At the exact moment that Nick Whitby marched through the woods in Maine, Roger Whitby Jr. lay in his bed in Pasadena, California, nearly as far away from his youngest son as he could be while remaining in the continental United States. In his bedroom, a single nightstand sat on the left side of a four-poster oak bed, the mattress harder than anything made in recent years. A mahogany bureau occupied an entire wall of the room, a piece he’d acquired in Boston at the start of his second marriage, old-fashioned even then, in the early sixties. The brass banker’s lamp that he consistently forgot to turn off now illuminated a framed black-and-white photograph of two men in their early twenties, reclining on the bow of a wooden cigarette boat, grinning with the shared hilarity only siblings know. Their blond hair had been whipped in the wind; their ropy muscles protruded from rolled-up sweater sleeves. This photograph of Roger and his brother, Quentin, taken eighteen months before Quentin ended his own life amid the bearings of the Brooklyn Bridge, was the only personal relic apparent in the bedroom. No Dodgers banner nor child’s sculpture rested on the bureau top; no local-business-owner award plaque nor John Singer Sargent print adorned the walls. At that moment, in that simple room smelling of dust and stagnant desert air, in that simple oak bed, a hemorrhage occurred in Roger’s left cerebrum, and he suffered a stroke. He coughed once, then took his very last breath.
Although Nick had more than half a lifetime of rage built up against the man, and although he would never admit it, he also loved his stepfather with the fierceness of a child ravenous for male affection. And Roger, in turn, loved his adopted son, and had outsize hopes for his future, which is perhaps the reason why, with Roger’s dying breath, Nick became the only heir to the remains of a once-great American fortune. But perhaps there were other reasons as well. Perhaps Nick became the heir due to the scheming of his mother, who was rumored to have forced an amendment in the will, during Roger’s final, unwell months. Or maybe in his old age, Roger harbored a private longing to see a continuation of himself carry on beyond him, a replacement for the youngest biological son, who died as a child, so many years before. Or it could have been Nick himself—the adopted son who looked so much like him—that induced deep guilt in Roger.
But Nick had no way of knowing the answers to these questions, nor the questions themselves. No one had ever informed him the inheritance was coming, and he was entirely unreachable as he stood in line before the biotech construction site. The clouds of his breath billowed out. Big D tapped Kever’s shoulder, and Kever took off under the resplendent night sky, running toward the crane and jumping onto it. Once on the machinery, Kever resembled a ferret, steadily and stealthily inching up the long diagonal pipe that held the first extension arm of the machine. Nick followed the man’s outline in the dark. Kever jumped up to touch the top arm of the crane; his hands gripped, and his little legs kicked up and looped around the pole. He was a gymnast, an expert. Soon he had shimmied far enough, and pulled himself into the crane’s bucket. He let out a brief whistle, which meant that Nick was up.
Nick froze. This had happened to him before, like in the helicopter, when the task before him seemed too gargantuan to complete. At those moments, he’d had the overwhelming impulse to give up. Before swim meets he used to think: I can haul myself out of the pool and chuck my rubber swim cap in the corner, then forget the whole dumb sport. And why couldn’t he do that now? There was no real reason for him to be here, in the woods, with these strangers. What was this action going to do, really? It was a minute resistance against a complex, multibillion-dollar industry. But they were all counting on him. Yes, he’d just met these eight people, but he’d made a promise to them. These were the people he wanted to be. Also, they were his ride home.
“Go now or get out, kid,” Big D growled.
Nick took a deep breath. He was already in Maine. Devorah was probably watching. And, for no good reason, he’d been given too much in the world: white skin, a man’s body, Roger’s extravagant trips and dinners and the Whitby name and a paid-for college education. He was guilty. Whether he liked it or not, he was complicit in the demonic capitalist system. Now it was his obligation to resist. Nick had never actually walked away from a swim meet. And he wasn’t going to walk away from this.
As he took off through the sparse grass, the cold air stung his cheeks. He jumped onto the ladder at the back of the white construction vehicle and climbed onto the flatbed. Soon his hands smacked the frozen metal of the lower bar of the telescoping crane. Two knees up, and he was doing it: climbing toward the bright stars, breathing evenly, focused. Blood pumped through his system, and he was wide-awake, invigorated. He had made the right choice.
His hands gripped the hard plastic of the edge of the crane’s bucket, which swayed in the wind. He wasn’t so far off the ground, but the wind really lashed around up there, forcing tiny tears to form in the corner of his eyes. Below him, everyone else was already working quickly and efficiently, and in mere moments they were handing him one gasoline-filled water jug after another. Nick dropped them down, one by one, and Kever caught each bottle without making a sound. Six bottles later, Nick stood in the crane’s bucket and watched his new friend scurry around the edges of the roof, tying the soaked rope around each bottle’s spout. Below Nick, Big D hung from his pelvis climbing harness on the crossbar of the crane, and flashed two thumbs up.
