The Hazards of Good Breeding (11 page)

Jack nods his head in perfunctory, distracted consent. His eyes are sweeping the tent in search of—who would he be looking for? Rock follows his glance and finds it stops on Caroline. There she is, in line for the buffet with two older women and Adam Lowell, a tall spindly boy a few years younger than Rock, with the kind of neck and shoulders that seem to taper into, rather than balance, his head. A human penis with little wire-rimmed glasses and enough goofy good spirits to float the
Hindenburg
. On the other side of the table the European, which is what Stephan has become in Rock's mind now, is standing at one of the tent posts filming them, his video camera protruding from between the puffy white flowers the post is wrapped with.

“You know anything about that guy?” Jack asks.

“Who, Adam Lowell? He went to—”

“With the camera.”

Rock darts a look at Jack, who is standing impassively, arms folded across his chest.

“Oh—he's making some kind of movie. . . .” Rock pauses.

In line, Adam throws his head back and laughs at something Caroline has said. Adam is always worming his way into girls' hearts, taking the unmenacing, androgynous, best-friend back door to their affections, and, once within the general parameters, making weaselly, whiny, desperate dashes at their hearts. Rock almost feels sorry for him for the first time ever; everything from his body language to his stupid bow tie presents a perfect, obnoxious vision of boisterous phoniness that Stephan must be lapping up.

Jack seems to be waiting for Rock to continue, although he really has nothing else to say. “It's about Concord,” Rock continues. “Some kind of documentary—I don't know, social commentary or something.”

Jack cocks his head to look at Rock directly for the first time. It is not exactly an encouraging look, but the alcohol begins pulling words out of Rock's mouth like one of those trick streamers under a clown's tongue.

“He's made a few already—about prominent places, you know, and their seamy undersides. . . . He's got a degree in women's studies from Sarah Lawrence, I think, and I guess he used to be a harpist for some New Age choir, but it was too hard on his fingers or his back or something—he'd been training since he was a kid. He's still in therapy about it—he's”—Rock makes the quotation gesture with his fingers—“‘working through it' in his films.”

Jack is still staring at Rock, but frowning now.

Jesus—how did he get started on this? Dunlap probably thinks he's friends with the guy or something—some kind of harp music fanatic or art film buff
.

“Bullshit,” Jack says, looking back across the room at Stephan, who is now talking to Adam and Caroline, who looks somewhat disconcerted to have found herself being filmed.

“Well . . .” Rock shrugs himself lower into his jacket and looks into the bottom of his empty glass. There is a wet cocktail napkin stuck to it that he hasn't even noticed—it seems suddenly equivalent to walking around with a piece of toilet paper on the bottom of his shoe.

Jack makes a sharp sudden sound, which at first Rock thinks is an outraged yelp, but it isn't. It's laughter. Jack Dunlap is laughing. A triumphant gloating feeling pushes up from Rock's abdomen. A salty breeze blows through the tent from the ocean. It is turning out to be an all right night after all. Rock and Jack stand side by side, staring across the room.

Almost at the front of the buffet line now, Adam is demonstrating something with his hands, describing points in the air with emphatic gestures while Caroline and Stephan look on. His right hand sweeps from his shoulder toward the table and knocks the neat roll of silverware out of Caroline's hand. “Sorry, sorry,” his voice carries all the way across to where Jack and Rock are standing as he leans over to pick up the dropped pieces. Caroline leans to help, but before she disappears behind the table she smiles at Stephan—a sort of gentle, amused smile accompanied by a little helpless shrug. There is something sweet about it, almost childish—and more than that—something intimate.

The triumphant feeling washes out of Rock completely and in its wake he can feel the foolish smile he has been wearing fall from his lips. Beside him Jack has shifted his gaze up at the pointed roof of the tent, as if maybe he is hoping for another bird in need of disposing. Across the tent, Stephan has lifted his camera and pointed it directly at them. Rock considers giving him the finger, but somehow, even in his drunkenness, he has a clear sense that this would be exactly what Stephan is looking for. Except, it dawns on him, that it would be him, and not Jack Dunlap. And judging from where the camera has been all night, Jack Dunlap seems to be at the heart of what the guy is after.

