The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Grieg,” said Sylvia, laughing.

  “Oh, that is funny, isn’t it? Grieg. I’m so stupid tonight.”

  “How much did you make? You seemed to be doing well.”

  “I’m not sure, I didn’t count.”

  Sylvia smiled at her intently. “I think you did, though. I think you counted exactly.”

  “All right,” Enid said, blushing because she was liking Sylvia so much. “It was a hundred thirty dollars.”

  A portrait of Edvard Grieg hung in a room of actual gilt ornateness that recalled the eighteenth-century splendor of Sweden’s royal court. The large number of empty chairs confirmed Enid’s suspicion that many of the cruise participants were low-class. She’d been on cruises where the classical concerts were SRO.

  Although Sylvia seemed less than knocked dead by the musicians, Enid thought they were wonderful. They played, from memory, popular classical tunes such as “Swedish Rhapsody” and excerpts from Finlandia and Peer Gynt. In the middle of Peer Gynt the second violinist turned green and left the room for a minute (the sea really was a bit stormy, but Enid had a strong stomach and Sylvia had a patch) and then returned to his chair and managed to find his place again without, as it were, missing a beat. The twenty people in the audience shouted, “Bravo!”

  At the elegant reception afterward Enid spent 7.7 percent of her gambling earnings on a cassette tape recorded by the quartet. She tried a complimentary glass of Spögg, a Swedish liqueur currently enjoying a $15 million marketing campaign. Spögg tasted like vodka, sugar, and horseradish, which in fact were its ingredients. As their fellow guests reacted to Spögg with looks of surprise and reproach, Enid and Sylvia fell to giggling.

  “Special treat,” Sylvia said. “Complimentary Spögg. Try some!”

  “Yum!” Enid said in stitches, snorting for air. “Spögg!”

  Then it was on to the Ibsen Promenade for the scheduled ten o’clock ice cream social. In the elevator it seemed to Enid that the ship was suffering not only from a seesaw motion but also from a yaw, as if its bow were the face of someone experiencing repugnance. Leaving the elevator, she almost fell over a man on his hands and knees like half a two-man prank involving shoving. On the back of his T-shirt was a punch line: THEY JUST LOSE THEIR AIM.

  Enid accepted an ice cream soda from a food handler in a toque. Then she initiated an exchange of family data with Sylvia which quickly became an exchange more of questions than of answers. It was Enid’s habit, when she sensed that family was not a person’s favorite topic, to probe the sore relentlessly. She would sooner have died than admit that her own children disappointed her, but hearing of other people’s disappointing children—their squalid divorces, their substance abuse, their foolish investments—made her feel better.

  On the surface, Sylvia Roth had nothing to be ashamed of. Her sons were both in California, one in medicine and the other in computers, and both were married. Yet they seemed to be hot conversational sands to be avoided or crossed at a sprint. “Your daughter went to Swarthmore,” she said.

  “Yes, briefly,” Enid said. “So, and five grandsons, though. My goodness. How old is the youngest?”

  “He was two last month, and what about you?” Sylvia said. “Any grandkids?”

  “Our oldest son, Gary, has three sons, but so, that’s interesting, a five-year gap between the youngest and the next youngest?”

  “Nearly six, actually, and your son in New York, I want to hear about him, too. Did you stop and see him today?”

  “Yes, he made a lovely lunch but we didn’t get down to see his office at the Wall Street Journal where he has a new job because the weather was bad, so, and do you get out much to California? To see your grandsons?”

  Some spirit, a willingness to play the game, left Sylvia. She sat peering into her empty soda glass. “Enid, will you do me a favor?” she said finally. “Come upstairs and have a nightcap.”

  Enid’s day had begun in St. Jude at five in the morning, but she never declined an attractive invitation. Upstairs in the Lagerkvist Taproom she and Sylvia were served by a dwarf in a horned helmet and leather jerkin who persuaded them to order cloudberry akvavit.

  “I want to tell you something,” Sylvia said, “because I have to tell someone on the ship, but you can’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Are you good at keeping secrets?”

