The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  “But none of this,” she said, “is why we’re on this cruise.”

  “No?” Enid said as if awakening.

  “No. We’re here because Ted won’t admit that Jordan was murdered.”

  “Is he …?”

  “Oh, he knows it,” Sylvia said. “He just won’t talk about it. He was very close to Jordan, closer in a lot of ways than he’s ever been to me. And he grieved, I’ll grant him that. He did grieve. He wept so much he could hardly move. But then one morning he was over it. He said that Jordan was gone and he wasn’t going to live in the past. He said that starting on Labor Day he was going to forget she was a victim. And every day, as it got later in August, he reminded me that beginning after Labor Day he wouldn’t admit that she was murdered. Ted’s a very rational man. His view was that human beings have been losing children forever and that too much grieving is stupid and self-indulgent. He didn’t care what happened to Withers, either. He said that following the trial was just another way of not getting over the murder.

  “And so, on Labor Day, he said to me,‘It may seem strange to you, but I will never speak of her death again, and I want you to remember that I’m telling you this. Will you remember this, Sylvia? So you don’t think I’m crazy later?’ And I said, ‘I don’t like this, Ted, I don’t accept this.’ And he said he was sorry but he had to do it. And the next night when he got home from work I told him, I think it was, that Withers’s lawyer was claiming his confession was coerced and the real killer was still at large. And Ted sort of grinned at me, in this way when he’s pulling your leg, and he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And so I actually said, ‘I’m talking about the person who killed our daughter.’ And he said, ‘No one killed our daughter, I don’t want to hear you say that again.’ And I said, ‘Ted, this is not going to work.’ And he said, ‘What’s not going to work?’ And I said, ‘Your pretending Jordan isn’t dead.’ And he said, ‘We had a daughter and we don’t now and so I guess she’s dead, but I’m warning you, Sylvia, you do not tell me she was killed, do you understand me?’ And ever since then, Enid, no matter how hard I push, he’s never dropped his pose. And I’ll tell you, I’m an inch away from divorcing him. Always. Except he’s so unfailingly dear to me otherwise. He never gets angry when I talk about Withers, he just gets bluff and laughs it off, like it’s some peculiar idée fixe of mine. And I can see that he’s like our cat dragging in a dead warbler. The cat doesn’t know you don’t like dead warblers. Ted wants me to be rational like he is, he thinks he’s doing me a favor, and he takes me on all these trips and cruises, and everything’s fine except that for him the most terrible thing in our life didn’t happen and for me it did.”

  “So did it happen?” Enid said.

  Sylvia drew her head back, shocked. “Thank you,” she said although Enid had posed the question because she was momentarily confused, not because she wanted to do Sylvia a favor. “Thank you for being honest enough to ask me that. I do feel crazy sometimes. All my work is in my head. I’m moving around a million little pieces of nothing, a million thoughts and feelings and memories inside my head, day after day, for years, there’s this enormous scaffolding and planning, like I’m building a cathedral of toothpicks inside my head. And it doesn’t even help to keep a diary, because I can’t make the words on the page have any effect on my brain. As soon as I write a thing down I leave it behind. It’s like dropping pennies over the side of a boat. And so I’m doing all this mental work without any possibility of external support, except for these slightly dowdy people in my Wednesday and Thursday groups, and meanwhile my own husband is pretending that the whole point of all this huge interior work—namely, that my daughter was murdered—isn’t real. And so, more and more, literally the only beacons I still have in my life, my only north and south and east and west, are my emotions.

  “And Ted’s right on top of that, he thinks our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it’s out of control, it’s not computers that are making everything virtual, it’s mental health. Everyone’s trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, is what Ted says. We’ve bumped up to the next level of abstraction because we have too much time and money, is what he says, and he refuses to be a part of it. He wants to eat ‘real’ food and go to ‘real’ places and talk about ‘real’ things like business and science. So he and I don’t really agree at all anymore on what’s important in life.

