Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  Out of Faneuil Hall, haven of meaning and purpose for weary sightseers, there blew a smell of fat: of hamburgers and fried shellfish and fresh croissants and hot pizzas, and chocolate chip cookies and french fries and hot crab meat topped with melted cheese, and baked beans and stuffed peppers and quiches and crispy fried Oriental Nuggets with tamari. Louis slipped in and out of an arcade to appropriate a napkin and blow his nose. The walking and the cold air had numbed him to the point where the entire darkening city seemed like nothing but a hard projection of an individual’s loneliness, a loneliness so deep it muted sounds—secretarial exclamations, truck engines, even the straining woofers outside appliance stores—till he could hardly hear them.

  On Tremont Street, under the gaze of windows now transparent enough to reveal unpopulated rooms full of wealth’s technology and wealth’s furnishings, he found himself bucking a heavy flow of anti-abortion demonstrators. They were spilling over the curb into the street as they marched towards the State House. Everybody seemed to be on the verge of angry tears. The women, who were dressed like stewardesses and gym teachers, held the stakes of their placards rigidly vertical, as if to shame the lightness with which other kinds of protesters carried placards. The few men in the crowd shuffled along empty-handed and empty-eyed, their very hair disoriented by the wind. From the way both the men and the women huddled together as they marched, sullenly dodging other pedestrians, it was clear that they’d come to the Common expecting active persecution, the modern equivalent of hungry lions and a jaded crowd of heathen spectators. Interesting, then, that this valley of the shadow was lined with restaurants, deluxe hotels, luggage stores, cold windows.

  Louis emerged from the rear of the parade with his necktie on. He’d tied it while avoiding STOP THE SLAUGHTER signs.

  It took him more than an hour, at a much-bumped table in the dusky Ritz bar, to realize that Rita Kernaghan had stood him up. The gin and tonic he’d ordered automatically turned his face a stoplight red, and the one conversation that kept surfacing in the sea of vying voices concerned eunuchs. He soon figured out that the word was UNIX, but he kept hearing eunuchs, the great thing about eunuchs, with eunuchs you can-do, I hated eunuchs, I resisted eunuchs, eunuch’s budding monopoly. “I feel very sick,” he murmured aloud every few minutes. “I feel very sick.” Finally he paid and went out through the lobby to find a telephone. He had to swerve around a trio of businessmen who might have been identical triplets. Their mouths moved like the mouths of latex dolls:

  You feel it?

  We couldn’t, here.

  Are you calling me a liar?

  The time was 7:10. Louis called directory assistance and to the question of what city, said: Ipswich. The instrument he was using was drenched with a cologne to which he might have been allergic, so denaturing was its effect on his nasal membranes. He let Rita Kernaghan’s number ring eight times and was about to hang up when a man answered and said in a dead, low, institutional voice: “Officer Dobbs.”

  Louis asked to speak with Mrs. Kernaghan.

  Eunuchs, cologne, fetus. Dobbs. “Who’s calling.”

  “This is her grandson.”

  Over the line came the wa-wa of palm on mouthpiece and a voice in the background, followed by silence. At length a different man spoke, one Sergeant Akins. “We’re going to need some information from you,” he said. “As you probably know, there’s been an earthquake up here. And you’re not going to be able to speak with Mrs. Kernaghan, because Mrs. Kernaghan was found dead a few hours ago.”

  At this point the synthetic operator began to insist on more coins, which Louis fumbled to supply.

  2

  Like Rome, Somerville was built on seven hills. The apartment in which Louis had found a share opportunity was on Clarendon Hill, the westernmost of the seven and, by default, the greenest. Elsewhere in the city, trees tended to be hidden behind houses or confined to square holes in the sidewalks, where children tore their limbs off.

  Earlier in the century Somerville had been the most densely populated city in the country, a demographic feat achieved by spacing the streets narrowly and dispensing with parks and front lawns. Clapboard triple-deckers encrusted the topography. They had polygonal bays or rickety porches stacked three high, and they were painted in color combinations like blue and yellow, white and green, brown and brown.

