The Hazards of Good Breeding (7 page)

“Down where?”

“Under the bridge—we used to hang down there, too. You just have to watch out for the park police—they called my folks once.”

“Oh,” Eliot says. He has never been under Old North Bridge. He has only walked over it, hundreds of times. Eliot looks at his watch; it is time to go outside.

“I had my first smoke down there, my first kiss. . . .” Rock lets out a little snort of delight. “I even put up my first tag—I used to . . .”

But Eliot is no longer listening. Caroline's face has emerged in his doorway, with her finger raised to her lips. She is gesturing frantically, pointing at herself and making a decisive slash with her hand.
Not here
, Eliot finally realizes she is mouthing.

Rock has wandered over to the window in his reminiscence, his back turned toward the door. He is playing with the wind chime made of flattened silver spoons and little disks of glass that Eliot's mother hung up there when he was a baby. Pretty, fragile sounds bounce around the room while he speaks.

“Okay,” Eliot says, and Caroline's head disappears immediately.

“Okay, what?” Rock says, interrupting his own monologue. He backs toward the center of the room and stares into Eliot's face and then, rapidly, to the now-empty door. “Who are you talking to?”

“You,” Eliot says.

“Okay to get grounded for four weeks?” Rock looks skeptical.

“Yes,” Eliot says gravely. “I mean, okay I have to clean up my room now.”

“Says who?” Rock walks out into the hallway and looks around.

“Me,” Eliot says.

Rock lifts his eyebrows. “Okay,” he says finally, and shrugs. “But I think what you need to do is loosen up—have a little more fun. Not clean your room.”

Eliot says nothing.

“Well, all right, then—tell your sister I stopped by.” And then Rock is gone, footsteps banging down the stairs in a sloppy haphazard order. Eliot checks his watch once more—it will take Rock another minute or two to get into his car and be gone, which will make Eliot late. He stands in the middle of the room for another moment and then walks over to the window to monitor Rock's leaving. Above him the wind chime is still tinkling faintly, a sad, leftover sound.

I
N HIS HURRY
to see Caroline,
Rock has left his car parked in the middle of the driveway under the bright glare of the sun. When he opens the door, the sour milk smell accosts him with unusual intensity. There is junk all over the floor and some stupid dirty baseball has ended up, God knows how, right smack in the middle of the driver's seat. A fucking pigsty. A dart of irritation stabs up through Rock—at the car, which is old and putrid-smelling, at the day, which has started all wrong, at himself, for things too vast and vague to itemize. He picks up the ball and hurls it into the rhododendron bushes on the other side of the circular drive, where he hears it drop through the leaves with a satisfying ripping sound. But then as he turns the ignition on he remembers: it is the ball his mother dug out of some box of his childhood possessions and gave him at the surprise party she threw for his mildly retarded cousin Betsy last Thursday night. Possibly the ball he caught from right field during the '86 playoffs. Why does his mother have to purge her household of his childhood belongings as if they are carriers of the plague? And why does she dump them on him at weird events when he is in between apartments? And why did he just chuck what might possibly be one of the greatest mementos of his adolescence into a fucking king-sized rhododendron bush?

Rock slams the car door and jogs across the gravel to what is actually a mini-forest of rhododendrons, an ungainly ring of them stretching up the bottom of the hill to the road, each bush sturdy and tough enough to be a small tree. Fighting through the big glossy leaves and springy branches, he feels a sharp pain on his forehead and, when he reaches his hand up to touch it, comes away with blood. “Fuck,” he swears, standing bent with one leg over a low branch and the other twisted awkwardly behind him. He sweeps his eyes over the ground ahead of him—there is a small clearing in the middle of the bushes and to the right side of this is a grayish object that appears to be his ball. Except it isn't his ball. It is a sneaker, and above the sneaker a leg. Rock raises his eyes and finds himself looking straight at a person—a blond, pink-polo-shirt-wearing boy, to be exact. “What the fuck?” Rock hears himself saying aloud, still frozen in his awkward semi-crouch.

