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  If it was true though, if Shelley’s father was dead and no longer existed in the world, she wasn’t just unhinged; she was free. She was a cog that had made it out of the Whitby machinery. Her breath came in bursts, as if she was at the top of a roller coaster about to ride into a great plunge. A sharp cackle came out of her.

  “Everything cool?” Matt the manager asked.

  She tried to breathe in through her nose.

  The flamingo frump had walked away and was muttering to her squat pal by the restaurant door. Matt came around the counter and sidled up behind Shelley, so that his pelvis pressed lightly into her buttocks. Once, as they both smoked by the dumpster, he had acted like so many others in her life and mumbled that Shelley was beautiful. She’d pretended not to hear him. Now he put both hands above her wide hipbones, thumbs falling into her steeped-in waist. “Hey,” he said softly, by the side of her neck. “Everything okay, Shells?”

  “Nope.” She shook her head forcefully. It was unclear if the nope was an answer to Matt’s question or just a general disagreement with everything happening at that moment. “Nope. I’m done with this job.” She continued to shake her head, and then, giving the old bird by the door a slant-eyed stare, took two large steps away from Matt. “None of you people know who I am. And, what you don’t know is that I . . .” These outbursts didn’t happen all the time, but she certainly wasn’t surprising herself at that moment. She reminded herself: consequences do not exist if you do not let them. She finished, “I do not deserve to be here!”

  She pulled the string from the apron around her waist, balled it up in her hands, and threw it. The apron flew over the countertop, hitting the giant brushed aluminum tank of the coffee station. Two Bic pens soared out in opposite directions; some change clanked against the floor. “I quit,” she announced. “I’m going home.”

  Shelley stomped out of the glass door of the restaurant and up Garden Street, back to Lathrop House. In her dorm room she pulled a giant suitcase from the back of her closet. She had thought about leaving Demming before. She’d barely been going to class since she began working at the Magic Mule. No one actually needed a college degree. A diploma was a meaningless paper symbol; she pitied her friends who didn’t understand that fact. There had been thirty-one dollars of tips in her apron pockets, money that she could have certainly used, but she decided to preserve her dignity and not go back for it. She told herself she wasn’t going to graduate anyway, with all those incomplete classes. There was nothing left for her there. In fact, she’d almost left school the previous week, when she had walked into her suitemate Aleisha’s bedroom and saw Ollie, the boy she’d been sleeping with for nearly a year, shirtless in the other girl’s bed. Shelley hadn’t spoken to either of them since that afternoon, despite several phone calls pleading to let them “explain.” It was not her father’s death or her future career prospects as a college dropout, but rather Ollie that she focused on—his pale sunken chest with scraggly red hairs at the center of it—as she picked up heaps of unfolded clothes from her drawers and dropped them into the suitcase.

  She did not think of her father at all until she was in a taxi on the way to the Metro-North station. The last time she’d seen him was two years before, in California. That was spring break of her sophomore year, and she’d been staying at the childhood home of the same suitemate, Aleisha. As a city kid, she’d never learned to drive, so she took an interminable cab ride from Santa Monica to her father’s one-story house in Pasadena. Roger’s petite Nigerian nurse had showed her to the screened-in back porch, where he sat in a wheelchair pointed toward a swath of California pines. Shelley sat beside him in silence, but for the final few minutes of the visit she had grabbed his hand and told him about college.

  When she was small, Roger would occasionally make vague incantations that his other children were all brilliant and fearless and audacious, but he’d never once extended the comment to her. When she’d terrorized teachers at Spence and her parents had to go in for a meeting, Roger would return home and sit in the parlor, clicking on the television. Little Shelley skulked around the room, waiting for him to comment on her actions, waiting for one chuckle or one assertion of, “Definitely my child, you are.” But she’d received nothing from him. Around that time Shelley had told her parents that she wanted to be an actress or a singer when she grew up, anything where she could take center stage. Her mother always hugged her tightly and told her she’d imagined nothing less. But after her father left, Shelley had dropped that dream and stopped picturing what her future would look like entirely. It was as if she was waiting for Roger to come home and tell her what to do. What she had wanted her whole life was for her father to ask her questions about what she liked and what she thought. In the past two years, Shelley had thought about those minutes on the porch in California often, although he hadn’t so much as squeezed her hand back in response.

