Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Phyllis had a suspicion, a deeply Jewish one borne of events that had played out in her very lifetime, that actually it was her connections that would help her here instead of the law enforcement that was tasked with it—that the fast and enthusiastic location of her missing son, more and more missing as time went on, would happen not by someone obligated to help her but by someone trying to please her.

The problem is that they didn’t stop to consider what the rest of us knew, which was that they had no right to set the conditions for safety and survival in the first place—that safety and survival might not work that way. They don’t care about you. They don’t accrue like an Israel bond. The more you bank on them as investments that feed off themselves, the more precarious and insidious their yields.

Her ancestors had left their ability to share their feelings on the Mayflower and had never called lost luggage to pick it up.

The weather, it was deadly. It was back-to-school, Jewish-holiday crisp, a bright blue sky with fibrous, bright white clouds. It was the weather of optimism and renewal and forgiveness. It was the weather of every fresh start he’d ever had, every lesson he’d ever learned, every first time he’d ever had. It was now also the weather of his grandmother’s funeral.

And the details were just atrocious: curling wrought-iron gates and shutters that couldn’t possibly work and stone-ish siding and my god, the columns: Corinthian, Doric, Ionic, tragic. Now here is a separate paragraph just for the doors. The doors on these homes were huge, at least two whole people high, like they led into a king’s chambers or the palace of an ancient ruin. They were elaborately carved and decorated, etched and embellished. Their knockers were comically ornamental: curlicued or in the shape of a cobra that was coiled or like a jaw of teeth. Beamer had only seen doors like this on fantasy television shows that took place in ancient worlds.

The house was the same study in contrasts as Phyllis herself: equal parts monstrously rich and maniacally frugal.

Phyllis would never replace the furniture because it had cost them so much in the first place and because she stubbornly took literally the salesman who told her and Zelig, as young newlyweds in hats and gloves in a showroom, that they’d have this stuff “for life.”

And the Fletcher children had not been immune to the inertia of all rich kids, which was to lack the imagination that the money could ever possibly stop coming in. They spent their money like third-generation American children do: quickly, and without thinking too hard about it. Beamer was leveraged because of his lifestyle; Nathan had the closest thing in the family to an investment portfolio but also a predilection for buying massive amounts of insurance. And Jenny, who had always been the most disdainful of the money, had given most of hers away.

The tyranny of Nathan’s anxiety was often easier for her to acquiesce to.

Nathan Fletcher had grown from that little boy making twenty-four-hour four-point contact with his mother during his father’s kidnapping into not so much a whole man but a collection of tics: a composite panic attack whose brain lived in both the unspeakable past and the terrifying future and rarely in a particular current moment unless that moment contained more fear than the past and future put together and therefore deserved his complete attention.

Nothing made you believe you were moving forward when you absolutely were not like paperwork. Nathan’s love for paperwork, his understanding of its rigors and demands, its emotional neutrality, its lines and boxes—it was a storybook love, a Vows section love, a movie love, a love for all time.

His father, who was too delicate to ask him about his own day, but who could absorb an untold amount of Holocaust stories, which is as close to describing the modern Jewish condition as you can get.

Over the years, Duty’s Head became populated by wealthy people from New York City who, like Columbus, erroneously believed they’d discovered the Hamptons.

If Rabbi Weintraub was correct, and all families are a Bible story unto themselves, then the history of Middle Rock and its people and the Fletchers of course doesn’t end there.

In Middle Rock, they wore boat shoes and took sailing lessons. Every mother had canvas boat bags from L.L.Bean. They wore Bermuda shorts and Polo shirts with popped collars. They fixed their noses into pointy things and dyed their hair blond and founded pool clubs and boat clubs so that the transformation was complete and no one would be able to pick them out from the general population and send them into slavery or off to concentration camps again. Their very own Canaan.

Jenny sat googly-eyed for a father who talked about society and its ills—who talked about anything, really. Her own father was an automaton who went to work every day, then, at night, became a zombie, distracted always, until you said his name a few times. Dad. Dad. Dad! Dad.

“They tried to kill us!” her grandmother would hiss. “This money you hate, it’s all that stands between you and the gas chamber!” “Ah,” Jenny would say. This was the night she stood amid a sea of college acceptance letters and was innocently trying to figure out where to spend the next four years. “The Holocaust. How novel to bring up the Holocaust.”

Jenny didn’t just join the union; she became the union. The dregs of ambition in her combined with the hormonal wash of the approval of her peers she had for so long missed and she was now filled with purpose. The union was social, it was scrappy, it was maximally involving, it was so busy that the questions Jenny had prior to this about how to live weren’t so much answered as it was the case that it was no longer quiet enough inside her head to hear those questions.

