Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  And the autobiographer will say this about her family: the money they’d waited so long for, and been so uncivil about, wasn’t wholly wasted on them. Abigail in particular began to flourish as soon as she had some financial weight to throw around in her bohemia; Joyce now calls Patty whenever Abigail’s name is in the Times again; she and her troupe are apparently the toast of Italy, Slovenia, and other European nations. Veronica gets to be alone in her apartment, in an upstate ashram, and in her studio, and it’s possible that her paintings, despite how ingrown and never-quite-finished they look to Patty, will be hailed by later generations as works of genius. Edgar and Galina have relocated to the ultra-Orthodox community in Kiryas Joel, New York, where they’ve had one last (fifth) baby and don’t seem to be causing active harm to anybody. Patty sees all of them except Abigail a few times a year. Her nephews and nieces are the main treat, of course, but she also recently accompanied Joyce on a British garden tour that she enjoyed more than she’d thought she might, and she and Veronica never fail to have some laughs.

  Mainly, though, she leads her own little life. She still runs every day, in Prospect Park, but she’s no longer addicted to exercise or to anything else, really. A bottle of wine lasts two days now, sometimes three. At her school, she’s in the blessed position of not having to deal directly with today’s parents, who are way more insane and pressurized than even she had been. They seem to think her school should be helping their first-graders write early drafts of their college application essays and build their vocabulary for the SAT, ten years in the future. But Patty gets to deal with the kids purely as kids—as interesting and mostly still untainted little individuals who are eager to acquire writing skills, so as to be able to tell their stories. Patty meets with them in small groups and encourages them to do this, and they’re not so young that some of them might not remember Mrs. Berglund when they’re grown up. The middle-school kids should definitely remember her, because this is her favorite part of her job: giving back, as a coach, the total dedication and tough love and lessons in teamwork that her own coaches once gave her. Almost every day of the school year, after class, for a few hours, she gets to disappear and forget herself and be one of the girls again, be wedded by love to the cause of winning games, and yearn pureheartedly for her players to succeed. A universe that permits her to do this, at this relatively late point in her life, in spite of her not having been the best person, cannot be a wholly cruel one.

  Summers are harder, no question. Summers are when the old self-pity and competitiveness well up in her again. Patty twice forced herself to volunteer with the city parks department and work outdoors with kids, but she turns out to be shockingly bad at managing boys older than six or seven, and it’s a struggle to interest herself in activity purely for activity’s sake; she needs a real team, her own team, to discipline and focus on winning. The younger unmarried women teachers at her school, who are hilariously hard partyers (like, puking-in-the-bathroom hard partyers, tequila-drinks-in-the-conference-room-at-three-o’clock hard partyers), become scarce in the summer, and there are only so many hours a person can read books by herself, or clean her tiny and already clean apartment while listening to country music, without wanting to do some hard partying of her own. The two sort-of relationships she had with significantly younger men from her school, two semi-sustained dating things that the reader surely doesn’t want to hear about and in any case consisted mainly of awkwardness and tortured discussion, both began in the summer months. For the last three years, Cathy and Donna have kindly let her spend all of July in Wisconsin.

  Her mainstay, of course, is Jessica. So much so, indeed, that Patty is rigorously careful not to overdo it and drown her with need. Jessica is a working dog, not a show dog like Joey, and once Patty had left Richard and regained a degree of moral respectability, Jessica had made a project of fixing up her mother’s life. Many of her suggestions were fairly obvious, but Patty in her gratitude and contrition meekly presented progress reports at their regular Monday-evening dinners. Although she knew a lot more about life than Jessica did, she’d also made a lot more mistakes. It cost her very little to let her daughter feel important and useful, and their discussions did lead directly to her current employment. Once she was back on her feet again, she was able to offer Jessica support in return, but she had to be very careful about this, too. When she read one of Jessica’s overly poetic blog entries, full of easily improvable sentences, the only thing she allowed herself to say was “Great post!!” When Jessica lost her heart to a musician, the boyish little drummer who’d dropped out of NYU, Patty had to forget everything she knew about musicians and endorse, at least tacitly, Jessica’s belief that human nature had lately undergone a fundamental change: that people her own age, even male musicians, were very different from people Patty’s age. And when Jessica’s heart was then broken, slowly but thoroughly, Patty had to manufacture shock at the singular unforeseeable outrage of it. Although this was difficult, she was happy to make the effort, in part because Jessica and her friends really are somewhat different from Patty and her generation—the world looks scarier to them, the road to adulthood harder and less obviously rewarding—but mostly because she depends on Jessica’s love now and would do just about anything to keep her in her life.

  One indisputable boon of her and Walter’s separation has been to bring their kids closer together. In the months after Patty left Washington, she could tell, from their both being party to information that she’d given only one of them, that they were in regular communication, and it wasn’t hard to guess that the substance of their communication was how destructive and selfish and embarrassing their parents were. Even after Jessica forgave Walter and Patty, she remained in close touch with her war buddy, having bonded with him in the trenches.