J
ACK IS NOT INITIALLY PLANNING
to make this little tromp out onto the golf course his exit from the Krasdale wedding. He just needs fresh air. And silence—the Coughlin kid has talked his ear off. The band is honking away at some frantic swing tune he recognizes vaguely from every other wedding he has ever been to. Lots of sliding horns and quick twists—the kind of music that made him feel like a lumbering idiot when he was a boy in dancing school. Jack has never been a fan of dancing, or, for that matter, of music. There is always something intrusive about it; something about the composition of notes and melodies that makes him feel manipulated. He knows nothing of them except that they are constructed, put together with the same cunning and precision that goes into building a house or a legal argument.

When he was a young man, he discovered a collection of dusty old records that had belonged to his mother, who had been, at this point, reduced in his mind to an ethereal black and white image, the smell of her perfume, and the click of heels across polished marble. Rhapsodies by Dvorak, the Mozart
Requiem
, some violin songs by a composer named Kreisler. He played these one afternoon in his Harvard dorm room and was sucked away into some other time and place where he did not have to keep his hands busy or his brain active, but could just sit, for hours in the brown-paneled room, watching the dust motes catch the afternoon sunlight and the snow outside be enveloped, slowly but surely, in icy blue shadow. And it made him feel what can only be described as real sorrow—unlike anything he had ever felt before: filled with not just visions, but whole pieces of himself as the little boy climbing the creaky, mothball-smelling back steps to bed in Helen's empty house alone, or building, secretly, a model airplane in the damp basement; spending Thanksgiving by himself in the cold, abandoned dormitory of his boy's school. His whole person was taken over and filled up with this great, oppressive sense—of all despicable things—of self-pity! He had been swept away by this unfathomable substance of arranged sounds into a deep state of melancholy. It was a profound manipulation; he has been suspicious of music ever since.

The wedding tent is set up away from the main building of the Ponkatawset Club, at the low end of the back lawn, where ordinarily parties are not allowed but which Skip's father, Hank Krasdale, having financed the club dining room renovation, has been given special permission to occupy. On one side of the tent there is a small wood—a carefully planted stand of fast-growing pine trees—and on the other, there is the golf course, glistening faintly in the moonlight. Here, beyond the throng of bodies and moist wine-scented air of the tent, the temperature drops pleasantly and there is a cool, damp breeze rushing out of the pines across the dark grass. Jack takes a deep breath and starts out toward the rise of the third hole; here he is one man, distinguished from the earth around him by his bones and blood and movement, not the color of his tuxedo jacket, the way he stands, the meaningless words coming out of his mouth. This is how he likes it. Why did he even come to this ridiculous event? The only reason he is even Skip's godfather is because when Skip was born, Hank wanted to buy the field Jack owns across the street from him, which Jack told him, even at the time, he would never sell. The man is a smarmy numbskull known for going through extravagant, high-profile divorces—Jack would have refused to become the boy's godfather if Faith hadn't thrown such a fit about the impropriety of such a thing.

Walking up the small rise of the third hole, Jack makes out what looks like a person—a small person, a child, actually, stretched out on his back on the close-cropped putting green. It makes him stop short, sloshing bourbon over the side of his hand—he has forgotten he is still holding his glass. “Who's that?” he says, and the figure scrabbles up to a sitting position. Jack can make out a squarish head and pudgy T-shirt-clad upper body—Joe Barrett. It sends an odd chill of recoil through him, enough that he has to stop himself from stepping backward.

“Joe?” he says, squinting through the darkness.

“Yeah.” The response is faint—too soft to sound as tough as it is obviously meant to.

“What are you doing out here?” Jack says.

“Nothing.” Joe is standing up now, looking down at his feet, one of which is scuffing back and forth over the short grass.

