The Exiles (30 page)

“Leave me at least one sleeve of them,” Emily said taking the pumpkin filling from his hand. In her haste she dropped it. It barely made a noise as it hit the floor’s soft, dated linoleum tiles. She stooped and inspected the can, which had landed squarely on its side and wasn’t dented. “We can make a graham crust and do a pumpkin pie, if there’s a pie tin.” She added the pumpkin to their stash on the counter (long-grain rice, canned tomatoes, raisins, honey, tea, Manhattan clam chowder, garbanzo beans, vegetable oil, soy sauce, garlic powder). In a cabinet under the stovetop, she found the pots and pans, worn but functional. She added two saucepans and a skillet to the pile of booty. She located a square cake pan that could substitute as a pie tin. Nate had already found the plates and silverware and was putting a small assemblage in one of the cardboard boxes he’d discovered just inside the back door.

“You’re sure we have electricity and gas at the house?” Emily said, taking an unopened bottle of dish soap from next to the sink and adding it to the box.

“Sure.” Nate said. “We have a phone line, too; the number was supposedly hooked up last week. The house is inhabitable. I mean, we were planning to be living there by now.”

“A phone line? Should we grab one of the phones from here? I saw two in the living room, plugged into the wall.” Simply having a phone listed in their names would give their residence a durable feel, Emily hoped. Setting up their house together would be one big step toward repairing, or consolidating, at least, their life together.

“That’s stealing. This isn’t our home.” He put the graham crackers down and stepped away from the food, as if ashamed. Emily was the only instinctive thief in this couple, apparently. “We should replace all of this once we have money again, and let’s put the living room furniture back in place before we leave today. This house should look untouched.”

“Except for the hole you punched into the back door’s window.”

“Right.”

“I’m kidding, Nate, I mean, assuming that the only owner of this house is your father, and you’re the only kid he has, it’s all coming to you someday, isn’t it? Maybe soon. You have to face the fact that this might be it for your father,” Emily said. She took a jar of cashew butter out of the cabinet and looked at its expiration date. “Look at the place. No one has lived here for ages. Sure, the floors have been mopped and the rugs vacuumed, but did you actually sit on any of the furniture? Dust rises out of it like powder from a Victorian wig.”

Nate only nodded, but Emily was right, she knew she was right. This home, for all of its un-Bedeckerian nods toward comfort, hadn’t had an actual inhabitant for a long, long time.

CHAPTER
26

History in the Family

E
MILY WAS OUTSIDE
bringing the first box—stuffed with plates, a can opener, and a silver gravy boat she’d found in the living room and insisted on taking—to the car, while Nate watched her through the kitchen window. His father’s kitchen window. A man couldn’t give birth to a son and not care about him whatsoever, could he? George had to care, at least instinctively. Especially given that he was critically injured and Nate was his next of kin, as Emily had pointed out. His only kin. They were the only Bedeckers left. It had taken them a near eternity, but they’d found each other. As Nate saw it, George would eventually get well enough to leave the hospital (the doctors were being conservative and cagey with their predictions, but Nate held out hope even if Emily didn’t) and would be set up comfortably in the master bedroom upstairs, right on top of this kitchen. They’d have to hire some sort of home health aide to care for him—whatever George’s health insurance covered—unless he made a miraculously quick recovery.

Nate missed Charlie with an immediacy he hadn’t felt in
more than a decade. He flexed and straightened his knobby fingers. His fingers were fine, he was fine, and he picked up the second box, this one mostly pans and pockmarked sponges and a rusty corkscrew. He stepped out the back door (he and Emily had already swept up the barbed shards from the glass pane he’d shattered) and looked for Emily, who was behind the open car trunk, hidden from view. He heard her rifling through the car’s contents. Of course. If his father was planning to stay for a while, he’d have packed his things in the trunk. They’d have to rearrange those things to make room for the boxes of food.

Nate carefully navigated the rough stone path between house and driveway, the haphazardly arranged slates rising and falling with the natural irregularities of the earth. When he stepped off the path, the ground, littered with slick, scrappy pebbles, crunched.

“Nate,” Emily said. Her face appeared above the open trunk, strained. “Nate, it’s a shrine in here.” Her voice cracked. She sounded scared. “Did you look in this trunk?”

