Baby of the Family Read online

  Marc seemed happy. Or, more than happy, he seemed relieved. His father, Lorenzo, was also a developer, one who had made the right financial moves early in life and fought through connections with some of the toughest men in the city of Boston. (No one ever articulated the word mob, but it was clear.) When Marc was ten, Lorenzo had moved the whole family out of the immigrant-laden urban neighborhood of Dorchester and into a huge house in the sprawling suburban enclave of Natick, where it was widely acknowledged that the Costas had made it. Now Marc, the spoiled only son, the one who had made nothing for himself, might finally follow in his father’s footsteps: he thought he was going to marry a Whitby and make it.

  “Did you even hear that I was on the phone?” Brooke asked him as she sat up in the bed.

  “Mmm. My man LJ? What kinda trouble is he stirring up now?” Marc let out a weak chuckle. He always had a vaguely distracted air about him, as if ready to stop listening the second a conversation got too complex or heavy for his liking. Occasionally she thought of him as a six-foot-tall toddler. He tossed Brooke her lavender blouse from where it had landed on the floor.

  “No, it wasn’t LJ.” Just after the funeral, LJ had called her from Reno. It was six in the morning in Boston, which meant it was the middle of the night in Nevada. He claimed he’d had a small motorcycle accident, that his bike had been clipped by a landscaping truck. But why would a landscaper be driving around in the middle of the night? He’d clearly gotten into some fight somewhere and gotten himself hurt. Another notch on the belt of Whitby destruction. Brooke hissed at Marc now: “It isn’t funny to talk about LJ like that. Plus that wasn’t him on the phone. That was Shelley. Do you even know who that is?”

  “Sure I do.” Marc’s hopeful expression fell swiftly. “We’re gonna be late, Brooke. Let’s go.” He walked out of the bedroom.

  She closed her eyes. She was the one being childish—petulant in front of a man who only wanted to help her. Brooke knew that the right thing to do would be to perk up, go look at this ugly McMansion, and try to gather the scraps of her life together as best she could. In recent years, she’d put the thought of having a child out of her head, as it had been too painful to accept the reality that she probably wouldn’t have one. But now she let herself wonder: What kind of mother would she be? Attentive. Present, even if something bad happened, unlike her own had been after Peter died. She and Marc could have this baby, and the baby would have a backyard and a big bedroom to itself, and most important, a greater family of grandparents and aunts—Marc’s sisters—around. Brooke would be a mother and wear a heavy diamond ring on her left hand. Her friends would giggle at its gaudiness, but they would still be there to giggle. Some of them would even drive out from the city for lunch in the summertime, bringing their kids to jump in the Costas’ pool. It wasn’t what she’d ever pictured. It was more gauche than anything the Whitbys did. But, even if slightly tacky, the baby could be surrounded by many loving arms. It was what she wanted for this baby. It was what she wanted for herself.

  A wave of nausea rolled through her, and Brooke shot out of bed. She ran to the stainless steel bathroom and kneeled in front of the toilet, evacuating her morning smoothie from her stomach at an alarmingly forceful rate. Terrified that Marc could hear her throwing up, she tried to flush the toilet as it was happening. After the worst of the episode was over, she leaned her head against the stone-tiled wall. She would call Shelley back and ask to meet her in New York as soon as possible. They needed to talk, face-to-face. They at least needed to try to locate their half brother.

  All of this was her father’s fault. He had caused her life to fall apart that first time, and he was doing it again now. When she was young all the trouble actually began not when her little brother got sick, but when Roger attempted to run for governor. Brooke had pinpointed the beginning of the end to one particular day: that early-spring party, when her father had officially announced his campaign. All the Whitbys were there. Twelve-year-old Brooke stood on the steps of the Massachusetts State House in her heavy wool coat, just a few short blocks from her house on Joy Street, with her straw-like hair sticking out of her wide-brimmed Easter hat. Before the speech began, while she was trailing her father through the crowd, old men kept stopping her. “Never be surprised by what your dad chooses to do!” one bald guy said, with a wink. Another, with a raspy voice, “Your family did come across on the Mayflower, so your father is actually from Massachusetts more than the rest of us.”

