Baby of the Family Page 11

  At this point Roger stood up from the piano, shocked. He paused with his hands at his side, mouth slung open, until the guy with the Afro in the front of the line planted his feet like a soldier. The leader placed his hands on his hips and yelled: “Mr. Whitby, these are the people you will be destroying by blocking the busing initiative.” Then he reached one hand into the leather satchel that hung off his shoulder.

  It took a few seconds at most, but the photographs of it would last forever. It was the photographs that ultimately did Roger in. When the protest leader stuck his hand in his shoulder bag, Brooke’s father flinched and dropped to the floor in front of the piano. Roger, in his navy suit and bow tie, lay facedown on his stomach; two flexed arms protected the crown of his head, hands gripping the back of his scalp. The protestor pulled the aluminum can out of his bag. An air horn. He pressed the button on the top of the air horn one long time, and at the sound of the horn, the children, prepped to think this was some kind of game, squealed in delight and began running. When the horn sounded, they all ran toward Roger on the floor. Soon the adult protestors were laughing, overjoyed by their good luck. They directed the children: “Over there.” “He’s your man.” And the children, with some of their neck signs swinging to their backs, surrounded Roger. Two of the smallest ones crawled directly onto his back, and a sweet-looking girl with French braids sat on his thigh and giggled.

  The photographers swooped in. The protesters had brought two of their own, but the Herald had also sent one just to be at the Whitby party. When Roger heard the snap snap of the camera shutters closing, he looked up, confused. Then he heard Corney huff, “Get up, Rodge!” He peeked up to see tiny patent-leather shoes and knobby tights-covered knees sticking out from under party dresses. He understood what was happening, but it was too late. The image of Roger Whitby, cowering facedown on the floor while surrounded by a group of happy children, was captured. This picture was printed in both the Globe and the Herald the next morning. The Globe headline read, IS THE WHITBY WIMP READY TO GOVERN? It was mortifying. He was called a racist from every pundit on the local level, as well as by a few on the national. His bid for governor was over in less than two weeks. Martin O’Toole, the son of a deceased congressman from an Irish-Catholic family, joined the race and knocked Roger out of the running, thus returning Brooke’s family to the second-class, everyday, Boston-based Whitbys they really were. That event—and that knowledge of their average status—was the first in a line of catastrophes that jostled Roger out of his seat of sanity and sent her family flying.

  Bang bang bang: Marc’s fist on the bathroom door.

  “Come on, Brooke.”

  She shook her head, as if it could literally fling off the memory of the shame that began her family’s downward spiral. As she flushed the toilet another time, she yearned to forget where she came from. She splashed tap water on her face, wanting to push the memory of her father and all his misguided actions out of her mind, at the same time as she wished so badly to be able to see him again.

  “We’re very late,” Marc said through the door. “Mom and Poppa are waiting for us.”

  “What?” Brooke turned off the faucet. Marc was the kind of adult who referred to his parents without a pronoun. Never “my mom said” but rather “Mom said.” It made Brooke’s stomach turn, while also ringing up a note of sadness. There was no way she was close enough to her mother to say that.

  “Why are your parents coming?” she asked from her side of the door.

  He gave a squirrelly laugh. “They want to see the house! Shouldn’t they get to see it, if they’re paying for it?”

  Of course his parents were coming. Marc’s money was all from the family business. His parents would always be coming, to every dinner and holiday and movie and shopping trip, for the rest of her life. His mother was always touching Brooke’s body, making comments about future children. His father was always grotesquely asking her about her salary, her family’s investments, and the numerical cash value of her house. This was not how Brooke Whitby did things. Yes, in some shallow way Marc was soothing to her. Walking beside him into a restaurant, spending a night sipping cocktails as he bantered on to businesspeople, falling asleep under the mainsail as he and some other boneheads he went to the Noble and Greenough School with laughed and shouted among themselves. It was fine and comfortable. But it wasn’t love. As she stared at the back of the frosted-glass bathroom door, her body literally ached for Allie’s. She just wanted to touch her, to feel that Allie, the person who knew who Brooke really was, existed in the world.

  The nausea returned, and Brooke could do nothing but lay back on the floor. She was astounded at herself that she hadn’t yet made a decision about the pregnancy. She was normally carefully decisive. But now she just didn’t know what to do. Although she was not a woman who’d ever fantasized about being a mother, she’d calculated the positive aspects of the role more than once. And this might be her last chance. Her visions of motherhood involved rolling a stroller over the cobblestones of her urban neighborhood and singing the baby songs her parents had sung together. But this baby also belonged to the man, the guy who was so unlike her, on the other side of the door. The only grandparents the baby would really know would be Marc’s uncouth, money-obsessed parents. And the baby currently did not have a home to live in. “I’m not coming, Marc,” Brooke said in the loudest voice she could muster, without getting off the floor. “Go on without me.”

  9

  The personal history of Mrs. Susan Scribner Whitby—the forty-nine-year-old ex–third grade teacher, the frequent gardener, the long-estranged wife of a recently deceased man—was inconsequential in the scope of civilization and culture. No one knew this to be true more than Mrs. Scribner Whitby herself. Her insignificance did not just rankle her: it pressed on her chest morning through night as she puttered around a small house on a slanted street in Orange County, California.

