The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist)

by Jonathan Franzen

  “None of us can.”

  No one had witnessed it, but the house was half ransacked. A single shot had been fired, through Billerica’s throat, and this was all it took to make Probst love a man he’d never been able to stand, his death revealing all his faults and effronteries as mere symbols for the final, forgivable weakness. Billerica’s parents were handling the arrangements, but Holmes wanted Probst at Vote No headquarters. He wanted everyone there.

  It began in August, in living color. He was looking out of a swimming pool into the face of an obese and idiot-eyed tabby whose paws rested on the pool’s concrete lip and whose tail lay flat and parallel to a single leg, a woman’s, on a lounger in the background. Two grade-school boys opened their lunchboxes on raised knees and showed him their contents, the apples red, the Twinkies orange. The faces were bleached to nostriled spectres with dried eyes and checkered teeth. And the city turned black and white. All was hilltop or valley now, the horizons, no matter how broken, falling away at the margins of his vision as if, out of sight, the remaining world were gathering like a storm. A black man gestured obscenely, an Indian tried to grope out from under the scope of what was seen, and distant boys played football, their feet planted in earth that seemed no more stable than a tilt-o-whirl. Luisa, in high contrast, smiled. Geese flew like happy thoughts at her shoulder. Under her shirt her breasts fell away from each other, rolling towards her locked elbows. Why was there danger in the smile she gave him? Three golfers, marked by their serene grayness and puffiness as retired, posed and mugged while a fourth golfer appeared, in the flatness of the vision, to swing his driver into their heads. The city lurked in the trees beyond the tee. In November the days fell thick and fast. Ghetto ten-year-olds straddled a chain-link fence as the cable of a wrecking ball went slack with the ball’s impact and a tenement teetered into the sky. The women were haggard. They looked like miniatures of themselves, three feet tall, package-laden and well-to-do. One was speaking to him, tossing him words with a flick of her head. The Plaza Frontenac parking lot died behind them at the edge of a flash, and neither the sky nor the windows of Shriners’ Hospital were lighted. He looked at a young policeman and saw nothing but face; above the bill of his cap, beyond his large pale ears, south of his receding chin, in the darkness behind his metal front tooth, in the material underneath the rays of his eyeballs, lay terra incognita. Ronald Struthers’s cheeks ballooned when he saw him, and his arms hung limp as a scarecrow’s over larger figures, one a balding apoplectic, the other a sad man in a lamé tunic and paisley robes. What was happening to the city? He saw Luisa’s naked back and paid as little attention to it as if it were a bathroom door; the funny ripples and blades turned livid as his stare lengthened in time and the snow falling outside the window faintly scuffed the nighttime. She was an object. This was what was happening. At the top of the Arch he captured the chubby hand of a baby stopped, by glass, from touching St. Louis. Chief Jammu and Asha Hammaker linked arms outside the Junior League, gl’amour, gl’amour, and Binky Doolittle, emerging through the door, sealed their union with a dirty look. A volunteer youth displayed a fistful of Vote No bumperstickers while a man in Fortrel climbed into a Cougar, hurriedly, to escape being pasted.

  Probst was impressed. He lingered in the front corner of the gallery, alone behind the flats on which the pictures hung. Beyond the flats, coffee splashed, the guests of honor and assorted friends pattered, and Joanne, the gallery owner, dropped her r’s. Probst didn’t look forward to sitting in a folding chair with no place to put his elbows. He glanced at the work of the young woman with whom Duane was sharing the gallery space. Duane was better, he decided.

  It sounded like several new visitors had come in while Probst was behind the flats. “They’re the first thing I look for when I open the paper,” he heard a familiar voice say. He stepped into the area behind the last flat. The voice was Jammu’s.

  “Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” She was sitting in a trench coat between Duane and Luisa, both of whom were twisting napkins on their laps.

  “I’m twenty,” Duane said.

  Luisa saw Probst peeking. He had to step out. “What do you think?” she said.

  Jammu and Duane looked up.

  “They’re excellent,” he told Duane. “I can see a lot of hard work.” To Jammu he said, “Hello.”

  “I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting your daughter.”

  Luisa turned away. Her dress was silk, dark purple and dark green, with tassels on the hem and cuffs. It looked secondhand. What was she doing with the money he sent?

