Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  The night after Thanksgiving, she took her frightening letter to the Grove and put it in the pocket of her apron. All nerves, she proceeded to mix up orders, twice bring the wrong salad dressing to the same diner, and get stiffed on her tip by a red-faced father who’d had to track her down to get his check. Why was she even still working at the Grove? She had thirteen thousand dollars. If she could just deliver the letter, she thought, she might quit. But the back room was jammed with friends and fans of Tanner’s home from college, and when the first set ended, a mob of well-wishers blocked her way to him.

  From her blind side, as she hesitated on the margins, came the voice of Laura Dobrinsky. “I hear you’re in Crossroads.”

  Becky looked down and flashed hot. The pink-spectacled shorty she meant to steal from was putting a match to a cigarette.

  “Tanner convinced you, I gather?”

  “Well, it is my church.”

  Laura shook the match and frowned. “You go to church?”

  “You mean, on Sunday?”

  “I wasn’t aware that you’re a churchgoer.”

  “I guess you don’t know me.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  Becky didn’t see why it mattered. “I’m saying you don’t know me.”

  “Yeah, and maybe I don’t know Crossroads, either. Kind of makes me glad I got out when I did.”

  Again Becky flashed hot. “I’m sorry—do you have a problem with me?”

  “Only in a general way. I hope it’s a good experience for you.”

  Leaving Becky trembling, Laura plunged into the oily ponytails and embroidered denim surrounding Tanner and dispensed some of the hugs she hadn’t felt like giving Clem. Only in a general way? So far, at least, Becky had done nothing more threatening than join Crossroads. It was almost as if the Natural Woman had smelled the letter she was carrying.

  Seeing no chance of catching Tanner alone, she went home with the letter. It now had a spot of salad oil on it, but she couldn’t bear to open it again. She also couldn’t bear to keep it for another week. She thought of mailing it, but she didn’t know if Tanner still lived with his parents; she had only the dimmest sense of his life outside the Grove. She was at the point of looking for his name in the phonebook when she recalled the word churchgoer.

  In the morning, she asked her mother if she ever saw Tanner Evans at Sunday services. Her mother conveyed, with a look and a pause, that her curiosity about Tanner had been noted. “Not the nine o’clock,” she said. “I think I have seen him on Sunday, though. You can ask your father.”

  It was none of her father’s business. On Sunday morning, when Clem and Perry were sleeping and her parents and Judson had left for the early service, she put on a demure full-skirted dress and walked down to First Reformed with the letter in her purse. Except for “midnight” Christmas services (which, like all things Midwestern, happened an hour early), she hadn’t gone to a service since she finished Sunday school. The faces of older parishioners brightened with pleasure and surprise when she crossed the sanctuary’s carpeted parlor. Her mother, in a church dress, and her father, in his vestments, were chatting with some nine o’clockers who’d lingered at the inter-service coffee hour. Judson sat in a corner reading a book, waiting to be taken home. When her mother saw Becky, it was clear from the slyness of her smile that she knew why she was there.

  Taking a program from the greeters, she sat down in the last row of pews and waited to see if she’d guessed right about Laura’s peculiar question. Might Laura come here, too? From the way she’d said churchgoer, Becky doubted it. The organist started up, playing something that her aunt could have named the composer of, and the late crowd began to fill the pews. With each new arrival, she turned to see if it was Tanner, until she became self-conscious about turning too often. She smoothed her skirt, folded her program into a small triangle, and fixed her eyes on the huge wood-and-brass cross hanging behind the altar. The longer she stared at it, the odder it seemed. The fact of its being manufactured somewhere, with the same kind of tools that made useful cabinets and furniture. Cross maker: what a weird nine-to-five to have. And paid how? With the money that people unaccountably, in exchange for nothing, dropped into wood-and-brass collection plates, possibly made by the same worker.

