Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  The sensation of hating Clem was new and overwhelming. It was like love ripped brutally inside out.

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  “Becky, come on. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. It’s just that you’ve got so much going on. You’re about to start college, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. And Tanner—I wouldn’t be surprised if he never leaves New Prospect.”

  She stopped and wheeled around. “Go to hell! I’m sick of you! I’m sick of you judging me and my friends! You’ve been doing it my whole life and I’m sick of it! I’m not six years old anymore! You’ve got your amazing life-changing sex-loving girlfriend—why don’t you stop bossing me around and tell her what to do? Or is she not passive?”

  She hardly knew what she was saying. An evil spirit had possessed her, and Clem’s shock was apparent in the streetlight. She struggled to regain her Christian bearings, but her hatred was too intense. She turned and ran full-tilt toward the drugstore.

  Russ was happy with his Christmas present. He’d had more than six hours with Frances, enough to feel like an entire day, and every seeming setback had turned into an advance. She’d no sooner disclosed her affair with the heart surgeon than she contrasted him unfavorably with Russ, no sooner threatened to go to Arizona than pushed Russ to join her there, no sooner antagonized Theo Crenshaw than commended herself to Russ’s guidance. Even the accident on Fifty-ninth Street had been a boon. He’d wrestled with the Fury’s mangled bumper and its frozen lug nuts, displaying strength of body and coolness of head, and when a group of teenagers loomed up in the snow, causing her to clutch his arm in suburban terror, she’d learned an important lesson about racial prejudice: the young men were only offering to help. The accident had made Russ so late that he now had no choice but to tell Marion he’d been with Frances, thus sparing him from fretting that Perry would tell her. Frances still claimed to be in a hurry to get home, but when he proposed a quick stop at McDonald’s she’d admitted she was starving, and when they finally returned to First Reformed her reluctance to go inside with him had yielded, piquantly, to his insistence.

  In his office, he’d handed her his blues records one by one, relating what little was known of Robert Johnson, what a tragic alcoholic Tommy Johnson had been, what a miracle that Victor and Paramount and Vocalion had made recordings of the early greats. The 78s were among his most valuable possessions, and she accepted them with appropriate reverence. She was sitting on his desk with her legs uncrossed, snowmelt dripping from her dangling feet. He was a short step away from standing between her legs, if he’d had the nerve of a heart surgeon.

  “I’m going to go straight home and listen to these,” she said. “I’d ask you to join me, but I’ve already kept you way too long.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “It’s been a rare pleasure.”

  “The other ladies will be jealous. But you know what? Tough luck. Fortune favors the bold.”

  He found it necessary to clear his throat. “I’m not sure I’d have time to listen to all ten of the records, but I could certainly—”

  “No, I don’t want to be greedy. You should get home.”

  “I’m not in any rush.”

  “Plus, what if I decide to get high with Larry’s pot? They say it’s great for appreciating music, but I don’t imagine you’d consider that a meaningful reason to break the law.”

  “Now you’re teasing me.”

  “You’re such a square, it’s irresistible.”

  “I already told you I’m open to experimenting with you.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what to do with that.” She laughed. “Has the church ever had to excommunicate someone? I could see me being the first, if it came out I’d lured you into reefer madness. You’d see me down at the A&P, wearing a scarlet letter.”

  “R for reefer,” he said, trying to keep up with her.

  “R for Russ. It could also stand for Russ.”

  He couldn’t remember her having spoken his first name. It was somehow astonishing that she even knew it, so breathtaking was the intimacy it seemed to promise.

  “I’m willing to take the chance if you are.”

  “Okay, noted,” she said, hopping off his desk. “But not tonight. I’m sure your wife is wondering where you are.”

  “She’s not. I left a message with Perry.”

  What he wanted must have been plain to her. She looked him in the eye and scrunched up her face, as if she smelled something off and wondered if he did, too. “This has been enough, don’t you think?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I—you don’t think so?”

  “I am in no hurry at all for this evening to end.”

