The Good House: A Novel

by Leary, Ann

  “Imagine,” she said now. “I was out of my mind. Moving up here was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  I got the sense that she had come to consider her marriage with Brian McAllister a failed attempt at love. A botched effort. Now, of course, she had found the real thing in Peter Newbold.

  I told her about Scott’s leaving me for Richard. She’d had no idea. Everybody in town knows that Scott left me for a man, but Rebecca hadn’t a clue, nor did she know about Linda Barlow’s son, who was killed, as an infant, in a car accident, in which Linda, the driver, only received a few scrapes. I chose not to tell Rebecca; she would have felt awful for making fun of Linda. Rebecca meant no harm with her witty commentaries. She seemed to sail about the town on a different course than us townies, unaware of the steady undercurrents we had known and understood our whole lives. She knew only what she could observe—the surface of things—and I learned, through Rebecca, how funny things can be, sometimes, if you just look at them on a surface level.

  During this time, I became aware of a change in Peter Newbold’s behavior toward me whenever we crossed paths at work. I don’t think I was imagining it. Peter has always been a thoughtful and considerate neighbor and tenant, but he became particularly solicitous during those weeks after Rebecca’s first visit to my house. One Friday morning, we both arrived at the office at the same time and he held the door open for me, but then, instead of jogging up the steps, as he usually did, he stopped to ask me how I was doing.

  “I’m great, Peter. How about you?” I was actually quite hungover.

  “Good, good, Hildy.”

  “Are Elise and Sam coming up this weekend?”

  “They’re gonna try to come up tomorrow night, I hope. Elise teaches a workshop on Saturday mornings now, and Sam likes to hang in Cambridge with his friends.…”

  “Of course,” I said. I suspected Peter had been with Rebecca the night before. I wondered if he could smell last night’s wine on me. I had been lonely the night before and had drunk a little more than usual. My head was splitting. I realized I was feeling a bit angry at Peter as I stood there fumbling about with my keys. I blamed him for my hangover—he had hijacked my drinking buddy, and that’s why I kept drinking long after I should have gone to bed the night before.

  Who the fuck do you think you’re kidding? I thought, glancing up at his tousled hair and his slightly exhausted expression. At the same time, I was aware of a strange excitement I felt in the knowledge that he had been with Rebecca the night before. He had been with my Rebecca. Nobody knew this but Peter and Rebecca and me. And I knew it without having been told. I finally found my keys and was about to turn to unlock my office door, when I said to Peter, “I’m sure you’re aware that I’ve been seeing a lot of Rebecca lately.” My head was throbbing. I think I must have still been a little tipsy from the night before and that’s what made me say it.

  “Rebecca…” Peter said.

  “Yes, I gather you’ve been nice enough to allow her to do some painting on your beach.”

  “Oh. Yes. Rebecca McAllister. Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “I’m so glad they moved to town. Though I don’t know him at all. Brian McAllister. It seems like he’s not up here much,” I said.

  “No?” Peter replied. I was trying to get a reading on him. He was cool, when he should have been sweating. He must have been taught this in shrink school, taught to be blank, not to reveal thoughts.

  “Well, have a nice weekend,” I said, finally finding the right key and unlocking my door.

  “You, too, Hildy,” Peter said, and I felt him watch me as I entered my office.

  * * *

  My friend Allie Dyer baby-sat for Peter Newbold from the time he was a toddler until he was about eight years old. Peter’s father, David Newbold, was almost fifty when Peter was born, and Dr. Newbold had a busy local practice. His mother, Colette, was in her twenties, and Mrs. Newbold had a very busy social life. It seemed that she was never at home, especially during the summer months. So she hired Allie Dyer as a full-time sitter. Colette Newbold played tennis daily. She also played bridge and golf and kept a horse at Westfield Hunt Club. She was on numerous town committees and was an active member of the Anawam Beach Club and the Wendover Yacht Club, in addition to the hunt club. She was the one who started the charity luncheon at Westfield’s big August horse show.

