Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  Although the house was a mess of toys and unwashed dishes and did indeed smell faintly of manure, the Renoir pastel and the Degas sketch and the Monet canvas were still hanging where they always had. Patty was immediately handed a nice, warm, adorable, not terribly clean one-year-old by Galina, who was very pregnant and surveyed the scene with dull sharecropper eyes. Patty had met Galina on the day of Ray’s memorial service but had barely spoken to her. She was one of those overwhelmed mothers engulfed in baby, her hair disordered, her cheeks hectic, her clothes disarranged, her flesh escaping haphazardly, but she clearly could still have been pretty if she’d had a few minutes to spare for it. “Thank you for coming to see us,” she said. “It’s an ordeal for us to travel now, arranging rides and so forth.”

  Patty, before she could proceed with her business, had to enjoy the little boy in her arms, rub noses with him, get him laughing. She had the mad thought that she could adopt him, lighten Galina and Edgar’s load, and embark on a new kind of life. As if recognizing this in her, he put her hands all over her face, pulling at her features gleefully.

  “He likes his aunt,” Galina said. “His long-lost aunt Patty.”

  Edgar came in through the back door minus his boots, wearing thick gray socks that were themselves muddy and had holes in them. “Do you want some raisin bran or something?” he said. “We also have Chex.”

  Patty declined and sat down at the kitchen table, her nephew on her knee. The other kids were no less great—dark-eyed, curious, bold without being rude—and she could see why Joyce was so taken with them and didn’t want them leaving the country. All in all, after her bad talk with Abigail, Patty was having a hard time seeing this family as the villains. They seemed, instead, literally, like babes in the woods. “So tell me how you guys see the future working out,” she said.

  Edgar, obviously accustomed to letting Galina speak for him, sat picking scabs of mud off his socks while she explained that they were getting better at farming, that their rabbi and synagogue were wonderfully supportive, that Edgar was on the verge of being certified to produce kosher wine from the grandparental grapes, and that the game was amazing.

  “Game?” Patty said.

  “Deers,” Galina said. “Unbelievable numbers of deers. Edgar, how many did you shoot last fall?”

  “Fourteen,” Edgar said.

  “Fourteen on our property! And they keep coming and coming, it’s stupendous.”

  “See, the thing is, though,” Patty said, trying to remember whether eating deer was even kosher, “it’s not really your property. It’s kind of Joyce’s now. And I’m just wondering, since Edgar’s so smart about business, whether it might make more sense for him to go back to work, and get a real income going, so that Joyce can make her own decision about this place.”

  Galina was shaking her head adamantly. “There’s the insurances. The insurances want to take anything he makes, up to I don’t know how many hundred thousands.”

  “Yes, well, but if Joyce could sell this place, you guys could pay off the insurances, I mean the insurance companies, and then you could get a fresh start.”

  “That man is a fraudster!” Galina said with blazing eyes. “You heard the story, I guess? That crossing guard is one hundred percent guaranteed fraudster. I barely tapped him, barely touched him, and now he can’t walk?”

  “Patty,” Edgar said, sounding remarkably much like Ray when he was being patronizing, “you really don’t understand the situation.”

  “I’m sorry—what’s not to understand?”

  “Your father wanted the farm to stay in the family,” Galina said. “He didn’t want it going in pockets of disgusting, obscene theater producers making so-called ‘art,’ or five-hundred-dollar psychiatrists who take your little sister’s money without ever making her better. This way, we always have the farm, your uncles will forget about it, and if there’s ever real need, instead of disgusting so-called ‘art’ or fraudster psychiatrists, Joyce can always sell part of it.”

  “Edgar?” Patty said. “Is this your plan, too?”

  “Yeah, basically.”

  “Well, I guess it’s very selfless of you. Guarding the flame of Daddy’s wishes.”

  Galina leaned into Patty’s face, as if to aid her comprehension. “We have the children,” she said. “We’ll soon have six mouths to feed. Your sisters think I want to go to Israel—I don’t want to go to Israel. We have good life here. And don’t you think we get credit for having the children your sisters won’t have?”