  Roger overheard that last one and nudged an elbow into the man’s arm. “Ah, Bob, I don’t know what I’m doing!” Then he added with a wink, “Saw Judge Strout in back, he’s looking for you.” That was her father: simultaneously self-deprecating and name-dropping—saying he didn’t belong, while making it damn clear that he knew everyone who did. Yet his children, especially Brooke, knew a different story. Roger’s jolly-go-lucky attitude was genuine but also precariously thin. The surface of it could be pierced at any moment and Roger would fall through into a pit of gloom that no one could pull him out of.

  Brooke thought she knew where this penchant stemmed from. Roger had often told his children the story of how the body of his brother, Quentin, was found washed up on the shores of the East River in 1956, in what was then a homeless encampment in Battery Park. The rest of the Whitbys upheld that Quentin must have been murdered. But after years of searching, the investigation closed without finding a culprit, and Roger always professed, angrily, that passersby had reported seeing a figure who resembled Quentin lurking at the edge of Brooklyn Bridge, looking down. It was a terrible story, but every time Roger told it, it was clear that he’d loved his brother, cherished him in all his tragic glory. And yet after the story, Roger would go dark, for hours or even days. Although it rarely happened in public, when it did occur it was a violently quick transition. But it hadn’t seemed to happen once since he began his campaign.

  As Roger began his speech at the temporary podium in the middle of the State House steps, little Brooke, lined up between her mother and Kiki, faced the crowd and scanned it for people she knew. Her uncle and cousins from New York were in the front; there were her older, mysterious half siblings from her father’s first marriage; farther back were her great-aunts and second cousins and all these family hangers-on—“friends” and employees they had collected throughout the years. Behind Brooke the redbrick and white columns of the State House held up the massive golden dome, glinting in the sun beside an American flag, snapping in the April wind. The scene might have been a postcard of what the patrician pilgrims dreamed for their New England home. Behind the podium, her father smiled in his newsboy hat and open trench coat, which revealed a maroon bow tie, his signature style. He was large already back then, his face puffy and stomach solidly round. But that didn’t stop him from being light on his feet, shifting and jumping up the steps while he talked in front of the reporters, the photographers, and all of the Whitby cousins.

  His voice boomed: “This coming November, the great state of Massachusetts will face one of the most important elections in this century. And you might be thinking, what’s this old New Yorker doing on our State House steps? Well, let me tell you. I have been won over by Massachusetts—by its history, by its traditions, by its physical beauty. Although I might have been born in the Big Apple, I’m proud to call the Bay State my home. My home for now, and forever!”

  He had been campaigning for months already, although unofficially. Brooke had already spent Sundays and weekday evenings being dragged to old-folks homes and elementary schools with him, or to the Gillette factory or the Squirrel Nut Zippers candy factory, and a few of the downtown hospitals. She had never seen her father in the middle of crowds like that before. She gathered, even at age twelve, that it was a new thing for the Whitbys, to try to endear themselves to the working masses. The previous men of the family had been eagle-eye-focused on business and industry, on watching the price of their stocks go up and down, on growing the gross
profit from shipping of opium, shipping of whiskey, shipping of furs, building of train tracks, the transport of lumber, the invention of container shipping, the buying of houses, the buying of hotels, the buying of city blocks and parks and undeveloped forests. Typically, Whitbys couldn’t be bothered with the duties of a public office.

  Brooke’s mother was clearly relieved that Roger had finally decided to commit to something, by running for office. He had never kept a profession longer than a year and a half, two at most, and paid all their bills through his Whitby trust. Brooke and her siblings were often unaware of where their father’s office was, as it changed so often. But now he had decided that he was getting too old to waste any more time, and it was time to make his mark on the world, like the rest of his family had. He would dedicate his life to this new endeavor. All Whitbys were Republicans, but Roger was considered progressive, socially liberal and fiscally conservative. He told reporters he believed in taking care of the poor, in human rights for all, and, especially, in the preservation of the environment. But what he was really running on, in 1978, was an antibusing agenda. For four years, the city of Boston had been embroiled in a battle that began with legislation forcing children from black neighborhoods to be bused into schools in white neighborhoods, and vice versa. In the late seventies, while the rest of the country considered the civil rights era over, in Boston the movement was still taking place and being fought out daily. Once, while Brooke was safely protected inside her parents’ Mercedes station wagon on the VFW Parkway, she saw a cluster of white teenage boys hurling rocks at a school bus. The Whitbys’ car had sped by, but the force of the boys’ throws, the sounds of their hateful epithets, stuck with her.

