The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  “No problem—maybe I’ll play a little frizz with D.D.”

  “ ‘D.D.’?” Caroline raises her eyebrows.

  “Daddy Dunlap,” Rock says, grinning.

  Alarm shoots through Eliot. “He doesn’t like Frisbee,” he says automatically.

  “Oh, sure he does—I’ll show him the old over-easy.”

  “Whatever that is.” Caroline glares at the top of his head. “Anyway, I don’t think—” she cuts herself off and a strange stricken look comes over her face. “Oh, El—you don’t think—do you think he’ll come to your play this morning?”

  “No,” Eliot says firmly. He has had to assure his mother of this fact at least once every phone call for the last six weeks. “He has a meeting.”

  “Okay,” Caroline says uncertainly. The possibility of their mother and father in the same room seems to dull her worry about Rock, who is still sitting, now with the antique chair tipped up on its back legs, at their kitchen table. Eliot does not feel similarly liberated.

  Caroline follows his gaze to Rock and shrugs, lifting her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Don’t burn the house down,” she says to Rock, jingling her car keys.

  “Just the garage,” Rock says. “Hey, break a leg,” he calls after Eliot, in what seems like a less-than-reassuring send-off.

  LEFT ALONE IN THE HOUSE, Rock continues shuffling through the paper until it hits him that he is in the house alone. Caroline’s house alone. Jack Dunlap’s house alone. It is an exciting thought. He could jerk off right here, at their kitchen table. But the idea is vulgar, unsensual. Rock is after something finer. He closes the paper and pushes his chair back, almost overturning it. There is a sudden wild barking from the mudroom from one of the Dunlap Devils, Rock’s personal nickname for the blue-black beasts Jack Dunlap breeds and raises. “Hey,” he says, standing up and walking toward the refrigerator. The dog stops barking and stands very still. “Where’s your partner?” Then he realizes the dog is not actually silent—there is an ugly, almost inaudible growl coming from its chest.

  Rock opens the refrigerator and closes it quickly—the dog is making him nervous. The kitchen is uninteresting, anyway. The secrets it holds (dietary preferences, cleanliness, brand affiliation) are chaste, feminine, busybody material. Rock is after deeper, more psychological insight.

  Rock has known the Dunlaps since he was a boy, and his mother introduced Faith Dunlap to the writings of Deepak Chopra. This has not ceased to amuse Rock since his mother proudly recounted it last Thanksgiving. It proves his theory that reading spiritual self-help books is a harbinger of disaster. Rock has been by the Dunlaps’ house plenty of times since the divorce—to drive Caroline home from the likes of Adam Lowell’s Yankee Swap party or Bee Bee Mender’s twenty-first birthday—but it has been a long time since he has been inside it.

  He heads through the door to the dining room, which is long and dark and boring—full of framed oil paintings and a grim, precise rubbing of some English ancestor’s tombstone. He has a vague memory of dinner here, long ago, when he was still playing PeeWee Hockey with the Dunlap boys. There was something uncomfortable about it, a new pair of shoes, a scratchy shirt collar, maybe a silent pinch fight with Jack Jr. under the table.

  The library, which he pokes his head into hoping for some immense, imposing desk to rout through, is dark, spare, and unoriginal, down to the black iron Remington horse and rider on the mantel. No desk.

  Rock sprints up the stairs, enjoying the screech of the wood under his feet. The house epitomizes what he loves about this part of Massachusetts—the austerity of design, the carefully maintained modesty of its appointments, and the cultivation of a somber moral framework through household furniture. Where else in America would a man who just spent $2.2 million on an empty plot of land outside Sun Valley have a grubby, moth-eaten hall runner with matching, similarly decrepit drapes depicting tiny scenes of the Boston Tea Party? There is something so perfectly dysfunctional about it, but at the same time so bravely and sincerely hopeful. After all, isn’t all this self-denial predicated on the idea that there is some sort of hereafter?

  At the top of the stairs and to the right is Caroline’s room, the only room up here Rock has ever actually been into. He could read her journal, run his hands through her underwear drawer. But this is something anyone would do, and he has already been there once this morning. He continues down the hall and opens a door at the left: a battered wooden bunk bed and National Geographic posters of lion cubs, a panda, and a pregnant iguana—Eliot’s room. In the middle, on the carpet, is a giant papier-mâché work in progress—a four-by-four-foot landscape with big ugly mounds of unpainted newspaper and clumps of dandruffy-looking trees. What the hell would compel the kid to make something like this? But this doesn’t really interest Rock, except insomuch as it reminds him he could get high. He gropes around in his pocket for the half-smoked joint he thinks he remembers—yes, there it is—and pushes the screen open. Then he lights up, sits on the windowsill, and discreetly hangs the joint out the window, stooping to exhale into the fresh summer air. Storybook air—it actually smells sweet, of strawberries and cut grass. There are cicadas revving up in the trees like the disparate parts of some giant engine.

  Back out in the hall, Rock is drawn to the door at the end. Mr. Dunlap’s room. Rock knows instinctively what it must be. He can feel his heart cluck and ruffle at the threshold.

  Inside, it is quite dark. Only one shade to the left of an enormous unmade bed has been partially pulled up. Rock hits the overhead light and floods the room with an ugly greenish yellow fluorescence. There are newspapers, magazines, and white eight-by-twelve institutional reports scattered on an ottoman and the carpet around it. On the right, two framed pictures draped with T-shirts. Rock pads across the carpet to peer at what is beneath these. A photo of Jack and his wife taken at their wedding, and a more recent, painfully posed family portrait. If he hates them so much, why hasn’t he just removed them?

