by Ann Patchett
They were all there, time having run them down: Eric and Marisol, Astrid, the Hollingers, a dozen more—all the summer guests come to claim him along with the rest of the world. Franny stayed at the back, standing against the wall in the peanut gallery of former students and devoted fans and old girlfriends. Natalie Posen had chosen to bury her husband in Los Angeles, giving her spite the air of the eternal.
“The wife,” Fix said. “As long as we’re thinking of things to feel good about, let’s thank the wife.”
“Leo’s wife?”
Fix nodded. “She’s the unsung hero in all this.”
“How do you figure?” It was Fix’s birthday, eighty-three, with metastases to the brain. Franny was making her best effort.
“If she hadn’t hung in there like a pit bull to get more money, Leo Posen would have been a free man.”
“Ah.” Caroline nodded. She colored her hair the warm reddish shade of brown it had been when they were children, she went to Pilates three times a week. She had followed their mother’s example, kept herself up. Caroline had become the younger sister.
“I’m not seeing your point,” Franny said.
Fix smiled. Caroline, as far as he was concerned, had never missed a trick.
“If Leo had ever gotten a divorce,” her sister explained, “he would have married you.”
“Franny girl,” their father said, turning with difficulty to look at her, “that may have been the only bullet you ever dodged.”
Franny and Caroline had long agreed it was a waste of resources for them to visit either parent at the same time. With divorced parents on opposite sides of the country, and husbands whose parents also required a certain number of family holidays, Franny and Caroline divided their burden in order to conquer it. There were only so many vacation days, personal leave days, plane tickets, missed school plays, and unexcused absences between them. Whatever affection the two sisters had found for each other later in life would not be manifesting itself in visits. Los Angeles was as close as Franny ever got to the Bay Area, though she meant to go. Albie lived there now, two hours away from Caroline. Caroline’s oldest son, Nick, was a senior at Northwestern, so at least when Caroline and Wharton came out for parents’ weekend Franny could drive up to Evanston to see the three of them. Caroline’s other two children, the girls, Franny had missed out on entirely, much the same way Caroline had missed out on Franny’s two boys. But Ravi and Amit, no matter how long she’d had them, were not actually Franny’s. They had come with the marriage, and Caroline, try as she might to feel otherwise, could never grant full citizenship to stepchildren.
All of which was to say that under normal circumstances neither Franny nor Caroline would necessarily have traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate Fix’s birthday, but since Fix had already exceeded the outer limits of his oncologist’s predictions, they both stepped up their game. This birthday was going to be his last, a quick glance over to the passenger seat confirmed this, and in honor of the occasion the two sisters broke their own arrangement and met in California.
“So what are we going to do for the big day?” Caroline had asked the night before. “Sky’s the limit.”
They were sitting in the den, the four of them, in the house in Santa Monica that Fix and Marjorie had moved to when they finally left Downey after retirement. It was something of a miracle, that house, in no way splendid except that it was two blocks from the beach. It was forty years ago that Fix had known a cop who played poker with a bankruptcy judge. He had a tip the place was coming up at auction. That was when Fix finally told Marjorie he’d marry her. They would use her recent inheritance from her aunt in Ohio as the down payment. They would buy it, rent it out for twenty years or so, and by the time they were ready to retire they’d practically own it.
“That’s your proposal?” Marjorie had said, but she took the offer.
“But what was Dad’s part in all of it?” Franny had asked her years later when she finally heard the full story. Fix and Marjorie had driven the girls by the Santa Monica house every time they came to visit. They would point it out from the car, saying they owned it, saying one day they were going to live there. “If you were the one with the money then why did you have to marry him? You could have just bought the place yourself and rented it.”
“Your father wanted a house at the beach, and I wanted to marry your father.” Marjorie laughed when she heard how that sounded. She tried again. “He wanted to marry me. He was just slower to figure it out. I like to think that in the end everybody won.”
Marjorie had just finished pushing the nutritional supplement into Fix’s PEG tube. She was a young seventy-five to his old eighty-three, but it seemed that Marjorie had stopped eating about the same time her husband did. Her shoulder blades pushed out like a wire rack beneath her sweater.
“Let’s go to the show,” Fix said. “We’ll see a matinee of Franny’s movie.”
“Fix,” Marjorie said, her voice tired. “We talked about this.”
“My movie?” Franny asked, but of course she knew what he was talking about. He’d called it her book.
“The one your boyfriend wrote about us. I figure I’ve got one chance to see a movie about my life.” Fix appeared wonderfully satisfied by the thought. “I never read the book, you know. I wasn’t going to give the son of a bitch my money. But now that he’s dead and the money will go to his wife, it’s fine by me. Plus I read the review in the paper that said the woman who plays your mother wasn’t any good. I’m thinking that must really burn her up.”
Marjorie raised a slender hand. “I’m out. You and the girls make a day of it. I’ll be here with cupcakes when you get back.” A few free hours were worth a month of pension checks.