  Susan’s personal history began thirty years before she was born. In 1924, in a state far removed from any Scribners, a young American named after his famous lyricist cousin sat down to write a book. Frances Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, and it became a remarkable thing. Scott, as he was personally known, was twenty-eight when he made this remarkable thing, but Susan Scribner knew that in order to do that, he must have accomplished many more feats of daring during his prior twenty-seven years. Susan had known she was destined for remarkable things since she took her first breath in the world, but it wasn’t until she picked up Gatsby in American Literature Review at Orange Coast College in 1972 that she realized it was only her own actions that would mark her as extraordinary.

  She read the book cover to cover, repeatedly, until the binding was cracked and the pages began to fall from her paperback copy. What was it about the story that enticed her so? The moments she loved best were when the characters were in the center of the roaring city, clumped up in raucous, unlikely groups. Susan wanted to see the actions again and again: champagne bottles glinting in the moonlight, Wolfsheim winking through cigar smoke above a craps table. Nick and Jay, Daisy and Tom, Myrtle and Jordan, they were constantly drawn toward Manhattan and then repelled from it; the city was the throbbing nexus they couldn’t handle too much of. Susan, in suburban California, fantasized about New York’s machinery and strangers, about licentious liaisons in grand hotels and rented apartments, about chance meetings becoming thrilling action.

  From a young age, Susan, who lived with her retired Air Force–captain-turned-power-plant-manager father and her homemaker mother, was always in trouble. An itch had tormented her most of her life; she felt restless, bored, and utterly companionless in these feelings. Her parents didn’t know what to do when her teacher reported she disrupted class, or she got kicked out of Sunday school for asking unanswerable questions. At fourteen, she boarded a bus and traveled to Los Angeles by herself, in order to go to a vigil after the assassination of RFK. But she lived in a small town; going
unnoticed was not an option. When she got off her return bus on Sand Canyon Avenue at dusk, her father was waiting with two indignant arms crossed over his chest. Susan’s problem, simply put, was that she was smarter than most of the other people she grew up around. Therefore, a deep loneliness built up inside of her, and outwardly, she was unruly.

  In college, when she read about Jay Gatz, he became a role model: he was a man who possessed the deftness and consummate will to remake himself. He wanted to become someone new and stopped at nothing until he had. Could a woman do what Jay Gatz did? Could she kick through all the roadblocks in front of her, jab down anyone or anything that attempted to hold her back, until she attained the thing that would make her finally, ultimately, happy? Of course, Susan had had no actual Daisy to pin her dreams to, and therefore her goal was more hazy than Jay’s. She wasn’t sure what she aspired to possess, but she knew that whatever it was, it was not waiting for her in Orange County.

  She didn’t understand then that her dislike of the place stemmed from her family. Her father wasn’t exactly a violent man. Sure, sometimes he would get angry and throw his fist at things, including his loved ones. But his real vice was his sincere fury whenever he was not the sole purveyor of authority, in any situation. He controlled his three daughters, and he certainly controlled his wife. It was all up to him: what she ate and what she wore, who she was friends with and mostly who she wasn’t, what she said and mostly what she didn’t. When Susan was ten years old, her mother had shown up at a neighborhood kid’s birthday party wearing a sunflower-covered dress with a slightly low dip at the neckline and a slightly high-on-the-thigh hemline, and her father had run into the neighbors’ yard five minutes later. He screamed as he traversed the freshly cut, sun-scorched grass. “Get in the goddamn car, Marcy!” The other little girls had all clung to the cement edges of the pool, mouths dropped open. “No wife of mine leaves the house dressed like a harlot. And no wife of mine ignores my commands!” As he moved toward her, he raised his hand, winding up. But the birthday girl’s father—Mr. Johnston was his name—caught Susan’s father’s hand as it stretched out. “Not in my house, Rick.”

  Her mother had hung her head and promptly walked out of the yard in shame, without so much as telling Susan to come along. It was then that Susan promised herself she would never, ever let her life be like her mother’s. She would get out of Orange County, leave California, and refuse to crumple in the face of a man.

  After high school, Susan continued to live with her parents, and once she had finished her classes at Orange Coast she spent her days teaching reading to elementary school students. Small children responded to her brusque and commanding manner: she was a symbol of authority one could depend on while still allowing a child to test out uncharted waters, a natural-born teacher. But Susan wasn’t really interested in teaching. She was the oldest of three daughters, her two younger sisters already married and out of the house, each with a potato-like newborn to tend to. They were never leaving California. But as Fitzgerald had shirked his Minnesota homeland and made his way to Paris in order to write, Susan’s gaze was set on New York City, sure that that was the place where the action of her own story would begin.

  It took two full years, but in 1977 the petite, buxom, and officious twenty-three-year-old set out across the country with a copy of Gatsby in her father’s bifold suitcase. She had won a scholarship to Teachers College by writing an essay for Seventeen magazine called “Women’s Words: How Female Voices Mean More.” Women’s liberation was the hot-button issue of the time, although Susan wasn’t particularly committed to it. She certainly believed in liberation for herself, but her beliefs didn’t exactly extend beyond that. But there was opportunity in this essay contest. Getting her teaching certificate was just a means to a rent-paying end. She would start with the teaching, she told herself, and from there she’d look around for something else, something enlivening.

