Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Maybe.”

“Sandrine. Work with me here.”

“I’m the guy’s granddaughter. David’s. That makes me a Laird, and I’m asking you a small favor that doesn’t personally cost you anything. The amount of money is nothing compared to what’s in the trust. I want you to buy my friend’s house, right away, and then charge him some rent he can afford. It won’t be a lot of rent, so it won’t be a great investment. But you can invest the money any way you want, right?”

Mr. Navarre made a tent of his fingers. “I have a fiduciary responsibility to invest the money wisely. I would need, at a minimum, your mother’s written authorization. I admit that it doesn’t seem likely she’ll be challenging my decisions any time soon, but I need to be covered for that eventuality.”

“Does the trust say that I’m the heir?”

“There is a per stirpes clause, yes.”

“So let me sign.”

“I can’t knowingly let you sign under a false name. Even if I were inclined to make this particular investment.”

Pip frowned. She’d thought of a lot, during the two flights it had taken her to get to Wichita, but she hadn’t thought of this. “If I give you my real name, you’re going to use it to try to find my mother, even if I ask you not to.”

“Let’s slow down here,” Mr. Navarre said. “Look at this from my side. I do believe that Anabel is alive and you’re her daughter. This is a highly unusual situation, but I believe you’re telling me the truth. But if you come to me next month and say you want another investment, for some other reason — where does it end?”

“I won’t do that.”

“So you say now. But if all you have to do is ask?”

“Well, then we’ll have this discussion again. But we won’t. It’s not going to happen again.”

Mr. Navarre increased the steepness of his tented fingers. “I don’t know what happened in that family. Your family. I never understood your mother or her father. But the decisions he made about his stake in McCaskill created a heck of a lot of ill will. Given the tax hit he took, leaving her a quarter of the estate, he had to put most of the rest in charitable trusts. I know you think I get money for nothing, but liquidating enough shares to pay the estate-tax bill wasn’t nothing. And meanwhile Anabel’s brothers only got about eighty million apiece fungible. The rest is in trusts they control but don’t much profit from. All this to make sure the daughter who hated David got her money in a lump. To say I never understood it is an understatement. And now you won’t even let me tell her the money is there?”

That is correct , Pip thought. Everyone needs to keep conspiring to protect my mother from reality.

“I can work on it,” she said. “But it has to be me. I don’t want her getting some registered letter from you. If I agree to work on it, will you buy this house in Oakland?”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because I’m the heir and I’m asking for it!”

“So you’re crazy, too.”

“No.”

“You could speak to your mother and be a billionaire, but instead you’re asking me to buy a house in foreclosure for some third party. This person wouldn’t happen to be your boyfriend?”

“No. He’s a well-medicated schizophrenic in his forties.”

Mr. Navarre shook his head. “You don’t want to eradicate malaria. You don’t want to send poor kids to college. You don’t want to take a private trip to outer space. You don’t even want to be a cokehead.”

“Aren’t all the Lairds and McCaskills messed up from having too much money?”

“About half of them, yeah.”

“Didn’t one of my uncles try to buy an NBA team?”

“Better than that. He wanted the David M. Laird Jr. Charitable Trust to buy it.”

“So it sounds like my weirdness is totally within normal parameters.”

“Listen here.” Mr. Navarre sat up straight and fixed Pip with a look. “I’m never going to have to report to you. I’m older than your mother, and I have a fondness for fatty red meats. It’s not because I owe you any courtesies that I propose the following. You’re going to tell me your real name and sign an authorization. After you leave here, you’ll go to the Laird family doctor and leave a blood sample. Six months from today, if I don’t hear from you sooner, I will hire a detective to locate your mother. In return, the trust will buy your friend’s house. I give you that, you give me your mother.”

“You have to buy the house right away, though. Like, today or tomorrow. Monday at the latest.”

“Do you agree to the terms? You’ll have six months to sort things out with your mother.”

Pip was weighing her wish to help Dreyfuss against her aversion to having a conversation with her mother. She realized that even if she didn’t have the conversation, her mother wouldn’t know for sure it was her fault that Mr. Navarre had found her. Her mother could imagine it was Tom’s fault, or Andreas’s. She could sign the registered receipt, burn the letter without reading it, and go right on denying reality.

“My legal name is Purity Tyler.”

It was four thirty by the time she’d signed the authorization, been phlebotomized at the doctor’s office, and taken another cab to the airport. Jets on the tarmac shimmered in fumes and unabated sun, but something was happening to the sky, some premonition that its depthless blue would soon be a more local gray. Her connecting flight, to Denver, was showing a delay of forty-five minutes. She had to be at work the following afternoon, but it occurred to her that she could miss her connection in Denver and rebook for the morning. She’d boldly asked Mr. Navarre to reimburse her for her flights and cabs; the trip so far had cost her nothing.

She couldn’t see Tom without admitting that she’d read his memoir, and although she felt a craving for Leila’s forgiveness she worried that Leila still considered her a threat and wouldn’t be happy to see her. With her phone, she searched instead for Cynthia Aberant and found her listed as an associate professor in a community-studies program. The only impeccably kind and well-behaved person in Tom’s entire memoir was his sister. Pip dialed her office number and got her.

“This is Pip Tyler,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

“I’m sorry. Say your name again?”

“Pip Tyler. Purity Tyler.”

There was a dead cellular silence. Then Cynthia said, “You’re my brother’s daughter.”

“Right. So, I was hoping I could talk to you?”

“You should talk to Tom, not me.”

“I’m on my way to Denver right now. If you had, like, even just an hour tonight. You’re the only person I can talk to.”

After another silence, Cynthia assented.

The flight, in a too-small jet, dodging thunderstorms, cured Pip of any desire for future air travel. She expected death the whole way. What was interesting was how quickly she then forgot about it, like a dog to whom death was literally unimaginable, while she rode in a cab to Cynthia’s. Dogs again had it right. They didn’t trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway.

Cynthia’s house was in the same neighborhood as Leila’s husband’s. She came to the front door holding a glass of red wine. She was a plus-size woman with long gray-blond hair and a pleasant face. “I needed a head start,” she said, raising the glass. “Do you drink?”

Her living room was an academic version of Dreyfuss’s, her art and her books and even her furniture steeped in leftism. Pip sat down by a cabinet with Latino peasants depicted in bright primitive paint. Cynthia took an armchair whose cushions bore the imprint of her body’s ample contours. “So, you’re my niece,” she said.