  The Tanner who entered the sanctuary, by himself, just after eleven, was hardly the Tanner she knew. He was wearing a dopey plaid sport coat and an actual necktie, albeit loose-knit and lumpily knotted. He slipped into the pew across the aisle from her, and she returned her eyes to the altar, where her father and Reverend Haefle were entering through a side door, but her skin knew precisely when Tanner turned and saw her; she felt it go hot. The music stopped, and Tanner, half standing, crossed the aisle and sat down by her.

  “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

  She shook her head to shush him.

  “Heavenly Father,” her father prayerfully intoned from the pulpit; and that was all she heard before her ears went deaf. He was a tall and handsome man, but to Becky the black robe he was wearing and the devout sincerity of his delivery more than negated any standing he had as a man in the world. She sat frozen but squirmed inside, counting the seconds until he shut up. It came to her now, with a clarity brought by her return after long absence, how much she must have always hated being a minister’s daughter. The fathers of her friends designed buildings, cured illness, prosecuted criminals. Her father was like a cross maker, only worse. His earnest faith and sanctity were an odor that had forever threatened to adhere to her, like the smell of Chesterfields, only worse, because it couldn’t be washed off.

  But then, when the congregation rose to sing the Gloria Patri and Tanner, at her side, in his ridiculous sport coat, sang forth in a clear, strong voice, unlike her own self-conscious murmur, and when she tried raising her own voice accordingly, As it was in the Beginning, is now and ever shall be, she caught a strange flashing glimpse of a desire, buried somewhere inside her, to belong and to believe in something. She wondered if the desire might always have been there; if it had only been her father, the shame of him, that repelled her from pursuing it. If maybe the fact of the brass cross, its manufacture, wasn’t so dumb. Maybe it was more like amazing that two thousand years after Jesus’s crucifixion people were still filling collection plates to make crosses in his honor.

  In a further flash, she saw that Laura did not like Tanner’s churchgoing; that it might be a fault line between them; that she, Becky, if she opened herself to the possibility of belief, might gain an unforeseen advantage; and that it therefore might be wiser, after all, not to put her letter in Tanner’s hand now, since this would suggest that delivering it was the only reason she’d come to church, but instead to keep coming on Sunday mornings.

  They shared a hymnal for the singing of “For the Beauty of the Earth,” Becky’s hair touching Tanner’s shoulder as she leaned in, and then Reverend Haefle gave the sermon. During the one year she’d been obliged to attend entire services, Becky had sat still for her father’s sermons, for fear of making other congregants restless with her restlessness, which would have embarrassed her as a Hildebrandt, but Dwight Haefle’s interminable slabs of lyrical abstraction had defeated her. Listening to him now, hoping greater age might bring greater understanding, she followed him only as far as Reinhold Niebuhr before losing herself in admiration of Tanner’s hands. She had to will herself not to touch them. In his jacket and necktie, he looked like a boy dressed up for church by his mother. Haefle had moved on to the importance of humility, not Becky’s favorite subject, though one she would need to work on if she got more serious about religion, and it occurred to her that, for Tanner, leaving his fringed jacket and his Frye boots at home was exactly what Haefle was talking about. All but one hour a week, Tanner’s coolness was beyond question, but he humbled himself for church, and this struck her as extremely dear.

  Rising with him to recite the Lord’s Prayer, she might already have been his girlfriend, not to say his wife of many years, a
nd the trespass for which she asked their Father’s forgiveness her theft of him from Laura.

  “You’re here,” he said, when the service was over.

  “Yeah, everything’s changing. I’m trying new things.”

  He was looking at her as if he couldn’t figure her out. This was good.

  “I owe you a big debt of gratitude,” she said. “For making me try Crossroads. I’m learning to be more open with my feelings. And—” She faltered, her face hot. He kept looking at her. “Will you be here next Sunday?”

  “It’s what I do.”

  She nodded, too vigorously, and stood up. “Okay, I’ll see you then.”

  On her way out through the parlor, she paused to be noticed by her father, hoping to take some free credit for having come to a service, but he was engaged with Kitty Reynolds and a petite blond woman whom Becky didn’t recognize. Her father was smiling, and the blond woman was apparently a magnet for his eyes. When they flicked up to Becky, his smile faded. When he returned them to the woman, it came back to life.

