Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Did she explain that?”

“She said . . .” Joyce looked woefully out into her flower garden. “She said the reason she couldn’t succeed was that, if she ever did succeed, then I would take it from her. It would be my success, not hers. Which isn’t true! But this is how she felt. And the only way she had to show me how she felt, and make me keep suffering, and not let me think that everything was OK with her, was to keep on not succeeding. Oh, I still hate to think about it! I told her it wasn’t true, and I hope she believed me, because it is not true .”

“OK,” Patty said, “that does sound hard. But what does it have to do with my basketball games?”

Joyce shook her head. “I don’t know. It just occurred to me.”

“I was succeeding, Mommy. That’s the weird thing. I was totally succeeding.”

Here, all at once, Joyce’s face crumpled up terribly. She shook her head again, as if with repugnance, trying to hold back tears. “I know you were,” she said. “I should have been there. I blame myself.”

“It’s really OK that you weren’t. Maybe almost better, in the long run. I was just asking a curious question.”

Joyce’s summation, after a long silence, was: “I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”

And this was all Patty got from her, then or later. It wasn’t a lot, it didn’t solve any mysteries, but it would have to do. That same evening, Patty presented the results of her investigations and proposed a plan of action that Joyce, with much docile nodding, agreed to every detail of. The estate would be sold, and Joyce would give half the proceeds to Ray’s brothers, administer Edgar’s share of the remainder in a trust from which he and Galina could draw enough to live on (provided they didn’t emigrate), and offer large lump sums to Abigail and Veronica. Patty, who ended up accepting $75,000 to help start a new life without assistance from Walter, felt fleetingly guilty on Walter’s behalf, thinking of the empty woods and untilled fields that she’d helped doom to fragmentation and development. She hoped Walter might understand that the collective unhappiness of the bobolinks and woodpeckers and orioles whose homes she had wrecked was not much greater, in this particular instance, than that of the family that was selling the land.

And the autobiographer will say this about her family: the money they’d waited so long for, and been so uncivil about, wasn’t wholly wasted on them. Abigail in particular began to flourish as soon as she had some financial weight to throw around in her bohemia; Joyce now calls Patty whenever Abigail’s name is in the Times again; she and her troupe are apparently the toast of Italy, Slovenia, and other European nations. Veronica gets to be alone in her apartment, in an upstate ashram, and in her studio, and it’s possible that her paintings, despite how ingrown and never-quite-finished they look to Patty, will be hailed by later generations as works of genius. Edgar and Galina have relocated to the ultra-Orthodox community in Kiryas Joel, New York, where they’ve had one last (fifth) baby and don’t seem to be causing active harm to anybody. Patty sees all of them except Abigail a few times a year. Her nephews and nieces are the main treat, of course, but she also recently accompanied Joyce on a British garden tour that she enjoyed more than she’d thought she might, and she and Veronica never fail to have some laughs.

Mainly, though, she leads her own little life. She still runs every day, in Prospect Park, but she’s no longer addicted to exercise or to anything else, really. A bottle of wine lasts two days now, sometimes three. At her school, she’s in the blessed position of not having to deal directly with today’s parents, who are way more insane and pressurized than even she had been. They seem to think her school should be helping their first-graders write early drafts of their college application essays and build their vocabulary for the SAT, ten years in the future. But Patty gets to deal with the kids purely as kids—as interesting and mostly still untainted little individuals who are eager to acquire writing skills, so as to be able to tell their stories. Patty meets with them in small groups and encourages them to do this, and they’re not so young that some of them might not remember Mrs. Berglund when they’re grown up. The middle-school kids should definitely remember her, because this is her favorite part of her job: giving back, as a coach, the total dedication and tough love and lessons in teamwork that her own coaches once gave her. Almost every day of the school year, after class, for a few hours, she gets to disappear and forget herself and be one of the girls again, be wedded by love to the cause of winning games, and yearn pureheartedly for her players to succeed. A universe that permits her to do this, at this relatively late point in her life, in spite of her not having been the best person, cannot be a wholly cruel one.

Summers are harder, no question. Summers are when the old self-pity and competitiveness well up in her again. Patty twice forced herself to volunteer with the city parks department and work outdoors with kids, but she turns out to be shockingly bad at managing boys older than six or seven, and it’s a struggle to interest herself in activity purely for activity’s sake; she needs a real team, her own team, to discipline and focus on winning. The younger unmarried women teachers at her school, who are hilariously hard partyers (like, puking-in-the-bathroom hard partyers, tequila-drinks-in-the-conference-room-at-three-o’clock hard partyers), become scarce in the summer, and there are only so many hours a person can read books by herself, or clean her tiny and already clean apartment while listening to country music, without wanting to do some hard partying of her own. The two sort-of relationships she had with significantly younger men from her school, two semi-sustained dating things that the reader surely doesn’t want to hear about and in any case consisted mainly of awkwardness and tortured discussion, both began in the summer months. For the last three years, Cathy and Donna have kindly let her spend all of July in Wisconsin.

Her mainstay, of course, is Jessica. So much so, indeed, that Patty is rigorously careful not to overdo it and drown her with need. Jessica is a working dog, not a show dog like Joey, and once Patty had left Richard and regained a degree of moral respectability, Jessica had made a project of fixing up her mother’s life. Many of her suggestions were fairly obvious, but Patty in her gratitude and contrition meekly presented progress reports at their regular Monday-evening dinners. Although she knew a lot more about life than Jessica did, she’d also made a lot more mistakes. It cost her very little to let her daughter feel important and useful, and their discussions did lead directly to her current employment. Once she was back on her feet again, she was able to offer Jessica support in return, but she had to be very careful about this, too. When she read one of Jessica’s overly poetic blog entries, full of easily improvable sentences, the only thing she allowed herself to say was “Great post!!” When Jessica lost her heart to a musician, the boyish little drummer who’d dropped out of NYU, Patty had to forget everything she knew about musicians and endorse, at least tacitly, Jessica’s belief that human nature had lately undergone a fundamental change: that people her own age, even male musicians, were very different from people Patty’s age. And when Jessica’s heart was then broken, slowly but thoroughly, Patty had to manufacture shock at the singular unforeseeable outrage of it. Although this was difficult, she was happy to make the effort, in part because Jessica and her friends really are somewhat different from Patty and her generation—the world looks scarier to them, the road to adulthood harder and less obviously rewarding—but mostly because she depends on Jessica’s love now and would do just about anything to keep her in her life.