  He could hardly have been plainer, and he saw her blanch. Then she laughed and touched him on the nose. “I like you, Reverend Hildebrandt. But I think it’s time for me to go.”

  That Clem had found that very moment to knock on his door, before the cataclysm of being beeped on the nose had fully registered, was simply an embarrassment, not a setback, but it had been followed, in the church parking lot, after he and Clem had dug out her Buick, by yet another advance. Frances beckoned him over and said, “It’s probably good he came when he did. Things were getting a little tensy-tense.”

  “I’m sorry I tried to keep you. I should be grateful you donated as much time as you did.”

  “Mission accomplished. Deliverables delivered.”

  “I truly am grateful,” he said with feeling.

  “Oh, pooh. I’m grateful, too. But if you really want to show your gratitude…”

  “Yes.”

  “You could go and talk to Rick. It looked like he was still in his office.”

  “Talk to him now?”

  “No time like the present.”

  It seemed to Russ that any other time would be better than the present.

  “I’m serious about going to Arizona,” she said, “and it won’t be half as rewarding if you aren’t there. I know that sounds selfish, but I’m not just being selfish. I hate to see you holding on to a grudge.”

  “I’ll—see what I can do.”

  “Good. I’ll be waiting. I want you to call me and tell me how it goes.”

  “Call you on the telephone.”

  “Is there some other kind of calling? I suppose I could ask you to drop by, but who knows what kind of reefer madness you’d be walking into.”

  “Seriously, Frances. You should not be doing that experiment by yourself.”

  “Okay, I’ll make sure to have a pastor present. I was going to say a pastor and a physician, but maybe we can do without the physician. I suspect he wouldn’t approve of—you.”

  Russ didn’t know what to say. Was the heart surgeon still a threat?

  “Anyway,” she said, “I hope you’ll make peace with Rick. Until you do, you’re not allowed to call me.” She shifted her car into forward gear. “Ha, listen to her. Giving ultimatums to a pastor. Who does she think she is?”

  And away she went.

  Russ had once devoted a Sunday sermon to Jesus’s disturbing prophesy to Peter at the Last Supper—his prediction that his most faithful disciple would thrice, before the cock crowed, deny that he knew him. The conclusion Russ had drawn from Peter’s fulfillment of the prophesy, and from the tears he then shed for his betrayal of his Lord, was that the prophesy had in fact been a profound parting gift. Jesus had told Peter, in effect, that he knew that Peter was only human; was fearful of worldly censure and punishment. The prophesy was his assurance that he would still be there in Peter at the moment when Peter most bitterly failed him—would always be there, would always understand him, always love him, in spite of his human weakness. In Russ’s interpretation, Peter had wept not simply with remorse but with gratitude for the assurance.

  Though the comparison was profane, Russ had been reminded of Peter’s denials when he denied to Clem, at least three times, that he lusted after Mrs. Cottrell. Frances was his joy of the season—she’d beeped him on the nose!—
and he ought to have been shouting the good news from every rooftop, but Clem’s accusations had caught him off guard. The accusations, and even more the crazy talk of Vietnam, had reeked of adolescent moral absolutism. Clem was too young to understand that, although commandments were important, the callings of the heart amounted to a higher law. This had been Christ’s revision of the Covenant, his message of love, and Russ regretted having lacked the courage to level with his son and make an example of his own heart’s calling for Frances. Clem needed to be cured of his absolutism. By denying his feelings, Russ had done a disservice not only to them but arguably to his son as well.

  Left alone in his office, he sat at his desk and tried to clear his head, telling himself that Clem might yet change his mind or fail to be drafted, and that, in any case, with American infantry no longer in combat, his risk of physical injury was low, so that he could devote his thoughts again to Frances. His outing with her hadn’t exceeded his wildest dreams, because it hadn’t ended with her sliding her hands inside his sheepskin coat and gazing up into his eyes, but it had come pretty close. She’d given him a dozen reasons to hope, and the tensy-tension she’d alluded to, in the parking lot, was unmistakably sexual.

