Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  In later years no one could say exactly how Kernaghan had acquired the house. It was possible that he himself had warned the patriarch of impending disaster and helped him out. But “fond” though the Dennises were of the younger man, they were reluctant to give him so much credit. Ever since Edith married him, said family oral history, the Dennis girls had been giggling and shaking their heads good-naturedly about the figure cut by this dark, taciturn, somewhat diminutive young attorney who hailed from the obscurity of Maine’s woods and who was so awed by the grand Dennises that he escorted Edith home only on holidays, hardly opening his mouth even then. But somehow this same Jack Kernaghan—with the loving guidance and support of the fallen patriarch, of course—had rescued the brick shell of the Dennis grandeur, and he went on to support his mother-in-law and five sisters-in-law through the nadir of the Great Depression. He was an odd bird, said family oral history. He was such a workaholic that he never once took a week’s vacation before he’d put the last of his sisters-in-law through private school. Knowing the importance of a summer house to the Dennises’ mental health, he rented them a place in Newport for six weeks every summer, but he didn’t much care for the water himself, and so he stayed in Boston, working. He could afford to hire a housekeeper for his mother-in-law, but he himself (no doubt because he came from Maine’s woods) was such a fan of fresh air that he walked nearly a mile to work every day. Everybody knew he always owned exactly three suits, a ratty one, an everyday one, and a good one. Altogether an odd, odd man, said family oral history, but he had done the Dennises a marvelous service, and they were grateful, yes: grateful.

  “And he resented the hell out of them,” Louis said.

  “No. Certainly not by the time I got to know him. I think he had too much contempt for the Dennises to resent them as equals. He was simply bitter cold. To your mother, to your Aunt Heidi, to your grandmother, in fact to everyone in the family except me. The first time we met was right before Edith finally divorced him. He asked me what I did. I said I was a student. He asked me what I planned to do with my degree, and when I told him I was going to teach, he threw back his head and laughed and walked out of the room laughing. I thought that was the end of that. But then a few years later he showed up at our wedding, uninvited, with Rita on his arm, and he was laughing as if he’d been laughing ever since I saw him walk out of the room, and your mother said it was the first time he’d kissed her in almost twenty years. It was pretty awkward for me, because half the people at the reception were looking daggers at him, and he made it clear that the reason he’d come was that he liked me: me personally. He patronized me, he asked me about my teaching and laughed at my answers, but there was something genuine going on—I could feel it. It was like he was drunk, almost like he was infatuated with me and he should have known better but he couldn’t help himself.

  “We started getting Christmas cards from him. A case of Dom Pérignon every year on December 22. He came to Chicago on business and took me to lunch and then out for more drinks and a walk in Lincoln Park. He asked me, Was I taking care of his little girl? (She wasn’t little and she wasn’t his; which was why he laughed. She dreaded him and warned me about him and refused to speak to me because I was too good-natured and too much of a young bastard to send his champagne back and say no to his invitations.) —Did I have tenure yet? I did? Well, that was great, it meant I could preach revolution eight days a week and never know financial insecurity until the revolution actually came, and even then I’d have it made as the Commissar of Marxist History. And he meant it: he thought it was great. It’s very weird, Lou, to be around a man to whom you obviously matter in some obscure but major way. Whom you somehow render almost silly with confused emotions. He made me promise to take care of his little girl, and be sure and come out and visit us. And we did go out, because your mother couldn’t stop me. You don’t remember it, but you were in Ipswich in the summer of ’69, you and Eileen and even your mother for a little while, she was mainly seeing friends in Boston—”

  “Were there horses?”

