The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  “He raised the sail, Mom, all by himself,” Nate interrupted Charlie. The car reached the far side of the bridges and headed down the mainland coast.

  “And no one else—”

  “Those dopes in the other boat, they got their sail halfway up and practically capsized. Charlie didn’t even need my help. He’s a future sailor, Mom.”

  “Hey, Mom, do you know what capsize means?”

  “You tell me, lieben.” She briefly turned from the front seat to smile at Charlie, sitting in the middle of the backseat. As they drove parallel to the water, the road narrowed and the houses grew farther apart. Nate’s mother appeared to be navigating by rote. She’d taken this road twice a day—to drop off George while the boys were swimming in the morning and to pick him up while they were sailing—since their arrival in Newport. “It will just take a minute,” she’d told her sons about today’s Narragansett drive. Tonight, back in Newport, they’d eat dinner together again, the last time they’d do so for a while, Nate figured. At the hotel, they always ate at the same table along the dining room’s windowed wall. The hotel’s linen napkins were embossed with tiny blue sailboats. The Bedeckers also used linen napkins for dinner at home, where small silver rings permanently resided next to their plates. After each meal at home, the boys twisted their napkins into the rings for safekeeping until the next day. George—Nate called his father by his first name, something that had started out as a joke when his dad wasn’t around and later stuck when his father didn’t seem to mind or notice—believed in minimalism and utilitarianism and made a frequent plea for paper napkins. Nate’s mother insisted on cloth and wouldn’t compromise. She insisted on keeping at least this small hold on tradition. Nate silently sided with his mother in the napkin debate. His mother was foreign and worldly even to her own sons, with her Austrian accent and relatives an ocean away. Their father’s relatives were American, but the boys had barely met them. “It’s okay,” Nate told Charlie once, while discussing their lack of extended kin, “I’m your family.”

  “This is taking more than a minute,” Nate said after they’d been on the road for twenty minutes, at least. Just as those words came out of his mouth, Annemarie turned the rental car up a driveway. They narrowly made their way through a tight opening in the tall, severe hedges that stood like ramparts in front of a deep lawn. The driveway led straight through that lawn to a house tucked into the far end of the land on a bluff above the beach. Nate could see waves in the background, breaking rough and white. The house itself was small. It was nothing grand at all.

  “It’s the old house,” his mother said, as if in explanation.

  It didn’t look particularly old. Compared to much of Newport, where the homes had historic plaques out front that Nate’s mother liked to read aloud (“Samuel Harford settled in this home, in the Federalist style, in 1812, after having lost all of his fortune when the tides turned, financially, at sea”) this house looked new. By the front door it had a small spotlight, unlike the electric lanterns that dotted the porticos across the bridge.

  From the side of the house, along a row of deep green rhododendrons as tall as elephants, George appeared and walked toward the front porch. He held another man by the elbow. The other man, older and stooped, walked with the loping gait of a novice hiker stepping from slippery boulder to slippery boulder in an erratically rushing stream. He began to fall and Nate held his breath as George caught him. There was a softness to George that Nate had never seen before, an instinctive empathy to his movements. He helped the man stand straight again, and after a steadying pause they continued their short trek to the porch.

  “Too much to drink!” said Charlie, proudly, matter-of-factly, as if parroting something he’d heard on TV.

  “Oh, lieben, no,” their mother said.

  But was Charlie right? He and Nate hadn’t seen much drunkenness up close. Their father never drank alcohol, not even a sip. Their mother drank, though her drinks seemed to have no effect on her at all. Perhaps she didn’t drink enough. A month ago, they’d heard Tait and Score narrate the Indians game against the Rangers. It was a losing season, already hopeless for Cleveland. In an effort to increase stadium attendance, the team’s owners had instituted Ten-Cent Beer Night. Practically free beer if you came to the game! It worked. Even before the first pitch, Score was heralding the massive attendance, twenty-five thousand spectators or more, but by the time the eighth inning opened, one naked fan had rushed the field and the relief pitchers were being pelted with firecrackers. After a drunk attendee literally stole second base, the game was called. “It’s unbelievable! Unbelievable,” Tait reported. “Unbelievable,” Tait said again, and again, sounding sad and amazed at the same time.

  “It’s not drink,” Nate’s mother said now, watching George and the old man through the windshield. “It is okay.”