“Oh, Dad,” Caroline said. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to stay home and pull our toenails out with pliers?”
Franny had her share of guilt and dread when Commonwealth was published, but still, she would never deny that those were glorious days: the publisher’s luncheon at La Grenouille, the award ceremony in which Leo was called to the stage, the never-ending book tour where night after night he read to the spellbound crowds and then waited while the crowds formed a line at a table, supplicants come to tell him how his work had changed their lives. He was famous again, back in the light of the world, and every night in a different hotel room he gave her full credit, cradling her head in his hands while they made love. He could not look away from her. He loved her and thanked her and needed her, Leo Posen did. So for all the many costs she had been rewarded.
But seeing the movie now would bring back more than just her betrayal of her family. The movie also spoke to the failure of her long-ago relationship and the lonely death of the man she had loved, as sold by his second wife.
Franny hadn’t understood what it would be like to live with Commonwealth when Leo was writing the book, and once she’d read the book it was too late to do anything about it. The movie, however, was another matter. The movie had yet to be made. Franny begged Leo to keep the rights. She understood that such a promise would constitute a significant financial loss, and still, with the manuscript in her hands, she begged him.
Leo gave them to her on a three-by-five card, because Franny was the sun, the moon, and every last glittering star.
To Frances Xavier Keating,
on the occasion of her twenty-seventh birthday,
I give you the film rights to Commonwealth,
for now and forever,
as a token of my enduring love and gratitude.
LEON ARIEL POSEN
He honored it, even later when they rarely spoke and she suspected he needed the money. She didn’t mention his promise to anyone after he died. Who would she have told? His wife? She knew an index card didn’t stand a chance against the flotilla of lawyers. Irrationally, she had gotten it in her head that they might try and take the card away from her.
“No,” Franny said. No, it wasn’t a movie she wanted to see, especially not with her father and sister
and a hundred strangers packed into the Santa Monica AMC 3, eating popcorn.
Fix laughed and smacked his hands flat against the arms of his recliner. “Boy, did you two turn out to be a couple of little girls. There’s nothing in that movie that’s going to hurt you. You should be able to see how a dying man stuck in this rattrap frame might want to see himself portrayed by a handsome movie star. And anyway, this story is ancient history. You’ve got until tomorrow to pull yourselves together. It’s my birthday and we’re going to the show.”
Caroline parked and Franny got the wheelchair out of the trunk. Fix had long since stopped driving but he wouldn’t sell the car. There was always the chance that fate could reverse itself, that a cure could be found in the latter part of the eleventh hour and the parts of himself that had been devoured by cancer could be restored. Hope, Fix said, was the blood of life, and the car could never be replaced. It was a Crown Victoria, a former unmarked police car he’d bought from the department. Franny called it the Batmobile for its ability to go a hundred and forty miles per hour if need be. Not that he’d ever driven it at a hundred and forty, but he liked to say he felt better just knowing what was possible.
Franny opened the car door and picked up her father’s feet from the floorboard, swinging them gently out and then taking his arm. “Count of three,” she said, and together they counted while he rocked back and forth to gain momentum. The car that could catch a stolen Ferrari could not help him up. Franny pulled him out and Caroline caught him in the chair the moment he stood. Even a month ago Fix had fought this. A month ago he wouldn’t use the walker, insisting instead on holding on to Marjorie, even after the falls. But that was behind them now. Now he let Franny put his feet on the paddles. He said thank you.
The actress who owned the house in Amagansett had wanted to play Julia in the movie, which was to say she wanted to play Franny’s mother. She didn’t know, of course, that Franny was a real person who would be sleeping in her bed on her Egyptian cotton sheets. Leo had blamed Albie for the end of their affair. He believed that had Albie never found them they would have gone on happily together. But Caroline was right: Albie didn’t put the nail in the tire, the nail was already there. Still, as long as Leo got to blame their personal problems on an innocent party, Franny would like the chance to blame the actress and her ridiculous goddamn house. No one should have so much money that they could own a house like that and then not even bother to live in it. The swimming pool was long and deep and looked nothing like a swimming pool at all. It looked like the foundation of a shotgun house that had been built in the 1800s and then blown away in a storm. The swimming pool was fed by a spring. No one knew exactly where it came from, not the spring, not the pool, both having been there longer than the actress’s house. And that was just the beginning: there were climbing roses that covered the east wall and then sprawled in a giant tangle over the sloping roof, a miraculous profusion of blooms. It was a storm of roses, white and red, a half a dozen shades of pink, that piled over themselves all summer long, one breed dying out just as another was peaking. A carpet of blown petals covered the lawn throughout the summer. And there was a Klimt in her bedroom, small but unarguably real, a painting of a woman who bore an almost ancestral resemblance to the actress. Who kept the Klimt in their summer house? It was the house, Franny believed, that had done them in. No one could stay away from it except the actress herself. Leo had called Franny one night long after their relationship was over to tell her the actress had invited him back to Amagansett for dinner. She said she wanted to talk about the movie, even though he told her there wasn’t any movie.
