The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist)

by Jonathan Franzen

  Further. On the Hill, a late-afternoon party in the home of Area I commander Lieutenant Colonel Frank Parisi is approaching the pinnacle of merriness. Chief Jammu has phoned in her best wishes. Fifty policemen and their families are packed into five small rooms. Luzzi, Waters, Scolatti and Corrigan are bellowing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” in two-and-a-half-part harmony at the piano. Parisi is stirring fresh eggnog in the kitchen, admiring the fat swirls of rum. The card marked Spiked has sustained repeated dunkings. Young faces glow. The noise is perfect. More than a dozen squad cars are parked out in front, their windows ablaze with all the colored lights of the happy street, brilliant points melting halos into the snow around them on the bushes and gutters. Shouts ring out and large cars cruise. From overhead the neighborhoods look like streams of luminous plankton, twinkling in patches and encompassing dark islands of service and storage and repose. Cars speed along the sinuous drives in Forest Park. There’s a danger in exposure tonight. Everyone wants to be somewhere. Just past the city limits, a dented red Nova with the lower half of a pine tree projecting from its trunk is slowing on Delmar to make a left turn. It parks. Duane Thompson jumps out and unlashes the trunk latch and hauls out the tree. They’re to be had for a dollar at this hour of this day. With a spring in his step, a determined lightness, he carries the tree up the stairs to his apartment. Inside, Luisa is still on the phone. She was on the phone an hour ago when he left. She waves with her fingers. He returns to the car for the popcorn and cranberries.

  Immediately to the north and east, in what the county imagination makes out to be the darkest, most crowded corner of the city, Clarence Davis sees terrible spaces and light. He was one of the last shoppers downtown. The Messiah plays on his radio, and the rabbit’s foot hanging from the mirror jumps at every pothole. From the top of unweathered aluminum standards, electric light the color of frost falls in brittle rays and shatters his windshield again and again. Spaces open up on either side of him where houses have been punched out of rows. Block after block, the light goes on without a tinge of yellow, without a tinge of fire. It overpowers the traffic lights, brave Jamaican colors, beneath which a year ago even on Christmas boys gathered, holding bottles, looking evil, and closed in the street a little. The groups are gone. In half a mile Clarence has passed three squad cars. They’re guarding nothing. No pedestrians, no businesses, just dogs and stripped vehicles. And property. High fences run along the street guarding bulldozed tracts and plywood windows. Is it such a tragedy? Not many people had to leave to make this place a desert; maybe the city can absorb those people. But Clarence is scared, scared in a mental way nothing like the gut fear of murder he once might have felt down here. It’s the scope of the transformation: square miles fenced and boarded, not one man visible, not one family left. The hand that has cleaned this place is no American hand. No American, no Idaho supremacist, no Greensboro Klansman, could have gotten away with this. These miles are the vision of a woman’s practicality. This is her solution. And she’s getting away with it, and how can Clarence complain with his back seat full of gifts and these not even half of it? How can anybody complain? Only those with no voice have much to complain of. And by daylight, on a day not a holiday, these acres look different. White men and black men wearing hardhats and holding prints peer between houses, drive stakes, and confer with surveyors. Clarence has recognized faces. Brother Ronald, having trouble with his hat. Cleon Toussaint rubbing his hands. City government people pointing at future parking lots, future drinking fountains, future projects. Bigshots, the board members and figureheads, drinking working-class coffee from thermoses. Oh, plenty of activity down here. To some eyes it must even look pretty, oh, pretty damned good. Clarence crosses the line into a neighborhood. He sees more cops, but humans, too. He presses up his street and slides the car into the garage. Stanly and Jamey are still out shooting baskets in the light from the kitchen.

  The city heaves north. Flashing strings of lights become jets as they drop to plowed runways. The Lambert Airport crowd is thinning fast. Hugs happen, opening like sudden flowers, in concourses, at gates and checkpoints, a blossoming of emotion. Flight attendants wheeling luggage are crabby. Taxis are leaving without fares. From her room the addict looks out on the air traffic with the uncritical gaze of someone viewing a nature scene, cows grazing, trees shedding leaves, jets rising, falling, banking. She lights a cigarette and sees her last one still burning in the ashtray. From a shoebox shrine she takes a long letter dated December 24, 1962, and reads it for the twentieth time while she waits for Rolf, who might, she thinks, arrive any moment.