  When Peter was little, Allie would baby-sit him at the Newbolds’ house on Wind Point Road. Every morning, after Colette breezed out in her tennis togs or riding britches, Mamie and Lindsey and I would ride our bikes over, and we’d sun ourselves on the beach in front of the Newbolds’ house, then devour whatever they had in their refrigerator. Colette never complained. She didn’t seem to mind who was watching Peter, as long as it wasn’t her.

  When Allie was old enough to drive, we took Peter everywhere with us. He was probably five or six years old when we started taking him to North Beach, where we’d meet up with boys and flirt and swill Cokes and smoke cigarettes and run around in the surf in our bikinis. Allie was making a dollar an hour, as long as we had Peter with us, so we always had him along. Peter picked up all our slang, which amused us. We taught him to wolf-whistle at pretty girls we didn’t know, and when the girls would turn and look, we’d convulse with laughter, little Peter giggling loudest of all. We taught him to give the peace sign out of Allie’s car window. We taught him to give the finger, the four of us shrieking with laughter at the astonished faces of the little old lades he flipped off. Mamie still has a photo of Peter with sunglasses and a cigarette dangling from his lips when he couldn’t have been more than seven. Another time, we took his picture as he posed on Mamie’s boyfriend’s motorcycle. We put a bandanna on his head and made him look like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. He loved hanging out with us, and we usually forgot about the facts of his tender age and his gender when it was just Peter and us girls. We’d be splayed across the sand in our bikinis, talking about boys and who was making it with whom, and Peter would just sit there and listen. We’d complain about our periods and about our parents and school, and Peter would just be drawing in the sand, taking it all in. We often had plans for the evening that we would discuss throughout the day, and Peter would sometimes beg to be included, which made us laugh. But there were times when Colette needed a nighttime sitter, so we took him to parties on the beach, or to the movies or to one of our homes. We got the sense he was lonely at home with his parents. He didn’t have many friends his own age, but when we asked him about this, he said they were all immature. No wonder. He spent most of his early years with a bunch of teenagers. Sometimes when he assumed he would be included in what we were doing, we had to remind him that he wasn’t really our friend.

  “You can come, as long as Allie’s getting paid,” Mamie would say, and Allie would shoot her a disapproving glance. Peter had a little crush on Allie. We all knew it, and Mamie’s comments were bound to have hurt his feelings.

  “Well, it’s the truth,” Mamie would mutter. “No point in letting him think there’s any other reason he’s hanging out with us. He’s friggin’ eight. We’re his paid friends.”

  “MAMIE,” Allie would say, giving Peter a little hug. But it was true. And Peter knew it.

  Here’s a very sweet story about Peter Newbold: Once, on his birthday, he received a ten-dollar bill from his grandparents. His mother asked him what he was going to spend it on. He told her that he wanted to spend it on ten hours with Allie. Mrs. Newbold told this story to Allie when Peter wasn’t in earshot, and they both laughed and agreed that it was adorable, but later Allie told me that it made her feel uncomfortable. Soon after that, Allie’s family moved to New Hampshire and the rest of us got our jobs at the Wendover Yacht Club, so we didn’t see Peter much anymore. Still, I’ve often thought that those summers spent listening to us girls and all our crazy talk prepared him for his vocation as a shrink. He was always a good listener

  When Peter started up his private practice in Wendover, he worked
first from an office above his garage and then, about ten years ago, he started renting the office upstairs from me. One February evening, several years ago, we were snowed in, and as we waited for one of Frankie’s crew to come with a plow, we sat in my reception area and split a bottle of champagne that a client had sent me. Peter told me about his work at McLean Hospital. He had gone there, years ago, to complete his residency and had stayed on as staff psychiatrist when he was finished. He had become quite interested in schizophrenia during those early years—in fact, that was considered his specialty. He had published numerous papers on the subject—clinical papers that were meant to be read by other professionals. He also had always had his private practice in Cambridge, as well as up here, with what he called the “worried well.”