  The message was unmistakable. He’d written her off and moved on. As she left the church, the word asshole popped into her head. Clem had uttered it, blasphemously, but it was new to her. Her growing interest in First Reformed, which ought to have pleased her father, was clearly of less consequence to him than his grudge against Rick Ambrose. And he a Christian minister.

  “Yes Tanner was there,” she announced to her mother when she got home, before her mother could annoy her by asking.

  “That’s nice,” her mother said. “He’s spoiling Rick Ambrose’s otherwise perfect record of turning young people off church services.”

  Becky declined the bait. “I’m sure Tanner would be thrilled to know he has your approval.”

  “I imagine he’d rather have yours,” her mother said. “As I’m gathering he does.”

  “Not talking about it,” Becky said, leaving the room.

  A few days later, she was felled by a cold so bad that she had to call in sick at the Grove and couldn’t go to church on Sunday. As soon as she recovered, she took the new step of hanging out at First Reformed after school, joining the girls outside Ambrose’s office, who kindly explained the stories behind their Crossroads gossip, helping her understand what was funny and what was appalling. When she tired of being the newcomer, she wandered down to the function hall and found a team of three boys, led by her own brother, silk-screening posters for the Christmas concert. In theory, she should have lent a hand, because she needed to start accumulating “hours” toward the Arizona trip—to be eligible for Arizona, you had to perform at least forty hours of service or paid work for the group—but Perry was the one thing about Crossroads she didn’t like. Perry was the brother who was brilliant at everything, including art (the poster design bore the mark of his hand), but lately the mere sight of him had made her scalp tighten and prickle, as if she were a dog in the presence of the occult; as if she shared a house with a psychopath whose brilliance was undergirded by all manner of dark doings. She knew about some of those doings but not, she suspected, all of them. He looked up from the silk screen, red-handed with Christmas ink, and smirked at her. She turned and fled.

  When she finally gained admittance to Ambrose’s office and he asked her how things were at home, she found herself saying that she was worried about her mother. Even two weeks ago, she would have considered it treasonous to pass family information to her father’s enemy. Now she positively relished it.

  “My mom keeps up a good front,” she said. “But underneath I get the sense she’s falling apart, and meanwhile Clem is convinced that my dad is going to leave her. It could just be an idea in Clem’s head, but he really harps on it.”

  “Clem is smart,” Ambrose said.

  “I know. I love him so much. But I’m worried about my mom. She’s so dependent on my dad, and the only time she ever stands up to him is when he criticizes Perry. She thinks Perry is a genius. Which, I mean, he is sort of a genius. But he does all this bad shit that she doesn’t have a clue about.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “She doesn’t know anything from me, that’s for sure.”

  “You protect him.”

  “It’s not him I’m protecting. I feel bad for her—she’s having a hard enough time already. But I also don’t want Perry to hurt her.”

  “Do you think we can help him?”

  “Crossroads? I think he only joined because his friends were in it, and then suddenly he’s like Mr. Gung Ho. I don’t know—maybe that’s good?”

  Ambrose waited, his dark eyes on her.

  “It’s just,” she said, “some part of me doesn’t believe it.”

  “Me neither,” Ambrose said. “The minute he walked in the door, I said to myself, ‘That kid is trouble.’”

  Becky felt breathless. She couldn’t believe Ambrose trusted her enough to say that. For a disorienting moment, her heart confused him with Tanner. His honesty with her was like an eighty-proof version of Tanner’s gentler brew. There was no wedding ring on his dark-haired hand, but she’d heard he had a girlfriend at the seminary where he was nominally still a student. It was a little like hearing that Jesus had a girlfriend.

  A burst of female laughter outside his door reminded her that she was one of many. As if to preempt a rejection, to save her dignity, she excused herself hastily and ran from the church, reorienting her heart.