  Rolf is sleeping off a pair of drinks in his favorite chair at home. He’s dreaming of sewers. Endless, spacious sewers. Upstairs, Audrey has wrapped the sweater she’ll give Barbie at their parents’ tomorrow. She loves Christmas. With a scissor blade she pulls a curl into each of the ribbons and, humming a little, reviews her work.

  Nearly everyone lives within two miles of the Ripleys. Sam Norris, his large house full of children and grandchildren, is moving from group to group touching them with his hands, placing them, and radiating satisfaction while Betty browns meat. Three streets over, Binky Doolittle is in the bathtub talking on the telephone. Harvey Ardmore staggers across his back yard with a huge Yule log, Chet Murphy pours pink champagne, the Hutchinsons watch the CBS Evening News in separate rooms, Ross Billerica throws darts with his brother-in-law from downstate. The home of Chuck Meisner, however, is dark. Chuck is in St. Luke’s West with a bleeding peptic ulcer. He’s been sleeping like a baby since he was rushed here three days ago.

  On Friday Probst worked until 8:00 in the evening, and coming home he found Barbara looking hot, in light clothes, though the house wasn’t very warm. She served him dinner. While he ate it and read the notes on Christmas cards, she left the kitchen and returned. She moved along the counters and left again. She did this several times.

  “What are you looking for?” he finally asked.

  “What?” She seemed surprised he’d noticed her.

  Distracted and small, she circulated for the rest of the evening, coming to rest only after he’d turned out his nightstand light, when she returned from her guest-room exile in a pale flannel nightgown, childishly large for her, and lay down on her side of their bed without a word of explanation. In the morning she made him French toast and juiced a quartet of blood oranges she’d picked up at a fancy new grocery in Kirkwood. The froth was pink, the coffee strong. She kept smiling at him.

  “What is it?” he finally said.

  “Monday’s Christmas,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me. Luisa is coming over.”

  “No. She isn’t. Uh-uh.”

  “Then what?”

  “Can’t I smile at you?”

  He shrugged. She could if she wanted.

  In the afternoon they played tennis together. His finger was healing; he hardly noticed it. Barbara horsed around on the court, laughed big hooting laughs when she missed a shot. She didn’t miss many. They were evenly matched, and he felt a pang when he thought of how much this little fact had meant to him over the years. But she wasn’t interested in lovemaking when they got home. She wanted to eat out and see a movie.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Halfway through dinner at the Sevens she began to give him a talking-to. It had the coherence of a prepared message, and she delivered it mainly to her broiled flounder. Luisa, she said, was eighteen now. After all. And just like some other people in the family, Luisa was stubborn. If these other people would only be a little more charitable, she’d be charitable in return, although she still might insist on living at Duane’s. She was OK. She’d written outstanding essays for her applications. She would probably have her pick of colleges. She was only eighteen, for goodness’ sake.

  Probst was appalled by the crudity of Barbara’s optimism.

  After breakfast Sunday morning they trimmed the tree. She did the lights, and he, who had a fondness for certain old ornaments from his mother’s col
lection, did the rest. For lunch there was beer, sardines, Wasa bread, cheese and deluxe Washington State apples. She played games with the paper wrappers. The sardines were Bristling at the suggestion that they opposed handgun legislation. The apples were Fancy and gave themselves to strangers for a price. Horse-radish was either a folk etymology or a false etymology, the distinction being one of those niceties Barbara had never mastered. She drained her glass and looked at Probst.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “I went to bed with the photographer on Friday.”

  He saw that suddenly her hands were shaking. “Is this something you do all the time?”

  “You know it isn’t, Martin.”

  The horseradish sauce was edged with yellow oil. The news was true but hadn’t registered in him; these were moments of freefall, during which his words were neither under his control nor under the control of a coordinating emotion, like jealousy or rage, that would have connected his tongue to his will, his brain to his blood. “Was it fun?” he was saying.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to make a habit of it?”

