Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I don’t believe you. You had some sort of a moral competition going. Who’s better at keeping promises.”

  “Things had become so violent and dirty between us. I wanted something purely good to come of it. And something did. You did.”

  “I am far from purely good.”

  “No one’s really perfect. But to me you were perfect.”

  This seemed to Pip the right moment to bring up the money, by way of demonstrating her imperfection. She told the story of her visit to Wichita and explained that her mother needed to be in touch with Mr. Navarre. The way her mother shook her head in response was more bewildered than adamant.

  “What would I do with a billion dollars?” she said.

  “You could start by getting Sonny out to pump the septic tank. I’ve been lying awake at night worrying about what’s in there. Has it ever been pumped?”

  “It’s not a real septic tank. I think the owner made it out of boards and cement.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “The money is meaningless to me, Purity. It’s so meaningless that I’m beyond refusing it. It’s just—nothing to me.”

  “My student debt isn’t nothing to me. And you’re the one who told me not to worry about the money.”

  “Fine, then. You can ask the lawyer to pay your debt. I won’t stop you.”

  “But it’s not my money. You have to be involved.”

  “I can’t be. I never wanted it. It’s dirty money. It ruined my family. It killed my mother, it turned my father into a monster. Why would I bring all of that into my life now?”

  “Because it’s real.”

  “Nothing is real.”

  “I’m real.”

  Her mother nodded. “That’s true. You are real to me.”

  “So here’s what I need.” Pip ticked off her demands with her fingers. “Student loan paid off in full. Four thousand more to pay off my credit-card debt. Eight hundred thousand to buy Dreyfuss’s house and give it back to him. Also, if you insist on staying here, we should buy the cabin and really fix it up. Grad-school tuition if I decide I want that. Monthly living expenses if you want to quit your job. And then maybe another fifty thousand in walking-around money while I try to start a career. The whole thing is less than three million. That’s like five percent of one year’s dividends.”

  “From McCaskill, though. McCaskill.”

  “Their business wasn’t only animals. There’s got to be at least three million you can take in good conscience.”

  Her mother was becoming distressed. “Oh, why don’t you just take it? All of it! Just take it and leave me alone!”

  “Because I’m not allowed to. It’s not in my name. As long as you’re alive, it’s just going to be great expectations for me.” Pip laughed. “Why did you start calling me Pip anyway? Was that something else you ‘knew all along’?”

  “Oh, no, it wasn’t me,” her mother said eagerly. Pip’s childhood was her favorite topic. “It was in kindergarten. Mrs. Steinhauer must have given it to you. Some of the little kids had trouble pronouncing your real name. I guess she thought ‘Pip’ fit you. There’s something happy about the name, and you were always such a happy girl. Or maybe she asked you, and you volunteered it.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “I didn’t even know it was your nickname until we had a parent-teacher conference.”

  “Well, anyway. Someday you’ll be gone, and the problem will be mine. But right now it’s your money.”

  Her mother looked at her like a child seeking guidance. “Can’t I just give it all away?”

  “No. The principal belongs to the trust, not you. You can only give away the dividends. We can find some good animal-welfare groups, responsible-farming groups, things you believe in.”

  “Yes, that sounds good. Whatever you want.”

  “Mom, it doesn’t matter what I want. This is your problem.”

  “Oh, I don’t care, I don’t care,” her mother wailed. “I just want it to go away!”

  Pip saw that bringing her mother back into firm contact with reality was going to be a long and possibly hopeless project. Nevertheless, she felt that progress had been made, if only in her mother’s willingness to take orders from her.