“What? No,” he said. He hadn’t thought to look in the trunk.

“Your father has constructed a shrine. Articles, pictures, I don’t know what else.”

“A shrine?”

Emily nodded and then stood quietly, waiting for him to respond. He imagined the trunk filled with boxes, each stuffed with his childhood report cards, with pictures he’d never seen of his mother and Charlie, with never-sent letters George had written to his oldest son. He stopped a few yards from the car. Maybe his hope for a past, the clues to his medical future, had never been in the old house after all. They were in the trunk of the Audi that Nate had been driving for the past twenty-four hours. He hadn’t thought to open the trunk; this could be a sign that his mind was going. No. No. No. He’d always forgotten things.
He tried to remember all of the things he’d forgotten over the years, but of course, none of it came back to him. He was not the right person to judge whether his own mind was on the wane.

“You’ve got to see what’s in here,” Emily said, walking away from the car and toward Nate, briefly tripping over the box of plates she’d left on the ground and cursing herself under her breath. “Nate,” Emily said. She was directly in front of him now and shook him (her hands on his shoulders, her face close to his) out of his thoughts. “Nate,” she said, “your father amassed an entire shrine. To himself.”

The trunk was as packed as their Jeep had been. It was less a shrine than the well-edited stash of a type-A hoarder. Nate and Emily lifted George’s things, box by box, laying each on the ground next to the car. The boxes were mostly metal file containers, beautifully brushed steel holding carefully sorted documents and pictures. Two of the containers were jammed with business documents—ledgers from past projects, contracts, plans for buildings for which, in the end, George didn’t get the contract. The drawings of these dead projects possessed a startling, ephemeral beauty. The plans were the only form in which these particular structures would ever exist. One entire crate was devoted to the never-constructed Bedecker bid for the Cymbalist Temple in Tel Aviv.

“There’s a whole history of architecture in this trunk,” Emily said. “I’ve been in some of these buildings.” Even the ones that didn’t exist, like the art museum George had designed for Cornell that never got built, Emily exclaimed that she had been in the one that
was
constructed, by I. M. Pei. “I didn’t know your father was up for that job,” Emily said, holding the plan close to the side of the car so that the Audi’s shadow blocked the sun’s glare from the page.

“I was a kid,” Nate said. “I don’t really remember it.”

That wasn’t true. Nate remembered the hours George spent working on the project (a four-month span when Nate hadn’t seen his father at all), he recalled the names his father had slung at Pei after the place was built, and he remembered the acclaim that Pei received. But all of this had taken place off center stage, in the wings of Nate’s life while he and Charlie hid out in their bedroom and listened to the Indians get pummeled by the White Sox. It was the only time Nate remembered his father swearing. The Cleveland
Plain Dealer
had run an AP piece lauding Pei as the quiet leader of twentieth-century design, and George, while Nate and Charlie lay in their bunks and pretended to sleep, spewed expletives that resonated off the glass walls of their house. “Horseshit!” he’d said, and Nate almost laughed, imagined using that word at school and the ridicule that would ensue.
Horseshit
didn’t even sound like an insult. It sounded like an agricultural byproduct. “Pei’s excuse for a museum is a cock-tease!” George had spat. During this tirade, Nate didn’t hear his mother speak, but he could picture her pacing between the kitchen and the living room, pretending to neaten up, working hard to stay out of George’s way.

Nate looked over Emily’s shoulder into a box of George’s ledgers. Nate used to dream of finding a new picture of his brother. Charlie had died so long ago, twenty years last February, that Nate had lost access to his visceral memories of the boy. Instead, when he tried to conjure Charlie, the only images that rose into Nate’s head were pictures from old photographs, from the small stack of photos that Nate had held on to. He ached to find a new memento, something to bring back a forgotten moment from his brother’s life. Something that might evoke a posture his brother once held, a sweater he’d worn, a particular day on which he’d lived. Charlie had loved alpine cheeses and hard
links of salami, Nate remembered this, but he could no longer picture his brother eating. Nate could picture his mother, who’d died only two years later, with acute specificity. She was his mother. He’d spent the bulk of his childhood studying her. That’s what boys did: They studied their parents in detail, looking for signs of their own future. Younger brothers, on the other hand, were viewed only haphazardly and without scrutiny.