It was not hyperbolic to say the union saved her life. It was the antidote to the faded vanilla person she’d become. Everyone in this new world had a fire in them; they were enraged. They had strong, definitive points of view. They had energy. The more time went by, the more the urgency of the union’s causes became glaring and her fellow members felt real to Jenny while the other people in the world felt like background noise—like the unawoken.

She finally had friends. By then, she was so desperate for friends that each one was a drop of water to rehydrate the desiccated husk of her sense of self. She loved them for that, but also for how purposeful they were. They weren’t like her bland high school friends who were all falling in line and coupling and working and marrying and giving birth now. Her union friends had sharp opinions and spiky personalities and stood up to the status quo. They cared about everything; they didn’t turn away from suffering. They sat in. They laid in. They died in. They marched. They plotted. They worked through the night.

“What information?” Ruth didn’t look up from her Tupperware. “I’m not allowed to talk to you about anything.”

She had convinced literally thousands of grad students that, yes, they were workers, that unions were for all workers, that they deserved fair pay and a career path. She had gone up against the pricey law firm that Yale hired to bust their efforts, which met with them and denigrated them at every turn, calling them glorified interns who should feel lucky. The union was now recognized by the university. She was done. She’d done her job. They’d be fine without her.

What it does to the soul when you only see children and middle-aged people.

She had thought she would have children who maybe resembled her a little more in their grit and energy. She had thought she would have children that she maybe thought more highly of. How she’d watch her three children flailing as they aimed to find meaning in a life where they didn’t have to work for anything. She felt bad for them, because once you’re born that way, even if you lose everything, the way they just had, you never feel the fire of survival in you. You never truly believe there’s a reason to get out of bed in the morning, even if now there is. Ruth had felt the survival instinct in her strongly. That was why she’d married a rich man with no thought about what this might yield in terms of her children. The danger had gone away when she’d married Carl, but the fear never did.

There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.

They were raised to be fattened, but never to reach a full and thriving adulthood. They’d arrived at the doorstep of life, unable to walk. Ruth used to hate them for this—hate them in a way you can only hate them because you love them—but now she saw how inevitable it was. Worse, now she saw that she was the author of their incompetence.

“One day, we will have to talk about why you didn’t think I should know any of this.” “I didn’t want to scare you.” “That’s not what marriage is, Nathan. It’s not like what your parents do, where your mother protects him from having to be a person in the world. That’s not partnership.” She patted his head like she did the boys’ when they were sick. “I think you should go to sleep. There’s time to talk later.”

“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ruth said. “I did not realize that you would use my old age to malign me—no, to libel me.” “It’s slander if it’s spoken,” Jenny said. “Libel if it’s written.” “It’s slander if it’s false,” Beamer said. “It’s not false. You weren’t there.”

“You are entering into a tradition of manhood, or personhood, in this troubled world,” Hershey said. “You are taking a full responsibility for the Torah and its laws, and you are responsible not just for perpetuating Judaism but for making sure that there are still Jews in the world. On this day, we ask of you that you build a Jewish home, that you feather it like a nest, that you keep it in one place and that you don’t move it around, so that the children you bring into the world will always know how to find you. Darling boys, you are beloved. You will live a long life and sometimes you will wonder what your worth is in the world, and at the lowest moments of this, you will remember how proud we were of you on this day, and how precious you are to all of us.”

Beamer and Jenny knelt and held their father’s hands as they watched him take his last breath, which he did, in the arms of his trusted old friend Ike Besser, who had stood loyally by their father’s side, who had filled in the gaps where he could, who had offered their father something they never could following his ordeal, which was dignity, and in whose backyard shed were 220,000 mildewing, rotting, marked, unusable dollars, which had been there since 1980 and which would not be found until Ike’s death four years later.

It was diamonds, of course. Zelig had watched his family lose all their money and property to the Nazis and knew that there would be a time when this great, new country caught up with the rest of the world and came for the Jews, as well.

That night, after all the well-wishers left the house, Ruth told the children about the diamonds that had been buried beneath the greenhouse. She told them she was going to sell half of them and keep half of them. A quarter of the cash would be for her future and for Marjorie’s future, and a quarter to invest in several irrevocable trusts that would be controlled by Arthur. The other half would be distributed among her children, who now had more money than they ever had before. See? A terrible ending. There would be no growth, no revelation, no coming of age, no plastic hour brought to fruition. There would be no reckoning with all that happened or resolution. Their problems were solved, and there was no need for any of that now. But what are you going to do? That’s how rich people are.

The Fletchers were gone for good now, and we never had to hear their terrible name again.