Nick was proud of himself. Finally. He was an individual now, making bold and courageous choices. Soon Kever would climb back into the crane’s bucket and throw one strike-anywhere match toward what they’d been calling the “artery”: the point where all the jute rope cords came together into one messy knot. Then Kever would shimmy down the crane, and all of them would run back into the woods while the rope caught fire and bottle bombs popped off, one after another. They would be safely in the van by the time the whole damn construction site burned to the ground, costing the developers and their evil biotech investors millions—billions?—of construction and research dollars.
From the crane’s bucket, Nick thought about how every second, corporations were buying up America, seizing land and power, controlling minds, and ruining people’s lives. They were murdering the environment in the process, but Nick didn’t love trees so much as he hated greed. It was the gentrification of his childhood home that destroyed him: the old bodegas in Hell’s Kitchen where the aging men had sold him single baseball cards were now being turned into condos. The neighborhood bookstore that he’d been terrified of—the one that sold witchy oils and potions in addition to used paperbacks—closed down, and the whole building became another bank. Nick had been forced to move away from New York when he was twelve, and the one thing that kept him going through those wretched last years of high school—when Roger had really left and his mother was desolate, literally moaning in desperation every night—was knowing he’d return for college. But when he did, the city was a different place. Within those six years, so much of the old New York grit and beauty had been erased. And Nick knew it would keep going. George Bush had been using 9/11 as an excuse to further ruin the world, to tie up the country into a web of evil oil money and disputes with the Middle East, to let every major economic center be overtaken by corporate control. What was Bush’s response to the World Trade Center attacks? “Go shopping.”
From the bucket of the crane, under the cover of the whipping wind, Nick said, “Fuck shopping.”
It was then that he heard the shriek from the roof. Kever ran across Nick’s eyeline, screaming. One orange tongue of flame shot up from the guy’s right shoulder. He flung himself backward in a circle—a frenzied gerbil, howling—while white smoke and then flames ran down his arm.
“Take off your jacket!” Nick yelled down.
Below him he heard Big D hollering something, but the wind was too loud to make out the words. Kever’s cries were curdling now. Then Nick heard a distinct hissing sound: a flame had caught on to one of the ropes. A crackle and a hiss in the silent Maine
night. Kever’s jacket was off him: it lay on the roof engulfed in flames, two glowing orange arms without a body in it. But his screams were still there, his Southern twang ringing out into the air.
Nick had no choice. He pulled his feet up to the edge of the bucket, thought about the worried face of his mother, and asked for protection from whatever spirit looked out for him in his religion-free life. As he jumped down onto the roof, off went a soft pop. Then came the next pop, this one deafeningly loud. And a crash. Kever had accidentally set off the whole web of bottle bombs. The water jug in front of Nick broke apart at the middle, the top piece of plastic disappearing. The last thing he saw as his sneakers thudded on the blacktop roof was a yellow-and-red stream moving violently upward out of the bottle. It was a waterfall going the wrong way. Instead of water streaming down toward the earth, fire shot up into the heavens. A fear of the old Whitby curse flashed through his mind: Could he have been acting too much like the rest of his family, striking out too boldly and daring too far, and now the consequences were upon him? It wasn’t until that thought that Nick realized he was screwed.
2
Brooke Whitby steadied herself against the side of her father’s antique rolltop desk. A light wave of nausea ran through her—more like the floor tilting. She had felt a similar sensation yesterday, when she’d just arrived in California, and had wondered for a moment if it was a minor earthquake. But no, it was definitely nausea. A quiet question about what that might mean filled her head, but she shook it away: at thirty-seven she was too old to have that accidentally happen to her. It was very early in the morning, and she was jet-lagged, disoriented, and grief-stricken. Brooke, alone on the porch office of her father’s Pasadena bungalow, was surrounded by a buzzing silence that occurs in the house of a dead person. The rest of the family—her full siblings and half siblings who had come in for the funeral, two of her father’s ex-wives—had done a vulture’s pass of the house yesterday, swooping and scanning to ensure that Roger Jr. really did not have anything of value lying around. When the other Whitbys found no Chippendale furniture in the living room, no Patek Philippe pocket watches or opal pinky rings in his top drawer, they promptly left, weakly thanking Brooke for all the packing and arranging and donating she was surely going to take care of.
Brooke was not like the rest of her family. She was smaller than the other Whitbys and naturally more responsible; she was earnest, she was giving—it was just her way. Her father had always told her that she was the one he counted on, that only she “could keep all these lunatics in line!” But she wasn’t doing a great job at the moment. Her brother LJ had tromped through the Pasadena house the prior afternoon, sporting his new frosted-tip haircut and never getting off a call on his cell phone. When he was standing by the front door again, he covered up the receiver with one hand and hollered to Brooke, “Mom says make sure to burn any letters from her!” He winked and left.
Brooke’s mother was not coming to the funeral. Her mother, Cornelia, or Corney for short, was just like the rest of them: justified in her anger at Brooke’s father but also using it as an excuse to be careless. Corney had surprised everyone by her toughness after the divorce, by her independence. But her overt self-respect also pushed her away from the whole Whitby family, including her children. And now she couldn’t be bothered to leave Connecticut, where she lived with her elderly, money-managing, golf-obsessed boyfriend.