  “It’s one thing I do well.”

  “Then, good,” Sylvia said. “Three days from now there’s going to be an execution in Pennsylvania. So, and two days after that, on Thursday, Ted and I have our fortieth anniversary. And if you ask Ted, he’ll tell you that’s why we’re on this cruise, for the anniversary. He’ll tell you that, but it’s not the truth. Or it’s only a truth about Ted and not me.”

  Enid felt afraid.

  “The man who’s being executed,” Sylvia Roth said, “killed our daughter.”

  “No.”

  The blue clarity of Sylvia’s gaze made her seem a beautiful, lovable animal that was not, however, quite human. “Ted and I,” she said, “are on this cruise because we have a problem with this execution. We have a problem with each other.”

  “No! What are you telling me?” Enid shuddered. “Oh, I can’t stand to hear this! I can’t stand to hear this!”

  Sylvia quietly registered this allergy to her disclosure. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not fair of me to ambush you. Maybe we should call it a night.”

  But Enid quickly regained her composure. She was determined not to miss becoming Sylvia’s confidante. “Tell me everything you need to tell me,” she said. “And I’ll listen.” She folded her hands in her lap like a good listener. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “Then the other thing I have to tell you,” Sylvia said, “is that I’m a gun artist. I draw guns. You really want to hear this?”

  “Yes.” Enid nodded eagerly and vaguely. The dwarf, she noticed, used a small ladder to fetch down bottles. “Interesting.”

  For many years, Sylvia said, she’d been an amateur print-maker. She had a sun-filled studio in her house in Chadds Ford, she had a cream-smooth lithography stone and a twenty-piece set of German woodblock chisels, and she belonged to a Wilmington art guild in whose semi-annual show, while her youngest child, Jordan, grew from a tomboy into an independent young woman, she’d sold decorative prints for prices like forty dollars. Then Jordan was murdered and for five years Sylvia printed, drew, and painted nothing but guns. Year after year only guns.

  “Terrible terrible,” Enid said with open disapproval.

  The trunk of the wind-splintered tulip tree outside Sylvia’s studio suggested stocks and barrels. Every human form sought to become a hammer, a trigger guard, a cylinder, a grip. There was no abstraction that couldn’t be tracer fire, or the smoke of black powder, or a hollow-point’s flowering. The body was worldlike in the repleteness of its possibilities, and just as no part of this little world was safe from a bullet’s penetration, no form in the big world had no echo in a gun. Even a pinto bean was like a derringer, even a snowflake like a Browning on its tripod. Sylvia wasn’t insane; she could force herself to draw a circle or sketch a rose. But what she hungered to draw was firearms. Guns, gunfire, ordnance, projectiles. She spent hours capturing in pencil the pattern of gleam on nickel plating. Sometimes she also drew her hands and her wrists and forearms in what she guessed (for she had never held a gun) were appropriate grips for a .50 caliber Desert Eagle, a nine-millimeter Glock, a fully automatic Μ16 with a folding aluminum stock, and other exotic weapons from the catalogues that she kept in brown envelopes in her sun-drenched studio. She abandoned herself to her habit like a lost soul to its hellishly fitting occupation (although Chadds Ford, the subtle warblers that ventured up from the Brandy-wine, the scents of warm cattail and fermenting persimmon that October winds stirred out of nearby hollows, staunchly resisted being made a hell of); she was a Sisypha who every night destroyed her own creations—tore them up, erased them in mineral spirits. Kindled a merry fire in the living room.


  “Terrible,” Enid murmured again. “I can’t think of a worse thing that could happen to a mother.” She signaled to the dwarf for more cloudberry akvavit.

