Baby of the Family Read online

  DUTTON

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Maura Roosevelt

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781524743185

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Roosevelt, Maura, author.

  Title: Baby of the family: a novel / Maura Roosevelt.

  Description: New York, New York: Dutton, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018021291 | ISBN 9781524743178 (hc)

  Subjects: LCSH: Inheritance and succession—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.O683 B33 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021291

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to living persons, or to actual events, is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my parents, Ann and Jim

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Whitby Family Tree

  Spring 2003Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Summer 2003Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Fall 2019Chapter 1

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I have watched you in the dark of a yard where we can only see each other by a lamp left on some rooms away. . . . Two moths dust the same screen for remembered light.

  —Jay Deshpande, “On Speaking Quietly with My Brother”

  When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.

  —George W. Bush

  Spring

  | 2003 |

  It all started with a rowboat.

  —ROGER WHITBY JR.

  1

  There was a time when the death of a Whitby would have made the evening post. Two generations earlier, flags would have been flown at half-mast and taps played in town squares at dusk. When Ethan and Ethel Whitby perished after their Buick collided with a logging truck on Route 9 in the Hudson Valley, just weeks after so many of their pals lost their lives on the Titanic, a special announcement thudded onto doorsteps just before five. All across New York State and greater New England, women standing in their parlors shrieked at the news; men hung their heads over their desks in sorrow, removing their hats for these leaders of industry, these strong-willed, big-toothed Americans. When the plane carrying Ethan’s son William and his new wife plummeted into the Atlantic two days after their wedding, all the major magazine covers displayed the couple’s youthful images, mourning the country’s great loss. But when Roger Whitby Jr. died half a century later, there was no such hubbub. On the night that Roger died, his youngest child, Nick, was completely unaware of his father’s passing. Nick did not receive notification by newspaper, or even by phone. No, that night at midnight, Nick Whitby was off the grid: the twenty-one-year-old had left his cell phone in his desk drawer in New York City and was now standing under the stars in northern Maine, shaking, about to commit an act of civil disobedience.

  As he beheld the construction site before him, Nick breathed too quickly and tried to muster up the fire—the fight—that he needed right now. Metal scaffolding encased the concrete frame of a six-story, half-built biotech lab, which was going up on the campus of Kennebec Valley Community College. He had done his research. The reports claimed that the lab would bring jobs to this empty expanse of rural vacation land. But Nick knew that it would also mess with the natural order of the world: once the walls of the lab were up, scientists would sit inside of them and breed mice with human ears, or manipulate corn so that it grew four feet high in two months and gave everyone who ate it cancer. This building was just one more development feeding the tumor that was the neoliberal takeover of America and the greater globalized world. Civilization itself was going to shit. Things were at a tipping point, and somebody had to step up and resist the destruction. So there he was, in the middle of the night in Maine, in line with eight other brave lunatics. He was taking a stand with a group of real anarchists from New York City. And as he took that stand, he couldn’t help thinking about what a fraud he really was.

  God, he was such a nerd. Clouds of his breath pumped out too quickly, and everyone could see. Soon they would know that he’d never done anything like this before. The air was very cold—even in a wool sweater and black hooded sweatshirt, with a beanie cap pulled over his forehead, he was freezing. For all purposes April was still winter in Maine. But Nick knew from his childhood trips through the state to the Whitby family reunions that in a few short weeks the sounds of bullfrogs croaking and crickets singing would emerge. He wished so badly for those sounds now; anything to cover up his huffs of panic. He was third in the line of people, and his comrades—or future comrades, as he was committed to showing he was just like them—were all dressed in similarly grungy jeans and winter hats, with bandit bandannas tied around their necks. There were no lights for miles: above Nick the sky was so clear and stars so bright that he could see the Milky Way. If he’d had time he could have named every constellation. He was good at things like that.

  Big D—the lanky and unsmiling leader of this crew, the bearded man Nick had met only yesterday in the van on the way up—turned around and whispered harshly, “You all right, brother? Kever’s going first, and then you’re up. As soon as he gets into the bucket of the crane, you need to start climbing.”

  Nick nodded but said nothing. Then Big D’s hands were, suddenly, on Nick’s biceps. The guy’s breath was redolent of the garlic-heavy stir-fry the farm owners had made them for dinner. “If you can’t do this, walk away now. We need to act quickly once everyone is up there. If you’re in, stay in. But i
f you’re out, you need to get out. Now.”

