Baby of the Family Page 3

  Brooke sighed and let her eyes scan the floor of the office, where the shiny oak planks were covered with file boxes. Roger Whitby Jr. had been dead for four days: he simply didn’t exist anymore. How was that possible? She put a hand on her hot forehead. It had been just over a year since she’d seen her father. The previous February he’d sat on that very porch in his wheelchair, unspeaking but smiling. It was clear to her that it wouldn’t be long before he passed; a nurse knows these things. But expecting something and living through it are two entirely separate challenges.

  A wave of queasiness passed from Brooke’s throat to her chest again, and then her stomach churned back up to her pounding head. A smell that only emanated from homes in California overwhelmed her: burnt grass, dry air, ghosts of desert animals trapped in walls that should never have been built in this waterless, inhospitable land. She decided to lie down on the floor. She wanted to go home; she wanted to be in Boston, in her own old bed. And more than anything, she wanted to be talking to her ex-girlfriend, Allie.

  The previous night, as she sat poolside with her chain-smoking brother at the Beverly Hills Hotel—the Whitbys had “their” hotel in every city that they went to, and someone long ago had chosen this particular one—she had looked around the dusky scenery and had the uncanny feeling that none of what was happening was real.

  “Can you believe he’s gone, LJ? I can’t. It’s like my body won’t let me believe it.”

  The charcoal peaks of the Santa Monica Mountains floated above them, sprinkled with lights gleaming from mansion windows. Hot wind blew in from the east. Mexican fan palm trees surrounded the pool, their mile-high fronds outlined in navy. It was a dream landscape; surely they’d soon wake up to the sounds of traffic on the cobblestone streets where they grew up.

  “Yes, I can believe it,” LJ muttered while he lit another cigarette. The tip of it glinted along with the mansion lights, one more dancing gem in the dark. He stared at the surface of the swimming pool in front of them and chuckled softly. “Remember when he threw me into the water at that hotel on the Cape?”

  Brooke laughed too, but only a little. Although the story had taken place before she was born, she knew it well: it was a quintessential Roger tale. Their parents had gone to stay at the Chatham Bars Inn near Hyannis one summer when LJ was four and Kiki seven, and Brooke just a three-month-old cluster inside Corney’s belly. LJ had been crying and whining for the whole three-hour car trip, and while the family was heading to their suite—far past dinnertime and no one had eaten—LJ saw the kidney-shaped pool and began to shout, “I want to go swimming! Take me swimming!”

  By that age LJ had been in multiple pools, lakes, and two different oceans, but he could not exactly swim. He could, though, be dragged around by his mother with inflated tubes on his arms while he exclaimed, “I’m an expert!”

  “How much do you really want to go in the water?” Roger asked in his booming voice. He was so full of energy then, his large teeth bared in a constant smile, always cracking jokes. He was almost embodying the jolly and thick-skinned persona he had always aspired to.

  “Realllly,” LJ whined. And then, faster than Brooke’s mother could register the actions, Roger picked up his son and threw him, clothes and all, into the pool. He let the kid sputter around for a long minute, his wife shrieking, her hands flailing in the humid air. Then Roger jumped into the pool himself, fully clothed. He lifted the boy out of the water and into the air, pumping the kid up and down over his head, as if he were a prize. Roger howled with laughter. He was proud of himself. He was ensuring that all his boy children would be resilient, always alert.

  The handful of other guests milling on the deck had frozen in their tracks, astounded. “Never underestimate the element of surprise!” Roger announced to the onlookers. For a moment little LJ was stunned, quiet in his father’s grip. But as soon as he saw his mother by the side of the pool, red-faced and horrified, he began to let out deep, gulping wails.

  “No!” Roger said, placing his son on the concrete edge. “Stop crying, kid! I did that for you. I’m teaching you to be ready for anything—to be a man! This is a lesson to learn right now, Lathrop James: greatness cannot be achieved if you let your guard down. Remember the rowboat.”