  For the first year of living in New York, Susan eagerly clacked down the linoleum-covered hallways of Teachers College, attentive to her studies and focused on excelling. She lived in university housing but took the subway alone to galleries downtown and wine-and-cheese political fund-raisers. There were men in New York who were nothing like her father; she was sure of it. She forced herself to smile brightly at every businessman and each long-haired wastoid on the subway platform; one never knew where opportunity would open its door. But as the months piled up, very few doors did open. She lived a solitary lifestyle and began to feel herself grow smaller in the big city.

  After two years she’d finished her teacher-training program and her father called to announce that it was time to head home. The vice principal of Irvine High School had also been an Air Force man, and her father had spoken to him about a job. “We’ll chip in on renting your own place, if you manage to get the position.” But Susan felt she’d been cheated out of a New York experience, living in a women’s dormitory and never missing a class. She refused her father, then also refused a full-time position teaching high school English at Spence, the prestigious private school on East Ninety-First, in order to have more free hours during the day in which she could really live.

  It was 1980 when she found an apartment in the West Village, on Bethune Street. The neighborhood was dodgy, but “up-and-coming,” and her “two-room studio” was cheaper than anything uptown. Occasionally needles lay discarded by the building’s door, and she quickly learned that the man who occupied the apartment next to her, Anthony, was a pimp who dealt mostly in young boys. But she was twenty-six years old, she wore her orange hair in a retro flip in order to stand out, and she was able to live there by herself. The first five days in her apartment were spent scrubbing off a thick layer of scum that covered everything from the floorboards to the galley kitchen to the window that faced into the air chute. She found a part-time elementary school teaching job at the Village Community School on West Tenth, and had afternoons off to go searching for the elusive thing that she so desperately wanted and needed.

  Susan didn’t know where to begin searching, so she spent most afternoons sitting in bars around the Village, sipping cocktails and rereading her tattered copy of what she’d come to think of as her book. She wasn’t sure if she was looking to find Jay Gatsby or looking to become him herself. Susan was aware that the most poignant paragraphs of the book did not involve Gatsby but rather Nick Carraway. Nick, quiet in the crisp West Egg air, under the belt of East Coast stars, looking up at Gatsby’s mansion windows. Nick was the one to love, she knew, but Susan simply wasn’t interested in quiet reflection and country air. She wanted to pour champagne herself, to steer a yacht farther into the sea.

  So Susan waited for excitement, and as she waited she drank Cape Codders at Chumley’s and at the front bar of the Ninth Circle. Sometimes she went to Ye Waverly Inn for a gin fizz. The other regulars were artists and writers and musicians, who found the fact that she was a teacher a real trip. On the way home from the Community School she’d pop into the White Horse Tavern or Cafe Minerva and drink a beer with the bartenders she’d become friendly with. A few blocks away, in Washington Square, the smell of marijuana wafted out of drum circles, teenagers danced around the defunct fountain with hair twenty years longer than it should have been. They seemed to have no idea that the 1980s had arrived. But over on the west side, everyone was aware of what year it was. With each passing month the gay revolution grew, and the streets of the Village became an urban Wild West. The partying did not only happen on the weekends: on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons men walked by in assless chaps, and one could hear the rustle of blow jobs in the bushes by the pier. Once, at eleven in the morning, she walked into the women’s room at John’s Pizzeria, and a shirtless man on his knees in front of another yelled, “Get the fuck out, bitch!” It was unfortunate; her apartment was a fourth-floor walk-up, she was two vodka tonics in, and she truly had to pee.

  Her neighborhood soon became a point of pride for her and a part of h
er identity: she was Susan of the West Village, the red-haired teacher who knew all the Italian grandmothers, all the drag queens, the names of both the white and the Puerto Rican children. She was the friendly Californian who was never without a drink in her hand. A billboard on Seventh Avenue stated boldly, GAY RIGHTS NOW, and it made Susan swell with pride at her chosen home. AIDS didn’t exist yet, and male sex seemed to infect the very air everyone breathed—kinetic, but also containing testosterone-filled grinding and punching. The good and the bad of this air affected everyone. Straight men turned on sex signals left and right, and Susan hailed them down. This was not suburban California. She was in total control of how calm or how eventful her day would be, and how many drinks accompanied her various events. It was easy to bring men up to her fourth floor, or go to their similarly disarrayed apartments. Time passed quickly, and although she was frequently alone, loneliness and wanting were no longer a part of her personality. The itch that had tormented her for most of her life was lifting.

  After nearly a year at the Community School, Susan began to show up late and then miss some mornings altogether. In an environment with very little respect for lesson plans, she had managed to break the rules. Her boss, Judy, was ten years her senior. When the formerly responsible Susan Scribner showed up to work for the first time all week on a Wednesday morning, Judy and her Coke-bottle glasses took Susan into the art-supply closet and fired her.