  “And he foxed my therapist, Enid. I had her to dinner so she could take a look at him, and you know those dinners the magazines say you shouldn’t make for company, where you’re in the kitchen for twenty minutes before every course? I made one of those, a risotto milanese and then pan-fried steaks with a two-stage reduction, and my therapist was out in the dining room the whole time quizzing Ted. And when I saw her the next day she said his condition was very common in men, he appeared to have dealt with his grief enough to function, and she believed he wasn’t going to change and it was up to me now to accept this.

  “And you know, I’m not supposed to let myself think magical or religious thoughts, but one thought I can’t escape is that this crazy thirst for revenge I’ve had for all these years isn’t really my own. It’s Ted’s. He won’t deal with it himself, and somebody’s got to deal with it, so I do, like I’m a surrogate mother except I’m not carrying a baby, I’m carrying emotions. Maybe if Ted had taken more responsibility for his feelings, and been less in a hurry to go back to work at Du Pont, I would have stayed just like I always was, and sold my woodcuts at the guild every Christmas. Maybe it was Ted’s being so rational and businesslike that pushed me over the edge. And so maybe the moral of this long story which you’ve been a total dear to listen to, Enid, is that I can’t stop finding a moral to the story no matter how hard I try not to.”

  To Enid at this moment came a vision of rain. She saw herself in a house with no walls; to keep the weather out, all she had was tissue. And here came the rain from the east, and she tacked up a tissue version of Chip and his exciting new job as a reporter. Here it came from the west, and the tissue was how handsome and intelligent Gary’s boys were and how much she loved them. Then the wind shifted, and she ran to the north side of the house with such shreds of tissue as Denise afforded: how she’d married too young but was older and wiser now and enjoying great success as a restaurateur and hoping to meet the right young man! And then the rain came blasting up from the south, the tissue disintegrating even as she insisted that Al’s impairments were very mild and he’d be fine if he’d just work on his attitude and get his drugs adjusted, and it rained harder and harder, and she was so tired, and all she had was tissue—

  “Sylvia?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I need to tell you something. It’s about my husband.”

  Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn, In Hepburn’s eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman.

  “Yes?” Sylvia prompted.

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

  “No, say.”

  “Nothing, really, just that I must get to bed. There’s certainly lots to do tomorrow!”

  She rose unsteadily and let Sylvia sign for the drinks. They rode an elevator in silence. Too-precipitous intimacy had left in its wake a kind of dirty awkwardness. When Sylvia stepped out at the Upper Deck level, however, Enid followed. She couldn’t bear to be seen by Sylvia as a “B” Deck sort of person.

  Sylvia stopped by the door of a large outside stateroom. “Where’s your room?”

  “Just down the hall here,” Enid said. But this pretense, she saw, was unsustainable. Tomorrow she would have to pretend s
he’d been confused.

  “Good night, then,” Sylvia said. “Thanks again for listening.”

  She waited with a gentle smile for Enid to move on. But Enid didn’t move on. She looked around uncertainly. “I’m sorry. What deck is this?”

  “This is the Upper.”

  “Oh dear, I’m on the wrong deck. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Do you want me to walk you down?”

  “No, I got confused, I see now, this is the Upper Deck and I’m supposed to be on a lower deck. A much lower deck. So, I’m sorry.”

  She turned away but still she didn’t leave. “My husband …” She shook her head. “No, our son, actually. We didn’t have lunch with him today. That’s what I wanted to tell you. He met us at the airport and we were supposed to have lunch with him and his friend, but they just—left, I don’t understand it, and he never came back, and we still don’t know where he went. So, anyway.”

  “That is peculiar,” Sylvia agreed.

  “So, I don’t want to bore you—”

  “No no no, Enid, shame on you.”

  “I just wanted to straighten that out, and now I’m off to bed, so, and I’m so glad we met! There’s a lot to do tomorrow. So. We’ll see you at breakfast!”