  His work with the severely ill had inspired him to write a book about “attachment.” It was called Of Human Bonding. This was a book written for the general public, more or less a pop-psychology book, I guess. He signed a copy and gave it to me, but I confess, I never read it until after the whole situation with Rebecca, and then I scoured it, desperate to find out everything I possibly could about Peter Newbold. Normally, I read only novels. But that night, waiting for the plow, I asked him about the book. It had just come out a few months earlier. He talked a little bit about the parent/infant bond. About how important it was. Stuff everybody knows, really. He talked about childhood traumas. Then, in the middle of our little chat, he suddenly said, “For example, when your mother committed suicide, you were how old … ten? Eleven?”

  I was completely floored by this. I wasn’t surprised Peter knew about my mother. Most people in town knew about her, so he would have heard about it, even though he was very young at the time. But I don’t think anybody, in all those many years since her death, had actually stated the fact of her death so plainly to me until Peter did so that afternoon. People referred to my mother’s “tragic” or “untimely” death, but never, ever, her “suicide.” Not even my father. It was actually several years into our marriage before I told Scott, one drunken evening, about the way my mother died. Then I instantly regretted it, because he, the lover of history, wanted to know every detail. He was surprised that I had never had any kind of grief counseling or therapy when it happened.

  “I don’t think they had that kind of thing up here then,” I had told him.

  Of course, when Scott and I split up, we had the girls see therapists, to “process their grief.” Their school counselor had recommended it. Tess was fourteen, Emily twelve at the time. And they’ve both been in therapy, on and off, ever since. I still pay their therapy bills, though I’m less and less able to afford them. I’ve told the girls I think it’s a bit of an indulgence. I’ve never been in therapy and I manage quite well. If anything, in my opinion, therapy has made the girls, especially Tess, more brooding and self-absorbed. She went through a stage where she was completely obsessed with finding out every detail about my mother.

  “What was really wrong with her?” she would ask me, and sometimes, if I’d had a couple of drinks, I’d offer up what I knew. “She had manic-depression. The doctors told Dad it was manic-depression.”

  “Bipolar,” Tess would proclaim excitedly. “It’s called ‘bipolar’ now.”

  “Okay. Fine,” I’d reply.

  “Well, it must have been hard for you, having a mother with such unpredictable moods,” Tess would say.

  “Honestly, I didn’t really notice. I don’t think I paid a lot of attention. We were at school all day. In the summers, we spent our time outdoors, mostly.…”

  “Because your mom found it so hard to cope?”

  “No, because that’s what all kids did in those days.”

  I would usually try to change the subject, but Tess would steer me back. “It’s important for me to know,” she’d say. “My therapist wants to know my history. I mean, if your mother was mentally ill, and such an alcoholic, and we know that there was insanity on your father’s side, going back to Sarah Good—”

  “Oh, please, don’t start up with the witch business again,” I’d cry out. “The poor old hag was hanged. Let her rest in peace.”

  Scott and our younger daughter, Emily, had a theory about my witch ancestress, Sarah Good. Emily even wrote an essay about Sarah Good in high school, called “Goodwife Good.” Here’s what she and Scott learned: Sarah Good’s father killed himself when she was a young child and when her mother remarried, her new husband took her inheritance. Sarah married once, at age sixteen, was widowed, and married again, this time to a man named Good. I guess she had a screw loose, because she somehow caused their ensuing bankruptcy and debt, and the Goods—including their four-year-old daughter, Dorcas—were soon homeless beggars. Sarah Good was not a sweet, humble beggar. She was antisocial and belligerent. She would knock on the doors in Salem Village and, if she was refused charity, would issue a series of incoherent curses under her breath. She and her daughter were unwashed and wore others’ cast-off rags for clothes.

