Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  It was only when the family filed out, at the service’s end, that Patty saw the assortment of unprivileged people filling the rear pews, more than a hundred in all, most of them black or Hispanic or otherwise ethnic, in every shape and size, wearing suits and dresses that seemed pretty clearly the best they owned, and sitting with the patient dignity of people who had more regular experience with funerals than she did. These were the former pro-bono clients of Ray’s or the families of those clients. At the reception, one by one, they came up to the various Emersons, including Patty, and took their hands and looked them in the eye and gave brief testimonials to the work that Ray had done for them. The lives he’d rescued, the injustices he’d averted, the goodness he’d shown. Patty was not entirely blown away by this (she knew too well the costs at home of doing good in the world), but she was still pretty well blown away, and she couldn’t stop thinking of Walter. She now sorely regretted the hard time she’d given him about his crusades for other species; she saw that she’d done it out of envy—envy of his birds for being so purely lovable to him, and envy of Walter himself for his capacity to love them. She wished she could go to him now, while he was still alive, and say it to him plainly: I adore you for your goodness.

  One thing she soon found herself particularly appreciating about Walter was his indifference to money. As a kid, she’d been lucky enough to develop her own indifference, and, in the way of lucky people, she’d been rewarded with the further good luck of marrying Walter, whose non-acquisitiveness she’d enjoyed with minimal thought or gratitude until Ray died and she was plunged back into the nightmare of her family’s money issues. The Emersons, as Walter had told Patty many times, represented a scarcity economy. To the extent that he meant this metaphorically (i.e., emotionally), she could sometimes see that he was right, but because she’d grown up as the outsider and had excused herself from her family’s competition for resources, it took her a very long time to appreciate how the forever lurking but forever untappable wealth of Ray’s parents—the artificiality of the scarcity—was at the root of her family’s troubles. She didn’t fully appreciate it until she pinned Joyce down, in the days following Ray’s memorial service, and extracted the story of the Emerson family estate in New Jersey, and heard about the quandary in which Joyce now found herself.

  The situation was this: as Ray’s surviving spouse, Joyce now owned the country estate, which had passed to Ray after August’s death, six years earlier. Ray had been constituted to laugh off and ignore the entreaties of Patty’s sisters, Abigail and Veronica, to “deal with” the estate (i.e., sell it and give them their share of the money), but now that he was gone Joyce was getting a daily drumbeat of pressure from her younger daughters, and Joyce was not well constituted to resist this pressure. And yet, unfortunately, she still had the same reasons that Ray had had for being unable to “deal with” the estate, minus only Ray’s sentimental attachment to it. If she put the estate on the market, Ray’s two brothers could make a strong moral claim to large shares of the sale price. Also, the old stone house was currently occupied by Patty’s brother, Edgar, his wife, Galina, and their soon-to-be-four little kids, and was unhelpfully scarred by Edgar’s ongoing DIY “renovations,” which, since Edgar had no job and no savings and many mouths to feed, had so far not advanced beyond certain random demolitions. Also, Edgar and Galina were threatening, if Joyce evicted them, to relocate to a West Bank settlement in Israel, taking with them the only grandchildren in Joyce’s life, and live on the charity of a Miami-based foundation whose in-your-face Zionism made Joyce extremely uncomfortable.

  Joyce had volunteered for the nightmare, of course. She’d been attracted, as a scholarship girl, by Ray’s Waspiness and family wealth and social idealism. She’d had no idea what she was getting sucked into, the price she would end up paying, the decades of disgusting eccentricity and childish money games and August’s imperious discourtesy. She, the poor Brooklyn Jewish girl, was soon traveling on the Emerson dime to Egypt and Tibet and Machu Picchu; she was having dinner with Dag Hammarskjöld and Adam Clayton Powell. Like so many people who become politicians, Joyce was not a whole person; she was even less whole than Patty. She needed to feel extraordinary, and becoming an Emerson reinforced her feeling that she was, and when she started having children she needed to feel that they, too, were extraordinary, so as to make up for what was lacking at her center. Thus the refrain of Patty’s childhood: we’re not like other families. Other families have insurance, but Daddy doesn’t believe in insurance. Other families’ kids work afterschool jobs, but we’d rather have you explore your extraordinary talents and pursue your dreams. Other families have to worry about money for emergencies, but Granddaddy’s money means that we don’t have to. Other people have to be realistic and have careers and save for the future, but even with all of Granddaddy’s charitable giving there’s still a huge pot of gold out there for you.

