Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Alfred shook his head. “Not your concern. It was never my intention to involve you in any of this. I want you to go and have fun. And be careful . Tell your mother to come up here with a rag.”

With this, he launched himself across the carpeting and shut the bathroom door behind him. Denise, to be doing something, stripped the bed and balled everything up, including her father’s wet pajamas, and carried it downstairs.

“How’s it going up there!” Enid asked from her Christmas-card station in the dining room.

“He wet the bed,” Denise said.

“Oh my word.”

“He doesn’t know his left leg from his right.”

Enid’s face darkened. “I thought maybe he’d listen better to you.”

“Mother, he doesn’t know his left leg from his right .”

“Sometimes the medication—”

“Yeah! Yeah!” Denise’s voice was plangent. “The medication!”

Having silenced her mother, she proceeded to the laundry room to sort and soak the linens. Here Gary, all smiles, accosted her with an O-gauge model railroad engine in his hands.

“I found it,” he said.

“Found what.”

Gary seemed hurt that Denise hadn’t been paying close attention to his desires and activities. He explained that half of his childhood model-railroad set—“the important half, with the cars and the transformer”—had been missing for decades and presumed lost. “I just took the entire storeroom apart,” he said. “And where do you think I found it?”

“Where.”

“Guess,” he said.

“At the bottom of the rope box,” she said.

Gary’s eyes widened. “How did you know that? I’ve been looking for decades .”

“Well, you should have asked me. There’s a smaller box of railroad stuff inside the big rope box.”

“Well, anyway.” Gary shuddered to accomplish a shift of focus away from her and back to him. “I’m glad I had the satisfaction of finding it, although I wish you’d told me.”

“I wish you’d asked!”

“You know, I’m having a great time with this railroad stuff. There are some truly neat things that you can buy.”

“Good! I’m happy for you!”

Gary marveled at the engine he was holding. “I never thought I’d see this again.”

When he was gone and she was alone in the basement, she went to Alfred’s laboratory with a flashlight, knelt among the Yuban cans, and examined the underside of the bench. There, in shaggy pencil, was a heart the size of a human heart:

She slumped onto her heels, her knees on the stone-cold floor. Little Rock. Seniority. Simpler if I just quit .

Absently, she raised the lid of a Yuban can. It was full to the brim with lurid orange fermented piss.

“Oh boy,” she said to the shotgun.

As she ran up to her bedroom and put on her coat and gloves, she felt sorriest about her mother, because no matter how often and how bitterly Enid had complained to her, she’d never got it through her head that life in St. Jude had turned into such a nightmare; and how could you permit yourself to breathe, let alone laugh or sleep or eat well, if you were unable to imagine how hard another person’s life was?

Enid was at the dining-room curtains again, looking out for Chip.

“Going for a walk!” Denise called as she closed the front door behind her.

Two inches of snow lay on the lawn. In the west the clouds were breaking up; violent eye-shadow shades of lavender and robin’s-egg blue marked the cutting edge of the latest cold front. Denise walked down the middle of tread-marked twilit streets and smoked until the nicotine had dulled her distress and she could think more clearly.

She gathered that Don Armour, after the Wroth brothers had bought the Midland Pacific and commenced their downsizing of it, had failed to make the cut for Little Rock and had gone to Alfred and complained. Maybe he’d threatened to brag about his conquest of Alfred’s daughter or maybe he’d asserted his rights as a quasi member of the Lambert family; either way, Alfred had told him to go to hell. Then Alfred had gone home and examined the underside of his workbench.

Denise believed that there had been a scene between Don Armour and her father, but she hated to imagine it. How Don Armour must have loathed himself for crawling to his boss’s boss’s boss and trying to beg or blackmail inclusion in the railroad’s move to Little Rock; how betrayed Alfred must have felt by this daughter who’d won such praise for her work habits; how dismally the entire intolerable scene must have turned on the insertion of Don Armour’s dick into this and that guilty, unexcited orifice of hers. She hated to think of her father kneeling beneath his workbench and locating that penciled heart, hated the idea of Don Armour’s drecky insinuations entering her father’s prudish ears, hated to imagine how keenly it offended a man of such discipline and privacy to learn that Don Armour had been roaming and poking through his house at will.

It was never my intention to involve you in this .

Well, and sure enough: her father had resigned from the railroad. He’d saved her privacy. He’d never breathed a word of any of this to Denise, never given any sign of thinking less of her. For fifteen years she’d tried to pass for a perfectly responsible and careful daughter, and he’d known all along that she was not.

She thought there might be comfort in this idea if she could manage to keep it in her head.

As she left her parents’ neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen. Denise unbuttoned her coat and turned back, taking a shortcut through the field behind her old grade school.

She’d never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

Alfred, likewise, had shown his faith in her by taking her at face value: by declining to pry behind the front that she presented. She’d felt happiest with him when she was publicly vindicating his faith in her: when she got straight A’s; when her restaurants succeeded; when reviewers loved her.

She understood, better than she would have liked to, what a disaster it had been for him to wet the bed in front of her. Lying on a stain of fast-cooling urine was not the way he wished to be with her. They only had one good way of being together, and it wasn’t going to work much longer.

The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away. She understood this better than Chip and Gary did, and so she felt a particular responsibility for him.

To Chip, unfortunately, it seemed that Alfred cared about his children only to the degree that they succeeded. Chip was so busy feeling misunderstood that he never noticed how badly he himself misunderstood his father. To Chip, Alfred’s inability to be tender was the proof that Alfred didn’t know, or care, who he was. Chip couldn’t see what everyone around him could: that if there was anybody in the world whom Alfred did love purely for his own sake, it was Chip. Denise was aware of not delighting Alfred like this; they had little in common beyond formalities and achievements. Chip was the one whom Alfred had called for in the middle of the night, even though he knew Chip wasn’t there.