Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

as a token of my enduring love and gratitude.

LEON ARIEL POSEN

He honored it, even later when they rarely spoke and she suspected he needed the money. She didn’t mention his promise to anyone after he died. Who would she have told? His wife? She knew an index card didn’t stand a chance against the flotilla of lawyers. Irrationally, she had gotten it in her head that they might try and take the card away from her.

“No,” Franny said. No, it wasn’t a movie she wanted to see, especially not with her father and sister and a hundred strangers packed into the Santa Monica AMC 3, eating popcorn.

Fix laughed and smacked his hands flat against the arms of his recliner. “Boy, did you two turn out to be a couple of little girls. There’s nothing in that movie that’s going to hurt you. You should be able to see how a dying man stuck in this rattrap frame might want to see himself portrayed by a handsome movie star. And anyway, this story is ancient history. You’ve got until tomorrow to pull yourselves together. It’s my birthday and we’re going to the show.”

Caroline parked and Franny got the wheelchair out of the trunk. Fix had long since stopped driving but he wouldn’t sell the car. There was always the chance that fate could reverse itself, that a cure could be found in the latter part of the eleventh hour and the parts of himself that had been devoured by cancer could be restored. Hope, Fix said, was the blood of life, and the car could never be replaced. It was a Crown Victoria, a former unmarked police car he’d bought from the department. Franny called it the Batmobile for its ability to go a hundred and forty miles per hour if need be. Not that he’d ever driven it at a hundred and forty, but he liked to say he felt better just knowing what was possible.

Franny opened the car door and picked up her father’s feet from the floorboard, swinging them gently out and then taking his arm. “Count of three,” she said, and together they counted while he rocked back and forth to gain momentum. The car that could catch a stolen Ferrari could not help him up. Franny pulled him out and Caroline caught him in the chair the moment he stood. Even a month ago Fix had fought this. A month ago he wouldn’t use the walker, insisting instead on holding on to Marjorie, even after the falls. But that was behind them now. Now he let Franny put his feet on the paddles. He said thank you.

The actress who owned the house in Amagansett had wanted to play Julia in the movie, which was to say she wanted to play Franny’s mother. She didn’t know, of course, that Franny was a real person who would be sleeping in her bed on her Egyptian cotton sheets. Leo had blamed Albie for the end of their affair. He believed that had Albie never found them they would have gone on happily together. But Caroline was right: Albie didn’t put the nail in the tire, the nail was already there. Still, as long as Leo got to blame their personal problems on an innocent party, Franny would like the chance to blame the actress and her ridiculous goddamn house. No one should have so much money that they could own a house like that and then not even bother to live in it. The swimming pool was long and deep and looked nothing like a swimming pool at all. It looked like the foundation of a shotgun house that had been built in the 1800s and then blown away in a storm. The swimming pool was fed by a spring. No one knew exactly where it came from, not the spring, not the pool, both having been there longer than the actress’s house. And that was just the beginning: there were climbing roses that covered the east wall and then sprawled in a giant tangle over the sloping roof, a miraculous profusion of blooms. It was a storm of roses, white and red, a half a dozen shades of pink, that piled over themselves all summer long, one breed dying out just as another was peaking. A carpet of blown petals covered the lawn throughout the summer. And there was a Klimt in her bedroom, small but unarguably real, a painting of a woman who bore an almost ancestral resemblance to the actress. Who kept the Klimt in their summer house? It was the house, Franny believed, that had done them in. No one could stay away from it except the actress herself. Leo had called Franny one night long after their relationship was over to tell her the actress had invited him back to Amagansett for dinner. She said she wanted to talk about the movie, even though he told her there wasn’t any movie.

“Come anyway,” she’d said.

“You remember all that champagne in the refrigerator?” Leo said to Franny on the phone.

Franny remembered the champagne.

“Well, we drank it.” From his apartment in Cambridge, Leo sighed. “Nothing happened. That’s what I wanted to tell you. In the end I couldn’t go upstairs with her. It was still our bedroom, Franny. I wasn’t going to do it.”

By the standards of the film industry, both the actress and her attempts to land a part by any means possible were now ancient history. She had long ago ceased to be the romantic interest in films. She had stopped playing the mother roles. At sixty, she was even too old to play fairytale witches. She was left with a handful of dowager parts, the occasional senior senator, a ruthless CEO in a well-reviewed cable series. That was what Franny had to content herself with as the lights in the movie theater in Santa Monica went down: somewhere the beautiful actress was going to see the movie of Commonwealth and remember how hard she’d tried to be Julia.

But that turned out to be no comfort whatsoever.

Franny and Caroline, sitting with their father, were joined in the darkness by a single improbable thought: Would it have been worse to see a film of their actual childhood? There was the summer that Bert had the Super 8 and stalked them like Antonioni as they ran through the sprinklers and weaved their bikes in and out of the frame. Holly swirled a hula hoop around the straight pole of her hips. Albie jumped in front of her, pulling off his shirt. The sound of Bert’s voice came from the other side of the camera, barking at them to do something interesting, but they were being children, and so, in retrospect, they were fascinating. Maybe that film still existed in a box in her mother’s attic or somewhere in the bottom of a file cabinet in Bert’s garage. Franny could try to find it the next time she was in Virginia and thread the tape into a projector. That way they could see the real Cal running again and erase the memory of this sullen boy who played him. A film of life would definitely be better than this, even if there had been a camera behind them every minute recording the entire disaster of childhood, all the worst moments preserved, it would still have been better than having to watch these strangers making some half-assed attempt to replicate their lives. Holly and Jeanette had been collapsed into a single girl who was neither Holly nor Jeanette but some horrible changeling who stamped her foot and slammed the door when she argued. When had Holly or Jeanette ever done anything like that? But of course the child actors weren’t trying to play real children. They wouldn’t have known that the book had anything to do with real people, and anyway, they wouldn’t have read the book. So was the movie excruciating to watch because nothing was right, or was it excruciating to watch because, impossibly, some things were? Every now and then there was a flash of familiarity in the minute cruelties the two families exchanged.

“It isn’t you,” Leo had said when she finished reading the book. “It isn’t any of you.” He was sitting in the second bedroom he used as an office in their apartment in Chicago, the little apartment they had before there was money. He held her in his lap and stroked her hair while she cried. She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but a day all the way back in Iowa when Leo, brushing his teeth while Franny was in the shower, had spit out his toothpaste, pulled back the curtain just a bit, and said, “I’ve been thinking about that story you told me about your stepbrother.”