The Hazards of Good Breeding (5 page)

“What would we do without you?” Faith says for what must be the thirty-seventh time. “It was so good of you to drive us here.” The conversation since they left BCD has been like air traffic control—both tense and incredibly boring.

“Mom,” Caroline says. “Okay. We're here.”

Faith seems unfazed by her daughter's exasperation.

“No problem,” Rock says. He had no choice; Jack took off in the car Caroline drove over.

The day has definitely not gone as Rock planned. Or at least it has not gone as he imagined. He would never have sat through the full hour of manipulative historical docudrama acted out by preadolescents if he had not thought he could lure Caroline out to Singing Beach afterward, or to Somerville to go record shopping. Instead, here he is, three hours later, sitting at the Garden picking at a possibly botulism-ridden tuna salad beamed in from Mars.

In his new role as Dunlap family chauffeur, Rock has subjected the entire family to the gritty seats and sour milk smell of his shit-brown Toyota. He has also made fifteen minutes of awkward conversation with his old sixth-grade teacher and twice been mistaken for one of the Dunlap twins and slapped violently on the back by their thuggish, middle-aged ex-golf partners. Possibly worst of all, he has had to endure being featured in his stepmother-to-be's condescending, ten-minute-long treatise about the modest aspirations of college graduates today, which she delivered to an audience of the pretentious, cool-guy filmmaker “friend” of hers—whom Rock suspects she's sleeping with, Caroline—and a panicked-looking, obviously inattentive Faith Dunlap.

Before Bensen's Organic closed down last week to make room for the expansion of InfoGraphix, its more successful next-door neighbor on Route 2, Rock would be working his shift, heaping dung onto the compost pile or tending to hydroponic tomatoes. While he was never “taken by the possibilities of all this environmentally conscious sustainable agriculture stuff,” as his father likes to spin the job to his friends (presumably to validate the four years of liberal arts education and twelve years of private schooling he paid for), Rock has always enjoyed manual labor. And right now he would give his left arm to be doing even the worst of his Bensen's responsibilities—hosing down the petting-zoo pigs or mucking out the duck pond. Even listening to Linda Bensen go on about the restorative powers of moonstones and bladderwort would be better than this.

“The rolls?” Caroline is saying, and Rock realizes it is the second time she has asked him. She looks so pretty sitting there with her pink T-shirt and shakily parted hair—her thin browned forearms resting on the table.

“Right-io.” It comes out too loud and Rock nearly upsets his water glass reaching them to her.

“So has Stephan been filming your rehearsals also?” Caroline asks Eliot.

Stephan,
pronounced
Ste-fahn
with a pretentious soft
ph
and long
ah
. Rock notes. So she is on a first-name basis with this film guy, who, Rock is sure, is already boffing his soon-to-be stepmother.

Eliot shakes his head. They have been in the restaurant for fifteen minutes and he has not yet spoken. With the remnants of his makeup—the fluorescent afterglow of wiped-off lipstick, eyeliner, and a bluish cloud of whatever was used to darken his almost invisible eyebrows—he looks like a child porn star.

“What sort of movie is he making?” Faith asks. “Maybe you'll be famous, Eliot.”

Eliot shrugs without looking at his mother.

“
The Last of the WASPS—from Puritans to Preppies
, or something,” Caroline quotes. “How does Denise know him anyway?” she asks Rock.

“From her days as an exotic dancer.” Rock puts his fork down.

“Right.” Caroline says giving him a fake smile.

“She . . . ?” Faith looks so genuinely shocked that Rock feels guilty.

“No, no—I'm just joking. She's his lawyer—or she
was
his lawyer for the last movie he made or something.”

“I didn't
think
that was right,” Faith says, folding her napkin into a triangle on her lap.

“I saw that movie—in my film class. I figured it out when I was talking to him,” Caroline says. “I couldn't figure out why he looked so familiar at first.” There is a sort of musing interest in her voice, a change from the beleaguered holding-up-the-conversation tone she has had up until now. Does she have a crush on him? The guy is, Rock has to admit, handsome. Has exactly the sort of exotic, tall-dark-stranger looks girls seem to equate with being smart, sensitive, and soulful. Caroline was chatting with him when Rock came back from his cigarette break; she was laughing and running her hand along her collarbone in, now that Rock thinks about it, a suggestively intimate way. And the guy certainly made a beeline for her—Rock saw him excuse himself from some no-doubt awful conversation with Denise and Mamie Starks and zoom over to her.

“He must be very talented,” Faith says, pushing a piece of feta off her salad.

“Why?” Caroline asks.