  On the State House steps, her father’s slower voice indicated that he was coming to the end of his speech. “The most important thing to know about me is that I am not a politician. But I am a leader, in business and otherwise, and I’m a strong manager and, above all, a preservationist. That’s my plan for leading this great state: I will protect the pristine dunes on the shores of Cape Cod, I will fight the developers threatening our precious farmland around Pittsfield, and here in Boston . . . I make a solemn promise that I will restore peace to our city’s schools!”

  Brooke’s mother now placed one arm around Brooke’s shoulders, clinging to her in a way she didn’t usually. Maybe it was because she usually kept her arms around Peter that way, protecting him in throngs of people. But Peter was still in the hospital just a few blocks away. It had been months now that he’d been there. Was he with the nanny at that moment, or alone? Perhaps he had told her parents he was fine there; at seven years old, Peter had a sense of dignity and fairness rarely found in a child.

  Roger continued, “Boston has been one of the most successful cities in America since the founding of this country, and our city’s success has always begun with strong education. As the next governor of Massachusetts I will restore the city to peace. I’m going to preserve our legacy as the bastion of thinking, as the champion of education within the whole United States. I, Roger Whitby, will return us to our former glory!”

  As her father grinned, he appeared to be as large and strong as any man ever was; rather than being someone who was easily pushed over the edge, he looked then as if he’d protect his whole family, and the whole state, for the rest of their lives. Brooke had swelled with pride and the feeling that she was, physically and otherwise, extremely safe.

  All the Whitbys, extended family included, were whisked into town cars and delivered to the stately stone building that housed the Harvard Club. Although they could have walked, it was Whitby custom to hire a fleet of black cars at family events. Brooke was proud that her parents were finally the ones hiring the cars and hosting the event. She had always felt like a second-class Whitby, being from dinky Boston and not from “the City.” But here was her own immediate family, finally doing something exciting and Whitby-like: a political campaign and their own party.

  Inside the wide, square rooms of the Harvard Club, above the marble and crimson-carpeted floors and below the oversize chandeliers of this old boys’ establishment, Brooke felt at home. She’d been going there her whole life and could tell all the other kids about the secret bathrooms on the third floor, and the camouflaged door under the grand staircase that led to the basement kitchen. Kiki seemed to be feeling the same way and strode into the club as if she owned it, directing people to the coat check and informing them about the crudité and cheese plates in the front salon. Kiki was finishing up her junior year at Demming College and had adopted an air of maturity and adulthood. Brooke could see through it, of course, but if Kiki’s adult put-on came with her calling Brooke by her real name instead of Birdie, and treating her with an ounce more of respect, she’d take it. LJ was not there to witness their sister’s act. He’d been temporarily forced out of boarding school for a drinking infraction, and was on a “trip” in Colorado, which was actually a three-week military-style boot camp in the desert, with scarce food and evil drill sergeants, meant to scare the pants off him. St. Paul’s had suggested it. They used the camp with troubled children whom, due to promised endowments, the school could not afford (or so they thought) to simply kick out.

  Inside the front salon of the Harvard Club, Brooke searched the crowd for her cousins, wondering if they had retreated to one of the hotel rooms upstairs without letting her know. She wished Peter were there. Viscerally, she felt the lack of his small body; it had always been there for her to track with her eyes or physically catch in her arms. If he were there he would be mashed between the arms or knees of one of their aunts or uncles, offering them a typical Peter story—a sincere explanation about how the portraits on the walls were actually superheroes in disguise, or how the grandfather clocks led to another galaxy. His imagination was astonishing. No one, not her parents or her siblings, had ever talked to her about their greatest fear, which was of course her fear as well. Although in the past six months they acknowledged the severity of his cancer, and spoke the word leukemia often, not one person would dare to say the word death. It was unimaginable.