“This box is all work, too,” Emily said, stacking another file on the ground and taking a tiny leather duffel from the back of the trunk. She opened it and after peering inside, said, “It’s clothing, and not much of it. Do you want to go through it? It’s an overnight bag.”

“No,” Nate said. He knew what his father’s clothing looked like, each piece was a repeat of the others. He pulled out the final file crate, this one made of what appeared to be a light birch, and balanced it on the lid of the trunk. After flipping the top open, he lifted a paper from the crest of the stack and gave it a quick scan. He handed it to Emily when he was done, and he watched her face fall.

In the living room, after a period of silence, Nate spoke.

“He could have called me,” Nate said. His gut ached, a sharp, searing ache as if he’d swallowed glass and it was working its way through his system. “If he didn’t want to talk to me himself, he could have had his lawyers call, the guys who handled my mom’s estate. They know how to reach me. Our number in New York was listed, for fuck’s sake.” Fuck it. He’d been so excited to discover, just over an hour ago, that the Jeep had been located and that he and Emily would be able to sleep at their house tonight. He’d actually been happy. He was a fool to have let his spirits rise.

Nate’s father had probably known that Huntington’s was in the family ever since his own father fell sick, ever since at least 1974. Fuck all of Annemarie’s allusions to the disease. It had been George’s responsibility to talk to his sons. If not in Rhode Island three decades ago, then later, when his own diagnosis came. Nate thought he would kill George if the old man weren’t already in a coma. A coma. The man didn’t deserve the balm of unconsciousness. Nate couldn’t believe that just this afternoon he’d thought there was still a chance for reconciliation. “I come from a family of idiots,” he said.

Emily didn’t respond. She was on the couch, crouched in the ersatz crib that Nate had yet to dismantle, carefully analyzing the medical documents as if hoping for a mistake, something they’d overlooked, the April Fool’s notation of a prankster medic. She wasn’t going to find it. George didn’t deal with the kind of people who played practical jokes. George Bedecker had Huntington’s (he wasn’t at risk for it, he wasn’t waiting to see if he’d inherited the gene or if the symptoms would emerge—he
had
the disease, firmly diagnosed by experts) and hadn’t bothered to call his son, his genetic son, to let him know.

“I don’t think I believed you were actually right about Huntington’s, about George having it,” Emily said as she flipped through the file. “It’s just, I know I’m the one with the doomsday prophesies all the time, but it seemed maybe you’d let your fears get the best of you.” George was experiencing all of the early physical symptoms of the disease, but his head still seemed to be fine. So George’s longtime misanthropic tendencies were his own, they weren’t the illness. And George’s head had been intact and he’d been thinking clearly eight months ago when, according to the medical records, he first went to a doctor complaining of shakes. George’s tremors had become undeniable,
it seems, and he’d finally faced up to the fact that his demise would mirror his father’s.
History in the family,
the medical forms stated.

Nate held his head between his hands and squeezed, hard. He wanted to tear the insides out of his own body in one fast-action movement. In a favorite ghost story he’d told Charlie during their campouts on Bedecker House’s lawn, the ghost of a butcher returned to his former neighbors’ homes to rip out their intestines. The phantom thrust his specter of a hand into townspeople’s abdomens while they slept, grasping their insides the way Dickens-era orphans grasped for pork sausage. That would be a relief right now, having his organs decimated instantaneously.

“I didn’t think your father actually had Huntington’s,” Emily repeated. “Even if your grandfather had it, there was a fifty percent chance George didn’t.”

“You didn’t think my father was real, either. Your track record’s not so good today.” The contents of this birch box, other than the folder that Emily held, were spread across Emily’s lap and on the floor in front of Nate. He sat in a high back chair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“I’m still trying to deal with our move to Newport, the implications—and sudden
fact,
you know?—of it. And up until yesterday, I thought my worst problem was that I’d transported stolen art across state lines.” That was still a bad problem, Nate had to admit, despite the good face Emily was putting on it. As he’d told her, even if the Barbers didn’t press charges, the authorities weren’t going to drop the case. She and Nate needed to come up with a strategy before she talked to the cops again. “Do you get that? Everything else is like a dream right now, I have nothing to grasp on to.”