“Hi,” the boy says in a scared, robotic voice. It is Forester Kittridge, Rock recognizes him now. Rock steps over the branch and works his way into the clearing, where he can now actually see his ball.

“What are you doing in here?” Rock asks.

“Looking for something.” Forester is tall and long-headed, oddly unmarked by the gawkiness of adolescence, which gives him the uncanny appearance of a mini-adult. Or a mini-version of his mother, who Rock knows well from his caddying days: an aggressive, slightly cross-eyed woman, notorious for never tipping.

“Oh, yeah?” Rock casts his eyes around the clearing. Dirt and stones and fallen branches—nothing out of the ordinary.

“Yeah.”

“You planning on camping out in here?” Rock asks, gesturing at the kid's backpack, which is substantial.

“No.” Forester glowers at Rock.

“Mr. Dunlap know you're poking around his bushes for buried treasure or whatever?” Rock asks. He is enjoying himself now. The kid is an asshole, that much is written across his face. One of those boys who like to goad weaker, younger children into eating chalk or raw hamburger, or making shit sculptures with their own feces. He is probably blackmailing Eliot into giving him his allowance, or forcing him to buy cigarettes at a dollar a pop.

Forester shrugs again. But he looks more anxious now. There is sweat beading on his forehead.

“Well, maybe you and I should go in there and have a little chat with him, just, you know, let him know what you're after.”

“Gimme a break,” Forester says. Mr. Dunlap is almost a cult figure in the community—known for his rudeness, for his refusal to let the Higginses' wedding guests park in his driveway, for having made his own sons clean litter off Route 2 as a punishment for having mooned someone at a drive-through. Rock allows silence to fill the space around them with tension. “I'm just waiting for Eliot,” Forester says finally.

“Well, why don't you do your waiting out in the open?” Rock says, stooping to pick up the ball. He cocks his head in the direction of the ragged tunnel through which he came, and Forester follows him with a certain degree of reluctance.

Once out in the open, Rock glances over at the house and, sure enough, there is Eliot's little face in the window. Rock raises his arm in an exaggeratedly cheery wave. He has certainly stumbled on to something. Behind him, Forester is looking over his shoulder to the road in what is either an attempt to seem nonchalant or a bona fide calculation of whether he should bolt.

“So, Forester,” Rock says over his shoulder as he approaches his car, “say hello to your mother—tell her to give me a call about that produce garden she wants to set up.”

“Whatever,” Forester mutters, and Rock climbs into his stinky car, with the painstakingly retrieved baseball beside him on the seat. He can see the kid glowering after him in the rearview mirror.

7

I
T IS EMBARRASSING
to have slept through breakfast. This is what teenagers do after long nights of drinking and necking and staying awake to watch the sun rise, not middle-aged mothers visiting old family friends. Faith has a vague recollection of Lucy poking her face around the narrow wooden door, smiling, head bobbing vigorously in explanation—breakfast, it must have been—breakfast is in half an hour, or ten minutes, or whatever it was. Faith must have gone promptly back to sleep. She is now pulling a comb through her flattened hair at ten forty-five.
She's not completely well
, she imagines Lucy's sweet but tactless husband Pete would have explained to the other guests.
She's been through a lot.
A whole tableful of healthy, stable individuals who've been out running and swimming and playing tennis since dawn turn sympathetic but smug, generic faces at her.

No. This is not the right way to start the day. Faith replaces the image with that of a pretty harbor scene, quiet, a single red boat with a white sail. Picture something soothing when you feel yourself getting anxious, Dr. Marcus says. Something that makes you feel relaxed. She had thought it was her own invention—a unique and individuated image of safety generated by her peace-seeking soul. It was a shock to recognize it, months later, in the December page of Marcus's own hanging calendar—Monet's
Red Sail Boat
. A regurgitated projection of some more articulate, more capable inner eye. It is almost tragic that it works.