  Some mysteries of her obsession, Sylvia said, were that she’d been raised as a Quaker and still went to meeting in Kennett Square; that the tools of Jordan’s torture and murder had been one roll of nylon-reinforced “strapping” tape, one dish towel, two wire coat hangers, one General Electric Light ’n Easy electric iron, and one WMF twelve-inch serrated bread knife from Williams-Sonoma, i.e., no guns; that the killer, a nineteen-year-old named Khellye Withers, had turned himself in to the Philadelphia police without (again) a gun being unholstered; that with a husband who earned a huge late-career salary as Du Pont’s vice president of Compliance, and a sport-utility vehicle so massive that a head-on crash with a VW Cabriolet might hardly have dented it, and a six-bedroom Queen Anne—style house into whose kitchen and pantry Jordan’s entire Philadelphia apartment would have fit comfortably, Sylvia enjoyed a life of almost senseless ease and comfort in which her only task besides cooking for Ted, literally her only task, was to recover from Jordan’s death; that she nevertheless often became so absorbed in rendering the tooling on a revolver butt or the veins in her arm that she had to drive crazily fast to avoid missing her thrice-weekly therapy with an M.D./ Ph.D. in Wilmington; that by talking to the M.D./Ph.D., and by attending Wednesday-night sessions with other Parents of Victims of Violence and Thursday-night meetings with her Older Women’s group, and by reading the poetry and novels and memoirs and insight books that her friends recommended, and by relaxing with yoga and horseback riding, and by volunteering as a physical therapist’s assistant at Children’s Hospital, she succeeded in working through her grief even as her compulsion to draw guns intensified; that she mentioned this compulsion to no one, not even to the M.D./Ph.D. in Wilmington; that her friends and advisers all constantly exhorted her to “heal” herself through her “art”; that by “art” they meant her decorative woodcuts and lithos; that when she happened to see an old woodcut of hers in the bathroom or guest bedroom of a friend she twisted her body with shame at the fraudulence; that when she saw guns on TV or in a movie she writhed in a similar way and for similar reasons; that she was secretly convinced, in other words, that she had become a real artist, a genuinely good artist of the gun; that it was the proof of this artistry that she destroyed at the end of each day; that she was convinced that Jordan, despite having earned a B.F.A. in painting and an M.A. in art therapy, and despite the encouragement and paid instruction in art she’d received for twenty years, had not been a good artist; that after achieving this objective view of her dead daughter she continued to draw guns and ammo; and that in spite of the rage and thirst for vengeance that her continuing obsession obviously betokened she had never once in five years drawn the face of Khellye Withers.

  On the October morning when these mysteries impressed themselves on her en masse, Sylvia took the stairs to her studio after breakfast at a run. On a sheet of ivory Canson paper, and using a mirror so that it appeared to be her right hand, she drew her left hand with its thumb raised and fingers curled, sixty degrees behind full profile, a nearly full rear view. This hand she then filled with a snub-nose .38 revolver, expertly foreshortened, whose barrel penetrated a pair of smirking lips above which she penciled accurately, from memory, the taunting eyes of Khellye Withers, over the recent exhaustion of whose legal appeals few tears had been shed. And at that—a pair of lips, a pair of eyes—Sylvia had set down her pencil.

  “It was time to move on,” Sylvia said to Enid. “I saw it all of a sudden. That whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not her. We’re all conditioned to think of our children as more important than us, you know, and to live vicariously through them. All of a sudden I was sick of that kind of thinking. I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I’m alive now. And I can live deliberately. I’ve paid the price, I’ve done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.

  “And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”

  “Maybe one more?” Enid said to the dwarf, raising her glass. She was almost wholly not listening to Sylvia, but shaking her head and murmuring “Uh!” and “Oh!” while her consciousness stumbled through clouds of alcohol into such absurd realms of speculation as how the dwarf might feel against her hips and belly, embracing her. Sylvia turned out to be very intellectual, and Enid felt befriended under somewhat false pretenses, but while not listening she also had to listen, because she was missing certain key facts, such as whether Khellye Withers was black and whether Jordan had been brutally raped.

