Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

That they married anyway, knowing it would set back any social ambitions that either might have harbored, would indicate that there really was love between them. Could Kernaghan have come to hate Edith so passionately without the knowledge that he’d loved her, once? A man hates in his wife those traits that he hates in her family; he hates the proof of how deeply the traits are rooted, how ineluctable heredity. Living for four years in near-total estrangement from the Dennises, and so seldom having the mother or sisters handy to compare with Edith, Kernaghan could only see her in her singularity, her prettiness, her passion for him. What’s more, he must have formed a similarly hopeful image of her family.

Because how else to explain the colossal good turn he did the Dennises? How else to explain why he nearly ruined himself financially to buy their house, and then undertook to support the very women who’d considered him such dirt that they’d skipped his wedding? If he’d wanted revenge in 1928, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to sit back and laugh at their ruin. Any person of ordinary moral strength would have considered him well within his rights.

He must still have been trying to win their love. He’d seen so little of them in the previous four years that he actually believed that if he saved them they would love him or at the very least respect him. (Because, again, after all, he could never have hated them so intensely later on if they hadn’t mattered to him, once.)

In their new life, the Dennises were, by necessity, civil to their benefactor. Four years earlier Kernaghan would gladly have settled for civility. But now — considering the risks he’d run in saving them, considering the major expenditure of selflessness — he required more. Now the time had come when they must love him. A better person than he would not have expected less.

But of course the Dennises couldn’t love him. Even if he hadn’t seen them at their lowest, even if he hadn’t had the temerity to rescue them, they were too in love with their own Brahmin selves and too secure in their sheer feminine quantity to need anything from him but money. Requests for school tuition, for clothing, for summer vacations, for trousseaus were communicated to Kernaghan through Edith, who tried for a while to mediate between her family and the commander of their occupied house, but who, inevitably, now that they all lived together, defected to the Dennis side. There were so many of them and only one of him. The women had all day to infect Edith with their pretensions and prejudices and artificial wants. Kernaghan’s children had seven mothers and one father; the father was the little man who worked sixty hours a week to make the household run.

Still he led an upright life. Melanie could remember a time when he had come straight home from work every night and read to her and her brother Frank (Frank the only male besides his father in a house of nine females), had drunk brandy and smoked cigarettes in his study, shined his own shoes and brushed his own coat before he went to bed. She remembered him returning from his separate church on Sunday, later than the rest of the family, so that even Sunday was like a pleasure boat that he always came too late to catch. He walked beside it on the shore, minding his own business unless a child happened to step off the boat and disturb him in his reading of the newspapers that had accumulated since the previous Sunday. She claimed to remember a warmth, from the time when she was little. Maybe he already hated his wife and in-laws, but something kept him in their service, and it almost had to have been his fear of hell. He as good as admitted it to you: he’d been trying, in 1928 and for ten years after, to win the favor not only of the Dennises but of God as well, and though he was clearly failing with the Dennises he still hoped he might succeed with God.

Then God killed Frank.

It happened during one of the Augusts when the family was doing its bathing-in-the-moming-tea-parties-in-the-aftemoon thing outside Newport and Kernaghan was drafting wills and covenants in Boston, and bacterial meningitis could carry off an unlucky boy in ninety-six hours. Melanie remembered Jack’s state when he arrived in Newport. No sorrow visible, only rage. Rage at his wife and mother-in-law and daughter and youngest sister-in-law for not taking Frank’s fever seriously, for not calling him (Jack) sooner, for following the doctor’s orders, for leaving Frank in the care of the backwoods Newport hospital, for letting Frank die, for killing Frank, for murdering Frank with their stupidity, for being Dennises, for making a hell out of his life. Melanie, six, was rushed from the house as if her father’s rage had physically endangered her. It was a shock that no one recovered from, a shock that set Jack ringing like a bell, like a planet struck by a meteor and still vibrating thirty years later, so that he’d tell you, over foie gras in his house in Ipswich:

“That family showed me what this country would be like if it was run by women. It’s simple — you spend somebody else’s money. Let’s spend a hundred billion on the poor, let’s spend a hundred billion on the Negroes. All the sentiments are very fine, but where’s that money going to come from? Industry’s what puts bread on their table, and you’re lucky if they even see you as a necessary evil. They look at you, they look at industry as if you’re dirt, beneath contempt, they smile behind their hands at you. Their whole future could be dying, and they wouldn’t even know it until the ax hit them too.”

