The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  Emily knew that Nate’s father had grown up in Rhode Island, but she’d had no idea—until Nate spewed his truths last night—that there was still a local house in the family.

  As if reading her mind, Nate said, “It’s not like anyone’s lived there for years. I don’t know why I never said anything to you about my family having a house here.” He paused and then said, “It seemed silly to mention the old place, it has nothing to do with me. But then once we were here, and we’d spent all this time talking about Rhode Island and plotting out the move, it felt as if I’d lied, by omission, not telling you that my father grew up here.”

  “Nate, I knew your father grew up in Rhode Island,” Emily said. “I just didn’t know that your father still owned a house here.”

  Nate’s foot let up on the gas, the car started to slow down. “You knew my dad grew up here?”

  “Nate, drive.” It would really cap off this holiday if they crashed and left Trevor parentless. Their lives hadn’t been worth so much, or much at all, Emily figured, until they had Trevor.

  “I told you that my father grew up here? I usually tell people that he’d spent his whole life in Cleveland, since that’s the way he portrayed it when he stooped to talk about his past. I know nothing about his time here.”

  “You never told me. You didn’t have to. His history is pretty much in the public domain.” Emily felt her words drop to the floor of the car like steel pellets. It was the great paradox of Nate’s pain: He acted so encumbered by having a father whose famous structures towered every day over the American heartland, yet never seemed to realize that though George Bedecker had refused to open himself up to his children, he was a completely public figure to the outside world. Emily had known George Bedecker’s name for as long as she could remember, the same way she’d always known of Georges Braque and Aaron Copland. It was only after her first date with Nate, however, when they’d known each other for two weeks, that she’d looked up the details of George’s work. And his history.

  “Bedecker believed that the Narragansett house influenced the tone of his earliest designs,” Emily said now, paraphrasing from the hidden recess of her mind where she’d carefully and consciously stored that history. “Oh, not directly the house itself. It was a traditional house, repeating designs seen ad nauseam in the 1930s, but the way the house perched on the landscape and gave the surrounding environment the upper hand. ‘Humans are only the inhabitants of a house, the land owns it,’ he said. ‘The house should thus form a dialogue with the earth on which it sits, not with the people who, on whim, will take up residence for a while.’”

  “It sounds almost beautiful, when you say it,” Nate said. The landscape outside the car was growing greener, more residential. “You knew we were moving to my father’s home state and you didn’t say anything.”

  “It was your place to say something. The last time I brought up your father’s name you threw a boot at me.”

  “A shoe, not a boot.”

  “Well, it was a big shoe.”

  “I think this is where he was heading when he had his accident, to the house,” Nate said. He inched over toward the shoulder to let a pickup truck pull past. Nate was driving uncharacteristically slow, as if afraid the maimed car might fall apart if he went over forty-five mph. “The place has been cleaned and prepped. Maybe he’s working on a project in the area and that’s why he was coming, but last time I checked, he wasn’t building anything in Rhode Island. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen evidence of anything he’s working on. It’s like he’s thrown in the towel. Like running into a ditch on Route 1 was the inevitable conclusion to whatever is going on with him.” Nate steered the car closer to the center of the road again, edging away from the narrow shoulder.

  “You don’t think—”

  “That he was trying to kill himself? It’s not his style, even in the face of Huntington’s. He always believed in accepting life’s hard knocks, on moving forward stoically and without complaint, without emotion at all,” Nate said. “The good news is that his house is well stocked, with a pantry full of nonperishables.”

