Джонатан Франзен – The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (страница 5)
Lunch at Hotel Geiger “Berchtesgarden”—
and if she was aware of certain historical facts behind the scenery, such as Hitler’s frequent visits to Berchtesgaden for recreational getaways, she didn’t mention it.
My father had had serious qualms about accepting such lavish hospitality from the Austrians, but my mother had worn him down to the point where he agreed to ask his boss, Mr. German, whether he should decline the invitation. (Mr. German had answered, essentially, “Are you kidding me?”) In 1974, when my father voiced misgivings about returning to Florida, my mother again wore him down. She pointed out that Kirby and Ellie were expecting our invitation, and she kept repeating the phrase “Just this one last year,” until finally, reluctantly, my father signed off on the usual plan.
Kirby and Ellie were good bridge players, and it would have been a dull trip for my parents with only me along. I was a silent, withdrawn presence in the back seat for the two-day drive through Cape Girardeau, Memphis, Hattiesburg, and Gulfport. As we were driving up the road toward the beach house, on an overcast afternoon made darker by an ominous bank of new high-rise condominiums encroaching from the east, I was struck by how unexcited I was to be arriving this year. I had just turned fifteen and was more interested in my books and my records than in anything on the beach.
We were within sight of the house’s driveway when my mother cried, “Oh no!
“Damn!” my father said again, angrily.
And then my mother said it, too:
It was the first time and the last time I ever heard her swear. Farther up the road, in the driveway, I could see Kirby standing beside the open door of his and Ellie’s sedan. He was chatting affably with a man who, I understood without asking, was the owner of the house.
“Damn!” my father said.
“Damn! Damn!”
They’d been caught.
Exactly twenty-five years later, the realtor Mike and my brother Tom agreed on an asking price of $382,000 for the house. Over the Labor Day weekend, when we all gathered in St. Louis to hold a memorial service for my mother, Mike dropped in only briefly. She appeared to have forgotten the ardor of our initial meeting—she barely spoke to me now—and she was subdued and deferential with my brothers. She’d finally held an open house a few days earlier, and of the two prospective buyers who’d shown some interest, neither had made an offer.
In the days after the memorial service, as my brothers and I went from room to room and handled things, I came to feel that the house had been my mother’s novel, the concrete story she told about herself. She’d started with the cheap, homely department-store boilerplate she’d bought in 1944. She’d added and replaced various passages as funds permitted, re-upholstering sofas and armchairs, accumulating artwork ever less awful than the prints she’d picked up as a twenty-three-year-old, abandoning her original arbitrary color schemes as she discovered and refined the true interior colors that she carried within her like a destiny. She pondered the arrangement of paintings on a wall like a writer pondering commas. She sat in the rooms year after year and asked herself what might suit her even better. What she wanted was for you to come inside and feel embraced and delighted by what she’d made; she was showing you herself, by way of hospitality; she wanted you to want to stay.
Although the furniture in her final draft was sturdy and well made, of good cherry and maple, my brothers and I couldn’t make ourselves want what we didn’t want; I couldn’t prefer her maple nightstand to the scavenged wine crate that I kept by my bed in New York. And yet to walk away and leave her house so fully furnished, so nearly the way she’d always wanted it to look, gave me the same panicked feeling of
In October, we hired an estate liquidator to put a price tag on all the things we’d left behind. At the end of the month, people came and bought, and Tom got a check for fifteen thousand dollars, and the liquidator made whatever she hadn’t sold just disappear, and I tried not to think about the sad little prices that my mother’s worldly goods had fetched.
As for the house, we did our best to sell it while it was still furnished. With the school year under way, and with no eager young Catholic parents bombarding us with offers, we dropped the price to $369,000. A month later, as the estate sale loomed and the oak leaves were coming down, we cut the price again, to $359,000. At Mike’s suggestion, we also ran a newspaper ad that showed the house under a Yuletide mantle of snow, looking the way my mother had most liked to see it pictured, along with a new tag line (also a suggestion of Mike’s): HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS. Nobody went for it. The house stood empty through all of November. None of the things my parents had thought would sell the house had sold it. It was early December before a young couple came along and mercifully offered us $310,000.
By then I was convinced that the realtor Pat could have sold the house in mid-August for my mother’s suggested price. My mother would have been stricken to learn how much less we took for it—would have experienced the devaluation as a dashing of her hopes, a rejection of her creative work, an unwelcome indication of her averageness. But this wasn’t the big way I’d let her down. She was dead now, after all. She was safely beyond being stricken. What lived on—in me—was the discomfort of how completely I’d outgrown the novel I’d once been so happy to live in, and how little I even cared about the final sale price.
Our friend Kirby, it turned out, had charmed the owner of the Florida house, and the beer keg was fully operational, and so our last week of living like rich people unfolded amicably. I spent morbid, delicious amounts of time by myself, driven by the sort of hormonal instinct that I imagine leads cats to eat grass. The half-finished high-rises to our east were poised to engulf our idyll, even if we’d wanted to come back another year, but the transformation of a quiet, sandpiper-friendly beach into a high-density population center was such a novelty for us that we didn’t even have a category for the loss it represented. I studied the skeletal towers the way I studied bad weather.
At the end of the week, my parents and I drove deeper into Florida, so that I could be taken to Disney World. My father was big on fairness, and because my brothers had once spent a day at Disneyland, many years earlier, it was unthinkable that I not be given the equivalent treat of a day at Disney World, whether or not I was too old for it, and whether or not I wanted to be there. I might not have minded going with my friend Manley, or with my not-girlfriend Hoener, and mocking and subverting the place and allowing myself to like it that way. But mocking and subverting in the presence of my parents was out of the question.
In our hotel room in Orlando, I begged my mother to let me wear my cutoff jeans and a T-shirt for the day, but my mother won the argument, and I arrived at Disney World in an ensemble of pleated shorts and a Bing Crosbyish sport shirt. Dressed like this, miserable with self-consciousness, I moved my feet only when I was directly ordered to. All I wanted to do was go sit in our car and read. In front of each themed ride, my mother asked me if it didn’t look like lots of fun, but I saw the other teenagers waiting in line, and I felt their eyes on my clothes and my parents, and my throat ached, and I said the line was too long. My mother tried to cajole me, but my father cut her off: “Irene, he doesn’t want to ride this one.” We trudged on through diffuse, burning Florida sunshine to the next crowded ride. Where, again, the same story.
“You have to ride
“I’ll ride that,” I said in a dull voice.
For the next twenty minutes, the three of us boarded and re-boarded the dismal merry-go-round, ensuring that our ride tickets weren’t going to waste. I stared at the merry-go-round’s chevroned metal floor and radiated shame, mentally vomiting back the treat they’d tried to give me. My mother, ever the dutiful traveler, took pictures of my father and me on our uncomfortably small horses, but beneath her forcible cheer she was angry at me, because she knew she was the one I was getting even with, because of our fight about clothes. My father, his fingers loosely grasping a horse-impaling metal pole, gazed into the distance with a look of resignation that summarized his life. I don’t see how either of them bore it. I’d been their late, happy child, and now there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from them. My mother seemed to me hideously conformist and hopelessly obsessed with money and appearances; my father seemed to me allergic to every kind of fun. I didn’t want the things they wanted. I didn’t value what they valued. And we were all equally sorry to be riding the merry-go-round, and we were all equally at a loss to explain what had happened to us.