  “I didn’t want a rowboat,” LJ wheezed, as his mother picked him up and swaddled him in her arms.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Corney roared at her husband. “Are you mentally deranged?”

  Now the child was heaving so hard he was sputtering, gasping for breath. Roger hung his head, receiving his wife’s scolding with perhaps too much ease. “He’s got to learn that he’ll get what he asks for. He’s my son, Cornelia. He’s always going to get what he asks for.”

  In Corney’s version of the story, LJ continued to sob for more than three hours and was finally calmed down with two giant pieces of chocolate cake from room service. But Roger was only present for the first fifteen minutes of his son’s crying; after that he was stationed at the hotel bar, downing one Maker’s Mark after another.

  Now, from the distance of nearly four decades, on the floor of a bungalow on a well-appointed street in Southern California, it was hard for Brooke not to love that awful story, because it was so particularly Roger. Her father was always brashly himself: in his impulsivity, in his excitement, in his naive and dreamy intentions. He was always pushing. His motto, often stated in front of his children, was “Never let them see you sweat.” Maybe it was because he got bored so easily, because he couldn’t stand repetition, but he encouraged his children to never shy away from a challenge. Yet Brooke knew that these appeals came from his own vulnerable axis and a desire for his children to live up to the family name and not to be as easily broken as he could be. The other kids seemed to be following through on Roger’s advice to make bold and illogical choices, but that had never been in Brooke’s nature. In fact, she’d been consistently working toward the opposite for years now; she longed for staidness, for consistency. Perhaps that was why she was the one Whitby who had continued to show up for the man who had taught them not to.

  What would her life look like now, if her parents had stayed together? There would have been no Allie. Brooke would have been more outgoing in high school and have gone to a better college, where she would have met a man with a steady, if prosaic, smile. They would have a summer home already, and she’d spend her days involved in her children’s private elementary school. She would be living the life of the other people she grew up with, the ones who never encountered the disruption that made Brooke who she was. She wouldn’t have spent so much time alone, grappling with her own skills and feelings and what to make of both, and she wouldn’t have—under any circumstances—become a nurse. In many ways, Brooke was more proud of herself now than she would have ever been if her parents had stayed together. She was more valuable to the world, more unique, than she would have turned out otherwise. But she couldn’t help but believe that if Roger and Corney had managed to stay married, although each stage of her life would have been unimaginatively prescribed, she would have been doing the right things, as opposed to the life she was living now.

  Her cell phone began to buzz from its perch on a side table across the porch. The green-marbled file boxes were all around her, their letters and papers spilling out. Most of the yellowing paper had typewriter print on it, containing ancient, banal invitations to lunch dates between her father and her grandfather, or notes to a secretary about phone calls to make. But already she’d found some handwritten ones, including a Victorianesque love note between her father and his first wife, scrawled in looping script. At that moment, lying on her back with the phone ringing across the room, she held in her hand a letter from her grandmother Whitby, which urged her father to think of the family’s reputation and stave off divorcing Brooke’s own mother. My dear boy, I understand your sorrows, and I side with you at every turn. But these problems you’re experiencing in married life ar
e precisely problems of married life itself and shall not amend themselves with a different spousal candidate. Do reconsider. The words sped something up within Brooke’s chest. They touched her, but in the form of fascination rather than sadness. Grandmother Whitby had known exactly what was going on.

  Whoever was calling was doing so for a second time. Brooke hauled herself up. The phone’s front screen revealed Armond’s number. Her dear, old Armond. He was the family lawyer, a paid employee of the greater brood, but he and Brooke had formed a special bond years before, after her father left and everything she had grown up with was crumbling around her. She feared that this lawyer cared more about her than any of her aunts or uncles.

  “Mr. Armond!” she exclaimed into the receiver. “Thank you for calling.”

  “Brooke, dearest.” He paused. “Out in Los Angeles?”