  “No.” She might have said: What if I do? He wished she had. “Are we quits?” she said.

  “You’ve been lying to me all weekend. You’ve been acting.”

  “That’s not true. I just want this to be over, I’m sick of fighting you. You’ve been stranger than I have. I know you’re still in there. I want you to come out.”

  He stood. “We’ll see.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going for a walk.”

  “Can I come along?”

  “I’d like to be alone.”

  “I don’t want you to be alone. I want to be with you. I laaah.”

  “You can’t say it. I can’t say it.”

  “I love you.”

  She said it in room after room, at his elbow, at his throat. The more she said it, the more he pitied her. But she wouldn’t leave him alone. When he put on his coat, she put on hers. She stayed within a foot of him, and finally, as they were heading up the front walk moments after heading down it, he succumbed. “All right,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. George LeMaster was replacing a colored bulb on his front railing. Probst led Barbara inside and shut the door. “All right. I love you, too.”

  She kissed his hand, but he pulled it away. He was beginning to feel betrayed. Barbara had defected to the world at large, to its optimisms, its smooth mechanisms of love and remorse, and like everyone else now she wanted to have Probst in her camp.

  “You would have done the same thing in my shoes. I know you, I know you better than anyone. I know you would have.”

  “So you say,” he said.

  “Look at me and tell me you believe in perfect faithfulness. I dare you.”

  Instead he went upstairs and changed his clothes, came down and built a fire, and opened the front door. It was 3:30. Guests were arriving, all their favorite people, as if at a clap of Barbara’s hands. She’d timed her announcement well. Probst had no choice but to appear himself when he let the Montgomerys in. Jill and Bob bubbled. The dining-room table was laden with interesting cookies, fruits and vegetables, tiny sandwiches of Gruyère and roast beef. Barbara popped into view with her arms full of liquor bottles. Bob made a crack, turned to Probst, and started in with a story about a flat tire he’d had at midnight on the outer belt two nights ago.

  The doorbell rang again and again. Cal Markham with a new girl named Nancy, Barbara’s college friend Lorri Wulkowicz, Barbara’s parents, both very tan. Sally and Fred Anderson and Probst’s secretary Carmen and her husband Eddie, who grinned and stammered. Peter Callahan, the widowed chief engineer, and his seventeen-year-old daughter Dana. More engineers, the Hoffingers, the Foxxes, the Waltons, the Joneses. Two of Barbara’s library coworkers and their husbands. People clustered around the fire, around the laughing Barbara and the smiling Probst. Small packages accumulated on the mantelpiece. The windows darkened. Cal volunteered to fetch more firewood, and Nancy joined Probst and Dana and Lorri Wulkowicz in the chairs by the piano. Lorri in particular warmed to Probst. She still wore the little round wireframed glasses she’d worn in the sixties. He watched her eat five Gruyère sandwiches between pulls on a bottle of Heineken. She’d recently been made chairman of her English department. It was a long time since she’d been in this house.

  Good-bye and Merry Christmas. Probst retrieved coats and saw guests to the door. He kept returning to Lorri, who had gotten him started on the current political situation in the city. The phone rang. Barbara went to answer it and did not come back.

  Now, towards six o’clock, only Lorri remains. Probst can hear Barbara in the kitchen on the phone. Lorri sits Indian style on the floor rolling her first cigarette of the afternoon. “That frumpy charisma,” she says. “She still seems totally Third World to me. The stupidest platitudes mean something, you know, they’re vital truths where she comes from. She’s got the imprimatur of struggle. And the ambiguities. On the one hand she has this naïve socialism. On the other hand she’s probably a closet mobster like her cousin Indira.”

  “Cousin?”

  “Fifth? Eighth? Twelve times removed? You and I are cousins twelve times removed.”

  “People romanticize her,” Probst says. “I romanticize her, too. What did you say—her charisma. A week ago I had myself completely convinced.” He shakes his head.

  “No, go on.”

  “I thought it meant something that she was an Indian, something to do with American Indians—”

  “The so-called terrorists.”

  “But superstitiously, too.” He explains.

