Purity by Jonathan Franzen Read Free Book Online Page B

certificate or the original copy of her real birth certificate along with legal documentation of her name change. Pip’s repeated fine-toothed combings of her mother’s possessions had turned up no documents like these, nor any safe-deposit key, which led her to conclude that her mother had either destroyed the documents or buried them in the ground as soon as she had a new Social Security number. Somewhere, some county courthouse may have had a public record of her name change, but the United States contained a lot of counties, few of them put their records online, and Pip wouldn’t even have known what time zone to start looking in. She’d entered every conceivable combination of keywords into every commercial search engine and ended up with nothing but an acute appreciation of the limitations of search engines.
    When Pip was very young, vague stories had satisfied her, but by the time she was eleven her questions had grown so insistent that her mother agreed to tell her the “full” story. Once upon a time, she said, she’d had a different name and a different life, in a state that wasn’t California, and she’d married a man who—as she discovered only after Pip was born—had a propensity to violence. He abused her physically, but he was very cunning about inflicting pain without leaving serious marks on her, and he was even more abusive psychologically. Soon she became a total hostage to his abuse, and she might have stayed married until he murdered her if he hadn’t been so enraged by Pip’s crying, as a baby, that she feared for Pip’s safety as well. She tried running away from him with Pip, but he tracked them down and abused her psychologically and brought them home again. He had powerful friends in their community, she couldn’t prove that he abused her, and she knew that even if she divorced him he would still get partial custody of Pip. And she couldn’t allow that. She’d married a dangerous person and could live with her own mistake, but she couldn’t put Pip at risk. And so, one night, while her husband was away on business, she packed a suitcase and boarded a bus and took Pip to a battered-wives shelter in a different state. The women at the shelter helped her assume a new identity and get a new, fake birth certificate for Pip. Then she boarded a bus again and took refuge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where a person could be whoever she said she was.
    â€œI did it to protect you,” she’d told Pip. “And now that I’ve told you the story, you have to protect yourself and never tell anyone else. I know your father. I know how enraged he must have been that I stood up for myself and took you from him. And I know that if he ever found out where you are, he would come and take you from me.”
    Pip at eleven was profoundly credulous. Her mother had a long, thin scar on her forehead which came out when she blushed, and her front teeth had a gap between them and didn’t match the color of her other teeth. Pip was so sure that her father had smashed her mother’s face, and felt so sorry for her, that she didn’t even ask her if he had. For a while, she was too afraid of him to sleep alone at night. In her mother’s bed, with stifling hugs, her mother assured her that she was completely safe as long as she never told anyone her secret, and Pip’s credulity was so complete, her fear so real, that she kept the secret until well into her rebellious teen years. Then she told two friends, swearing both to secrecy, and in college she told more friends.
    One of them, Ella, a homeschooled girl from Marin, reacted with a funny look. “That is so weird,” Ella said. “I feel like I’ve heard that exact story before. There’s a writer in Marin who wrote a whole memoir with basically that story.”
    The writer was Candida Lawrence (also an assumed name, according to Ella), and when Pip tracked down