Baby of the Family

by Maura Roosevelt

  Her heart began to race. Her breath sped up. The biological chances of this happening were less than 20 percent. She knew this as fact, she kept track of her body. She looked again at the faded pink symbols and tried to inform herself of the news: I am pregnant. She heard footsteps in the hallway. Allie, walking toward the kitchen. Allie’s footsteps landing on her floor.

  She loved those footsteps. Now panic set in. She loved the fact that Allie’s feet were in her house. And once Allie knew about this pregnancy, she would certainly leave forever. Brooke’s hand went instinctively to the lower part of her abdomen. She was pregnant. With Marc Costa’s child. Upon looking down at the plastic stick, she realized perhaps this was what she wanted to happen, but this was certainly not the way she wanted it to happen. It felt as though everything that had been secured to the floor was now blasted into the air, floating. She stumbled back onto the edge of the old tub. She felt her fear coming true—the Whitby Curse was actually returning. Despite Armond’s assurances, it was all coming apart again. Soon she would have nothing to grasp on to.

  7

  It was two weeks after Shelley fled college and her waitressing job that she met Mr. Kamal. She’d needed money quick, although looking back, it was just a tiny sum. The shock of what we didn’t know can impress us, over and again.

  Shelley had never lived alone before. She was staying up late watching episodes of E! True Hollywood Story, sleeping until noon, then beginning her day with a tropical fruit juice and Stoli concoction. Why the hell not? This setup was temporary—it would end any day, whenever her mother returned. Occasionally she wondered if this was the lifestyle her mother inhabited, before she fell off the edge into mania. But Shelley quickly dismissed those thoughts; she wasn’t like her mother. She was a kid, and this was normal behavior. She was happy to have left Demming, really. Not only was she wasting her time there, but with every plastic cup of beer and plate of french fries and matinee at the South Hills Cinema, she was unnecessarily draining her bank account. But now that she was away from that ineffectual yet busy college life, her days seemed longer than they’d ever been. The night after she’d arrived home, she had picked up the ringing landline phone, and thus been found by the shrill voice of Ms. Scribner, who had apparently talked to some random Demming girl and learned that Shelley had returned home. Then, of course, Ms. Scribner had told the lawyer, Armond, where Shelley was. Now she received phone calls from each of them on a near daily basis. Some days it was a mere check-in (“Heard from Nick?”), but other days there were thundering yells from Ms. Scribner and the occasional cry. She felt deadened to these outbursts. Since Roger’s death, Shelley’s life had been on hold, and it seemed that Nick’s was too. He’d surely pop up when things returned to normal.

  One Tuesday Shelley was up early: 11:52 a.m. The phone rang, and there was Ms. Scribner, inconsolable. “Is he dead, Shelley? Is my baby dead? Gone forever, lying in a park somewhere—murdered and cast away?” She continued like this while Shelley remained silent. The police had gotten involved. Nick was considered missing, but Shelley hadn’t succumbed to the panic. It was just the kind of thing he would do, disappear so that everyone would pay attention to him. “You don’t understand,” Ms. Scribner wailed over the line. “You’re too young, you’ve never even known anyone who has died.” Shelley didn’t respond, but rather felt a kick of sorrow in her stomach as she refilled her drink in a pint glass that read 50th Reunion, Exeter Class of ’41. The glass had belonged to her father.

  Shelley hadn’t spoken to her other half siblings, although Ms. Scribner said many of them were at their father’s funeral. This confirmed two facts: that there had actually been a funeral, and that the other children had conveniently gotten the message about it. With this news, that kick became an ache lodged in Shelley’s gut. Her half siblings were quick to forget her. They were so much older than her, living lives she couldn’t imagine. Brooke was her only connection to them, and even she hadn’t told Shelley about it. The other half siblings were more like distant cousins who only reached out when they had a personally pressing need. She imagined their distraction right now, the raging fires popping up in the houses of each of her semi brothers and sisters. They must have spent the past week calling each other late at night, wrapping strands of pearls around their fingers and crunching the ice from their drained tumblers. “He would do this to us, just one final smack from the grave. He would give everything to the one person who isn’t even a real Whitby.”

