from three communities continue to pour water on his three-story house, which burned to the ground late this afternoon. Cliff Quinlan has a live mini-cam report.”

  “Don, no one knows how the fire started, Webster Groves fire chief Kirk McGraw has said it’s too early to speculate on the possibility of arson, I don’t think anyone here really thinks the blaze was in any way related to Probst’s recent political activities, but this has been a deadly fire. When Webster Groves fire fighters arrived, they witnessed a man believed to be Probst’s, ah, gardener entering the house. He did not come out again. The intensity of the heat has made recovery of the body impossible thus far, and it may be another one to three hours before it’s determined whether any other persons were in the house at the time of the blaze. The one known victim is the, ah, gardener, who lived on the property and has not been seen. However, neighbors say that Probst’s car is not on the property, so it appears unlikely that he himself was in the house. I’ve asked Chief McGraw how a fire could burn out of control for as long as it did in this residential neighborhood.”

  “Well, Cliff, first I’d have to point up the secluded nature of the residence, you see the hedges and the fence, the residence is set well back from the street, and at the period of time in question, namely the late afternoon, with visibility being what it was—”

  Telephones rang throughout the house.

  “Yes, he is,” Jack said in the kitchen. He appeared in the doorway. “Martin, it’s for you.” He pointed—jabbed—a finger at the phone on the console in the hall. Then he withdrew again to the kitchen.

  Probst retrieved his coat from the closet and walked out the front door into the rain. He’d hardly recognized the Webster Groves scene on the news. But he could identify the phone call with certainty. It was the summons he’d been waiting for. Only Jammu would have thought to look for him here. He’d mentioned Jack to her once, and once, he was learning, was all she needed.

  She woke up with a headache and some grogginess, but basically the substance he’d given her had treated her as gently as he himself had. For a while she lay breathing experimentally, accustoming herself to consciousness, expecting dinner. But when she shifted her legs and opened her eyes she saw that everything had changed. The fetter was gone, the sheets were clean, a big lamp with a shade stood on a dresser by a chair on which her clothes—

  She’d nearly fainted. On her next try, she stood up in increments, raising her head gradually, as if placing it atop the statue of her body. She crossed the room and opened the door. The lock she’d heard turn so many times was gone. And now, where for all the weeks she’d been led to the bathroom she’d heard the unmistakable echoes of vacancy, she was walking through an apartment very much like the New York apartment John had been forcing her to imagine.

  Books of hers lay on the arms of Scandinavian chairs. She’d hung lingerie up to dry in the bathroom. On a desk in the dining room, above a pack of her Winstons and a dirty ashtray, she’d filed away her letters from Luisa and Audrey in a set of modular shelves. She’d stocked the refrigerator with her preferred brands of yogurt, diet chocolate soda, martini olives. (She was starving for real food, but she didn’t touch anything.) She’d written a grocery list and left it on the counter. On the floor near the outer door she found a scrap of white paper.

  Bhimrao Ambedkar

  Barrister at Law

  Chowpatty, Bombay

  The nurses, orderlies and candy stripers gave Buzz a wide berth. In the waiting area on the ICU floor at Barnes he sat hunched and trembling, a small, hungry old man. He hadn’t eaten anything since his Reuben sandwich at noon. What the intercoms were saying he didn’t understand. A nurse manipulated jumbo file cards and a telephone pealed electronically. A thin, even layer of scar tissue covered the walls and floors, the residue of the artificial light that had been falling twenty-four hours a day for twenty years.

  The chief neurologist had told Buzz that any brain damage would not become evident until Bev regained consciousness, but that he should begin to prepare himself for a long and arduous recovery period. Asha had told him, when he finally got in touch with her, that she wouldn’t be able to see him tonight because she’d made a commitment to appear at the election festivities downtown. And Martin’s phone wasn’t working.

  Strain was building in his throat and behind his nose when he heard a familiar voice. He stifled a sob, looked up and saw his urologist strolling with another doctor at a conversational pace. Both of them peeled off green caps and massaged their scalps. Buzz raised his head further and uncrossed his arms to let himself be recognized and spoken to. They didn’t speak to him. Dr. Thompson said, “Kids get side-aches.”

  The other doctor said, “Kids eat candy.”

  Dr. Thompson said, “Candy causes side-aches.”

  Both men laughed and walked onto the elevator, which had opened for them as they approached it.

  Tired of driving but not of moving, Probst parked the Lincoln in one of the Convention Center garages, counted five other cars on the entire Lemon level, and set out from there on foot. It was nine o’clock. He’d spent two hours at the police station in Webster Groves, speaking to Allstate, thanking firemen, accepting coffee and condolences from Chief Harrison, and giving information to a series of lesser officers who transferred his statements onto dotted lines. He was told there would soon be a body to identify. He was left by himself in a corridor to wait, gratefully, on a carved walnut bench. Then an officer called his name: he was wanted on the telephone. It was the second summons, and again he walked away, got in his car, drove east.

  Rock music, so loud it could only be live, reverberated inside the Convention Center and through the walls across the plaza. The song’s chorus seemed to go, You love you won you win. Maybe the Center was packed with young people dancing and waving their arms above their heads, but maybe not; the plaza and surrounding streets were barren of stragglers. Pairs of policemen in mackintoshes turned their heads back and forth with an air of defensiveness. They stamped their feet and blew on their hands. Probst crossed Washington Street in the middle of a block and didn’t see a car coming in either direction. The downtown streets, of course, were off limits to private cars tonight. Pedestrians were expected to carry the party into every square yard of the area. But there were fewer pedestrians in sight than on an ordinary Tuesday night.

  A dixieland band was playing beneath a plastic awning in front of the Mercantile Tower, next to the chromium sculpture, which gle
amed cheaply, a household knickknack grossly enlarged. Three teens in ski jackets stood listening to the music. The washboard player took a short solo, hunkering down and giving a vigorous rub to the slats of his instrument. He winked at the kids.

  At the empty sidewalk cafés on 8th Street, waiters sat smoking, dozing, playing cards. Rain pelted the canopies, which shivered in each gust of wind like dogs that had evacuated. Probst stepped up to the sampling booth for Jardin des Plantes and ordered a slice of quiche from a short man with a bullet-shaped head.

  “Five.”

  “Five dollars?”

  “It’s a benefit.”

  He bolted the quiche before it got too cold to stomach, crunching the bean sprouts and miniature shrimps embedded in it, squeezing the oils through his mouth and down his throat.

  In another booth, above a tank of water, in a seat connected by springs to a bull’s-eye at which passersby could pay to throw tennis balls, Sal Russo sat reading the Post-Dispatch. Sal was a city alderman from the ward in which Probst & Company were located. He looked quite toasty, his hair dry and styled, between a pair of radiant heaters. “Hey, Martin.”

  “Hi, Sal.” Probst turned to the attendant. “How much?”

  The attendant pointed to a sign. “Five bucks a throw. Sir. Or ten for three. It’s a benefit.”

  He bought six balls, and then six more. Before Sal could surface in the tank, Probst had hastened around the corner onto Market Street. Here he stopped in his tracks, shocked by the Arch.