The Corrections (76 page)

He wept at the injustice of his sentence. “For God’s sake, Chip,” he said loudly, because he sensed that this might be his last chance to liberate himself before he lost all contact with that clarity and power and it was therefore crucial that Chip understand
exactly
what he wanted. “I’m asking for your help! You’ve got to get me out of this! You have to put an end to it!”

Even red-eyed, even tear-streaked, Chip’s face was full of power and clarity. Here was a son whom he could trust to understand him as he understood himself; and so Chip’s answer, when it came, was absolute. Chip’s answer told him that this was where the story ended. It ended with Chip shaking his head, it ended with him saying: “I can’t, Dad. I can’t.”

The correction
, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they’d been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she’d seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off; she’d helped her mother pass out leftovers to homeless men in the alley behind their roominghouse. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts.

Nevertheless, the markets did collapse, and Enid, who hadn’t dreamed that she would ever be
glad
that Alfred had locked their assets up in annuities and T-bills, weathered the downturn with less anxiety than her high-flying friends. Orfic Midland did, as threatened, terminate her traditional health insurance and force her into an HMO, but her old neighbor Dean Driblett, with the stroke of a pen, bless his heart, upgraded her and Alfred to DeeDeeCare Choice Plus, which allowed her to keep her favorite doctors. She still had major non-reimbursable monthly nursing-home expenses,
but by scrimping she was able to pay the bills with Alfred’s pension and Railroad Retirement benefits, and meanwhile her house, which she owned outright, continued to appreciate. The simple truth was that, although she wasn’t rich, she also wasn’t poor. Somehow this truth had eluded her during the years of her anxiety and uncertainty about Alfred, but as soon as he was out of the house and she’d caught up on her sleep, she saw it clearly.

She saw everything more clearly now, her children in particular. When Gary returned to St. Jude with Jonah a few months after the catastrophic Christmas, she had nothing but fun with them. Gary still wanted her to sell the house, but he could no longer argue that Alfred was going to fall down the stairs and kill himself, and by then Chip had done many of the jobs (wicker-painting, waterproofing, gutter-cleaning, crack-patching) which, as long as they’d been neglected, had been Gary’s other good argument for selling the house. He and Enid did bicker about money, but this was recreational. Gary hounded her for the $4.96 that she still “owed” him for six six-inch bolts, and she countered by asking, “Is that a new watch?” He conceded that, yes, Caroline had given him a new Rolex for Christmas, but more recently he’d taken a nasty little bath on a biotech IPO whose shares he couldn’t sell before June 15, and anyway, there was a principle at stake here, Mother, a principle. But Enid refused, on principle, to give him the $4.96. She enjoyed knowing that she would go to her grave refusing to pay for those six bolts. She asked Gary which biotech stock, exactly, he’d taken the bath on. Gary said never mind.

After Christmas Denise moved to Brooklyn and went to work at a new restaurant, and in April she sent Enid a plane ticket for her birthday. Enid thanked her and said she couldn’t make the trip, she couldn’t possibly leave Alfred, it would not be right. Then she went and enjoyed four wonderful days in New York City. Denise looked so much
happier than she had at Christmas that Enid chose not to care that she still didn’t have a man in her life or any discernible desire to get one.

Back in St. Jude, Enid was playing bridge at Mary Beth Schumpert’s one afternoon when Bea Meisner began to vent her Christian disapproval of a famous “gay” actress.

“She’s a
terrible
role model for young people,” Bea said. “I think if you make an evil choice in your life, the least you can do is not brag about it. Especially when they have all these new programs that can help people like that.”

Enid, who was Bea’s partner for that rubber and was already annoyed by Bea’s failure to respond to an opening two-bid, mildly commented that she didn’t think “gays” could help being “gay.”

“Oh, no, it’s definitely a choice,” Bea said. “It’s a weakness and it starts in adolescence. There’s no question about that. All the experts agree.”

“I loved that thriller her girlfriend made with Harrison Ford,” Mary Beth Schumpert said. “What was it called?”

“I don’t believe it’s a choice,” Enid insisted quietly. “Chip said an interesting thing to me once. He said that with so many people hating ‘gays’ and disapproving of them, why would anybody choose to be ‘gay’ if they could help it? I thought that was really an interesting perspective.”

“Well, no, it’s because they want special rights,” Bea said. “It’s because they want to have ‘gay pride.’ That’s why so many people don’t like them, even apart from the immorality of what they’re doing. They can’t just make an evil choice. They have to brag about it, too.”

“I can’t remember the last time I saw a really good movie,” said Mary Beth.

Enid was no champion of “alternative” lifestyles, and the things she disliked about Bea Meisner she’d disliked for forty years. She couldn’t have said why this particular bridge-table conversation made her decide that she no longer needed to
be friends with Bea Meisner. Nor could she have said why Gary’s materialism and Chip’s failures and Denise’s childlessness, which had cost her countless late-night hours of fretting and punitive judgment over the years, distressed her so much less once Alfred was out of the house.

It made a difference, certainly, that all three of her kids were helping out. Chip in particular seemed almost miraculously transformed. After Christmas, he stayed with Enid for six weeks, visiting Alfred every day, before returning to New York. A month later he was back in St. Jude, minus his awful earrings. He proposed that he extend his visit to a length that delighted and astonished Enid until it emerged that he’d got himself involved with the chief neurology resident at St. Luke’s Hospital.

