Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Joyce had volunteered for the nightmare, of course. She’d been attracted, as a scholarship girl, by Ray’s Waspiness and family wealth and social idealism. She’d had no idea what she was getting sucked into, the price she would end up paying, the decades of disgusting eccentricity and childish money games and August’s imperious discourtesy. She, the poor Brooklyn Jewish girl, was soon traveling on the Emerson dime to Egypt and Tibet and Machu Picchu; she was having dinner with Dag Hammarskjöld and Adam Clayton Powell. Like so many people who become politicians, Joyce was not a whole person; she was even less whole than Patty. She needed to feel extraordinary , and becoming an Emerson reinforced her feeling that she was, and when she started having children she needed to feel that they, too, were extraordinary, so as to make up for what was lacking at her center. Thus the refrain of Patty’s childhood: we’re not like other families. Other families have insurance, but Daddy doesn’t believe in insurance. Other families’ kids work afterschool jobs, but we’d rather have you explore your extraordinary talents and pursue your dreams. Other families have to worry about money for emergencies, but Granddaddy’s money means that we don’t have to. Other people have to be realistic and have careers and save for the future, but even with all of Granddaddy’s charitable giving there’s still a huge pot of gold out there for you.

Having conveyed these messages over the years, and having allowed her children’s lives to be deformed by them, Joyce now felt, as she confessed to Patty in her quavering voice, “unnerved” and “a tiny bit guilty” in the face of Abigail’s and Veronica’s demands for the liquidation of the estate. In the past, her guilt had manifested itself subterraneanly, in irregular but substantial cash transfers to her daughters, and in her suspension of judgment when, for example, Abigail hurried to August’s hospital deathbed late one night and extracted a last-minute $10,000 check from him (Patty heard about this trick from Galina and Edgar, who considered it highly unfair but were mostly chagrined, it seemed to her, not to have thought of the trick themselves), but now Patty had the interesting satisfaction of seeing her mother’s guilt, which had always been implicit in her liberal politics, applied to her own children in broad daylight. “I don’t know what Daddy and I did,” she said. “I guess we did something. That three of our four children are not quite ready to . . . not quite ready to, well. Fully support themselves. I suppose I—oh, I don’t know. But if Abigail asks me one more time about selling Granddad’s house . . . And, I guess, I suppose, I deserve it, in a way. I suppose, in my own way, I’m somewhat responsible.”

“You just have to stand up to her,” Patty said. “You have a right not to be tortured by her.”

“What I don’t understand is how you turned out to be so different, so independent,” Joyce said. “You certainly don’t seem to have these kinds of problems. I mean, I know you have problems. But you seem . . . stronger, somehow.”

No exaggeration: this was among the top-ten most gratifying moments of Patty’s life.

“Walter was a great provider,” she demurred. “Just a great man. That helped.”

“And your kids . . . ? Are they . . . ?”

“They’re like Walter. They know how to work. And Joey’s about the most independent kid in North America. I guess maybe he got some of that from me.”

“I’d love to see more of . . . Joey,” Joyce said. “I hope . . . now that things are different . . . now that we’ve been . . .” She gave a strange laugh, harsh and fully conscious. “Now that we’ve been forgiven , I hope I can get to know him a little.”

“I’m sure he’d like that, too. He’s gotten interested in his Jewish heritage.”

“Oh, well, I’m not at all sure I’m the right person to talk to about that . He might do better with—Edgar.” And Joyce again laughed in a strangely conscious way.

Edgar had not, in fact, become more Jewish, except in the most passive of senses. In the early nineties, he’d done what any holder of a PhD in linguistics might have done: become a stock trader. When he stopped studying East Asian grammar structures and applied himself to stocks, he in short order made enough money to attract and hold the attention of a pretty young Russian Jew, Galina. As soon as they were married, Galina’s materialistic Russian side asserted itself. She goaded Edgar to make ever larger amounts of money and to spend it on a mansion in Short Hills, New Jersey, and fur coats and heavy jewelry and other conspicuous articles. For a little while, running his own firm, Edgar became so successful that he showed up on the radar of his normally distant and imperious grandfather, who, in a moment of possible early senile dementia, soon after his wife’s death, greedily permitted Edgar to renovate his stock portfolio, selling off his American blue-chips and investing him heavily in Southeast Asia. August last revised his will and trust at the height of the Asian stock bubble, when it seemed eminently fair to leave his investments to his younger sons and the New Jersey estate to Ray. But Edgar was not to be trusted with renovations. The Asian bubble duly burst, August died soon after, and Patty’s two uncles inherited next to nothing, while the estate, due to the building of new highways and the rapid development of northwest New Jersey, was doubling in value. The only way Ray could hold off his brothers’ moral claims was to retain possession of the estate and let Edgar and Galina live on it, which they were happy to do, having been bankrupted when Edgar’s own investments tanked. This was also when Galina’s Jewish side kicked in. She embraced the Orthodox tradition, threw away her birth control, and aggravated her and Edgar’s financial plight by having a bunch of babies. Edgar had no more passion for Judaism than anybody else in the family, but he was Galina’s creature, all the more so since his bankruptcy, and he went along to get along. And, oh, how Abigail and Veronica hated Galina.

This was the situation that Patty set out to deal with for her mother. She was uniquely qualified to do it, being the only child of Joyce’s who was willing to work for a living, and it brought her the most miraculous and welcome feeling: that Joyce was lucky to have a daughter like her. Patty was able to enjoy this feeling for several days before it curdled into the recognition that, in fact, she was getting sucked back into bad family patterns and was competing with her siblings again. It was true that she’d already felt twinges of competition when she was helping to nurse Ray; but nobody had questioned her right to be with him, and her conscience had been clean regarding her motives. One evening with Abigail, however, was enough to get the old competitive juices fully flowing again.

While living with a very tall man in Jersey City and trying to look less like a middle-aged housewife who’d taken the wrong exit off the turnpike, Patty had bought a rather chic pair of stack-heeled boots, and it was perhaps the least nice part of her that chose to wear these boots when she went to see her shortest sibling. She towered over Abigail, towered like an adult over a child, as they walked from Abigail’s apartment to the neighborhood café at which she was a regular. As if to compensate for her shortness, Abigail went long with her opening speech—two hours long—and allowed Patty to piece together a fairly complete picture of her life: the married man, now known exclusively as Dickhead, on whom she’d wasted her best twelve years of marriageability, waiting for Dickhead’s kids to finish high school, so that he could leave his wife, which he’d then done, but for somebody younger than Abigail; the straight-man-disdaining sort of gay men to whom she’d turned for more agreeable male companionship; the impressively large community of underemployed actors and playwrights and comics and performance artists of which she was clearly a valued and generous member; the circle of friends who circularly bought tickets to each other’s shows and fund-raisers, much of the money ultimately trickling down from sources such as Joyce’s checkbook; the life, neither glamorous nor outstanding but nevertheless admirable and essential to New York’s functioning, of the bohemian. Patty was honestly happy to see that Abigail had found a place for herself in the world. It wasn’t until they repaired to her apartment for a “digestif,” and Patty broached the subject of Edgar and Galina, that things got ugly.