  “I think I’ll have a look.” Jammu touched Duane’s knee. “If you’ll excuse me.” Probst stepped aside to let her past, but with a jerk of her head she made him follow. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  He gave Luisa and Duane a smile of distaste: business. Jammu had folded her coat over her arm. She was wearing a gray knit dress, surprisingly well cut for a woman he’d considered couturially drab, and a string of pearls. “Yes?” he said.

  “As I mentioned the last time we met,” she said in a very low voice, “I think it’s ridiculous that in seven months we haven’t managed to speak to each other.”

  “Yes, scandalous,” Probst replied. “We should be ashamed of ourselves.” She’d charmed the city and most of its leaders. She wouldn’t charm him.

  “But I mean it,” she said. “I think we should talk.”

  “Oh, certainly.” He turned his gaze to Duane’s pictures, encouraging her to do likewise so he could look at her. She was small, he saw, much smaller than news photos or television let on. Her body had an unusual prepubescence, as if she were a girl wearing adult clothes from a costume bin, and so her face, though normal for a thirty-five-year-old, looked sick with age. Casually, he predicted she’d be dead in ten years.

  The gallery door opened, and Duane’s parents, Dr. Rodney and Dr. Pat, hurried in. Luisa sprang to her feet to greet them. Duane stayed with the cookies and drinks. His nose disappeared in a styrofoam cup. Rodney kissed Luisa. Pat hugged Luisa. Probst blamed them. Luisa handed Pat coffee and stood with her hands on her hips, shaking her hair back at regular intervals. When had she learned to act so at ease?

  Jammu had proceeded without Probst to the last of the pictures. “You know,” he said, joining her, “I’m not really doing anything later on—”

  “Tonight?” Jammu looked at her watch. “I have a visit to pay at Barnes Hospital. You’re welcome to come along, of course, but if you’ll be here a while, I should drop in again. I live just around the corner anyway. We could have a drink or something. You’re here alone?”

  “Yes. My wife’s out of town.”

  Rodney and Pat had taken center stage between Luisa and Joanne, forcing Duane to come to them. Luisa turned and looked through Probst.

  “I’ll come along,” he told Jammu.

  She left him standing on the second floor of Barnes while she consulted at the information desk. The Wishing Well, the hospital gift shop, was fully lit, but the security portcullis had been lowered. In the lobby carpeting a flesh color predominated, a background for abstract organs of pale blue and ochre and pale yellow connected by mazes of red arteries and deep blue veins.

  Jammu was autographing a page of a notebook for a high-school-aged boy. Probst heard the boy thank her. He hoped that sometime, once, before he retired, someone would approach him for an autograph.

  “We only have a few minutes,” Jammu told him.

  The room was on the fourth floor. In the bed nearer the door, amid potted mums and a small forest of Norfolk pines, lay the officer. Bandages circled his head, winding from his ears on up. He had no pillow. His whiskers had been growing for at least a week. A white sheet was draped across his chest and legs too neatly, the even lines of the hems on either side of the bed testifying to an inability to move. From the IV tube rising from his hand his arm seemed to have contracted a terminal slenderness.

  Probst hung in the doorway while Jammu moved along the side of the bed u
ntil she could look straight down into the officer’s open eyes. The head rolled a few degrees towards her.

  “How’s it going, Morris?” she said levelly.

  “Awr,” said the officer.

  Probst read the clipboard. PHELPS, Morris K.

  “You’re looking good,” Jammu said. With a tiny fierce movement of her head she forced Probst to join her at the bedside. “I was at your home today. I spoke with your wife. I understand she’s been spending almost all her time here with you.”

  Probst looked down and felt paralyzed. The eyes were on him but in a line perpendicular to that of his own. No meeting was possible. He didn’t dare turn his head sideways to meet the eyes for fear of seeming to condescend. “Sheerft,” the mouth said. “Nadir.”

  “I understand,” Jammu said. “But she seems to be holding up very well. You have some great kids.”

  A nurse appeared behind them in the doorway and raised a monitory finger. She didn’t leave. It was still fifteen minutes before 9:00. Probst wished it was one minute before 9:00.

  “This is Martin Probst.”

  Phelps released a breath. “Huh.”

