The Exiles (15 page)

He stood within two hours of Narragansett. He could be there, inside the house, his feet planted on the floorboards of his ancestors, soon. Even if he continued driving cautiously and well under the speed limit, he’d be there by early afternoon. What did it mean that even as George sold Bedecker House, his own longtime residence, he’d held onto his father’s home? That he’d kept possession of the modest ground where his father had lived his whole life, had raised George himself? George waited for a lull in the traffic stream and then cracked open the door to the car and slid himself inside, engaging the power locks and turning the key in the ignition. He would be remembered, he told himself. Of course he would.

CHAPTER
14

On Faith

N
ATE AND
T
REVOR SAT
on an expanse of lawn around the corner from the Viking, across from a stone Unitarian chapel. Newport was a living, breathing slice of God circa 1750. Its cramped, old-town lanes were densely populated with clapboard churches and threatening gravesites and one staunch, domineering Quaker meeting house. Given this milieu, Nate tried to feel pious, but instead he felt only the grogginess of too many sleepless hours, of nearly four decades of living as a heathen.

Trevor had been up most of the night, refusing to be placated by Cheerios or formula, even resisting when Emily, at 3:00 a.m., brought him into the king-size bed where they’d drowsily sung reggae to him, making up nonsense lyrics and riffing on the classics (“No woman,
no cry
”), using their lips and tongues to mimic the Rasta beats of his lost CD. It didn’t work. The boy kicked and punched at the air until, after he nailed Nate in the ribs with his tiny torpedo of a leg, they finally returned him to
the Pack ’n Play. Eventually they all must have fallen asleep, because at 8:00 a.m. Nate woke to find himself on the floor, curled around a corner of that Pack ’n Play as if sheltering his child. If only he could. Emily was deep in slumber on the bed, her legs entwined in the sheet. And the phone was ringing. Nate reached up and grabbed the receiver before the harsh clang disturbed Emily. The phone call, it turned out, was a wake-up call. Emily must have requested it. With all of her nervous energy she probably wanted to get a jump on the day even though they had nowhere to go. He hung up the phone and let Emily continue to sleep.

Though Emily lay undisturbed, the call woke the baby. Nate changed and dressed the boy with little more than the usual struggle and grabbed Emily’s overstuffed baby bag. He took her phone and wallet out of it and restocked it with supplies (a few diapers, a bottle that Nate filled with fresh formula, a sealed packet of wipes). Then he carried Trevor outside to this spread of grass. Together they watched as congregants lined up outside the chapel. The congregants climbed up the entryway’s high steps, nodding their heads in silent greeting to one another. What were
their
sins? There must have been forty people waiting to enter and countless others already inside. One older man tripped and fell gently up the steps, rather than down. As the final churchgoers approached the entrance, they lightly crushed against one another in a delicate push to get through the door. Simple belief had to be a nice way to live.

“Oh, hey, buster!” Nate scrambled after Trevor, who had begun to crawl toward the deists. There was a morning chill to the ground and Nate plucked Trevor up and held the boy’s hands in front of his mouth, warming them with his breath. Trevor poked a finger between Nate’s teeth, and Nate gently
nibbled on it. Trevor smiled, a genuine smile, but he was still looking at the church. He’d been making a beeline for religion, something he’d surely never get from his parents.

“You want a piece of the action, chief?” Nate smoothed his son’s rangy hair. The boy smelled like hotel soap.

Before leaving the Viking, Nate had left Emily a hastily penned note: “Awake early, out for fresh air with T.” Church was the opposite of what Emily and Nate usually considered fresh air. Religion, to them, fell somewhere between oppression and pollen, squarely in the realm of the rarely observed hindrance. Faith and fate, as Nate saw it, went hand in hand. And over this past month, he and fate had launched into an uncomfortable relationship. Here, though, standing with his son in the town where the boy would grow up—Nate fervently hoped that Trevor
would
actually grow up—eyeing a congregation of hopefuls, a crowd of religious dreamers praying for their hearts’ desires, Nate felt, for a moment, appealingly small and abundantly blameless. He felt like just another cog. He felt improbably at home.

