In his dim study, Mr. Kamal continued the interview. “I already know you are prompt. But are you neat? Would you say you are an organized person?”
“Very much so.”
“And happy? As a child? Do you often have regrets?”
Shelley heard an uncharacteristic giggle escape from her throat, and then cut it off—he wanted her to answer. “Oh. As a child I was very happy.”
“I meant these days. What’s the most recent mistake you have made?”
Could he sense her eyebrows rising? She pictured her body passed out in a Z shape on Biddy’s bed, while the party in the parlor clamored on.
“I don’t often have regrets.”
Mr. Kamal nodded, the horizontal line of his mouth taut. He was a powerful figure, a commander. But there was something strange about this squat man. “And happy, are you a happy person?”
“Very,” she responded, growing weary of the questions.
“Fine. Now: What do you know about me?”
What was she supposed to know about him? She’d looked him up on the internet quickly before leaving the house but had only learned that he was blind and built many low-rise buildings and restored the National Cathedral in Washington. “Well, I’ve heard about you, and read about you. And I think—I mean, I must have been inside some of your buildings.”
“Yes, well. I am the master architect of two public monuments. I am the winner of the Driehaus Prize, and I worked in conjunction with Prince Charles of England and the Royal Family. I attended MIT and taught at Princeton.”
Shelley understood by the silent beat that she was meant to respond. “Wow.”
“I was blinded shortly after beginning my London apprenticeship with the father of new classical architecture, Raymond Erith. Mr. Erith then took me under his wing and allowed me to plan and envision without the use of my eyes. It was he, and my first assistant in his office, who enabled me to design masterpieces through the use of touch, smell, and sound.”
The speech sounded mechanical, as if he were expounding the long version of his name. “My assistants have always acted as my amanuenses. Do you know what an amanuensis is?”
Shelley scanned her brain. “No.”
“John Milton wrote with an amanuensis. Andrea Bocelli composes with an amanuensis. And I build with an amanuensis. All of my communications, theories, and plans have been dictated to someone, who then physically transcribes my ideas. This person also acts as my first editor, because I will occasionally ask them how a line falls or a tower rises.”
“I see.”
“Now tell me, how does that sound to you? Do you think that is something you could do?”
“Yes, definitely.” A trickle of cold sweat ran down the right side of her rib cage, but she made a point of smiling. Perhaps he could sense a smile, just as one knows if someone is smiling on the other end of the phone line. Her adrenaline was waning. There were other jobs.
“This is a unique moment in my career, as I am endeavoring something new. I plan to write my own narrative book, the first of its kind by a great architectural mind. Would you be interested in this becoming a full-time position, if you are up to the task?”
“Yes!” She perked up. “That would be wonderful. Fantastic.” Writing was the one subject in school that she’d been okay at. She’d produced nothing gut-ripping, but opinions she was not short of, and her education had, if nothing else, taught her to record them correctly. Shelley had never actually visualized what her grown-up life would look like before. No one had expressed realistic hopes that she become any kind of professional. Shelley always assumed that ambition was something she’d get to later. And after her father left, that later kept getting pushed further and further away. Her half sister Brooke was the only one who had ever even inquired about Shelley’s predilections and minor talents. While the other, older half siblings couldn’t be bothered, Brooke seemed committed to the charade that the two of them knew each other better than they really did. And despite all her eye-rolling, Shelley accepted Brooke’s put-on and the attention that came with it. But the older girl never seemed to accept that Shelley was not what one called a go-getter. She hated running, and couldn’t be bothered to keep her bureau tidy or her bed made. What she did like were the old Grateful Dead CDs Brooke had given her years before. And rip-off bands like Guster and the Slip. Her mind flashed to an easy life of walking to the Grisham with earphones on.
Mr. Kamal’s austere mask seemed to break for a moment, and his mouth contorted to something of a frown. “Now I must tell you something, because when you are looking me up on the World Wide Web you may come across it: a few years ago, I had a mentally deranged assistant.”
“Oh.” Then she offered, “Sorry.”
“She was mentally deranged and wrote an article about me. A defaming article. Despicable. She accused me of everything—everything. From perjury to rape to murder.”
The last word fell slowly through the dim, unventilated air. They were alone in the study with the door closed. Her mind raced to whether there was anyone else in the apartment.
Mr. Kamal continued, “I could not be a rapist.”
She told herself: He’s a blind man. He is barely moving.
“There’s no way I could be a rapist. I won the Driehaus Prize!”
Now the word struck her as if she’d been physically hit. This was not the kind of crap she took. When an evangelical loon preached on the subway, Shelley was the one in the car who screamed, “You don’t know me! Don’t put your demon gods on me!” But Mr. Kamal was old. And his frame looked too small to truly crush her, if he tried. She took a deep breath and gripped the edges of the wooden chair. She visualized the broken couch leg, her MIA mother, and her own bank statement that read $41.50. Her high-pitched giggle returned. “That’s terrible, I’m sorry.”