  “Horses? Maybe, across the road. But anyway, when I came back in November the red carpet was rolled out for me. There was a man from Sweeting-Aldren waiting in a company car when I flew in, and lunch for Jack and me on Argilla Road—oysters, lobsters, champagne. I wanted to get to work in the afternoon, but he told me, You’ve got tenure, what do you need to work for? Not quite mocking me. More like suggesting to me a way of thinking that he’s not sure I’m smart enough to learn. He showed me his new wine cellar, his new car, his new color TV set in a hardwood console. He drove me to the beach, which he might as well have owned, because it was empty in both directions, and he sat on the hood of his Jaguar and blew cigarette smoke at the ocean, and the waves were collapsing slavishly at his feet. He took me down to the marina and showed me his new boat, which he’d christened Willing Thing. Painted on the bow! Willing Thing! He drove me to a house on a hill, a rambling Victorian affair out closer to Cape Ann. He parked across the mouth of the driveway, got out of the car with his back to me, and I realized he was pissing in the white gravel. He pisses out half a bottle of Dom Pérignon, a little murky gray river flowing down between his feet. He hops to settle his thing back in his underwear and tells me that this was the house he’d really wanted but the current owners wouldn’t sell. He stands there in the driveway looking up the hill. He says he guesses that Melanie’s told me her grandpa got wiped out in the crash of ’29. I say, Yep, that’s what she told me. He says, Damn right, the only thing is that it was spring of ’28. Every market bloated, everybody getting richer, nobody getting poorer. He says, It took a rare kind of man to go all-out bankrupt in the spring of ’28. He says that a friend of his dropped by his office in the winter of ’27-’28 and mentioned that Sam Dennis had put his houses up for surety on loans to cover his stock-market losses. ‘And Bob,’ he says, ‘even then the man couldn’t see what was coming. I shouted at that asshole from three in the afternoon until ten at night before he let me have the town house. It was already under liens that cost me my own house and every dollar I could borrow on my word to get free of. Three weeks later he was dead. And that family still thought money grew like moss in bank vaults. They would have been out on the street like a bunch of zoo animals staring at the fucking traffic, Bob, if it wasn’t for me. They were so criminally dim-witted you can’t believe it, and they never even knew it, because of me. Believe it: I was that family’s knight in shining armor.’

  “I ask him, ‘Why?’

  “He gets back in the car. He says, ‘Because I was afraid of God.’

  “‘Yeah, I bet.’

  “‘I was afraid of God. Believe it, Bob. I was afraid of the old man in flowing robes.’

  “We were back on Route 133 and we saw a girl hitchhiking, long hair, tasseled leather jacket, guitar. Jack slows the car down and pulls even with her. She’s picking up her guitar when he steps on the gas and pulls away. I thought this was just some meanness of his, teasing hitchhikers, but he was shaking his head. ‘Flat,’ he says, and I say, ‘What?’ —‘Nothing in her shirt,’ he says. And we drive along, and after a while he says, ‘There’s not a one of them that won’t get in the car.’ And we go back to Argilla Road for Beluga caviar, pheasant, and truffles, everything selected for maximum expense. Anna comes over from Peabody after work, he’s said in advance that there’s somebody he wants me to meet—”

  “Really sorry here,” Louis said. “But I don’t see how you could have spent five minutes with this guy.”

  “How I could not hate him? Of course I hated him. At night I wondered if I was going to end up killing him, in the name of the people. But to be with him was a different story. There was a magnetism. He dressed like the English landed gentry; I remember one maroon velvet smoking jacket in particular. He was sixty-nine years old, but his skin was still tight and unspotted. He was hard and shiny and elegant, like death, and I’m afraid there’s nobody alive who can’t find something to enjoy there—in the shining
killer, the way he stands apart from the bodies piling up in Southeast Asia. All that carnage can be as sexy from a distance as it’s sickening at close range. And when you were with Jack Kernaghan, you felt that that distance was absolutely maintained. You were at an endless masque of the red death, up in that castle on the hill. He was my proof that there really was something there—there in the boardrooms, there in the M-I complex—that unquestionably deserved our hatred. You know how easily we’re led astray by our idealism: how easy it is to think that intellectual honesty demands that you forgive those guys, and see them as human beings like yourself, as pawns in the grip of history. Jack was a gorgeous proof of the contrary. He was willful. He luxuriated in being a jerk. And I deliberately provoked him, see, because I was a young bastard just like you, and he couldn’t hurt me. Or so I thought.”

  Jack said his father was a schoolteacher, “a ridiculous old fart,” which you took to mean an upright and selfless man who taught his children what was right and what was wrong. Assume that the young Jack bought it. Assume that he was awed by his father’s rectitude. Assume that when he left home for college at sixteen he believed that by living right he would earn a trip to heaven, and by living wrong he’d go straight to the pools of sulfur. Assume he took the Host on Sundays and believed it was his Savior’s body, and loved his Savior as his father did.