  Probst felt himself imploding around the lack of words to speak. “Hello,” he attempted. Why had she taken him here? Or not warned him not to come? He wanted to hit her. The nurse came a step closer to them.

  “Adit ove,” Phelps said. “Dunsim.”

  “I know you would have. You’re a good man, Morris. They’ll have you up and around in no time.”

  The nurse put an end to it. In the hall, Probst asked what the prognosis was.

  “Probably full-time care for the rest of his life,” Jammu said. “From the neck down he has the muscles of an ox. But one little bullet in the head…”

  They were crossing the lobby downstairs, heading for the street, when Probst veered into the men’s room.

  Earlier that evening, before he’d driven to the gallery, he’d read an editorial in the Post-Dispatch.

  …The public has not been well served by the discussion thus far. Jammu’s case for a merger would be far stronger if she were willing to discuss the referendum’s impact on the county. We believe the facts will show a moderately negative impact far outweighed by the benefits to the region’s truly needy, its collective economic health, and its deteriorating infrastructure. Jammu has no reason to fear the facts.

  We can only speculate why Probst, while correct in pointing up the need for careful study, has steadfastly refused to enter into a responsible discussion with Jammu. An attempt to deny legitimacy to the pro-merger forces is surely beneath him.

  Probst claims that the proposed debate would focus too heavily on personalities. The claim has merit. But with the public starving for input, he must be faulted for overfastidiousness. He is hiding behind his scruples. Must the present confusion persist merely because one man refuses to lower his sights a little?

  Let Jammu acknowledge the need for study. Let Probst come down to earth. Let the final month of the campaign be a model of spirited, informed discourse.

  The piece had delighted him, and not just because he enjoyed ignoring the advice of editors. It was another example of the magical capacity of public life to magnify his person faithfully. Vote No ran a clean campaign. It stuck to the facts. If he had any doubts about whether he was a stickler when it came to ethics, he only had to open the newspaper. There they said it: Martin Probst is a stickler when it comes to ethics.

  He and Jammu went straight from the hospital to the Palm Beach Café, a restaurant peopled by the generation of St. Louisans halfway behind Probst and Barbara’s. They ordered drinks, and after a very awkward silence Jammu looked up at him.

  “Why don’t you tell me in one sentence,” she said, making no effort to clear the hoarseness from her throat, “what you have against the merger. We can debate in private, can’t we? Our personalities aren’t swaying anyone here.”

  “One sentence,” Probst said. “Given that I and the rest of Municipal Growth used to advocate city-county consolidation ourselves.” He thought a moment, looking for other bases to cover. “Given that the referendum was drafted in response to the county’s own fear of missing the boat. Given that the context is a free political market and the question is whether the market will bear a merger—”

  “You haven’t touched on any of this in your statements.”

  “Didn’t need to, with you hammering away at it. I’m simply trying to show you I’ve mastered your arguments. And what it comes down to, then, is that my intuitive distrust of this referendum—since everything indicates that I should favor it—my intuitive distrust means a lot.”

  Jammu’s eyes widened. “That’s your argument?”

  “And to articulate this, then,” he said, “the first thing is the knee-jerk quality of what’s been going on. The voters can’t vote intelligently, and you have to be afraid of drastic change, an unregulated marketplace of ideas, just like you have to be afraid of new toys that could maybe hurt children. Now, I trust you—” He tried to engage Jammu visually, but she was playing with her drink. “And I’d like to mention that that’s what I’ve been telling Municipal Growth all along. But in the case of Urban Hope, it’s as if Municipal Growth had suddenly begun to make policy recommendations based purely on the profit motives of its member chief executives. Rolf Ripley wants it to pass for trickle-down welfare, supply-side progress, which is what I myself practice at work, except that I’m employing men while Ripley is making real-estate killings. Plus the fact that he’s allied himself with populist public-sector Democrats like the mayor! Somewhere, somebody isn’t telling the real story.”

  “None of this makes the merger a bad idea,” Jammu said.