“Faithey.” There is a gentle rapping at the door. Faith shoves the comb into her toilet kit, checks to see that her blouse is buttoned. Lucy's face peers back around the door, a reality-based déjà vu. Except this time Faith is dressed, standing at the sink, not lolling like some teenage slut on her bed.

“You're awake! I saved you some breakfast,” Lucy says, coming through the door like a brisk, reassuring puff of oxygen—a safety line thrown out into the dense, gravityless orbit Faith has been floating in. Faith has known Lucy for thirty-six years now. Together they used to sneak cigarettes at cotillion events, lie out on silver reflective blankets slathered in baby oil, take the bus in to Harvard to sit on the steps of Widener Library smiling at the handsome young men. Lucy is a short woman with an athletic-looking body, compact and tanned, with firm round muscles on the backs of her calves, the swell of her forearms, even the curve of her neck. For ten years in a row she has won her country club tennis tournament in the energetic, good-spirited way tennis tournaments are supposed to be won, not with the sort of catty desperation that scared Faith off the Ponkatawset Club courts. With her sensible brown bobbed hair and clean pink polo shirt, Lucy looks as strong and sturdy as a little rocking horse. Faith would like, for a moment, to fall at Lucy's feet, hug her competent round knees in an excess of relief. “Oh, you didn't have to—I'm so embarrassed—so silly of me to sleep so long,” she says instead, lifting a hand to her hair.

“Can it,” Lucy says. She is a fan of wholesome 1950s expressions—
fiddlesticks
,
blow off steam
,
okeydoke
. Coming from her, they sound exactly right. “Rest and relaxation—that's what this place is all about. What do you think Pete and I come here for? Now—let's bring this out to the porch and then I'll give you the tour. There's a tennis tournament at four and . . .” Faith finds herself listening instead to the energy crackling from Lucy's body. What a wonderful mother she must be! If only her own mother had sounded like this. Obediently—carelessly, even—she follows Lucy down the flights of stairs, through the dark cool common rooms, and out into the sunshine.

From the beginning, Faith did not want to go on this trip to Pea Island. It was Lucy's idea that she come—that they have some time to rest and catch up and reminisce together. Faith didn't realize when she agreed that this plan included six of Lucy and Pete's closest friends from Greenwich and her own former neighbor, Rock Coughlin, who was Pete's college roommate. Faith has spent the last few weeks worrying that she will be the outsider among this sampling of hearty couples who have weathered marital storms and raised kids together, have cried on each other's shoulders and flirted with each other's spouses. Who will probably finish each other's sentences, speak in code, and like to play charades. In their presence, Faith will be the intruder—the lonely divorcée. The word, at least, is pleasantly exotic. She hopes Lucy has referred to her in such terms—
my friend Faith, the divorcée
.

When she has eaten enough of the cinnamon buns and fruit salad to appease Lucy, they begin a walk through the house and around the island, which Faith is amazed to find she remembers quite distinctly. She visited it several times as a teenager, but has not been back for almost twenty-five years. It is a small hump of land, thickly wooded and bean-shaped. There are three rambling, weather-beaten houses owned by Lucy's family and built by her great-great-grandfather in 1909 for throwing rustic weekend parties and luring the Vanderbilts up from Newport. Each of these has ten to twelve bedrooms, now occupied by a motley crew of cousins and their guests, great-aunts, grandnieces older than Lucy, cousins-in-law, and one mildly deranged uncle who lives in the unwinterized “honeymoon cottage” year-round. Most of whom Lucy cannot explain her exact relationship to. All of whom trace their heritage back to the early days of the Republic. Lucy herself is a great-great-great-grandniece of Betsy Ross; Faith can never remember if this is the one who was married to George Washington or the one who sewed the first Star-Spangled Banner, despite the fact that Lucy has clarified the matter more than once for her. There is an old-fashioned sauna perched precariously on a rocky cliff over the ocean and the remnants of a lovely sculpted garden that has sunk beneath the surface of the sea. There are fluffy, unprickly-looking pine trees that shed long rust-colored needles all over the paths, and, of course, there are no cars.

