Baby of the Family Read online

  By the time Nick was eleven he would often skip the hotel altogether to sleep at a friend’s house. But when he was at the Marriott, he’d swim for hours every day, then order Playboy channel movies to the TV in his room. It was the fall of the year he was in the sixth grade when Susan showed up at Nick’s classroom door at MS 44 on a Thursday, insisting that she needed to take him out of class for a “family emergency.” At that time in the morning Susan was also supposed to be at school. As they descended the gray concrete steps, he’d wrenched his hand away as she’d tried to grab it. She’d come to get him because Roger was taking them on a picnic.

  “I was busy,” Nick complained.

  Soon he and his mother stood on a paved helicopter dock by the Hudson River, next to the World Trade Center. The black chopper’s propeller pounded steadily, and wind whipped their hair every which way. Roger sat in the pilot’s seat, wearing sunglasses and large red earphones, and motioning to the two of them to come in. Yes, he was taking his mistress and her son on a picnic, but this picnic would be in Connecticut. Susan shrieked with delight for the entire ride to Greenwich. Turning around to Nick, who was strapped into a jump seat, she repeated to him, “How much fun are you having? How lucky are you?”

  When the helicopter touched down in Connecticut, the old man put his hand on Nick’s head and smiled roguishly. “How do you like adventure, son? I can tell you’re made for it.” Those words, said in Roger’s rubbery low voice, would echo through Nick’s mind for the rest of that day and many years that followed.

  That afternoon, on a tartan blanket in the field outside a country house, Roger told Susan he had bought a house in Newport Beach, California. He was divorcing Elizabeth Saltman Whitby and wanted—very badly—for Susan to become Mrs. Susan Scribner Whitby. “Every other woman in my past has been holding me back from the grandeur I was meant to achieve. But you are different, Susan. It’s taken me most of my life, but I’ve found you.” He choked in what appeared to be a genuine sob.

  Susan Scribner shook Roger by the shoulders. “Yes, yes!” she exclaimed. Nick sat dumbfounded beside them, as Susan began to calculate and organize. When the school year ended they would sell everything in their apartment and fly together, as a family, to California. They would begin again, all three of them unaware that their beginning would so quickly become another ending.

  12

  | 2003 |

  Every day that week, Shelley received an early phone call from her employer. For the first time in her life, she trained herself to be awake by seven, as the time he called varied and she was afraid he would not approve of the sleep in her voice. She nearly jogged through the park on her way to the Grisham, wearing gloves and sloshing acrid deli coffee onto the recently thawed ground. Mr. Kamal was always waiting for her, unsmiling, at the elevator door. As the days passed, her duties were increasing. She not only read the newspaper but also began leading him on walks to Seventy-Ninth Street and back. Or, rather, he led her. He gripped her bicep and pushed her around children flooding out of schools and golden retrievers crouching next to parking meters. He sidestepped puddles and bore down on her arm while weaving in and out of scaffolding. Peculiarly, he said he “liked to see the afternoon sunshine best of all.”

  The first week passed, then the second. The April freeze softened into a wet and wicked May. When Shelley wasn’t there to answer her calls, Ms. Scribner left voice mails on her machine without introducing herself. The woman jumped into her orders: “Try looking for Nick at a place called Bleecker Bob’s, a record shop. It’s right by the college and he told me more than once it was his favorite. And then this café that’s open all night, on MacDougal Street. Esperanza? Esperanto? Nicky told me he was there at four thirty in the morning once. Tell me you’ll go to these places. You have to look for him, Michelle—he’s your brother.”

