The Good House: A Novel (2 page)

Wendy Heatherton always likes to throw a party for her wonderful clients. It’s her way of thanking them for their business and also a way of introducing them to other people Wendy thinks are wonderful. Her son Alex and his boyfriend, Daniel, always do all the preparations. Daniel is an interior decorator. Alex collects antiques. For the McAllister party, they decided that dinner would be in the garden. Alex and Daniel set a series of long banquet tables under a blooming magnolia tree. They hung paper lanterns in the tree’s branches. Then they covered the tables with some of Wendy’s antique white linen tablecloths, and used her best silver and china and crystal, which was rather unexpected and delightful at an outdoor dinner. They had bunches of fragrant lilacs flouncing over the sides of tall silver vases. Citronella torches lined the path from house to table and were also planted in the ground around the table, to keep the bugs away. It was “magical,” everybody told Wendy and Alex and Daniel. And it really was.

The party began at seven, but I didn’t arrive until close to eight, because I don’t drink cocktails anymore. I’m in “recovery.” I don’t go to a lot of parties, but when I do, I try to arrive just before dinner is served and I leave right after dessert. The night of the McAllister party, I arrived at the same time as Peter and Elise Newbold. Peter, Elise, and their son, Sam, live in Cambridge during the week because Peter is a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in nearby Belmont. He has a small private practice in Cambridge as well as here in Wendover, but he sees patients in Wendover only on Fridays and the occasional Saturday.

As we walked up the Heathertons’ front steps, Peter clapped my shoulder and said, “Well, at least we’ll know one person at this party.” Then he said to his wife, “Elise, you know Hildy Good, right?”

Elise offered a sarcastic “No, Peter, I’ve never heard of Hildy Good.”

Peter had been renting an office from me, upstairs from my offices at Good Realty, for years, but I’ve really only met Elise a few times. She teaches writing workshops in Cambridge, but I can’t quite recall what kind of writing she actually does herself. Poetry maybe. Since Sam had become a teenager, he hadn’t liked leaving his friends to come to Wendover for the weekends, and I’d always had the sense that Elise never liked coming here at all, so in recent years, Peter had spent many weekends up here alone. He told me it was actually good for him, as he was writing a new book—
The Psychology of Communities,
I believe it was.

When we entered the house, a young woman ushered us through the living room and out onto the back patio, where cocktails were being served. She asked us what we’d like to drink and Peter asked for a beer. Elise asked what kind of white wine they were serving and, after wrinkling her nose at the two options, finally settled on the Pinot Grigio.

I ordered a club soda with a slice of lime.

*   *   *

My daughters, Tess and Emily, had surprised me with my very own “intervention” almost two years prior, the little dears. Emily lives in New York, but Tess lives in Marblehead, which is only about twenty minutes from here. One cold November evening, Tess and Michael, my son-in-law, invited me over for dinner. Their son Grady was just an infant at the time, and I was thrilled to go over for a visit. Tess had been distant since the baby had been born. Distant toward me, that is; she had Michael’s mother, Nancy, over all the time.

“I’d love to watch Grady, anytime,” I used to say to Tess. “You and Michael should go out to dinner and a movie some night. Leave Grady with me.”

“Nancy lives right here in Marblehead. I’d hate for you to have to come all that way,” Tess would say. I told her I didn’t mind in the least, but then, she never did ask, so I guessed she really didn’t want to bother me.

So that night I had driven to Marblehead and was surprised to see two cars in Tess and Michael’s driveway, in addition to their own cars.

“Hello?” I called cheerfully as I opened the door. I was feeling quite good. I had had a closing that afternoon and had celebrated with my clients at the Warwick Tavern afterward. I only had one or two drinks. Maybe three, tops. I wandered into Tess’s living room and was shocked to see that Emily was there, too, and she had brought her boyfriend, Adam, all the way from New York with her. And Sue Peterson was there. My secretary Sue. There was another woman, a stout woman with short, brassy hair. (Truthfully, the woman’s hair was orange.) Everybody had been sitting, but when I entered the living room, they all stood up. They were all smiling sympathetically at me, and my first thought was that something had happened to Grady. My legs actually became weak. It was hard to stand.

“Mom,” Tess said, blinking back tears. “Come sit down.”