  Shelley’s half siblings called Nick that on several occasions, whenever there was a family reunion or a wedding or a funeral that required most of them in attendance. Shelley was related to them by blood—half the stuff coursing through her was similar to half the stuff coursing through them—and to the older crew of siblings, this was enough to include her. Although Roger’s marriage to Shelley’s mother certainly upset and disrupted the previous families, his other children never seemed to hold it against Shelley personally. Of course, there was another reason she was included by her father’s first two families. Shelley’s mother was a Saltman: an East Coast–bred, putter-around-in-loafers, old, wealthy family. The Saltmans knew the Whitbys, always. But Nick’s mother was simply a schoolteacher. She had grown up in California, where no one was really from. Ms. Scribner was uncouth, short, and heavy-set in the wrong places; she was clearly not their kind, and therefore, neither was Nick. Shelley imagined Kiki and Andrew, and all the rest of the lawyers and bankers and stay-at-home moms with Princeton degrees, scoffing through the phone lines: “Obviously that woman is behind the change in the will,” which actually meant, That woman is trash, trash, trash.

  As Shelley’s lonely days in her mother’s apartment piled up, she watched her physical pile of cash dwindle down. She paced her intake of Virginia Slims and bought the off-brand tropical fruit juice. Yet the money still went. Her mother, her sweet and well-intentioned mother, had been sick for years, but as far as Shelley knew, she really could be dashing back and forth from the Vineyard to Boston, talking to lawyers and “saying goodbye” to the old house. Although this was the longest stint, this was not the first time she’d dropped off. Elizabeth’s previous disappearances had always been due to hospitalizations. After the first hospitalization, when Shelley was in high school and Biddy was still alive, Elizabeth had returned home and said absently, under her breath but very clearly, “I am no longer in charge.” Shelley had stopped in her tracks in the parlor but had not responded. If they talked about the comment, it would become established, more true. Yes, her mother sometimes needed help. And if she was in the hospital now, then she was also being taken care of. Someone, at some point, would let Shelley know.

  After a week of camping out alone, she’d finally called up some friends. Charlotte and Zoë were girls she’d gone to Spence with; girls she’d slept beside during sleepovers at their country houses; girls who, for their own reasons, were not in college but rather living in upper Manhattan with their families. They had met some trouble-making skateboarding boys in Union Square and brought them back to Strong Place on a Friday night with beers and rolling papers. Shelley accidentally fell asleep upstairs on Biddy’s old elevated bed and awoke around five in the morning. She stumbled down to the parlor to see her guests kneeling around the coffee table with a beefy Latino man, snorting lines off the cover of an art book. The dealer had baggy jeans with one leg rolled up—he had ridden his bike there. They were all jabbering and smoking cigarettes with abrupt hand gestures when this rolled-up man lifted himself off the floor and down again onto the end of the powder-blue velvet settee, which broke under his weight. The foot cracked vertically in two pieces, and the couch fell on one of its haunches.

  Shelley turned toward the accident: she was in a haze, confused. “Why’d th-that happen?” she stuttered. The man shrugged, and Shelley thought of her mother. Of all things she would care about when she returned, this was the most grave. Although technically it belonged to Roger, the house was the only b
eloved possession her mother still had. Elizabeth Saltman Whitby truly loved their four walls, their constricted rooms and ancient possessions.

  “Bastards!” Shelley yelled at the crowd. The two girls and three boys in the living room giggled at various pitches, as if she were joking. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and nearly spat. “Out! Everyone out, all of you! Now.”

  She pointed and pushed the drug-laden group through the kitchen and out the front door, then watched them descend the cobbled street in the predawn. Inconsiderate. Selfish. Not one of them had said a thing about her father. Neither Charlotte nor Zoë even knew that Nick was missing. Had she ever made a decent friend in her life?