“Well—I mean, it's very hard to make a movie—or at least, I know it used to be, maybe it's gotten easier, but there's so much behind the scenes, I don't know, talking, and applying . . . Your uncle Merrill wanted so badly to make it in Hollywood and it was so hard, so expensive.”

“But Merrill is an idiot, Mom—he wanted to when? In between wanting to start that ridiculous antique business and wanting to be a professional polo player?”

“Well,” Faith says, rearranging her fork and knife apologetically on her plate. “He had a lot of dreams.”

Looking at her bowed head, the neat, gray-blond part, and her thin fingers, the ropy veins on the backs of her hands, Rock has the sudden hopeless feeling he gets watching those nature shows about baby wildebeests that can't get up and walk in time to keep up with the herd, or mother zebras with broken legs who have to be left at lonely watering holes to die. There is something about Faith that seems so inviting of disaster. Rock wasn't surprised when she ended up in Maclean's last year—in a way it is her presence back in the real world that is surprising.

“I had a dream last night,” Eliot says—he is looking at the corner of the table rather than anyone in particular—“that you were dead.”

There is the sound of forks clinking, the wind flapping the awning outside the open window, the waiter calling something over his shoulder as he steps out of the kitchen—missteps, actually—and nearly drops his tray.

“Me?” Faith is more mouthing than saying, sitting back as if she has been slapped.

“That's terrible, El,” Caroline says.

Rock's stomach lets out an inappropriate growl.

“Oh, Eliot,” Faith says. There are tears welling up in her eyes. The shadow of the American Legion flag flutters up the side of the building next door like a flame.

6

S
INCE LEAVING THE PLAY
yesterday,
Jack has gotten a car wash, closed a deal, chaired a board meeting, talked John Liggat into selling his stake in the Lambrecht venture, and swung by Tarbell's Toys and Models to pick up the miniature Franklin stove, Mason & Tuttle minuteman figures, and new glue gun he needs for the diorama he is finishing. The numbness in his head and splintery feeling in his stomach he had after leaving Colby Kesson has been steamrolled by the familiar combination of frustration and bitterness that seeing his ex-wife inspires in him. It fuels him to get things done, be productive, keep moving.

What happened to the pretty, shy Faith Cartwright he married? What happened to the young woman who used to crew for him on his grandfather's sailboat, or ski down the toughest trails on Whistler Mountain behind him in avalanche season?
That
Faith Dunlap was quiet, sweet, and often uncertain, but not the meek, wounded little bird-woman who trembled her way through the BCD lobby yesterday morning. The present Faith is, perhaps, better than the veritable madwoman who checked herself into Maclean's last year. That Faith believed a carful of Cuban doctors were trying to steal her kidneys. But this Faith—she is
still
so goddamn timid and fragile. And Jack sees this as a personality of her own choosing, the product of her own actions; what was it if not her desire to get divorced that caused the breakdown in the first place? And all the therapy and self-help books and yoga classes he has been forced to foot the bill for have left her exactly where he predicted.

It would be almost vindicating if he didn't know she blamed him. Which is absurd; he never asked for a divorce or told her to go live on her own, five blocks from Harlem, in New York City. He isn't the one who threw the carefully constructed model of her life—no, both of their lives, and the children's—up into the air to watch it rain down in a million irreparable pieces. Jack knows this, but the vision of himself that he sees reflected in her wide, fidgety gray eyes contradicts this. It may be false, but it is clear enough to be persuasive.

On his way home from picking Caesar up from Jim Ridgeway's, Jack pulls off Route 20 to the Keystone Steak House. He does not have to be in the office until noon today and he has called ahead for three orders of French toast, bacon, and sausage in honor of Caroline's second morning home from college. He has always liked Keystone's, with its old-fashioned bowl of mints by the door, its dignified dark green walls and working fireplace. When he was a boy, and then later, when he was newly married, whenever he was in Boston he would come here for Sunday brunches with his grandfather. They would inspect the old hunting prints and cartoons cut from the
Boston Globe
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and
Harper's
. “Pansies,” he can hear his grandfather saying about this one that depicts a horde of skinny, long-haired young men, brandishing anti-war signs, climbing the steps of the statehouse. “Thank god you're not one of them.” The place has not changed much since then—a new sign outside, a glassed-in addition in the back, but otherwise the same unpretentious, straightforward,
upstanding
feeling.

Jack is pleased to have come up with the plan to come here, to have thought of calling ahead. At home, there is nothing in the refrigerator—maybe some cornflakes or whatever it is Eliot has for breakfast. He is, now that he thinks about it, looking forward to having Caroline home for a while—of course, not for too long, a young person has to make his own way in the world, but for the time being. And she is a young
woman
, after all; the need to go out and make a name for herself is less urgent than it is for the boys, whom Jack finds alarmingly unambitious. Hanging around a ski resort in Colorado is not what he had in mind when he paid for their Harvard educations.