Brooke had always considered her own nuclear family to be Roger’s real one. Her father had been married four times, and Brooke’s mother was the second marriage. When Brooke was a child, her parents would discuss Roger’s first family as an understandable mistake. He had married Margaret Vanderbilt when he was very young, at the same time as he flunked out of his senior year at Harvard. The couple then moved back to the upper-crust New York society from which they both hailed and quickly produced three towheaded children. Brooke had met poor Margaret a few times—she was silent and sullen, with a short blond ponytail poking over a pink-and-black skirt suit. It was as if she’d been pulled from central casting: someone couldn’t have picked her out of a lineup in front of Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue.
Roger married a Vanderbilt because it was expected of him. The Whitby family had made its way to the new world on the Mayflower, and then built their dynasty in shipping and importing. Hildebrand Whitby, Roger’s grandfather and Brooke’s great-grandfather, the industrious son of a family who still spoke Dutch at home, began a business at the age of sixteen, shuttling people across New York Harbor in a rowboat. Soon the rowboat business became a steamship enterprise, and by the time Hildebrand was thirty-one, he also owned several major railroad companies in the country. The family’s later generations were also hailed for their ruggedness and cunning: when they got knocked down, they got up and tried another angle. Great American fortitude. Ethan Whitby, Hildebrand’s youngest son, had been the biggest railroad magnate, but it was Brooke’s grandfather, the oldest son, Roger Whitby Sr., who became a manager of the shipping and boating side, and had funneled his shipping money into real estate, thus crowning the Whitbys with the moniker “the landlords of New York.” Indeed, the names of New York City landmarks—the Whitby Highway on the west side and Whitby Place downtown, the Whitby-Grand Hotel—were enduring reminders of this illustrious history. The original patriarch, Hildebrand, was more than a hero to the later generations of Whitbys: he was a demigod. Roger himself liked to repeat the phrase to his children, with wistful reverence, “It all started with a rowboat.” But as each generation of children moved farther away from that demigod, they became more beleaguered by the expectations their last name carried. And marrying further into his social milieu had made Brooke’s father, who was still a very young man at the time, feel stifled, anxious, and depressed.
After multiple failed attempts to work on Wall Street (whether it was two weeks or two months, he’d simply stop showing up to whatever office had hired him based on his last name), Roger took a trip to Boston to investigate a real estate venture, where he met the brash, dark-haired Cornelia Wesner. Cornelia was the antithesis of Roger’s first wife: she was an effusive twenty-two-year-old who dreamed of being an actress. Whenever she walked into a room it began to glow, from her own freckles to the reddening in men’s cheeks. Thus, the light in Roger’s world started to shine once again. When Brooke was a child, her father proclaimed that her mother had saved him. Although the Wesners were in fact a staple of New England high society, by marrying Corney and moving to Boston, Roger was, in his own way, taking a bold stand against Whitby traditions. Brooke had always been convinced that if the tragedies hadn’t happened, or if her father had simply possessed a heartier constitution and a more stable soul, then her parents’ marriage would have been Roger’s last.
His third wife, the woman he left Brooke’s mother for, was the college roommate of Brooke’s older sister Kiki. The marriage to Elizabeth Saltman was an impulsive reaction to Roger’s personal upheaval, which was of course enhanced by the surprise pregnancy. But even though Elizabeth Saltman was more than three decades younger than Roger, in marrying her he was also returning to his roots. Although brown-haired and consistently shabby, Elizabeth was a sullen, New York–bred, Waspish preppy, who barely spoke. Her demeanor was more unsettling than that of Roger’s first wife though; too pale and too thin, she consistently gave off an air of the disturbed.
Roger vacillated between silent women and boisterous ones; after a marriage to one kind, he’d swing to the other. The final wife was another act of resistance. Susan Scribner was a teacher from the Midwest or California or somewhere else foreign to East Coasters, and Brooke had to admit she was a real departure. Susan already had a child out of wedlock, and rumor said she had alcohol problems just like Roger. This final marriage was due to Roger’s old age. It wasn’t dementia exactly, but rather weariness that had allowed it to happen. All Whitbys had to put up certain defenses around themselves, to ensure that they were not taken advantage of by this
exact type of wheedling personality. And Roger had simply let his guard down.
The saga made Brooke’s heart ache still. She could see that those final two marriages were a reaction to the unfairness of the world. If circumstances had been different, Brooke’s mother would be beside her right then, sorting through Roger’s belongings. At one point, her parents had loved each other deeply. This was something Brooke was sure of. It wasn’t just that they had held hands underneath the dinner table while jabbering on to all the kids, or that each would gaze with wonder at the other, at home or in public, as if they couldn’t quite believe the perfect and pleasing configuration of the person in front of them. It wasn’t just that her parents consistently touched each other’s shoulders and elbows and thighs, but rather it was clear that each represented something grander to the other person. Brooke knew that jumping back and forth on invisible ions between her parents was the sincere belief that the other represented freedom. Each believed that with the other, he or she had become unshackled from the standards and expectations placed upon them: Roger was absolved of his Whitby Wall Street duties, and Corney of her staunch Lutheran past. Together, they ventured away from the confines of their youths. It felt joyful, near miraculous, and was, in its own way, rebellious.
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