  “They do seem like fun kids,” Patty admitted. Her nephew was dozing in her arms.

  “So leave it alone,” Galina said. “Come and see the children whenever you want. We’re not bad people, we’re not kooks, we love having visitors.”

  Patty drove back to Westchester, feeling sad and discouraged, and consoled herself with televised basketball (Joyce was up in Albany). The following afternoon, she returned to the city and saw Veronica, the baby of the family, the most damaged of them all. There had always been something otherworldly about Veronica. For a long time, it had had to do with her dark-eyed, slender, wood-sprite looks, to which she’d adapted in various self-destructive ways including anorexia, promiscuity, and hard drinking. Now her looks were mostly gone—she was heavier but not heavy like a fat person; she reminded Patty of her former friend Eliza, whom she’d once glimpsed, many years after college, in a crowded DMV office—and her otherworldliness was more spiritual: a nonconnection to ordinary logic, a sort of checked-out amusement regarding the existence of a world outside herself. She’d once shown great promise (at least in Joyce’s view) as both a painter and a ballerina, and had been hit on and dated by any number of worthy young men, but she’d since been bludgeoned by episodes of major depression beside which Patty’s own depressions were apparently autumn hayrides in an apple orchard. According to Joyce, she was currently employed as an administrative assistant at a dance company. She lived in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom on Ludlow Street where Patty, despite having phoned in advance, seemed to have interrupted her in some deep meditative exercise. She buzzed Patty in and left her front door ajar, leaving it to Patty to find her in her bedroom, on a yoga mat, wearing faded Sarah Lawrence gym clothes; her youthful dancer’s limberness had developed into a quite astonishing yogic flexibility. She obviously wished that Patty hadn’t come, and Patty had to sit on her bed for half an hour, waiting eons for responses to her basic pleasantries, before Veronica finally reconciled herself to her sister’s presence. “Those are great boots,” she said.

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “I don’t wear leather anymore, but sometimes, when I see a good boot, I still miss it.”

  “Uh huh,” Patty said encouragingly.

  “Do you mind if I smell them?”

  “My boots?”

  Veronica nodded and crawled over to inhale the smell of the uppers. “I’m very sensitive to smell,” she said, her eyes closed blissfully. “It’s the same with bacon—I still love the smell, even though I don’t eat it. It’s so intense for me, it’s almost like eating it.”

  “Uh huh,” Patty encouraged.

  “In terms of my practice, it’s literally like not having my cake and not eating it, too.”

  “Right. I can see that. That’s interesting. Although presumably you never ate leather.”

  Veronica laughed hard at this and for a while became quite sisterly. Unlike anyone else in the family, except Ray, she had a lot of questions about Patty’s life and the turns that it had lately taken. She found cosmically funny precisely the most painful parts of Patty’s story, and once Patty got used to her laughing at the wreck of her marriage, she could see that it did Veronica good to hear of her troubles. It seemed to confirm some family truth for her and put her at ease. But then, over green tea, which Veronica averred she drank at least a gallon of per day, Patty brought up the matter of the estate, and her sister’s laughter became vaguer and more slippery.

  “Seriously,” Patty said. “Why are
you bothering Joyce about the money? If it was just Abigail bothering her, I think she could deal with it, but coming from you, too, it’s making her really uncomfortable.”

  “I don’t think Mommy needs my help to make her uncomfortable,” Veronica said, amused. “She does pretty well with that on her own.”

  “Well, you’re making her more uncomfortable.”

  “I don’t think so. I think we make our own heaven and hell. If she wants to be less uncomfortable, she can sell the estate. All I’m asking for is enough money so I don’t have to work.”

  “What’s wrong with working?” Patty said, hearing an echo of a similar question that Walter had once asked her. “It’s good for the self-esteem to work.”