He has more faith in Caroline, though. She has a good head on her shoulders. He has never had to chide her for bad grades or discipline her for the frivolous kind of pranks her brothers pulled off all the way through high school. Once, when she was ten, she was sent home from school early because she had gotten into a fight—a real physical fight in which she kicked a boy in the stomach. She would not say what started it and was silent that night while Faith served chicken and chattered about a neighbor's new swimming pool or some other nonsense to relieve the tension
. He called her a name
, Caroline had said finally when Faith ducked back through the swinging door to get the pie out of the oven. Jack can still remember those steady gray eyes meeting his in challenge across the table.
Hmm
, he had said, and nodded, staring back at her. He did not ask what it was. But neither did he make her go straight upstairs to bed after dinner.

“Here you go, sir,” says the chirpy blond who has gone back to the kitchen to see about his order. “Anything else?” the woman asks. “Juice? Coffee?”

“No,” Jack says. “Thank you.” But then his eyes land on the cheesecake under the glass cake plate on the counter, which stirs some deep, long-forgotten fold of brain tissue. Cheesecake, which is Caroline's favorite. He can't think how he knows this, but he is quite certain. “Actually, yes. Cheesecake—three slices,” he says.

“Cheesecake?” the woman says doubtfully. It is too early for cheesecake, Jack realizes.

“Cheesecake,” he repeats firmly. It doesn't matter, though. He will surprise his daughter.

T
here is no sign of
activity when Jack walks through the kitchen door, bearing the warm Styrofoam boxes of French toast. There is a skittering sound from the mudroom and then a short burst of half-repressed barking. Brutus. Which is strange, because Jack left him outside last night. Someone has brought him in and penned him up overnight; the poor dog probably has to go to the bathroom. Jack lets him out of the pen and then the front door to join Caesar. He streaks to the middle of the lawn, where he squats and pees like a female. Jack frowns in the doorway.

“Caroline?” he calls, walking through the dining room. “Eliot?”

There is a distant response—Caroline's voice. Jack turns and walks back into the kitchen, trying to repress his irritation. What if he had gone to the office? The dog would have been stuck inside for God knows how long. For all this competence and responsibility he has been reflecting on, Caroline can still be as careless as her older brothers. Jack can't imagine himself, even as a boy, let alone at twenty-two, doing the same thing.

Of course, Jack never really had a
home
in the true sense of the word, to come back to. He was raised, from the age of seven on, by his father's sister, Helen, after his parents were killed in a car crash. And Helen, better known as Lilo, was certainly not much of a maternal figure. He slept in the austere third-floor guest bedroom of her Beacon Hill brownstone and learned early to be circumspect about his presence so as not to invite the attentions of her self-absorbed, alcoholic husbands—there were four of them. When he came back from boarding school to Helen's for holidays or visits, he asked permission to stay however long he planned to, to give Beatrice his laundry to do, even to get himself a glass of water. He didn't interfere with any household habits. Even here in Concord, at his grandfather's, where he felt the most at ease, he was careful to adapt, for instance, to his grandmother's habit of walking
around
the dining room carpet rather than
on
it, or his grandfather's habit of wearing a jacket to dinner. It was a matter of respect, simple as that.

“Dad!” Caroline says, coming through the door from the dining room to the kitchen in some sort of athletic outfit. “You're not working this morning?”

“Not for another hour,” Jack says. “Did you bring Brutus in last night?”

“Oh. . . .” Caroline darts a look over at the mudroom. “I did—why? Where is he?”

“I let him out. He needed to go to the bathroom.”

“Oh,” Caroline says, “sorry.” She opens a tin of saltines that have been sitting on the counter for God knows how long, takes out a cracker, and gives him a sidelong glance, leaning against the counter. “So, you really gave Mom a minor heart attack, showing up at the play yesterday.”

“Oh?” Jack tries to affect distracted bemusement. An image of the BCD lobby, Faith's trembly face, the oppressive feeling of just
standing around
, his least favorite thing in the world, flashes before him.

“You
saw
her. Jesus—these are disgusting.” Caroline tosses the cracker into the garbage. “What made you decide to do that?”

“Do what?” Jack looks back at her. “I would think I could go to my own son's play if my schedule cleared up, without an interrogation.”