  Nate moved closer to his brother and put his arm around the boy as the two and their mother kept their gazes on the men. It was steamy in the car. Nate had thought that here, by the ocean, it would be chilly all day, but the sun beat down on them as they swam and sailed and walked along the old town beach, and while they watched their father stroll with a man who looked so strikingly like him that he could only be Nate’s grandfather.

  George had a dad.

  The men continued their slow walk along the lawn until they reached the porch, where George awkwardly helped his companion up the steps and into a wicker chair. The older man, his face in a sour, stiff scowl, fell into the seat hard. Immediately afterward the screen door behind him opened and a white-clad nurse stepped out and adjusted the man’s position, propping his shoulders against the back of the chair. George nodded at the nurse and then said something to the man, who snarled. Finally, with his head down, George walked quickly to the car and got in. “All right, time to go,” he said, slamming the car’s door and locking it. “Let’s go.”

  Their mother backed down the driveway as Nate and Charlie continued to look out the window toward the house. The old man began to collapse over himself. The ocean in the background looked almost green from this angle, the same near-green as the lush, dusky rhododendron leaves. They drove past the hedgerow and onto the two-lane main street in silence. All that Nate knew about his paternal grandparents was that his grandmother was dead and that his grandfather wasn’t much in touch with George. They had “never been close.” Nate kept his eye on the disappearing hedgerow until the car turned a corner and it was out of view.

  Charlie slid away from Nate and took his Yes & Know book out of the seat pocket in front of him. He uncapped the magic pen and concentrated on a word-find, locating nautical terms in the grid of letters. PORT was already circled, and MOORING. Nate put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder and then looked away, out the window where real boats were coming into view.

  “That was Grandpa,” Nate said toward his father in the front seat. Nate had never used the word grandpa before. It was a term co-opted from other lives with a hint of hope.

  George turned from the passenger seat and took a hard look at Nate, sitting behind him. George’s skin was red from the sun and damp with sweat.

  “That was your grandfather, Nate,” George confirmed. Nate was startled by his father’s admission—after nearly nine years of keeping the boy from his grandfather, George had conceded the older man’s identity with surprising readiness. Nate sat utterly still in the backseat, afraid that if he moved, the moment would pass. His father continued, “I’m so profoundly sorry. His mind is not well.”

  “His mind looks okay,” Nate said, because it was the man’s body that had appeared skewed. He looked dizzy, the way he wavered when he walked. Perhaps George was embarrassed by him, perhaps this is why he’d kept the man hidden from his sons. George hated things (papers, paper clips, people) that were messy and out of place. The air remained silent for a moment. Nate wished he’d gotten out of the car and run up to the old man, met him, touched his pale skin. “He looked fine,” Nate said, though that wasn’t true.

&n
bsp; Nate’s father only shook his head.

  “It’s hunting, sons,” Nate’s mother finally added from behind the wheel, as if an afterthought. In her sharp Austrian accent, the words came out barbed. A boy could snag himself on her honed consonants. “It’s hunting, sons.”

  It almost made sense, his mother’s words. In Ohio, there were hunting accidents every season and Nate’s mother frequently lamented the senseless loss of life, or loss of a limb. Nate had friends whose fathers had built gun cabinets in their garages and hung deer antlers on their living-room walls. Nate’s house barely had closets or adornment at all. Nate didn’t remark, as the car drew closer to Newport, that his mother had never addressed her children as “son” or “sons” before, or that a hunting accident seemed like an unlikely cause for the old man’s afflictions. He thought, instead, about how his father said the man’s mind was not well, when, in truth, it appeared to be his arms and legs and face that were sick. Nate had seen his grandfather’s arms swing. He’d watched his legs wobble as he tried to walk across the flat lawn to the porch. An ailment of the mind would be preferable, Nate thought, tougher to spot from a parked car, less embarrassing to George.

  “Think about dinner,” Nate’s mother said as they crossed the bridge into Newport. Each night when the waiter appeared at their table, Nate and Charlie would still be debating whether to get the hamburger or the fried scallops or the spaghetti with shrimp. “It’s your last night. Think about what you’d like to eat,” their mother said.

  But as they pulled up to the hotel and the evening’s breeze began to slowly gather force, Nate didn’t think about dinner. His mind wasn’t on what he’d be eating or the pointers he’d learned about sailing today or the long-beaked gray birds he and Charlie had manically chased that morning across the beach’s wet sand. The only thing on Nate’s mind as their family vacation came to a close was the stooped old man living with a nurse in Narragansett.