  He worked summers for a law firm in Orono. He found himself accepted into the law school at Harvard, and, excelling there, he joined a partnership in Boston and continued to take the Host on Sundays. With so much credit on both his heavenly and his earthly balance sheets, he must have been stunned by the vehemence with which the family of his intended wife rejected him. Mr. Dennis, having five more daughters after Edith to get rid of, was halfhearted in his opposition, but Mrs. Dennis made up for this by finding every conceivable aspect of Kernaghan’s person inappropriate, not just that he was Catholic, not just that he came from a poor family in “the woods of Maine,” not just that he’d deceived them all by courting Edith outside her own home, but that he was dark-haired and short. She confided to Edith that she’d had to choke back a laugh the first time she saw her with Kernaghan. It was like a freak show! It was inconceivable! A giantess and a dwarf! A duchess and her tailor! (In fact it was a matter of an inch and a half.) She expressed her firm intention to boycott the nuptials, and immediately severed relations with the family at whose house the lovebirds had become acquainted.

  That they married anyway, knowing it would set back any social ambitions that either might have harbored, would indicate that there really was love between them. Could Kernaghan have come to hate Edith so passionately without the knowledge that he’d loved her, once? A man hates in his wife those traits that he hates in her family; he hates the proof of how deeply the traits are rooted, how ineluctable heredity. Living for four years in near-total estrangement from the Dennises, and so seldom having the mother or sisters handy to compare with Edith, Kernaghan could only see her in her singularity, her prettiness, her passion for him. What’s more, he must have formed a similarly hopeful image of her family.

  Because how else to explain the colossal good turn he did the Dennises? How else to explain why he nearly ruined himself financially to buy their house, and then undertook to support the very women who’d considered him such dirt that they’d skipped his wedding? If he’d wanted revenge in 1928, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to sit back and laugh at their ruin. Any person of ordinary moral strength would have considered him well within his rights.

  He must still have been trying to win their love. He’d seen so little of them in the previous four years that he actually believed that if he saved them they would love him or at the very least respect him. (Because, again, after all, he could never have hated them so intensely later on if they hadn’t mattered to him, once.)

  In their new life, the Dennises were, by necessity, civil to their benefactor. Four years earlier Kernaghan would gladly have settled for civility. But now—considering the risks he’d run in saving them, considering the major expenditure of selflessness—he required more. Now the time had come when they must love him. A better person than he would not have expected less.

  But of course the Dennises couldn’t love him. Even if he hadn’t seen them at their lowest, even if he hadn’t had the temerity to rescue them, they were too in love with their own Brahmin selves and too secure in their sheer feminine quantity to need anything from him but money. Requests for school tuition, for clothing, for summer vacations, for trousseaus were communicated to Kernaghan through Edith, who tried for a while to mediate between her family and the commander of their occupied house, but who, inevitably, now that they all lived together, defected to the Dennis side. There were so many of them and only one of him. The women had all day to infect Edith with their pretensions and prejudices and artificial wants. Kernaghan’s children had seven mothers and one father; the father was the little man who worked sixty hours a week to make the household run.

  Still he led an upright life. Melanie could remember a time when he had come straight home from work every night and read to her and her brother Frank (Frank the only male besides his father in a house of nine females), had drunk brandy and smoked cigarettes in his study, shined his own shoes and brushed his own coat before he went to bed. She remembered him returning from his separate church on Sunday, later than the rest of the family, so that even Sunday was like a pleasure boat that he always came too late to catch. He walked beside it on the shore, minding his own business unless a child happened to step off the boat and disturb him in his reading of the newspapers that had accumulated since the previous Sunday. She claimed to remember a warmth, from the time when she was little. Maybe he already hated his wife and in-laws, but something kept him in their service, and it almost had to have been his fear of hell. He as good as admitted it to you: he’d been trying, in 1928 and for ten years after, to win the favor not only of the Dennises but of God as well, and though he was clearly failing with the Dennises he still hoped he might succeed with God.

  Then God killed Frank.

