The Exiles (33 page)

“Holy crap,” Nate said, as if waking from a dream to a reality far wilder than the one in which he’d fallen asleep. Emily might have plenty of reasons to resent Nate, but at least he wasn’t sleeping with a coffee-bar clerk.

“I know,” Jeanne said. “Sleeping with a barista. It’s every I-banker’s fantasy. His friends are probably slapping him on the back.”

“No,” Nate said. “Holy crap about Anna taking the blame for something she can’t remember.”

“She had the motive, and the drunkenness, to make it happen. I mean, she’s given up everything for Randy,” Jeanne said. “She could have had a decent career, but instead spends her days delivering his dry cleaning and planning parties for his friends. The very least she expected in return was exclusive sex from the guy.”

“Emily gave up a lot for me,” Nate said.

“No I didn’t,” Emily said in a voice that was nearly a whisper. “The cops—” Emily could barely speak, this turn of events felt so undeservedly fortuitous, “the cops believe this? I mean, do they have proof?”

“They have a witness placing her at the back of the apartment, which is sort of proof, but I don’t think they care anymore. I mean, if Anna destroyed the Rufino—there was so much trash at that party, and it was all gone by the time anyone realized the painting had been taken. If Anna got rid of it, it’s somewhere in the city’s decaying mountains of refuse. And if she got rid of it, it’s not a crime, right? You have every right to destroy your own property.”

“Did they at least dust for fingerprints?” Nate asked.

“I don’t know. Bess didn’t say.”

“I used that back bathroom during the party,” Emily said with a sharp glance to Nate. “So they’d find my prints if they dusted, don’t you think? I mean, everyone passed through that apartment.”

“Anna confessed. It’s all moot,” Jeanne said. “And who cares? You’re free of all that bullshit now that you’ve moved. You won’t have to try to impress frauds like the Barbers anymore. Or like Bess Van Rhyn and her fellow vultures, for that matter.”

“They’re not all bad,” Emily said.

“Whatever. You’re going to be able to live high on the hog here. You’ll be the big fish in this town.” As Jeanne finished her sentence Trevor started to wail.

“He needs a bath,” Emily said. She’d always liked Bess Van Rhyn. Anna and Randy, well, they were due for a fall, just not necessarily at the hands of Emily Latham. Serendipity was an unjust thing. “We need to get some real baby shampoo and soap.”

Jeanne offered to do a shopping run, and after they finished eating, Nate and Emily drew up a list. Toilet paper, milk, instant coffee, the things they’d forgotten they’d need. Emily promised Jeanne that they’d pay her back after the fact, but it felt like a weak promise, heavy in her gut. Emily hated owing money. IOUs hung over her head like invisible highway signs pointing to her financial inadequacies.

“Don’t worry about it, it’s my housewarming gift,” Jeanne said to Emily. To Nate, she added matter-of-factly, “Emily told me about the Huntington’s. I’ll do some investigating when I’m back at work tomorrow. Shit, I have to be back at work tomorrow, by one p.m.,” she said. “How long’s the drive to New York?”

Nate looked up, his face flat and expressionless. Emily turned her attention to Jeanne, to Jeanne’s hands, which ran over the shopping list, the fingers as familiar as her own. It amazed Emily that Jeanne was here. Emily had screamed at her, bitter and vengeful screams, and instead of running away Jeanne had left Rhinebeck and driven to Newport and searched them out at the Viking, where the concierge told her that the Bedeckers had checked out. “Thank goodness your phone and address here are listed already,” Jeanne said. She’d picked up a pizza and arrived at the house a mere half hour before the Audi drove up. “And
you’re lucky you showed up when you did. Another half hour and I was planning to head back to the Viking to see if the room you left was still open.”

“You couldn’t afford it,” Emily said.

“No joke,” Nate added. “I wonder if they’ll end up charging us the full suite rate, or if they’ll take pity and only bill us for a regular room. We’d have taken a standard room if one had been available.”

“But we sure took advantage of having a suite,” Emily said.

“After they forced it on us.”

“Okay,” Jeanne said, rising from the floor in one fluid movement, proving that yoga had given her flexibility and balance, if not inner peace. “I’ll get on the shopping.”