I let her lead me over to the sofa, and there I sat, with Tess on one side of me, Emily on the other. I was still in a panic about the baby. That’s something about me that Tess and Emily have never been able to appreciate. That everything I have ever done is for them. That my first concern is always for
their
well-being. Theirs and now little Grady’s.

I think everybody knows what happens at these things. The girls took turns reading aloud the excruciatingly elaborate details of my alleged sodden crimes. The day I drank too much at Emily’s graduation party. The night I “passed out” (their words, not mine—I was napping) before Thanksgiving dinner. The times I had “staggered” out to my car and how worried they always were when I insisted on driving myself home. Then, of course, the DUI. I had been pulled over the summer before, on my way home from Mamie Lang’s. Mamie is my oldest friend—we’ve known each other since third grade—and one night we had a little too much to drink, and as I drove home, I watched the moon out of my passenger window. I was driving past the salt marshes and that bright orange moon seemed to tumble along the tips of the wispy sea grass, right alongside me, chasing me, like a playful balloon. I was on Atlantic Avenue, and when I came to the stop sign at Route 122, I saw the car. I was stopping. But I misjudged the distance, I guess, and rear-ended it. I barely tapped it. I put a tiny dent in the fender, that’s all, but, just my luck, it was a state trooper. Trooper Sprenger. Had to be Sprenger. Our other local trooper used to date Emily, and our only town cop, Sleepy Haskell, is my brother Judd’s best friend. I had never even met Sprenger before that night. He had no idea who I was.

So at my inquisition—oh, excuse me, intervention—I listened to the girls declare my various shameful lapses like tearful little magistrates. They had somehow convinced Sue to join forces with them, and she stammered something about how the clients were starting to notice. All the other brokers knew. She wept, too, and, like my daughters, she finished her statement by lunging at me so that she could encircle my shoulders with her arms and sob into my neck. I’m not a big hugger, but I placed my arms around each of them and tried to come up with the appropriate responses.

“Oh,” I think I whispered. “That’s an interesting point of view.”

Really, what are you supposed to say?

I knew there was no use in arguing. No point in stating my case. I had read the Betty Ford autobiography. You can’t prove you’re not an alcoholic once everybody has announced your affliction and tearfully told you how your “disease” has affected them. The more you protest—“deny,” as they say—the more they stoke the flames of shame that have been dancing around you since the inquest began.

But there was hope. Jenny, of the orange hair, was from Hazelden. She offered a solution: a twenty-eight-day program in Minnesota.

“I can’t,” I said. “I have a business to run.”

“I’ve taken care of everything,” chirped Sue. “It’s so slow right now, I’ll just have Wendy”—Wendy Heatherton was then my associate broker—“take over your clients. It’s just a month. We’ll say you’re in Florida.”

Sue did take care of everything, and I took care of Sue just a few weeks after I returned from Minnesota. I fired her.

*   *   *

At Wendy’s party, I stood with Peter and Elise, scanning the crowd to see whom else I might know, and almost immediately Wendy was upon us. Wendy, in addition to being slim and bubbly, is one of those women who must always clasp everybody’s hands. She won’t just shake your hand; she traps it between both of hers and cocks her head so that she can smile at you from what she seems to believe is a captivating display of her profile.

“Peter! Elise! Hildy!” she exclaimed, taking turns sandwiching each of our hands and tilting her head this way and then that. “I’m so glad you made it. You’re just in time. We’re about to sit down to dinner, but first, come. Come meet our wonderful guests of honor, the McAllisters. Well, Hildy, of course you know Brian and Rebecca.”

Wendy was leading us over to the far side of the crowded patio. She was still holding on to Peter’s hand, and he had reached around and grabbed Elise’s, and as I followed them, I had a passing thought that I should grab Elise about her slim waist to form a snaking conga line.

I hadn’t been able to admit it to Linda Barlow, but I really do hate parties now.

We finally reached a corner of the patio where a group had formed around Brian McAllister, who was talking about the Boston Bruins. Many people in the area know that Brian is a silent co-owner of the Bruins, along with Jeremy Jacobs and some others, and, well, this is Massachusetts. Most people are hockey nuts. Everybody had questions about the new recruits and where the hockey team was headed. Mamie’s husband, Boatie, a slightly annoying Republican from an old Brahmin family, interrupted several times to bluster on about Phil Esposito and Bobby Orr and the good old Bruins of yore.