  “Indeed. I’m cleaning out my father’s Pasadena place. You won’t be surprised, but I am the only one here actually looking through his possessions and trying to figure out what to do with them.” She sighed. When she complained to LJ or her sister, Kiki, or even to her mother or half siblings, when she reminded them that it was only she who took on the tedious familial duties, they’d all reply with nasal chuckles. So don’t do it, Birdie, they’d snicker, using her childhood nickname. You take this work on yourself. No one’s forcing you to make yourself miserable. Just don’t do it! But if she wasn’t there, categorizing the old letters into small gift piles, no one else would be. The family’s little remaining history would be lost.

  “Brooke, I’ve called you first among the children,” Armond said in his overarticulated, obsolete transatlantic accent. He’d remained so much himself, all these years. “We have a matter of your father’s estate to discuss, and I need you to be sitting down to hear this.”

  Brooke had already repositioned herself on her back on the oak floorboards. “Go on, Mr. Armond, I’m fine.”

  She was aware, as were the rest of her siblings, both full and half, that she would inherit little to no money. No one had expectations. It was well-known that due to risky business choices and bad real estate investments and, moreover, all the divorces, her father had blown through nearly all his inheritance from the Whitby fortune. (That was how the family had always referred to it: “the fortune,” or “Grandfather’s fortune.” Perhaps it was a gauche name, but no one seemed to be aware of an actual numerical value attached to the money that her grandfather had amassed. And, of course, none of them would dream of uttering the word fortune to non-Whitby ears. Not even to Armond.) Brooke questioned: “Is something unexpected happening?”

  “It’s the houses, my dear.”

  “What?”

  “The houses. They were all in Roger’s name, and there is an amendment of the rewritten will that bequeaths all the assets—all of the money, and the property that outweighs the monetary assets—to one child alone. It’s my duty to relay this news.” Armond cleared his throat, as if to punctuate the importance of what he was saying. “It cuts everyone else out.”

  Brooke sat up. “What? All the houses? My house too?” The nausea had ceased rolling through her, but now there was pressure on her chest. Her breath caught.

  Armond said nothing.

  She knew, of course, that her father still technically owned the house on Beacon Hill, the same house he hadn’t lived in for more than twenty years. But the thought of Roger repossessing it now, of him taking it back from beyond the grave, was preposterous. The possibility had not even occurred to her. Her voice cracked out high. She knew she sounded spoiled, but she couldn’t help herself. “He gave my house away?”

  “I’m sorry to bear this news. The funeral is tomorrow, yes? When do you return to Boston? Perhaps this is a subject easier discussed in person. I can show the documents to you—”

  “Who did he leave them all to? Andrew? Andrew has more money than Midas. He wouldn’t need this gift in a million years.” Brooke was the nurse; Brooke was an underpaid and overworked nurse who dedicated her daily life to quieting the suffering of others. If anyone deserved this—

  “No, no. It wasn’t Andrew. He’s left everything to the final child.”

  “He left my house to Shelley?” Her voice was loud now, amplified in the empty house. Shelley, her poor, misguided half sister, the youngest one of the bunch. She was a distracted hippie, but moreover, a child. Yet Brooke had always had a tenderness for her. All those summers on the Vineyard together. Although they were fourteen years apart, bred in different cities by different mothers, they were undeniably sisters. Brooke took a deep breath and let her heart rate slow: Shelley would let her keep her house.

  “Pardon me, dear, it is not Michelle Whitby I’m referring to. The will marks Roger Jr.’s very youngest child as the recipient. Susan Scribner’s son, Nick.”

  Brooke flinched. She had forgotten all about that kid. Nick was the child her father had adopted in his fourth marriage, in his old age, when his impetuousness seemed to multiply like cancer cells. At seventy-two years old, he’d discarded another woman and child, sending the members of his first three families into a state of confusion yet again, contributing to their acute need for therapy, which of course none of them would ever get.