  The following Sunday, after the service ended, she and Tanner sat in the rearmost pew and talked for more than an hour. When someone turned off the sanctuary lights, and the last distant voices died away, they stayed on in the more solemn light of the stained-glass windows. Becky was relieved that she did not, after all, need to do the Crossroads thing of telling Tanner she wanted to get to know him better.

  An exchange of past impressions yielded the interesting fact that Becky, even as a sophomore in high school, had seemed to Tanner impossibly unapproachable. When she countered that, no, he had been that person, he laughed and denied it, as befit his unconceited nature, but she could tell that he was pleased. While they skated around on the subject of Crossroads and the friends of Tanner’s who now served as advisers in the group, her mind worked furiously below the surface. It ought to have followed logically, even irresistibly, that two such singularly unapproachable-seeming people were meant to be together. But what if being together only meant being friends?

  She saw that she had no choice but to take a risk. In a studiously offhand tone, she asked Tanner why Laura didn’t come to church with him.

  “She was raised Catholic,” he said, with a shrug. “She hates institutional religion.”

  Becky waited.

  “Laura’s way more radical than me. She was ready to split for San Francisco as soon as we finished high school. Sleep in the van, be part of the scene.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Becky said, barely breathing.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m not that into the scene—going back to someone’s house and staying up all night. That’s okay once a week, or if you’re into drugs, but I’d rather be sleeping and getting up early to practice. I’ve still got so far to go as a musician.”

  “You already sound amazing.”

  He looked at her gratefully. “You’re not just saying that?”

  “No! I love listening to you.”

  She watched him take this in. It seemed to go down well. He squared his shoulders and said, “I want to cut a demo album. That’s my whole focus right now. Twelve songs good enough to record before I’m twenty-one. I was afraid, if we hit the road, I’d lose sight of that.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Really? I’m not sure Laura does. She’s so gifted, but she doesn’t care about being a professional. If it were up to me, we’d be doing three or four gigs a week. Blues, jazz, Top Forty, whatever. Putting in the hours, developing an audience. The only thing bar owners care about is making money, and Laura hates that. If somebody asked her to do Peggy Lee, she’
d just laugh in their face. But me…”

  “You’re more ambitious,” Becky suggested.

  “Maybe. Laura’s got a lot going on, she’s working the crisis hotline, she’s got her women’s group. For me, it’s enough to work on my music and try to feel closer to God. You know, I really like going to church. I like seeing you here.”

  “I like seeing you, too.”

  “Truly? I was starting to worry that you didn’t.”

  She looked into his eyes, wordlessly telling him he had nothing to fear. God only knew what might have happened if they hadn’t heard footsteps in the vestry, the reverberant bang of metal. Dwight Haefle, no longer in his robe, had popped the release on one of the sanctuary doors. “You don’t have to leave,” he told them. “The doors open from the inside.”

  But Tanner was already on his feet, and Becky stood up, too. Their moment had been too fragile to be reassembled now. As they left the sanctuary, he told her how Danny Dickman and Toby Isner and Topper Morgan had smoked grass and drunk whiskey in the sanctuary on the night before the third Arizona trip, and how Ambrose, in the church parking lot, beside the idling and fully loaded trip buses, had led the group in reaming out the miscreants and debating whether they should be barred from the trip. The confrontation had lasted two hours. Topper Morgan had cried so violently he burst a blood vessel in his eye. And the church had started locking the sanctuary doors.

  Becky went home frustrated by her failure to get a clear statement on Tanner and Laura. She needed to be more than just his experiment. She was, admittedly, inexperienced in love, but her pride and her ethics and her basic sense of tidiness insisted that, before she consented to be added, Laura be explicitly subtracted. The only useful nugget she’d gleaned in this regard was that Tanner still lived with his parents. Since he wasn’t shacked up with Laura, there was no decisive action he could take. But this made a formal renunciation all the more necessary. She considered this requirement absolute, and so it was with a confusing sense of self-betrayal, of observing a person she morally disapproved of and didn’t understand but nevertheless was, that she let Tanner kiss her before he’d satisfied it.