  Having conveyed these messages over the years, and having allowed her children’s lives to be deformed by them, Joyce now felt, as she confessed to Patty in her quavering voice, “unnerved” and “a tiny bit guilty” in the face of Abigail’s and Veronica’s demands for the liquidation of the estate. In the past, her guilt had manifested itself subterraneanly, in irregular but substantial cash transfers to her daughters, and in her suspension of judgment when, for example, Abigail hurried to August’s hospital deathbed late one night and extracted a last-minute $10,000 check from him (Patty heard about this trick from Galina and Edgar, who considered it highly unfair but were mostly chagrined, it seemed to her, not to have thought of the trick themselves), but now Patty had the interesting satisfaction of seeing her mother’s guilt, which had always been implicit in her liberal politics, applied to her own children in broad daylight. “I don’t know what Daddy and I did,” she said. “I guess we did something. That three of our four children are not quite ready to . . . not quite ready to, well. Fully support themselves. I suppose I—oh, I don’t know. But if Abigail asks me one more time about selling Granddad’s house . . . And, I guess, I suppose, I deserve it, in a way. I suppose, in my own way, I’m somewhat responsible.”

  “You just have to stand up to her,” Patty said. “You have a right not to be tortured by her.”

  “What I don’t understand is how you turned out to be so different, so independent,” Joyce said. “You certainly don’t seem to have these kinds of problems. I mean, I know you have problems. But you seem . . . stronger, somehow.”

  No exaggeration: this was among the top-ten most gratifying moments of Patty’s life.

  “Walter was a great provider,” she demurred. “Just a great man. That helped.”

  “And your kids . . . ? Are they . . . ?”

  “They’re like Walter. They know how to work. And Joey’s about the most independent kid in North America. I guess maybe he got some of that from me.”

  “I’d love to see more of . . . Joey,” Joyce said. “I hope . . . now that things are different . . . now that we’ve been . . .” She gave a strange laugh, harsh and fully conscious. “Now that we’ve been forgiven, I hope I can get to know him a little.”

  “I’m sure he’d like that, too. He’s gotten interested in his Jewish heritage.”

  “Oh, well, I’m not at all sure I’m the right person to talk to about that. He might do better with—Edgar.” And Joyce again laughed in a strangely conscious way.

  Edgar had not, in fact, become more Jewish, except in the most passive of senses. In the early nineties, he’d done what any holder of a PhD in linguistics might have done: become a stock trader. When he stopped studying East Asian grammar structures and applied himself to stocks, he in short order made enough money to attract and hold the attention of a pretty young Russian Jew, Galina. As soon as they were married, Galina’s materialistic Russian side asserted itself. She goaded Edgar to make ever larger amounts of money and to spend it on a mansion in Short Hills, New Jersey, and fur coats and heavy jewelry and other conspicuous articles. For a little
while, running his own firm, Edgar became so successful that he showed up on the radar of his normally distant and imperious grandfather, who, in a moment of possible early senile dementia, soon after his wife’s death, greedily permitted Edgar to renovate his stock portfolio, selling off his American blue-chips and investing him heavily in Southeast Asia. August last revised his will and trust at the height of the Asian stock bubble, when it seemed eminently fair to leave his investments to his younger sons and the New Jersey estate to Ray. But Edgar was not to be trusted with renovations. The Asian bubble duly burst, August died soon after, and Patty’s two uncles inherited next to nothing, while the estate, due to the building of new highways and the rapid development of northwest New Jersey, was doubling in value. The only way Ray could hold off his brothers’ moral claims was to retain possession of the estate and let Edgar and Galina live on it, which they were happy to do, having been bankrupted when Edgar’s own investments tanked. This was also when Galina’s Jewish side kicked in. She embraced the Orthodox tradition, threw away her birth control, and aggravated her and Edgar’s financial plight by having a bunch of babies. Edgar had no more passion for Judaism than anybody else in the family, but he was Galina’s creature, all the more so since his bankruptcy, and he went along to get along. And, oh, how Abigail and Veronica hated Galina.