  And three decades later, when Nate found himself again in Rhode Island, with his own son this time and a whole life ostensibly ahead of him, the picture that he could not get out of his crowded, stressed, tired-to-the-core head was that very same image of his waning, distant grandfather and the old man’s unmistakable, distinctive, sober, loping gait.

  CHAPTER 8

  Small City, Big Ideas

  AT 10 A.M. ON SATURDAY, Newport’s harborfront was crammed with pedestrians—the women wearing sweaters in off-primary tints that hadn’t been popular since Emily was a teenager, the men sporting hair that was battened limp and listless under baseball caps and sun visors. These people looked as pitiful as Emily felt. Pitiful and distracted, in Emily’s case: Her head had been drawn back to New York this morning when two more acquaintances who’d been at the Barbers’ party left voice mails. According to Celeste Inge, the police had spent yesterday evening with the Barbers, in their apartment, asking questions. Emily could picture it, the cops’ stiff uniforms stark against the Barbers’ high-gloss white walls. Celeste said the cops had grilled the doormen who’d been on duty, too. “I heard they’re going to question us guests next!” Celeste said in her exhilarated, rambling message. Celeste had a son just three months older than Trevor, and she and Emily had spent dozens of mornings together over the past year, wedging their two strollers into the corners of neighborhood coffee shops and downing steaming vats of latte. They were often the only actual mothers out in the neighborhood with their kids. Celeste had an afternoon nanny, but mornings she was on her own with the baby. She was one of the few people Emily missed.

  Celeste was right about the cops, wasn’t she? They would need to talk to the Barbers’ party guests. It seemed so obvious and now Emily couldn’t figure out why the guests hadn’t been corralled for questioning already. Who would the police call in first? Not Emily, for sure—not all the way up in Newport. And yet, if the cops were smart, she’d be at the top of their list: hard as she’d been trying not to think about it, she had information they’d want. Still, they had no way of knowing that. Even the smartest detectives couldn’t know what no one had told them yet. They couldn’t possibly discern who, from the guest list, might point them in the right direction. They couldn’t.

  “We’re now officially the have-nots,” Nate said. He was pushing the stroller through Newport’s narrow streets.

  “Excuse me?” Emily said. By Emily’s estimation, she and Nate had been the have-nots for as long as they’d been together.

  “I mean, without the car.” Nate looked hard at the oncoming traffic, as if contemplating making a swan dive into it. “Every time an SUV drives by I want to give it the finger.”

  “The cops could still find the Jeep.” Emily hoisted the diaper bag higher on her shoulder. Cops, the word itself had a sinister ring, tough and explosive. “Once the thief realizes he’s got a lemon, he might dump it by the side of the road. Anyway, look at everyone else here. They all look like have-nots. Newport’s not what it used to be.”

  “Nothing’s what it used to be,” Nate responded as they walked toward the water. He turned his eyes to the ground and carefully steered Trevor and Ollie across a mismatched seam in the sidewalk. Emily used to joke (to Jeanne, the sole person in the world who would understand and not hold it against Nate) that Nate was the only guy on Wall Street hoping for a crash, or at least an extended recession, since it would even out the playing field for a while. Anything, she’d say, to stop the warp-speed widening of their own personal income gap. Things would be better in Newport, she knew, a place where everyone’s ragged-edged seams were starting to show. Even Emily’s mother, who’d always believed Emily belonged in New York, approved of the Newport move. She’d surprised Emily by telling her that it was time she and Nate shook up their life. Perhaps she sensed their financial despair—a situation that Emily had never overtly shared. Why worry her? Given Emily’s mom’s meager academic income and impending retirement, there wasn’t a thing that she could do to help them.

  It was time for a move, regardless. Yesterday, as they’d pulled out of Manhattan, Emily had glanced back at the city’s staccato skyline, jammed with overlapping high-rises and thin streams of smoke. Along the East River, shadowy construction cranes leaned tall into the clouds. This was what their world had come to, developers building layer upon layer atop an already maxed-out landscape. Newport lay low to the ground and was comparatively sprawling. When Emily stepped away and looked at their life from a distance, she was unexpectedly charmed by the random chance of this move, the odd luck of landing in Rhode Island. The state was founded as a refuge for exiles and iconoclasts, originally settled by the first New World Jews, early Quakers, and devotees of Roger Williams—as well as the physically deformed and politically righteous colonists who’d been shunned farther north. And the legacy held. Providence remained honorably progressive and Newport was its smaller, old-money offshoot. In the abstract, Emily was growing to appreciate the idea of raising a child here. In the concrete, she wasn’t so sure. Real life rarely lived up to her imagination of it.

