Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen

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      Louis covered up the document with a paperback and turned around. His mother was emerging from the bathroom.

      It was obvious that she’d been spending money. Spending money and (so it seemed to Louis) sleeping, for she looked approximately fifteen years younger than she’d looked at dinner on Sunday. The skin of her face was golden and glowing and so tautly attached to her jawline it seemed to pull her dark eyes open wide. She’d had her hair set in a short pageboy—and colored also? What Louis remembered as an even dark gray had been resolved into black and silver. She was wearing a pale yellow linen dress with black velvet trim, the hem about an inch above the knee. The high collar was joined with a brooch that contained a nickel-sized pearl. At the mirror, nostrils flared in concentration, she touched invisible and possibly nonexistent hairs around her temples. Then she went to the closet and with the exact same fluidity of vertical motion that Eileen had inherited, dropped to her knees and drew a shoe box from a plastic Ferragamo bag.

      “You’re lookin’ nice there, Mom.”

      “Thank you, Louis. Isn’t your father back yet?”

      With raised eyebrows he watched her remove a pair of shoes from a bed of crimson tissue paper. He turned to Eileen, wondering if she too might raise her eyebrows at this spectacle of a mom transformed by sudden spending power. But Eileen was no less transformed. With eyes pinkened by hurt and hate and a face in which every muscle had gone dead she watched their mother slip her small feet into a pair of shoes as sleek as Jaguars. No way Louis could catch her eye. She needed to have her sorrows noticed by their mother, not by him. So while she suffered by the window (cold rain falling between her and the business school) and their mother complacently fitted a pair of white roses into the black band of a floppy white hat, he sat down on the bed and opened the sports section of a handy Globe. It could almost as easily have been he and not his sister suffering by the window, but what is a pack dog thinking, what’s going on behind its yellow eyes, when it sees one of its fellows taken aside by a polar explorer to have its throat slit and be made into supper for its siblings?

      “Your father’s going to have about three minutes to shower and dress,” their mother said. “Maybe one of you could—”

      “No,” Eileen said.

      “No,” Louis said. Their father swam in earplugs and goggles and had to be physically prodded to leave a pool.

      “Well.” Their mother stood up with her hat on, flattened her dress across her hips, and spun around once on her toes. “How do I look?”

      There was a silence, Eileen not even glancing.

      “Like a million bucks,” Louis said.

      “Ha ha ha!” Eileen cawed mirthlessly.

      Their mother, without expression, began to reload a newlooking black clutch. “Louis,” she said. “I’m going to have to talk to you.”

      “Yeah, well, I already heard it,” Eileen said, stamping across the room. “So I’ll see you guys at the service.” She pulled her raincoat from a hanger and opened the door and reeled back before their father, who, towel around his waist and goggles nestled in the sodden gray fluff below his throat, was advancing like an interested lobster, saying to Eileen, “Well, if it ain’t the Infanta Elena! Dark star of Aragon! Keepress of the emerald scepter!” She swung back into clothes hangers, her fingers splayed and rigid near her ears, while the lobster gathered her waist in the crook of its stout claw. She shied writhingly. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! Oh, you’re still wet!” Color was returning to her cheeks. Her father kissed one and released her, saluted across the room to Louis, and disappeared into the bathroom. Their mother had witnessed none of this.

      Fifteen minutes later the four Hollands were sitting in the parental rented two-door Mercury, Melanie at the wheel, the kids in back. The kids’ cars had stayed behind in the hotel lot because Bob Holland considered automobiles an abomination and had threatened to walk if they took more than one. Louis was folded together like a card table and incipiently carsick, with his under-insulated head against a cold fogged window and the taste of heavy rain and diesel exhaust in his throat. On his shins he held his mother’s hat. Someone who was not Louis and probably not Eileen was farting steadily. Bob, looking diminished in a thirty-year-old suit, was glaring out his window at overtaken drivers in the heavy midmorning traffic on Memorial Drive. He thought that driving a car was an act of personal immorality.

      Louis pushed out the hinged rear window and put his nose and mouth against the flat surface of the cooler air outside. He was beginning to relate his carsickness to flatten the left frontal portion of the skull and immediately terminate all brain activity, the imagination of death having advanced covertly and autonomously, penetrating his consciousness only now. He managed to suck a fortifying breath of air in through the window. “Do you think she knew it was an earthquake?”

      Eileen gave him an ugly, morose look and retreated within herself.

      “Who?” Melanie said.

      “You know. Rita. Do you think she knew the shaking was an earthquake?”

      “It sounds,” Melanie said, “as if she was far too inebriated to think much of anything.”

      “It’s kind of sad,” Louis said, “don’t you think?”

      “There are worse ways to go. Better this than cirrhosis in a hospital bed.”

      “She’s left you all this money. Don’t you think it’s kind of sad?”

      “She didn’t leave me any money. She didn’t leave me anything but a quarter of a million dollars in illegally secured debts, if you want to know the truth.”

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