Chapter 19 #2
“Some firework display, huh?” Benjamin said.
“Your mother insisted we buy from a new vendor this year. Apparently, she always thought the ones we got were lackluster. That’s just like your mother.
Quietly hating something for years and not bothering to say anything till you get comfortable. ” Benjamin chuckled.
Alexander squeezed his hands into fists. “They’re beautiful, yeah.”
“You always loved the Fourth of July when you were younger,” Benjamin said wistfully.
“Your mother hated it at first. She craved Bastille Day, French food, and French wine. She hated Nantucket, hated the Lodge. She probably hated me. But then she had this funny little son who couldn’t get enough of the Fourth of July, or hot dogs, or parades, or any of it. ”
Alexander had never heard this narrative before. “Why did she stay if she hated it so much?”
Benjamin thought for a moment. “Probably because of her children.”
Alexander’s guilt sat heavily on his shoulders.
“I see.” He swallowed, his eyes smarting from all the exploding fireworks and the tension between them.
“Dad, about that. I need to tell you.” Gosh, why was he so nervous?
He was almost twenty-four years old. He was a man.
“I need to tell you that Janie and I are going to leave. Probably sooner rather than later. Now that the baby didn’t make it, there are things we want to do with our lives.
” Alexander felt like he was in a free fall.
Benjamin looked at him, his jaw clenched. His eyes were dangerous. “Don’t you see that this is where you belong? We opened our doors back to you after you left the first time.”
“I know. I know that. And this isn’t to say that we wouldn’t come back,” Alexander tried.
“We gave you everything, Alexander. We gave you what my father gave me, and what his father gave him. You’re a part of a one hundred and fifty-year tradition. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
Alexander realized that he shouldn’t have accosted his father like this, not on the Fourth of July, not standing in the shadow of the glorious White Oak Lodge.
If anything, he should have written them a letter and taken off in the night.
Please don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness, he reminded himself.
But the damage was already done.
“If it’s about Janie,” his father growled, “you can tell her to leave you behind. We don’t need her. She isn’t a Whitmore, not yet, and if she doesn’t want our lifestyle, if she doesn’t want our traditions, then she should leave.”
Alexander gaped at his father. “I don’t want her to leave. I love her.”
Benjamin closed his eyes. “There are so many more important things than love.”
Alexander took a step back. He’d never heard his father talk like this.
Suddenly, he remembered Chloe, his father’s potential affair, the destruction both his mother and father had wrought on their family in the past. Before he could stop himself, he shot, “I love Janie. Maybe I love her more than you ever loved Mom. I don’t want her to go and live a life without me.
And I don’t want to cheat on her either.
With Chloe, Dad? Come on. She worked here.
She loved it here. You ruined it, like you ruin everything.
” He flared his nostrils, his heart racing. He couldn’t believe he’d gone that far.
Benjamin closed his eyes. The fireworks continued exploding overhead, and Alexander watched his father’s face light up in greens and reds and yellows. He looked sickly.
Slowly, softly, his father said, “I gave Chloe a lot of money to leave our family alone.”
“You paid her off?” Alexander huffed. Was this the cozy family his father demanded he stay with?
Benjamin sighed. “It’s so much more complicated than you can imagine.”
“Why? It sounds pretty clear to me.”
Benjamin turned to watch the fireworks. The air tightened between them. And then he said, “I paid her to stay away from me, from all of us. But most of all, I paid her to stay away from Nina. Legally, she’s not her daughter. But biologically speaking, she is.”
Alexander was stunned and silent.
Nina, little Nina, whom their mother had always rejected, whom their mother hadn’t taught Italian, whom had always been kept off to the side, like a sinister secret, wasn’t really Francesca’s daughter. She was Chloe’s.
Did that mean Chloe had come back to Nantucket to see Nina again?
Alexander tried to recall the party two years ago.
Chloe had watched Nina, playing off to the side by herself.
Was that the first time Chloe had seen Nina since childbirth?
Had there been something in Chloe’s expression to indicate their connection?
“She took the money, Alexander,” Benjamin reminded him quietly, as though that mattered. “To me, that means she doesn’t really care about Nina. Not like we do.”
Suddenly, Benjamin stormed away from Alexander, headed for the Lodge.
Alexander watched, frozen, as he entered the back door and went left, toward the staircase that led into the tunnels beneath the White Oak Lodge.
The tunnels, where the rumored treasure is housed, Alexander thought darkly.
But there was no Whitmore treasure. There was only darkness and filth.