  Now, looking out of the rectangular window of the Metro-North train car, she watched the Hudson River roll by. She hoped she never saw Ollie again and that Aleisha would return to California and be miserable in her shopping-mall-filled, parochial life. She pictured her half brother Nick with his constant scowl, hiding away in the Village, probably in some poor, susceptible NYU girl’s room. Shelley wished him to stay there. As she considered all these people, the rage announced itself in the depths of her stomach again, collecting heat as it swirled and grew. She rattled back toward Manhattan, toward home, all the time looking out at the breadth of the Hudson River, recently unfrozen and deep muddy brown. Wide and unadorned, filthy and dull; that river was permanent and would never change. It was miserable and there was nothing she could do about it.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the city, Shelley got out of the cab at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Seventy-Third Street. No, she couldn’t afford to take another cab, but as she was standing in front of Grand Central, one rolled up in front of her—an old-school Crown Victoria with some dents on the bumper, which reminded her of her childhood. The driver was heaving her suitcase into the trunk before she could protest. Shelley “grew up in a New York that doesn’t exist anymore.” When she was a child her parents had a mart’ at four, and left her with a nanny after that. When they could no longer afford the nanny, they simply left her alone. She had lived in the same apartment on the Upper West Side all her life, save for those three-plus years of college. But now the apartment she grew up in was empty: her father left when she was in the eighth grade, her grandmother died five years later, and her dazed and bespectacled mother, well . . . If she wasn’t doing another in-patient stint, maybe she was actually on Martha’s Vineyard selling Shelley’s grandmother’s, Biddy’s, old house.

  Now, Shelley bumped her suitcase against the cobblestones as she made her way up Strong Place. She liked to repeat that line, that she “grew up in a New York that doesn’t exist anymore.” Where she really grew up was in an apartment at the back end of an old horse alley off Columbus Avenue, between Seventy-Third and Seventy-Fourth Streets. Strong Place was a street so narrow a car couldn’t drive up it, and the Whitbys’ apartment, a duplex on the bottom two floors of a brownstone, was so narrow itself that as a child she couldn’t do two consecutive somersaults across it without banging the crown of her head against the plaster. The walls were lined with built-ins, filled with classic novels and volume after volume of glossy, hard-backed art books. Her poor mother had cherished these, buying them at forty-five, fifty bucks a pop, without thinking twice. She bought them even when the cash on hand was so low that Shelley had to lure her grandmother Biddy into another room, the old woman’s white topknot bobbling as she padded over the rugs, while Shelley’s mother dipped into her purse. Although a Whitby, Shelley was her father’s youngest biological child, and by the time she came along, it was only Biddy who had any dough. And after her mother’s travel and the pills and primarily the long divorce, they burned through that money too.

 
The cold outside was biting and wet. It was below fifty, and she didn’t have a jacket. The setting sun turned the air dusky as Shelley laid her eyes on her childhood home. When she entered she saw that the foyer light had burned out and mouse droppings speckled the white countertops of the first-floor kitchen. But the place smelled like comfort: dried pasta and old books, a tinge of dust that threatened a sneeze. She inhaled it all deeply, that particular scent of home. Then she put herself down at the kitchen table and picked up the landline telephone. Although Shelley had been avoiding facing the reality of where her mother really was, it was time to try to find her. The darkness from the diner was closing back in on her. She dialed her mother’s cell phone, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine the most peaceful place she could think of. She found herself picturing the end of the old dock at her grandmother’s Martha’s Vineyard summer home. The phone rang and rang, and Shelley’s mother did not pick up. Finally a high-pitched computerized voice announced: We’re sorry, but the mailbox you have reached is full and is not accepting new messages.

  It wasn’t as if her mother had always been attentive, but disappearing for this long was new. Shelley felt the heat of anger rising again through her lower abdomen. She was still the child. She was the child, and her father was dead, and she deserved a little consolation. For years after her father left, her mother barely went out of the apartment at all. Elizabeth Saltman Whitby had just hummed around the overpacked rooms, her chin-length blunt cut rustling. She never said a word. She was, for lack of a better phrase, a woman destroyed. But in Shelley’s final years of high school, she managed to get her mother out on the weekends, where they would sit side by side at the counter at Old John’s Luncheonette. Shelley would order for them both: “Two plates of two fried eggs, and hash browns extra brown.” No please, no coy appreciation. She would gulp her large orange juice, smack her lips, and let out an ahhh.