  Back upstairs in Biddy’s bed, the sun rose as Shelley alternately pulled at the roots of her hair and released tears that resembled trickles of sweat. It was midmorning when she concluded that what she needed to do was make some cash and hire a professional to repair the couch before her mother returned. She went into the cramped office, turned on the old desktop, and went onto Craigslist. She’d thought of this work before; what occasionally broke young woman in New York hadn’t? She perused the Casual Encounters section, searching M4W and Paid and responded to the first three bulletins. Then she clicked on the Etc. / Misc. tab, where the headline of the first ad announced: ASSISTANT TO BLIND PROFESSIONAL NEEDED, UPPER EAST SIDE. The body of the notice said: “Looking for well-educated young woman to read to clinically blind architect, in his home. Must have strong reading voice and be able to take dictation. Position available immediately.”

  She shot off another thoughtless message, which invented a college degree, before her drowsy head wavered and dropped to the shellacked surface of the rolltop letter desk.

  Her cell phone’s ring woke her; her back ached from having slept while sitting.

  “Hello?” a deep voice inquired over the line. It was a voice that commanded a listener to follow it; a voice that believed it was owed another’s time. Shelley was disoriented. Her email held messages from two of the three Casual Encounter requests she’d responded to. The voice on the phone continued, “This is Yousef Kamal. I have been told you responded to my ad for a reader.” Each vowel of the last word was elongated, articulated individually.

  “Oh, yes, hello.” She was surprised that her pitch hit an octave higher than normal. She had never thought of herself as shy. At Spence she’d often sat in the wood-paneled office of the upper school dean. Mr. Berneson, stop making the girls sing that banana song, it’s perverted, she’d said to her sixth-grade music teacher. Mrs. Michaelson, if you didn’t smoke cigarettes by the jungle gym you wouldn’t have so many wrinkles and your husband wouldn’t have left you. Fourth grade, mandatory suspension. The Fulbright committee called and said they’d never give you a fellowship, because you are so unbelievably average. Dr. Kelly, seventh grade. Grown-man tears.

  “Let me tell you about myself,” the voice over the phone bellowed. “I am the master architect of two public monuments and multifarious classical buildings, both American and abroad. I was rendered into absolute blindness from an automobile accident at age twenty-four.”

  The first two emails back from her M4W responses were polite: “Looking for a freak, hope you fit. Let’s play! Respond and I’ll send location.” And “Business man who can give a good spanking, fun and easy. If you’re ready to have it I’m ready to give it. Fast cash—must respond now.” But she had two more emails from the second man: “Meet at 5 at my office. My desk is waiting. I’ll spread you over it. A sure $150.” Then: “What’s your fucking problem? I’m sick of undependable cunts. I need to leave my office soon.”

  Shelley opted to respond to the voice on the phone. “I see—”

  He said, “I am looking for someone to help me, to read to me. How soon can you come in for an interview?”

  * * *

  —

  Two hours later Shelley had showered and crossed the park. She found herself on Sixty-Eighth Street and Madison Avenue, standing in front of the Grisham: a mammoth stone building that fit into the dignified air of the neighborhood. She unfastened the safety pin that held her peacoat shut. It was a nice coat, really, it was just old. As soon as her mother returned from the Vineyard she would surely buy Shelley a new one. They’d probably go to the Patagonia store and buy one of those non-puffy down pieces, her mother hugging Shelley’s body sideways as they descended the wide, crowded sidewalk on Columbus. But for now, Shelley took the safety pin out from where a button should be and put it in her pocket.

  One deep breath, and she walked into the lobby. The doorman was shrunken; the starch of his black-and-gold uniform seemed as if it alone were holding him up.

  “How may I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Mr. Kamal.”

  He looked her up and down. “Top floor, ma’am. Press fourteen.”

  As Shelley ascended the stacked floors of the Grisham, she knew exactly where she was. She rose past locked apartments where children in sparse kitchens were tucked into highchairs, being fed dinners of cut-up hot dogs and brown rice by their tired nannies. The doorman was returning to his post, fixing his eyes through the glass door, onto the pavement’s yellow traffic lines, dotted with brown maple leaves that had emerged from the late-thawing snow. Across the street at the Stylus Club, white-haired women pretended to smile while sipping lukewarm decaf in the drawing room, discussing their dead husbands.