  “The thing is, we don’t know. Aren’t your convictions pretty intuitive, too? Taxes won’t fall. The city payroll won’t shrink, it might even expand. But you see this all somehow transmuting into an urban utopia. All of today’s sinecure holders out in droves tomorrow clearing weeds from railroad tracks on the South Side. The North Side blacks happily filling the pockets of the Rolf Ripleys. This is what I mean by unrealistic. And it’s far worse in the county. You’re trying to hook people intuitively yourself. With your vision of a united greater St. Louis.”

  “What you’re saying is that we’re in conflict over the potential for positive change. You’re pessimistic. I’m optimistic.”

  Probst didn’t like how this sounded. He’d thought it was the other way around. He sanguine and St. Louisan, she dour and tired. She (in the words of Barbara’s friend Lorri Wulkowicz) unconcealably Third World. At closer range everything she wore—her fine pearls, her fine dress, her fine makeup—seemed cheapened by her face and figure. She looked (Probst couldn’t have said exactly why) like she needed a bath. He watched her swallow a pill with her wine. “Antihistamine,” she explained, snapping her purse. The purse was a black clutch. Like someone determined to pay for the drinks, she kept it ready on her lap.

  “Who are you?” Probst asked.

  She coughed. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for example, what’s your first name?”

  “Colonel.” She smiled.

  “No. What is it?”

  “I don’t like my first name. It isn’t ‘me.’ I would have changed it if people hadn’t got used to calling me by my first initial, which is S. I don’t mind S. You can call me Ess. That’s what my mother calls me, that and Essie. Can I call you Martin?”

  “Your mother,” he said conversationally. “Where is she?”

  “She lives in Bombay. You can read all about it in the Post on Sunday. Everything you always wanted to know about my private life but were too bored to ask.”

  He paused to admire how this blocked further questions. Then he said, “I’m not bored, and I don’t trust what I read in the paper. And anyway—”

  “And anyway, I should be more polite. I’m sorry. Rough day.”

  Another deft block. He tried an end run. “Why did you leave India? Does anyone ever ask you
that?”

  “Well, all the reporters do.”

  He gave up. Soft light still bathed the tables, the piano still appealed to moods, but to him the room now had the ambience it must have had at 10:00 in the morning when the extra lights were on and the vacuum cleaner was run. Some tables, some chairs. He looked around Jammu to catch the waiter’s attention, and it was then that he noticed that the couple at the next table were speaking to each other but facing him and Jammu. Other faces at other tables, too. People were watching them. He hunched his shoulders and retracted his head.

  “It was a typical midlife career change,” Jammu said. “I had the opportunity to come and work here, and I took it. I like this country—I’ve said as much to the reporters, only it sounded bad in print.”

  Probst nodded. “How did it happen that you didn’t forfeit your U.S. citizenship by holding public office in India?”

  “They bent the rule for me.”

  “You mean they broke it.”

  She looked at the piano. “Unwittingly, though. They could have revoked my passport, but my mother took care of the renewals. She never mentioned that I worked for the police service, and the INS never asked. Now I don’t hold office in India, so there’s nothing they can do.”

  “Didn’t the Police Board wonder?”

  “They said if I could prove my eligibility they wanted to have me. It was up to me.”

  “But if the INS had been awake you wouldn’t have had citizenship in July.”

  “I suppose not. Why are you asking me these questions?”

  “I’m still trying to tell you what I have against the merger.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “How did you win the war on crime? What’s happened to all the muggers and heroin addicts? And the Mafia. I can’t believe they’re all in jail, and, pessimist that I am, I know they haven’t reformed. Are the crime figures for real?”

  “They’re for real. And you know I’ve come under very close scrutiny because of it. We’ve had police chiefs from all the major cities here asking the same question. We’ve had the ACLU breathing down our necks. We’ve had the media looking for a scandal. And as you’ll have noticed, we’ve had no serious complaints. Why not? Mainly I’d say that for once the small size of St. Louis has worked in its favor. It simply isn’t large enough to produce an endless supply of places for crime to breed. What in other cities would be just a major rejuvenation here amounts to something nearly total. The North Side redevelopment currently covers about fourteen square miles. That’s one-fourth of the entire city. In a city like Philadelphia or Los Angeles or Chicago it would be about five percent. Here a large percentage of the city land has become so valuable that the owners themselves do most of the policing. On property worth a hundred fifty dollars a square foot, you don’t see much crime, apart from the white-collar variety. So the rate drops.”