Joe is the son of the night watchman at the club, Jack's gardener Wheelie Barrett's brother. Jack would not know this if he hadn't helped save the boy's life last winter. The kid had been thrown from a snowmobile going, it was later noted, over thirty miles an hour on a winding path through the wildlife refuge that lies in the lowland between Monument and Bedford streets. He had cleared a good four feet in the air and landed on an old, half-snow-covered threshing machine, which sent one of its spikes straight through the soft flesh of his upper arm. Which was how Jack and Rosita found him—a small body, two corduroy-clad legs, a beige parka, and a lot of livid blood soaking out into the snow around him. They had been en route to the commuter train that Rosita was going to take back to her sister's for the weekend when a small, hysterical woman in a dirty-looking down vest and rubber boots came waving and screaming out of the brush along the road. An ugly little thing, with scraggly hair, no hat, barely intelligible, she had led them over the crunchy, ice-encrusted snow to an unkempt trail obscured from the road by a stand of trees. And in the middle of this—the overturned snowmobile with an unconscious man (Joe's drunken father) trapped beneath it, and the surreally spiked body of the boy. Eleven years old, and improbably skewered by the rusty spike of an ancient piece of farm machinery. He was screaming—a high, weak, inhuman sound that seemed as much a cause as a result of his trauma.

Out on the golf course there is a rush of wind through the pines. “Why aren't you home in bed? It must be past your bedtime.” Jack is surprised to find his voice has taken on a thick, gruff quality.

“Waiting for Pop.” The boy shrugs. “He works until midnight.”

Jack nods and stares at him. A distinct strain of music separates itself from the general buzz of voices emanating from the tent and floats across through the night air toward them.

On that afternoon, in the snow, Jack had stood there, stunned for a moment, before snapping into action. He told the wailing, screaming woman (who turned out later to be Joe's father's girlfriend, the owner of the snowmobile) to shut up and go back to the road to call an ambulance. As if through some unspoken agreement, he and Rosita had moved toward the terrifying hump of dingy corduroys and blood-slickened parka. The spike had gone straight through the boy's arm, about two inches below his shoulder—a half inch to the right and it would have been his lung; the boy would be dead now, Jack was told later. Rosita wrapped her hands around the boy's arm and shoulder, steadying it, while Jack slid one hand under his back and one just below the spike, then wrenched upward in one smooth motion. There was the slick feeling of the nylon parka, like a wet sail, and the impossible sucking that must have been the boy's flesh. And there was the sound of Rosita's voice, strangely calm and low, speaking to the boy, stopping his wheezy screaming.

“You don't want to wait inside?” Jack asks. “Or in there?” He motions at the tent.

“Un-unh.” The boy shakes his head emphatically.

“Hmm.” Jack nods and glances back at the bright squares of yellow light that compose the tent from here. It looks frivolous and impenetrable, like something on a television screen. He does not, he realizes, particularly want to go back there, either.

“Look,” the boy says, approaching him shyly. He is holding his arm out, pulling the T-shirt sleeve back with his other hand.

Jack looks at the pale
appendage being proffered. It is marked with a deep, indented purple scar that spiders its way along the bone for about four inches between his elbow and shoulder.

“No more bandage,” Jack says heavily.

“I'm taking Spanish in school,” the boy offers, kicking at the ground again.

“Oh?” For a moment Jack can't think what this is supposed to mean. But then he remembers:
uno, dos, tres
, was what Rosita was saying.
This is how you count in my language
, holding this boy's hand and speaking as if they were sitting snugly on some living room sofa, her eyes unflinching.

“Aha.” Jack stiffens. A shriek of laughter from inside the tent hurtles through the darkness. The boy is looking up at him, waiting for something with a guarded but insistent expression on his face. Jack can almost feel this more than he can see it in the moonlight. “Well, take care of yourself,” he says, stepping backward and then turning to walk away from the tent toward the parking lot across the grass.

Behind him, he can feel the boy's presence like a distant banging that works its way into a dream.