Emily walked Jeanne to the door. Trevor had crawled onto the empty pizza box, sinking his bare knees into a spot of congealed cheese. They’d give him a bath tonight, get him back into his routine. “Just make sure you pick up baby shampoo, if you see any? And laundry detergent, unscented?”

“Sure,” Jeanne said, and was out the door. “I’ve got my phone, call if you think of anything else,” she added on her way down the walk.

When Emily turned around, Trevor was still examining the pizza dregs and Nate was flat on his back, supine on the hardwood floor. His khaki pants blended into the polished bamboo as if he and the house were one already. The wine bottle next to him was empty, a one-time impulse purchase, gone. She could not believe that Anna had taken the blame for the theft. Emily wondered, briefly, if Jeanne might have the story wrong, but she had all of the details, they all fit. Bess Van Rhyn wasn’t a gossip; she was a reliable source. And, in fact, the cops hadn’t called Emily today for further questioning. As Nate would say, holy fuck.

“It’s crazy, right, Anna taking the blame? Do you think we’re off the hook? I feel like I should confess,” Emily said, though she no longer felt that way. When Nate didn’t respond, she continued, “Nobody’s actually been hurt. Maybe we even helped Anna, if she was looking for a way to crush Randy. And the monetary loss, the cash that was in the painting, they didn’t need it. So why do I feel so guilty?” She wanted Nate to absolve her of the guilt. Then, the only thing left to do would be to get rid of the evidence. They should have bought a house with a working fireplace.

Nate didn’t move, and even Trevor took a timeout from examining the pizza grease to look at his father stretched along the floor in his grimy pants and a sweat-stained shirt, his hair sticking straight up and a pizza box next to his ear.

“You told Jeanne about the Huntington’s,” Nate said. He didn’t sound mad, exactly. “I don’t even know if I have it. I didn’t think it was public knowledge.”

Emily stood at the foot of the stairs, a few yards from him but not moving closer. “She’s a doctor and a close friend. Trusting people isn’t a crime.”

Nate had bottled up so much inside himself that he—and Emily and Trevor to some degree, too—had become an island. The fact that there were so many boats in this town didn’t help dispel that feeling. Since arriving on Friday, she and Nate hadn’t seen a single face they actually knew, anyone they had genuinely known before they arrived in Newport—until Jeanne showed up.

“What if I’m dying?” Nate said.

“If you’re dying, you’re not going to tell Jeanne about it?” It would, in fact, be just like Nate to underplay his own death. That was exactly what George appeared to be doing. “We’re all dying, Nate. It’s just a matter of who gets there first.”

In the silence that followed, a tree brushed against the house’s side windows, scratching sharply against the glass. It was breezy out tonight. In New York, their apartment looked over the back of the building, into a courtyard. It was a real courtyard with trees and sky, not a New York City airshaft, and in the spring, when they slept with the bedroom window open, noises drifted up from their neighbors’ perches below. A barely discernable voice, the slam of a door, a metal pot dropped onto the unyielding tiles of a kitchen floor. Emily and Nate were renters in the city, but most of their friends had bought apartments in co-ops, where the inhabitants didn’t own their actual apartments, technically, but owned shares in the building itself. And thus
share
was the word that came to Emily’s mind on those balmy evenings in New York when the sounds of her neighbors (from downstairs in her own building and from the co-op across the yard) rose up and mingled with her own life.

Here, though, they owned their actual house and the land on which it sat, as well as the small hedge that separated them from their neighbors. There was almost no traffic on their cul-de-sac street. At night in Newport, the only sounds Emily would hear would be Trevor’s fussing and the occasional deep wheeze from Nate and the knock-knock-knock of branches on their windows. The life that they lived here would be their own.

CHAPTER
28

The Drive to Narragansett, the Final Leg

W
HO WAS
G
EORGE
B
EDECKER
? George considered this question as the sun beat down on Route 1 in southern Rhode Island. The highway loomed like his road to the finish line. Who was he? He had no innate pedigree. His parents had been middle-class Methodist drinkers with small goals that they’d accomplished by default. In Europe, this lack of lineage would have been a liability, but in America, in the lowdown trenches of architecture, all George had needed was an unremitting determination and a fail-proof work ethic. All it took was a lifetime of keeping his head down.

