Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen
“Oh come on, Mel.”
“Well, she did, Bob. She had a mortgage on a house that didn’t belong to her. The bank in Ipswich was unaware of this little fact, which—”
“Your mother’s father,” Bob said, “left everything he had in a trust—”
“Bob, this doesn’t interest Louis.”
“Sure it does,” Louis said.
“And it’s not particularly his business either.”
“Oh, well.”
“But the basic point,” Melanie continued, “is that by the time my father died he had a very clear idea of the kind of woman he’d taken for a second wife, and while he had a duty to leave her comfortable he also didn’t want her to fritter away an estate that he eventually wanted to go to his children—”
Bob barked with delight. “Meaning he didn’t leave your mother a cent! And not a cent to your Aunt Heidi either! He wrote exactly the kind of spiteful, arrogant, dead-handed, lawyer’s lawyer will you’d have expected from him. Everybody beggared, everybody bitter, and a committee of three lawyers from the Bank of Boston meeting twice a year to write themselves checks on the fund.”
“I like the way you honor the dead.”
“Could you open a window a little?”
“And Mel’s going to right a few wrongs now, isn’t she? See, Lou, after Heidi died it all came to devolve on your mother. It was supposed to go to the surviving daughters. Your mother’s in exactly the same position your grandfather was ten years ago. Only the rich have gotten richer, haven’t they? Your mother’s in a position to build some schools and clinics, maybe give a gym to Wellesley. Or help the homeless, huh, Mel?”
Melanie tilted her head back, removing herself from the discussion. Eileen smiled bitterly. Louis asked again to have a window opened.
The memorial service, which was to have been held in a meadow in Essex County if the sun had shone, had been shifted to the ballroom of the Royal Sonesta, a luxury hotel overlooking the mouth of the Charles at the extreme northeast corner of Cambridge. For a moment, when Louis followed his parents through the doorway, he thought they’d entered the wrong room; milling in sad social lumps were, it seemed to him, the very people he’d seen marching against abortion on Tremont Street a week earlier—the same inflexible middle-aged female faces, the same smattering of vacant-eyed men, the same curtain-colored clothing and sensible shoes. But then, alerted by the beeline Eileen was making, he saw Peter Stoorhuys.
Peter was standing slightly apart from a group of three uneasylooking men in nice suits, three obvious executives or professionals. With his legs spread and his shoulders thrown back and his hands shallowly in his pockets, he looked like a person to whom the world may come if it really must. Eileen, colliding with him, pressed her ear against one of his houndstooth lapels and rested one hand on his stomach, the other on his shoulder.
Louis stopped in his tracks and stared at the embrace with his hands on his hips. Then, altering his trajectory as though a repulsive field now surrounded Eileen, he caught up with Bob and the two of them shuffled after Melanie, whose approach was causing the three gentlemen in suits to break into smiles of relief. She brushed cheeks with two of them, shook hands with the third. Peter freed himself from Eileen and came over to Melanie with his arm outstretched, but suddenly she was keeping her hands to herself. She smiled glacially. “Hello Peter.” Bob Holland, like a grateful second-stringer, claimed the unshaken hand and pumped it, but Melanie’s snub had not escaped Eileen’s attention; she glowered at Louis. Louis smiled back pleasantly. He was interested to see that at some point during the week his parents had made Peter’s acquaintance.
“This is our son, Louis,” Melanie said. “Louis, this is Mr. Aldren, Mr. Tabscott, Mr. Stoorhuys—”
Mr. Who, Mr. Who, Mr.—?
“Good to know you, Louis,” they chorused, pressing his flesh. The same courtesies were then extended to Eileen.
“Peter’s dad,” Mr. Stoorhuys added for Louis’s benefit, waving a hand at his son, to whom he bore a resemblance both unmistakable and unflattering to himself. Seen from close up, Mr. Stoorhuys did not actually match his two companions. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott appeared to be real Men, men with the beefy faces and inflamed-looking bull’s nostrils of frequent beefeaters, men who were emphatically not “young men” and even more emphatically not “women.” They had gold chains across their necktie knots and a hard red shrewdness in their eyes.
Mr. Stoorhuys was more nervous and lanky. Three inches of shirt cuff stuck out of his jacket sleeves on either wrist. His hair grew in half a dozen directions and half a dozen shades of gray; a long, seventies-style forelock rested on his dandruffy eyebrows. He had sunken pitted cheeks, teeth so large he seemed unable to keep his hps over them, and bright intelligent eyes that were engaged in looking over his shoulder even as he stood facing Louis, one hand raised to keep him on hold.
“Louis,” Melanie said. He turned to see her standing on one leg, leaning through bodies. “Maybe you’d like to get me a cup of coffee.”
“Actually—” Mr. Tabscott pinched the cuff of Louis’s jacket. “I think the, uh, service is going to start here in a minute.”
“Yes,” Mr. Aldren said. “We’re going to sit with your mother if you don’t mind.”
“Good to meet you, son.”
“Good to meet you, uh. Louis.”
Mr. Stoorhuys followed them, escaping his stillborn conversation with Louis the easy way: by just leaving.
The drab crowd was herding itself towards rows of function-room chairs set up facing a lectern and a grand piano on which a Japanese man with expressive shoulders and a ponytail had begun to play the Pachelbel Canon. Louis’s father, with his academic’s respect for lecterns, had already taken a seat. Eileen stood hugging Peter’s chest. And a tableau presented itself: Mr. Aldren leading Melanie away, his elbow linked with hers, and Melanie not needing to be led but walking with him as naturally as if they were sweethearts on a boardwalk; Mr. Stoorhuys following with a grip on her other arm, smiling his smile that was not a smile, lagging behind for a moment to look over his shoulder through the rough tufts of hair in his eyes; and Mr. Tabscott like a rear guard with his back squarely to the three of them, unambiguously warning off anyone foolish enough to pursue. A white hat and a yellow linen dress— a lady as little a man as at least two of these men were ladies— fenced in by dark pinstripe.
Louis, staring, extended one finger and rammed the tip of it into the bridge of his glasses.
The Canon had grown deafening. Melanie sat down between Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott with Mr. Stoorhuys crowding in from Mr. Aldren’s side, his thin arm almost long enough to reach behind all three of them, five inches of white shirt cuff showing now. Louis roughed up the pastel broadloom with a heavy shoe. Asking Eileen who and what these men were was not an option; she had her cheek against Peter’s necktie and was feeling around under the back of his jacket as if looking for the key one wound him up with. Their lips were moving: they were conversing inaudibly. They and Louis were now the only mourners not seated in the array of chairs. An ashen-faced woman in a caftan had stationed herself behind the lectern and was resting one elbow on it as she gravely watched the pianist. The pianist had begun to grapple visibly with the Canon, trying to enforce a ritardando while hurrying the ponderous chords to find a respectable point for breaking off. The Canon was showing its backbone and seemed far from surrendering.
Louis walked over to the young lovers in their invisible sphere of oblivion and stood, as it were, outside their door. “Hi, Peter,” he said.
Peter seemed to have a reflex problem. It was three or four seconds before he turned and said, “Hey, how’s it going.”
“Fine, thanks. Wonder if I could talk to my sister for a second.”
Eileen removed