  Now Shelley sat alone in the kitchen and wondered if it was time to cry. Any chance she’d had to become a part of her father’s life was gone, forever. As she sat there in silence the tears didn’t come, but irrational thoughts did. What if Roger was really alive? What if he had just gotten better and decided to leave California? Could he and her mother be hiding somewhere, making up for the years that they’d missed together?

  After finishing a packet of soggy saltine crackers, Shelley went upstairs for the night. The downstairs still reminded her of her father right before he left, slumped in the winged-back armchair watching the first televised discussion of the president’s rumored affairs, his frayed shirt collar pulled up from his moth-eaten Brooks Brothers sweater. A Scotch tumbler sweated as he sat in front of the television for hours, unaware of Shelley and her friends traipsing around. He was already so old. His shade business, which he’d started when he’d retreated from the corporate and political aspirations of his previous marriages, was going under. The hobby-cum-company had catered to old homes, brick mansions in the city, and wide-windowed arts-and-crafts summer places in the far reaches of Long Island. Roger Whitby Jr. aimed to fulfill the needs of each house’s intricacies. But Home Depot and Target had been pushing him out of the market; no one wanted to buy custom-cut shades from a local shop anymore. For years the Whitbys kept the tiny workroom and storefront, which was four blocks from their apartment. The place was nothing more than a closet with a counter in front of a few work benches scattered with tools and tacking nails, set on the ground floor of a dingy tan office building from the sixties. Her family kept the shop long after Roger had moved to California with Shelley’s former teacher Ms. Scribner, truly surprising them all that he still had it in him.

  Shelley lugged her bags up the creaking staircase, then climbed into Grandmother Biddy’s old bed and pulled the nubby bedspread up to her chin. Roger Whitby Jr. had no doubt been ignored by his parents as well. And in turn, her grandparents must have been disregarded too. A lack of attention, but moreover parental rocking and petting was absent. This lack of parental love funneled through their family, a fissure hundreds of years old and ditch-deep. The absence of physical, bodily security traced all the way back to the Mayflower. Growing up, Biddy was the only one whom Shelley had touched regularly, and the only one with whom she could speak honestly. On one of those final days when Biddy was in bed, never to emerge again, Shelley had tucked herself in beside her grandmother. The old woman’s halitosis overtook the room, and her pinched warble warned, “You know your mother, Shelley; she’s not well. She’s always been prone to untoward things.”

  Now Shelley thought about her personal golden rule, about her absent mother, and decided that she was entitled to do whatever she wanted. She pulled a pack of Virginia Slims out of the front pocket of her backpack and lit one up while lying in bed. She flipped on the television. Her shoulders were shaking slightly. Her father’s hand no longer existed. If he really was dead, if the lawyer’s report was right, perhaps there would be talk of it on the news. She began flipping from channel two to channel four to channel seven. Tom Brokaw discussed the new military base camp being set up in Fallujah, with a projected map of Iraq above him. Richard Schlesinger showed clips of George W. Bush blushing behind a podium, repeating the phrase “Dubya-Em-Dee, it stands for weapons of mass deestruction.” Barbara Walters was doing a special on residents of the Financial District who decided to permanently relocate in the wake of 9/11.

  A middle-aged man with dark Italian features looked into Barbara’s eyes and told her, “It’s the memory of the smell. Human bodies. I can’t get that out of me.” The camera cut to Barbara shaking her head without blinking once.

  Shelley flipped between these stations, one after another, waiting for any sort of mention of her father, or her family. He was a Whitby. Wouldn’t there be something? Wouldn’t the news mention that another Whitby died from the ridiculous family curse? She kept flipping. She made it through six cigarettes, clicking at the remote control while a swirling ball of rage and despair swelled inside of her. It was then that Shelley cried. It was just for a minute or two: her perfectly balanced face distorted, and real, wet tears streaked down her cheeks and fell off the cleft of her chin. She was totally alone.

