Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ by the Chelsea city manager and that’s sitting on completely unconsolidated landfill. It’s hard to imagine a building more prone to damage in an earthquake, and to me it’s just insanity to allow 250 church members to be living in it, even if every one of them signed a waiver.”

      “So you believe there could be further earthquakes,” an unseen male interviewer said.

      “You can’t rule it out. Not after what happened in Peabody on Friday.”

      “Dr. Axelrod at?G? told me he thinks the odds of a damaging earthquake in central Boston in the next twelve months are still less than one in a thousand.”

      “They could be one in a million, there still shouldn’t be people living in that building.”

      “I take it you’re not in agreement with Reverend Stites on the issue of abortion.”

      As DR. RENEE SEITCHEK struggled to reply to this irrelevant question, the camera zoomed in on her until the tiny freckles around her eyelids could be seen. In her right ear she wore three small silver hoops in separate holes. Out-of-focus leaves and sunshine played in the window behind her.

      “I don’t think a woman who terminates a pregnancy needs Philip Stites to tell her the significance of what she’s done.”

      “Think again,” Libby murmured. “Think again.”

      DR. RENEE SEITCHEK blinked in the bright lights, her face still filling the screen, while the interviewer asked a final question: “If it’s not OK for the state to interfere in a woman’s decision about abortion, why is it OK to interfere with the church members’ decision to live in the Central Avenue apartment block?”

      “Because Philip Stites made that decision for them.”

      DR. RENEE SEITCHEK’S reply had apparently continued from here, but the sound was cut off as the reporter brought viewers back to Central Avenue in Chelsea, where a female member of Stites’s Church of Action in Christ was leaving a bleak yellow-brick apart ment complex that had sheets of weather-bleached plywood on its windows.

      “The reason I live in this yere building,” the woman said. “Is that I trust in God more than I trust in scientists and engineers. This yere’s a building with NO PROTECTION. The unborn have NO PROTECTION. But if God will protect me here, I’ve got the power to protect the unborn.”

      “One scientist I spoke to,” the reporter said, “claimed it was Reverend Stites’s persuasion that made you sign the waiver, rather than your own free will.”

      The woman held up a placard reading THANKS MOM I ♥ LIFE. “The will that moves me,” she told the camera, “is the same will as moves the Reverend Stites, and that is the will of God.”

      “How does it feel to go to bed at night knowing that even a small earthquake could send all these bricks down on top of you?”

      “There’s no man in this world that wakes up in the morning but by the grace of our Lord.”

      The television’s response to this avowal was a perfume ad. Libby Quinn shifted on the sofa, looking around the room selfconsciously, as if she thought Louis and Alec expected her to justify herself. She stood up suddenly. “I’m a mother, Louis. You know I have two girls in high school. And what that little Harvard girl doesn’t understand is that to a lot of these teenagers, an abortion’s like a trip to the dentist. I know for a fact that there’s no one out there telling kids that what they’re flushing into Boston Harbor is tiny babies.”

      “Ah, yeah,” Louis said. “Although these prolifers aren’t just trying to educate some teenagers.”

      “These prolifers,” Libby said pointedly, “think it’s important to take responsibility for your sexual behavior.”

      “What do you sink, Louis?” Alec said. Libby might have been a controversial film they’d been watching. “You agree with her? Take your time! Your future at this station may be at stake.”

      “Let me ask you this, Louis,” Libby said. “Why do you think the people who hate economic greed always want to be excusing sexual greed? Why do you think that is?”

      Alec turned expectantly to Louis, sucking his lozenge of amusement, his eyebrows raised.

      “Economic greed hurts other people,” Louis said.

      Alec’s eyes followed the ball back into Libby’s court.

      “Right,” she said with an unhappy smile. “Sexual greed doesn’t hurt anybody. Unless you happen to consider a fetus a victim.”

      It was an exit line; she left the room.

      “And what does Vanna have to say to that?” Alec asked, changing channels. “No, no, Vanna stands higher than such concerns.”

      Louis was trembling. He didn’t understand what he’d done to make Libby turn against him.

      Alec leaned back comfortably on the sofa to soak up Wheel-of-Fortune rays. “Libby,” he said, “is an unhappy person. You forgive her, eh? She raised two girls without a husband. The man was no good. He came back and married her when the older girl was two, then left again. Is a hard life for her, Louis. She made a mistake twice. One time, OK, but twice, is hard to live with.”

      “She’s selling you out,” Louis said.

      Alec shrugged. “I owe her back pay, she’s ambitious. She should have gone to college, but she had her babies. Is hard for her to see girls have abortions now. You forgive her.”

      Louis shook his head. He went outside into the twilit parking lot. “Hey, Libby,” he said. She was getting in her car. “Libby!” he said again, but she had closed the door. He watched her drive away.

      It may be that to understand is to forgive; but Louis was tired of understanding. Almost everyone he knew seemed to have good reasons for not being kind and polite to him, and he could see these reasons, and yet it didn’t seem fair that it was always him who had to understand and forgive and never them. It seemed like the world was set up so that the unhappy people who did rotten things—the abused child who became a child abuser, the injured Libby who injured Louis and Alec—could always be forgiven because they couldn’t help what they did, while the unhappy people who still refused to do rotten things got more and more hurt by the other people’s rottenness, until they’d been hurt so many times that they too stopped caring what they did to other people, and there was no way out.

      “Why aren’t you speaking to me?” he’d asked MaryAnn Bowles, a week after the previous Easter. She was making pickled beets in a haze of vinegar.

      “I’m surprised you have to ask that,” she said.

      “Oh, I’ve got a theory. But I wanted to check.”

      She stuck a fork into a purple chunk of beet. “Well, Louis,” she said. “I’m not blaming you. But I guess you must know that I am very, very hurt by what’s happened. I am very, very, very hurt.” The sound of her own words made her throat tighten and her face crumple up. “AII I can say is this has nothing to do with you. She was only trying to hurt me. And I guess you can see”—her words continued to affect her violently—”that she succeeded very well indeed.”

      Louis СКАЧАТЬ