  The rain went away, came back, and went away again. When Pip was alone in the cabin, she read books and texted Jason and talked to him on the phone. She liked to sit at the kitchen table so she could watch the pair of brown towhees in the side yard as they foraged in the wet tree litter or perched on fence posts for no apparent reason but to show off how splendid they were. To Pip, no bird could surpass the excellence of brown towhees; in their avian way, they were as excellent as Choco. They were a perfect medium size, more substantial than juncos, more modest than jays. They were neither too shy nor too forward. They liked to be around houses but retreated under shrubs if you disturbed them. They didn’t frighten anything except little bugs and her mother. They preferred hopping to flying. They took long and vigorous baths. Except under the tail, where the feathers were peach-colored, and around the face, where there were subtle gray streakings, their plumage was similar in color to Pip’s mother’s faded brown dress. They had the beauty of the second glance, the beauty that only revealed itself with intimacy. All Pip had ever heard a brown towhee say was Teek! But this they said often. The call was sharp and cheerful, like the squeak of a sneaker on a basketball court. It couldn’t have been simpler, and yet it seemed to express not only everything that a towhee would ever need to say but everything that really needed to be said by anyone. Teek! According to the Internet, brown towhees were rare outside California and unusual in being monogamous and mating for life. Supposedly (Pip had never witnessed this) the male and the female sang a more complicated song in breeding season, a duet that announced to other towhees that he and she were spoken for. Indeed, wherever you saw one towhee, you soon saw the other one. They stayed together in one spot year-round; were Californians. Pip could imagine a whole lot of worse ways of being to aspire to.

  As the days went by and the reality of the money sank in, she began to catch glimmerings, in her mother, of the young woman she’d read about in Tom’s memoir, the rich girl whose vestigial hauteur was expressing itself again. One night she found her mother scowling at the tired dresses in the tiny closet on the sleeping porch. “I suppose it wouldn’t kill me to buy a few new clothes,” she said. “You say not all of the money is in McCaskill stock?”

  And one morning at the kitchen window, glaring at her neighbor’s chicken coop: “Ha. Little does he know that I could not only buy his rooster, I could buy his whole house.”

  And again one evening, returning from her shift at New Leaf: “They think I can’t afford to quit. But if I catch Serena rolling her eyes at me one more time, I might just do it. Who is she to roll her eyes at me? I don’t think she’s bathed in a week.”

  But then, pensively, to Pip, at the dinner table: “How much of my father’s money did Tom take? Do you know? That has to be our absolute limit. Not even for you will I ever take more than he took.”

  “I think it was twenty million dollars.”

  “Hm. Now that I say that, I’m having new thoughts. I’m afraid I may not be able to take anything, pussycat. Even one dollar is too much. One dollar, twenty million dollars, it’s the same thing, morally.”

  “Mom, we’ve been through this.”

  “Maybe the lawyer can pay off your debt. He’s certainly done very well for himself.”

  “You at least have to buy Dreyfuss’s house. That was a moral crime, too. A worse one, in my opinion.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. There is no afterlife. And yet, my father … The idea that he might somehow know … I need to think some more about this.”

  “No, you don’t. You just need to do what I tell you.”

  Her mother looked at her uncertainly. “You did always have good moral sense.”

  “I got it from you,” Pip said. “So trust it.”

&
nbsp; Jason was begging her to come home, but there was the pleasure of the mountain rain and the related pleasure of being on new, more honest terms with her mother. To the loving that had always been in Pip was coming a new and unexpected sense of liking. Anabel had been likable, at least to Tom, at least in the beginning, and now that her mother was allowed to be Anabel again, to acknowledge her old privilege and dip a toe in her new privilege, to have a bit of an edge, Pip could imagine how the two of them might actually be friends.

  She also still had a task so daunting that she kept finding fault with every moment when she could have performed it. It took her two weeks to admit to herself that, in fact, no time on no day was a good time to call Tom. She finally chose a Monday at five o’clock in Denver.

  “Pip!” Tom said. “I was afraid you’d never call.”

  “Really. Why’s that.”

  “Leila and I think about you all the time. We miss you.”

  “Leila misses me. Really. It’s not a problem that I’m your daughter?”

  “Sorry, hang on. I’m shutting the door.”