  The place was modest, not the kind of spread Emily expected, given that its design had ostensibly inspired George to build the Treehorn Retreat and the Armistice Library. The library was the only building of George’s that Emily had been in since meeting Nate four years ago. It was a year into their relationship and she’d found herself in Baltimore for a commercial shoot. Between wrapping the final take and catching her train back to New York, she took a cab over to the library and spent ten minutes wandering the perimeter of its capacious central hall. The entryway was built to maximize the natural light. Here is your father, Nate, she thought as she lingered next to the buffed walls, nearly late for her train. She’d assumed that standing in George’s building might help her understand the troubled son, her boyfriend who wouldn’t talk about his family, but it hadn’t helped at all. It had simply made her feel guilty, surreptitious. It had made her feel wrong: because as much as Nate despised his father, Emily, while standing inside of George Bedecker’s building, couldn’t deny the beauty in its design. It was breathtaking and awe-inspiring. It was merely a building, but the feeling of standing inside it transcended its dimensions and materials, it brought on a sense of the ethereal. Bedecker may have been no good at maintaining a family, but he’d mastered his work. This Narragansett house, however, was small and oddly traditional. It bore no resemblance to the library.

  “I’ll open a window. It’s stuffy in here,” Nate said.

  “It’s okay. It smells like fresh laundry.”

  “He had the place professionally cleaned. I found the bill.” Nate opened the windows in the dining room and propped the front door open, letting air circulate through the house and back out again. The windowsills were covered in cracked white paint. The panes were framed by linen curtains that hung straight to the floor. Emily took herself on a tour of the first story. This house wasn’t large, but it was bigger than her and Nate’s new home. It had the kind of history, that sense of having been lived in, that their relatively new construction lacked. The oak floorboards in the hallway, leading from the dining room to the living room, sagged slightly as she walked.

  “It looks like someone didn’t appreciate the setup in the living room,” she said, standing in the room’s doorway. All of the furniture in the living room was upholstered in broad floral prints, like garden party dresses. In the center of the room, the couch and a console table and an end table had all been sandwiched together, evoking images of a massive furniture love-in. Nate came up behind her.

  “Oh, yeah, I tried to make a crib for Trevor, when he was here with me,” he said. “You’d think the son of George Bedecker could have constructed something with a little more style.”

  Right, Trevor had been here. Last night, Nate had explained their father-son investigation, the couple of hours he and Trevor had spent checking the place, snooping in the attic until the policeman arrived. The timing was odd, Nate being at his father’s house exactly when police came looking for someone to claim the old man. Well, not claim him, like a body, but to claim him as kin, as a responsibility. Nate seemed to see it as an omen, a call to rise to the occasion. Emily felt drunk, woozy with emotional overload. She could only imagine how the hangover was going to feel once all of this sank in.

  “Come on,” Nate said. He left the room and Emily followed.

  In the kitchen, they rifled through the cabinets—the refrigerator was empty, save for a box of baking soda and four unopened liters of sparkling water, the labels in Dutch. The tall maple cabinets, though, were packed with the kind of food that a paranoid gourmand might stockpile in anticipation of a nuclear winter. Dried beans, canned tomatoes, canned soup, jarred carrots and peas, boxes of rice, tins of sardines, instant oatmeal as well as rolled oats, dried apricots in a vacuum-packed bag, tea, honey, preserved lemons, and one box of graham crackers, which Nate had broken into and was eating his way through.

 
; “Look at all the tuna!” Emily said. “When do you think these cabinets were stocked?” There were eight tins of albacore packed in spring water. “It’s a mercury overload waiting to happen.” For the past couple of years, ever since the government issued its mercury warnings against tuna and swordfish, Emily had steered completely clear of the species. She’d replaced tuna with chicken salad in her diet, swordfish with swordfish abstinence.

  “Some of these cans are recent,” Nate said through a mouth full of graham crackers, looking at the expiration date on a container of processed pumpkin filling. “Though the graham crackers are a little soft.”

  “Leave me at least one sleeve of them,” Emily said taking the pumpkin filling from his hand. In her haste she dropped it. It barely made a noise as it hit the floor’s soft, dated linoleum tiles. She stooped and inspected the can, which had landed squarely on its side and wasn’t dented. “We can make a graham crust and do a pumpkin pie, if there’s a pie tin.” She added the pumpkin to their stash on the counter (long-grain rice, canned tomatoes, raisins, honey, tea, Manhattan clam chowder, garbanzo beans, vegetable oil, soy sauce, garlic powder). In a cabinet under the stovetop, she found the pots and pans, worn but functional. She added two saucepans and a skillet to the pile of booty. She located a square cake pan that could substitute as a pie tin. Nate had already found the plates and silverware and was putting a small assemblage in one of the cardboard boxes he’d discovered just inside the back door.

