Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen Read Free Book Online Page B

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 herself from Peter and gave some attention to her hair. By almost but not quite meeting Louis’s eyes she managed to appear entirely absent.
    “I didn’t do anything to you,” Louis said.
    “Didn’t say you did.”
    “Mom give you a hard time or what.”
    “Let’s just not talk about it.”
    “Yeah. Well.”
    “I’m going to go sit with Peter, OK?”
    She left him standing in the middle of the ballroom, ten paces behind the last row of chairs. The lights shone more brightly on him than on the fifty or so assembled mourners, more brightly even than on the ashen moderator, who, after a nod of appreciation to the sweating and victorious pianist, looked squarely at Louis and said, “We may be seated.”
    Louis held his ground, arms crossed. The woman closed her eyes with raised eyebrows. Then she put on a pair of glasses that were chained to her neck.
    “We’re assembled here today,” she said, reading from the lectern, “to honor the memory of Rita Damiano Kernaghan, a mentor unto many of us and a friend unto all. Can you hear me in the back row?”
    The only person in the back row, Bob Holland, gave the woman a captain’s salute.
    “My name is Geraldine Briggs. I was a friend of Rita Kernaghan. I knew her well. At times, we were as sisters unto one another. We laughed together, we wept together. We were as little girls, sometimes.”
    The pallid mourners were listening raptly, their heads like so many compass needles pointing at the lectern. The men with Melanie, Mr. Stoorhuys included, sat with their fingers pressed into their foreheads.
    “When first I met Rita at the Empowerment Center in Danvers in 1983, she had just penned a book entitled Beginning Life at 60 , familiar to many of you, I’m sure, and seemed, she did, a perfect embodiment of the principles limned therein. Rita had learned that the soul is eternal and youthful, gay and joyous, filled with glad melodies. Age is no impediment unto the soul. Nay, death itself