The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  He took underwear, socks, wool slacks, a white shirt, and a gray cardigan to the room that he’d shared with Gary in the years between Denise’s arrival in the family and Gary’s departure for college. Gary had an overnight bag open on “his” twin bed and was packing it.

  “I don’t know if you noticed,” he said, “but Dad’s in bad shape.”

  “No, I noticed.”

  Gary put a small box on Chip’s dresser. It was a box of ammunition—twenty-gauge shotgun shells.

  “He had these out with the gun in the workshop,” Gary said. “I went down there this morning and I thought, better safe than sorry.”

  Chip looked at the box and spoke instinctively. “Isn’t that kind of Dad’s own decision?”

  “That’s what I was thinking yesterday,” Gary said. “But if he wants to do it, he’s got other options. It’s supposed to be down near zero tonight. He can go outside with a bottle of whiskey. I don’t want Mom to find him with his head blown off.”

  Chip didn’t know what to say. He silently dressed in the old man’s clothes. The shirt and pants were marvelously clean and fit him better than he would have guessed. He was surprised, when he put the cardigan on, that his hands did not begin to shake, surprised to see such a young face in the mirror.

  “So what have you been doing with yourself?” Gary said.

  “I’ve been helping a Lithuanian friend of mine defraud Western investors.”

  “Jesus, Chip. You don’t want to be doing that.”

  Everything else in the world might be strange, but Gary’s condescension galled Chip exactly as it always had.

  “From a strictly moral viewpoint,” Chip said, “I have more sympathy for Lithuania than I do for American investors.”

  “You want to be a Bolshevik?” Gary said, zipping up his bag. “Fine, be a Bolshevik. Just don’t call me when you get arrested.”

  “It would never occur to me to call you,” Chip said.

  “Are you fellas about ready for breakfast?” Enid sang from halfway up the stairs.

  A holiday linen tablecloth was on the dining table. In the center was an arrangement of pinecones, white holly and green holly, red candles, and silver bells. Denise was bringing food out—Texan grapefruit, scrambled eggs, bacon, and a stollen and breads that she’d baked.

  Snow cover boosted the strong prairie light.

  Per custom, Gary sat alone on one side of the table. On the other side, Denise sat by Enid and Chip by Alfred.

  “Merry, merry, merry Christmas!” Enid said, looking each of her children in the eye in turn.

  Alfred, head down, was already eating.

  Gary also began to eat, rapidly, with a glance at his watch.

  Chip didn’t remember the coffee being so drinkable in these parts.

  Denise asked him how he’d gotten home. He told her the story, omitting only the armed robbery.

  Enid, with a scowl of judgment, was following every move of Gary’s. “Slow down,” she said. “You don’t have to leave until eleven.”

  “Actually,” Gary said, “I said quarter to eleven. It’s past ten-thirty, and we have some things to discuss.”

  “We’re finally all together,” Enid said. “Let’s just relax and enjoy it.”

  Gary set his fork down. “I’ve been here since Monday, Mother, waiting for us all to be together. Denise has been here since Tuesday morning. It’s not my fault if Chip was too busy defrauding American investors to get here on time.”

  “I just explained why I was late,” Chip said. “If you were listening.”

  “Well, maybe you should have left a little earlier.”

  “What does he mean, defrauding?” Enid said. “I thought you were doing computer work.”

  “I’ll explain it to you later, Mom.”

  “No,” Gary said. “Explain it to her now.”

  “Gary,” Denise said.

  “No, sorry,” Gary said, throwing down his napkin like a gauntlet. “I’ve had it with this family! I’m done waiting! I want some answers now.”

  “I was doing computer work,” Chip said. “But Gary’s right, strictly speaking, the intent was to defraud American investors.”

  “I don’t approve of that at all,” Enid said.

  “I know you don’t,” Chip said. “Although it’s a little more complicated than you might—”

  “What is so complicated about obeying the law?”

  “Gary, for God’s sake,” Denise said with a sigh. “It’s Christmas?”