  Shelley listened to every word. She didn’t call back, but she listened, and occasionally in the evenings she answered the phone and heard Ms. Scribner’s huffs and shrieks of desperation. Ms. Scribner never once brought up the will or the money to Shelley. Perhaps she didn’t know that Shelley knew. Brooke was also a frequent caller, and Shelley never told her about the conversations with Susan. That knowledge would just add to Brooke’s own hysteria. Surely it would make Brooke hate Nick even more. Occasionally, in the midst of Ms. Scribner’s telephone-line sobs, she’d blurt out, “And my baby’s been through so much already. He deserves this chance. A chance!” This line was further evidence that she had manipulated Roger into leaving everything to Nick. That was the most logical explanation, Shelley told herself. It wasn’t the money that bothered Shelley; she’d never cared about money at all, as long as she had enough to subsist on. What she cared about were her father’s intentions. Even if he didn’t love Shelley more, Roger had to have loved her just as much as he loved Nick. Didn’t he? She was his flesh and blood. Ms. Scribner also insisted that the police would be in touch with Shelley, interviewing her about Nick and where and when she had last talked to him. But no police ever called.

  Shelley was determined to focus on her job with Mr. Kamal. She went to the Grisham Monday through Friday, sometimes for two hours, sometimes for six. They were falling into a rhythm, she and this older man: she read to him in the morning, watched him eat his cookies and drink his tea, then moved to the office to answer his emails and organize his files. In the afternoon she often took the subway to Midtown or Wall Street to bring sealed envelopes to accountants’ offices. On the way out of Mr. Kamal’s apartment Shelley would occasionally halt in a darkened room to say hello to the cook, whom she learned was named Clova. Clova appeared to sporadically enter and exit the apartment, but as she said, she “had been with the Kamals” for twenty-four years and could do what she pleased. When Clova was there, though, she could usually be found in the kitchen watching a miniature, muted countertop television. But other than Clova, he appeared to live alone.

  As her daily work duties increased, Shelley let nearly everything else fall away. She consistently refused Charlotte’s and Zoë’s invitations to movies and parties. She didn’t have time for them. She was captivated, by both her increasing desire to do a good job for Mr. Kamal and her extreme urge to hear him say that she had. Mr. Kamal maintained his habit of questioning: Had she eaten eggs for breakfast? Did she use mouthwash that morning? He seemed particularly attuned to his nose, and Shelley adjusted her bodily behavior accordingly. She never smoked before going to the Grisham, and she made sure to toss her pants into the washing machine at night. In the two-plus weeks she’d been there, she hadn’t been an amanuensis at all, but rather a gopher, acting as the man’s eyes and hands and feet. She was a mere fetching agent. Occasionally Mr. Kamal would grumble that she was “not yet ready.” Shelley had begun to take these jabs not as insults, but as challenges. She was challenged; she was trying. Instead of responding as she would have for the previous twenty-two years of her life, with a phrase akin to “Choke on a bag of dicks,” she offered him one diminutive “Thank you.” The exact number of weeks since she’d spoken to her mother wasn’t clear now, but if she had counted she would have reached the number nine. Over two months without a word. She did know, though, that this stretch had been too long. It would surely end any day.

  Mr. Kamal slipped a check into her hand at the end of each Friday afternoon. His own hand was smoother and colder than she’d expected, but his touch was also more tender. Shelley accepted this touch willingly, in the same way she accepted her rate of nine dollars an hour. She deposited the checks on the walk home, feeling not only accomplished but also energized. She would then immediately stock up on the staples that sustained her: Stoli, soy milk, tuna fish.

  The news, which Shelley read aloud every day, reported impending economic collapse in all financial centers, American and otherwise. For interminable minutes she listened to her own voice, high and faltering, recounting pundits’ conjecturing that the United States was conducting secret drone attacks on
Iran and that southern India was sure to get involved. Editorialists riled with the fear of another great depression and what would happen domestically if America declared war in all parts of the Far and Middle East.

  On occasion Mr. Kamal made smacks and snorts in response to the articles, but he never shared his opinions. Public policy was not a cup of tea Shelley had ever cared to taste either. Nick was the only person in her life who had ever talked to her about current events. On their walks Mr. Kamal continued to ask her “What do your parents do?” as if he had never mentioned it before. Was he testing her? Did his memory fail? By now she knew he would not call her on her consistency, so she changed her answer every time. Sometimes she said they were in politics, sometimes she said hardware. On those days she waited for the line So are you related . . . ? But the question never came. What he knew of the Whitbys—of where she fell, at the bottom of the illustrious line, of her father now buried in the ground, of her half brother nowhere to be seen—was a mystery.