“Hmm.” Caroline cocks her head to the side and brushes the crumbs off her hands. “Well,” she says, noticing Eliot, who has slunk into the kitchen and is walking toward the sink with an empty water glass. She gives an unconvincing, if not slightly hostile, shrug. “Whatever.”

Eliot turns on the faucet and lets water splatter into the glass. He is wearing what looks like a pair of long underwear and a huge pale blue T-shirt that says
NAKED CO-ED WATER POLO
—undoubtedly one of the twins' cast-offs. It hangs all the way down to his knees and makes him look frail and slightly clownish.

“Okay,” Caroline says, pushing herself off from the counter. “I'm going for a run. I made Eliot oatmeal and there's some left over if you want it.”

“Oh,” Jack says. He looks over at the Styrofoam boxes and the little cardboard container of cheesecake.

“What's that . . . ?” Caroline follows his gaze. “Oh, did you get—was that for breakfast?” There is that look Jack dreads on her face—alarm, concern . . . pity even.

“No,” Jack grunts dismissively, turning to wash his hands at the sink, which he can do facing out the window. “Leftovers from dinner last night.”

“Oh,” Caroline says doubtfully. “Okay—well, I'm sorry to be leaving you guys. I just—”

“Caro-line,” Eliot sighs.

“Okay, okay, I'm off.” And in a moment she has slammed through the screen door out into the driveway.

“'Bye,” Eliot calls.

“'Bye,” Jack echoes gruffly. He watches her start up the drive and then shortcut the curve over the grass Wheelie has just mowed. He tries to feel annoyed, but feels instead something else, sadder and more piercing, watching her shadow precede her across the grass. Carefully, he dries his hands on the dish towel.

There is a rustle from the table and then a pause. From outside there is once again the sound of Caroline's footsteps, faster now, on the gravel.

“But it's still warm,” Jack can hear Eliot saying from behind him.

C
AROLINE HAS A VAGUELY
guilty feeling
as she lets herself out of the house. Is she skipping out on what her father hoped to make some sort of family breakfast? How could she know, though, when he won't even give a straight answer? She bends over to stretch out her calves. Whatever. She is not going to let it put her in a bad mood.

It is beautiful out: hot, but not as humid as yesterday. The sun has the strong but bloodless shine of early morning: white across the bricks of the walkway and silver on the panoply of leaves over the drive. There is the hush of warming air, the smell of sage growing between the bricks, and the feel of evaporating dew—no sign of the brown Toyota. She has beaten Rock this morning.

At the end of the driveway Caroline breaks into a jog. The pavement is surprisingly springy under her feet and she feels spry and sporty in her new running shoes and sports bra: the products of repeated, and often abandoned, resolutions to get in shape. Caroline has never been terribly athletic. Proficient, yes—she can wield a lacrosse stick and tennis racket and can even knock around a hockey puck with some success, thanks to all the sports camps and teams the New England Independent School League deemed essential to a fruitful adolescence. But the drive to make a goal or slam a serve or score a point has always eluded her. This is perhaps not unrelated to her father's relationship to athletics, which bring out a severe and terrifying enthusiasm in him, not dissimilar from greed. He was actually banned from attending her older brothers' Little League games in Lexington because of the time he screamed, “You fat fucking idiot,” at a chubby boy who tagged out one of the twins in a controversial double play.

Caroline takes a left onto Liberty Street, past the North Bridge Visitors' Center. Everywhere she is aware of the scrim of her childhood obscuring the lines and contours of the pres-ent—transforming the trees, the street signs, the telephone poles and boxwood bushes, the open vistas and stands of wood into complex forms with double meanings—the overlay of childhood vision onto the here and now.

Here is the Kittridge house, the Dellars' field, the famous intersection in which the little Dorchester girl bused in to Alcott Elementary School was hit by a car. Here is the patch of woods where Silas Kittridge used to lead violent games of capture the flag and where Clare Whiteside claimed to have lost her virginity. Here is where her older brothers used to fashion cruel and elaborate worm factories out of sticks and paper cups and stones that dropped from mini-parapets to sever worms in two. Here is the Concord Rod and Gun Club she was afraid of as a little girl—for good reason, it occurs to her; what kind of person joins a club dedicated to using
rods
as a hobby?

On the left, the row of weeping cherries and then the neat white picture-book gazebo in front of the Tooleys' house emerges. And up ahead, Caroline can see the green oblong of Concord Circle, complete with its—not two or three—but five monuments within eyesight. Below the “War of the Rebellion” obelisk in the center of the pretty green traffic island, there is a patch of scarred black earth riddled with stones that makes the rest of the manicured grass look like a hastily unfolded picnic blanket—not quite big enough to cover up the dirt beneath.