  “And you’re a thief,” Gary said, wheeling on her.

  “What?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. You sneaked into somebody’s room and you took a thing that didn’t belong—”

  “Excuse me,” Denise said hotly, “I restored a thing that was stolen from its rightful—”

  “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!”

  “Oh, I’m not sitting here for this,” Enid wailed. “Not on Christmas morning!”

  “No, Mother, sorry, you’re not going anywhere,” Gary said. “We’re going to sit here and have our little talk right now.”

  Alfred gave Chip a complicit smile and gestured at the others. “You see what I have to put up with?”

  Chip arranged his face in a facsimile of comprehension and agreement.

  “Chip, how long are you here for?” Gary said.

  “Three days.”

  “And, Denise, you’re leaving on—”

  “Sunday, Gary. I’m leaving on Sunday.”

  “So what’s going to happen on Monday, Mom? How are you going to make this house work on Monday?”

  “I’ll think about that when Monday comes.”

  Alfred, still smiling, asked Chip what Gary was talking about.

  “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “You really think you’re going to go to Philadelphia?” Gary said. “You think Corecktall’s going to fix all this?”

  “No, Gary, I don’t,” Enid said.

  Gary didn’t seem to hear her answer. “Dad, here, do me a favor,” he said. “Put your right hand on your left shoulder.”

  “Gary, stop it,” Denise said.

  Alfred leaned close to Chip and spoke confidentially. “What’s he asking?”

  “He wants you to put your right hand on your left shoulder.”

  “That’s a lot of nonsense.”

  “Dad?” Gary said. “Come on, right hand, left shoulder.”

  “Stop it,” Denise said.

  “Let’s go, Dad. Right hand, left shoulder. Can you do that? You want to show us how you follow simple instructions? Come on! Right hand. Left shoulder.’”

  Alfred shook his head. “One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need.”

  “Al, I don’t want one bedroom and a kitchen,” Enid said.

  The old man pushed his chair away from the table and turned once more to Chip. He said, “You can see it’s not without its difficulties.”

  As he stood up, his leg buckled and he pitched to the floor, dragging his plate and place mat and coffee cup and saucer along with him. The crash might have been the last bar of a symphony. He lay on his side amid the ruins like a wounded gladiator, a fallen horse.

  Chip knelt down and helped him into a sitting position while Denise hurried to the kitchen.

  “It’s quarter to eleven,” Gary said as if nothing unusual had happened. “Before I leave, here’s a summary. Dad is demented and incontinent. Mom can’t have him in this house without a lot of help, which she says she doesn’t want even if she could afford it. Corecktall is obviously not an option, and so what I want to know is what you’re going to do. Now, Mother. I want to know now.”

  Alfred rested his shaking hands on Chip’s shoulders and gazed in wonder at the room’s furnishings. Despite his agitation, he was smiling.

  “My question,” he said. “Is who owns this house? Who takes care of all of this?”

  “You own it, Dad.”

  Alfred shook his head as if this didn’t square with the facts as he u
nderstood them.

  Gary was demanding an answer.

  “I guess we’ll have to try the drug holiday,” Enid said.

  “Fine, try that,” Gary said. “Put him in the hospital, see if they ever let him out. And while you’re at it, you might take a drug holiday yourself.”

  “Gary, she got rid of it,” Denise said from the floor, where she’d knelt with a sponge. “She put it in the Disposall. So just lay off.”

  “Well, I hope you learned your lesson there, Mother.”

  Chip, in the old man’s clothes, wasn’t able to follow this conversation. His father’s hands were heavy on his shoulders. For the second time in an hour, somebody was clinging to him, as if he were a person of substance, as if there were something to him. In fact, there was so little to him that he couldn’t even say whether his sister and his father were mistaken about him. He felt as if his consciousness had been shorn of all identifying marks and transplanted, metem-psychotically, into the body of a steady son, a trustworthy brother …

  Gary had dropped into a crouch beside Alfred. “Dad,” he said, “I’m sorry it had to end this way. I love you and I’ll see you again soon.”

