Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Her mother turned her head and gave her an empty look. “What kind of person are you now?”

“I don’t know. I have a real boyfriend — that’s one thing. I’m kind of in love with him.”

“That’s nice.”

“OK, another thing. A big thing. I know what your real name is.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Will you say it for me?”

“No. Never.”

“You have to say it. You have to tell me everything, because I’m your daughter and I can’t be in the same room with you if all we do is lie.”

Her mother stood up gracefully, with her Endeavor-perfected limberness, but her head hit the shampoo basket and knocked a bottle to the shower floor. She threw herself angrily out of the stall, stumbled on Pip, and ran from the bathroom.

“Mom!” Pip said, chasing her.

“I want nothing to do with that part of you.”

“Which part of me?”

Her mother spun around. Her face was pure torment. “ Get out! Get out! Leave me alone! Both of you! For the love of God, please just leave me alone! ”

Pip watched, horrified, as the person who now seemed entirely Anabel fell onto her bed and yanked the comforter over her head and lay there rocking herself, crying full-throatedly in pain. Pip had expected difficulty, but this was extreme by any measure. She went to the kitchen and knocked back a glass of wine. Then she returned to the bed and pulled the comforter away, lay down behind her mother and put her arms around her. She buried her face in her mother’s thick hair and breathed in her smell, the most distinct of all smells, the smell that there was nothing like. The brown dress’s cotton was soft from a hundred washings. Slowly her mother’s crying subsided into whimpers. Rain pattered on the sleeping-porch roof.

“I’m sorry,” Pip said. “I’m sorry I can’t just leave, I know it’s hard. But you created me and now you have to deal with me. That’s my purpose. I’m your reality.”

Her mother said nothing.

Both of you?

Pip lowered her voice to a whisper. “Do you still love him?”

She felt her mother stiffen.

“I think he still loves you.”

Her mother took a sharp breath and didn’t let it out.

“So there’s got to be a way to move on,” Pip said. “There’s got to be a way to forgive and move on. I’m not leaving until you do.”

* * *

How she got the story out of her mother, the next morning, was by letting her believe that Tom had told her his version of it; she figured, correctly, that her mother would find this intolerable. Her mother omitted the details of her conception, saying only that it had occurred the very last time she’d seen Tom, but she was surprisingly calm and articulate about other details. Pip’s actual birthday was February 24, not July 11. She’d been delivered naturally, by a midwife, in a safe house in Riverside, California. Until she was two, she and her mother had lived in Bakersfield, where her mother cleaned hotel rooms for a living. Then, by bad luck (because Bakersfield was really nowhere), her mother ran into a college friend who asked too many questions. A new friend from the women’s shelter knew of a cabin for rent in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and there they moved.

“I heard terrible stories in the shelters and safe houses,” her mother said. “So many women who were punching bags. So many stories of men whose idea of love was stalking and stabbing their ex-wives. I should have felt guilty about misrepresenting myself, but I didn’t. Men’s emotional cruelty can be every bit as painful as physical abuse. My father was cruel and my husband was crueler.”

“Really,” Pip said.

“Yes, really. I told him it would kill me if he ever took money from my father, and he did it. Did it specifically to hurt me. He slept with my best friend to hurt me. He took my advice and encouragement and used it to make a career for himself, and then, when I was struggling with my own career, he abandoned me. You’re only young once, and I gave him my youth because I believed his promises, and then, when I wasn’t young anymore, he broke his promises. And I knew it all along. I knew he would betray me. I told him all along, but it didn’t stop him from making promises to me, which I believed because I was weak. I really was like the other women in the shelters.”

Pip crossed her arms prosecutorially. “And so it seemed OK to you to have his baby without telling him. That seemed like the morally right thing to do.”

“He knew I wanted a baby.”

“But why his? Why not some random sperm donor’s?”

“Because I keep my promises. I promised him I’d be his forever. He could break his promise, but I wasn’t going to break mine. We were meant to have a baby, and we did. And then, right away, you were everything to me. You have to believe me that I stopped caring who your father was.”

“I don’t believe you. You had some sort of a moral competition going. Who’s better at keeping promises.”

“Things had become so violent and dirty between us. I wanted something purely good to come of it. And something did. You did.”

“I am far from purely good.”

“No one’s really perfect. But to me you were perfect.”

This seemed to Pip the right moment to bring up the money, by way of demonstrating her imperfection. She told the story of her visit to Wichita and explained that her mother needed to be in touch with Mr. Navarre. The way her mother shook her head in response was more bewildered than adamant.

“What would I do with a billion dollars?” she said.

“You could start by getting Sonny out to pump the septic tank. I’ve been lying awake at night worrying about what’s in there. Has it ever been pumped?”

“It’s not a real septic tank. I think the owner made it out of boards and cement.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“The money is meaningless to me, Purity. It’s so meaningless that I’m beyond refusing it. It’s just — nothing to me.”

“My student debt isn’t nothing to me. And you’re the one who told me not to worry about the money.”

“Fine, then. You can ask the lawyer to pay your debt. I won’t stop you.”

“But it’s not my money. You have to be involved.”

“I can’t be. I never wanted it. It’s dirty money. It ruined my family. It killed my mother, it turned my father into a monster. Why would I bring all of that into my life now?”

“Because it’s real.”

“Nothing is real.”

“I’m real.”

Her mother nodded. “That’s true. You are real to me.”

“So here’s what I need.” Pip ticked off her demands with her fingers. “Student loan paid off in full. Four thousand more to pay off my credit-card debt. Eight hundred thousand to buy Dreyfuss’s house and give it back to him. Also, if you insist on staying here, we should buy the cabin and really fix it up. Grad-school tuition if I decide I want that. Monthly living expenses if you want to quit your job. And then maybe another fifty thousand in walking-around money while I try to start a career. The whole thing is less than three million. That’s like five percent of one year’s dividends.”

“From McCaskill, though. McCaskill.”

“Their business wasn’t only animals. There’s got to be at least three million you can take in good conscience.”

Her mother was becoming distressed. “Oh, why don’t you just take it? All of it! Just take it and leave me alone!”

“Because I’m not allowed to. It’s not in my name. As long as you’re alive, it’s just going to be great expectations for me.” Pip laughed. “Why did you start calling me Pip anyway? Was that something else you ‘knew all along’?”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t me,” her mother said eagerly. Pip’s childhood was her favorite topic. “It was in kindergarten. Mrs. Steinhauer must have given it to you. Some of the little kids had trouble pronouncing your real name. I guess she thought ‘Pip’ fit you. There’s something happy about the name, and you were always such a happy girl. Or maybe she asked you, and you volunteered it.”