10

T
HE DRIVEWAY SHINES
white a
nd chalky in the moonlight, a wide bright path that narrows and darkens under the scraggly, intertwined limbs of the beech trees as it nears the road. There is no one home, no one around to hear, but Eliot walks softly anyway, measuring his footfalls so that the crunch of gravel beneath his feet is no louder than a sigh. On his back, his backpack sits snug and heavy, like a parachute. The night is sticky, heavier than the day, and full of the wet, decaying smells of summer.

Eliot is not actually scared out here in the night. It is scarier to be in the house, with its distant, darkened rooms and creaky sounds, its feeling of live emptiness. Inside, there are all those portraits of stern, unhappy-looking ancestors and the constant, unacknowledged presence of the attic overhead. Eliot is afraid to walk through the dining room, with its framed brass rubbing of Sir Percival in a full suit of armor, lifted from the knight's own Westminster Abbey grave. People were smaller back then, according to Eliot's mother. He has always taken this to mean the reproduction is Sir Percival's actual size. Eliot is already two inches taller than the dark, skeletal form in the rubbing, and the image of its ghost walking around eye level with the sideboard is unnerving.

On the road, he switches his flashlight on and shines it up into the canopy of leaves above him. Their dusky underbellies rustle like a mass of scurrying animals, alive in the wind. He shines the light ahead of him, illuminating a round spot of purplish pavement, a scattering of wet leaves and twigs, two fat orange slugs. The night is full of the gentle crackling sounds of summer: peeping crickets, rustling bushes, and the soft trickle of water in the ditch.

Eliot walks a quarter of a mile down Memorial Road and then turns right on the narrow path that horses take from the stable to the road. It is darker and closer here in the woods and he can feel his heart speed up inside his rib cage. He has had this nervous, wound-up feeling for the last few days and it has only gotten more extreme as his plan nears completion. Yesterday, he realized the map he printed out from the Internet was missing. It doesn't really matter, he has built the route into his papier-mâché project and memorized all its forks and turns already. But still, he doesn't like the idea of it at large in the world.

The other end of a twig he has stepped on scratches against a stone and Eliot jumps at the sound it makes. His brothers once told him a young girl was murdered in this wood a hundred years ago and that at night her spirit walks around in the patent-leather shoes she was wearing. He pictures the path as it is in the daylight to drive out this image. Pictures the light falling in moving pieces on the rotting leaves under his feet, the stretch of Memorial Road visible below them through the trees. He is almost at the place where he and Rosita would scrabble down the bank of the hill to sit on the flat rocks that jut out over the river here.
How do you call this?
he remembers Rosita asking of the furry moss here under the trees.
How do you call this?
of the bird's nest at the top of the apple tree. Hearing her voice in his head is comforting—it makes Eliot feel brave navigating this darkness.
Brave,
Rosita's voice pops into his mind suddenly,
like your father
. She had rested the vocabulary book on her knee for a moment with an unfamiliar, almost self-conscious expression on her face.
Arrojado,
she pronounced musingly. Eliot has never thought of his father as particularly brave.

At the end of the path, the Sunny Gables Stable meadow appears, a bright moonlit plain punctuated by the dense black form of the stable at the far end. The manicured grass, neatly cornered field, and clean bright fences that inhabit this place by day have become an inky watercolor version of themselves—the absolute distinctions between wood and grass, sky and tree rendered insignificant.

Crouching down slightly, Eliot starts across the meadow. Forester said there would be no one there after eight, but Eliot is not sure he truly believes him. He has paid Forester a good four months' worth of allowance, which should be enough to ensure veracity, but Forester is not a boy who inspires trust. Better to be careful, which is why he is here in the first place: this is his trial run. He needs to be sure there is no night watchman, that he can find everything, that the key Forester handed him is the right one.

When Eliot is twenty feet from the stable, he turns his flashlight off and skirts the perimeter, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. A complete loop reveals nothing but grass and air and darkness. At the door he can hear soft creaking, sighing sounds from inside, the almost imperceptible hum of animal breaths. He props his backpack against the wall and tries the keys in the rusty padlock. The first one doesn't fit, but the second, with some fiddling, opens it. The heavy door swings open and the warm pungent smell of horses and soiled straw sweeps over him. It is almost completely black.