  “Well. Yurrr vollb. Yeaugh,” Alfred replied. He lowered his head and looked around with rank paranoia.

  “And you, my feckless sibling.” Gary spread his fingers, clawlike, on top of Chip’s head in what he apparently meant as a gesture of affection. “I’m counting on you to help out here.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Chip said with less irony than he’d aimed for.

  Gary stood up. “I’m sorry I ruined your breakfast, Mom. But I, for one, feel better for having got this off my chest.”

  “Why you couldn’t have waited till after the holiday,” Enid muttered.

  Gary kissed her cheek. “Call Hedgpeth tomorrow morning. Then call me and tell me what the plan is. I’m going to monitor this closely.”

  It seemed unbelievable to Chip that Gary could simply walk out of the house with Alfred on the floor and Enid’s Christmas breakfast in ruins, but Gary was in his most rational mode, his words had a formal hollowness, his eyes were evasive as he put on his coat and gathered up his bag and Enid’s bag of gifts for Philadelphia, because he was afraid. Chip could see it clearly now, behind the cold front of Gary’s wordless departure: his brother was afraid.

  As soon as the front door had closed, Alfred made his way to the bathroom.

  “Let’s all be happy,” Denise said, “that Gary got that off his chest and feels so much better now.”

  “No, he’s right,” Enid said, her eyes resting bleakly on the holly centerpiece. “Something has to change.”

  After breakfast the hours passed in the sickishness, the invalid waiting, of a major holiday. Chip in his exhaustion had trouble staying warm, but his face was flushed with the heat from the kitchen and the smell of baking turkey that blanketed the house. Whenever he entered his father’s field of vision, a smile of recognition and pleasure spread over Alfred’s face. This recognition might have had the character of mistaken identity if it hadn’t been accompanied by Alfred’s exclamation of Chip’s name. Chip seemed beloved to the old man. He’d been arguing with Alfred and deploring Alfred and feeling the sting of Alfred’s disapproval for most of his life, and his personal failures and his political views were, if anything, more extreme than ever now, and yet it was Gary who was fighting with the old man, it was Chip who brightened the old man’s face.

  At dinner he took the trouble to describe in some detail his activities in Lithuania. He might as well have been reciting the tax code in a monotone. Denise, normally a paragon of listening, was absorbed in helping Alfred with his food, and Enid had eyes only for her husband’s deficiencies. She flinched or sighed or shook her head at every spilled bite, every non sequitur. Alfred was quite visibly making her life a hell now.

  I’m the least unhappy person at this table, Chip thought.

  He helped Denise wash the dishes while Enid spoke to her grandsons on the telephone and Alfred went to bed.

  “How long has Dad been like this?” he asked Denise.

  “Like this? Just since yesterday. But he wasn’t great before that.”

  Chip put on a heavy coat of Alfred’s and took a cigarette outside. The cold was deeper than any he’d experienced in Vilnius. Wind rattled the thick brown leaves still clinging to the oaks, those most conservative of trees; snow squeaked beneath his feet. Near zero tonight, Gary had said. He can go outside with a bottle of whiskey. Chip wanted to pursue the important question of suicide while he had a cigarette to enhance his mental performance, but his bronchi and nasal passages were so traumatized by cold that the trauma of smoke barely registered, and the ache in his fingers and ears—the damned rivets—was fast becoming unbearable. He gave up and hurried inside just as Denise was leaving.

  “Where are you going?” Chip asked.

  “I’ll be back.”

  Enid, by the fire in the living room, was gnawing at her lip with naked desolation. “You haven’t opened your presents,” she said.

  “Maybe in the morning,” Chip said.

  “I’m sure I didn’t get you anything you’ll like.”

  “It’s nice you got me anything.”

  Enid shook her head. “This wasn’t the Christmas I’d hoped for. Suddenly Dad can’t do a thing. Not one single thing.”

  “Let’s give him a drug holiday and see if that helps.”

