Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

The autobiographer wishes she could report that Patty left Richard immediately after Lalitha died, but in fact she stayed another three months. (Nobody will ever mistake her for a pillar of resolve and dignity.) She knew, for one thing, that it would be a long time, possibly forever, before somebody she really liked would want to sleep with her again. And Richard, in his stalwart if unconvincing way, was doing his best to be a Good Man now that she’d lost Walter. She didn’t love Richard a lot, but she did somewhat love him for this effort (although even here, let the record show, she was actually loving Walter, because it was Walter who’d put the idea of being a Good Man into Richard’s head). He manfully sat down to the meals she made him, he forced himself to stay home and watch videos with her, he weathered her frequent downpours of emotion, but she was forever aware of how inconveniently her arrival had coincided with his reawakening commitment to music—his need to be out all night with his bandmates, or alone in his bedroom, or in numerous other girls’ bedrooms—and although she respected these needs in the abstract, she couldn’t help having her own needs, such as the need not to smell some other girl on him. To absent herself and earn some money, she worked evenings as a barista, making exactly those coffee drinks she’d once ridiculed the idea of making. At home, she struggled hard to be funny and agreeable and not a pain in the ass, but before long her situation became rather hellish, and the autobiographer, who has probably already said far more about these matters than her reader cares to hear, will spare him the scenes of petty jealousy and mutual recrimination and open disappointment that led to her parting with Richard on not very good terms. The autobiographer is reminded of her country’s attempts to extricate itself from Vietnam, which ended with our Vietnamese friends being thrown off the top of the embassy building and shoved away from the departing helicopters and left behind for massacre or brutal internment. But that is truly all she’s going to say about Richard, except for one further small note toward the end of this document.

For the last five years, Patty has been living in Brooklyn and working as a teacher’s aide in a private school, helping first-graders with their language skills and coaching softball and basketball in the middle school. How she found her way to this wretchedly paid but otherwise nearly ideal job was as follows.

After she left Richard, she went to stay with her friend Cathy in Wisconsin, and it happened that Cathy’s partner, Donna, had had twin girls two years earlier. Between Cathy’s job as a public defender and Donna’s at a women’s shelter, the two of them together earned one decent salary and were getting one person’s decent night’s sleep. So Patty offered her services as a full-time babysitter and instantly fell in love with her charges. Their names are Natasha and Selena, and they are excellent, unusual girls. They seemed to have been born with a Victorian sense of child comportment—even their screaming, when they felt obliged to do it, was preceded by a moment or two of judicious reflection. The girls were primarily focused on each other, of course, always watching each other, consulting each other, learning from each other, comparing their respective toys or dinners with lively interest but rarely competition or envy; they seemed jointly wise . When Patty spoke to one of them, the other also listened, with an attention that was respectful without being timid. Being two years old, they had to be watched constantly, but Patty literally never tired of it. The truth was—and it made her feel better to be reminded of this—she was as good with little kids as she was terrible with adolescents. She took a deep ongoing delight in the miracles of motor-skill acquisition, of language formation, of socialization, of personality development, the twins’ progress sometimes clearly visible from one day to the next, and in their innocence of how hilarious they were, in the clarity of their needing, and in the utter trust they placed in her. The autobiographer is at a loss to convey the concreteness of her delight, but she could see that one mistake she hadn’t made about herself was wanting to be a mother.

She might have stayed much longer in Wisconsin if her father hadn’t gotten sick. Her reader has no doubt heard about Ray’s cancer, the aggressive suddenness of its onset and swiftness of its progress. Cathy, who is herself very wise, urged Patty to go home to Westchester before it was too late. Patty went with much fear and trembling and found her childhood home little changed from the last time she’d set foot in it. The boxes of outdated campaign materials were even more numerous, the mildew in the basement even more intense, Ray’s towers of Times -recommended books even higher and more teetering, Joyce’s binders of untried Times Food Section recipes even thicker, the piles of unread Times Sunday magazines even more yellowed, the bins of recyclables even more overflowing, the results of Joyce’s wishful attempts to be a flower gardener even more poignantly weedy and random, the reflexive liberalism of her world-view even more impervious to reality, her discomfort in her oldest daughter’s presence even more pronounced, and Ray’s snide jollity even more disorienting. The serious thing that Ray was now disrespectfully laughing at was his own impending death. His body, unlike everything else, was greatly changed. He was wasted and hollow-eyed and pallid. When Patty arrived, he was still going to his office for a few hours in the morning, but this lasted only another week. Seeing him so sick, she hated herself for her long coldness to him, hated her childish refusal to forgive.

Not that Ray, of course, was not still Ray. Whenever Patty hugged him, he patted her for one second and then pulled his arms away and let them wave in the air, as if he could neither return her embrace nor push her away. To deflect attention from himself, he cast about for other things to laugh at—Abigail’s career as a performance artist, the religiosity of his daughter-in-law (about which more later), his wife’s participation in the “joke” of New York State government, and Walter’s professional travails, which he’d read about in the Times . “Sounds like your husband got involved with a bunch of crooks ,” he said one day. “Like he might be a little bit of a crook himself.”

“He’s not a crook,” Patty said, “obviously.”

“That’s what Nixon said, too. I remember that speech like it was yesterday. The president of the United States assuring the nation that he is not a crook . That word, ‘crook.’ I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘I am not a crook.’ Hilarious.”

“I didn’t see the article about Walter, but Joey says it was totally unfair.”

“Now, Joey is your Republican child, is that correct?”

“He’s definitely more conservative than we are.”

“Abigail told us she practically had to burn her sheets after he and his girlfriend stayed in her apartment. Stains everywhere, apparently. The upholstery, too.”

“Ray, Ray, I don’t want to hear about it! Try to remember I’m not like Abigail.”

“Ha. I couldn’t help thinking, when I read that article, about that night when Walter got so exercised about his Rome Club. He was always a bit of a crank. That was always my impression. I can say that now, can’t I?”

“Why, because we’re separated?”

“Yeah, that, too. But I was thinking, because I’m not going to live long, I might as well speak my mind.”

“You always spoke your mind. To a fault.”

Ray smiled at something in this. “Not always, Patty. Less than you might think, actually.”