Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Dad,” Aaron pleaded, following Gary up the stairs to the second floor, “what do I tell her?”

“Tell her to call 911. Use your cell phone, call an ambulance.” Gary raised his voice: “Caroline? Call 911!”

Nine years ago, after a midwestern trip whose particular torments had included ice storms in both Philly and St. Jude, a four-hour runway delay with a whining five-year-old and a screaming two-year-old, a night of wild vomiting by Caleb in reaction (according to Caroline) to the butter and bacon fat in Enid’s holiday cooking, and a nasty spill that Caroline took on her in-laws’ ice-covered driveway (her back trouble dated from her field-hockey days at Friends’ Central, but she now spoke of having “reactivated” the injury on that driveway), Gary had promised his wife that he would never again ask her to go to St. Jude for Christmas. But now his parents had come to Philly eight years in a row, and although he disapproved of his mother’s obsession with Christmas — it seemed to him a symptom of a larger malaise, a painful emptiness in Enid’s life — he could hardly blame his parents for wanting to stay home this year. Gary also calculated that Enid would be more willing to leave St. Jude and move east if she’d had her “one last Christmas.” Basically, he was prepared to make the trip, and he expected a modicum of cooperation from his wife: a mature willingness to consider the special circumstances.

He shut himself inside his study and locked the door against the shouts and whimpers of his family, the barrage of feet on stairs, the pseudo-emergency. He lifted the receiver of his study phone and turned off the cordless.

“This is ridiculous,” Enid said in a defeated voice. “Why don’t you call me back?”

“We haven’t quite decided about December,” he said, “but we may very well come to St. Jude. In which case, I think you should stop here after the cruise.”

Enid was breathing rather loudly. “We’re not making two trips to Philadelphia this fall,” she said. “And I want to see the boys at Christmas, and so as far as I’m concerned this means you’re coming to St. Jude.”

“No, Mother,” he said. “No, no, no. We haven’t decided anything.”

“I promised Jonah—”

“Jonah’s not buying the tickets. Jonah’s not in charge here. So you make your plans, we’ll make ours, and hopefully everything will work out.”

Gary could hear, with strange clarity, the rustle of dissatisfaction from Enid’s nostrils. He could hear the seashore of her respiration, and all at once he realized.

“ Caroline? ” he said. “ Caroline, are you on the line? ”

The breathing ceased.

“ Caroline, are you eavesdropping? Are you on the line? ”

He heard a faint electronic click, a spot of static.

“Mom, sorry—”

Enid: “What on earth?”

Unbelievable! Unfuckingbelievable! Gary dropped the receiver on his desk, unlocked the door, and ran down the hallway past a bedroom in which Aaron was standing at his mirror with his brow wrinkled and his head at the Flattering Angle, past the main staircase on which Caleb was clutching his catalogue like a Jehovah’s Witness with a pamphlet, to the master bedroom where Caroline was curled up fetally on a Persian rug, in her muddy clothes, a frosty gelpack pressed into her lower back.

“ Are you eavesdropping on me? ”

Caroline shook her head weakly, perhaps hoping to suggest that she was too infirm to have reached the phone by the bed.

“Is that a no? You’re saying no? You weren’t listening?”

“No, Gary,” she said in a tiny voice.

“I heard the click, I heard the breathing—”

“No.”

“Caroline, there are three phones on this line, I’ve got two of them in my study, and the third one’s right here. Hello?”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just picked up the phone—” She inhaled through gritted teeth. “To see if the line was free. That’s all.”

“And sat and listened! You were eavesdropping! Like we’ve talked and talked and talked about not doing!”

“Gary,” she said in a piteous little voice, “I swear to you I wasn’t. My back is killing me. I couldn’t reach to put the phone back for a minute. I put it on the floor. I wasn’t eavesdropping. Please be nice to me.”

That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for ecstasy — that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and red-cheeked and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on; that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for her — only deepened his feeling of betrayal. He stormed back up the hall to his study and slammed the door. “Mother, hello, I’m sorry.”

But the line was dead. He had to dial St. Jude now at his own expense. Through the window overlooking the back yard he could see sunlit, clamshell-purple rain clouds, steam rising off the monkey puzzle tree.

Because she wasn’t paying for the call, Enid sounded happier. She asked Gary if he’d heard of a company called Axon. “It’s in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania,” she said. “They want to buy Dad’s patent. Here, I’ll read you the letter. I’m a little upset about this.”

At CenTrust Bank, where Gary now ran the Equities Division, he’d long specialized in large-cap securities and never much concerned himself with small fry. The name Axon was not familiar to him. But as he listened to his mother read the letter from Mr. Joseph K. Prager at Bragg Knuter & Speigh, he felt he knew these people’s game. It was clear that the lawyer, in drafting a letter and sending it to an old man with a midwestern address, had offered Alfred no more than a tiny percentage of the patent’s actual value. Gary knew the way these shysters worked. In Axon’s position he would have done the same.

“I’m thinking we should ask for ten thousand, not five thousand,” Enid said.

“When does that patent expire?” Gary said.

“In about six years.”

“They must be looking at big money. Otherwise they’d just go ahead and infringe.”

“The letter says it’s experimental and uncertain.”

“Mother, exactly. That’s exactly what they want you to think. But if it’s so experimental, why are they bothering with this at all? Why not just wait six years?”

“Oh, I see.”

“It’s very, very good that you told me about this, Mother. What you need to do now is write back to these guys and ask them for a $200,000 licensing fee up front.”

Enid gasped as she’d done long ago on family car trips, when Alfred swung into oncoming traffic to pass a truck. “ Two hundred thousand! Oh, my, Gary—”

“And a one percent royalty on gross revenues from their process. Tell them you’re fully prepared to defend your legitimate claim in court.”

“But what if they say no?”

“Trust me, these guys have no desire to litigate. There’s no downside to being aggressive here.”

“Well, but it’s Dad’s patent, and you know how he thinks.”

“Put him on the phone,” Gary said.

His parents were cowed by authority of all kinds. When Gary wanted to reassure himself that he’d escaped their fate, when he needed to measure his distance from St. Jude, he considered his own fearlessness in the face of authority — including the authority of his father.

“Yes,” Alfred said.

“Dad,” he said, “I think you should go after these guys. They’re in a very weak position and you could make some real money.”

In St. Jude the old man said nothing.

“You’re not telling me you’re going to take that offer,” Gary said. “Because that’s not even an option. Dad. That’s not even on the menu.”