Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

If you’d looked very closely, though, you would have seen that the wealth had merely been transformed and concentrated. All the beavers that had ever drawn breath in Franklin County, Massachusetts, had been transmuted into one solid-silver tea service in a parlor on Myrtle Street in Boston. The towering white pines from ten thousand square miles of Commonwealth had together built one block of brick town houses on Beacon Hill, with high windows and a fleet of carriages, chandeliers from Paris and settees upholstered in Chinese silk, all of it occupying less than an acre. A plot of land that had once supported five Indians in comfort was condensed into a gold ring on the finger of Isaiah Dennis, the great-uncle of Melanie Holland’s grandfather.

And when New England had been fully drained — when its original abundance had shrunk into a handful of neighborhoods so compact that a god could have hidden them from sight with his fingertips — then the poor English farmers who had become poor American farmers flocked to the cities and became poor workers in the foundries and cotton mills that the holders of concentrated wealth were building to increase their income. Now a time-lapse movie would have shown an exfoliation of red brick, the damming of new streams, the disemboweling of the barren land for the clay and iron ore within it, the blackening of the air, the confluence of freighters from Charleston carrying cotton, the spread of worker housing, the spread of iron, the tides of excrement and urine, the slaughter of the last wild birds that anyone would dream of eating, the smoke of trains bringing meat from Chicago to feed the workers, the weeding over of farmland, the final death of barns and farmhouses at the hands of the newly opened Middle West, but most of all: a general increase in wealth. Melanie’s great-grandfather Samuel Dennis and his industrialist and banker accomplices had learned to burn not just the trees of their own age but the trees of the Carboniferous as well, now available as coal. They’d learned to exploit the wealth not only of their own home soil but of the cottonland of Mississippi and the cornland of Illinois. “Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black.”

Melanie’s grandfather, Samuel Dennis III, had a Marlborough Street town house, a summer house east of Ipswich, a Dusenberg Roadster and some garden-variety debts, and he was skippering a family of six daughters, only one of them married, when a devil of the period moved him to install a stock ticker in his office on Liberty Square.

For decades the office had been little more than a place to smoke cigars and write checks to the nephews and nieces whose trusts Dennis executed. It was the terminus of various income streams rising in the mill towns north of Boston — streams that by 1920 were showing a propensity to silt up and run dry — and was the depot of old, old dollars: dollars with beaver blood on them (and mink blood and cod blood), dollars that smelled of black pepper and Jamaican rum, piney dollars from clear-cut Dennis landholdings, rusty war dollars, dollars damp and sour with the sweat of female loom operators, odd dollars of obscure provenance which at some point had decided to come along for the ride, all the dollars encrusted with long-compounded interest and no dollar, no matter how musty, any less a dollar than all the rest. Certainly a democratic nation’s stock market made no distinction between old wealth and new.

Family oral history had it, Bob said, that Dennis was very slow to realize when his speculations ruined him. For several weeks, one winter in the late twenties, he came home to Marlborough Street wearing expressions of deeper and deeper puzzlement. And then one night he died.

His body had hardly reached room temperature when his family discovered they were broke. There were even liens, or so they later maintained, on the china and linens. Daughters and widow alike faced the prospect of becoming the wards of moralizing aunts and uncles, and yet (or so they later maintained) it wasn’t themselves they felt sorry for, it was their house on Marlborough Street and their house in Ipswich. Who could ever groom and pamper those houses as the Dennises had done?

The female Dennises were on the brink of despair when their lawyer informed them that Sam Dennis, a month before he died, had quietly transferred the deed to the house on Marlborough Street to his married daughter, Edith — or rather, to be totally precise, to Edith’s husband, John Kernaghan. Though stripped of its furnishings, the beloved house was saved.

In later years no one could say exactly how Kernaghan had acquired the house. It was possible that he himself had warned the patriarch of impending disaster and helped him out. But “fond” though the Dennises were of the younger man, they were reluctant to give him so much credit. Ever since Edith married him, said family oral history, the Dennis girls had been giggling and shaking their heads good-naturedly about the figure cut by this dark, taciturn, somewhat diminutive young attorney who hailed from the obscurity of Maine’s woods and who was so awed by the grand Dennises that he escorted Edith home only on holidays, hardly opening his mouth even then. But somehow this same Jack Kernaghan — with the loving guidance and support of the fallen patriarch, of course — had rescued the brick shell of the Dennis grandeur, and he went on to support his mother-in-law and five sisters-in-law through the nadir of the Great Depression. He was an odd bird, said family oral history. He was such a workaholic that he never once took a week’s vacation before he’d put the last of his sisters-in-law through private school. Knowing the importance of a summer house to the Dennises’ mental health, he rented them a place in Newport for six weeks every summer, but he didn’t much care for the water himself, and so he stayed in Boston, working. He could afford to hire a housekeeper for his mother-in-law, but he himself (no doubt because he came from Maine’s woods) was such a fan of fresh air that he walked nearly a mile to work every day. Everybody knew he always owned exactly three suits, a ratty one, an everyday one, and a good one. Altogether an odd, odd man, said family oral history, but he had done the Dennises a marvelous service, and they were grateful, yes: grateful.

“And he resented the hell out of them,” Louis said.

“No. Certainly not by the time I got to know him. I think he had too much contempt for the Dennises to resent them as equals. He was simply bitter cold. To your mother, to your Aunt Heidi, to your grandmother, in fact to everyone in the family except me. The first time we met was right before Edith finally divorced him. He asked me what I did. I said I was a student. He asked me what I planned to do with my degree, and when I told him I was going to teach, he threw back his head and laughed and walked out of the room laughing. I thought that was the end of that. But then a few years later he showed up at our wedding, uninvited, with Rita on his arm, and he was laughing as if he’d been laughing ever since I saw him walk out of the room, and your mother said it was the first time he’d kissed her in almost twenty years. It was pretty awkward for me, because half the people at the reception were looking daggers at him, and he made it clear that the reason he’d come was that he liked me: me personally. He patronized me, he asked me about my teaching and laughed at my answers, but there was something genuine going on — I could feel it. It was like he was drunk, almost like he was infatuated with me and he should have known better but he couldn’t help himself.