  “I can work,” Veronica said. “I’m working now. I’d just rather not. It’s boring, and they treat me like a secretary.”

  “You are a secretary. You’re probably the highest-IQ secretary in New York City.”

  “I just look forward to quitting, that’s all.”

  “I’m sure Joyce would pay for you to go back to school and get some job more suitable for your talents.”

  Veronica laughed. “My talents don’t seem to be the kind the world’s interested in. That’s why it’s better if I can exercise them by myself. I really just want to be left alone, Patty. That’s all I’m asking at this point. To be left alone. Abigail’s the one who doesn’t want Uncle Jim and Uncle Dudley to get anything. I don’t really care as long as I can pay my rent.”

  “That’s not what Joyce says. She says you don’t want them getting anything, either.”

  “I’m only trying to help Abigail get what she wants. She wants to start her own female comedy troupe and take it to Europe, where people will appreciate her. She wants to live in Rome and be revered.” Again the laugh. “And I’d actually be fine with that. I don’t need to see her that much. She’s nice to me, but you know the way she talks. I always end up feeling, at the end of an evening with her, like it would have been better to spend the evening alone. I like being alone. I’d rather be able to think my thoughts without being distracted.”

  “So you’re tormenting Joyce because you don’t want to see so much of Abigail? Why don’t you just not see so much of Abigail?”

  “Because I’ve been told that it’s not good to see no one. She’s sort of like TV playing in the background. It keeps me company.”

  “But you just said you don’t even like to see her!”

  “I know. It’s hard to explain. I have a friend in Brooklyn I’d probably see more of if I didn’t see so much of Abigail. That would probably be OK, too. Actually, when I think about it, I’m pretty sure it would be OK.” And Veronica laughed at the thought of this friend.

  “But why shouldn’t Edgar feel the same way you do?” Patty said. “Why shouldn’t he and Galina get to keep living on the farm?”

  “Probably no reason. You’re probably right. Galina is undeniably appalling, and I think Edgar knows it, I think that’s why he married her—to inflict her on us. She’s his revenge for being the only boy in the family. And I personally don’t really care as long as I don’t have to see her, but Abigail can’t get over it.”

  “So basically you’re doing this all for Abigail.”

  “She wants things. I don’t want things myself, but I’m happy to help her try to get them.”

  “Except you do want enough money so you never have to work.”

  “Yes, that would definitely be nice. I don’t like being someone’s secretary. I especially hate answering the phone.” She laughed. “I think people talk too much in general.”

  Patty felt like she was dealing with a huge ball of Bazooka that she couldn’t get ungummed from her fingers; the strands of Veronica’s logic were boundlessly elastic and adhered not only to Patty but to themselves.

  Later, as she rode the train back out of the city, she was struck, as never before, by how much better off and more successful her parents were than any of their children, herself included, and how odd it was that none of the kids had inherited one speck of the sense of social responsibility that had motivated Joyce and Ray all their lives. She knew that Joyce felt guilty about it, especially about poor Veronica, but she also knew that it must have been a terrible blow to Joyce’s ego to have such unflattering children, and that Joyce probably blamed Ray’s genes, the curse of old August Emerson, for her kids’ weirdness and ineffectuality. It occurred to Patty, then, that Joyce’s political career hadn’t just caused or aggravated her family’s problems: it had also been her escape from those problems. In retrospect, Patty saw something poignant or even admirable in Joyce’s determination to absent herself, to be a politician and do good in the world, and thereby save herself. And, as somebody who’d likewise taken extreme steps to save herself, Patty could see that Joyce wasn’t just lucky to have a daughter like her: that she was also lucky to have had a mother like Joyce.

  There was still one big thing she didn’t understand, though, and when Joyce returned from Albany the following afternoon, full of anger at the senate Republicans who were paralyzing the state government (Ray, alas, no longer being around to rag Joyce about the Democrats’ own role in the paralysis), Patty was waiting in the kitchen with a question for her. She asked it as soon as Joyce had taken off her raincoat: “Why did you never go to any of my basketball games?”

