Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“You’re not in touch with him at all,” Richard said.

“No,” she said. “It’s like some kind of fairy tale. We haven’t talked since the day I left Washington. Six years and not one word. I only hear about him from my kids.”

“Maybe you should call him.”

“I can’t, Richard. I missed my chance six years ago, and now I think he just wants to be left alone. He’s living at the lake house and doing work for the Nature Conservancy up there. If he wanted to be in touch, he could always call me.”

“Maybe he’s thinking the same thing about you.”

She shook her head. “I think everybody recognizes that he’s suffered more than I have. I don’t think anyone’s cruel enough to think it’s his job to call me. Plus I’ve already told Jessie, in so many words, that I’d like to see him again. I’d be shocked if she hadn’t passed that information along to him—there’s nothing she’d like better than to save the day. So he’s obviously still hurt, and angry, and hates you and me. And who can blame him, really?”

“I can, a little bit,” Richard said. “You remember how he gave me that silent treatment in college? That was bullshit. It’s bad for his soul. It’s the side of him I could never stand.”

“Well maybe you should call him.”

“No.” He laughed. “I did finally get around to making him a little present—you’ll see it in a couple of months if you keep your eye out. A little friendly shout across the time zones. But I’ve never had any kind of stomach for apologies. Whereas you.”

“Whereas I?”

He was already waving to the bar waitress for the check. “You know how to tell a story,” he said. “Why don’t you tell him a story?”

There are many ways for a house cat to die outdoors, including dismemberment by coyotes and flattening by a car, but when the Hoffbauer family’s beloved pet Bobby failed to come home one early-June evening, and no amount of calling Bobby’s name or searching the perimeter of Canterbridge Estates or walking up and down the county road or stapling Bobby’s xeroxed image to local trees turned up any trace of him, it was widely assumed on Canterbridge Court that Bobby had been killed by Walter Berglund.

Canterbridge Estates was a new development, consisting of twelve spacious homes in the modern many-bathroomed style, on the southwest side of a minor water now officially called Canterbridge Estates Lake. Though the lake wasn’t close to anything, really, the nation’s financial system had lately been lending out money essentially for free, and the building of the Estates, as well as the widening and paving of the road that led to it, had momentarily stirred the stagnant Itasca County economy. Low interest rates had also then enabled various Twin Cities retirees and young local families, including the Hoffbauers, to buy themselves a dream home. When they began moving in, during the fall of 2007, their street still looked very raw. The front and back yards were lumpy and furzed over with unthriving grass, scattered with intractable glacial boulders and such birches as had been spared felling, and resembled, all in all, a child’s too-hastily completed school terrarium project. The cats of the new neighborhood understandably preferred to stalk the woods and thickets of the adjoining Berglund property, where the birds were. And Walter, even before the last Canterbridge house was occupied, had gone door to door to introduce himself and ask his new neighbors to please keep their cats inside.

Walter was a good Minnesotan and reasonably friendly, but there was something about him, a political trembling in his voice, a fanatic gray stubble on his cheeks, that rubbed the families on Canterbridge Court the wrong way. Walter lived by himself in a dumpy, secluded old vacation house, and although it was undoubtedly nicer for the families to look across the lake at his scenic property than for him to look at their bare yards, and although a few of them did stop to imagine how noisy the construction of their homes must have been, nobody enjoys feeling like an intruder on somebody else’s idyll. They’d paid their money, after all; they had a right to be there. Indeed, their property taxes were collectively hugely higher than Walter’s, and most of them were facing a ballooning of their mortgage payments and were living on fixed incomes or saving for their children’s educations. When Walter, who obviously had no such worries, came to complain to them about their cats , they felt they understood his worry about birds a lot better than he understood what a hyper-refined privilege it was to worry about them. Linda Hoffbauer, who was Evangelical and the most political person on the street, was especially offended. “So Bobby kills birds,” she said to Walter. “So what?”

“Well, the thing is,” Walter said, “small cats aren’t native to North America, and so our songbirds never evolved any defenses against them. It’s not really a fair fight.”

“Cats kill birds,” Linda said. “It’s what they do, it’s just part of nature.”

“Yes, but cats are an Old World species,” Walter said. “They’re not part of our nature. They wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t introduced them. That’s the whole problem.”

“To be honest with you,” Linda said, “all I care about is letting my children learn to take care of a pet and have responsibility for it. Are you trying to tell me they can’t do that?”

“No, of course not,” Walter said. “But you already keep Bobby indoors in the winter. I’m just asking that you do that in the summer, too, for the sake of the local ecosystem. We’re living in an important breeding area for a number of bird species that are declining in North America. And those birds have children, too. When Bobby kills a bird in June or July, he’s also leaving behind a nest full of babies that aren’t going to live.”

“The birds need to find someplace else to nest, then. Bobby loves running free outdoors. It’s not fair to keep him indoors when the weather’s nice.”

“Sure. Yes. I know you love your cat. And if he would just stay in your yard, that would be fine. But this land actually belonged to the birds before it belonged to us. And it’s not like there’s any way that we can tell the birds that this is a bad place to try to nest. So they keep coming here, and they keep getting killed. And the bigger problem is that they’re running out of space altogether, because there’s more and more development. So it’s important that we try to be responsible stewards to this wonderful land that we’ve taken over.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Linda said, “but my children matter more to me than the children of some bird. I don’t think that’s an extreme position, compared to yours. God gave this world to human beings, and that’s the end of the story as far as I’m concerned.”

“I have children myself, and I understand that,” Walter said. “But we’re only talking about keeping your Bobby indoors. Unless you’re on speaking terms with Bobby, I don’t see how you know he minds being kept indoors.”

“My cat is an animal. The beasts of the earth weren’t given the gift of language. Only people were. It’s one of the ways we know we were created in God’s image.”

“Right, so my point is, how do you know he likes to run free?”

“Cats love being outdoors. Everybody loves being outdoors. When the weather warms up, Bobby stands by the door, wanting to go out. I don’t have to talk to him to understand that.”

“But if Bobby’s just an animal, that is, not a human being, then why does his mild preference for being outdoors trump the right of songbirds to raise their families?”