Jonathan Franzen - Purity

I learned some of this and many other things in the thrilling two hours we spoke that night. Though I didn’t feel myself to be an interesting person, I did have listening skills. The more I listened, the more her voice softened toward me. And then we uncovered an odd coincidence.

She’d grown up in Wichita, in a stately house on College Hill. She belonged to the fourth generation of one of the two families that wholly owned the agribusiness conglomerate McCaskill, the country’s second-largest privately held corporation. Her father had inherited a five percent share of it, married a fourth-generation McCaskill, and gone to work for the company. As a girl, Anabel said, she’d been very close to her father. When the time came to send her away to Rosemary Hall, which her mother had attended before its merger with Choate, she said she didn’t want to go. But her mother was insistent, her father uncharacteristically unwilling to indulge her, and so she arrived in Connecticut at the age of thirteen.

“For the longest time, I had everything turned around exactly wrong in my mind,” she told me. “I thought my mother was terrible and my father was wonderful. He’s extremely smart and seductive. He knows how to have his way with people. And when he started betraying my mother, after I went away to school, and when my mother started drinking after breakfast, I realized that she’d been trying to protect me by sending me away. She never admitted it to me, but I know that’s what it was. He was killing her, and she didn’t want him to kill me, too. I was so unjust to her. And then he killed her. My poor mother.”

“Your father killed your mother?”

“You have to understand the way McCaskill works. They’re obsessed with keeping the business in the family, so nobody on the outside can know what they’re doing. It’s all about secrets and family control. When a Laird marries a McCaskill, it has to be forever, because they’re obsessed with family solidarity. So after I went away to school and my father started cheating on my mother, there really wasn’t anything for her to do but drink. That’s the McCaskill way. That and drugs and dangerous hobbies like piloting helicopters. You’d be surprised how much of my extended family is strung out on something. At least one of my brothers is strung out as we speak. You either go to work for the company and increase the family riches — which is what they call the McCaskill way — or else you kill yourself with hedonism, because there’s no reality principle to hold you back. It’s not like anybody in the family needs to make a living.”

I asked what had happened to her mother.

“She drowned,” Anabel said. “In our pool. My father was out of town — no fingerprints.”

“How long ago was this?”

“A little over two years ago. In June. It was a nice warm night. Her blood alcohol would have knocked a horse down. She passed out in the shallow end.”

I said I was very sorry, and then I told her that my dad had died in the same month as her mother. He’d retired only two weeks earlier, after counting the years to his sixty-fifth birthday, never speaking of “retirement,” only of “retirement from teaching,” because he still had so much energy. He was looking forward to reconstructing his caddis-fly collection and finally getting his PhD, to learning Russian and Chinese, to hosting foreign-exchange students, to buying an RV that met my mother’s requirements for outdoor comfort. But the first thing he did was volunteer for a two-month zoological mission to the Philippines. He wanted to scratch his old itch for exotic travel while I was still young enough to be spending summers at home, so that my mother wouldn’t be alone. When I drove him to the Denver airport, he told me that he knew my mother could be difficult but, if I ever felt impatient with her, I had to remember that she’d had a rough childhood and wasn’t in the best of health. His speech was loving and the last I ever heard from him. A day later, he was in a small plane that hit the side of a mountain. A four-paragraph story in the Times .

“What day did this happen?”

“It was June nineteenth in the Philippines. June eighteenth in Denver.”

Anabel’s voice became hushed. “This is extremely weird,” she said. “My mother died on the same day. We were both half orphaned on the exact same day.”

It now seems to me somehow crucial that the day was arguably not the same — her mother had died on the nineteenth. And until that Friday night I’d never been a superstitious person. My father had waged a personal war against the overvaluation of coincidence; he had a classroom riff, sometimes repeated at home, in which he “proved” that chewing Juicy Fruit gum causes hair to be blond, by way of illustrating proper scientific inference. But when Anabel spoke those words, after an hour and a half in which my world had been shrinking to the size of her voice in my ear — and here again it seems crucial that we had our first real conversation on the phone, which distills a person into words passing directly into the brain — I shivered as if my fate were overtaking me. How could the coincidence not be significant? The interesting person who’d pronounced me a jerk not six hours earlier had now been confiding in me, in her lovely voice, for an hour and a half. It felt incredible, magical. After the shiver had passed, I had an erection.

“What do you think it means?” Anabel said.

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. That’s what my dad would say. Although—”

“It’s very weird,” she said. “I wasn’t even planning on going to your office today. I was coming back from the Barnes Collection, which is a different story, why anybody still thinks Renoir père needs to be looked at, but there is such a person at Tyler and I have the misfortune of being in his lecture class, not having taken it last year when everyone else did. I’d imagined that an exception might be made, but, safe to say, nobody’s in a mood to make exceptions for me now. But I was on the platform at Thirtieth Street, and I got so upset thinking about what you’d done to me that I let my train go by. And that seemed like a sign that I should go and find you. Because I missed the train. I’ve never gotten so involved in a thought I’ve missed a train.”

“That does seem like a sign,” I said, at the urging of my erection.

“ Who are you? ” she said. “Why did this happen?”

In the state her voice had put me in, I didn’t consider these questions nutty, but I was spooked by their seriousness. “I am an American, Denver-born,” I said. And added, pompously, “Saul Bellow.”

“Saul Bellow is from Denver?”

“No, Chicago. You asked me who I am.”

“I didn’t ask who Saul Bellow is.”

“He won the Pulitzer Prize,” I said, “and that’s what I want to do.” I was trying to seem a tiny bit interesting to her, but instead I sounded idiotic to myself.

“You want to be a novelist?” Anabel said.

“Journalist.”

“So I don’t have to worry about you taking my story and putting it in a novel.”

“Not going to happen.”

“It’s my story. My material. It’s what my art comes out of.”

“Of course it is.”

“But journalists betray people for a living. Your little reporter betrayed me. I thought he was interested in what I was trying to express.”

“That’s not the only kind of journalist.”

“I’m trying to figure out whether I should be hanging up now. Whether these are bad signs. Betrayal and death, those are bad signs, aren’t they? I think I should be hanging up on you. I’m remembering that you hurt me.”

But of course she couldn’t hang up.