  There was a fumbling, a bonk, a rustle, a clunk.

  “Pip, sorry,” Tom said. “What are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you I know everything.”

  “Yikey. OK.”

  “It’s not what you think. I didn’t read your document.”

  “Ah, good. Good. Excellent.” Tom’s relief was audible.

  “I deleted it,” she said. “But Andreas told me who you were, before he died. That made the research easy, and then my mom told me everything.”

  “Jesus. She told you. It’s amazing you’re even speaking to me.”

  “You are my father.”

  “I shudder to imagine her version.”

  “It’s better than no story, which is what you gave me.”

  “That’s a fair point. Although sometime I hope you’ll give me a chance to tell my side.”

  “You had your chance.”

  “True enough. I had my reasons, but it’s a fair point. And I’m assuming this is why you called me? To tell me I blew it with you?”

  “No. I called because I want you to come out here and see my mother.”

  Tom laughed. “I’d rather be dropped in the middle of the Congolese civil war.”

  “You cared enough about her to keep her secret for her.”

  “I suppose … in a sense…”

  “She obviously still matters to you.”

  “Pip, listen, I’m very sorry I didn’t tell you anything. Leila’s been after me to call you. I should have listened to her.”

  “Well, now I’m telling you how you can make it up to me. You can get on a plane and come out here.”

  “Why, though? Why would I do that?”

  “Because I won’t have anything to do with you if you don’t.”

  “I can tell you, from our side, that would be a loss.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see my mom again anyway? Just once, after all these years? All I’m asking is that you guys forgive each other. I want to be allowed to see both of you, but I can’t do it if I feel like I’m betraying one of you whenever I see the other.”

  “You don’t have to feel that way with me. I don’t have any claim on you.”

  “But I have a claim on you. And you’ve never had to do anything for me. This is the one thing I’m asking.”

  Tom sighed heavily across the time zones. “I don’t suppose there’s any liquor in your mother’s house?”

  “I’ll make sure there’s liquor.”

  “And we’re talking—when? Next month?”

  “No. This week. Maybe Friday. The longer you guys think about it, the worse it will get.”

  Again Tom sighed. “I could do Thursday. My Friday nights are for Leila.”

  Pip felt a twinge of resentment and was tempted to insist on Friday. But the road back to friendship with Leila was looking long enough already.

  “One other thing,” she said.

  “Yep,” Tom said.

  “I’ve been looking at DI every week. I keep thinking you’ll do a big story about Andreas.”

  “He wasn’t well, Pip. I saw him at the end, I saw him go over the cliff. The only thing I feel is sadness. Leila’s annoyed by the postmortem adulation, but I find it hard to begrudge him. He was the most remarkable person I ever met.”

  “The Express is still waiting for me to write something about him. I feel the same thing you do, sadness. But I also feel like somebody should tell the real story.”

  “About the murder? It’s your call. One of the costs would be the girl, the one who helped him. There could still be legal consequences for her.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “But he left a confession, which his people covered up. There’s definitely a story if you want to pursue it.”

  Was Tom also worried about his own complicity in the murder coming to light? Probably not, if he believed that Pip hadn’t read his memoir.

  “OK,” she said. “Thank you.”

  When her mother returned from work, Pip explained to her what had to happen. She was relieved that her mother didn’t immediately have a meltdown. But the reason she didn’t was that the entire concept made no sense to her.

  “What on earth did I ever do that needs to be forgiven?”

  “Um—had me and didn’t tell him? That’s pretty big.”

  “How can he blame me for that? He abandoned me. He never wanted to hear from me again. And I gave him that. Like everything else. He always got everything he wanted. Just like my father.”

  “Still, at some point, you should have let him know about me. On my eighteenth birthday, whatever. It was wrong of you not to. It was spiteful.”

  Her mother huffed and puffed at this, but finally she nodded. “If you say so,” she said. “And only because it’s you saying it.”

