Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Patty, before she could proceed with her business, had to enjoy the little boy in her arms, rub noses with him, get him laughing. She had the mad thought that she could adopt him, lighten Galina and Edgar’s load, and embark on a new kind of life. As if recognizing this in her, he put her hands all over her face, pulling at her features gleefully.

“He likes his aunt,” Galina said. “His long-lost aunt Patty.”

Edgar came in through the back door minus his boots, wearing thick gray socks that were themselves muddy and had holes in them. “Do you want some raisin bran or something?” he said. “We also have Chex.”

Patty declined and sat down at the kitchen table, her nephew on her knee. The other kids were no less great—dark-eyed, curious, bold without being rude—and she could see why Joyce was so taken with them and didn’t want them leaving the country. All in all, after her bad talk with Abigail, Patty was having a hard time seeing this family as the villains. They seemed, instead, literally, like babes in the woods. “So tell me how you guys see the future working out,” she said.

Edgar, obviously accustomed to letting Galina speak for him, sat picking scabs of mud off his socks while she explained that they were getting better at farming, that their rabbi and synagogue were wonderfully supportive, that Edgar was on the verge of being certified to produce kosher wine from the grandparental grapes, and that the game was amazing.

“Game?” Patty said.

“Deers,” Galina said. “Unbelievable numbers of deers. Edgar, how many did you shoot last fall?”

“Fourteen,” Edgar said.

“Fourteen on our property! And they keep coming and coming, it’s stupendous.”

“See, the thing is, though,” Patty said, trying to remember whether eating deer was even kosher, “it’s not really your property. It’s kind of Joyce’s now. And I’m just wondering, since Edgar’s so smart about business, whether it might make more sense for him to go back to work, and get a real income going, so that Joyce can make her own decision about this place.”

Galina was shaking her head adamantly. “There’s the insurances. The insurances want to take anything he makes, up to I don’t know how many hundred thousands.”

“Yes, well, but if Joyce could sell this place, you guys could pay off the insurances, I mean the insurance companies, and then you could get a fresh start.”

“That man is a fraudster!” Galina said with blazing eyes. “You heard the story, I guess? That crossing guard is one hundred percent guaranteed fraudster. I barely tapped him, barely touched him, and now he can’t walk?”

“Patty,” Edgar said, sounding remarkably much like Ray when he was being patronizing, “you really don’t understand the situation.”

“I’m sorry—what’s not to understand?”

“Your father wanted the farm to stay in the family,” Galina said. “He didn’t want it going in pockets of disgusting, obscene theater producers making so-called ‘art,’ or five-hundred-dollar psychiatrists who take your little sister’s money without ever making her better. This way, we always have the farm, your uncles will forget about it, and if there’s ever real need, instead of disgusting so-called ‘art’ or fraudster psychiatrists, Joyce can always sell part of it.”

“Edgar?” Patty said. “Is this your plan, too?”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Well, I guess it’s very selfless of you. Guarding the flame of Daddy’s wishes.”

Galina leaned into Patty’s face, as if to aid her comprehension. “ We have the children ,” she said. “We’ll soon have six mouths to feed. Your sisters think I want to go to Israel—I don’t want to go to Israel. We have good life here. And don’t you think we get credit for having the children your sisters won’t have?”

“They do seem like fun kids,” Patty admitted. Her nephew was dozing in her arms.

“So leave it alone,” Galina said. “Come and see the children whenever you want. We’re not bad people, we’re not kooks, we love having visitors.”

Patty drove back to Westchester, feeling sad and discouraged, and consoled herself with televised basketball (Joyce was up in Albany). The following afternoon, she returned to the city and saw Veronica, the baby of the family, the most damaged of them all. There had always been something otherworldly about Veronica. For a long time, it had had to do with her dark-eyed, slender, wood-sprite looks, to which she’d adapted in various self-destructive ways including anorexia, promiscuity, and hard drinking. Now her looks were mostly gone—she was heavier but not heavy like a fat person; she reminded Patty of her former friend Eliza, whom she’d once glimpsed, many years after college, in a crowded DMV office—and her otherworldliness was more spiritual: a nonconnection to ordinary logic, a sort of checked-out amusement regarding the existence of a world outside herself. She’d once shown great promise (at least in Joyce’s view) as both a painter and a ballerina, and had been hit on and dated by any number of worthy young men, but she’d since been bludgeoned by episodes of major depression beside which Patty’s own depressions were apparently autumn hayrides in an apple orchard. According to Joyce, she was currently employed as an administrative assistant at a dance company. She lived in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom on Ludlow Street where Patty, despite having phoned in advance, seemed to have interrupted her in some deep meditative exercise. She buzzed Patty in and left her front door ajar, leaving it to Patty to find her in her bedroom, on a yoga mat, wearing faded Sarah Lawrence gym clothes; her youthful dancer’s limberness had developed into a quite astonishing yogic flexibility. She obviously wished that Patty hadn’t come, and Patty had to sit on her bed for half an hour, waiting eons for responses to her basic pleasantries, before Veronica finally reconciled herself to her sister’s presence. “Those are great boots,” she said.

“Oh, thank you.”

“I don’t wear leather anymore, but sometimes, when I see a good boot, I still miss it.”

“Uh huh,” Patty said encouragingly.

“Do you mind if I smell them?”

“My boots?”

Veronica nodded and crawled over to inhale the smell of the uppers. “I’m very sensitive to smell,” she said, her eyes closed blissfully. “It’s the same with bacon—I still love the smell, even though I don’t eat it. It’s so intense for me, it’s almost like eating it.”

“Uh huh,” Patty encouraged.

“In terms of my practice, it’s literally like not having my cake and not eating it, too.”

“Right. I can see that. That’s interesting. Although presumably you never ate leather .”

Veronica laughed hard at this and for a while became quite sisterly. Unlike anyone else in the family, except Ray, she had a lot of questions about Patty’s life and the turns that it had lately taken. She found cosmically funny precisely the most painful parts of Patty’s story, and once Patty got used to her laughing at the wreck of her marriage, she could see that it did Veronica good to hear of her troubles. It seemed to confirm some family truth for her and put her at ease. But then, over green tea, which Veronica averred she drank at least a gallon of per day, Patty brought up the matter of the estate, and her sister’s laughter became vaguer and more slippery.

“Seriously,” Patty said. “Why are you bothering Joyce about the money? If it was just Abigail bothering her, I think she could deal with it, but coming from you, too, it’s making her really uncomfortable.”

“I don’t think Mommy needs my help to make her uncomfortable,” Veronica said, amused. “She does pretty well with that on her own.”