  Mr. Kamal and Shelley developed a unique rapport: beside him in the library, she followed his low and controlled commands and didn’t attempt small talk when he didn’t initiate it. Now, in his pauses, she would examine him: his brown skin was quixotically smooth. Small white flecks marred the bottom of his cheeks, but he had no wrinkles, neither smile nor frown lines; his mask was heavy, contemplative, and set. The stillness of his physical features was frustrating. There was no way to read him. But the stillness gave him a statuesque quality; he was solid and permanent, not handsome exactly, but closer to beautiful. The more cool and unmoving he was, though, the more Shelley squirmed and twitched in front of him. Could he be doing this on purpose? It seemed a favorite pastime of his to inquire about her need for the bathroom. He would also frequently question, “Are you feeling hunger?” with no offer of nourishment to follow. Once, as she was reading aloud the obituary of Daniel Winthrop Strang, the publisher of Blackrock Books, Mr. Kamal rested his hand on the arm of her chair. “Your head is aching at this moment, yes?”

  In response to that question Shelley offered a small and quick “Not at all.” But with each odd question, she blushed. Later that same morning she pulled the strap of her underwear aside and scratched at the groove of her pelvis. She could have sworn a satisfied smile crept across Mr. Kamal’s face. She thought, Sick. And yet, she was smiling too. As the days grew, Shelley found herself relaxing in his presence. He was so insistent about what he deserved in life, so sure of his worth. Mr. Kamal thought of himself as a great man, and this was, in fact, reassuring. He was someone to depend on, and she was determined to get herself into a position where she truly could.

  * * *

  —

  This was the pattern, the two of them primarily alone, primarily in the library. It was a dull yet comforting pattern, until the day she stepped out of the elevator just as the bells chimed eleven o’clock and to her surprise, there was movement in the penthouse apartment. A private yoga class was taking place in the dining room. The table, still set, had been backed into a wall, and a squat German woman in a one-piece spandex suit was directing a more svelte, even lanky woman into the downward-dog position. As Shelley removed her shoes, the woman rose from her posture, her shoulder-length auburn hair settling itself as she ignored the German’s orders. She walked right over to Shelley with a smile clenched in her cheeks.

  Could it be—the wife? Mrs. Kamal was a white, athletic American. She moved with a brisk step, her outstretched hand preceding her. Her stare rose from Shelley’s feet to the roots of her thin, blow-dried hair. “Nice to meet you. I’m Jillian,” she said, as if conjuring a challenge.

  Shelley was stunned. The woman had to be in her late forties or early fifties. Following introductions, Shelley began to move toward the library when the woman called after her, with hands on the hips of her flared yoga pants.

  “You went to Demming? I graduated from a Seven Sisters school too.” She shifted her weight. “That was right after Yousef won the Driehaus prize. When I met him.”

  Shelley maintained a smile and answered, “That’s nice.” Mrs. Kamal turned back to the German instructor and promptly assumed the lotus position. Why had the wife shown up? And where on earth had she been for the last three weeks?

  Shelley said nothing to Mr. Kamal about the encounter, and he not a word to her. The morning and afternoon passed as usual, with her reading the Times and traveling downtown to deliver a parcel to a secretary in a skirt suit. When she returned to the Kamals’ apartment Clova told her to wait in the library, for Mr. Kamal was engaged at that moment. In the library, on the side table where the morning paper usually lay, was a blocky white laptop. The laptop was open, but the screen was dark. After twenty minutes of sitting in silence, Shelley placed a finger on the touchpad, and the screen illuminated an Internet Explorer page open to the website Gawker. Black text on a white background read: UNCOVERING SCANDALS FROM THE PAST!

  Below the headline were three hyperlinks, written in neon pink:

  TRUE STORIES OF THE KENNEDYS’ DISTURBED DAUGHTER!