  The streets of Somerville were lined solidly with cars that were less like cars than like mateless shoes. They trudged off to work in the morning or shuffled back and forth across the pavement under the pressure of twice-monthly street sweeping. Even in the early 1980s, when the Massachusetts economy was experiencing a Miracle, with billions of dollars flowing from the Pentagon into former mill towns in the Commonwealth, Somerville continued to house mainly the lowlier members of the footwear hierarchy. There were salt-stained Hush Puppies and scuffed two-tone pumps in unfortunate colors parked near the doors of the Irish and Italian middle class; well-worn Adidases in the driveways of single women; bovver boots and Salvation Army specials near the spaces of those who found the town perversely chic; laceless Keds up on blocks in the back yards of the waning counterculture; wide untapering leisure shoes with soft crinkly uppers and soles of rubber foam marking the homes of realtors and retirees; battered student Wallabees under the eaves of battered student houses; a few tasseled Gucci loafers in the City Hall parking lot; and shiny stud boots and flimsy dancing slippers and Flash Gordon—style athletic footwear in the driveways of parents who still had eighteen- and twenty-year-olds in the house.

  Towards the end of the eighties, just before the nation’s arms buildup slowed and Massachusetts banks began to fail and the Miracle was shown to be not so much a Miracle as an irony and fraud, a new breed of car invaded Somerville. The new breed looked intrusion-molded. For just as Reebok and its imitators had finally succeeded in making real leather look wholly artificial, Detroit and its foreign counterparts had managed to make real metal and real glass indistinguishable from plastic. The interesting thing about the new breed, however, was its newness. In a town where for decades, when a car came home for the first time, its price had more often than not been written in yellow crayon on the windshield, one suddenly began to see the remains of stickers in rear left windows. Not being stupid, local landlords began to double rents between leases; and Somerville, too close to Boston and Cambridge to remain a renter’s heaven forever, came of age.

  Louis had a room in a two-bedroom apartment on Belknap Street that was leased by a graduate student of psychology at Tufts. The student, whose name was Toby, had promised Louis, “Our paths will never cross.” Toby’s bedroom door was open when Louis came home from work, still open when he went to bed, and closed when he left in the predawn darkness. The shelves in Toby’s refrigerator were bisected vertically by slotted pine-wood panels. The bathmat was also made of pinewood, good for fungus control and stubbing toes. The living room contained two broad-beamed armchairs and one sofa, all upholstered in beige, plus a beige wall unit that was empty except for phone books, a Scrabble set, a glossy beige bud vase made of GENUINE MOUNT ST. HELENS VOLCANIC ASH in a plastic suspension, and receipts for the wall unit and the furniture totaling $1,758.88.

  Louis kept to his bedroom. The thirtyish couple in the apartment opposite his window owned a piano and often sang arpeggios while he ate his evening meal of sandwiches, carrots, apples, cookies, and milk. Later the arpeggios stopped and he read the Globe or The Atlantic laboriously, front to back, skipping nothing. Or he sat cross-legged in front of his television set and frowned as intently at baseball—even at the beer commercials—as he would have at war news. Or he stood in the harsh light of the overhead fixture and studied the beige walls and tiled ceiling and wood floor of his bedroom from every possible angle. Or he did the same in Toby’s room.

  On Friday night, once the Ipswich police had finished with him on the telephone and he’d driven back to Somerville, he called Eileen. “You won’t believe what I just saw on the news,” Eileen said. What she�
��d just seen via live minicam was the ambulance that held their step-grandmother’s body. Eileen thought she’d felt the earthquake without knowing it while she was studying. She’d thought it was trucks. She said it was the second little earthquake she’d felt in Boston in two years.

  Louis said he hadn’t felt it.

  Eileen said their parents were flying into town on Sunday, because of Rita’s death, and staying in a hotel.

  Louis said, “They’re spending money on a hotel?”

  In the morning he went to the corner drugstore to buy newspapers. It had been raining all night and the rain clouds looked unspent, but the sky had brightened for a moment and the fluorescent light inside the drugstore was the same color and intensity as the light outside. The Saturday Herald had printed on its cover:

  The earthquake had also made the front page of the Globe (TREMOR ROCKS CAPE ANN; ONE DEAD), which Louis began to read as he headed home again. Absorbed, he was late in noticing a tall old man in a cardigan and unbuckled rubber boots who was rubbing his four-door American-made brogue with a hand towel. Spotting Louis, he stepped out to block the sidewalk. “Reading the paper, are ya?”