  An hour later, Brooke sat alone in a corner of the large dining room, sulking. Her cousins had gone somewhere else and not invited her. She couldn’t find any of the kids. Surrounding her on the wood-paneled walls were oil paintings of white men: their old-fashioned faces were long, and they all wore black suits, ranging from pilgrim-era narrow to wide-collared seventies-chic. These presidents of Harvard University looked down on the crowd with stern and distant resignation. Would they be pleased that her father was running for governor?

  Her parents ambled up to an upright piano, which the staff had brought into the dining room for the occasion. Now her mother tapped a finger on the top of the stand-up microphone and spoke into it one breathy “Test-ing.” Both of her parents looked ecstatic. They must have thought that the Christmas concert had been such a raving success, why not do it again? Perhaps this is what their lives would become, if her father won the race: the Whitbys, heirs to a family fortune, state governor and his wife, musical duo, sure to liven up any cocktail hour on the Eastern Seaboard. In the Harvard Club’s dining room, her mother giggled into the microphone, then flexed her hands in jazz-dance manner. “We thought we’d treat everyone to a glimpse of what it’s really like to be in the Whitby family,” she said in a husky voice, which was met with resounding chuckles. Then she added, “We like to keep things musical!”

  Behind her, Brooke’s father’s low vibrato began, “‘Oh the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-coming . . .’” Everyone cheered as he launched into the song from Music Man, and her mother joined in. The whole crowd began clapping along. As always, her parents were a hit.

  That was when the protestors entered. There was a line of them, wearing jeans and T-shirts, some in multicolored winter coats. They marched in a line, all silent, into the grand crimson room. These protestors held handmade cardboard signs over their heads, reading: INTEGRATED SCHOOLS NOW,
WE DEMAND AN END TO THE BIAS, and DORCHESTER NEEDS QUALITY EDUCATION. They were all black, with cropped hair or big Afros on both the men and the women. Brooke would understand later that they were also young, mostly college kids, but at the time she saw them as adults. There were so many protestors: Twenty? Forty? All of them were tight-lipped, staring straight ahead as if in a trance. As they entered the room, the Whitby-partygoers collectively gasped, abruptly halting their singing and clapping. But in the corner, Brooke’s parents didn’t notice what was happening. For several excruciating moments Corney and Roger went right along singing the song from Cats, for what they continued to believe was a sympathetic crowd. Brooke considered running toward them, but when she tried to move, her limbs locked.

  The waiters and staff of the Harvard Club sprinted around the room; men and women, in black-and-white serving outfits, tried to yell while also whispering, “Call the police.” “Get Al! Get a manager!”

  A man with an Afro at the front of the line of protestors pointed to Brooke’s parents in the corner, and they all began marching directly toward them. The appetizer-eating bystanders parted for this line of activists. The faces of her parents’ friends are what Brooke remembered clearly: shocked but also unmoving. No one jumped in front of a protestor to stop him, no one shouted anything. Brooke’s mother noticed the protestors first and cut herself off right in the middle of a long note: “‘Mem-rieeeeeee—’” But her father kept on playing the piano for a few beats. Corney, just like everyone else, froze. The leader of the protest held his sign with one hand and picked up a walkie-talkie radio in the other. He muttered something into it, and less than a minute later—it happened too fast for it to make sense, really—the second line of protestors came in. But this line was different. This line was made up entirely of children.

  These children were both black and white, not one of them older than eight years old. Each child had a large piece of cardboard slung around his or her neck with string. Their handmade signs read, HELP INTEGRATE OUR SCHOOLS and DON’T I DESERVE AN EDUCATION? All of these kids wore party clothes: small gray suits and pleated pink dresses and shiny shoes. At first they looked bewildered. Each child had a hand on the shoulder of the one in front, but their little faces turned left and right, ogling the giant room they were walking through. Some offered a confused hello to the cocktail-holding crowd.