  INTERVIEW WITH THE MOTHER OF ROMAN POLANSKI’S TINY TART

  INSIDE SCOOP: I WAS YOUSEF KAMAL’S SEEING-EYE GIRL

  That was it. That must have been the article he’d mentioned in her interview—the one defaming him. Had he left the laptop there for her? Or was it the wife? She stared at the screen until it went dark again. Then she sat waiting. The grandfather clock chimed lightly for the quarter hour mark and then more heavily at half past. The minutes ticked by and eventually Shelley leaned over and skimmed her finger against the touchpad again. She clicked the third pink link, which revealed a retro black-and-white photograph of a young woman in a cowl-neck sweater. A brunette with vulgarly crooked front teeth. The headline on this page read: HOW KAMAL’S SEEING-EYE GIRL CAME TO HER SENSES.

  Her eyes fell to the first paragraph. “One morning in his downtown office, he sat beside me and said: ‘I can hear your polyester skirt rubbing against the skin and hair of your vulva. Why have you foregone underwear today?’”

  Shelley clicked the page away and lowered the top of the laptop; it closed with a soft snap. She would not be caught reading that. She sat quietly in the library for the next forty minutes, at which point Clova curved her head in and told her she could go home. She would surely be paid for her wait time.

  The routine of Shelley’s evenings at Strong Place now began with eating a dinner of tuna from a can while standing over the trashcan and flipping through Rolling Stone. That day she hustled home with a plan to go right to the internet though, now that she knew where to find the article. As soon as she entered the chilly kitchen, she grabbed a package of saltines from the counter and made her way to the cramped office on the second floor. Dropping her pants, she kicked them aside and arranged herself cross-legged in her underwear on the hard office chair.

  Outside, a few car horns blew on Columbus; the setting sun cast the room in an azure wash. As the gray desktop computer booted up, Shelley felt strangely giddy and giggled aloud in the empty room. So Mr. Kamal had ignored her today. That would happen, on occasion. She imagined, briefly, that this was exactly the life she wanted but had never known it. A daily routine, an undulation of intrigue: new news, old books, ornately decorated office-building lobbies. A walk across the park, a familiar penthouse. “Well, here I am,” she said to no one, “a grown-up.”

  When the computer was on, she found herself clicking around to various websites. She checked out the Live Journal page of her old roommate, Aleisha. She downloaded a few songs from the Slips’ new acoustic album. Outside, the sun had fully set. She did not go back to the article on Gawker. After an hour, she decided she truly didn’t want to read it. There was no need for her to know those things. She would get up the next day and return to the job; her body had become accustomed to a clockwork rhythm. Shelley stood and walked away from the old desk. She wandered through the quiet rooms of her childhood home with a ce
rtain aloneness that reminded her of an empty Saturday afternoon, as if there was something she kept forgetting to do. This was a feeling she had nothing but fondness for. It wasn’t that she was happy—no, she suspected this was not what happiness felt like. It could be, though, that this was what it felt like to be content.

  * * *

  —

  Three days after their mid-yoga meeting, Shelley glimpsed the back of Mr. Kamal’s wife’s leather tote bag exiting the dining room and slipping behind the heavy door to the hallway that led to the family bedrooms. Mr. Kamal had already made it clear that “help is not allowed in those quarters.” In the three preceding days Shelley had heard, several times, the patter of quick steps and the door to the family quarters shutting. It appeared permanent: the wife had returned to the apartment from wherever she’d been. The internet revealed that the wife was actually Dr. Jillian Hollingsworth Kamal, PhD in—strangely—Far Eastern rather than Middle Eastern art, and head curator of the Asian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Would it all change now?

  But although there was a bit more breath and light in the Kamals’ penthouse, as the work days passed, Shelley’s fears were assuaged: it was still very much the staid apartment where she had been interviewed. She and Mr. Kamal’s routine remained, but she had yet to write one word with him. Occasionally he would reference their future together. When we begin writing, you will sit in that chair. Our writing, when it happens, will take place in the afternoon. Yet each afternoon he kept her busy with emailing and filing and delivering. Day in and day out, Shelley watched him and something akin to admiration grew for this serious, particular man. Although he didn’t seem to be working on anything—minor or major—at the moment, he had spent his life working toward being extraordinary, which in itself was extraordinary. She felt not just that she knew him but also that the two of them were on the same team. Perhaps all colleagues felt that way: extraordinary, together.