  “You’re right,” Joyce said immediately, as if she’d been expecting the question for thirty years. “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. I should have gone to more of your games.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  Joyce reflected for a moment. “I can’t really explain it,” she said, “except to say that we had so many things going on, we couldn’t get to everything. We made mistakes as parents. You’ve probably made some yourself now. You can probably understand how confused everything gets, and how busy. What a struggle it is to get to everything.”

  “Here’s the thing, though,” Patty said. “You did have time for other things. It was specifically my games that you weren’t going to. And I’m not talking about every game, I’m talking about any games.”

  “Oh, why are you bringing this up now? I said I was sorry I made a mistake.”

  “I’m not blaming you,” Patty said. “I’m asking because I was really good at basketball. I was really, really good. I’ve probably made more mistakes as a mother than you did, so this is not a criticism. I’m just thinking, it would have made you happy to see how good I was. To see how talented I was. It would have made you feel good about yourself.”

  Joyce looked away. “I suppose I was never one for sports.”

  “But you went to Edgar’s fencing meets.”

  “Not many.”

  “More than you went to my games. And it’s not like you liked fencing so much. And it’s not like Edgar was any good.”

  Joyce, whose self-control was ordinarily perfect, went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of white wine that Patty had nearly killed the night before. She poured the remainder in a juice glass, drank half of it, laughed at herself, and drank the other half.

  “I don’t know why your sisters aren’t doing better,” she said, in an apparent non sequitur. “But Abigail said an interesting thing to me once. A terrible thing, which still tears me up. I shouldn’t tell you, but somehow I trust you not to talk about these things. Abigail was very . . . inebriated. This was a long time ago, when she was still trying to be a stage actress. There was an excellent role that she’d thought she was going to be cast in, but hadn’t been. And I tried to encourage her, and tell her I believed in her talents, and she just had to keep trying. And she said the most terrible thing to me. She said that I was the reason she’d failed. I who had been nothing, nothing, nothing but supportive. But that’s what she said.”

  “Did she explain that?”

  “She said . . .” Joyce looked woefully out into her flower garden. “She said the reason she couldn’t succeed was that, if she ever did succeed, then I would ta
ke it from her. It would be my success, not hers. Which isn’t true! But this is how she felt. And the only way she had to show me how she felt, and make me keep suffering, and not let me think that everything was OK with her, was to keep on not succeeding. Oh, I still hate to think about it! I told her it wasn’t true, and I hope she believed me, because it is not true.”

  “OK,” Patty said, “that does sound hard. But what does it have to do with my basketball games?”

  Joyce shook her head. “I don’t know. It just occurred to me.”

  “I was succeeding, Mommy. That’s the weird thing. I was totally succeeding.”

  Here, all at once, Joyce’s face crumpled up terribly. She shook her head again, as if with repugnance, trying to hold back tears. “I know you were,” she said. “I should have been there. I blame myself.”

  “It’s really OK that you weren’t. Maybe almost better, in the long run. I was just asking a curious question.”

  Joyce’s summation, after a long silence, was: “I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”

  And this was all Patty got from her, then or later. It wasn’t a lot, it didn’t solve any mysteries, but it would have to do. That same evening, Patty presented the results of her investigations and proposed a plan of action that Joyce, with much docile nodding, agreed to every detail of. The estate would be sold, and Joyce would give half the proceeds to Ray’s brothers, administer Edgar’s share of the remainder in a trust from which he and Galina could draw enough to live on (provided they didn’t emigrate), and offer large lump sums to Abigail and Veronica. Patty, who ended up accepting $75,000 to help start a new life without assistance from Walter, felt fleetingly guilty on Walter’s behalf, thinking of the empty woods and untilled fields that she’d helped doom to fragmentation and development. She hoped Walter might understand that the collective unhappiness of the bobolinks and woodpeckers and orioles whose homes she had wrecked was not much greater, in this particular instance, than that of the family that was selling the land.