  “In!” Nick barked too loudly, as if Big D were his drill sergeant. He focused on the machinery in front of him. It looked like one of those phone company cranes, but larger, and attached to a giant white construction vehicle. When he had agreed to be part of this action with this Earth Liberation Front group, he was told he’d just be a minor player—another body, a lookout. But when they’d gone over the plan on the six-and-a-half-hour van ride up there, they collectively determined that Nick was one of the stronger and fitter individuals involved, and therefore he was needed to climb the crane. He still wasn’t the most crucial person in the action: the short guy in front of him in the line, Kever, would climb up the machinery first and then jump down onto the roof of the half-constructed building. Then Nick would climb up and stay in the bucket of the crane. Five-gallon Poland Spring water jugs, half-filled with ethyl alcohol, would be assembly-lined up to him, and he would then drop them down into Kever’s tiny arms. Kever would strategically place the jugs around the roof of the unfinished building, then tie each one to another in a spiderlike web with gasoline-soaked rope cords. He would throw down the match, and they’d all flee the scene.

  On the ground, as Nick waited in line, some of the women were spray-painting the sides of the other construction vehicle. That’s where Nick’s friend Devorah was, in front of a dozer with a ferocious-looking shovel on the front of it, painting a communiqué note claiming responsibility for this action. The spray paint would read: BIOTECH = CORPORATE CONTROL. DOWN WITH DEVELOPMENT! FUCK WAGE SLAVERY. STAY WILD.—ELF.

  In the van on the trip up, Devorah had slept with her head in Nick’s lap as they rumbled north on I-95. Nick was like a little kid at his first sleepover party, too excited and nervous to speak. This was the kind of adventurous life he’d been deprived of because of his freakish family, because of his adopted stepfather, Roger. Roger, when he was still his mother’s secret boyfriend, hid Nick away at the hotel all those weekends of his childhood, then forced him to move out of New York and the only life he’d ever known. Because of Roger, Nick was always being taken away from something. He’d never had the chance to fit in, much less to be cool.

  “Hey, you heard this one?” Kever, sitting beside him in the van, asked in a Southern-twanged accent. His studded jean jacket with patches of old punk bands on it looked child-sized. “Two anarchists walk into the bar. The bartender looks them up and down, sees their sneakers pulled from the trash, their homemade tattoos and ratty-ass sweatshirts. Then he asks these two dudes: ‘What can I get for you?’ And one responds”—he made his voice deep and cartoonish—“‘That’s not funny!’” He slapped his leg, howling at the ceiling.

  Nick wondered if he’d misheard him. Was that a joke?

  “And then the other—hooo—the other anarchist scoffs and says, ‘That was so fucked up.’” He kept laughing, so Nick chuckled too, quietly and politely.

  Devorah turned her sleepy face upward, and mock-groaned. “Get it? Anarchists have no sense of humor.” Then she added, “Kever wants to be the first anarchist stand-up comedian.”

  “The punk-rock Jerry Seinfeld!” He winked. “But instead of talking about soup, I’ll talk about, you know . . . smashing the state.”

  Nick laughed again, less softly. He was grateful someone even assumed he would get that joke. Devorah was the real reason that Nick was in that van at all. He had been in love with her since his freshman year of college, when she lived a few doors down from him in Hayden Hall. Devorah of the dark hair, of the East Coast professor parents, of the ring through the bottom of her nose. She was cool, she was into politics, and she was as far from the Orange County high school girls of his past as one could possibly be. She also claimed she was a lesbian. But Nick took that claim as a challenge rather than a hindrance, and followed her around to many campus and citywide activities, waiting for his in. Nick Whitby—star sociology student, former swim team champion, only child of a middle-class, middle-brow, anxiety-riddled mother—was uncannily good at many things. This fact pleased him greatly, as he was also a perfectionist. And if he could not do something perfectly, he was filled with an anger that teetered on uncontrollable. Although six foot two and, if he did say so himself, the proprietor of chiseled face and handsome physique, one thing Nick was terribly bad at was girls.

  His desire for females, for the feel of their smooth bodies and the assurance of their constant attention, was elephantine, and—he occasionally feared—dangerous to his own health. In his miserable high school years he was unable to talk to anyone of the opposite gender due to a sincere dearth of confidence, but how could he have been blamed for that? He didn’t fit in anywhere. He wasn’t a Californian, but was no longer a New Yorker either. He liked hard-core music and punk bands, but he was in honors classes and was too shy to introduce himself to the group of kids who smoked cigarettes by the track field, wearing studded belts and dog collars. He was even an outcast in his own family: when Roger finally married his mother, after the years of living in secrecy, Nick gained the Whitby last name, yet he knew he would never truly be one of them. Even though it didn’t logically make sense, and even though his mother flat out denied it, he’d always felt he’d looked suspiciously like Roger and his family, and therefore there was a good chance Roger was his biological father. No one would ever admit that to him though. So when he left for college, he decided to use the anger he’d stored from his childhood as fuel, powering him to live the best adult life he possibly could. And that life involved sex. At NYU, Nick talked to every Converse-wearing, Elliott Smith–loving, Belle and Sebastian–listening attractive girl he met. He tried, and kept trying. But in the end he was wretched at engaging with them. They all had too many feelings—feelings Nick didn’t know what to do with and would eventually walk away from. Now in his senior year, it seemed that the girls had begun talking with each other too—lying to each other—and currently there was an army of poetry readers out to get him, fueled by vegan diets and rage.