Crossing a narrow path that leads to the wild part of the island, Faith has a vague recollection of being groped by Lucy's drunken father there, against that giant boulder—the picnic stone. He was a sweet man, really—not hard or bullyish, just desperately, desperately—what? lost? Strange, she has never, till this moment, even thought of his advances as anything but sad. Dr. Marcus would certainly think otherwise.

Faith came here only once with Jack, shortly after they were married, and it was not a fun trip, as she remembers it. Lucy and Jack never liked each other and Jack found the place stifling—not enough space and not enough to do and all these blue-haired old aunts and uncles in your face morning, noon, and night. This was Jack's criticism. There was some sort of disastrous picnic on the headlands in which Jack did something truly boorish that resulted in, what was it? some sort of accident with a food item, a pie he stepped in or sat on or otherwise ruined.

Around the corner from the last house, Lucy's husband, Pete, is practicing his golf swing, hitting balls off an almost trim lawn into the woods. “Faithey!” he calls, dropping the nine iron in his hand. The ease with which he has picked up Lucy's girlish pet name for her has always struck Faith as endearing. On his tongue it has such an absurd and surprising sound to it, like a frilly nightgown on a football player. Pete is the manliest man Faith knows, except maybe for Jack, who is manly in a quieter, more intense, and, Faith thinks, crueler way. Where Jack likes to drink bourbon straight and climb mountains in torrential downpours without complaining, Pete likes to drink beer and watch football and slap other men on the back in the hearty, comradely way of men in Budweiser commercials. Pete grew up in Yonkers, the son of Irish immigrants, and made millions selling his family car rental business to the Japanese. Lucy's parents did not approve of him, which has always struck Faith as romantic, suggestive of a great, otherwise hidden, passion.

“There's someone I want you to meet,” Pete says, flinging his arm out toward a man taking spastic swings at the ball with a putter. “John John—what are you doing with that toothpick back there? Get over here!” Pete barks. The man grins and tosses his club after Pete's iron and walks toward them. He is wearing what looks like a safari outfit—a beige fishing hat and short-sleeved beige oxford shirt and khakis. He has olive skin and an almost pretty face, flat as an Eskimo's.

“Faith, this is Lucy's cousin Jean Pierre—flew all the way from France just to meet you.”

The delicate balloon of Faith's confidence, which has been floating along on the breeze of Lucy's comfortable certainty, bumps and sags, punctured by the terrifying possibility that, in fact, they have lured her here to set her up—to force her into the desperate and intimidating world of adult dating. And with a Frenchman! A man who probably believes in mistresses and puts garlic in his eggs.

“No, no—stop it, Pete,” Lucy says. “Jean Pierre is visiting on his way to California.” Behind Jean Pierre's back, Lucy is rolling her eyes, lifting her hands in helplessness. “We didn't even know he would be here.”

“An unexpected vis-i-tor.” Jean Pierre bows slightly, extending his hand. The word sounds scientific the way he says it, like an extinct species.

“Nice to meet you,” Faith says. “I'm sorry I don't speak French.” She takes care to speak loudly and slowly.

“No problems.” Jean Pierre smiles. “I speak English.”

“And I can always
parlez
,” Pete says, at which both he and Jean Pierre laugh.

“Well—
parlez
away,” Lucy says.

Faith lifts a hand in a tentative wave.

Once they have rounded the bend and are again on one of the soft cool paths through the trees, Faith pulls out the paper she has been nervously folding and unfolding in her jacket pocket and unfolds it, idly, as they are walking—something for her anxious fingers to do. Lucy is talking about the golf tournament she and Pete just played in—Marvin Dobbs and Cee Cee McCormac, did Faith remember them from the old days? Faith's eyes meet the words
Property of Eliot Dunlap—Do Not Open!!!!!
in careful, elongated script on the inside fold of the paper. The sight of her son's handwriting gives Faith a start. There is a skull and crossbones below the letters—slightly shaky, as if drawn with great care. What is this? And why is it in her pocket? He must have stuck it in when he borrowed her jacket after the play. Carefully she unfolds it with a flutter in her stomach, half expecting some tirade against her, or frightening confession of self-hatred. But what it is, is almost more surprising—a xeroxed map of Concord and Lexington with a route outlined in black running through it. What does it mean for such a simple thing to be marked with such dire threats?