  Lorri tells him it’s simply literate behavior. “You can do numerology tricks, assign a number to each letter of your name. Birthplace, birth date, sign. I’m always rationalizing attractions—”

  “I’m so-o-o-o sorry,” Barbara says, returning at last.

  Lorri puts on her coat, which she has dropped on the floor behind a chair, kisses Probst and Barbara, and leaves with an invitation to return for dinner sometime after New Year’s.

  “I like her,” Probst says.

  “She likes you. She always has.”

  Silence has fallen on the used glasses and sugared plates. For the first time in eighteen Christmas Eves the Probsts can do whatever they want. The traditional activity at this hour is Luisa’s opening of the gifts that come to Probst from his suppliers. “Maybe we should open some boxes,” he says.

  The boxes are stacked against the southern wall of the den. He turns on the TV and waits for Barbara. The lead story on the KSLX local news is a visit to a North Side soup kitchen.

  Barbara comes in wiping her hands. “Luisa and Duane are going to be at Mom and Dad’s tomorrow.”

  “And it took you all that time to persuade them.”

  “Yep.” She sits. “You don’t mind, I hope.”

  “Why should I mind?”

  “Minnie Sanders is sixty-three. Her only child, Leroy—”

  “Duane’s parents are in St. Croix.”

  Probst sniffs. “Is it my imagination, or is there something wrong with them?”

  She doesn’t answer. He looks. Tears are streaming down her cheeks.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” he says. “We’ll see her tomorrow.”

  She shakes her head.

  “You want me to call her?”

  She stares at the TV, her hands on her lap, her face lined and wet. How very few tears she will have shed, Probst thinks, between growing up and dying. One cupful. Distantly the furnace comes to life.

  Cliff Quinlan’s face is gray. Outdoor light shows up his gash-like dimples in high relief. “I’m standing on the southern city limits of St. Louis, behind me is the River des Peres, and beyond that, a quiet residential neighborhood in what is Bella Villa. In my first report I examined the dilemmas that the regional law-enforcement community faces in dealing with threats such as the ‘Osage Warriors.’ It was very close to where I stand now t
hat the group crossed the river and escaped into the county. They are still at large.” Quinlan consults his text. “In my second report we saw how borders such as this one enable lawbreakers to enter and leave suburban neighborhoods with relative impunity, and how difficult it is to trace these lawbreakers in a county which is currently a hodgepodge of more than fifty independent police forces. The burglary rate in St. Louis County stands at an all-time high. However, for the last four months the city rate has been dropping steadily. Tonight: prospects for change.”

  Probst turns off the TV. Barbara cries. He knows what’s on her mind, the whole matrix of Christmases with Luisa at eight, ten, twelve, sixteen. One girl who came in every size and every mood. He will grow sentimental and sorry for himself. On the floor between him and Barbara is a box of graphic imaginings: how she acted with John Nissing. Nissing’s vulgar language, his insinuating laughter. Who touched whom when. Whether Nissing was better. How much better.

  Selecting boxes from the pile at random (for Luisa, opening these gifts was a science; for him, it’s a chore) he sits and slits tape with a penknife. White styrofoam roaches come swarming out of the first box, along with an envelope. Seasons Greetings from Ickbey & Twoll, Fabricators. The roaches cling to his sweater. He brushes them off, but they stick to his fingers, eluding him, scooting around onto the back of his splinted hand, up onto his wrists. He has to pull them off one by one.

  Inside the box is a clock radio. He writes clock radio on the card for the benefit of Carmen, who will write the thank-you’s.

  Seasons Greetings from Thuringer Brothers: a five-pound tin of cashews. Seasons Greetings from Joe Katz, salesman for Variatech: a socket wrench set. Happy Holidays from Morton Seagrave: The Soul of the Big Band Era, Volume XII. Peace on Earth from Fulton Electric: a two-speed drill. Merry Christmas from Zakspeks: fruitcake. Seasons Greetings from Pulasky Maintenance: fruitcake. Merry Christmas from Dick Feinberg, Caterpillar salesman: a plaid half-gallon thermos and a matching blanket. Seasons Greetings from Camp & Weston: fruitcake.