  “You’re smiling,” Nate said.

  Emily nodded and started to walk again, pulling Nate and the stroller along with her. “This place might end up being okay,” she said.

  “Hey—” Nate got her attention as he steered the stroller through a clapboard doorway and into a shop. She ducked in after him and took a moment to adjust to the traditional whiff of the place, the reek of potpourri and mothballs, eau de antiques.

  The large room was packed to capacity with nearly indistinguishable tchotchkes. Abutting the door, an ornate gold-trimmed chest housed a collection of glassy costume jewelry, each piece larger than Trevor’s fist. A mahogany sideboard was haphazardly set with reproduction china, a skewed imitation of what a society matron’s table might have looked like during the colonial era. Dainty, ancient Christmas ornaments, either left over from last year or early for the next, hung from every picture frame, coat hook, and window ledge in the place. Outside the far window Emily saw a sailing school preparing to t
ake off for the day. High schoolers, it looked like. Maybe they were a team. Did high schools have sailing teams? In Newport they must. Emily could imagine it: a fourteen-year-old Trevor in Bermuda shorts and a worn T-shirt, complaining that he doesn’t want to go to practice, that he has a stomach ache or sailor’s knee or a hangover.

  Emily shrank back from the clutter. If people were buying this crap, that meant that not everyone here was down-and-out. Some of them still had cash to burn. Emily no longer believed that someday she’d be one of those people herself. As a child in Cambridge, Emily had fantasized about growing up and owning a town house in Boston. In her dreams, the urban castle featured a game room, a screening room for movies, and a minifridge full of Grape Crush. She’d since given up that dream (she didn’t want it all anymore, she merely wanted enough to remain consistently in the black) along with so many others. What she got, in return, was Nate.

  He’d come as a surprise. Five years ago, she hadn’t expected to have any man in her life at all, ever. She was in her early thirties back then and still deeply single and had assumed, with resignation, that a life partner wasn’t in her cards. She ultimately convinced herself that she didn’t need love, that a career in advertising, combined with expensive cocktails and girlfriends who could write prescriptions, would be enough. She grew numbly and nimbly accustomed to living solo, and fooled herself into believing she’d earn the urban castle on her own. Then Nate crawled into her cab and all of that changed. She discovered that being with Nate was like a sort of solitude. Not loneliness, at all, but like being completely within herself, at peace. This was love, she understood. This was love, the essential thing she had, during her decades of unfortunate dating, told herself she’d be happy without.

  She’d cheated on Nate once, only one time with one person. It was right after she discovered she was pregnant with Trevor, almost three years into her relationship with Nate, when all of the facts of their lives were finally on the table. It felt, then, as if they knew each other inside and out. The finality scared her. Her life had changed at breakneck speed—what happened to the convincing arguments she’d spent so long crafting, her protofeminist rationalizations that life was better solo? What happened to that once-coveted town house with the elaborate screening room and wood-burning fireplaces? What happened to her larger-than-life dreams? She’d turned into a potato chip marketer, pregnant by the only pauper on Wall Street. With her anxiety in full swing, she’d called Henry Vartan, whom she used to sleep with frequently when she was single. She hadn’t seen him since she met Nate, and calling him out of the blue after three years was like a dare to herself. She wasn’t even sure that he still had the same phone number. He did. He answered on the first ring and invited Emily to come over. She was two months pregnant and not showing yet and took a cab to his apartment, where she trembled on the elevator ride up and then let him take her clothes off while she ran her hands down his taut, stocky body, nothing like Nate’s. Afterward she felt completely alone, the lonely kind of alone. Sitting naked on the edge of Henry’s bed, in his glass-walled apartment in the Financial District, watching as he pulled his boxers back up: This empty-hearted moment was the image that came to Emily’s mind now each time she thought about being impoverished. That was her worst-case scenario, and she’d survived it. On the rare occasion that this image didn’t stabilize her equilibrium (at least she wasn’t sleeping with Henry Vartan!) she took an Inderal.