Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

They were all there, time having run them down: Eric and Marisol, Astrid, the Hollingers, a dozen more — all the summer guests come to claim him along with the rest of the world. Franny stayed at the back, standing against the wall in the peanut gallery of former students and devoted fans and old girlfriends. Natalie Posen had chosen to bury her husband in Los Angeles, giving her spite the air of the eternal.

“The wife,” Fix said. “As long as we’re thinking of things to feel good about, let’s thank the wife.”

“Leo’s wife?”

Fix nodded. “She’s the unsung hero in all this.”

“How do you figure?” It was Fix’s birthday, eighty-three, with metastases to the brain. Franny was making her best effort.

“If she hadn’t hung in there like a pit bull to get more money, Leo Posen would have been a free man.”

“Ah.” Caroline nodded. She colored her hair the warm reddish shade of brown it had been when they were children, she went to Pilates three times a week. She had followed their mother’s example, kept herself up. Caroline had become the younger sister.

“I’m not seeing your point,” Franny said.

Fix smiled. Caroline, as far as he was concerned, had never missed a trick.

“If Leo had ever gotten a divorce,” her sister explained, “he would have married you.”

“Franny girl,” their father said, turning with difficulty to look at her, “that may have been the only bullet you ever dodged.”

Franny and Caroline had long agreed it was a waste of resources for them to visit either parent at the same time. With divorced parents on opposite sides of the country, and husbands whose parents also required a certain number of family holidays, Franny and Caroline divided their burden in order to conquer it. There were only so many vacation days, personal leave days, plane tickets, missed school plays, and unexcused absences between them. Whatever affection the two sisters had found for each other later in life would not be manifesting itself in visits. Los Angeles was as close as Franny ever got to the Bay Area, though she meant to go. Albie lived there now, two hours away from Caroline. Caroline’s oldest son, Nick, was a senior at Northwestern, so at least when Caroline and Wharton came out for parents’ weekend Franny could drive up to Evanston to see the three of them. Caroline’s other two children, the girls, Franny had missed out on entirely, much the same way Caroline had missed out on Franny’s two boys. But Ravi and Amit, no matter how long she’d had them, were not actually Franny’s. They had come with the marriage, and Caroline, try as she might to feel otherwise, could never grant full citizenship to stepchildren.

All of which was to say that under normal circumstances neither Franny nor Caroline would necessarily have traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate Fix’s birthday, but since Fix had already exceeded the outer limits of his oncologist’s predictions, they both stepped up their game. This birthday was going to be his last, a quick glance over to the passenger seat confirmed this, and in honor of the occasion the two sisters broke their own arrangement and met in California.

“So what are we going to do for the big day?” Caroline had asked the night before. “Sky’s the limit.”

They were sitting in the den, the four of them, in the house in Santa Monica that Fix and Marjorie had moved to when they finally left Downey after retirement. It was something of a miracle, that house, in no way splendid except that it was two blocks from the beach. It was forty years ago that Fix had known a cop who played poker with a bankruptcy judge. He had a tip the place was coming up at auction. That was when Fix finally told Marjorie he’d marry her. They would use her recent inheritance from her aunt in Ohio as the down payment. They would buy it, rent it out for twenty years or so, and by the time they were ready to retire they’d practically own it.

“That’s your proposal?” Marjorie had said, but she took the offer.

“But what was Dad’s part in all of it?” Franny had asked her years later when she finally heard the full story. Fix and Marjorie had driven the girls by the Santa Monica house every time they came to visit. They would point it out from the car, saying they owned it, saying one day they were going to live there. “If you were the one with the money then why did you have to marry him? You could have just bought the place yourself and rented it.”

“Your father wanted a house at the beach, and I wanted to marry your father.” Marjorie laughed when she heard how that sounded. She tried again. “He wanted to marry me. He was just slower to figure it out. I like to think that in the end everybody won.”

Marjorie had just finished pushing the nutritional supplement into Fix’s PEG tube. She was a young seventy-five to his old eighty-three, but it seemed that Marjorie had stopped eating about the same time her husband did. Her shoulder blades pushed out like a wire rack beneath her sweater.

“Let’s go to the show,” Fix said. “We’ll see a matinee of Franny’s movie.”

“Fix,” Marjorie said, her voice tired. “We talked about this.”

“My movie?” Franny asked, but of course she knew what he was talking about. He’d called it her book.

“The one your boyfriend wrote about us. I figure I’ve got one chance to see a movie about my life.” Fix appeared wonderfully satisfied by the thought. “I never read the book, you know. I wasn’t going to give the son of a bitch my money. But now that he’s dead and the money will go to his wife, it’s fine by me. Plus I read the review in the paper that said the woman who plays your mother wasn’t any good. I’m thinking that must really burn her up.”

Marjorie raised a slender hand. “I’m out. You and the girls make a day of it. I’ll be here with cupcakes when you get back.” A few free hours were worth a month of pension checks.

“Oh, Dad,” Caroline said. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to stay home and pull our toenails out with pliers?”

Franny had her share of guilt and dread when Commonwealth was published, but still, she would never deny that those were glorious days: the publisher’s luncheon at La Grenouille, the award ceremony in which Leo was called to the stage, the never-ending book tour where night after night he read to the spellbound crowds and then waited while the crowds formed a line at a table, supplicants come to tell him how his work had changed their lives. He was famous again, back in the light of the world, and every night in a different hotel room he gave her full credit, cradling her head in his hands while they made love. He could not look away from her. He loved her and thanked her and needed her, Leo Posen did. So for all the many costs she had been rewarded.

But seeing the movie now would bring back more than just her betrayal of her family. The movie also spoke to the failure of her long-ago relationship and the lonely death of the man she had loved, as sold by his second wife.

Franny hadn’t understood what it would be like to live with Commonwealth when Leo was writing the book, and once she’d read the book it was too late to do anything about it. The movie, however, was another matter. The movie had yet to be made. Franny begged Leo to keep the rights. She understood that such a promise would constitute a significant financial loss, and still, with the manuscript in her hands, she begged him.

Leo gave them to her on a three-by-five card, because Franny was the sun, the moon, and every last glittering star.

To Frances Xavier Keating,

on the occasion of her twenty-seventh birthday,

I give you the film rights to Commonwealth,

for now and forever,