The Exiles (8 page)

Emily shook her head.

Nate walked over to her, lifted one of the city guides from the desk, and rifled through its pages. For a man with such a steady, calm exterior, Nate had a surprising proclivity for fidgeting.

“Good idea,” he said, placing the guide back in front of her.

“What is?”

“Doing the tourist crap today. Anything we can walk to.”

“Maybe they’ll find our car,” Emily said.

“You don’t really believe that.”

“No,” she said. “Well, maybe.”

“We can’t sit around waiting for it to drive back to us. We’ll hit up a landmark or two. We’ve got the time.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be locals?” Emily found that saying it aloud, professing that they were residents, made that fact feel almost real.

“As long as we’re staying in a hotel, we might as well do all the shameless sightseeing. We’ll never do it once we move in,” Nate said. “Trust me.” In New York, they made fun of tourists, even of friends who came to visit and insisted on seeing Broadway plays—well, not
plays
but musicals—though ever since
Cats
closed it had been harder to deride the out-of-towners. Manhattanites had lost their punch line.

“I haven’t done touristy Newport since I was a kid,” Nate said. He walked toward the window. The sun was starting to stream in around the edge of the drapes.

“You were here as a kid?” Emily said. He’d painted a picture of a glee-free childhood, and Emily had imagined his family dressed entirely in Puritan gray, eating Salisbury steak TV dinners.
He rarely spoke about his family at all, in fact. When Emily first started dating Nate, she’d tried to draw him out with questions about his brother and his mother, both long dead already. In response to her inquests he merely shrugged and lamented that it all happened a long time ago.

If Emily were like Nate, a person who ordered his life by lists and numbers, this lingering family trauma, along with his financial poverty, would have made up the whole of her “cons” column about building a life with him. The pros were profligate, she reminded herself. The cons, she feared, were mostly on her side now.

“We, my family, vacationed in Newport once,” Nate said.

“You told me you never went on family vacations.”

“Barely. There was one short Newport trip when I was in grade school. I mean, during a summer when I was that age.”

“You never mentioned it.”

Emily had assumed that famous architects were rich, until she met Nate and he explained that even the biggies struggled. They sank into debt with each commission they lost and tended to set up their offices in the heartland, where space and talent were cheaper than in New York and L.A.

“I thought I had,” said Nate.

A plaintive babbling—this one sounded like
dada,
Emily had to concede—came from Trevor’s direction. Emily was struck by the capaciousness of their suite.

“I’m being called.” Nate smiled and leaned in to kiss her, then abruptly pulled away. “Oh, honey, secondhand nicotine.” He winced and made his way toward the bedroom and Trevor’s cries. “You’ve got to give up the gum, honestly.”

“You want me to smoke?” Emily said, following him and standing in the door to the bedroom.

“You hate smoking,” Nate said. He was already at the side of the Pack ’n Play, leaning down to pick up Trevor. “It’s an empty threat.”

Emily glanced behind her and took one last look at the Newport area guide, which lay on the desk. Stupid sightseeing would be good for them, better than trekking to their new house and checking that the utilities were on and pacing the empty rooms, better than lamenting this life of hers and waiting for the future to hit. There’d be plenty of time for that later. Sightseeing would be a fine distraction, she thought, and mostly free of charge, too. They could walk the docks in the harbor and pretend to be legitimately married, utterly innocent Midwesterners seeing touristy Newport for the first time.

CHAPTER
7

Newport, 1974

N
ATE, AT AGE EIGHT
, had been thrilled when his mother announced they’d be taking a family vacation to a place called Newport. He’d have been thrilled to go anywhere, seeing as he’d rarely been out of Ohio, other than one trip to Vienna when he was a toddler and a small slew of summer weekends on lakes in Wisconsin and Michigan in the years since. Travel was alluring, exotic, practically unheard of. And travel with his entire family? It seemed all but impossible. Whole-family vacations, up until that very moment, had been the kind of thing that other people did. Bart Oaken and his parents went to Europe every summer, and each fall Bart returned to school with a new French catchword and beret. Art Eberly spent Christmases in Dallas with both sets of his grandparents. Shawn Doohan, who couldn’t make it the short distance from home to school without losing his permission slip—or even, once, his left shoe—went on lavish globetrotting family adventures while Nate, whose mother was
from
Europe, traveled almost nowhere. He couldn’t even remember his one visit to
Austria, when he was an infant. Nate was told that he’d met his maternal grandmother during that trip. She died the following year and Nate’s parents flew to her funeral alone while Nate and his newborn brother Charlie stayed home.