  Before Sylvia could stop her, Enid sidled up the corridor (she needed surgery on her hip but imagine leaving Al at home alone while she was in the hospital, just imagine) castigating herself for blundering down a hall she didn’t belong on and blurting out shameful nonsense about her son. She veered to a cushioned bench and slumped and did, now, burst into tears. God had given her the imagination to weep for the sad strivers who booked the most el-cheapo “B” Deck inside staterooms on a luxury cruise ship; but a childhood without money had left her unable to stomach, herself, the $300 per person it cost to jump one category up; and so she wept for herself. She felt that she and Al were the only intelligent people of her generation who had managed not to become rich.

  Here was a torture that the Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything. And the nights were getting cold now.

  She considered returning to Sylvia’s room and fully unburdening herself.

  But then, through her tears, she saw a sweet thing beneath the bench beside her.

  It was a ten-dollar bill. Folded once. Very sweet.

  With a glance up the corridor, she reached down. The texture of engraving was delicious.

  Feeling restored, she descended to the “B” Deck. Background music whispered in the lounge, something perky with accordions. She imagined she heard her name bleated, distantly, as she fitted her key card in the lock and pushed on her door.

  She encountered resistance and pushed harder.

  “Enid,” Alfred bleated from the other side.

  “Shh, Al, what on earth?”

  Life as she knew it ended with her squeeze through the half-open door. Diurnality yielded to a raw continuum of hours. She found Alfred naked with his back to the door on a layer of bedsheets spread on sections of morning paper from St. Jude. Pants and a sport coat and a tie were laid out on his bed, which he’d stripped to the mattress. The excess bedding he’d piled on the other bed. He continued to call her name even after she’d turned on a light and occupied his field of vision. Her immediate aim was to quiet him and get some pajamas on him, but this took time, for he was terribly agitated and not finishing his sentences, not even making his verbs and nouns agree in number and person. He believed that it was morning and he had to bathe and dress, and that the floor by the door was a bathtub, and that the handle was a faucet, and that nothing worked. Still he insisted on doing everything his way, which led to a pushing and pulling, an actual blow to her shoulder. He raged and she wept and abused him. He managed with his madly flopping hands to unbutton his pajama top as fast she could button it. She’d never heard him use the words “t**d” or “c**p,” and the fluency with which he used them now illuminated years of prior silent usage in his head. He unmade her bed while she tried to remake his. She begged him to sit still. He cried that it was very late and he was very confused. Even now she couldn’t help loving him. Maybe especially now. Maybe she’d known all along, for fifty years, that there was this little boy in him. Maybe all the love she’d given Chipper and Gary, all the love for which in the end she’d got so little in return, had merely been practice for this most demanding of her children. She soothed and berated him and silently cursed his addling medications for an hour or more, and finally he was asleep and her travel clock showed 5:10 and 7:30 and he was running his electric shaver. Not having gone properly under, she felt fine getting up and fine dressing and catastrophically bad going to breakfast, her tongue like a dust mop, her head like something on a spit.