Nate had been brought up without religion, yet when he returned to Ohio for Christmas during his senior year of high school, he tripped over a small ivory Buddha. The diaper-clad demigod—sitting cross-legged in front of a woven prayer rug—had been installed in Bedecker House’s glass-paned entryway while Nate was away. The kitchen windows, the smallest in the house (miniscule portals sandwiched between the industrial cabinets and metal counters), had been covered with ethereal white muslin shades. His mother, who’d shunned God for as long as Nate could remember, had suddenly fallen for Western Caodaism.

“Western
what?
” Nate asked.

“Western Caodaism,” his mother said with an accent on
Caodaism
that he couldn’t place. She continued, “Existence is in accord, in every step.”

Charlie, who’d been home for a few days longer than Nate, walked into the room as Annemarie said this. He smiled at Nate. Clearly this wasn’t the first of these pronouncements from their mother.

“Existence in the accord?” Nate said.

“Come on, Nate! The great Western Caodaism, savior of the people!” Charlie smirked as he said this, though their mother showed no reaction. “Come on, Mom, I’ve done my research, and Austrians do not worship mass-produced ivory statues of naked Asians. Not even in the name of Caodaism.”

“I don’t worship the Buddha,
lieben,
” she said, her voice gentle. She spoke with the slow cadence she’d used to placate her sons when they were children. “The statue is simply in homage to our Eastern brethren. We live in a greater world, never forget that.”

Charlie tugged on the arm of Nate’s sweater and led him out of the room.

“Don’t we need to take action, intervene?” he asked Nate as they stood in the house’s entryway. He wanted a directive from Nate. As the younger brother, Charlie had always deferred to Nate on family-related matters. He listened to Nate, took his perspective as Bedecker law even though, as Nate saw it, Charlie was the sharper observer, the quiet synthesizer. Nate was a pro when it came to the surface details, but Charlie understood what was going on at the heart of matters. Nate worried that once they became true adults, equals and no longer younger brother and older brother, Charlie would curse himself for having relied on Nate’s skin-deep counsel for so many years.

“Nate, she’s freaking out. We need to save her.”

“How would we save her?” Nate said. “She’s only trying to save herself.”

“It’s psychiatric, isn’t it, what’s going on? There must be doctors who could treat her, or clinics.”

“What would she do at a clinic?” Nate said. “Clinics are for tennis lessons and heart patients.”

They heard a body shifting in the doorway and both turned to look behind them. George stood staunch in the square space, openly listening to his sons. He turned to leave and then turned back. “Don’t worry, boys, she’ll snap out of it in a year or two,” he said. “You’ll have your mother back.”

Two years later she’d withdrawn deeper into her own consciousness and Charlie was dead. He’d gone from
there
to
not
without warning, as if he’d never been alive at all. In the days after Charlie’s death, Nate found himself reaching out his arms to feel the air in front of him, as if he might brush up against Charlie’s chest. As if he weren’t dead but simply invisible. As if his mass still existed and it were merely a matter of locating it. It was at Charlie’s funeral that Nate, stoic in his disbelief, saw both of his parents cry for the first time. His mother’s tears were like a wet veil over her face; his father’s were softer and quiet in their unexpectedness. Nate understood, then, that these two strange adults truly shared something. After the funeral, they and Nate went their separate ways again, the bonds between them one person weaker. Two years after that, Annemarie was dead, too, the doctors promising that the speed of her leukemia had been a blessing and that she’d gotten the best care.

After Annemarie’s graveside service, where Nate (a senior in college at the time) and his father stood with a foot of cold Cleveland air between them, Nate spent his final nights in the glass house. He boxed up his and Charlie’s things for storage
and signed a stack of papers: a contract with the storage facility, a form from the trust that Annemarie had set up and included just enough to cover the remainder of Nate’s education costs.

“We’re all that’s left,” Nate told his father on one of those nights as they sat across from each other in the kitchen. “What do we do?” He said it lightly, his voice tentative, and the
we
hit George and bounced back to Nate with the reflexive speed of a Super Ball. George had always been linked to his children through their mother and didn’t seem to have the instincts, or interest, to be a father. Nate’s questions were met with silence and headshakes. He could hear his father crying late at night, out in the living room, probably sitting in the Eames chair that was imprinted with the shape of his spine. Even through the heavy walls that separated Nate’s room from this expanse, he could hear his father’s choked sobs. George’s grief was private but unbridled, as if the man, the man inside the man, had been set loose.

