Jonathan Franzen: Freedom

“It was nice of your wife to invite me,” Linda said.

Walter had apparently resumed regular shaving with the return of his wife—he looked very pink now. “Listen,” he said, “I was awfully sorry to hear your cat disappeared.”

“Really?” she said. “I thought you hated Bobby.”

“I did hate him. He was a bird-killing machine. But I know you loved him, and it’s a hard thing to lose a pet.”

“Well, we have three more now, so.”

He calmly nodded. “Just try to keep them indoors, if you can. They’ll be safer there.”

“I’m sorry—is that a threat?”

“No, not a threat,” he said. “Just a fact. It’s a dangerous world for small animals. Can I get you something else to drink?”

It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty’s greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at. During small thaws, the two Berglunds could be seen taking long walks together, sometimes nearly to Fen City, and when the big thaw came, in April, and Walter again went door to door on Canterbridge Court, it was not to berate people about their cats but to invite them to join him and a scientist friend on a series of nature walks in May and June, to get to know their local heritage and to see, up close, some of the marvelous life the woods were full of. Linda Hoffbauer at this point abandoned the last vestiges of her resistance to Patty, admitting freely that she knew how to manage a husband, and the neighborhood liked this new tone of Linda’s and opened its doors a little wider to her.

And so it was all in all unexpectedly sad to learn, midway through a summer in which the Berglunds hosted several barbecues and were much sought after socially in return, that they would be moving to New York at the end of August. Patty explained that she had a good job in education that she wanted to return to, and that her mother and her siblings and her daughter and Walter’s best friend all lived in or near New York, and that, although the house on the lake had meant a lot to her and Walter over the years, nothing could last forever. When she was asked if they might still return for vacations, her face clouded and she said that this wasn’t what Walter wanted. He was leaving his property, instead, to be managed by a local land trust as a bird sanctuary.

Within days of the Berglunds’ departure in a big rental truck, whose horn Walter tooted while Patty waved good-bye, a specialized company came and erected a high and cat-resistant fence around the entire property (Linda Hoffbauer, now that Patty was gone, dared to declare the fence somewhat ugly), and soon other workers came to gut the little Berglund house, leaving only the shell standing, as a haven for owls or swallows. To this day, free access to the preserve is granted only to birds and to residents of Canterbridge Estates, through a gate whose lock combination is known to them, beneath a small ceramic sign with a picture of the pretty young dark-skinned girl after whom the preserve is named.

Patty didn’t see a picture of Qaddafi until some years after college, and even then, though struck immediately by his resemblance to Richard Katz, she didn’t make anything special of the fact that Libya seemed to her to have the world’s cutest head of state.

It occurred to Patty, on the bus ride from Chicago to Hibbing, that maybe the reason Richard had spurned her was that she wasn’t into his music and he was annoyed by this. Not that there was anything she could have done about it.