Nate’s father traveled solo all the time for work. He spent months at a stretch in Copenhagen or Charlottesville or Bangladesh, coming home only for a night or two to repack his suitcase and check the mail. Those were early-to-bed evenings for Nate and Charlie. They’d huddle in their bunks, arranged one atop the other, and listen to a baseball game on the radio while their parents did whatever parents did in the grand open space that was the rest of the house.

Nate’s father seemed to love living in a home of his own design, a home he’d built specifically for this family. According to the house’s lore, George Bedecker had envisioned it as an update of Le Corbusier’s apartment complex in Marseille, stacked concrete blocks with large wall-spanning windows set back into the structure. At age eight, Nate—whose father gave him monographs on Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe for Christmas when other kids got Matchbox cars—had seen all of the articles about their house. He’d laid eyes on actual newspaper stories featuring grainy photos of his own front yard.
Homage,
one article said of the Bedecker house.
Homage
was a word Nate didn’t need to look up. He’d heard the term so often that it was part of his vernacular.
Homage
and
derivative
were the words most of the articles relied on to describe the spare square building where Nate lived. The cube lay nestled in the woods just outside Cleveland, a far cry from Marseille, from what Nate understood, though Nate’s mother, Annemarie, tried to raise its standing by holding Sunday night “Culture Court” for her sons, introducing them to Wagner and Kandinsky and serving
homemade dumplings and sauerkraut and torten layered with apricot. The one thing she hadn’t managed to infuse into the home was warmth. No matter how much art she brought in, the Bedeckers’ residential box was still constructed completely out of raw concrete and glass, a massive open square only divided to make room for the boys’ beds, for their parents’ bed, and for two utilitarian bathrooms.
Our house wasn’t made for sleeping,
Nate heard Charlie tell one of his friends a year before the Newport trip, when Charlie was only five yet already viewed the world in a straightforward, nonjudgmental fashion. If there had been no Nate and no Charlie, Nate assumed the house would have been left entirely open, without walls whatsoever.

In Newport, the Bedeckers stayed in a hotel that surpassed Nate’s expectations. He reveled in the small divided chambers, the satin drapes, and the bathroom tiled with tiny mosaic circles. Rather than concrete, the walls were wooden on the outside and wallpaper inside. On their first night, while Charlie unwrapped the shower cap in the bathroom, Nate opened and closed the drawers on the fragile wooden desk next to the window, taking out a toothpick-thin pencil and examining it in detail. The window itself was split into sixteen panes of wavy glass, speckled with age. The paint on the sash and the sill was a stark dove white.

The next morning, the family gathered for breakfast in the hotel’s formal dining room and spoke in hushed voices as Nate’s mother described the schedule for the week ahead. After breakfast each day, Nate and Charlie would have a swim lesson and then play with their mother on the beach. Later in the day, the boys would take a group sailing class. Nate nodded and reached across the table for a saucer filled with rosettes of butter. He
carefully cut one of the petals off with his knife and spread it across his pancakes, the fat melting even before he had a chance to pour hot syrup on top.

The syrup, the sailing, the soft-serve window a block from the beach: Six-year-old Charlie was enchanted by the whole trip. He’d have been happy with the soft-serve only. The sailing and swimming were icing to him, but Nate, two years older, had been looking forward to an actual family getaway. He’d imagined his father ruffling his hair and letting them drink extra Cokes and watching from the beach as their sailing class debarked. As it turned out, Nate and his brother barely saw their father at all in Newport except at the breakfast and dinner tables—and dinner was so late (did everyone eat so long after dark on vacation? Charlie practically fell asleep at the table each night) that Nate was dazed through much of it. The only time they saw their father during the daylight hours was on their final afternoon.

