Page 3 of These Summer Storms

Trailblazing Genius Franklin Storm, Dead at 70

His thumb hovered over the link.

Don’t,she willed, not sure she would be able to look away, even though she knew the story within. Had known it since she was born. Franklin Storm had stepped into his parents’ garage in North Boston at the age of seventeen and changed computing and the world with $1,107 and a dream. He’d made computers large and small, brought them into homes and schools, and placed them in pockets and on wrists the world over.

That was the first paragraph. The ones that followed would be about his company, his vast collection of art, his philanthropy, his charm, his daredevil tendencies (no one should be too surprised by a gliding accident, really). And then, his family.

There’d be photos, probably from his seventieth birthday, taken that past April—the ones Alice had pored over in the Style section of theTimes. Captions. A footnote about the child not pictured (not invited). A reminder of why.

Don’t open it.

He didn’t. Alice breathed again.

Swallowing the urge to tell him to read a book or something, she reached down and pulled a newspaper out of her bag. She hadn’t held a print newspaper since she was a kid, when a stack of them would be delivered to the apartment every morning.

Still, she smoothed her hand over the front page of that morning’sNew York Times,printed twenty hours earlier, rendered instantly obsolete in this world where (allegedly)Breaking Newscame all day, all hours, directly to a person’s preferred rectangle, there, then gone. Turned instantly into the past to make room for the future—a shift so quick that the present simply disappeared.

Why had she bought it? Alice rubbed a thumb across the words, tattooing herself with the ink of yesterday’s news—the Before. Tomorrow’s paper would be the After.

The top of the fold on the front page would be devoted to her father’s death—the biggest story of the week. Of the year.

Longer for Alice (and her therapist).

She traced a headline about inflation. Another about unhoused New Yorkers. A third about the solar power revolution. Stories that were more important than anything the paper would say the next day.

Stories she couldn’t read because there, in her peripheral vision, her seatmate had turned over his phone, and the back of it gleamed smooth, black obsidian, without any reflection, its only mark a swirling silverS,like the eye of a hurricane.

Years ago, when she was young, that insignia had words that came with it—repeated over and over on television commercials. Radio plays. Print advertisements. The whole world knew them.

Storm Inside™

The world didn’t know the half of it.

Chapter

2

Before the robber baronsof the Gilded Age changed the face of American business with steel and banks and oil, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt changed the face of American travel, snapping up and consolidating more than a dozen small railway lines and amassing a fortune that few had ever seen outside of royalty. (Who needs titles when you can have trains?)

In 1870, Cornelius Vanderbilt II—nepo-grandbaby to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Original Flavor—did what rich young men have done for as long as they have been rich young men: He used his grandfather’s money and power and influence to make it easier for him to have friends over for parties.

With his brother, young Cornelius established the Newport and Wickford Railroad and Steamboat Company, overseeing a mere three and a half miles of train track from the main rail line connecting New York and Boston to the port of Wickford, RI, a sleepy town with wildly desirable geography. Wickford was located on the western edge of Narragansett Bay, the 147-square-mile estuary that divided the western, mainland half of Rhode Island from the eastern side of the state, anarchipelago where New York City’s wealthiest nineteenth-century families built the over-the-top mansions that would remain a hallmark of Rhode Island tourism and American film for more than a century.

It was the Vanderbilts who put Wickford on the map, quite literally, plucking valuable farmland and ocean views from unsuspecting Rhode Islanders (eminent domain isn’t just for present-day billionaires) and laying the track that would become the safest, easiest journey to Newport for New York’s elite, along with their dogs, servants, and secrets. It also opened up access to a collection of small private islands peppering the Bay.

On that particular Wednesday before Labor Day, as Amtrak Northeast Regional train 1603 crossed the Rhode Island border, it occurred to Alice that if the Vanderbilts got one look at the train’s worn maroon carpet and polyester-blend upholstery, they would have bemoaned the ceding of rail travel to the common man and paid someone to set the whole thing on fire.

Robber barons would robber baron. Of that, Alice was certain.

She’d been raised by one, after all.

With a soft “Excuse me,” to the long legs in the aisle seat, Alice gathered her bags and headed for one of the three doors that would open to the elevated platform of the once-again-sleepy town—no longer a hub of travel for the wealthy and famous.

Staring at her newly charged phone, she ignored the red bubbles at the corner of every app she used regularly. Fourteen new voicemails. Sixty-three new emails. One-hundred-and-twenty-one new text messages.

She swiped to a rideshare app, her thumb hovering over the green square as she waited for the SOS at the top of the screen to turn to bars indicating service. And tried not to impart double meaning into that SOS.

“This is my stop, too.”

---