After George left home in the 1950s, and in the years that followed, his father seemed to be proud of him but often mystified, as well. From the start, Hank Bedecker followed George’s architecture career with curiosity. He attempted to make sense of each accomplishment despite his lack of context in which to place it, a situation that caused Hank’s praise of George’s buildings
to come across as muted and muddled. And then, Hank lost the brainpower to follow or praise anything at all.

George witnessed and monitored his father’s decline. He visited Henry Charles Bedecker every six months during his decade of sickness. He watched as Hank lost his facial expression, then his stability, his muscle control, his capacity to feed himself, and eventually his power to swallow entirely. George’s father screamed often, not in pain, but in offense. He seethed with imagined anger and misconstrued jealousy. One spring, he’d lambasted George for stealing and hawking the only thing of value in the Narragansett house, a sterling silver gravy boat. George tried to elucidate the situation, explaining that the gravy boat hadn’t gone anywhere, it remained on the mantel where it had been displayed since the house’s construction (
Look, Hank, the gravy boat is right here
). In response, Hank hurled a pineapple through the air. The fruit missed George’s head by mere inches and shattered against the whitewashed wall at the back of the room.

A week later Hank slapped one of his nurses. These outbursts came as a surprise to George. His father had never been a violent man. Yet everything George had known about Hank turned untrue during that final decade. His father became someone else, not gradually but in a single moment. As Hank lost his physical strength and no longer had the power to throw fruit, let alone to stand and walk, his mien took on a fierceness. His face grew taut and angular, frozen at a cocked angle on his neck. In the mirror, George began to examine his own face for signs of gruesome change, but if the transformations were there, they were happening so slowly that he couldn’t detect them. Would he wake up one day to discover that he, too, was someone new? And on whom would his slaps fall? He had done everything he
could to make sure that those punches would land far from his own children, his own surviving son.

A small truck passed the Audi as George navigated the highway’s subtle curves. Without realizing it, he had slowed to a dangerously lethargic pace and now he softly increased the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal, easing up closer to the speed limit. The road was beginning to look familiar. Unlike Chicago and Cleveland, the other places that George had called home, this part of the world had changed little since he lived here. The trees still grew thick right up to the edge of the roadway and the air had a blue tinge at mid-morning. It was the sense of history, the ability right here to step out of modern life, that made the place appealing. In Narragansett, no one would come knocking at his door. The neighbors wouldn’t wonder why he wasn’t trudging off to work every morning. Chances were, they wouldn’t recognize him. Eventually, when he hired an at-home nurse, they wouldn’t question it. People might stare, but they wouldn’t talk. He’d be seen as yet another deranged old man who’d chosen to live out the end of his life by the sea.

His death would differ from his father’s in only one respect: George’s sons would not be flying in to monitor his illness. One son was long dead; the other, George hoped, would live for a long time. Given the distance between them, this son would never have to stand witness to his father’s decline the way that George had to Hank’s.

Seeing his father’s deterioration (seeing the emptiness in his eyes and the manic insanity of his limbs) had unhinged George. Ever since, he’d had nightmares in which he was his father, nightmares that turned out to be premonitions. Knowing what his future held only made it worse. His boy, Nathan, if he had the disease, would at least be able to sleep in peace until the first
symptoms emerged. He wouldn’t have the firsthand images—like war photographs, like multicolor aneurisms—in his head. By absenting himself from Nathan’s life, George had saved his son at least this anguish.

This was what George told himself, but what did he know? He had lost his other son before bothering to know him. That should have spared George the pain after the boy’s death, but it didn’t. For years—and today, too—George’s heart ached for that son with the constancy of a pulse. If he could live his life over? No matter, a man could not relive the past. A man was given only one chance. George Bedecker’s legacy would not be his children. It would be his buildings, for however long they stood.

For most of his sons’ childhoods, George had been away from these children, absorbed with his work. More than once, his mind turned to Longfellow: “The architect / Built his great heart into these sculptured stones / And with him toiled his children, and their lives / Were builded, with his own, into the walls.” What George had felt for his family—and, in those early years, he felt strongly, if privately—those feelings were built into the walls. The walls would stand staunch and strong and would bring no harm. Perhaps someday George’s surviving son might look up at one of the structures and think,
This is me.