  “He’s left everything to that accidental child?” Brooke was shocked; she no longer cared how her voice sounded. She had met Nick only a few times. He was tense and grim, angry even, with his knobby shoulders hunched around his ears. He hadn’t even grown up with Roger—he had to have been at least ten when he was adopted. And Brooke had gotten the distinct impression that the boy hated her father deeply. “He’s just a kid. Is it legal for him to take possession of a property?”

  “He’ll be twenty-two in December of this year,” Armond said. “The papers state that in the event of his father’s death, the money and the houses—Boston, New York, and California—shall be delivered to him in full. There’s a waiting period, of course. But after being held in escrow for one hundred and fifty days, the entire inheritance will become Nick Whitby’s legal property.”

  “What?” Brooke was yelling. She stood up quickly, her nausea replaced with rage. How could her father have done this? She was the only one who defended him for years, after all the disastrous decisions he’d made in the aftermath of their family’s greatest tragedy. Brooke had been Roger’s steady companion, and as far as she knew the only offspring of his four families who carried a shred of sympathy for him and the reasons why he had abandoned them all. But now he was doing it again: he was taking away her security, pulling her home out from under her feet.

  Her mind was spinning. “But why would he do this?”

  Armond didn’t say a word.

  “There was money too?”

  “Hmm,” Armond murmured. “We can discuss that in person, dear. Now I’m going to say something to you, and only you, Brooke. . . . Do not take this as coarseness, but there is a view in which Roger’s death was timely, concerning the matter of these properties. I say this in your confidence, as you are aware I have, for years, had fealty to your well-being. . . .” Armond paused; that kind of admission must have been hard for a bound-up man like him. “The waiting period for the execution of this will ends by September. You have more than four months now, indeed a whole summer, to convince your half brother to gift these houses to the current residents. Is there any possibility of accomplishing that proposal?”

  “Is he my half brother? I wouldn’t know him if I passed by him on the street.”

  Her life had been so calm, so ordered in the past five, even ten, years. Her work was dramatic, so she kept everything else simple. She rented out the top floors of her childhood home on Joy Street and set up an apartment for herself on just the first; she had become a practicing RN, despite the disdain for her middle-class profession from both her family and everyone else she’d grown up around. She liked to wake up with the sun and walk her goldendoodle, Phoebe, down to the Co
mmon, then spend her day at Mass General taking vitals and inserting chemo ports in the chests of the very brave and very sick. She held her patients’ cooled hands when their breath began to shallow, and allowed their spouses to cling to her after they’d received the news that the tumors had metastasized. It was quietly thrilling to Brooke to be good at her job, then be able to walk home to Beacon Hill utterly worn-out, and go to sleep satisfied. Within her routine she’d been able to protect herself, cocoon herself against the turmoil that her family caused.

  It had taken her years, an embarrassingly long number of years, to crawl out from under the tragedies and disappointments of her childhood. But she’d done it. And at thirty-seven, she was fine. Everything had been perfectly fine, more or less, just a week beforehand. Now, still holding the cell phone, she clamped her eyes shut and pictured Allie. Allie’s small, strong limbs; her black bushy hair that smelled of coconut. If Allie were there, holding Brooke against her petite, rock-climber frame while assuring Brooke that everything would be fine, life would stay tied to the ground. Then she remembered Marc: it was he and his tanned, masculine arms she was supposed to picture now, not Allie.

  Her mother used to say it often during the bad years: the Whitbys were cursed. And Corney wasn’t the only one who thought the shipping magnates dragged devastation around in their wake. All these disasters were colliding in Brooke’s life. It was as if she were twelve years old again, when her little brother, Peter, died and her father left, and everything stable was snatched away rapid-fire, then disappeared. For years, she’d carried the fear that her life would one day unravel again, just as suddenly as it had the first time.

  On the porch in Pasadena she tried to steady herself with a deep breath. This cluster of events couldn’t turn out as poorly as they had when she was a child; she didn’t have enough years left to recover again.

  “I don’t even know this Nick kid, Armond,” she said into the phone.