  The elevator opened directly into the apartment. Its low bing and the jut of the doors made Shelley sigh. It was familiar; just the same as the apartments of the Charlottes and Zoës of her life. How nice to return to the places you were really from. She swallowed, looked up, and there he was. In the foyer stood Mr. Yousef Kamal, almost falling into the open doors.

  He had no eyes. He was Middle Eastern, in his midsixties, wearing a crisp oxford and belted khakis. His hand extended, waiting. He had sparse, wiry hair. Where there would normally be convex bulbs there were scooped recesses, largely obscured by drooping skin. The cornea, the pupil, the retina below, none existed—only two moonlike slivers of white were visible just below the eyelids.

  For a moment she froze, terrified. He didn’t look human. Inappropriate, she thought, even for her. She stuck her hand right into his. “Shelley Whitby. Nice to meet you.”

  “And you as well. I am Yousef Abdel Kamal. Please, follow me.” He turned into the dimly lit front room. “Now, some of these rugs are more than two hundred years old. I ask that you remove your shoes.” The rugs were beige and blue with intricate Persian designs. The grandfather clock swung into a chime. A wall of plates displayed colorful, geometric designs, a few containing looping Arabic script.

  She kicked off her boots as he moved his stocking feet with deliberate shucks, his hands flexed about his hips. “Come now. Shall we go to my athenaeum?”

  He led Shelley through the front of the twelve-room apartment, starting with the dining room, where the table was set with fine china, crystal glasses, and silver serving trays. A three-tiered cake stand stood as a centerpiece. There was no food on the table, but the places were set: it appeared a great dinner was about to be had and then abandoned. Something about this old room reminded Shelley of the empty apartment Grandmother Whitby had kept on Sixty-Fifth, the one that seemed to disappear after she died. When they reached the russet-glossed study, Mr. Kamal questioned, “Is the light on in the room?”

  There were small lamps glowing behind an oversize wooden desk, though it was darker than what Shelley was used to. In the far corner of the room was a pristine white drafting table, tilted up. Beside it, a tall, glass cylinder rested on the floor, containing oversized scrolls of paper—blueprints or plans. “Yes, two lights.”

  Mr. Kamal sat behind the desk, and Shelley in front of it. He waited for her to stop shifting. “You went to Demming, I see. Now tell me, Shelley, what do your parents do?”

  “Uh,” she stuttered. Could he know she was on
e of those Whitbys? Her nerves pricked up one by one. She got the distinct impression that he knew more about people than others did; perhaps his lack of sight gave him other gifts.

  Mr. Kamal waited with a stony face.

  Shelley’s mother had never had a job. The family lived off Biddy and her father’s semipopular shop, Whitby Shades and Blinds, which he’d opened on a whim.

  “Well,” she sighed, “my mother’s in real estate, and my father owned a shop.”

  He nodded. “And where do they complete these jobs?”

  “I’m from the city.”

  “Very good.”

  When Shelley’s father met her mother he was already on his second marriage and still the ambassador to the Caribbean. His eldest daughter from his second marriage, Kiki Whitman Whitby, had been a senior at Demming College, where she was the best friend and roommate of Elizabeth Saltman, Shelley’s mother. Roger Whitby Jr., Kiki’s father, would come to visit his daughter for a week at a time, as the trip from the island of Barbados was not quick. After his third trip to Poughkeepsie, he announced to everyone that he was divorcing his wife and marrying his daughter’s college roommate, the young Elizabeth Saltman. They were married in December, right after the fall semester ended, twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth and fifty-nine-year-old Roger, on horseback on a Caribbean beach. It was a small wedding, about thirty people. Many of the guests were Whitbys—weddings were something they showed up for. Hats were big then, according to Biddy. Boxy ones adorned with peacock feathers and netting kept blowing off and landing in the sand. Biddy—who had been pleased, of course, that her daughter was marrying a Whitby, but had also expected nothing less—had recounted the scene to Shelley numerous times: as Elizabeth sat atop her horse, a large gust blew her empire-waist dress back against her body, and her four-and-a-half-month pregnant stomach was outlined in ivory crepe. Inside of Elizabeth, Shelley was growing at a healthy and rapid rate. The crowd squawked and clucked, though the bride and groom couldn’t hear it over the wind off the water.