He never mentioned Frank’s name in Bob’s hearing, but he loved to talk about what he did to the Dennis women the year he “came to his senses.” How the kitchen began to smell like a landfill after he dismissed the housekeeper and the women waited, as days turned to weeks, for someone, anyone besides them, to wash the pots and take the trash out. How they found a Negro girl willing to work in exchange for meals and extra groceries, and how he then cut the grocery allowance in half (eating magnificent lunches himself and bringing his little girl, Melanie, elaborate and nutritious treats), and corrupted the Negro girl with candy and whiskey and cigarettes and screwed her in the pantry. How he let two sisters-in-law start a new fall semester at Smith and sent a letter after them, informing the college that he had no intention of paying their bill. How he did the same thing to his mother-in-law, quietly cutting off her credit at Jordan Marsh and Steams, setting up scenes where personnel humiliated her. How he canceled another sister-in-law’s wedding on short notice, informing her that her intended was a weakling. And how, for himself, in the space of a year, he bought twenty suits, a hundred shirts, diamond cuff links, Italian shoes. How he entertained cheap women, a new one every week, at the Ritz-Carlton and the Statler and other venues where an audience of the Dennises’ friends was guaranteed. How he made the Dennis women pay.

The same year Frank died, a mustached entrepreneur named Alfred Sweeting was acquiring land in Peabody to build the first commercial-scale nitrate plant in New England. In a process developed by the Germans, the nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen of clean air and clean water were transformed into ammonium nitrate for high explosives. Production began in 1938, and in 1942 Sweeting merged with J. R. Aldren Pigments, his industrial next-door neighbor in Peabody, a maker of dyes and paints that was seeking improved contacts with the military. For three and a half years, battleships painted with Aldren’s grays and B-17s camouflaged in Aldren’s browns and olive drab pounded Fascists with endless charges of Sweeting nitrates.

The Sweeting/Aldren merger had been brokered by Troob, Smith, Kernaghan & Lee; and Kernaghan, a specialist in corporate law, became the company’s counsel in every sense of the word. He oversaw the acquisition of the patents and the small single-product companies that enabled Sweeting-Aldren, when the war ended, to retool and diversify. Eulogists at his funeral in 1982 would credit him with having influenced the company to expand early and vigorously in the direction of pesticides — a decision which, given the fifties mania for good-looking apples and tomatoes and for suppressing all infestations of indoor vermin and outdoor weeds however faintly reminiscent of Communists, was the single most profitable in the company’s history. By 1949 Kernaghan and a staff of four at Troob, Smith were working exclusively on patent, liability, and contract law for Sweeting-Aldren, and he was buying discounted shares of common stock at a pace that resulted in his election to the board in 1953. He would later tell Bob that in 1956, the last year of his marriage and his last year in private practice, he had thirty-one different women on more than 220 separate occasions and personally pulled down $184,000 in fees, after taxes, from Sweeting-Aldren. A 1957 advertisement in Fortune boasted that in the previous year, according to reliable scientific estimates, Sweeting-Aldren’s Green Garden™ and Saf-tee-tox™ product lines had killed 21 billion caterpillars, 26.5 billion cockroaches, 37 billion mosquitoes, 46.5 billion aphids, and 60 billion miscellaneous harmful household and economic pests in the United States alone. Lined up hind legs to feelers, pests killed by the Green Garden™ and Saf-tee-tox™ product lines would circle the earth at the equator twenty-four times.