Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“You’re my aunt.”

“And why are you here and not at my brother’s?”

Pip drank her wine and told her story. When she was done, Cynthia poured her more wine and said, “I always thought Tom had a novel in him.”

“He says it in the memoir,” Pip said. “He wanted to be a novelist, but my mom wouldn’t let him.”

Her aunt’s expression hardened. “She was all about not letting.”

“Did you not like her?”

“No, I did like her, at first. I wanted us to have a relationship. But she was somehow not approachable.”

“She’s the same way now. She’s really shy underneath.”

“I didn’t like how she treated my stepmother. But Clelia was a person of strong judgments herself, and so I cut your mother some slack. But then … this is probably in the memoir…”

“The spitting thing?”

“I was there in the room, I saw it happen. Tom explained it to me afterward, and I sort of understood — I’m no friend of agribusiness and bare-knuckled capital. But I couldn’t help thinking that Tom had made a mistake. I thought, ‘This woman is nuts .’ And then for years I hardly saw him and I never saw her — I was raising my own daughter. But even from afar I had the sense that he was in a toxic relationship. He was so loyal to her, I could never get anything out of him while they were together. Even afterward, he wouldn’t really speak ill of her. I thought he should be way angrier than he was. But eventually things worked out well for him. He’s outstanding at what he does, and Leila — well, you know. Everybody loves Leila. He should have been married to her all along.”

“Right. Everyone can see she’s more wonderful than my mom.”

“She is pretty great. I don’t see why you’re talking to me and not her.”

“She seemed to think I wanted to take Tom away from her.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. They seem to be more of a unit than ever these days.” Cynthia refilled her own glass. “But here you are. Tell me why again?”

“Because I don’t know what to do.”

“You want my advice.”

“Yes, please.”

“You might not like it.”

“Give it to me anyway.”

“I think you should be really, really angry.”

Pip nodded. “It’s hard, though. I feel like I betrayed Tom by reading his memoir, and now I’m betraying my mother by going to Wichita and knowing things behind her back.”

“That’s nonsense, if you’ll pardon me.”

“How is it nonsense?”

“I got very mad at Tom when he told me about you. You lived in his house for however long, for weeks, and he knew you were his daughter and didn’t tell you. Don’t you think you had a right to that information?”

“I guess he was respecting my mom’s privacy.”

“Really? Is that not the most infuriating bullshit? Why should he protect her? Why should he defer to his ex-wife at your expense? She got herself pregnant without telling him. She never told him that she had you. She used him — she used you —to continue some never-ending fight she had with him. He could have had a daughter, you could have had a father, but she ‘wouldn’t let him.’ On what planet does he owe her anything?”

“That’s a helpful insight.”

“On what planet do you owe her anything? From what Tom tells me, you spent your entire childhood below the poverty line. Your mother made you for her own selfish purposes—”

“No, that’s harsh,” Pip said. “Weren’t you a single mom, too?”

“Not by choice. Gretchen’s father knew about her, and she knew about him. They have a relationship now. And I did everything I could for Gretchen. I quit organizing and went back to school because of her, so she didn’t have to suffer from my personal choices. What personal choice did your mother ever give up for you?”

Tears came to Pip’s eyes. “She loved me.”

“I’m sure. I’m sure she did. But by your own account, she doesn’t have anyone else in her life. She created you to be what no one else can be for her. I’m angry at the selfishness of that. I’m angry that she’s the kind of ‘feminist’ who gives feminism a bad name. I feel like going over to Tom’s right this minute and slapping him in the face. For enabling her fantasies. She had real gifts — it’s such a waste. I don’t see why you’re not out of your mind with rage.”

“I can’t explain it. She’s a really lost person.”

“Well, fine. I can’t make you be angry if you’re not. But do me a favor and try to keep one thought in mind: you don’t owe these people anything. They owe you , big-time. It’s your turn to call the shots now. If they give you any resistance, you’re within your rights to nuke them.”

Pip nodded, but she was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

Cynthia made them a simple dinner, opened a second bottle, and talked about the world as she saw it: the concentration of capital in the hands of a few, the calculated demolition of faith in government, the worldwide abdication of responsibility for climate change, the disappointments of Obama. She oscillated between anger and despair, and Pip both did and didn’t share her anger. Certainly it seemed unfair that she’d been stuck with a shitty world of her parents’ making. They’d put her in an impossible position personally, and they belonged to the generation that had done nothing about nuclear weapons and less than nothing about global warming; it wasn’t her fault. And yet it was oddly comforting to know that even if she could identify the ethically correct thing to do with a billion dollars, and proceeded to do it, she could never alter the world’s shitty course. She thought of her mother’s spiritual Endeavor, her striving merely to be mindful. For better or worse, she was her mother’s daughter.

She kept thinking about her mother after she went to bed, in Gretchen’s bedroom. What Cynthia couldn’t know was how she’d made her mother smile. The pure, spontaneous love in that smile, every time she’d caught sight of Pip. And the shyness of it, the visible worry that Pip might not love her as much as she loved Pip. Her mother had a childlike heart. From reading the memoir, Pip suspected that she’d never stopped loving Tom, even to this day. Oh, the heartbreak of that scene with the stuffed toy bull: Pip knew exactly the nuttily, childishly hopeful look that her mother must have had on her face. There had been stuffed animals on her own childhood bed, a small menagerie of them, and she and her mother had played with them for hours on end, giving them voices, inventing moral crises to resolve. The little child and the big child, the one whose hair was going gray, the one whose shy sidelong glances the little one sometimes caught. Her mother had needed to give love and receive it. This was why she’d had Pip. Was that so monstrous? Wasn’t it more like miraculously resourceful?

* * *

On Sunday, Jason again was waiting when she unlocked the door of Peet’s. He loitered at the counter, ignoring Navi’s unfriendly looks, until Pip could speak to him.

“So stop me if I’m being too intrusive,” she said. “But can I ask why you aren’t with your girlfriend on a Sunday morning?”

“She’s a late riser,” Jason said. “Like, afternoon late. She stays up online until four in the morning.”

“Do you guys live together?”

“It’s not that kind of thing.”

“But it’s the kind of thing where it’s OK to play tennis with a girl you used to date.”