  This was the situation that Patty set out to deal with for her mother. She was uniquely qualified to do it, being the only child of Joyce’s who was willing to work for a living, and it brought her the most miraculous and welcome feeling: that Joyce was lucky to have a daughter like her. Patty was able to enjoy this feeling for several days before it curdled into the recognition that, in fact, she was getting sucked back into bad family patterns and was competing with her siblings again. It was true that she’d already felt twinges of competition when she was helping to nurse Ray; but nobody had questioned her right to be with him, and her conscience had been clean regarding her motives. One evening with Abigail, however, was enough to get the old competitive juices fully flowing again.

  While living with a very tall man in Jersey City and trying to look less like a middle-aged housewife who’d taken the wrong exit off the turnpike, Patty had bought a rather chic pair of stack-heeled boots, and it was perhaps the least nice part of her that chose to wear these boots when she went to see her shortest sibling. She towered over Abigail, towered like an adult over a child, as they walked from Abigail’s apartment to the neighborhood café at which she was a regular. As if to compensate for her shortness, Abigail went long with her opening speech—two hours long—and allowed Patty to piece together a fairly complete picture of her life: the married man, now known exclusively as Dickhead, on whom she’d wasted her best twelve years of marriageability, waiting for Dickhead’s kids to finish high school, so that he could leave his wife, which he’d then done, but for somebody younger than Abigail; the straight-man-disdaining sort of gay men to whom she’d turned for more agreeable male companionship; the impressively large community of underemployed actors and playwrights and comics and performance artists of which she was clearly a valued and generous member; the circle of friends who circularly bought tickets to each other’s shows and fund-raisers, much of the money ultimately trickling down from sources such as Joyce’s checkbook; the life, neither glamorous nor outstanding but nevertheless admirable and essential to New York’s functioning, of the bohemian. Patty was honestly happy to see that Abigail had found a place for herself in the world. It wasn’t until they repaired to her apartment for a “digestif,” and Patty broached the subject of Edgar and Galina, that things got ugly.

  “Have you been to the Kibbutz of New Jersey yet?” Abigail said. “Have you seen their milch cow?”

  “No, I’m going out there tomorrow,” Patty said.

  “If you’re lucky, Galina won’t remember to take the collar and leash off Edgar before you get there, it’s such a verrrry handsome look. Very manly and religious. You can definitely bet she won’t bother washing the cow shit off the kitchen floor.”

  Patty here explained her proposal, which was that Joyce sell the estate, give half the proceeds to Ray’s brothers, and divide the rest among Abigail, Veronica, Edgar, and herself (i.e., Joyce, not Patty, whose financial interest was nugatory). Abigail shook her head continuously while Patty explained it. “To begin with,” she said, “did Mommy not tell you about Galina’s accident? She hit a school crossing guard in a crosswalk. Thank God no children, just the old man in his orange vest. She was distracted by her spawn, in the back seat, and plowed straight into him. This was only about two years ago, and, of course, she and Edgar had let their car insurance lapse, because that’s the way she and Edgar are. Never mind New Jersey state law, never mind that even Daddy had car insurance. Edgar didn’t see the need for it, and Galina, despite living here for fifteen years, said everything was different in Rrrrussia, she had no idea. The school’s insurance paid the crosswalk guard, who basically can’t walk now, but the insurance company has a claim on all their assets, up to some ungodly sum. Any money they get now goes straight to the insurance company.”

  Joyce, interestingly, had not mentioned this to Patty.

  “Well, that’s probably as it should be,” she said. “If the guy is crippled, that’s where the money should go. Right?”

  “It still means they run away to Israel, since they’re penniless. Which is fine with me—sayonara! But good luck selling that to Mommy. She’s fonder of the spawn than I am.”

  “So why is this a problem for you?”

  “Because,” Abigail said, “Edgar and Galina shouldn’t get a share at all, because they’ve had the use of the estate for six years and pretty well trashed it, and because the money’s just going to vanish anyway. Don’t you think it should go to people who can actually use it?”