  It happened during one of the Augusts when the family was doing its bathing-in-the-moming-tea-parties-in-the-aftemoon thing outside Newport and Kernaghan was drafting wills and covenants in Boston, and bacterial meningitis could carry off an unlucky boy in ninety-six hours. Melanie remembered Jack’s state when he arrived in Newport. No sorrow visible, only rage. Rage at his wife and mother-in-law and daughter and youngest sister-in-law for not taking Frank’s fever seriously, for not calling him (Jack) sooner, for following the doctor’s orders, for leaving Frank in the care of the backwoods Newport hospital, for letting Frank die, for killing Frank, for murdering Frank with their stupidity, for being Dennises, for making a hell out of his life. Melanie, six, was rushed from the house as if her father’s rage had physically endangered her. It was a shock that no one recovered from, a shock that set Jack ringing like a bell, like a planet struck by a meteor and still vibrating thirty years later, so that he’d tell you, over foie gras in his house in Ipswich:

  “That family showed me what this country would be like if it was run by women. It’s simple—you spend somebody else’s money. Let’s spend a hundred billion on the poor, let’s spend a hundred billion on the Negroes. All the sentiments are very fine, but where’s that money going to come from? Industry’s what puts bread on their table, and you’re lucky if they even see you as a necessary evil. They look at you, they look at industry as if you’re dirt, beneath contempt, they smile behind their hands at you. Their whole future could be dying, and they wouldn’t even know it until the ax hit them too.”

  He never mentioned Frank’s name in Bob’s hearing, but he loved to talk about what he did to the Dennis women the year he “came to his senses.” How the kitchen began to smell like a landfill after he dismissed the housekeeper and the women waited, as days turned to weeks, for someone, anyone besides them, to wash the pots and take the trash out. How they found a Negro girl
willing to work in exchange for meals and extra groceries, and how he then cut the grocery allowance in half (eating magnificent lunches himself and bringing his little girl, Melanie, elaborate and nutritious treats), and corrupted the Negro girl with candy and whiskey and cigarettes and screwed her in the pantry. How he let two sisters-in-law start a new fall semester at Smith and sent a letter after them, informing the college that he had no intention of paying their bill. How he did the same thing to his mother-in-law, quietly cutting off her credit at Jordan Marsh and Steams, setting up scenes where personnel humiliated her. How he canceled another sister-in-law’s wedding on short notice, informing her that her intended was a weakling. And how, for himself, in the space of a year, he bought twenty suits, a hundred shirts, diamond cuff links, Italian shoes. How he entertained cheap women, a new one every week, at the Ritz-Carlton and the Statler and other venues where an audience of the Dennises’ friends was guaranteed. How he made the Dennis women pay.

  The same year Frank died, a mustached entrepreneur named Alfred Sweeting was acquiring land in Peabody to build the first commercial-scale nitrate plant in New England. In a process developed by the Germans, the nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen of clean air and clean water were transformed into ammonium nitrate for high explosives. Production began in 1938, and in 1942 Sweeting merged with J. R. Aldren Pigments, his industrial next-door neighbor in Peabody, a maker of dyes and paints that was seeking improved contacts with the military. For three and a half years, battleships painted with Aldren’s grays and B-17s camouflaged in Aldren’s browns and olive drab pounded Fascists with endless charges of Sweeting nitrates.

  The Sweeting/Aldren merger had been brokered by Troob, Smith, Kernaghan & Lee; and Kernaghan, a specialist in corporate law, became the company’s counsel in every sense of the word. He oversaw the acquisition of the patents and the small single-product companies that enabled Sweeting-Aldren, when the war ended, to retool and diversify. Eulogists at his funeral in 1982 would credit him with having influenced the company to expand early and vigorously in the direction of pesticides—a decision which, given the fifties mania for good-looking apples and tomatoes and for suppressing all infestations of indoor vermin and outdoor weeds however faintly reminiscent of Communists, was the single most profitable in the company’s history. By 1949 Kernaghan and a staff of four at Troob, Smith were working exclusively on patent, liability, and contract law for Sweeting-Aldren, and he was buying discounted shares of common stock at a pace that resulted in his election to the board in 1953. He would later tell Bob that in 1956, the last year of his marriage and his last year in private practice, he had thirty-one different women on more than 220 separate occasions and personally pulled down $184,000 in fees, after taxes, from Sweeting-Aldren. A 1957 advertisement in Fortune boasted that in the previous year, according to reliable scientific estimates, Sweeting-Aldren’s Green Garden™ and Saf-tee-tox™ product lines had killed 21 billion caterpillars, 26.5 billion cockroaches, 37 billion mosquitoes, 46.5 billion aphids, and 60 billion miscellaneous harmful household and economic pests in the United States alone. Lined up hind legs to feelers, pests killed by the Green Garden™ and Saf-tee-tox™ product lines would circle the earth at the equator twenty-four times.