  “Weak people hold grudges, Mom. Strong people forgive. You raised me all by yourself. You said no to the money that everyone else in your family couldn’t resist. And you were stronger than Tom. You put an end to it—he couldn’t do it. You got everything you wanted. You won! And that’s why you can afford to forgive him. Because you won. Right?”

  Her mother frowned.

  “You’re also a billionaire,” Pip said. “That’s a kind of winning, too.”

  The next morning they rode the bus into Santa Cruz. It was a clear cold morning between storms. Homeless people were wearing their sleeping bags like shawls, Christmas bows were shivering on lampposts, the sky was full of wheeling seagulls. A hairdresser at Jillz trimmed Pip’s mother’s hair in a flurry of split ends. Then Pip took her for a manicure, and it was Anabel, not her old mother, who instructed the Vietnamese manicurist not to cut her cuticles, Anabel who explained to Pip that cutting cuticles was a racket, because they grew back quickly and needed to be cut again. It was Anabel who briskly worked through racks of dresses, through store after store, and continued to reject things long after Pip’s own patience was exhausted. The dress that she finally deemed “adequate” was vintage and full-skirted, sexy in a prairie-schoolteacher way, with twin lines of buttons on the bodice. Pip had to admit that it was the most suitable dress they’d seen all morning.

  She’d asked Jason to get a Zipcar and fetch Tom from the San Jose airport, so that she could stand guard over her mother and try to keep her calm. “Bring Choco, too,” she said.

  “He’ll just be in the way,” Jason said.

  “I want him in the way. Otherwise my mom’s going to focus on her freak-out. She’ll meet you, she’ll meet Choco, and, oh yeah, here’s the ex she hasn’t seen in twenty-five years.”

  On Thursday morning, another storm arrived. By late afternoon the rain was drumming so hard on the roof that Pip and her mother had to raise their voices. Darkness had fallen early, and the lights had flickered several times. Pip had prepared a bean soup and laid in other supplies, including ingredients for a Manhattan. After her mother had showered, Pip applied a blow-
dryer to her hair, brushing it and fluffing it. “Let’s give you some makeup, too.”

  Her mother muttered, “Why I’m dolling myself up like this…”

  “You’re putting on armor. You want to be strong.”

  “I can put on my own mascara.”

  “Let me do it. It was something I never got to do with you.”

  At five o’clock, while Pip was lighting a fire, Jason called to report that he and Tom were stuck in traffic near Los Gatos. Her mother, sitting on the sofa, was looking altogether very good in her vintage dress, like the older Anabel she was, but she was doing her rocking thing, her mildly autistic thing. “You should have a glass of wine,” Pip said.

  “I feel betrayed by my Endeavor. The time I most need it … where is it?”

  “Endeavor to drink some wine.”

  “It will go straight to my head.”

  “Good.”

  When the Zipcar finally came up the lane, its wipers laboring hard, its headlights making a white fury of the downpour, Pip left the side porch where she’d been waiting and ran, under an umbrella, to greet Jason. He looked a little harrowed by the drive, but his first thought was her first thought, which was to lock lips. Then Choco barked, and Pip opened the car’s rear door and let him lick her face.

  Tom emerged from the car tentatively, umbrella first. Pip thanked him for coming and kissed his meaty cheek. Somehow in the fifteen feet between car and front door Choco managed to get not only soaked but covered with wet redwood needles. He squeezed past Pip and ran inside. Her mother raised her arms, as if to ward him off, and gazed with dismay at the needles and muddy paw prints on the floor.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Pip said.

  She corralled Choco and led him back onto the side porch, where Tom was scuffing his feet. “That is the most hilarious dog I’ve seen in my entire life,” he said.

  “You like him?”

  “Love him. Want him.”

  They went inside, followed by Jason. Her mother, by the woodstove, wringing her hands, shyly raised her eyes to look at Tom. It was clear to Pip that both of them were struggling not to smile. But they couldn’t help smiling anyway; both of them, broadly.