  “It sounds like the crossing guard could use it.”

  “He’s been paid off. It’s just the insurance company now, and companies have insurance for these things themselves.”

  Patty frowned.

  “As for the uncles,” Abigail said, “I say tough tittie. They were sort of like you—they ran away. They didn’t have to have Granddaddy farting up every holiday like we did. Daddy went over there practically every week, his whole life, and ate Grandmommy’s nasty stale Pecan Sandies. I sure don’t remember seeing his brothers doing that.”

  “You’re saying you think we deserve to be paid for that.”

  “Why not? It’s better than not being paid. The uncles don’t need the money anyway. They’re doing verrrrry well without it. Whereas for me, and for Ronnie, it would make a real difference.”

  “Oh, Abigail!” Patty burst out. “We’re never going to get along, are we.”

  Perhaps catching a hint of pity in her voice, Abigail pulled a stupid-face, a mean face. “I’m not the one that ran away,” she said. “I’m not the one who turned her nose up, and could never take a joke, and married Mr. Superhuman Good Guy Minnesotan Righteous Weirdo Naturelover, and didn’t even pretend not to hate us. You think you’re doing so well, you think you’re so superior, and now Mr. Superhuman Good Guy’s dumped you for some inexplicable reason that obviously has nothing to do with your sterling personal qualities, and you think you can come back and be Miss Lovable-Congenial Goodwill Ambassador Florence Nightingale. It’s all verrrry interesting.”

  Patty made sure to take several deep breaths before replying to this. “Like I said,” she said, “I don’t think you and I are ever going to get along.”

  “The whole reason I have to call Mommy every day,” Abigail said, “is that you’re out there trying to wreck everything. I’ll stop bothering her the minute you go away and mind your own business. Is that a deal?”

  “In what way is it not my business?”

  “You said yourself you don’t care about the money. If you want to take a share and give it to the uncles, fine. If that helps you feel more superior and righteous, fine. But don’t tell us what to do.”

  “OK,” P
atty said, “I think we’re almost done here. Just—so I’m sure I’m understanding this—you think that by taking things from Ray and Joyce you’ve been doing them a favor all your life? You think Ray was doing his parents a favor by taking things? And that you deserve to be paid for all these great favors?”

  Abigail made another peculiar face and appeared to consider this. “Yes, actually!” she said. “You actually put that pretty well. That is what I think. And the fact that it obviously seems strange to you is the reason you don’t have any business messing with this. You’re no more part of the family than Galina at this point. You just still seem to think you are. So why don’t you leave Mommy alone and let her make her own decisions. I don’t want you talking to Ronnie, either.”

  “It’s not actually your business whether I talk to her.”

  “It is so my business, and I’m telling you to leave her alone. You’ll just get her confused.”

  “This is the person whose IQ is, like, one-eighty?”

  “She’s not doing well since Daddy died, and there’s no reason to go tormenting her. I doubt you’ll listen to me, but I know what I’m talking about, having spent approximately a thousand times more time with Ronnie than you have. Try to be a little considerate.”

  The once-manicured old Emerson estate, when Patty went out there the next morning, looked like some cross between Walker Evans and nineteenth-century Russia. A cow was standing in the middle of the tennis court, now netless, its plastic boundary lines torn and twisted. Edgar was plowing up the old horse pasture with a little tractor, slowing to a standstill every fifty feet or so when the tractor bogged down in the rain-soaked spring soil. He was wearing a muddy white shirt and mud-caked rubber boots; he’d put on a lot of fat and muscle and somehow reminded Patty of Pierre in War and Peace. He left the tractor tilting severely in the field and waded over through mud to the driveway where she’d parked. He explained that he was putting in potatoes, lots of potatoes, in a bid to make his family more perfectly self-sufficient in the coming year. Currently, it being spring, with last year’s harvest and venison supplies exhausted, the family was relying heavily on food gifts from the Congregation Beit Midrash: on the ground outside the barn door were cartons of canned goods, wholesale quantities of dry cereal, and shrink-wrapped flats of baby food. Some of the flats were opened and partly depleted, giving Patty the impression that the food had been standing in the elements for some time without being carried into the barn.