Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Your father’s at his office,” Joyce said. “We’ll go straight there.”

But she didn’t turn the key.

“I’m sorry about this,” Patty said.

“What I don’t understand,” her mother burst out, “is how such an outstanding athlete as you are—I mean, how could Ethan, or whoever it was—”

“Ethan. It was Ethan.”

“How could anybody—or Ethan,” she said. “You say it’s pretty definitely Ethan. How could—if it’s Ethan—how could he have . . . ?” Her mother hid her mouth with her fingers. “Oh, I wish it had been almost anybody else. Dr. and Mrs. Post are such good friends of—good friends of so many good things. And I don’t know Ethan well, but—”

“I hardly know him at all!”

“Well then how could this happen!”

“Let’s just go home.”

“No. You have to tell me. I’m your mother.”

Hearing herself say this, Joyce looked embarrassed. She seemed to realize how peculiar it was to have to remind Patty who her mother was. And Patty, for one, was glad to finally have this doubt out in the open. If Joyce was her mother, then how had it happened that she hadn’t come to the first round of the state tournament when Patty had broken the all-time Horace Greeley girls’ tournament scoring record with 32 points? Somehow everybody else’s mother had found time to come to that game.

She showed Joyce her wrists.

“ This is what happened,” she said. “I mean, part of what happened.”

Joyce looked once at her bruises, shuddered, and then turned away as if respecting Patty’s privacy. “This is terrible,” she said. “You’re right. This is terrible.”

“Coach Nagel says I should go to the emergency room and tell the police and tell Ethan’s headmaster.”

“Yes, I know what your coach wants. She seems to feel that castration might be an appropriate punishment. What I want to know is what you think.”

“I don’t know what I think.”

“If you want to go to the police now,” Joyce said, “we’ll go to the police. Just tell me if that’s what you want.”

“I guess we should tell Dad first.”

So down the Saw Mill Parkway they went. Joyce was always driving Patty’s siblings to Painting, Guitar, Ballet, Japanese, Debate, Drama, Piano, Fencing, and Mock Court, but Patty herself seldom rode with Joyce anymore. Most weekdays, she came home very late on the jock bus. If she had a game, somebody else’s mom or dad dropped her off. If she and her friends were ever stranded, she knew not to bother calling her parents but to go ahead and use the Westchester Cab dispatcher’s number and one of the twenty-dollar bills that her mother made her always carry. It never occurred to her to use the twenties for anything but cabs, or to go anywhere after a game except straight home, where she peeled aluminum foil off her dinner at ten or eleven o’clock and went down to the basement to wash her uniform while she ate and watched reruns. She often fell asleep down there.

“Here’s a hypothetical question,” Joyce said, driving. “Do you think it might be enough if Ethan formally apologized to you?”

“He already apologized.”

“For—”

“For being rough.”

“And what did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything. I said I wanted to go home.”

“But he did apologize for being rough.”

“It wasn’t a real apology.”

“All right. I’ll take your word for it.”

“I just want him to know I exist .”

“Whatever you want—sweetie.”

Joyce pronounced this “sweetie” like the first word of a foreign language she was learning.

As a test or a punishment, Patty said: “Maybe, I guess, if he apologized in a really sincere way, that might be enough.” And she looked carefully at her mother, who was struggling (it seemed to Patty) to contain her excitement.

“That sounds to me like a nearly ideal solution,” Joyce said. “But only if you really think it would be enough for you.”

“It wouldn’t,” Patty said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said it wouldn’t be enough.”

“I thought you just said it would be.”

Patty began to cry again very desolately.

“I’m sorry,” Joyce said. “Did I misunderstand?”

“HE RAPED ME LIKE IT WAS NOTHING. I’M PROBABLY NOT EVEN THE FIRST.”

“You don’t know that, Patty.”

“I want to go to the hospital.”

“Look, here, we’re almost at Daddy’s office. Unless you’re actually hurt, we might as well—”

“But I already know what he’ll say. I know what he’ll want me to do.”

“He’ll want to do whatever’s best for you. Sometimes it’s hard for him to express it, but he loves you more than anything.”

Joyce could hardly have made a statement Patty more fervently longed to believe was true. Wished, with her whole being, was true. Didn’t her dad tease her and ridicule her in ways that would have been simply cruel if he didn’t secretly love her more than anything? But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

There was a smell of mothballs in her father’s inner sanctum, which he’d taken over from his now-deceased senior partner without redoing the carpeting and curtains. Where exactly the mothball smell came from was one of those mysteries.

“What a rotten little shit!” was Ray’s response to the tidings his daughter and wife brought of Ethan Post’s crime.

“Not so little, unfortunately,” Joyce said with a dry laugh.

“He’s a rotten little shit punk,” Ray said. “He’s a bad seed!”

“So do we go to the hospital now?” Patty said. “Or to the police?”

Her father told her mother to call Dr. Sipperstein, the old pediatrician, who’d been involved in Democratic politics since Roosevelt, and see if he was available for an emergency. While Joyce made this call, Ray asked Patty if she knew what rape was.

She stared at him.

“Just checking,” he said. “You do know the actual legal definition.”

“He had sex with me against my will.”

“Did you actually say no?”

“ ‘No,’ ‘don’t,’ ‘stop.’ Anyway, it was obvious. I was trying to scratch him and push him off me.”

“Then he is a despicable piece of shit.”

She’d never heard her father talk this way, and she appreciated it, but only abstractly, because it didn’t sound like him.

“Dave Sipperstein says he can meet us at five at his office,” Joyce reported. “He’s so fond of Patty, I think he would have canceled his dinner plans if he’d had to.”

“Right,” Patty said, “I’m sure I’m number one among his twelve thousand patients.” She then told her dad her story, and her dad explained to her why Coach Nagel was wrong and she couldn’t go to the police.

“Chester Post is not an easy person,” Ray said, “but he does a lot of good in the county. Given his, uh, given his position, an accusation like this is going to generate extraordinary publicity. Everyone will know who the accuser is. Everyone. Now, what’s bad for the Posts is not your concern. But it’s virtually certain you’ll end up feeling more violated by the pretrial and the trial and the publicity than you do right now. Even if it’s pleaded out. Even with a suspended sentence, even with a gag order. There’s still a court record.”

Joyce said, “But this is all for her to decide, not—”

“Joyce.” Ray stilled her with a raised hand. “The Posts can afford any lawyer in the country. And as soon as the accusation is made public, the worst of the damage to the defendant is over. He has no incentive to speed things along. In fact, it’s to his advantage to see that your reputation suffers as much as possible before a plea or a trial.”