  Even for a big ship the sea this morning was poor footing. The regurgitative splats outside the Kierkegaard Room were almost rhythmic, a kind of music of chance, and Mrs. Nygren informatively brayed about the evils of caffeine and the quasi-bicamerality of the Storting, and the Söderblads arrived damp from intimate Swedish exertions, and somehow Al proved equal to conversation with Ted Roth. Enid and Sylvia resumed relations stiffly, their emotional muscles pulled and aching from last night’s overuse. They talked about the weather. An activities coordinator named Suzy Ghosh came by with orientative tidings and registration forms for the afternoon’s outings in Newport, Rhode Island. With a bright smile and anticipatory noises Enid signed up for a tour of the town’s historic homes, and then watched in dismay as everyone else but the Norwegian social lepers passed along the clipboard without registering. “Sylvia!” she chid, her voice shaking, “you’re not going on the tour?” Sylvia glanced at her bespectacled husband, who nodded like McGeorge Bundy green-lighting ground troops for Vietnam, and for a moment her blue eyes seemed to look inward; apparently she had that ability of the enviable, of the non-midwestern, of the moneyed, to assess her desires without regard to social expectations or moral imperatives. “OK, yes, good,” she said, “maybe I will.” Ordinarily Enid would have squirmed at the hint of charity here, but she was waiving the oral exam for gift horses today. She needed all the charity she could get. And so on up the day’s steep incline she labored, availing herself of a complimentary half-session of Swedish massage, watching coastal leaves senesce from the Ibsen Promenade, and downing six ibuprofens and a quart of coffee to prepare for her afternoon in charming and historic Newport! In which freshly rain-laundered port of call Alfred announced that his feet hurt too much to venture ashore, and Enid made him promise not to nap or he wouldn’t sleep at night, and she laughingly (for how could she admit that it was life and death?) implored Ted Roth to keep him awake, and Ted replied that getting the Nygrens off the ship ought to help with that.

  Smells of sun-warmed creosote and cold mussels, of boat fuel and football fields and drying kelp, an almost genetic nostalgia for things maritime and things autumnal, beset Enid as she limped from the gangway toward the tour bus. The day was dangerously beautiful. Big gusts and related clouds and a fierce lion of a sun blew the gaze around, agitating Newport’s white clapboard and mown greens, making them unseeable straight on. “Folks,” the tour guide urged, “just sit back and drink it in.” But that which can be drunk can also drown. Enid had slept for six of the previous fifty-five hours, and even as Sylvia thanked her for inviting her along she found she had no energy for touring. The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn’t understand antiques or architecture, she couldn’t draw like Sylvia, she didn’t read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she’d ever had. And so she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night’s approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and
pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward. On the bus between Rosecliff and the lighthouse, Sylvia offered Enid a cell phone so she could give Chip a call. Enid declined, since cell phones ate dollars and she thought a person might incur charges simply by touching one, but she made this statement: “It’s been years, Sylvia, since we had a relationship with him. I don’t think he tells us the truth about what he’s doing with his life. He said once he was working for the Wall Street Journal. Maybe I misheard him, but I think that’s what he said, but I don’t think that’s really where he’s working. I don’t know what he does for a living really. You must think it’s awful of me to complain about this, when you’ve had things so much worse.” In Sylvia’s insistence that it wasn’t awful, not at all, Enid glimpsed how she might confess an even more shameful thing or two, and how this exposure to the public elements might, while painful, offer solace. But like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance—thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets—this alluring pain proved, at closer range, to be inhuman in its scale. From Newport the Gunnar Myrdal sailed east into sapphire vapors. The ship felt stifling to Enid after an afternoon’s exposure to big skies and the tanker-size playpens of the superwealthy, and though she won sixty more dollars in the Stringbird Room she felt like a lab animal caged with other lever-yanking animals amid the mechanized blink and burble, and bedtime came early, and when Alfred began to stir she was already awake listening to the anxiety bell ringing with such force that her bed frame vibrated and her sheets were abrasive, and here was Alfred turning on lights and shouting, and a next-door neighbor banging on the wall and shouting back, and Alfred stock-still listening with his face twisted in paranoid psychosis and then whispering conspiratorially that he’d seen a t**d run between the beds, and then the making and unmaking of said beds, the application of a diaper, the application of a second diaper to address some hallucinated exigency, and the balking of his nerve-damaged legs, and the bleating of the word “Enid” until he nearly wore it out, and the woman with the rawly abraded name sobbing in the dark with the worst despair and anxiety she’d ever felt until finally—like an overnight traveler arriving at a train station differing from the dismal ones before it only in the morning twilight, the small miracles of restored visibility: a chalky puddle in a gravel parking lot, the steam twisting from a sheet-metal chimney—she was brought to a decision.