Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Louis scratched his neck. “You say Eileen thought this was a good idea?”

“Oh yes.”

“Then what was she crying for on Thursday.”

“Because. ” A faraway look came into his mother’s eyes, and then they began to glisten, tears seeming to form directly on her dark brown irises, the way rock candy grows wet with itself. “Because, Louis, she had come to me to ask for money.”

He laughed. This was the Eileen who let cars roll into lakes. “So? Write her a check. Or don’t write her a check.”

“Oh!” His mother’s hands rose to her face again, her fingers bent hard at the knuckles. “Oh! I won’t have you talk like this!”

“Like what? ”

“I’m not going to discuss this a moment longer. We must put this out of our minds. I want you to leave now. Do you understand? I have asked you and asked you not to joke about these things, and you will not listen to me. You are worse than your father, who I know you think is very funny. But it is not the least bit funny, it is simply inconsiderate— And don’t you roll your eyes at me! DON’T YOU ROLL YOUR EYES AT ME! Do you understand? I want you to leave the house this minute.”

“All right, all right.” Louis walked into the front hall. “Just drop us a postcard from Monaco, OK?”

Melanie pursued him. The volume of the television had tactfully been increased. “Take that back!”

“All right. Don’t drop us a postcard from Monaco.”

“You really don’t understand how inconsiderate you’re being. Do you?”

When Louis got mad, as opposed to merely feeling righteous, he stuck his chest out and raised his chin and looked down his nose like a sailor or an ugly asking for a fight. He was completely unaware of doing this; the look on his face was dead serious. And as he faced his mother, who after all wasn’t likely to shove him or take a free swing, he looked so incongruously belligerent that her expression softened. “Are you going to punch me, Louis?”

He lowered his chin, angrier still to see he was only amusing her.

“Give me a hug,” his mother said. She laid a hand on his arm and held it firmly when he tried to pull away. She said, “I’m not selfish. Do you understand?”

“Sure.” His hand was on the doorknob. “You’re just upset.”

“That’s right. And it will be some time before I even see the money.”

“Sure.”

“And when I do, I don’t know how much it’s going to be. The figure you mentioned, which you must have gotten from your father — could change a great deal. It’s a very complicated and unfortunate situation. A very — very unfortunate situation.”

“Sure.”

“But no matter what, we’ll all be able to do some nice things.”

“Sure.”

Her irritation flared. “Stop saying that!”

A bowling ball struck pins. A crowd cheered. “Sure,” Louis said.

She dropped his arm. Without looking at her he walked out the door and closed it quietly behind him. Continuing to stare straight ahead, he marched past his car and down the drive, stiff-legged, letting gravity do the work, depressed the way he’d been when he read about the earthquake eight days earlier, depression an isotope of anger: slower and less fierce in its decay, but chemically identical. When his father came into view, at a bend near the bottom of the drive, he hardly noticed him.

“Howdy, Lou.” Bob’s head was aglow in a nest of Gore-Tex and plaid lining. He smelled like burnt marijuana.

“Hello,” Louis said, not breaking stride. Bob smiled as he watched him go and immediately forgot that he’d seen him.

East of the Kernaghan house the land became even more parklike, the yards giving way to estates with hurdles in the pastures and horse trailers in the driveways. A sleek Japanese-made ski boot whooshed past Louis. Pasted to a window was the face of a young girl in a pink church dress. The boot braked and turned and faded a little in the white air as it drove up a hill. The girl jumped from the sliding door running, carrying something in her hand, a book maybe, a Bible.

Between the ages of six and fifteen, Louis himself had returned from church on approximately 350 Sunday mornings. He’d emerged from the back seat with a light head and the sense of a morning’s worth of playtime lost, wasted in basement church-school rooms which had the accidental furniture arrangement and dank smell of places frequented only by transients. In the early years, of course, there were efforts made to cover up the swindle. There were jars of paste and rusty scissors, mimeographed leaves from a coloring book, and brown crayons with which to color the donkey on which Jesus sat. (These crayons were among the first contributors to his sense of the vastness of the past and the strangeness of history, their unfamiliar design and soiled and dried-out wrappers suggesting that this business of coloring donkeys had been going on significantly longer than his life had, longer than anything at real school, where supplies were always new.) There was music — in particular one song about how Jesus loved the little children of the world who came in crayon colors: red and yellow, black and white. There was cottage industry, the manufacture of styrofoam Advent wreaths, construction-paper palms, ceramic Mother’s Day items, and (one morning when Louis dislodged the front tooth of a boy who was using his blue tempera paint, and miraculously wasn’t punished for it) plaster crèche figurines. But he was no more fooled by this veneer of fun than he was fooled at the dentist by the sweetness of the tooth polish. And when he reached seventh grade, the veneer fell away entirely. He was issued a Bible with a red leatherette binding and his name in gilt capitals on the front: louis francis Holland, and spent the Sunday morning hour in an even smaller and more barren cubicle in a different wing of the church, the class size for some reason much diminished in the transfer, all his male friends having dropped out, able now to spend the morning watching the Sunday cartoons to which he himself had become attached during the summer, so that he occupied without challenge the very bottom of a mainly female class in which, there being no grades, he deduced his rank from the fact that unlike all the other Bibles, his had immediately and through no conscious fault of his own acquired a blackened and ragged spine and a back cover with a rip across one corner, to say nothing of the fact that he was called upon to read aloud from this Bible three times as often as anyone else and was forever being told, in a too-gentle voice by a parent named Mr. Hope, to speak up a little, to not be shy. On one occasion the class was asked to describe Jesus the man, and a girl offered that he had been frail and gentle — a characterization with which Mr. Hope took issue, reasoning that this carpenter’s son must have been physically powerful in order to overturn the money changers’ tables in the Temple; Louis thought that for once the frail and gentle Mr. Hope had a point.

Even though their own father used Sunday mornings for swimming rather than for worship, church school had never seemed optional to the Holland kids. Nine months a year Melanie herded them along in front of her, up the rear stairs of the church from the parking lot, and gave them a last push towards the classrooms while she proceeded into the sanctuary, there to occupy a pew close to the pulpit, not because such proximity made her a better Christian (that was for God to decide) but because she liked to have her clothing noticed. She kept going to church even after her children reached fifteen and proved unconfirmable — Eileen because girls with social lives needed to sleep late on Sunday, and Louis because he had a personality clash with every single person in the church. Despite ten years of Sunday school, the permanent escape from all further responsibility turned out to cost him no more than saying nope, I don’t buy it. It was the final proof that the Church’s authority could simply not be compared with the school district’s.