“Come anyway,” she’d said.
“You remember all that champagne in the refrigerator?” Leo said to Franny on the phone.
Franny remembered the champagne.
“Well, we drank it.” From his apartment in Cambridge, Leo sighed. “Nothing happened. That’s what I wanted to tell you. In the end I couldn’t go upstairs with her. It was still our bedroom, Franny. I wasn’t going to do it.”
By the standards of the film industry, both the actress and her attempts to land a part by any means possible were now ancient history. She had long ago ceased to be the romantic interest in films. She had stopped playing the mother roles. At sixty, she was even too old to play fairytale witches. She was left with a handful of dowager parts, the occasional senior senator, a ruthless CEO in a well-reviewed cable series. That was what Franny had to content herself with as the lights in the movie theater in Santa Monica went down: somewhere the beautiful actress was going to see the movie of Commonwealth and remember how hard she’d tried to be Julia.
But that turned out to be no comfort whatsoever.
Franny and Caroline, sitting with their father, were joined in the darkness by a single improbable thought: Would it have been worse to see a film of their actual childhood? There was the summer that Bert had the Super 8 and stalked them like Antonioni as they ran through the sprinklers and weaved their bikes in and out of the frame. Holly swirled a hula hoop around the straight pole of her hips. Albie jumped in front of her, pulling off his shirt. The sound of Bert’s voice came from the other side of the camera, barking at them to do something interesting, but they were being children, and so, in retrospect, they were fascinating. Maybe that film still existed in a box in her mother’s attic or somewhere in the bottom of a file cabinet in Bert’s garage. Franny could try to find it the next time she was in Virginia and thread the tape into a projector. That way they could see the real Cal running again and erase the memory of this sullen boy who played him. A film of life would definitely be better than this, even if there had been a camera behind them every minute recording the entire disaster of childhood, all the worst moments preserved, it would still have been better than having to watch these strangers making some half-assed attempt to replicate their lives. Holly and Jeanette had been collapsed into a single girl who was neither Holly nor Jeanette but some horrible changeling who stamped her foot and slammed the door when she argued. When had Holly or Jeanette ever done anything like that? But of course the child actors weren’t trying to play real children. They wouldn’t have known that the book had anything to do with real people, and anyway, they wouldn’t have read the book. So was the movie excruciating to watch because nothing was right, or was it excruciating to watch because, impossibly, some things were? Every now and then there was a flash of familiarity in the minute cruelties the two families exchanged.
“It isn’t you,” Leo had said when she finished reading the book. “It isn’t any of you.” He was sitting in the second bedroom he used as an office in their apartment in Chicago, the little apartment they had before there was money. He held her in his lap and stroked her hair while she cried. She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but a day all the way back in Iowa when Leo, brushing his teeth while Franny was in the shower, had spit out his toothpaste, pulled back the curtain just a bit, and said, “I’ve been thinking about that story you told me about your stepbrother.”
What she had thought at that moment, naked in the water, the shampoo running down her neck, was that Leo Posen had listened to her, that he had found Cal’s death worthy of his further reflection. He reached into the water, ran his finger in a circle around her small soapy breast.
What she hadn’t thought of in the shower was that one day she would be fifty-two and have to watch the outcome of her smiling acquiescence play out on a screen. Cal’s character wasn’t dead yet, that was waiting up ahead. Albie’s character had been drugged a couple of times by the other children, the character who was Caroline had slapped and pinched the character who was Franny every time the camera panned in their direction, and the movie wasn’t even about the children. It was about the mother of one family and the father of the other and how they looked at each other at night from across the driveway. The character who was Franny�
��s mother pushed her hand repeatedly through her long blond hair while staring off into the distance, proof that she struggled with the weight of her infidelity. She wore blue surgical scrubs that seemed to have been tailored to her pretty figure. The mother in the movie was pulled in so many directions: the hospital, her children, her neighbor who was her lover, his wife who was her friend. Only her hapless husband seemed to ask nothing of her. He moved along the edges of the screen, picking up the children’s dishes as she cut a line through the center of the kitchen. She was being called away again.
“Enough,” Fix howled. He pushed himself halfway up to standing, as if he meant to walk out of the theater on his own, but his feet were still on the paddles. Caroline shot from her seat, catching him just as he pitched forward into the wide open space in front of handicapped seating, breaking his fall with her body. They were clambering around in the darkness, each with a knee and both hands on the sticky floor. Franny had her arms around her father’s chest but he was thrashing, fighting her off.
“I can get up!” he said.
The collective eyes of the movie theater fell upon them. No one hushed them. Up on the screen the scene had changed. Now Cal’s character was running down the street past the neighbors’ houses in the middle of the day, his brother running behind him, trying to catch up. There was for that moment enough light that the patrons could see the noise was coming from an old man in a wheelchair. There were two women trying to help him up. No one knew that they were the movie.