  “You’re sure we have electricity and gas at the house?” Emily said, taking an unopened bottle of dish soap from next to the sink and adding it to the box.

  “Sure.” Nate said. “We have a phone line, too; the number was supposedly hooked up last week. The house is inhabitable. I mean, we were planning to be living there by now.”

  “A phone line? Should we grab one of the phones from here? I saw two in the living room, plugged into the wall.” Simply having a phone listed in their names would give their residence a durable feel, Emily hoped. Setting up their house together would be one big step toward repairing, or consolidating, at least, their life together.

  “That’s stealing. This isn’t our home.” He put the graham crackers down and stepped away from the food, as if ashamed. Emily was the only instinctive thief in this couple, apparently. “We should replace all of this once we have money again, and let’s put the living room furniture back in place before we leave today. This house should look untouched.”

  “Except for the hole you punched into the back door’s window.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m kidding, Nate, I mean, assuming that the only owner of this house is your father, and you’re the only kid he has, it’s all coming to you someday, isn’t it? Maybe soon. You have to face the fact that this might be it for your father,” Emily said. She took a jar of cashew butter out of the cabinet and looked at its expiration date. “Look at the place. No one has lived here for ages. Sure, the floors have been mopped and the rugs vacuumed, but did you actually sit on any of the furniture? Dust rises out of it like powder from a Victorian wig.”

  Nate only nodded, but Emily was right, she knew she was right. This home, for all of its un-Bedeckerian nods toward comfort, hadn’t had an actual inhabitant for a long, long time.

  CHAPTER 26

  History in the Family

  EMILY WAS OUTSIDE bringing the first box—stuffed with plates, a can opener, and a silver gravy boat she’d found in the living room and insisted on taking—to the car, while Nate watched her through the kitchen window. His father’s kitchen window. A man couldn’t give birth to a son and not care about him whatsoever, could he? George had to care, at least instinctively. Especially given that he was critically injured and Nate was his next of kin, as Emily had pointed out. His only kin. They were the only Bedeckers left. It had taken them a near eternity, but they’d found each other. As Nate saw it, George would eventually get well enough to leave the hospital (the doctors were being conservative and cagey with their predictions, but Nate held out hope even if Emily didn’t) and would be set up comfortably in the master bedroom upstairs, right on top of this kitchen. They’d have to hire some sort of home health aide to care for him—whatever George’s health insurance covered—unless he made a miraculously quick recovery.

  Nate missed Charlie with an immediacy he hadn’t felt in more than a decade. He flexed and straightened his knobby fingers. His fingers were fine, he was fine, and he picked up the second box, this one mostly pans and pockmarked sponges and a rusty corkscrew. He stepped out the back door (he and Emily had already swept up the barbed shards from the glass pane he’d shattered) and looked for Emily, who was behind the open car trunk, hidden from view. He heard her rifling through the car’s contents. Of course. If his father was planning to stay for a while, he’d have packed his things in the trunk. They’d have to rearrange those things to make room for the boxes of food.

  Nate carefully navigated the rough stone path between house and driveway, the haphazardly arranged slates rising and falling with the natural irregularities of the earth. When he stepped off the path, the ground, littered with slick, scrappy pebbles, crunched.

  “Nate,” Emily said. Her face appeared above the open trunk, strained. “Nate, it’s a shrine in here.” Her voice cracked. She sounded scared. “Did you look in this trunk?”

  “What? No,” he said. He hadn’t thought to look in the trunk.

  “Your father has constructed a shrine. Articles, pictures, I don’t know what else.”

  “A shrine?”