“Yes. Well.” His voice dialed back to its lower tone. “Will you choose a book, any book, off the shelf? Open to the middle of it, and begin reading to me.”
Shelley stood and perused the floor-to-ceiling bookcase beside her. Her mouth was dry. All the books were reference: The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World, The Economist Desk Companion, The Almanac of Famous Men. Finally, on a lower shelf, she found something. “I have Shakespeare’s sonnets here.”
“No. Much too difficult. Choose something else. Perhaps you should look in the bookcase beside me.” Moving across the room, Shelley realized that again, it was full of volumes of reference material. There was one non-reference book on the shelf, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
“All I could find was Freud.”
“Yes. Go ahead, read from the middle.”
She sat back down in front of the desk, opened the book, and strained her neck in order to see the print in the low light. She took a deep breath. “‘Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces . . .’”
When the interview was ostensibly over and they both stood up to leave the study, Mr. Kamal announced in his booming voice, “Shelley Whitby, everyone is deprived of something. I want to find out just what it is that you are deprived of.” He grabbed her forearm. She resisted for a flash but then let him lead her out of the room and over his ancient carpets. The word deprived echoed through her mind, as if it physically ricocheted off the penthouse walls. She was all alone now. Her father was dead, and her mother might never come back. But on paper, she was a Whitby. The antithesis of deprivation. When this man found out, he would surely figure she didn’t need the money and refuse to pay her. Her pulse sped up. She was, in fact, broke. Mr. Kamal moved toward the elevator a few steps ahead of her, his arm behind him, gripping hers tightly.
Why was she letting this happen? A meek voice emerged from her throat, offering a goodbye. “
And thank you.”
He hung there, sipping in small exasperated breaths. “I think you are a very nervous person,” he said. “You seem too nervous.”
That was enough. She thought if she put up with that interview at least she would be compensated.
“But I want you to come back tomorrow. I will give you another try. I will call you promptly at nine o’clock tonight.”
The elevator door opened as Shelley was nodding, catching herself before she tripped over her unbuckled boots. She forced herself to say, “Thank you again.”
As she rode the elevator down and then exited the building, she was shaking and wasn’t sure why. She found herself released into the Upper East Side night, the street a spectrum of rotating taxicab lights and streams of people walking, directed, looking at no one. Who was that man? What had she just done? She struggled to hold her coat closed, but she soldiered on, making her way toward home.
8
From Marc’s bed, Brooke heard the shower go on. She looked down at her bare, exposed stomach: it was pale and soft but very flat. She hadn’t told Marc anything about the pregnancy, because she hadn’t yet decided what to do. It was hard to believe that life had taken hold in there, that an organism had glommed on to one of her body parts and was now thriving and growing in time to her own heartbeat. But she was utterly exhausted every day and nauseated upon waking. She placed her palm below her belly button to check if, illogically, the skin was warmer there. A ridiculous thing for a nurse to do. She was unraveling.
Marc’s apartment, on the twenty-eighth floor of the Prudential Center, might have been the highest residential space in all of Boston. Brooke leaned over a bedside table and held down a white switch, which made the wide shades raise on the wall of windows. Slowly a picture of Copley Square and the brown town houses of Newbury Street came into view, then Storrow Drive and finally the blue snake that was the Charles River. It was a sunny day, and a few triangular sails floated out on the water. Brave souls, it had to be frigid out there.
It was nearly noon and a Tuesday, but Brooke’s work schedule was off-kilter that week because she’d covered for a colleague with a sick child. Today was her nurse’s Saturday, and Marc could work whenever he pleased. He was a developer with his family business, Costa Construction. He was one of those guys who walked around construction sites in a suit jacket, wearing a hard hat. Most of his business was in the dismal, far-out suburbs—Waltham and Framingham and Whitman. But he’d begun embarking on bigger projects on the Cape to turn unused land into strip malls, working with the Davidson Corporation, the same people who now owned her family’s hotel. His work was unseemly, really, but Brooke didn’t focus on it, or listen very carefully, when he reported on his day. From the bathroom she heard music go on, and then Marc’s own cracking voice singing along with the gruff tones of DMX: “‘Stop! Drop!’”
At forty-two, he was as mature as he was ever going to be: whatever she signed up for now with Marc was what she was getting forever. What had once been refreshing about him—his nonserious nature, his appreciation for indulgences, his long summer sails under the New England sun—was no longer. And the hope that she had for herself, that she could embrace his family the way she had Allie’s, and become once again a member of a loud and loving clan, was quickly diminishing. She hadn’t slept at Marc’s apartment the previous night. She almost never did, as he was a late riser and didn’t have the kitchen gadgets she needed for her particular blended smoothie breakfast. And now with the morning nausea, she certainly had to avoid it. But she had come over around eleven because they were going together to look at a house in the suburbs. Brooke had told Marc about her father’s will and the mysterious, invisible boy who was slated to steal her house away from her. After she’d recounted the news, Marc hadn’t asked one question about how it had made her feel, nor had he offered a condolence on losing her home. Instead, Marc had grinned. He was delighted. He wanted her to live with him. But how could this relationship that had begun as a distraction from her regular life become the rest of it?