Nate finished his last semester of college and continued—then and in the years that followed—trying to reach out, with occasional phone calls, to George. He was the only other person on earth with whom Nate had shared Charlie and Annemarie. George handled Nate’s calls (and the ensuing conversations about nothing, about Nate’s New York digs or the greater implications of solar power or the weather) haltingly. Sometimes in the silences Nate felt his father’s desire, perhaps, to make a connection. But before the silence could develop, before Nate or George could reach all the way across the line for some sort of tangible touch with the other, the call would be over. The calls finally dwindled to once or twice a year, and now the two Bedeckers came into contact on only rare occasions—once, in a call put through by George’s longtime assistant, Danielle, to
tell Nate that the trust, effectively empty, was being closed out. And once, over a decade ago, to announce another death, that of Nate’s grandfather, George’s dad. After Nate answered that call, Danielle put George on the line.

“The old man in Rhode Island,” Nate said into the phone. “That’s who’s dead?”

He didn’t understand precisely why his father was making a point to call with the news. Nate had never known the old man, though he’d thought of him often, of that one glimpse of him.

“He made it to old age,” George said. “Confounding. He should have given up years ago.”

“I never knew him. I’m sorry for your loss.” These were the same platitudes people offered Nate when they heard he had a dead mother, a dead brother (two tragedies that had been numbed, in Nate, by time rather than platitudes). They were the only words he had in his possession when it came to talking about grief.

“If he’d been well, if he’d been accessible and in mental health, physically able, I’d have introduced you. You’d have known him. It wasn’t a possibility by the time you came along.”

There was a silence on the phone, like the arid, aural spaces that had filled the Cleveland house on so many empty Saturdays.

“I’ll be going to Rhode Island to settle his things. That’s why I’ve called. Before closing up his house, I’m planning to have my goods shipped from storage in Cleveland. I’ll keep them there, now. It’s an empty house, with a surplus of unused space,” George said. After Annemarie’s death, he’d relocated his office and residence to Chicago, seeing no reason to remain in Ohio, apparently, a place with either too many memories or too few. George had sold the glass-and-stone cube that served as the family’s home in Cleveland, boxed up its contents and moved them
into storage. “If you’d like me to have your boxes shipped at the same time, I can have that done. No one is living in the Rhode Island house anymore. The space is free.”

Nate remembered the home in Narragansett, with its old-fashioned front porch and views over the water and creepily degenerated inhabitant.

“Why don’t you just sell the damn house in Rhode Island?” Nate said. After all, George had found it remarkably easy to unload the Cleveland home, the house in which Nate grew up, a home that George himself built. The new owners had probably torn the place down by now. “You sold our home.”

“Our house was mine to sell,” George said. “The Rhode Island house has history.” And after a pause, matter-of-factly, as if his words were rationed, “I loved the Cleveland house. I loved your brother, too. I loved Annemarie.” And then, it seemed, there was nothing else to say. Nate would leave his boxes in storage in Ohio, cleaving his things from his father’s, a decision that made their physical rift final.

Nate wanted to be as close to Trevor as George had been distant with his own sons. That was the thought he had on the lawn in Newport—that perhaps he could be the negative image of his own father. That, ideally, Trevor could love him back. When the last parishioners had entered the church across the way, Nate looked back down at his son. A steady stream of drool dripped straight from Trevor’s lips to his now-damp T-shirt.

“Oh, kiddo,” Nate said touching the shirt’s wet spot, which stretched from Trevor’s neck down his chest. The boy’s diaper was wet, too. Nate could feel the familiar ooze as he wrapped his arms around Trevor’s back and bottom, adjusting the boy’s weight in his grasp.

He lay Trevor on the grass and reached into the bag for the diapers and wipes. What Trevor really needed was a dry shirt. Nate knew that finding one was a long shot, given their lack of clean laundry, but he rifled through the bag anyway. Emily usually kept a spare set of Trevor’s clothes in the diaper tote. The kid was constantly in need of changing.