Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Have you ever had a job?” my mother asked Anabel.

“No, I grew up obscenely rich,” Anabel said. “It would have been a joke to have a job.”

“Honest work is never a joke.”

“She works incredibly hard on her art,” I said.

“Art isn’t work,” my mother said. “Art is something you do for yourself. I’m not saying you have to work, if you’re lucky enough not to have to. But if there’s money coming to you, you should accept the responsibilities that come with it. You need to do something .”

“Art is something,” I said.

“Part of my artistic performance,” Anabel said, “is not to touch money that has blood on it. To be the person who rejects it.”

“I don’t understand that,” my mother said.

“There’s such a thing as collective guilt,” Anabel said. “I didn’t personally keep farm animals in hellish conditions, but as soon as I found out about the conditions I accepted my guilt and decided to have nothing to do with it.”

“I can’t believe McCaskill is any worse than other companies,” my mother said. “It’s helping feed a hungry world. And what about wheat? And soybeans. Even if you don’t like the meat business, your money isn’t all bad. You could take some of it for yourself and do something charitable with the rest. I don’t see what you gain by rejecting it.”

“The Nazis improved the German economy and built a great highway system,” Anabel said. “Maybe they were only half bad, too?”

My mother bristled. “The Nazis were a terrible evil. You don’t have to tell me about the Nazis. I lost my father in Hitler’s war.”

“But you don’t have any guilt yourself.”

“I was a child.”

“Oh, I see. So there isn’t such a thing as collective guilt.”

“Don’t talk to me about guilt,” my mother said angrily. “I left behind a sister and a brother and a sick mother who needed me. I don’t know how many letters I wrote to apologize, and they never wrote back.”

“Neither did six million Jews, I guess.”

“I was a child .”

“So was I. And now I’m doing something about it.”

My own brand of collective guilt had to do with being male, but I could see that my mother had a point about work. When Anabel and I returned to Philadelphia and I again faced the impossibility of The Complicater , I was seized with a new plan: write a novella . Begin it in secret and surprise Anabel with it on our wedding day. It would give me new work to do, solve the problem of a wedding present for Anabel, prove to her that I was interesting and ambitious enough for her to marry, and maybe even reconcile her with my mother — because the novella I envisioned was a Bellovian treatment of the only good story I knew: my mother’s guilty flight from Germany. I already had the first sentence of it: “The fate of the family on Adalbertstraße was in the hands of a raging stomach.”

We’d chosen the Washington’s Birthday weekend for our wedding party, so that our friends from out of town could comfortably attend. Besides Nola, Anabel still had three reasonably good friends, one from Wichita, two from Brown. (She would terminate two of these friendships within months of our marrying; the third would remain on probation until a baby put an end to it.) Since she was inviting no one from her family to the party, and since my mother didn’t even like her, Anabel thought it was unfair to invite my own family, but I made the case that Cynthia did like her and that I was my mother’s only child.

Then one evening Anabel brought me a letter from our mailbox.

“It’s interesting,” she said, “that your mother still writes just to you, not to both of us.”

I opened the letter and scanned it: Dearest Tom … house seems so empty with you gone from it … Dr. Van Schyllingerhout … higher dose of … I tried to say nothing but every nerve in my body … to compare her childhood of inherited privilege and luxury to my childhood in Jena … unspeakable carnage of the War with modern farming methods … deeply offended … no choice but to speak my heart freely to you … You are making a TERRIBLE MISTAKE … quite attractive and very alluring to an inexperienced young man … you ARE very inexperienced … see nothing but unhappiness in your future with a pampered, demanding, EXTREME person raised in extreme wealth and privilege … already so skinny and pale from the kooky diet she has you … when a person is not experienced sometimes the sex instinct clouds their judgment … I beg you to think hard and realistically about your future … want nothing more than for you to find a loving, sensible, mature, REALISTIC person to make a happy life with …

With suddenly cold hands, I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope.

“What does she say?” Anabel asked.

“Nothing. Her colon’s flared up again, it’s really bad.”

“Can I read the letter?”

“It’s just her being her.”

“So we’re getting married in six weeks, and I can’t read a letter from your mother.”

“I think the steroids make her a little crazy. You don’t want to read it.”

Anabel gave me one of her frightening looks. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “We’re either full partners or we’re nothing. There is no letter that anyone could send me that I wouldn’t want you to read. None. Ever.”

She was preparing to rage or to cry, and I couldn’t stand either, and so I handed her the letter and retreated to the bedroom. My life had become a nightmare of exactly the female reproach I’d dedicated it to avoiding. To avoid it from my mother was to invite it from Anabel, and vice versa; there was no way out. I was sitting on the bed, kneading my hands, when Anabel appeared in the doorway. She didn’t look hurt, just coldly angry.

“I’m going to use this word once in my life,” she said. “Exactly once.”

“What word?”

“ Cunt .” She clapped her hands to her mouth. “No, that’s a terrible word, even for her. I’m sorry I said it.”

“I’m so sorry about the letter,” I said. “She’s really not well.”

“But you understand I’m not going to see her again. I’m not going to buy her little Christmas presents. She’s not coming to our wedding party. If we ever have a family, she’s not going to see my children. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes, yes,” I said eagerly, in my relief that Anabel hadn’t turned against me .

She knelt at my feet and took my hands. “People have strong reactions to me,” she said, more gently. “It hurts me, but I’m used to it. What I can’t stand is what her letter says about you . She has no respect for your taste or your judgment or your feelings. She thinks she still owns you and can tell you what to do. And that makes me very angry. She refuses to see who you are.”

“I really do think she’s miserable because she’s sick.”

“Her feelings make her sick. You’ve said it yourself.”

“She was polite to you in Denver. This has to be the steroids talking…”

“I’m not saying you can never see her again. You’re a loving person. But I can’t see her anymore. Ever. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“We were both half orphaned on the same day,” she said. “And now we’ll be full orphans together. Will you do that with me?”

The next day, I wrote a very formal letter to my mother, retracting her invitation to the wedding party.

We were married on Valentine’s Day, with two ladies from the clerk’s office as witnesses. We had dinner at home, spaghetti with spinach and garlic and olive oil, to symbolize the thrift that we intended to embrace, but Anabel had once mentioned that she liked Mumm champagne, and I’d bought her a bottle to mark the occasion with some small luxury. After dinner, she gave me my present, a new Olivetti portable typewriter. I was immediately aware of a more troubling symbolism: both of our gifts had to do with my work, not hers. But my novella had taken an unexpected turn — the young woman in Jena came from the town’s richest family, and her father was a brute — and I believed that Anabel would be able to recognize it as a loving tribute to her. So I bravely handed over a manila envelope to which I’d glued a white bow.