  So Nick had returned to Devorah. She was the only one he’d ever loved anyway. And she was the only one he’d never even come close to kissing. When he was a sophomore, 9/11 happened just over a mile from their college. Nick and three hundred other terrified students had to evacuate their dorm building carrying as little as possible, a water bottle or a pillow, and run north on Lafayette Street as fast as their legs could carry them. It was 9/11 that had pushed Nick to truly care about politics, and when he joined the club Devorah started, SMD, or Students Mobilizing and Demonstrating, he became a star member. As with almost everything he attempted, he turned out to have talent as an activist: he organized teach-backs, led walkouts, and made speeches in Washington Square Park about America’s unjust raids in the Middle East and why his university should divest from oil. It seemed that other college students wanted to listen to the tall kid with angelic dark blond curls. Even his wonky voice amplified through a megaphone did not deter people from gathering around and looking up at him.

  But in their senior year, Devorah’s activism started branching out beyond the college, and two weeks before they’d left for Maine she’d taken Nick to a citywide activist meeting held in the back room of the Alt Coffee in the East Village. The meeting was about the Republican National Convention protests—still a year away—and Nick sat through three hours of it, including four consensus-based votes about when to have the next meeting. When there was a pause in the agenda, his utter boredom compelled him to slip out of the front door and onto Avenue A.

  On the street, as he flipped open his phone to investigate what hate messages he’d received from the poetry girls, he felt a tap on his shoulder. “You’re Nick, right? The NYU kid?” It was the small, dirty-looking guy from the meeting. “Nice work y’all are doing over there.”

  Nick couldn’t tell if this guy was making fun of him.

  “You may have heard about me,” the guy continued. “I’ve been going by Little D, or Litt
le Dumpster. But that’s changing now, so you can call me Kever.”

  Nick had not, in fact, heard of him, but they shook hands.

  “Devorah told us you’re friends with her. And we want you to be involved in, uh, a project with us. Can you come over to our place and talk about it?”

  “Uh, sure, man. Love to.”

  Two weeks later, a van picked him and Dev up on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street, at two in the morning, in the wet spring cold. He had told no one where he was going: not his roommate, Amil; not his mother in California.

  After the interminable van ride, Nick found himself in a sleeping bag in the loft of a barn owned by the radical art collective called the Ant Colony, a group that made giant murals explaining everything from the way NAFTA worked to the manner in which Zapatista communities divide household labor. Devorah and the rest of the crew appeared to be sleeping soundly beside him in the loft. By then it was daytime and both bright and icy in the barn, but something inside of Nick wouldn’t let him sleep—testosterone or giddy excitement. The place reeked of the sleeping people: sweat and unwashed clothes and the yeasty scent of dried beer. It was as if he was on a field trip with a group of the most thrilling weirdos anyone could dream up.

  Eighteen hours later they parked the van on a dark dirt road and played follow-the-leader through the woods, with Big Dumpster marching first, leading Nick into a state of near panic. He had a flash of being twelve years old and sitting in the cockpit of a helicopter beside his stepfather, Roger. The old man had urged him, with an unhinged laugh, to take over the cyclic stick. Nick’s stomach dropped down to the shrinking toy island of Manhattan below them. He was not ready. “C’mon, kiddo,” Roger had said. “You’re the son I was always meant to have. You have the spark that made my family great. Be bold, kid. Captain this ship through the air!” Now, as twenty-one-year-old Nick recalled his own twelve-year-old hand shaking as it grabbed the cold, black helicopter lever, the pressure of tears pulsed behind his temples. It was pitiful, how much he had wanted that crass geezer to be proud of him. Since they had met when Nick was eight years old, Roger had kept an acutely focused eye on him, as if watching to see what Nick might accomplish or how he would live up to the man’s strange expectations to perform adventurous acts. Thank God Nick was an adult now and didn’t need that approval anymore. But as he realized that he hadn’t spoken to Roger in months, the pulsing in his temples grew stronger.