“Wait until this season,” Brian promised him, swigging his beer and smiling. “I think we’re gonna have a great season.”

I saw Rebecca standing a little off to the side, and I walked over to say hello. The Newbolds followed me and I introduced them. They all shook hands and then Rebecca sort of peered up at Peter in that way she has, the way of the petite, and she said, “Haven’t we met before? You seem so familiar.…”

“I’m not sure,” Peter said. He was looking at her carefully then. “I don’t think so. I have one of those faces. I’m always reminding people of somebody else.”

Rebecca was smiling up at him, still not convinced, when Peter said, “I’m sure your husband gets sick of people wanting to talk hockey all the time.”

“No, not really. He sort of gets off on it, actually,” she replied.

I saw Peter glance back at Brian and then smile at Rebecca, amused.

“What do you do?” Elise asked Rebecca.

“Um, well, nothing really,” Rebecca said, laughing nervously.

She seemed, suddenly, self-conscious, and I was aware of an impulse, which I of course resisted, but an impulse to pull Rebecca close to my side, the way a mother might shield a shy child from a stranger. Elise was asking Rebecca what she did so that Rebecca would, in turn, ask her what she did, and then Elise could carry on about her annoying writing.

“You’re so pretty,” Elise persisted. “Didn’t I read someplace that you model or something?” She said this in an almost accusatory tone, and there was a moment of awkward silence before Rebecca, clearly flustered, stammered, “No, I, well, I used to do some acting, but now I just, you know, take care of my kids.”

“Oh,” said Elise. “But before that?”

“Well, I paint,” Rebecca said. “I used to ride horses pretty competitively. Now I decorate our houses and … nothing really.”

In fact, Rebecca had been short-listed for the U.S. Equestrian Team when she was only nineteen. In fact, she was the daughter of Col. Wesley Potter, the former Carter administration cabinet member, who had once been a CIA agent, and whose appointments had enabled Rebecca to live in Germany and Africa during her youth. In fact, she was the great-great-granddaughter of J. P. Morgan on her mother’s side. You learn these things about a client. Her lawyer talked to mine. My lawyer talked to me. And, of course, we brokers all Google these days.

“How are the kids liking Wendover?” I asked Rebecca.

“Well, they love the beach and the new house.…”

“How old are they?” Elise asked.

I could sense Rebecca’s unease. Why wouldn’t Elise stop interrogating her?

“They’re five and seven. Excuse me,” Rebecca said, “I need to go inside … and wash my hands. I was in the garden all afternoon,” she said, and then she turned and made her way through all the wonderful guests to the dark house. A few minutes later, Wendy rang a little silver bell and announced that dinner was being served, and so we all followed the torch-lit path to the dinner table.

Brian was seated across from me. On my right was Peter Newbold and on my left was my friend Mamie. Now Mamie gets all self-conscious about how much she drinks around me. We’re still friendly when we see each other, but I haven’t been to her house in ages, nor she to mine. It probably goes without saying that in a town like this, when you disappear for twenty-eight days, everybody knows where you’ve been. While I was at Hazelden, I imagined the gossip.
Yes, she did like her drinks. Remember the O’Donnells’ Fourth of July party? Remember the Langs’ Christmas party? Didn’t she get a DUI?
There are plenty of people in this community who drink more than I ever drank, but I’m the one who is branded an alcoholic. If I had allowed the server to fill my glass with wine, there at Wendy’s party, I imagine that everybody would have gasped in unison and then there would have been a spontaneous and unanimous attempt to wrestle the glass from my grip.

Rebecca sat toward the far end of the table, several seats away from Brian, and to Brian’s right was Sharon Rice. Sharon is a lean woman in her mid-fifties who has allowed her hair to whiten naturally. She wears it cut in a bob. Sharon is the head of the Wendover Land Trust, which preserves all the beautiful woods and wetlands and salt marshes that run in and around our town. She is also on the zoning board and the school committee, is president of an arts program for underprivileged children in Lynn, organizes weekly activities at the Wendover Senior Center, and, every Election Day, drives the elderly and disabled to the polls. Her husband, Lou, is in insurance.