  Sarah Good was one of the first three women in Salem accused of witchcraft, when the mass hysteria began, and her own little daughter, Dorcas, and her husband both testified against her. Here’s something I find so, so sad about the case of Sarah Good: Four-year-old Dorcas was also accused of witchcraft, and because of her youth and ignorance, she confessed. She was chained in a dungeon, like the others, and when she was interviewed by magistrates several days after her arrest, she told them that her mother had given her a snake, and that the snake bit her thumb and sucked her blood. The officials assumed that the snake was a “familiar,” and this pretty much sealed Sarah Good’s fate. She had been pregnant when arrested, and after giving birth to her baby (which subsequently died), she was hanged. Dorcas Good was eventually released. So deranged was she by her time spent chained in a dungeon that she was deemed “never good for anything” by her father, who received some restitution for his damaged progeny. She must have been good for something, to some man, as I am her descendant, as are my daughters.

  Emily’s paper asserted that had Sarah Good lived today, she would have been diagnosed with a severe form of mental illness—bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. She cited the witnesses’ descriptions of Sarah Good’s odd behavior—her inclination to mutter things to herself and others, her sometimes hostile and antisocial nature. There is a genetic component to these mental illnesses, Emily wrote, and she made reference to Sarah Good’s suicidal father. Scott helped Emily research her paper and she received an A. The essay was actually entered in some kind of statewide essay contest. She didn’t win, but she did receive an honorable mention.

  Scott was always fascinated by this theory, about this double line of madness in my family. He never met my mother, of course, but he was quite preoccupied with what he called the “ironies” of her situation. For example, the fact that my mother spent a good part of my childhood in Danvers State Hospital, an institution for the insane. Many don’t know that the Salem witch trials actually took place in Salem Village, which is now Danvers, in very close proximity to the hospital where my mother was confined more than once. Scott got a big kick out of the fact that Danvers State Hospital, built in the late 1800s, was originally called the “State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers,” and that the hospital stood on Hathorne Hill, which was named after John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials.

  “They actually called it a lunatic hospital,” he would call out to me as he read from one of his stacks of library books. “Did they still call it that when your mother was there?”

  “No, of course not,” I would reply impatiently.

  Scott knew I hated talking about the place. Most everything he knew about my mother, he had learned when we were half in the bag, both of us. Drinking always loosened my lips. Apparently, it had had the same effect on my mother. When she was “up,” according to my dad—I actually don’t recall her periods of mania very well; I don’t think they happened often—she would drink to slow herself down a bit, to get a little sle
ep, but she would overdo it, I guess. I’ve been told that she ended up at Danvers once, when I was very small, because she drove over to the home of Reverend Howell, who was then the minister of the Congregational church. (Another favorite irony of Scott’s: Reverend Howell’s former dining room is my current office.) She marched into his dining room and, as Reverend Howell sat at the dinner table with his wife and three young children, asked why he kept raping her and sodomizing the children of the parish. I didn’t know about that until my aunt Peg told me, in hushed, faltering words, a few days before I left for college. We went to the Congregational church every Sunday of my youth. Mrs. Howell had taught my Sunday school class and led us in the church children’s choir. She was always so kind to me. I had no idea.

  The first time I remember my mother going to the hospital in Danvers was after my brother, Judd, was born. I was six; my sister Lisa was about four. I guess my mom had postpartum depression after each of us was born—they just didn’t know as much about it then. She became very depressed. She slept all the time. Aunt Peg came over and stayed after Judd was born. My cousin Jane is just a year younger than I am, and Eddie is three years older, so it was fun having them at the house with us all the time. One day, Peg was doing something in the kitchen and she tried to get my mother to hold Judd. My mother kept refusing tearfully. Finally, she whispered into Peg’s ear that she was afraid to hold him because she might take him into the bathroom and drown him in the tub. She had repeated visions of doing it. My mother hadn’t bathed in weeks. It turned out, she was afraid to go near the bathtub because of the visions of drowning the baby.