Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“I’ve made my decision,” Alfred said. “What I do is not your business.”

“Yes, it is, though. I have a legitimate interest in this.”

“Gary, you do not.”

“I have a legitimate interest,” Gary insisted. If Enid and Alfred ever ran out of money, it would fall to him and Caroline — not to his undercapitalized sister, not to his feckless brother — to pay for their care. But he had enough self-control not to spell this out for Alfred. “Will you at least tell me what you’re going to do? Will you pay me that courtesy?”

“You could pay me the courtesy of not asking,” Alfred said. “However, since you ask, I will tell you. I’m going to take what they offer and give half of the money to Orfic Midland.”

The universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.

“Well, now, Dad,” Gary said in the low, slow voice he reserved for situations in which he was very angry and very certain he was right. “You can’t do that.”

“I can and I will,” Alfred said.

“No, really, Dad, you have to listen to me. There is absolutely no legal or moral reason for you to split the money with Orfic Midland.”

“I was using the railroad’s materials and equipment,” Alfred said. “It was understood that I would share any income from the patents. And Mark Jamborets put me in touch with the patent lawyer. I suspect I was given a courtesy rate.”

“That was fifteen years ago! The company no longer exists . The people you had the understanding with are dead .”

“Not all of them are. Mark Jamborets is not.”

“Dad, it’s a nice sentiment. I understand the feeling, but—”

“I doubt you do.”

“That railroad was raped and eviscerated by the Wroth brothers.”

“I will not discuss it any further.”

“This is sick! This is sick!” Gary said. “You’re being loyal to a corporation that screwed you and the city of St. Jude in every conceivable way. It’s screwing you again, right now , with your health insurance.”

“You have your opinion, I have mine.”

“And I’m saying you’re being irresponsible. You’re being selfish. If you want to eat peanut butter and pinch pennies, that’s your business, but it’s not fair to Mom and it’s not fair to—”

“I don’t give a damn what you and your mother think.”

“It’s not fair to me! Who’s going to pay your bills if you get in trouble? Who’s your fallback?”

“I will endure what I have to endure,” Alfred said. “Yes, and I’ll eat peanut butter if I have to. I like peanut butter. It’s a good food.”

“And if that’s what Mom has to eat, she’ll eat it, too. Right? She can eat dog food if she has to! Who cares what she wants?”

“Gary, I know what the right thing to do is. I don’t expect you to understand — I don’t understand the decisions you make — but I know what’s fair. So let that be the end of it.”

“I mean, give Orfic Midland twenty-five hundred dollars if you absolutely have to,” Gary said. “But that patent is worth—”

“Let that be the end of it, I said. Your mother wants to talk to you again.”

“Gary,” Enid cried, “the St. Jude Symphony is doing The Nutcracker in December! They do a beautiful job with the regional ballet, and it sells out so fast, tell me, do you think I should get nine tickets for the day of Christmas Eve? They have a two o’clock matinee, or we can go on the night of the twenty-third, if you think that’s better. You decide.”

“Mother, listen to me. Do not let Dad accept that offer. Don’t let him do anything until I’ve seen the letter. I want you to put a copy of it in the mail to me tomorrow.”

“OK, I will, but I’m thinking the important thing right now is The Nutcracker , to get nine tickets all together, because it sells out so fast , Gary, you wouldn’t believe.”

When he finally got off the phone, Gary pressed his hands to his eyes and saw, engraved in false colors on the darkness of his mental movie screen, two images of golf: Enid improving her lie from the rough ( cheating was the word for this) and Alfred making light of his badness at the game.

The old man had pulled the same kind of self-defeating stunt fourteen years ago, after the Wroth brothers bought the Midland Pacific. Alfred was a few months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday when Fenton Creel, the Midpac’s new president, took him to lunch at Morelli’s in St. Jude. The top echelon of Midpac executives had been purged by the Wroths for having resisted the takeover, but Alfred, as chief engineer, had not been a part of this palace guard. In the chaos of shutting down the St. Jude office and moving operations to Little Rock, the Wroths needed somebody to keep the railroad running while the new crew, headed by Creel, learned the ropes. Creel offered Alfred a fifty percent raise and a block of Orfic stock if he would stay on for two extra years, oversee the move to Little Rock, and provide continuity.

Alfred hated the Wroths and was inclined to say no, but that night, at home, Enid went to work on him. She pointed out that the Orfic stock alone was worth $78,000, that his pension would be based on his last three full years’ salary, and that here was a chance to increase their retirement income by fifty percent.

These irresistible arguments appeared to sway Alfred, but three nights later he came home and announced to Enid that he’d tendered his resignation that afternoon and that Creel had accepted it. Alfred was then seven weeks short of a full year at his last, largest salary; it made no sense at all to quit. But he gave no explanation, then or ever, to Enid or to anyone else, for his sudden turnabout. He simply said: I have made my decision .

At the Christmas table in St. Jude that year, moments after Enid had sneaked onto baby Aaron’s little plate a bite of hazelnut goose stuffing and Caroline had grabbed the stuffing from the plate and marched into the kitchen and flung it in the trash like a wad of goose crap, saying, “This is pure grease — yuck,” Gary lost his temper and shouted: You couldn’t wait seven weeks? You couldn’t wait till you were sixty-five?

Gary, I worked hard all my life. My retirement is my business, not yours .

And the man so keen to retire that he couldn’t wait those last seven weeks: what had he done with his retirement? He’d sat in his blue chair.

Gary knew nothing of Axon, but Orfic Midland was the sort of conglomerate whose holdings and management structure he was paid to stay abreast of. He happened to know that the Wroth brothers had sold their controlling stake to cover losses in a Canadian gold-mining venture. Orfic Midland had joined the ranks of the indistinguishable bland megafirms whose headquarters dotted the American exurbs; its executives had been replaced like the cells of a living organism or like the letters in a game of Substitution in which shit turned to shot and soot and foot and food, so that, by the time Gary had okayed the latest bulk purchase of OrficMfor CenTrust’s portfolio, no blamable human trace remained of the company that had shut down St. Jude’s third-largest employer and eliminated train service to much of rural Kansas. Orfic Midland was out of the transportation business altogether now. What survived of the Midpac’s trunk lines had been sold off to enable the company to concentrate on prison-building, prison management, gourmet coffee, and financial services; a new 144– strand fiber-optic cable system lay buried in the railroad’s old right-of-way.

This was the company to which Alfred felt loyal?

The more Gary thought about it, the angrier he got. He sat by himself in his study, unable to stem his rising agitation or to slow the steam-locomotive pace at which his breaths were coming. He was blind to the pretty pumpkin-yellow sunset unfolding in the tulip trees beyond the commuter tracks. He saw nothing but the principles at stake.