  How the two siblings have negotiated the sharp contrasts between their personalities has been interesting for Patty to watch, given her own failures in this line. Joey seems to have been especially insightful regarding the duplicity of Jessica’s little drummer boy, explaining certain things to her which Patty had found it politic not to. It also definitely helps that Joey, since he had to be brilliantly successful at something, has been flourishing in a business that Jessica approves of. Not that there aren’t still things for Jessica to roll her eyes at and be competitive about. It rankles her that Walter, with his South American connections, was able to steer Joey into shade-grown coffee at exactly the moment when fortunes could be made in it, while there is nothing that either Walter or Patty can do to help Jessica in her own chosen career of literary publishing. It frustrates her to be devoted, like her father, to a declining and endangered and unprofitable enterprise while Joey gets rich almost effortlessly. Nor can she conceal her envy of Connie for getting to travel the world with Joey, getting to visit precisely those humid countries that she herself is most multiculturally enthusiastic about. But Jessica does, albeit grudgingly, admire Connie’s shrewdness in delaying having babies; she’s also been heard to admit that Connie dresses pretty well “for a midwesterner.” And there is no getting around the fact that shade-grown coffee is better for the environment, better especially for birds, and that Joey deserves credit for trumpeting this fact and marketing it astutely. Joey has Jessica pretty well beaten, in other words, and this is yet another reason why Patty works so hard to be her friend.

  The autobiographer wishes she could report that all is well with her and Joey, too. Alas, all is not. Joey still presents a steel door to Patty, a door cooler and harder than ever, a door that she knows will remain closed until she can prove to him that she’s accepted Connie. And, alas, though Patty has made great strides in many areas, learning to love Connie isn’t one of them. That Connie sedulously checks every box of good daughter-in-lawship only makes things worse. Patty can feel in her bones that Connie doesn’t actually like her any more than she likes Connie. There is something about Connie’s way with Joey, something relentlessly possessive and competitive and exclusive, something not right, th
at makes Patty’s hair stand on end. Although she wants to become a better person in every way, she has sadly begun to realize that this ideal may very well be unattainable, and that her failure will always stand between her and Joey, and be her lasting punishment for the mistakes she made with him. Joey, needless to say, is scrupulously polite to Patty. He calls her once a week and remembers the names of her co-workers and her favorite students; he extends and sometimes accepts invitations; he tosses her such small scraps of attention as his loyalty to Connie permits. In the last two years, he’s gone so far as to repay, with interest, the money she sent to him in college—money that she needs too much, both practically and emotionally, to say no to. But his inner door is locked against her, and she can’t imagine how it will ever open again.

  Or actually, to be precise, she can imagine only one way, which the autobiographer fears her reader won’t want to hear about but which she will mention anyway. She can imagine that, if she could somehow be with Walter again, and feel secure in his love again, and get up from their warm bed in the morning and go back to it at night knowing that she’s his again, she might finally forgive Connie and become sensible of the qualities that everybody else finds so appealing in her. She might enjoy sitting down at Connie’s dinner table, and her heart might be warmed by Joey’s loyalty and devotion to his wife, and Joey in turn might open the door for her a little bit, if only she could ride home from dinner afterward with Walter and rest her head on his shoulder and know she’s been forgiven. But of course this is a wildly unlikely scenario, and by no stretch of justice one that she deserves.

  The autobiographer is fifty-two now and looks it. Her periods have lately been strange and irregular. Every year at tax time, it seems as if the year just past was shorter than the year before it; the years are becoming so similar to each other. She can imagine several discouraging reasons why Walter hasn’t divorced her—he might, for example, still hate her too much to put himself even minimally in contact with her—but her heart persists in taking courage from the fact that he hasn’t. She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there’s a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn’t want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there’s some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing. Having made so many mistakes in her life, she has every reason to assume she’s being unrealistic here, too: is failing to imagine some obvious fatal impediment to their getting back together. But the thought won’t leave her alone. It comes to her day after day, year after similar year, this yearning for his face and his voice and his anger and his kindness, this yearning for her mate.

  And this is really all the autobiographer has to tell her reader, except to mention, in closing, what occasioned the writing of these pages. A few weeks ago, on Spring Street in Manhattan, on her way home from a bookstore reading by an earnest young novelist whom Jessica was excited to be publishing, Patty saw a tall middle-aged man striding toward her on the sidewalk and realized it was Richard Katz. His hair is short and gray now, and he wears glasses that make him weirdly distinguished, even though he still dresses like a late-seventies twenty-year-old. Seeing him in Lower Manhattan, where you can’t be as invisible as you can in deep Brooklyn, Patty was sensible of how old she herself must look now, how much like somebody’s irrelevant mother. If there’d been any way to hide, she would have hidden, to spare Richard the embarrassment of seeing her and herself the embarrassment of being his discarded sexual object. But she couldn’t hide, and Richard, with a familiar effortful decency, after some awkward hellos, offered to buy her a glass of wine.