His shower water turned off now, and she realized she only had a minute to try Shelley again. For over a week, Brooke had been calling Shelley’s cell phone every day at various hours, to no avail. She just wasn’t answering. As the phone began to ring, in came Marc with a towel tied around his waist and his tan chest exposed. He looked good for any age; the only sign that he was in his forties was that the small patches of hair above his nipples had gone slightly gray and bushy.
A voice on the other end of the phone line said, “Hello?”
“Shelley!” Brooke was taken off guard. “I haven’t been able to reach you. It’s Brooke! How’s school going?”
“Fine.”
Brooke watched Marc drop his towel on the floor and walk naked into his long, narrow closet. He wasn’t listening to her call.
“Do you know about Dad?” Brooke spoke into the receiver, stumbling over the word Dad. Normally, she would only use that term with her full siblings, Kiki and LJ. With Shelley and the older Vanderbilt half siblings, she called her father Roger. But this was not a time to make anyone feel like an outsider.
Shelley sucked in a loud breath. “I know.”
Brooke paused. What she wanted to say was: Do you have this same hollowed-out feeling that I have? How would I feel right now if he had ever apologized to me? That’s what I wanted to hear: I wanted to hear him say, “I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused. I have faith in you. You’re making the right choices in life.” Did you want to hear that too?
Brooke said into the cell phone, “Then you know about Nick Scribner? And what’s happening to our houses?”
“Nick Whitby, Brooke. His last name is Whitby.”
“Okay. So you’re aware that we’re screwed, right?” She sighed. “You know the kid better than the rest of us. There’s no logical way that he would give up these houses, right?”
“We’re not screwed!” Shelley’s voice rose into the middle ground between a shriek and a whine. “You and Armond don’t know Nick at all. There’s nothing to worry about. No one is fucking screwed.”
“Calm down, Shells. I’m just trying to be realistic. Do you know of a way to get in touch with him? Armond says that even Susan can’t find him.”
Shelley didn’t answer.
Brooke pushed on. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“I saw him over our winter breaks. But no, I haven’t talked to him recently. He’s fine though. It’s going to work out. There’s no reason it wouldn’t.”
Shelley was just the type of person who defensively, always, convinced herself that everything was fine. She was a magical thinker. What was happening with her right now was very far from fine—her house was going to get taken away too, and Brooke knew all about Shelley’s mother’s sickness. Shelley’s grandmother, the only other person who had ever really taken care of the girl, had died several years ago. It was a sincere comfort to Brooke that although Kiki and LJ had basically divorced themselves from her family, they still existed. Just as their mother had disappeared into Connecticut postdivorce, her jaw set in determination not to be taken down any further by Roger, Kiki had fled to England after her father married her old roommate. And now, years later, Kiki was fully wrapped up in her own three children, whom Brooke could barely tell apart. They’d come to visit Boston every year or two, staying at the Copley Plaza and inviting Brooke on a Duck Tour or to a game at Fenway, where Kiki would occupy herself with baby wipes and juice boxes and snickering at the ugly footwear of Americans, as if she herself had been raised in the United Kingdom. On the rare occasion that Kiki’s husband, Will, would pop up, he’d offer a handshake before burying his grimacing face in the business section of the International Herald Tribune.
LJ was another story. Brooke missed him, deeply, but knew that if he were around he’d just be disrupting her life. LJ, who seemed to only be friends with people like Marc now
, lived in Las Vegas and appeared to be following in their father’s footsteps by getting himself involved in one risky business venture after another. But he consciously distanced himself from all things Whitby, including the East Coast. And since they’d entered their thirties, Brooke had sometimes gone years at a time without seeing him. Still, he would call her when he was in trouble, as if she were the older sibling rather than the younger, and ask for advice and occasionally a loan.
Yes, her full siblings were difficult and largely absent. But they were hers. If she ever truly needed them, they would be there. Poor only-child Shelley was more alone than Brooke.
“When’s your graduation, Shells? I’d love to come. And I think it would be good to see each other to discuss our plan about Nick.”
“We don’t need a plan. And I’m not going to graduation. It’s a ceremony for corny losers, so I’m skipping it.”
She was being more obstreperous than usual. “Come on.” Brooke clucked her tongue. “You have to go!”
Shelley said nothing.
“Let me celebrate you.”
“Just come to New York in the summer, when I’m back. Anyway, I gotta get off the phone. Big test coming up.”
Brooke sighed and hung up the way they always said goodbye, since back in their Vineyard friendship days. “Ciao-ciao.”
“Ciao-ciao,” Shelley muttered.
Marc emerged from his closet fully clothed: sharkskin slacks, an electric-blue oxford, and shining leather shoes.
“Up and at ’em,” he said with a wink. “Let’s go check out Brooke in Brookline. Let’s go see how hot you look in this mansion I’m going to buy for you.”
Baby of the Family Page 9