The sailing lessons had turned out to be torture every day at 2:00 p.m. Aside from the Bedeckers, there were only two kids in the class: a set of brothers from Washington, DC. These other boys spoke a hidden code, making secret jokes about the people in rowboats and the yacht club’s hot dogs. They’d been coming to Newport for their entire lives. Their swim trunks were brightly colored and the older one’s featured a stretch of actual rope around the waistband. They knew everything. As the DC brothers yammered on, Nate and Charlie remained largely silent during the lessons. The other boys’ noise was tough to compete with and the Bedeckers had more to learn anyway, having never sailed before. After each class was over and the other boys gone, Nate and Charlie came alive again, Nate summing up the events of the lesson.

“Hello, Cleveland! Rookie Charlie Bedecker outperformed
himself at the rudder today, slipping a fast one over the eyes of two bad trades from DC!” he’d say, mimicking Joe Tait, the voice of the Cleveland Indians on the radio. Nate and Charlie were like Tait and his partner, Herb Score. Score could go three full innings without saying a word. When he did speak, it was simple trustworthy narration, true to the facts. Strong and silent, that was Charlie. He was conscientious and thoughtful, his life taking place inside his own head. Nate, like Tait, could fill empty space—between batters or between sailing class and dinner—with off-center observations and a steady stream of electrifyingly empty words.

On the final afternoon their lesson was short, only a one-hour wrap-up where the boys were allowed to man the rudder and the sheet by themselves. Afterward they met up with their mother as they had every day, at the end of the dock, next to the sailing school’s warped flagpole. She usually fetched them on foot, but today, since they were done so early, she’d arrived in the rental car, briefly leaving it idling while she ran up to the sidewalk and motioned to the boys to get in. This afternoon they’d be accompanying their mother on her daily trek to nearby Narragansett to pick up their father. Nate assumed it was a work project that had drawn George to Rhode Island and kept him tied up in Narragansett this week; Nate had grown to assume that this family vacation was, for George, merely another business trip. Nate imagined that while he and Charlie were at swim class each morning, their father was building a beach house for another boy’s family.

Nate and Charlie slouched in the back of the rental car, their tan legs spread fat against the vinyl seats.

“I pulled on the halyard, Mom, it’s really hard, all by myself—”

“He raised the sail, Mom, all by himself,” Nate interrupted Charlie. The car reached the far side of the bridges and headed down the mainland coast.

“And no one else—”

“Those dopes in the other boat, they got their sail halfway up and practically capsized. Charlie didn’t even need my help. He’s a future sailor, Mom.”

“Hey, Mom, do you know what capsize means?”

“You tell me,
lieben.
” She briefly turned from the front seat to smile at Charlie, sitting in the middle of the backseat. As they drove parallel to the water, the road narrowed and the houses grew farther apart. Nate’s mother appeared to be navigating by rote. She’d taken this road twice a day—to drop off George while the boys were swimming in the morning and to pick him up while they were sailing—since their arrival in Newport. “It will just take a minute,” she’d told her sons about today’s Narragansett drive. Tonight, back in Newport, they’d eat dinner together again, the last time they’d do so for a while, Nate figured. At the hotel, they always ate at the same table along the dining room’s windowed wall. The hotel’s linen napkins were embossed with tiny blue sailboats. The Bedeckers also used linen napkins for dinner at home, where small silver rings permanently resided next to their plates. After each meal at home, the boys twisted their napkins into the rings for safekeeping until the next day. George—Nate called his father by his first name, something that had started out as a joke when his dad wasn’t around and later stuck when his father didn’t seem to mind or notice—believed in minimalism and utilitarianism and made a frequent plea for paper napkins. Nate’s mother insisted on cloth and wouldn’t compromise. She insisted on keeping at least this small hold on tradition. Nate silently sided with his mother in
the napkin debate. His mother was foreign and worldly even to her own sons, with her Austrian accent and relatives an ocean away. Their father’s relatives were American, but the boys had barely met them. “It’s okay,” Nate told Charlie once, while discussing their lack of extended kin, “I’m your family.”