  5

  | 1994 |

  The scent of pink lilies flooded the hotel lobby—sickly sweet, intoxicating the mind with each breath; one could think of nothing at all. On the other side of the automatic glass doors the morning was hazy and claustrophobic, like so many Los Angeles mornings. Nick Whitby was twelve years old. He wore a New York Yankees cap and a charcoal suit, too large in the shoulders and too short in the ankles. His mother clacked ahead of him on the mauve marble floor. “Will you hurry—?” She stuck her hand behind her as if Nick would grab it. His shoulders hunched up in humiliation. Although they lived only an hour away, Nick and his mother were staying with the rest of the family at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Today was Grandfather Whitby’s funeral. The barrel baron, the king of capital, the yelling fat man in a wheelchair—he had fought off death for ninety-seven years, and came close to beating it.

  A line of black town cars waited in the circular drive of the hotel, each car perfectly aligned with a potted queen palm, beside which stood a driver in black uniform and white gloves. In front of Nick, his mother moved at an alarming clip; the wide seat of her pantsuit waddled to and fro and into the back seat of a town car. Nick was the only child of this ex–third grade teacher, this half-hearted gardener, this piner after her absent, aged husband. He wondered if there was a car for each of his adopted father’s wives: “One, Two, Three, Four . . .” Though Roger had just moved Nick and his mother to California, he was already living outside of their home. Every time they walked through the lobby of the hotel, Nick’s mother’s freckles burned as she looked left and right for Roger, her face brighter than the copious blooming lilies.

  Grandfather Whitby had been an icon to many. Roger Whitby Sr. was the shipping king turned real estate mogul, the prize of American industry. The son of already prominent in
dustrialists, he and his brother had surpassed their parents and created a true empire. His physical image had been reproduced wildly on pasted-up bills and magazine ads in the forties: two solid feet planted at the stern of a wooden steamship, hands clasped at his chest, collar tied up tight. The blade of competition gleamed in his eyes, underneath one-hundred-foot sails. Somehow Grandfather Whitby possessed none of the Whitby characteristics that his progeny and the subsequent bloodline upheld. No, Roger Whitby Sr. was a stout five feet nine inches tall, with a drum of a belly orbing from his egg center. His hair, when it still existed, was dishwater dark and wiry. Yet his children were ethereal WASPs: sullen and stretched-out, perpetually sunburned. And his grandchildren were all the more Waspish. It was as if Grandfather Whitby had produced this familial effect through hard-set will alone. Although Nick was adopted, and technically only a Whitby through legal means, everyone commented on how he looked like the rest of them. He was an angular kid, and tall for his age, with most of the height coming from the great length of leg that held him up. He would have looked older than he was, save for his head of fat golden curls. Mothers had cooed at his hair for as long as he could remember. It gave him a softness he couldn’t get away from, and this fact made embarrassment boil in his guts. He knew he was cherublike, girlish.

  During the funeral service at the chapel of Forest Lawn cemetery, Nick sat beside his mother in the second row of pews and didn’t notice the girl there at all. His mother kept telling him that this was a “family event,” but Nick understood that he was in a room filled with wealthy strangers, most of whom were suspicious of him and his mother, if they had any idea who they were. It wasn’t until he was standing in the graveyard at the front of the crowd that he saw her. The service was a buzz of boring protestant platitudes until three notes from a bugle player cracked through the gray air and three marines marched out holding mahogany rifles. Two more marched behind, in white hats and dark jackets, but these men walked backward while their knees rose in time to the bugle as they unfurled an American flag. Nick wondered what he would feel like if all these multitudes of people really were his family—it would be like being part of a sports team, or an army, where you were always protected. The sheer number of them ensured this; all those people would not only know you but help you, and you could do anything in the world that you wanted. It was then that the girl at the front of the crowd began to produce embarrassing hound-like howls. Nick’s adopted father was at the foot of the burial plot, eyes unfocused, turning his tongue over in his open mouth, holding a metal cane. He was getting sick. In recent weeks Nick’s mother had tucked herself beside Nick in his bed and pulled her son close as she whispered that his father was an adulterer. Nick found this fitting. Roger was certainly an adult; compared to him and his mother, he was so very old.