The neurologist, Alison Schulman, was a kinky-haired and rather plain-looking Jewish girl from Chicago. Enid liked her well enough, but she was mystified that a successful young doctor wanted anything to do with her semi-employed son. The mystery deepened in June when Chip announced that he was moving to Chicago to commence an immoral cohabitation with Alison, who had joined a group practice in Skokie. Chip neither confirmed nor denied that he had no real job and no intention of paying his fair share of household expenses. He claimed to be working on a screenplay. He said that “his” producer in New York had “loved” his “new” version and asked for a rewrite. His only gainful employment, however, as far as Enid knew, was part-time substitute teaching. Enid did appreciate that he drove to St. Jude from Chicago once a month and spent several long days with Alfred; she loved having a child of hers back in the Midwest. But when Chip informed her that he was going to be the father of twins with a woman he wasn’t even married to, and when he then invited Enid to a wedding at which the bride was
seven months pregnant
and the groom’s current “job” consisted of rewriting his screenplay for the fourth or fifth time
and the majority of the guests not only were extremely Jewish but seemed
delighted
with the happy couple, there was certainly no shortage of material for Enid to find fault with and condemn! And it didn’t make her proud of herself, it didn’t make her feel good about her nearly fifty years of marriage, to think that if Alfred had been with her at the wedding, she
would
have found fault and she
would
have condemned. If she’d been sitting beside Alfred, the crowd bearing down on her would surely have seen the sour look on her face and turned away, would surely not have lifted her and her chair off the ground and carried her around the room while the klezmer music played, and she would surely not have loved it.

The sorry fact seemed to be that life without Alfred in the house was better for everyone but Alfred.

Hedgpeth and the other doctors, including Alison Schulman, had kept the old man at St. Luke’s through January and into February, lustily billing Orfic Midland’s soon-to-be-former health insurer while they explored every conceivable avenue of treatment, from ECT to Haldol. Alfred was finally discharged with a diagnosis of parkinsonism, dementia, depression, and neuropathy of the legs and urinary tract. Enid felt morally obliged to offer to care for him at home, but her children, thank God, wouldn’t hear of it. Alfred was installed in the Deepmire Home, a long-term care facility adjacent to the country club, and Enid undertook to visit him every day, to keep him well dressed, and to bring him homemade treats.

She was glad, if nothing else, to have his body back. She’d always loved his size, his shape, his smell, and he was much more available now that he was restrained in a geri chair and unable to formulate coherent objections to being touched. He let himself be kissed and didn’t cringe if her lips lingered a little; he didn’t flinch if she stroked his hair.

His body was what she’d always wanted. It was the rest of
him that was the problem. She was unhappy before she went to visit him, unhappy while she sat beside him, and unhappy for hours afterward. He’d entered a phase of deep randomness. Enid might arrive and find him sunk deeply in a funk, his chin on his chest and a cookie-sized drool spot on his pants leg. Or he might be chatting amiably with a stroke victim or a potted plant. He might be unpeeling the invisible piece of fruit that occupied his attention hour after hour. He might be sleeping. Whatever he was doing, though, he wasn’t making sense.

Somehow Chip and Denise had the patience to sit and converse with him about whatever demented scenario he inhabited, whatever train wreck or incarceration or luxury cruise, but Enid couldn’t tolerate the least error. If he mistook her for her mother, she corrected him angrily: “Al, it’s
me, Enid
, your wife of
forty-eight years
.” If he mistook her for Denise, she used the very same words. She’d felt Wrong all her life and now she had a chance to tell him how Wrong he was. Even as she was loosening up and becoming less critical in other areas of life, she remained strictly vigilant at the Deepmire Home. She had to come and tell Alfred that
he
was wrong to dribble ice cream on his clean, freshly pressed pants. He was wrong not to recognize Joe Person when Joe was nice enough to drop in. He was wrong not to look at snapshots of Aaron and Caleb and Jonah. He was wrong not to be excited that Alison had given birth to two slightly underweight but healthy baby girls. He was wrong not to be happy or grateful or even remotely lucid when his wife and daughter went to enormous trouble to bring him home for Thanksgiving dinner. He was wrong to say, after that dinner, when they returned him to the Deepmire Home, “Better not to leave here than to have to come back.” He was wrong, if he could be so lucid as to produce a sentence like that, not to be lucid at any other time. He was wrong to attempt to hang himself with bedsheets in the night. He was
wrong to hurl himself against a window. He was wrong to try to slash his wrist with a dinner fork. Altogether he was wrong about so many things that, except for her four days in New York and her two Christmases in Philadelphia and her three weeks of recovery from hip surgery, she never failed to visit him. She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he’d been and how right she’d been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. Even if he wouldn’t listen, she had to tell him.

He’d been living at the Deepmire Home for two years when he stopped accepting food. Chip took time away from parenthood and his new teaching job at a private high school and his eighth revision of the screenplay to visit from Chicago and say goodbye. Alfred lasted longer after that than anyone expected. He was a lion to the end. His blood pressure was barely measurable when Denise and Gary flew into town, and still he lived another week. He lay curled up on the bed and barely breathed. He moved for nothing and responded to nothing except to shake his head emphatically, once, if Enid tried to put an ice chip in his mouth. The one thing he never forgot was how to refuse. All of her correction had been for naught. He was as stubborn as the day she’d met him. And yet when he was dead, when she’d pressed her lips to his forehead and walked out with Denise and Gary into the warm spring night, she felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

JONATHAN FRANZEN

The Twenty-Seventh City

‘A huge and masterly drama … gripping and surreal and overwhelmingly convincing’

Newsweek

St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city. But that all changes when it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city’s leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction,
The Twenty-Seventh City
shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unravelling into terror and dark comedy.

‘Franzen has managed to put together a suspense story with all the elements of a complex, multi-layered psychological novel… A riveting piece of fiction that lingers in the mind long after more conventional pot-boilers have bubbled away’

New York Times Book Review
 

Unsettling and visionary. The Twenty-Seventh City is not a novel that can be quickly dismissed or easily forgotten: it has elements of both “Great” and “American”. A book of memorable characters, surprising situations, and provocative ideas’