Eliot turns on his flashlight and walks gingerly toward Blacksmith, who dips his head and nudges the half door. Seeing this is strangely affecting—Eliot has spent so little time with him since he was sold, but yet somehow the horse seems to recognize him, perking his ears forward and then back and then forward again, and then coming closer, nudging his velvety face against Eliot's chest. Eliot digs into his pocket and pulls out an apple he has brought, holds it out for Blacksmith to flutter his big silly-looking lips around—blubberingly at first, and then with a sudden fierceness that pulls the whole fruit between his snapping teeth.

Blacksmith is a beautiful, delicately constructed black thoroughbred. He used to belong to Eliot's mother, who is an accomplished equestrian and would ride him in amateur competitions and steeplechases. When she was first “away” at Maclean's, Blacksmith became Eliot's responsibility. He brushed and groomed the horse himself and rode him at least twice a week. But while Eliot has his mother's slight build, light bones, and natural affinity for the saddle, he lacks the passion to be a true equestrian. He likes Blacksmith's hugeness and patience—the way he holds his sturdy hoof up to be scraped with a pick. He likes the solid, muscular bulk of him, and his generous obedience. But he has never liked all the rigid fussiness of riding as a sport, the jumping and posting and keeping his hands down and wrists straight and winning silly garish-colored ribbons. He was not crushed when his father sold Blacksmith to Anne Kittridge.

But now, watching the horse chew the apple almost shyly, standing back a few paces in his stall, Eliot feels a pang of sorrow that this beautiful creature no longer belongs to his mother. That now he belongs, really, to Forester. When Eliot was little, Faith read him countless horse stories—
The Black Stallion, My Friend Flicka
, even the ancient Blaze series she had read as a girl. The stories themselves were boring to Eliot; there was something overwhelmingly tragic, but at the same time tedious about the trials and tribulations of the animal kingdom. But Eliot loved the smooth, gentle tones his mother's voice took on when reading them. Reading these tales of mute suffering and ultimate, costly triumph, she became wise and competent and even-keeled, a woman who could be counted on not to lose her head.

Blacksmith has not seen Faith for almost two years now. Watching him, Eliot wonders if he misses her. Certainly if he were Blaze, or the Black, or even Flicka, he would be getting thin with worry and plotting ways to escape and track his mistress down. But he does not look that smart to Eliot. He looks soulful, perplexed sometimes, inquisitive even, but not really intelligent.

“Hold on a minute,” Eliot says, gathering his backpack up. The jarring sound of his voice makes him more aware of the silence and darkness he is surrounded by.
Be right back
, he thinks, but this time he doesn't say it out loud.

The tack room is even darker than the main part of the stable, but Eliot does not want to turn on the overhead light. His flashlight passes over stacks of saddles piled high on posts along the far wall, and at the front, a desk messy with paperwork, candy bar wrappers, and little bowls of paper clips, thumbtacks, and bottle caps. There is something spooky about its untidiness—the chair pushed back as if someone has just risen from it, the feeling of interrupted activity. It is as if he has walked in on the ghost of the day.

He hurries to the back of the room according to Forester's instructions and looks for the Kittridges' saddle on the third post where Forester has assured him it will be, finds it, and lifts it off. It is surprisingly heavy. He carries this back to Blacksmith's stall and approaches him slowly. “Good boy,” he murmurs, patting the hot flank and then awkwardly throwing the saddle up over him, straightening it, fumbling under his stomach with the buckles. It is important to have tried all this, that he know how to get into the stable, find the equipment, and get Blacksmith ready. Blacksmith is a little tense, but patient. He lets Eliot feed him the bit and bows enough to let him loop the halter over his ears, and Eliot feels a swell of gratitude to this great big, considerate creature who could just as easily kick him aside, or rear his head upward and refuse to be mounted by a boy who, for all intents and purposes, abandoned him to Forester. He rests one hand on Blacksmith's shoulder and presses his forehead against the smooth short hair just below his mane. Beneath this he can feel the powerful beating of his heart.