  From her studio Sylvia had gone straight to a Wawa Food Market and bought one of every dirty magazine it had in stock. Nothing she found in the magazines was sufficiently hardcore, however. She needed to see the actual plumbing, the literal act. She returned to Chadds Ford and switched on the computer that her younger son had given her to foster closeness in their time of loss. Her e-mailbox contained a month’s backlog of filial greetings that she ignored. In less than five minutes she located the goods she wanted—all it took was a credit card—and she moused through thumbnail views until she found the necessary angle on the necessary act with the necessary actors: black man performing oral sex on white man, camera shooting over left hip sixty degrees behind full profile, crescent of high values curving over buttock, knuckles of black fingers duskily visible in their probing on the dark side of this moon. She downloaded the image and viewed it at high resolution.

  She was sixty-five years old and she’d never seen a scene like this. She’d fashioned images all her life and she’d never appreciated their mystery. Now here it was. All this commerce in bits and bytes, these ones and zeros streaming through servers at some midwestern university. So much evident trafficking in so much evident nothing. A population glued to screens and magazines.

  She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn’t secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak. It could be vivid, certainly, in its weakness, as on days when the sun baked fallen apples in orchards and the valley smelled like cider, and cold nights when Jordan had driven to Chadds Ford for dinner and the tires of her Cabriolet had crunched on the gravel driveway; but the world was fungible only as images. Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

  And yet Sylvia was struck by the contrast between the online porn and her unfinished drawing of Withers. Unlike ordinary lust, which could be appeased by pictures or by pure imagination, the lust for revenge could not be tricked. The most graphic image couldn’t satisfy it. This lust required the death of a specific individual, the termination of a specific history. As the menus said: no SUBSTITUTIONS. She could draw her desire but not its fulfillment. And so she finally told herself the truth: she wanted Khellye Withers dead.

  She wanted him dead despite her recent interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer in which she’d avowed that killing someone else’s child wouldn’t bring back her own. She wanted him dead despite the religious fervor with which her M.D./Ph.D. had forbidden her to interpret Jordan’s death religiously—for example, as a divine judgment on her own liberal politics or liberal parenting or senseless affluence. She wanted him dead despite believing that Jordan’s death had been a random tragedy and that redemption lay not in vengeance but in reducing the incidence of random tragedies nationwide. She wanted him dead despite imagining a society that provided jobs
at a decent wage for young men like him (so that he would not have had to bind the wrists and ankles of his former art therapist and bully out of her the passwords for her bank card and credit cards), a society that stanched the flow of illegal drugs into urban neighborhoods (so that Withers could not have spent the stolen money on crack, and would have had more mental clarity when he returned to the apartment of his former art therapist, and would not have proceeded to smoke the rock and torture her, on and off, for thirty hours), a society in which young men had more to believe in than brand-name consumer goods (so that Withers would have fixated less insanely on his former art therapist’s Cabriolet, and would have believed her when she insisted she’d lent the car to a friend for the weekend, and would have set less store by her possession of two sets of keys (“Couldn’t get around that,” he explained in his partially coerced but still legally admissible confession, “all the keys right there on the kitchen table, you know what I’m saying? Couldn’t get my ass around that fact”), and would not have repeatedly applied the victim’s Light ’n Easy iron to her bare skin and advanced the temperature setting from Rayon up through Cotton/Linen while demanding to know where she’d parked the Cabriolet, and would not have cut her throat in a panic when her friend came by on Sunday evening to return the car and her third set of keys), a society that once and for all put an end to the physical abuse of children (so that it would have been absurd for a convicted murderer to claim, in the sentencing phase of his trial, that his stepfather had burned him with an electric iron when he was little—though in the case of Withers, who had no burn scars to exhibit, such testimony seemed mainly to underscore the convict’s own lack of imagination as a liar). She wanted him dead despite even her realization, in therapy, that his smirk had been a protective mask donned by a lonely boy surrounded by people who hated him, and that if she’d only smiled at him like a forgiving mother he might have laid aside his mask and wept with honest remorse. She wanted him dead despite knowing her desire would please conservatives for whom the phrase “personal responsibility” constituted permission to ignore social injustice. She wanted him dead despite being unable, for these political reasons, to attend the execution and to see with her own eyes the thing for which no image could substitute.