Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Daughters don’t inherit?”

She ignored this small temerity. “The money is already ruining my brothers. I’m not going to let it ruin me. But that’s not even the reason. The reason is the money has blood on it. I can smell it in my checking account, the blood from a river of meat. That’s what McCaskill is, a river of meat. They trade in grain, too, but even there a lot of it goes to feed the river. You probably had McCaskill meat for breakfast today.”

“They have a thing called scrapple here. It’s said to be made out of organs and eyeballs.”

“That’s the McCaskill way, use everything.”

“I think scrapple is more Pennsylvania Dutch.”

“Have you ever been to a pig factory? Chicken farm? Stockyard? Slaughterhouse?”

“I’ve smelled them from afar.”

“It’s a river of meat. I’m making my thesis film about it.”

“I’d like to see this film.”

“It’s unwatchable. Everybody hates it, except Nola, who’s vegan. Nola thinks I’m a genius.”

“Remind me what vegan is?”

“No animal products of any kind. I know I need to go that way myself, but I basically live on toast and butter, so it’s not easy.”

Everything she said fascinated me. We seemed to be heading toward the train station, and I was afraid that we’d part ways without my having fascinated her at all.

“I can assign a story on scrapple,” I said. “Investigate where it comes from, what it’s made of, how the animals are treated. I could write it myself. Everybody complains about scrapple, nobody knows what it is. That’s the definition of a good story.”

Anabel frowned. “It’s sort of my idea, though. Not yours.”

“I’m trying to make amends here.”

“First I’d need to find out whether McCaskill makes scrapple.”

“I’m telling you, it’s Pennsylvania Dutch. I was the one who brought it up, anyway.”

She stopped on the sidewalk and faced me full-on. “Is this what we’re going to do? Are we going to compete? Because I’m not sure I need that.”

I was happy that she spoke of us as something potentially ongoing; distressed that we might be something she didn’t need. Somehow, already, the decision was hers to make. My interest in her had quietly been assumed.

“You’re the artist,” I said. “I’m just the journalist.”

Her eyes searched my face. “You’re very pretty ,” she said, not kindly. “I’m not sure I trust you.”

“Fine,” I said, smarting. “Thank you for showing me Thomas Eakins.”

“I’m sorry.” She pressed a gloved hand to her eyes. “Don’t be hurt. I just suddenly have a bad headache and need to go home.”

When I got back to campus, I thought of calling her to see how she was feeling, but the word pretty was still rankling, and our date had been so unlike what I’d hoped for, so much not the dreamlike continuation of our phone call, that the needle of my sexual compass was swinging back toward Lucy and her plan. My mother had lately taken to warning me not to make the mistake she’d made and fall too hard for a person at too tender an age — to think of my career first, by which she meant that I should first make money and then choose the most expensive house, etc. — and I certainly felt safe from falling too hard for Lucy.

In my Sunday-night call to Denver, I mentioned that I’d been to the art museum with one of the heirs of the McCaskill fortune. This was weak of me, but I felt I’d disappointed my mother by failing to make the right sort of Ivy League friends. I seldom had news that cheered her.

“Did you like her?” my mother asked.

“I did, actually.”

“Your father’s friend Jerry Knox spent his entire career with McCaskill. They’re well known for having the highest ethical principles. Only in America can you find a company like that…”

I settled in for another lecture. Since my father died, my mother had become a droner, as if to fill the hole in her life with verbiage. She’d also frosted her hair a yellowish gray to make herself look older, more like a widow, but she was still only forty-four and I hoped she would remarry, this time choosing somebody rich and politically right of center, after the expiration of whatever she deemed a proper interval of bereavement. Not that she’d done much actual grieving. She’d used the interval instead to be angry at my father and the pointless way he’d died. It had fallen to me and my sisters to be devastated by the plane crash. I’d already begun to take a kinder view of my father when it happened, and when I arrived at the high-school auditorium for his memorial service and saw the overflow crowd of colleagues and former students, I felt proud to be the son of a man who never met a person he didn’t want to like. My sisters both gave eulogies whose effusion seemed pointed at his widow, who sat next to me and chewed her lip and stared straight ahead. She was still dry-eyed when the service ended. “He was a very good man ,” she said.

I’d since spent three increasingly unbearable summers with her. The highest-paying job I could find was at the Atkinson’s Drugs branch where she herself worked. I stayed out late every evening with my friends and returned home after midnight to foul smells in our bathroom. My mother’s colon was unhappy not only with me but with my sisters. Cynthia had dropped out of grad school to become a labor organizer in California’s Central Valley; Ellen was living in Kentucky with a gray-bearded banjo player and teaching remedial English. Both of them seemed happy, but all my mother could see, and drone about, was the waste of their abilities.

I owed my drugstore job to Dick Atkinson, the owner of the chain. During my second summer with my mother, her bowel’s irritation was aggravated by Dick’s courtship of her. Dick was a nice guy and a staunch Republican, and I felt that my mother, who’d always admired his entrepreneurship, could do a lot worse. But Dick was twice divorced, and she, who had stuck it out with my father, disapproved of discarding spouses and wanted no part in it. Dick considered this ridiculous and believed that he could wear her down. By the end of the summer, she’d worked herself into such a state that her gastroenterologist had to put her on prednisone. A few months later, she’d quit her job at the pharmacy. She was now working, at what I suspected were slave wages, for the congressional campaign of Arne Holcombe, a developer of downtown Denver office space. When I’d gone home for a third summer with her, I’d found her health improved but her idealization of Arne Holcombe so over the top, so incessantly and droningly expressed, that I worried for her sanity.

“What are the polls showing?” I asked her when she’d exhausted the subject of McCaskill’s contributions to the moral fiber of the nation. “Does Arne have a chance?”

“Arne has run the most exemplary campaign the state of Colorado has ever seen,” she said. “We’re still suffering from the aftereffects of a lowlife president who put his lowlife cronies’ interests before the public good. What a gift that was to the special-interest-pandering Democrats and their sickening, grinning peanut farmer. Why any rational person would think that Arne has anything to do with Watergate, it mystifies me, Tom, it really does. But the other side slanders and slanders and panders and panders. Arne refuses to pander. Why would he pander? Is it really so hard to understand that a person with twenty million dollars and a thriving business only descends into the gutter of Colorado politics if he’s animated by civic responsibility?”

“So, that’s a no?” I said. “The polls aren’t looking good?”

I could never get a straight answer from her anymore. She droned on about Arne’s honesty and integrity, Arne’s fiercely independent mind, Arne’s sensible business-based solution to the problem of stagflation, and I hung up the phone still not knowing what the polls showed.