W
hen Eliot has
let himself back out of the stable into the night, he feels almost nauseous with the excitement of anticipation. It is nearly impossible to fasten the padlock with his jumpy fingers; when he has finally managed to jam the metal prong into the body of the lock, turn the key, and extract it, he breaks into a run.

The wind is damp against his face and whistles softly in his ears. Under his feet the ground is springy and uneven. He spreads his arms and hands and the air separates around them with the soft solidity of Jell-O. He is aware of the faint trace of webbing between his fingers, the remnant of a time before America, before Sir Percival, before human beings could stand up. As he runs he imagines himself underwater, a vague shadow rising toward the surface, defining himself slowly but surely against the particles he is surrounded by.

C
AROLINE HAS BEEN
to the bathroom twi
ce already since the wedding reception started, but the hall looks different this time. Is it the planters along the wall that have moved? Or the silly little Louis XIV sofa with its splayed toes and bristly purple velvet that is different? Only once Caroline is faced with Mr. Holden's flaccid penis does she realize she has opened the door to the men's room. And she doesn't even feel drunk, really.

In the women's room, Caroline dabs on some lipstick, a dark mauvey shade she picked out last spring. But once it's on, it feels vulgar, as if she has painted
over
, rather than
on
her lips. As if she is wearing a mask. She stares at herself in the mirror and lets her face go slack, relaxing all the little muscles that keep it halfway to an expression. The face that stares back at her looks terribly sad.

Hello
, she thinks, shaping the full word in her mind—the
h
, the
e
, the double
l
, the
o
.
Hello
. It sounds formal and absurd, but the face in front of her remains frighteningly impassive. Does one normally have to tell oneself to laugh? Caroline blinks. There is an unfamiliar freckle on the line of her jaw and a faint premonition of two wrinkles between her brows. She can see exactly what she will look like when she is old.

She has spent most of the night talking to Stephan, not quite so much about what he will expect of her as his production liaison as about everyone at the wedding: where the Chatman children go to school and how John Hollsworth smashed his own son's car up driving home after the Murtins' Christmas party last year, and the time the Wallers were robbed by their handyman last summer. And about her family: about the time her brothers thought it would be funny to steal a goat from Drumlin Farm and let it loose in their lacrosse coach's house, where it promptly chewed up a family heirloom, about how Jack Jr. thought Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Romania were in South America until he was eighteen, and about her father's diorama-building. She feels a twinge of guilt thinking about this—not because the dioramas are secret or anything, but because Stephan seemed so very interested in them, he must have seen this as some appalling act of wasp-hood. She even—here is the real twinge of guilt—mentioned the time her mother signed up for a year's worth of vitamins and a set of breathing crystals, which she actually thinks is very sad and not that funny. Particularly because of its proximity to her nervous breakdown. Which Caroline did not mention. Which, for that matter, Caroline never mentions. Drinking has made her loose-lipped. And talking to Stephan seems to have trotted all the old family skeletons out of the closet.

There is a shriek of laughter from outside the bathroom door and the sound of someone practically throwing herself against it. Caroline rearranges her features into a half smile and slips out as a gaggle of bridesmaids enter.

In the hall, the lights are dim, brownish, and almost institutional. Someone is sitting hunched over on the little spindly-legged sofa now, head resting on his upturned palms. Caroline almost walks past, but then—it's Rock sitting there with his head in his hands.

“Rock,” Caroline exclaims. “What are you doing?”

“What?” His face, on lifting, looks tired and somehow unfamiliar. “Oh. Waiting.”

“Ugh,” Caroline says, sinking down next to him. “I have to get out of here.” She lets her shoes fall off, wiggles her toes appreciatively. Her feet feel swollen from standing around all night. “Maybe I should go work on one of those cannery ships in Alaska.”