“. . . it was that paddle tennis court with the broken fence, wasn't it?” Lucy is saying. The needles hiss gently beneath their feet.

“I'm sorry,” Faith says. “I just . . .”

Lucy turns around and looks back at Faith quizzically. “Are you okay, Faithey?”

“Oh, yes, I just . . .” suddenly Faith realizes she does not want to share her discovery. “I forgot my bathing suit,” she says, holding the paper down at the bottom of her pocket as if, left to its own devices, it might spring out into the air between them. The blood has rushed to her face and her heart is beating quite fast.

“Hmm.” Lucy frowns. She has reminded Faith about her swimsuit at the end of every phone conversation they have had for the last two weeks. “I have an extra one—it'll be a little big, but it should do the trick,” she says.

What a stupid lie it was—now, after all that careful searching for an appropriate new suit, she will have to wear one of Lucy's! But it is only a brief thought, barely registered over the clatter in her mind set off by the piece of paper. Which is probably silly. He is just a little boy coming up with silly boy-pranks. But somehow this is not convincing to her. What sort of route is her son tracing? After all, what sort of mother has she been?

R
OCK IS SURE HE HAS STUMBLED
on to something. Has actually been on to it all morning—Forester in the rhododendrons is just the final piece of evidence. There is a certain trapped way Eliot acts, a passive sneakiness that Rock knows from darker moments of his own life. He's got something. Cigarettes, maybe, but bigger, Rock thinks. Pot, probably. Maybe even stashed away in that “project” of his. It's a shame because he's just the sort of kid to get fucked by that kind of thing—pensive, cynical—if he's smoking up, it's his own trip, not some joiner's attempt to be cool. A few more years and he'll be off at Holderness, popping whippets in Saturday morning study hall, stealing turpentine from the wood shop. It's almost tragic, considering how much Caroline loves the kid. Maybe he should tell her, but there's really nothing to be done—the master plan is in motion. Rock is a firm believer in destiny. Caroline, on the other hand, is one of those responsibility-takers. She will chastise herself for Eliot's downfall no matter what, but the self-chastisement will reach catastrophic proportions if she has foreknowledge and a sense that she could have saved him. She'll end up waitressing at some ski resort in Utah, practicing holistic medicine, and listening to Phish bootlegs and Mickey Hart drum solos, talking incessantly about the wisdom of the Anasazi. She will become as tentative and self-despising as her mother. For a moment this image of her—stringy-haired, stunned-looking, and wearing some blowsy South American getup—is so immediate that it blurs the contours of here and now: Caroline as clear-eyed and sharp-tongued, a girl who, even when she first wakes up, succeeds in looking somehow streamlined.

Rock parks the car across the street from his father's post-divorce dwelling in Brookline. He has been living here nearly a year now—since the apartment he shared with two of his friends from Wesleyan was repossessed by the landlord. A year in this place! Fucking incredible! The house itself has a crippled, incomplete feeling to Rock—a parody of a home. It is a “duplex,” according to his father, but Rock is certain the word means something more specific than Rock Sr. intends it to. Stretching haphazardly up the right side of a beautiful old Victorian that, for a short period of time, the Kennedy family lived in, it has the feeling of something left over. It is as if the “duplex” is the remainder of some intricate living space equation worked out by the Pforzheimer family, who own the main part of the house—the superfluous rooms they have lopped off like extra piecrust. That his father doesn't see the indignity of this seems emblematic of a deeper, possibly incurable problem, which Rock cannot name but is afraid he has inherited.