  The tension was still in him, palpable in the rapid beating of his heart. He’d never profaned the church by abusing himself in his office, but he was so deeply in the thrall of Frances that he was tempted to do it now. Turn out the light, lower his zipper, and declare his allegiance. Beneath his feet was a bass rhythm from the function hall, so blurred and diffracted that it was more of a random hum. Slipping in beneath his door was the attenuated smoke of countless concert cigarettes. The church was already profaned; there was license in the air. But the thought of Rick Ambrose stayed his hand.

  Heart beating in a less agreeable way, he stood and opened his door. He couldn’t help hoping that Ambrose had gone home—had spared him from taking any action until after the holidays. But Ambrose’s door was still ajar. The very light spilling out of it was hateful to Russ. The last time he’d set foot in that office, three years ago, he’d been accused of coming on to Sally Perkins, and Ambrose had stabbed him in the back.

  He closed his own door again and sat down to pray.

  Heavenly Father, I come to you seeking the spirit of forgiveness. Already, as you know, I’ve broken your commandments by following my heart, and I pray you’ll forgive me for wanting to experience more joy in your Creation—to more fully rejoice in the life you’ve given me. What I need now is to find forgiveness in myself. Earlier tonight, when I felt moved to make peace with my enemy, I heard your Son speaking in my heart, and I allowed myself to hope that you were working your will through Frances. But now I’ve lost hold of the impulse. Now I worry that what I heard speaking wasn’t love of your Son but simply lust for Frances—a selfish wish to be with her in Arizona. Now I worry that “making peace” without love in my heart will only compound my offenses against you. I’m alone with my doubts and my weakness, and I beg you, humbly, to instill me again with the spirit of Christmas. Please help me sincerely want to forgive Rick.

  He knew better than to expect a direct response. Prayer was an inflection of the soul in God’s direction, an inner movement. God’s answer, if it came at all, would seem to him his own idea. The thing to do was wait quietly and make himself receptive to it.

  The first words that came to him were lacerating. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to be your son? In hindsight, of all the abuses Clem had rained on him, this was the hardest to dismiss, because it seemed to refer to more than just Russ’s weakness for Frances. It was an explicit eruption of a disrespect that had been building in Clem for several years. Russ had attributed the disrespect to adolescence, but it came to him now, all at once, that his humiliation at the hands of Rick Ambrose had been painful not only to him. The humiliation must have been painful to his son as well. He’d been too preoccupied with his own pain to see it.

  At the humiliating fellowship meeting, the Clem who’d stood up to defend him against Sally Perkins and Laura Dobrinsky was still the Clem he knew and loved. But Clem had become less and less recognizable since then. He’d grossly overstepped at Thanksgiving, styling himself as Becky’s defender, ordering Russ to let her make her own decision about her inheritance. And now he wanted to go to Vietnam. What had happened to the boy who’d marched against the war’s immorality? Even allowing for his absolutism, even granting the validity of his point about student deferments, it made little sense to join the army when the war was winding down and he wasn’t saving some other boy’s life, just derailing his own. As an act of principle, it didn’t add up. He was clearly doing it to hurt his father.

  How terribly Russ must have embarrassed him. It was all very well to be privately deplorable, cowering in his office, nursing his grudge, creeping through the attic for fear of running into Ambrose. He could bear the private shame; he could square his own accounts with God. But to be so deplorable in his son’s eyes? He saw that if he only thought of Frances he would never sincerely forgive Ambrose, because the impulse was impure. It was hopelessly tangled up with his desire to (in Clem’s outrageous word) bone her. But if he performed the act of forgiveness as a gift to Clem? To make himself a father more worthy of respect?

  Keeping his eyes half shut, to protect his fragile idea, he left his office and went up the hallway to the hateful door. With someone’s volition, his own or God’s, he knocked.

  The response was immediate and sharp. “Yep.”