  In the bar where they alighted, Richard listened to Patty’s news of herself with the halved attention of a man who’s busy and successful. He seemed finally to have made peace with his success—he mentioned, without embarrassment or apology, that he’d done one of those avant-garde orchestral thingies for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that his current girlfriend, who is apparently a big-deal documentary-maker, had introduced him to various young directors of the kind of art-house movies that Walter always loved, and that some scoring projects were in the works. Patty allowed herself one small pang at how relatively contented he seemed, and another small pang at the thought of his high-powered girlfriend, before turning the subject, as always, to Walter.

  “You’re not in touch with him at all,” Richard said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s like some kind of fairy tale. We haven’t talked since the day I left Washington. Six years and not one word. I only hear about him from my kids.”

  “Maybe you should call him.”

  “I can’t, Richard. I missed my chance six years ago, and now I think he just wants to be left alone. He’s living at the lake house and doing work for the Nature Conservancy up there. If he wanted to be in touch, he could always call me.”

  “Maybe he’s thinking the same thing about you.”

  She shook her head. “I think everybody recognizes that he’s suffered more than I have. I don’t think anyone’s cruel enough to think it’s his job to call me. Plus I’ve already told Jessie, in so many words, that I’d like to see him again. I’d be shocked if she hadn’t passed that information along to him—there’s nothing she’d like better than to save the day. So he’s obviously still hurt, and angry, and hates you and me. And who can blame him, really?”

  “I can, a little bit,” Richard said. “You remember how he gave me that silent treatment in college? That was bullshit. It’s bad for his soul. It’s the side of him I could never stand.”

  “Well maybe you should call him.”

  “No.” He laughed. “I did finally get around to making him a little present—you’ll see it in a couple of months if you keep your eye out. A little friendly shout across the time zones. But I’ve never had any kind of stomach for apologies. Whereas you.”

  “Whereas I?”

  He was already waving to the bar waitress for the check. “You know how to tell a story,” he said. “Why don’t you tell him a story?”

  CANTERBRIDGE ESTATES LAKE

  There are many ways for a house cat to die outdoors, including dismemberment by coyotes and flattening by a car, but when the Hoffbauer family’s beloved pet Bobby failed to come home one early-June evening, and no amount of calling Bobby’s name or searching the perimeter of Canterbridge Estates or walking up and down the county road or stapling Bobby’s xeroxed image to local trees turned up any trace of him, it was widely assumed on Canterbridge Court that Bobby had been killed by Walter Berglund.

  Canterbridge Estates was a new development, consisting of twelve spacious homes in the modern many-bathroomed style, on the southwest side of a minor water now officially called Canterbridge Estates Lake. Though the lake wasn’t close to anything, really, the nation’s financial system had lately been lending out money essentially for free, and the building of the Estates, as well as the widening and paving of the road that led to it, had momentarily stirred the stagnant Itasca County economy. Low interest rates had also then enabled various Twin Cities retirees and young local families, including the Hoffbauers, to buy themselves a dream home. When they began moving in, during the fall of 2007, their street still looked very raw. The front and back yards were lumpy and furzed over with unthriving grass, scattered with intractable glacial boulders and such birches as had been spared felling, and resembled, all in all, a child’s too-hastily completed school terrarium project. The cats of the new neighborhood understandably preferred to stalk the woods and thickets of the adjoining Berglund property, where the birds were. And Walter, even before the last Canterbridge house was occupied, had gone door to door to introduce himself and ask his new neighbors to please keep their cats inside.

  Walter was a good Minnesotan and reasonably friendly, but there was something about him, a political trembling in his vo
ice, a fanatic gray stubble on his cheeks, that rubbed the families on Canterbridge Court the wrong way. Walter lived by himself in a dumpy, secluded old vacation house, and although it was undoubtedly nicer for the families to look across the lake at his scenic property than for him to look at their bare yards, and although a few of them did stop to imagine how noisy the construction of their homes must have been, nobody enjoys feeling like an intruder on somebody else’s idyll. They’d paid their money, after all; they had a right to be there. Indeed, their property taxes were collectively hugely higher than Walter’s, and most of them were facing a ballooning of their mortgage payments and were living on fixed incomes or saving for their children’s educations. When Walter, who obviously had no such worries, came to complain to them about their cats, they felt they understood his worry about birds a lot better than he understood what a hyper-refined privilege it was to worry about them. Linda Hoffbauer, who was Evangelical and the most political person on the street, was especially offended. “So Bobby kills birds,” she said to Walter. “So what?”

  “Well, the thing is,” Walter said, “small cats aren’t native to North America, and so our songbirds never evolved any defenses against them. It’s not really a fair fight.”