  Louis did not deny it.

  “John,” the old man goggled. “John Mullins. I see you live next door here, I saw you movin’ in. I live on the first floor right here, lived here twenty-three years. I was born in Somerville. John’s the name. John Mullins.”

  “Louis Holland.”

  “Louis? Lou? You mind if I call you Lou? You reading about the earthquake there.” Suddenly the old man might have bitten a lemon or a rotten egg; he made a face like the damned. “Terrible about that old woman. Terrible. I felt it, you know. I was at the Foodmaster, you know, round the corner here, it’s a good store. You shop there? Good store, but what was I, what was I . . . I was sayin’ I felt it. I thought it was me. I thought it was nerves, you know. But I was watching the news and wooncha know, it was a temblor. That’s what they call it, you know, a temblor. Thank God it wasn’t any worse. Thank God. What are you, a student?”

  “No,” Louis said slowly. “I’m in radio. I work for a radio station.”

  “Lot of students live around here. Tuff students mainly. It’s right up the street. They’re not bad kids. What do you think? You like it around here? You like Somerville? I think you’ll like it. I tell you I felt that earthquake?”

  John Mullins hit himself in the forehead. “Sure I did. Sure I did.” The encounter was evidently becoming too much for him. “All right, Lou.” He squeezed Louis’s shoulder and stumbled towards his car.

  As Louis went inside he heard his soprano neighbor’s arpeggios commencing, the fundamentals being struck on the piano in a rising chromatic scale. He sat down on the bare floor of his room and opened the papers. “Drat it,” he distinctly heard John Mullins say to some other neighbor. “They said it wasn’t going to rain anymore.”

  Neither the Globe nor the Herald could quite hide its delight at having a death—Rita Kernaghan’s—to justify big headlines for a small local temblor. The shock, with a magnitude of 4.7 and an epicenter just southeast of Ipswich, had occurred at 4:48 p.m. and lasted less than ten seconds. Property damage had been so insignificant that a photograph of an Ipswich man fingering a crack in his breakfast-room wall received a prominent enlargement in both papers. Being the higher-brow paper of the two, the Globe also ran boxed articles about the history of earthquakes in Boston, the history of earthquakes, and the history of Boston, including a special graphic time line revealing (among other things) that the last two significant tremors to shake the city had coincided with the end of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.’s second term as U.S. senator (1944) and the end of his third (1953).

  Another box on page 16 contained an update on the doings of a Protestant minister by the name of Philip Stites, who according to the Globe had six months earlier moved his Church of Action in Christ up to Boston from Fayetteville, North Carolina, with the stated intention of “eliminating abortion in the Commonwealth.” Stites’s followers were attacking fetal murder by standing at the doors of clinics. On Friday evening people of conscience from thirty-one states and possessions had marched to the third in a series of protest rallies in downtown Boston; in a subsequent television interview Stites said the earthquake had come close to striking “the epicenter of butchery,” by which he meant the Massachusetts State House. God (he let it be inferred) was angry with the Commonwealth. Like the Church of Action in Christ, He would not rest until the slaughter of the unborn had ceased. “Look for me everywhere,” Stites said.

  “I was at the Foodmaster,” John Mullins said above the rain and arpeggios. “I thought it was the old nerves.”

  Victim Was a Writer

  Rita Damiano Kernaghan, whose death was the only one reported in yesterday’s earthquake in Ipswich, was a popular lecturer on the local New Age circuit and the author of three books on inspirational topics. She was 68 years old.

  Kernaghan was perhaps best known for the battle she and the Town of Ipswich had waged since 1986 concerning the pyramidal structure she erected on the roof of her home, a farmhouse built within the town limits of Ipswich in 1765 and enlarged in 1623 under the direction of George Stonemarsh, a leading post-Revolutionary era architect.

