Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“A major question about the seventeenth century,” Bob said, “is whether the economy was subsistence-oriented, or whether there was already a capitalist mentality, and if there was capitalism, then how sophisticated was it. Real-estate speculation is a good indicator of sophistication, and there was some intriguing material there in Ipswich. Your mother was less than keen on my staying in Jack’s house, but I thought it was just her paranoia. I was still a young bastard. Even now I have no objection to drinking single-malt scotch at a corporate officer’s expense. They’re not magicians, you know — that scotch doesn’t flow from stone. Politically, of course, Jack and I were about as opposed as two people could have been—”

“This was—?”

“November ’69. I was on sabbatical. Sweeting-Aldren was shipping twenty million bucks a month worth of defoliants straight to Vietnam, also spot sales of napalm. As a direct result of which, its general counsel and senior vice president had been able to buy a million bucks’ worth of Revolutionary Era history on Argilla Road. Every morning for a week I walked up the road into Ipswich, a town granted its charter in 1630 by an imperialist-expansionist English crown, a town whose most valuable commodity by far is its own history, a town that prides itself on having been an early center of freedom of conscience and the Tax Revolution of the eighties, that is, the 1680s. While back here my students were freely expressing their consciences in protesting a war of imperialism in Southeast Asia, for which effrontery I don’t believe they enjoyed universal popular support in Ipswich, certainly not on Argilla Road. And not in the Salem courthouse either. Every day for another five days I went there and read the records of a thousand deeds. Deeds: What a word! The fact that the mighty deeds of our forefathers are recorded as the purchase of such and such triangular piece of pasture for three yearling oxen, and the sale of said piece of pasture nine months later for twelve pounds, six shillings. Such were their heroic deeds.”

“But Krasner. She was living with him?”

“No no no. If she’d moved in, it would have been the end of her. It would have made her family.”

“What was she like?”

Bob poured scotch into his tumbler. He tilted the bottle again and poured a smaller splash, and then a very small splash, as if honoring some precise limit. He took a deep breath and turned his head and gazed at the screen door, like a plaintiff recalling his assailant.

“Loud, vulgar, beautiful,” he said. “She had a big Slavic mouth, and a Slavic tilt to her eyes, long auburn hair, maybe a trace of a Slavic accent — at least she liked to drop her definite articles. She was perfect for his purposes. She had bad enough taste and bad enough manners that she’d stretch out on his lap and hang from his neck, just so there was no mistaking their relationship. Then she’d snap her fingers in his face so I could see that she had spirit. Like a half-broken horse or some other cliché that makes men of a certain bent go wild. She had one of those cello voices that make you sure the woman’s entire body is capable of tremendous resonance, under the right circumstances. A cello body too, not skinny — a body to die for. She was the kind of woman who could smoke a cigar with a smile on her face. An object whose pleasure it was to be an object. But even so, there was something strange going on between them, something particularly unloving, that I saw with my very own eyes. She’d sit at the table and stare at him and say, So when are you going to make me vice president? And he’d say, Whenever you want, and she’d say: Tomorrow. He’d shrug and say, Sure, tomorrow, but she’d keep right on staring at him, with her cigar-smoking smile, about fifty teeth showing in two curving rows, and say, Tomorrow? Good! Tomorrow you make me vice president. You’re going to do it tomorrow first thing. You said you would, right? Or are you a liar? I hope you’re not a liar . Bob, you heard him. He says he’s making me vice president tomorrow.”

“But she was a chemist?”

Bob held his tumbler to the light. He seemed oblivious to Louis’s presence. “Every couple of years I get a student like her. You’re almost certain they don’t understand the material, but they’re so full of confidence, and animal energy, and this idea that history is a jungle that they’re wily enough and seductive enough and important enough to survive in, that they really do survive. A dubious article on petroleum is just the kind of work that Anna would have somehow gotten published. The work may be bad, but there’s a vitality in the author that makes it hard to turn it down.”

From the darkness outside the screen door came tearing sounds, accompanied by the faint growling of a cat intent on business. A small animal was being dismembered.

By the late eighteenth century, a person traveling the 240 miles from Boston to New York passed through no more than twenty miles of wooded country. Visitors from Europe commented on how scarce and stunted the trees in America were. They thought the soil must be sterile. They marveled at how the Americans wasted wood for the sake of short-term profit or convenience. At sawmills only the tallest and most perfectly formed trees were milled into lumber; all the less perfect trees had been torched or left to rot. Families built large, poorly insulated houses of wood or of wood-fired brick (the kind of houses, Bob said, that even now charmed visitors to Ipswich) and from October through April they kept fires roaring in every room.

As soon as a white American acquired land from the Indians, he tried to profit from it quickly, cutting the trees for timber or burning them for ashes if local ash demand was great enough. Otherwise he could save labor by simply killing the trees and letting decay bring them down. Crops planted on formerly forested land grew well for a few years, but without trees to capture nutrients, and with a farmer’s endeavors confined within immutable property lines, the soil soon became useless. It was a myth, Bob said, that the Indians had fertilized exhausted land with fish. The way to make a garden last ten thousand years is to rotate crops from field to field. It was the white Americans who sowed alewives with their seeds, and whose fields stank so much that travelers would vomit by the roadside.

Barred from roaming freely, cattle grazed the land more closely than wild animals had. They trampled the soil, squeezing the air out, diminishing water retention. Cape Cod had had no sand dunes when the Europeans came. The dunes developed after cows killed the native grasses and the topsoil blew away.

Lowlands, kept dry for millennia by trees that evaporated rain from their leaves, turned into bogs as soon as they were cleared; mosquitoes, malaria, and thorns moved in. On higher ground, without the shade of trees, a blanket of snow melted quickly and the ground froze deeper, retaining less water when the spring rains came. Flooding became common. Unchecked by tree roots and fallen leaves, the rain stripped the land of nutrients. Raging streams dumped topsoil into bays and harbors. Spawning fish ran into dams and mud-choked water. But in summer and fall, without forests to regulate the flow of water, all the streams became dry gullies, and the naked land baked in the sun.

So it happened that the country whose abundance had sustained the Indians and astonished the Europeans had in less than 150 years become a land of evil-smelling swamps, of howling winds, of failing farms and treeless vistas, of hot summers and bitterly cold winters, of eroded plains and choked harbors. A time-lapse movie of New England would have shown the wealth of the land melting away, the forests shriveling up, the bare soil spreading, the whole fabric of life rotting and unraveling, and you might have concluded that all that wealth had simply vanished — had gone up in smoke or out in sewage or across the sea in ships.