  Emily nodded and then stood quietly, waiting for him to respond. He imagined the trunk filled with boxes, each stuffed with his childhood report cards, with pictures he’d never seen of his mother and Charlie, with never-sent letters George had written to his oldest son. He stopped a few yards from the car. Maybe his hope for a past, the clues to his medical future, had never been in the old house after all. They were in the trunk of the Audi that Nate had been driving for the past twenty-four hours. He hadn’t thought to open the trunk; this could be a sign that his mind was going. No. No. No. He’d always forgotten things. He tried to remember all of the things he’d forgotten over the years, but of course, none of it came back to him. He was not the right person to judge whether his own mind was on the wane.

  “You’ve got to see what’s in here,” Emily said, walking away from the car and toward Nate, briefly tripping over the box of plates she’d left on the ground and cursing herself under her breath. “Nate,” Emily said. She was directly in front of him now and shook him (her hands on his shoulders, her face close to his) out of his thoughts. “Nate,” she said, “your father amassed an entire shrine. To himself.”

  The trunk was as packed as their Jeep had been. It was less a shrine than the well-edited stash of a type-A hoarder. Nate and Emily lifted George’s things, box by box, laying each on the ground next to the car. The boxes were mostly metal file containers, beautifully brushed steel holding carefully sorted documents and pictures. Two of the containers were jammed with business documents—ledgers from past projects, contracts, plans for buildings for which, in the end, George didn’t get the contract. The drawings of these dead projects possessed a startling, ephemeral beauty. The plans were the only form in which these particular structures would ever exist. One entire crate was devoted to the never-constructed Bedecker bid for the Cymbalist Temple in Tel Aviv.

  “There’s a whole history of architecture in this trunk,” Emily said. “I’ve been in some of these buildings.” Even the ones that didn’t exist, like the art museum George had designed for Cornell that never got built, Emily exclaimed that she had been in the one that was constructed, by I. M. Pei. “I didn’t know your father was up for that job,” Emily said, holding the plan close to the side of the car so that the Audi’s shadow blocked the sun’s glare from the page.

  “I was a kid,” Nate said. “I don’t really remember it.”

  That wasn’t true. Nate remembered the hours George spent w
orking on the project (a four-month span when Nate hadn’t seen his father at all), he recalled the names his father had slung at Pei after the place was built, and he remembered the acclaim that Pei received. But all of this had taken place off center stage, in the wings of Nate’s life while he and Charlie hid out in their bedroom and listened to the Indians get pummeled by the White Sox. It was the only time Nate remembered his father swearing. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had run an AP piece lauding Pei as the quiet leader of twentieth-century design, and George, while Nate and Charlie lay in their bunks and pretended to sleep, spewed expletives that resonated off the glass walls of their house. “Horseshit!” he’d said, and Nate almost laughed, imagined using that word at school and the ridicule that would ensue. Horseshit didn’t even sound like an insult. It sounded like an agricultural byproduct. “Pei’s excuse for a museum is a cock-tease!” George had spat. During this tirade, Nate didn’t hear his mother speak, but he could picture her pacing between the kitchen and the living room, pretending to neaten up, working hard to stay out of George’s way.

  Nate looked over Emily’s shoulder into a box of George’s ledgers. Nate used to dream of finding a new picture of his brother. Charlie had died so long ago, twenty years last February, that Nate had lost access to his visceral memories of the boy. Instead, when he tried to conjure Charlie, the only images that rose into Nate’s head were pictures from old photographs, from the small stack of photos that Nate had held on to. He ached to find a new memento, something to bring back a forgotten moment from his brother’s life. Something that might evoke a posture his brother once held, a sweater he’d worn, a particular day on which he’d lived. Charlie had loved alpine cheeses and hard links of salami, Nate remembered this, but he could no longer picture his brother eating. Nate could picture his mother, who’d died only two years later, with acute specificity. She was his mother. He’d spent the bulk of his childhood studying her. That’s what boys did: They studied their parents in detail, looking for signs of their own future. Younger brothers, on the other hand, were viewed only haphazardly and without scrutiny.