  Enid might have been reading bad prognoses in the fire. “Will you stay for a week and help me take him to the hospital?”

  Chip’s hand went to the rivet in his earlobe as to a talisman. He felt like a child out of Grimm, lured into the enchanted house by the warmth and the food; and now the witch was going to lock him in a cage, fatten him up, and eat him.

  He repeated the charm he’d invoked at the front door. “I can only stay three days,” he said. “I’ve got to start working right away. I owe Denise some money that I need to pay her back.”

  “Just a week,” the witch said. “Just a week, until we see how things go in the hospital.”

  “I don’t think so, Mom. I’ve got to go back.”

  Enid’s bleakness deepened, but she didn’t seem surprised by his refusal. “I guess this is my responsibility, then,” she said. “I guess I always knew it would be.”

  She retired to the den, and Chip put more logs on the fire. Cold drafts were finding ways through the windows, faintly stirring the open curtains. The furnace was running almost constantly. The world was colder and emptier than Chip had realized, the adults had gone away.

  Toward eleven, Denise came inside reeking of cigarettes and looking two-thirds frozen. She waved to Chip and tried to go straight upstairs, but he insisted that she sit by the fire. She knelt and bowed her head, sniffling steadily, and put her hands out toward the embers. She kept her eyes on the fire as if to ensure that she not look at him. She blew her nose on a wet shred of Kleenex.

  “Where’d you go?” he said.

  “Just on a walk.”

  “Long walk.”

  “Yuh.”

  “You sent me some e-mails that I deleted before I really read them.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what’s going on?” he said.

  She shook her head. “Just everything.”

  “I had almost thirty thousand dollars in cash on Monday. I was going to give you twenty-four thousand of it. But then we got robbed by uniformed men in ski masks. Implausible as that may sound.”

  “I want to forgive that debt,” Denise said.

  Chip’s hand went to the rivet again. “I’m going to start paying you a minimum of four hundred a month until the principal and interest are paid off. It’s my top priority. Absolute highest priority.”

  His sister turned and raised her face to him. Her eyes were bloodshot, her forehead as red as a newborn’s. “I said I forgive the debt. You owe me nothing.”

  “Appreciate it,” he said quickly, looking away. “But I’m going to pay you an
yway.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going to take your money. I forgive the debt. Do you know what ‘forgive’ means?”

  In her peculiar mood, with her unexpected words, she was making Chip anxious. He pulled on the rivet and said, “Denise, come on. Please. At least show me the respect of letting me pay you back. I realize I’ve been a shit. But I don’t want to be a shit all my life.”

  “I want to forgive that debt,” she said.

  “Really. Come on.” Chip smiled desperately. “You’ve got to let me pay you.”

  “Can you stand to be forgiven?”

  “No,” he said. “Basically, no. I can’t. It’s better all around if I pay you.”

  Still kneeling, Denise bent over and tucked in her arms and made herself into an olive, an egg, an onion. From within this balled form came a low voice. “Do you understand what a huge favor you’d be doing me if you would let me forgive the debt? Do you understand that it’s hard for me to ask this favor? Do you understand that coming here for Christmas is the only other favor I’ve ever asked you? Do you understand that I’m not trying to insult you? Do you understand that I never doubted that you wanted to pay me back, and I know I’m asking you to do something very hard? Do you understand that I wouldn’t ask you to do something so hard if I didn’t really, really, really need it?”

  Chip looked at the trembling balled human form at his feet. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I’m having trouble on numerous fronts,” she said.

  “This is a bad time to talk about the money, then. Let’s forget it for a while. I want to hear what’s bothering you.”

  Still balled up, Denise shook her head emphatically, once. “I need you to say yes here, now. Say ‘Yes, thank you.’”

  Chip made a gesture of utter bafflement. It was near midnight and his father had begun to thump around upstairs and his sister was curled up like an egg and begging him to accept relief from the principal torment of his life.

  “Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he said.

  “Would it help if I asked you for something else?”