  Russ pushed the door farther open. Ambrose, seated at his desk, looked over his shoulder. To judge from his expression, Russ might have been a blood-soaked apparition.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “Um—sure,” Ambrose said. “Come in.”

  Russ shut the door and sat down on the sofa where the young crowd received its counseling. Its springs were so shot that his knees ended up higher than his head. He shifted to the edge of a cushion, trying to gain height, but the sofa insisted on his being lower than Ambrose. And just like that, in no time at all, despite his loving intentions, he was engulfed in hatred. Engulfed in the misery of being made to feel smaller than a man half his age. There was a reason he’d shunned Ambrose for three years. It was only in the madness of Frances that he’d forgotten. She had no concept of the enormity of what she’d asked of him.

  “I suppose,” he said stiffly, “I should begin with an apology.”

  Ambrose was now glowering. “You can skip it.”

  “No, I have to say it. It’s long overdue. I’ve been—childish—and I apologize for that. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I apologize.”

  The words rang completely hollow. Not only did he not expect to be forgiven, he didn’t even want to be. He struggled to find a way around his hatred, but it had grown so large in three years, and thinking of Clem helped him not at all.

  “So,” Ambrose said. “What can I do for you?”

  Russ leaned back on the sofa and looked at the ceiling. He wanted to be gone, but to run away now, it seemed to him, would be to admit that he would never have Frances, never regain Clem’s respect. He opened his mouth to see what he might say. “What do you make of all this?”

  “All this what.”

  “You, me, the situation. What do you make of it?”

  Ambrose sighed. “I think it’s a misfortune. I won’t pretend I don’t blame you for it, but I understand that your pride was badly wounded. To the extent I made it worse, I regret it. I apologized to you at the time. I can apologize again if you’d like.”

  “No. Skip it.”

  “Then tell me what I can do for you.”

  The tokens of love and adulation in Ambrose’s office had proliferated since Russ was last in it. Above the desk were poems and messages in female handwriting, on pages ripped from spiral notebooks. Hundreds of snapshots were thumbtacked on top of one another, teen faces peeking out from the lower strata. Silk-screened posters now entirely covered one wall, right up to the ceil
ing. Feathers and rocks and carved sticks and scraps of watercolor painting crowded two long shelves. The cup of Ambrose ranneth over.

  “I don’t even know how it happened,” Russ said. “How I came to hate you so much. It goes way beyond pride—it’s basically consumed my life, and I don’t understand it. How I can be a servant of God and feel this way. Just being in this office is a torture. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I can’t control it. I can’t think of you for five seconds without feeling sick. I can’t even look at you now—your face makes me sick.”

  He sounded like a little girl running to her parents with hurt feelings. Mean Rick made me feel bad.

  “If it’s any comfort,” Ambrose said, “I don’t like you, either. I used to have a lot of respect for you, but that’s long gone.”

  Beneath them, the bass vibrations crescendoed and stopped. That Russ could hear the crowd’s cheering at all, at this distance, suggested that it was very large. It really should have been a comfort to know that his hatred was reciprocated, but now it only reminded him of Clem’s disrespect.

  “Be that as it may,” he said, “we can’t keep doing this to the church. It’s just too obscene. I don’t know how to get out of it, but we have to find a way to be more—civil.”

  “It was brave of you to knock on my door. To take that step.”

  “Oh my God.” Russ clutched at the air and made his hands into fists. “Talk about things that make me sick. That little tremor in your voice when you tell someone they’re brave. As if you’re the world’s leading authority on courage. As if your opinion is of the utmost importance.”

  Ambrose laughed. “That was a brave thing to say.”

  “I used to love you, Rick. I thought we were friends.” Again the hurt little girl.

  “It was good while it lasted,” Ambrose said.

  “No. I don’t think so. I think I was always basically a fraud. I had no business trying to be a youth minister—I was never any good at it. And then you came into my church, and you’re right, it was a blow to my pride. How good at it you were. It was stupid of me to envy that, because I’m good at other things—things you’re not good at. But none of them seemed to matter.”