Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“You don’t have to feel that way with me. I don’t have any claim on you.”

“But I have a claim on you . And you’ve never had to do anything for me. This is the one thing I’m asking.”

Tom sighed heavily across the time zones. “I don’t suppose there’s any liquor in your mother’s house?”

“I’ll make sure there’s liquor.”

“And we’re talking — when? Next month?”

“No. This week. Maybe Friday. The longer you guys think about it, the worse it will get.”

Again Tom sighed. “I could do Thursday. My Friday nights are for Leila.”

Pip felt a twinge of resentment and was tempted to insist on Friday. But the road back to friendship with Leila was looking long enough already.

“One other thing,” she said.

“Yep,” Tom said.

“I’ve been looking at DI every week. I keep thinking you’ll do a big story about Andreas.”

“He wasn’t well, Pip. I saw him at the end, I saw him go over the cliff. The only thing I feel is sadness. Leila’s annoyed by the postmortem adulation, but I find it hard to begrudge him. He was the most remarkable person I ever met.”

“The Express is still waiting for me to write something about him. I feel the same thing you do, sadness. But I also feel like somebody should tell the real story.”

“About the murder? It’s your call. One of the costs would be the girl, the one who helped him. There could still be legal consequences for her.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“But he left a confession, which his people covered up. There’s definitely a story if you want to pursue it.”

Was Tom also worried about his own complicity in the murder coming to light? Probably not, if he believed that Pip hadn’t read his memoir.

“OK,” she said. “Thank you.”

When her mother returned from work, Pip explained to her what had to happen. She was relieved that her mother didn’t immediately have a meltdown. But the reason she didn’t was that the entire concept made no sense to her.

“What on earth did I ever do that needs to be forgiven?”

“Um — had me and didn’t tell him? That’s pretty big.”

“How can he blame me for that? He abandoned me. He never wanted to hear from me again. And I gave him that . Like everything else. He always got everything he wanted. Just like my father.”

“Still, at some point, you should have let him know about me. On my eighteenth birthday, whatever. It was wrong of you not to. It was spiteful.”

Her mother huffed and puffed at this, but finally she nodded. “If you say so,” she said. “And only because it’s you saying it.”

“Weak people hold grudges, Mom. Strong people forgive. You raised me all by yourself. You said no to the money that everyone else in your family couldn’t resist. And you were stronger than Tom. You put an end to it — he couldn’t do it. You got everything you wanted. You won! And that’s why you can afford to forgive him. Because you won. Right?”

Her mother frowned.

“You’re also a billionaire,” Pip said. “That’s a kind of winning, too.”

The next morning they rode the bus into Santa Cruz. It was a clear cold morning between storms. Homeless people were wearing their sleeping bags like shawls, Christmas bows were shivering on lampposts, the sky was full of wheeling seagulls. A hairdresser at Jillz trimmed Pip’s mother’s hair in a flurry of split ends. Then Pip took her for a manicure, and it was Anabel, not her old mother, who instructed the Vietnamese manicurist not to cut her cuticles, Anabel who explained to Pip that cutting cuticles was a racket, because they grew back quickly and needed to be cut again. It was Anabel who briskly worked through racks of dresses, through store after store, and continued to reject things long after Pip’s own patience was exhausted. The dress that she finally deemed “adequate” was vintage and full-skirted, sexy in a prairie-schoolteacher way, with twin lines of buttons on the bodice. Pip had to admit that it was the most suitable dress they’d seen all morning.

She’d asked Jason to get a Zipcar and fetch Tom from the San Jose airport, so that she could stand guard over her mother and try to keep her calm. “Bring Choco, too,” she said.

“He’ll just be in the way,” Jason said.

“I want him in the way. Otherwise my mom’s going to focus on her freak-out. She’ll meet you, she’ll meet Choco, and, oh yeah, here’s the ex she hasn’t seen in twenty-five years.”

On Thursday morning, another storm arrived. By late afternoon the rain was drumming so hard on the roof that Pip and her mother had to raise their voices. Darkness had fallen early, and the lights had flickered several times. Pip had prepared a bean soup and laid in other supplies, including ingredients for a Manhattan. After her mother had showered, Pip applied a blow-dryer to her hair, brushing it and fluffing it. “Let’s give you some makeup, too.”

Her mother muttered, “Why I’m dolling myself up like this…”

“You’re putting on armor. You want to be strong.”

“I can put on my own mascara.”

“Let me do it. It was something I never got to do with you.”

At five o’clock, while Pip was lighting a fire, Jason called to report that he and Tom were stuck in traffic near Los Gatos. Her mother, sitting on the sofa, was looking altogether very good in her vintage dress, like the older Anabel she was, but she was doing her rocking thing, her mildly autistic thing. “You should have a glass of wine,” Pip said.

“I feel betrayed by my Endeavor. The time I most need it … where is it?”

“Endeavor to drink some wine.”

“It will go straight to my head.”

“Good.”

When the Zipcar finally came up the lane, its wipers laboring hard, its headlights making a white fury of the downpour, Pip left the side porch where she’d been waiting and ran, under an umbrella, to greet Jason. He looked a little harrowed by the drive, but his first thought was her first thought, which was to lock lips. Then Choco barked, and Pip opened the car’s rear door and let him lick her face.

Tom emerged from the car tentatively, umbrella first. Pip thanked him for coming and kissed his meaty cheek. Somehow in the fifteen feet between car and front door Choco managed to get not only soaked but covered with wet redwood needles. He squeezed past Pip and ran inside. Her mother raised her arms, as if to ward him off, and gazed with dismay at the needles and muddy paw prints on the floor.

“Sorry, sorry,” Pip said.

She corralled Choco and led him back onto the side porch, where Tom was scuffing his feet. “That is the most hilarious dog I’ve seen in my entire life,” he said.

“You like him?”

“Love him. Want him.”

They went inside, followed by Jason. Her mother, by the woodstove, wringing her hands, shyly raised her eyes to look at Tom. It was clear to Pip that both of them were struggling not to smile. But they couldn’t help smiling anyway; both of them, broadly.

“‘Hello, Anabel.’”

“‘Hello, Tom.’”

“So, Mom,” Pip said, “this is Jason. Jason, my mom.”

As if in a trance, her mother turned away from Tom and nodded to Jason. “Hello.”

Jason gave her a kind of vaudevillian two-handed wave and said, “Hey.”

“So, like I said,” Pip said, “just a quick H and G here. We’ll come back after dinner.”

“You’re sure you won’t stay?” Tom said anxiously.

“No, you guys need to talk. If there’s anything left to drink later, we’ll help you drink it.”

Before any entanglement could develop, Pip hurried Jason outside. Choco was so long and the side porch so narrow that he couldn’t turn around to make way for them but had to skitter backward. “Can we leave him here?” she asked Jason.