Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“No,” Eileen said.

“No,” Louis said. Their father swam in earplugs and goggles and had to be physically prodded to leave a pool.

“Well.” Their mother stood up with her hat on, flattened her dress across her hips, and spun around once on her toes. “How do I look?”

There was a silence, Eileen not even glancing.

“Like a million bucks,” Louis said.

“Ha ha ha!” Eileen cawed mirthlessly.

Their mother, without expression, began to reload a new-looking black clutch. “Louis,” she said. “I’m going to have to talk to you.”

“Yeah, well, I already heard it,” Eileen said, stamping across the room. “So I’ll see you guys at the service.” She pulled her raincoat from a hanger and opened the door and reeled back before their father, who, towel around his waist and goggles nestled in the sodden gray fluff below his throat, was advancing like an interested lobster, saying to Eileen, “Well, if it ain’t the Infanta Elena! Dark star of Aragon! Keepress of the emerald scepter!” She swung back into clothes hangers, her fingers splayed and rigid near her ears, while the lobster gathered her waist in the crook of its stout claw. She shied writhingly. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! Oh, you’re still wet!” Color was returning to her cheeks. Her father kissed one and released her, saluted across the room to Louis, and disappeared into the bathroom. Their mother had witnessed none of this.

Fifteen minutes later the four Hollands were sitting in the parental rented two-door Mercury, Melanie at the wheel, the kids in back. The kids’ cars had stayed behind in the hotel lot because Bob Holland considered automobiles an abomination and had threatened to walk if they took more than one. Louis was folded together like a card table and incipiently carsick, with his under-insulated head against a cold fogged window and the taste of heavy rain and diesel exhaust in his throat. On his shins he held his mother’s hat. Someone who was not Louis and probably not Eileen was farting steadily. Bob, looking diminished in a thirty-year-old suit, was glaring out his window at overtaken drivers in the heavy midmoming traffic on Memorial Drive. He thought that driving a car was an act of personal immorality.

Louis pushed out the hinged rear window and put his nose and mouth against the flat surface of the cooler air outside. He was beginning to relate his carsickness to flatten the left frontal portion of the skull and immediately terminate all brain activity , the imagination of death having advanced covertly and autonomously, penetrating his consciousness only now. He managed to suck a fortifying breath of air in through the window. “Do you think she knew it was an earthquake?”

Eileen gave him an ugly, morose look and retreated within herself.

“Who?” Melanie said.

“You know. Rita. Do you think she knew the shaking was an earthquake?”

“It sounds,” Melanie said, “as if she was far too inebriated to think much of anything.”

“It’s kind of sad,” Louis said, “don’t you think?”

“There are worse ways to go. Better this than cirrhosis in a hospital bed.”

“She’s left you all this money. Don’t you think it’s kind of sad?”

“She didn’t leave me any money. She didn’t leave me anything but a quarter of a million dollars in illegally secured debts, if you want to know the truth.”

“Oh come on, Mel.”

“Well, she did, Bob. She had a mortgage on a house that didn’t belong to her. The bank in Ipswich was unaware of this little fact, which—”

“Your mother’s father,” Bob said, “left everything he had in a trust—”

“Bob, this doesn’t interest Louis.”

“Sure it does,” Louis said.

“And it’s not particularly his business either.”

“Oh, well.”

“But the basic point,” Melanie continued, “is that by the time my father died he had a very clear idea of the kind of woman he’d taken for a second wife, and while he had a duty to leave her comfortable he also didn’t want her to fritter away an estate that he eventually wanted to go to his children—”

Bob barked with delight. “Meaning he didn’t leave your mother a cent! And not a cent to your Aunt Heidi either! He wrote exactly the kind of spiteful, arrogant, dead-handed, lawyer’s lawyer will you’d have expected from him. Everybody beggared, everybody bitter, and a committee of three lawyers from the Bank of Boston meeting twice a year to write themselves checks on the fund.”

“I like the way you honor the dead.”

“Could you open a window a little?”

“And Mel’s going to right a few wrongs now, isn’t she? See, Lou, after Heidi died it all came to devolve on your mother. It was supposed to go to the surviving daughters. Your mother’s in exactly the same position your grandfather was ten years ago. Only the rich have gotten richer, haven’t they? Your mother’s in a position to build some schools and clinics, maybe give a gym to Wellesley. Or help the homeless, huh, Mel?”

Melanie tilted her head back, removing herself from the discussion. Eileen smiled bitterly. Louis asked again to have a window opened.

The memorial service, which was to have been held in a meadow in Essex County if the sun had shone, had been shifted to the ballroom of the Royal Sonesta, a luxury hotel overlooking the mouth of the Charles at the extreme northeast corner of Cambridge. For a moment, when Louis followed his parents through the doorway, he thought they’d entered the wrong room; milling in sad social lumps were, it seemed to him, the very people he’d seen marching against abortion on Tremont Street a week earlier — the same inflexible middle-aged female faces, the same smattering of vacant-eyed men, the same curtain-colored clothing and sensible shoes. But then, alerted by the beeline Eileen was making, he saw Peter Stoorhuys.

Peter was standing slightly apart from a group of three uneasy-looking men in nice suits, three obvious executives or professionals. With his legs spread and his shoulders thrown back and his hands shallowly in his pockets, he looked like a person to whom the world may come if it really must. Eileen, colliding with him, pressed her ear against one of his houndstooth lapels and rested one hand on his stomach, the other on his shoulder.

Louis stopped in his tracks and stared at the embrace with his hands on his hips. Then, altering his trajectory as though a repulsive field now surrounded Eileen, he caught up with Bob and the two of them shuffled after Melanie, whose approach was causing the three gentlemen in suits to break into smiles of relief. She brushed cheeks with two of them, shook hands with the third. Peter freed himself from Eileen and came over to Melanie with his arm outstretched, but suddenly she was keeping her hands to herself. She smiled glacially. “Hello Peter.” Bob Holland, like a grateful second-stringer, claimed the unshaken hand and pumped it, but Melanie’s snub had not escaped Eileen’s attention; she glowered at Louis. Louis smiled back pleasantly. He was interested to see that at some point during the week his parents had made Peter’s acquaintance.

“This is our son, Louis,” Melanie said. “Louis, this is Mr. Aldren, Mr. Tabscott, Mr. Stoorhuys—”

Mr. Who, Mr. Who, Mr.—?

“Good to know you, Louis,” they chorused, pressing his flesh. The same courtesies were then extended to Eileen.

“Peter’s dad,” Mr. Stoorhuys added for Louis’s benefit, waving a hand at his son, to whom he bore a resemblance both unmistakable and unflattering to himself. Seen from close up, Mr. Stoorhuys did not actually match his two companions. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott appeared to be real Men, men with the beefy faces and inflamed-looking bull’s nostrils of frequent beefeaters, men who were emphatically not “young men” and even more emphatically not “women.” They had gold chains across their necktie knots and a hard red shrewdness in their eyes.