Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“We started getting Christmas cards from him. A case of Dom Pérignon every year on December 22. He came to Chicago on business and took me to lunch and then out for more drinks and a walk in Lincoln Park. He asked me, Was I taking care of his little girl? (She wasn’t little and she wasn’t his; which was why he laughed. She dreaded him and warned me about him and refused to speak to me because I was too good-natured and too much of a young bastard to send his champagne back and say no to his invitations.) — Did I have tenure yet? I did? Well, that was great, it meant I could preach revolution eight days a week and never know financial insecurity until the revolution actually came, and even then I’d have it made as the Commissar of Marxist History. And he meant it: he thought it was great. It’s very weird, Lou, to be around a man to whom you obviously matter in some obscure but major way. Whom you somehow render almost silly with confused emotions. He made me promise to take care of his little girl, and be sure and come out and visit us. And we did go out, because your mother couldn’t stop me. You don’t remember it, but you were in Ipswich in the summer of ’69, you and Eileen and even your mother for a little while, she was mainly seeing friends in Boston—”

“Were there horses?”

“Horses? Maybe, across the road. But anyway, when I came back in November the red carpet was rolled out for me. There was a man from Sweeting-Aldren waiting in a company car when I flew in, and lunch for Jack and me on Argilla Road — oysters, lobsters, champagne. I wanted to get to work in the afternoon, but he told me, You’ve got tenure, what do you need to work for? Not quite mocking me. More like suggesting to me a way of thinking that he’s not sure I’m smart enough to learn. He showed me his new wine cellar, his new car, his new color TV set in a hardwood console. He drove me to the beach, which he might as well have owned, because it was empty in both directions, and he sat on the hood of his Jaguar and blew cigarette smoke at the ocean, and the waves were collapsing slavishly at his feet. He took me down to the marina and showed me his new boat, which he’d christened Willing Thing . Painted on the bow! Willing Thing ! He drove me to a house on a hill, a rambling Victorian affair out closer to Cape Ann. He parked across the mouth of the driveway, got out of the car with his back to me, and I realized he was pissing in the white gravel. He pisses out half a bottle of Dom Pérignon, a little murky gray river flowing down between his feet. He hops to settle his thing back in his underwear and tells me that this was the house he’d really wanted but the current owners wouldn’t sell. He stands there in the driveway looking up the hill. He says he guesses that Melanie’s told me her grandpa got wiped out in the crash of ’29. I say, Yep, that’s what she told me. He says, Damn right, the only thing is that it was spring of ’28. Every market bloated, everybody getting richer, nobody getting poorer. He says, It took a rare kind of man to go all-out bankrupt in the spring of ’28. He says that a friend of his dropped by his office in the winter of ’27-’28 and mentioned that Sam Dennis had put his houses up for surety on loans to cover his stock-market losses. ‘And Bob,’ he says, ‘even then the man couldn’t see what was coming. I shouted at that asshole from three in the afternoon until ten at night before he let me have the town house. It was already under liens that cost me my own house and every dollar I could borrow on my word to get free of. Three weeks later he was dead. And that family still thought money grew like moss in bank vaults. They would have been out on the street like a bunch of zoo animals staring at the fucking traffic, Bob, if it wasn’t for me. They were so criminally dim-witted you can’t believe it, and they never even knew it, because of me. Believe it: I was that family’s knight in shining armor.’

“I ask him, ‘Why?’

“He gets back in the car. He says, ‘Because I was afraid of God.’

“‘Yeah, I bet.’

“‘I was afraid of God. Believe it, Bob. I was afraid of the old man in flowing robes.’

“We were back on Route 133 and we saw a girl hitchhiking, long hair, tasseled leather jacket, guitar. Jack slows the car down and pulls even with her. She’s picking up her guitar when he steps on the gas and pulls away. I thought this was just some meanness of his, teasing hitchhikers, but he was shaking his head. ‘Flat,’ he says, and I say, ‘What?’ —‘Nothing in her shirt,’ he says. And we drive along, and after a while he says, ‘There’s not a one of them that won’t get in the car.’ And we go back to Argilla Road for Beluga caviar, pheasant, and truffles, everything selected for maximum expense. Anna comes over from Peabody after work, he’s said in advance that there’s somebody he wants me to meet—”

“Really sorry here,” Louis said. “But I don’t see how you could have spent five minutes with this guy.”

“How I could not hate him? Of course I hated him. At night I wondered if I was going to end up killing him, in the name of the people. But to be with him was a different story. There was a magnetism. He dressed like the English landed gentry; I remember one maroon velvet smoking jacket in particular. He was sixty-nine years old, but his skin was still tight and unspotted. He was hard and shiny and elegant, like death, and I’m afraid there’s nobody alive who can’t find something to enjoy there — in the shining killer, the way he stands apart from the bodies piling up in Southeast Asia. All that carnage can be as sexy from a distance as it’s sickening at close range. And when you were with Jack Kernaghan, you felt that that distance was absolutely maintained. You were at an endless masque of the red death, up in that castle on the hill. He was my proof that there really was something there — there in the boardrooms, there in the M-I complex — that unquestionably deserved our hatred. You know how easily we’re led astray by our idealism: how easy it is to think that intellectual honesty demands that you forgive those guys, and see them as human beings like yourself, as pawns in the grip of history. Jack was a gorgeous proof of the contrary. He was willful. He luxuriated in being a jerk. And I deliberately provoked him, see, because I was a young bastard just like you, and he couldn’t hurt me. Or so I thought.”

Jack said his father was a schoolteacher, “a ridiculous old fart,” which you took to mean an upright and selfless man who taught his children what was right and what was wrong. Assume that the young Jack bought it. Assume that he was awed by his father’s rectitude. Assume that when he left home for college at sixteen he believed that by living right he would earn a trip to heaven, and by living wrong he’d go straight to the pools of sulfur. Assume he took the Host on Sundays and believed it was his Savior’s body, and loved his Savior as his father did.

He worked summers for a law firm in Orono. He found himself accepted into the law school at Harvard, and, excelling there, he joined a partnership in Boston and continued to take the Host on Sundays. With so much credit on both his heavenly and his earthly balance sheets, he must have been stunned by the vehemence with which the family of his intended wife rejected him. Mr. Dennis, having five more daughters after Edith to get rid of, was halfhearted in his opposition, but Mrs. Dennis made up for this by finding every conceivable aspect of Kernaghan’s person inappropriate, not just that he was Catholic, not just that he came from a poor family in “the woods of Maine,” not just that he’d deceived them all by courting Edith outside her own home, but that he was dark-haired and short . She confided to Edith that she’d had to choke back a laugh the first time she saw her with Kernaghan. It was like a freak show! It was inconceivable! A giantess and a dwarf! A duchess and her tailor! (In fact it was a matter of an inch and a half.) She expressed her firm intention to boycott the nuptials, and immediately severed relations with the family at whose house the lovebirds had become acquainted.