  In 1987 the Ipswich Town Meeting conceded that a clerical error had resulted in the granting of a building permit for the pyramid, and acted to retroactively enforce the local landmarks-preservation code and ordered the removal of the pyramid. Kernaghan sued the town in 1988 and later refused an out-of-court settlement under which the town would have paid the cost of removing the pyramid and restoring the house to its original 1823 design.

  Kernaghan maintained that her right to build the pyramid—a geometrical form held by some to exert healing and preservative influences—is a First Amendment issue, rooted in the separation of church and state. The case, still unresolved, has become a cause celebre in the north-suburban New Age community.

  Kernaghan, whose printed works include “Beginning Life at 60,” “Star Children,” and the recently published “Princess of Italy,” was the widow of Boston attorney John Alfred Kernaghan. She is survived by a step-daughter, Melanie Holland of Cleveland.

  Higher and higher the soprano’s fundamentals rose, a slow upward spiral of hysteria. Louis was frowning, his pinky on the bridge of his glasses, his fingertips on his hairline, his thumb on his jaw. The thing he couldn’t stop looking at was his mother’s name. Not because the Globe had stuck her in Cleveland but for the name’s sheer personal resonant presence in print on paper. Melanie Holland: this was his mother, peculiarly reduced. Two words in a Boston paper.

  Still frowning, and also beginning now to shiver, as if when the raindrops hit the windowpanes behind him their chill came right on through, he looked again at the boxed article about the Reverend Philip Stites. “Up Tremont Street,” it said, “and across the Common to the steps of the State House.” The facts were consistent with what Louis himself had seen of the march—consistent in a deep way, because the article, like memory, like dreams, reduced the event to an idea, illuminated not by twilight and streetlight but by its own light, in the darkness of his head: he saw it because he knew that this was what had happened, because he knew that this was how things had been. And therefore it seemed to him that it could only be raining this morning. The rain had to be there to make this day different, to bar any return to yesterday afternoon and the particular conditions of atmosphere and light through which those marchers had been marching, the blue northern clarity of light in greater Boston when the earthquake struck. The rain made the morning real, so unshakably present that it was hard to believe there’d even been an earthquake; to believe the accidents had occurred anywhere but on paper.

  Stacked against one wall of the bedroom were his cartons of radio equipment, which he’d faithfully shipped from Evanston to Houston and from Houston to Boston and never unpacked. He worked his fingernail under the duct tape holding the top carton closed. Strength failed him. He
staggered to his futon, one foot slipping on the open Globe, crashed heavily and lay face down until long after the arpeggios had stopped.

  Sunday night he had dinner with his family in a fish restaurant on the harbor. He was surprised to hear that his mother and Eileen took it for granted that Rita Kernaghan had fallen to her death less because an earthquake shoved her than because she was blind drunk at the time. Then again, they’d known her and he hadn’t. The word was she’d fallen off a barstool, which sounded like a joke in bad taste but was apparently the literal truth. She was being cremated privately on Wednesday morning, her ashes hurled from a pier in Rockport on the afternoon of same, and her life celebrated the next day at a memorial service that Louis was expected to take time off from work to attend. His mother, obviously impatient with the whole deceased-disposal process, referred to the service as “the thing on Thursday.”

  It wasn’t until shortly before “the thing” that he saw his parents again. He’d done Dan Drexel’s board work until ten in the morning, and then, possibly a little hurt that his mother hadn’t planned any other get-togethers or shown any interest in where he lived and worked (“hurt,” however, maybe not the word for his feelings towards a family in which people rarely had the resources to take or fake a personal interest in anyone’s life but their own, “regret” or “bitterness” or “general sadness” maybe being more like it), drove straight to their hotel, a newish medium-rise by the river in Cambridge, just off Harvard Square. It would later transpire that his mother had made his father spend two afternoons in Widener Library so they could write off his half of the trip. Outside their door, at the end of a hushed hallway, Louis raised his hand but didn’t knock. He lowered it again.

  “Eileen, that’s not the point.”

  “Well, what is the point.”

  “The point is to show some consideration for my feelings and try to understand things from my side. This has been an extremely upsetting—Yes! Yes!—an extremely upsetting week! So you might at least have had the consideration to wait—”