Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen
was falling on Mass Ave. The telephone rang.
He went to the communications equipment, which sat on its own little table, and ran his eyes over it as if it were a buffet where nothing appealed to him. Finally, after the fifth ring, the machine not coming on, he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Peter?” The speaker was an old woman with a tremor in her voice. “Peter, I’ve been trying and trying—”
“This isn’t Peter.”
There was an uneasy rustle. Muttering an apology, the woman asked for Eileen. Louis offered to take a message.
“Who’s this?” the woman asked.
“This is Eileen’s brother. Louis.”
“Louis? Well, for goodness’ sake. This is Grandmother.”
He stared at the window for a long time. “Who?” he said.
“Rita Kernaghan. Grandmother.”
“Oh. Hey. Grandmother. Hey.”
“I don’t believe we’ve met but once.”
Belatedly Louis recalled an image, the image of a potbellied woman with a painted kitty-cat face who was already seated at a table at the Berghoff, in Chicago on a snowy evening, when he and his parents and Eileen trooped in. This was some seven years ago—about a year after his mother had flown to Boston for her father’s funeral. Of the Berghoff dinner he remembered nothing but a plate of braised rabbit with potato pancakes. And Rita Kernaghan touching Eileen’s hair and calling her a doll? Or was this some other dinner, some other old woman, or maybe a dream?
Not grandmother: step-grandmother.
“Yes,” he said. “I remember. You live around here.”
“Just outside Ipswich, yes. You’re visiting your sister?”
“No, I work here. I work for a radio station.”
This information seemed to interest Rita Kernaghan. She pressed Louis for details. Was he an announcer? Did he know the programming director? She proposed they have a drink together. “You can get to know me a little. Shall we say after work on Friday? I’ll be in the city in the evening.”
“All right.” Louis said.
No sooner had they set a time and place than Rita Kernaghan murmured goodbye and the line went dead. Moments later Eileen returned to the apartment, wet and angry, and disappeared into the kitchen. “No dinner till you apologize to me!” she said.
Louis frowned thoughtfully, consuming breadsticks.
“You were very childish and very bullyish,” Eileen said. “I want you to apologize to me.”
“I will not. He wouldn’t even shake hands with me.”
“He was cold!”
Louis rolled his eyes at his sister’s sincerity. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry I messed up your dinner.”
“Well, don’t do it again. I happen to be very fond of Peter.”
“Do you love him?”
The question brought Eileen out of the kitchen with a confounded look on her face. Louis had never asked her anything even remotely so personal. She sat down by him on the sofa and reached for her toes, in a leg-shaving posture, the tip of her nose resting lightly on one knee. “Sometimes I think I do,” she said. “I’m not the real romantic type, though. Milton Friedman’s more my speed. I mean, it’s funny you should ask.”
“Isn’t it the obvious question?”
Still bent over, she closed one eye and studied him. “You seem different,” she said.
“Different from what?”
She shook her head, unwilling to admit it had never occurred to her that her little brother might, at the age of twenty-three, be acquainted with the concept of love. She gave careful attention to her ankles, fingering the round protruding bones, pinching the tendons in back and rocking a little. Her face was already losing prettiness. Time and sun and business school had made her color more shallow, a conceivable middle-aged Eileen suddenly beginning to show through like old wallpaper beneath a coat of new paint. She looked up at Louis shyly. “It’s nice we’re in the same city again.”
“Yeah.”
She became even more tentative. “You like your job?”
“Too early to say.”
“Would you give Peter a chance, Louis? He comes on a little arrogant but he’s very vulnerable underneath.”
“Which reminds me,” Louis said. “He got a phone call while you were out. I was like, Grandmother? Grandmother who?”
“Oh. Rita. She tried to get me to call her Grandmother too.”
“It slipped my mind that she existed.”
“That’s because she and Mom are like—agggggh.” Eileen started strangling herself with both hands. “Do you know anything about this?”
“You know when the last time I had a real conversation with Mom was? Ferguson Jenkins was on the Cubs’ roster.”
“Well, but apparently Grandpa made a whole lot of money at some point, and when he died he didn’t leave anything at all to Mom or Aunt Heidi, because he was married to Rita. Rita got everything.”
“Definitely not the way to Mom’s heart.”
“Except Peter says Rita didn’t really get anything either. It’s all in a trust fund.”
“What’s Peter know about this?”
“He was Rita’s publicist. That’s how I met him.” Eileen hopped up and went to her bookshelf. “Rita turned New Agey after Grandpa died. She’s got a pyramid on the roof of the house. She keeps her wine in the barn because she thinks it won’t mature under the pyramid. This is her new book.” She handed Louis a thin, hot-pink volume. “She has them printed by some pretend publisher in Worcester, and they all come in one shipment, on these huge flats. Last time I was at her house she had them all in the barn, with the wine. Just this massive wall of books. That’s what she needs a publicist for, and for her lectures too. But listen, do you want tortellini with red sauce or linguine with white clam sauce?”
“Whichever’s easier.”
“Well, they’re both in bags.”
“Tortellini,” Louis said. The title of the hot-pink book was Princess Itaray: An Atlantean Case History. On the title page the author had written: To Eileen, my little doll, with love from Grandmother. Louis paged through the book, which was divided into chapters and subchapters and sub-subchapters with boldface numbered headings:
4.1.8 Implications of the Disappearance of the Dime-sian Appendage: A Reversible Fall from Eden?’
He looked at the flap copy. In this fanciful yet erudite work, Dr. Kernaghan advances the hypothesis that the cornerstone of Atlantean society was the universal gratification of sexual desire, and proposes that the human appendix, now a vestigial organ, was, among the Atlanteans, both external and highly functional. With the hypnotic regression of a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Mary M— of Beverly, Massachusetts, Dr. Kernaghan embarks on a compelling exploration of Atlantean deep psychology, the historical origins of repressed sexuality, and the modern world’s potential for a return to a golden age …
“She’s written two other books too,” Eileen said.
“She’s a doctor?”
“Some honorary degree. Milton Friedman thinks it’s the silliest thing he’s ever heard of, isn’t that right, Milton Friedman? Peter helped her a lot—got her on the radio and on TV a couple times. He has all kinds of connections and he’s only in it