  Rock kicks his shoes off and scuffles his bare feet over the dark green carpet, feeling it chafe at the delicate, almost sticky skin of his arches. He never walks around without shoes. He worries about worms and tetanus and that his feet are too thin for a man’s—or that they are too pale, too hairy. He picks up the magazine lying face down on the bed. The Economist—opened to an article about fear as an important motivator among canning industry workers. Rock stretches out on the burgundy sheets—flannel, slightly greasy-feeling. They have a comfortable, bready smell that suggests they haven’t been washed for weeks. Rock stares up at the ceiling and imagines he is Jack Dunlap, founder of Amerithon, Inc., terrorizer of the Ponkatawset Club Events Committee and Concord Junior League, father of the most beautiful girl he, Rock Coughlin, knows.

  2

  FAITH DUNLAP HAS NEVER been good at packing. Looking ahead, planning strategically, incorporating variables (a hurricane? a rash? an unexpected party?) has never been her forte. Once, when she was ten, she went to St. Barth’s for two weeks with nothing but corduroys, wool sweaters, plaid skirts, and thick white tights. Her parents had never said it was a warm place, that it was different from Boston, New Hampshire, or the Cape—never mentioned palm trees, or beaches, or gecko lizards, or anything else a ten-year-old would be interested in. That is the kind of parents they were. If they had been different, if they had held her hand on her first airplane trip, or remembered her birthdays, or let her sleep with a night-light, things might have turned out differently. She might still be married and a good mother, someone capable of identifying and filling her own week’s worth of needs and packing in a jiffy. This is what she has determined from therapy; it is the simplest answer to the question of how she got to where she is now.

  This morning, sitting on the scratchy blue and gray polyester seat cushion of the seven-thirty Delta shuttle she is taking up to Boston from her new home in New York City, Faith is exhausted. She was up until nearly one A.M. packing, sorting through sweaters and blouses, creams and lotions, allergy medicat
ions and anti-anxiety pills. At midnight she was still choosing her reading material: the last five issues of House Beautiful? or the novel Caroline sent her for her last birthday—something thick, but suspiciously light-looking (does her daughter think she isn’t capable of real literature?)? She packed and unpacked a first-aid kit three times and replaced her third pair of sandals with a pair of twelve-year-old, never-used golf shoes. After her son’s play, she is going to her old friend Lucy’s summer home, and Lucy is so sporty; Faith will surely be roped into stressful rounds of tennis, badminton, golf, and croquet.

  Staring out the scratched double-glass window of the airplane, Faith can feel her blood pressure rising. From above, Boston looks just like any other city: an uneven grid of rectangles broken up by more rectangles, looped together by a few sinewy ribbons of road. Last week, Faith had a computer installed in her apartment so she could e-mail with her children—a possibility that seems incredible to her still. The technician pulled out a flat metal panel covered with tiny squares and rectangles, called, what was it? it had such a sad, human-sounding name—the motherboard, that was it. It housed all the information the computer would ever need to carry out its operations, he explained, the mechanical equivalent of DNA. From here, the city looks remarkably like this thing; the shiny channels of highways, the smooth square tops of buildings. It seems almost mystical, this repetition of structure—as if both are reflections of the same archetypal image of order.

  When the plane touches down, Boston looks brighter and sunnier than Faith expected. It looks hot, in fact, the way the leaves on the trees sag and the grass is that deep, almost blurry shade of green. The captain makes an elaborate announcement about what gate they will be pulling into in the same falsely enthusiastic, sidewalk-salesman voice he has used throughout the flight to fill passengers in on everything from cruising altitude to obscure geographical features of the Connecticut coastline. “Eighty-eight degrees and rising,” he confirms Faith’s suspicions. She is certainly wearing all the wrong things. The pink-and-white-striped blouse she has on is long-sleeved and her linen pants are lined! She will sweat through Eliot’s performance—through her first visit back to Concord since she left it. The thought sends a shimmery burst of adrenaline from her gut to her heart. She is just going to a play, she tells herself. Just a morning, and then lunch with her children, and then she will be off. At least the twins, who have come to intimidate her with their baseball caps and loud voices and aggressive, uncommunicative way of speaking, are off in Colorado. And most importantly, Jack won’t be there; she is lucky, really, to have this opportunity to see the place without him. It could be so much worse.

  The fact remains, though, that Faith dreads this morning at the play: all the hugs of sympathetic neighbors, curious glances of familiar strangers, and nosy, condescending “how are you’s” and “so good to see you back here’s” of all the Barton Country Day mothers she has not seen since what Dr. Marcus suggests she think of as her “time-out,” a term he accompanies with a refereelike gesture.

  Faith is a small, slim woman, only five-foot-five. Her limbs and fingers are long and nervous; when she sits down and crosses her legs it is almost impossible to stop the anxious back-and-forth movement of her size-six foot. She is pretty also—her features are delicate, indistinct, and give the impression of being somehow watery, as if, faced with something really shocking or gruesome, they would melt. This is misleading, though. In fact, Faith has been privy to more shocking, gruesome things than many women of her class and age group. When she was nineteen, for example, her older brother was decapitated in an auto accident with Faith seated right beside him. There was an elm tree, a Bloody Mary in his hand, a tremendous sound of smashing machinery. She emerged from the overturned car with two cuts above her right eyebrow and a sprained wrist.

  Faith manages to get her own bag out of the overhead compartment, wrestles it down the aisle and into the cool, antiseptic-smelling airport. Then she joins the masses of official, business-suited people streaming down the long gray hall to the taxi line out front. She feels like an impostor, someone who shouldn’t be allowed to take such a professional, early morning plane.

  “Where you going?” the driver asks when Faith is finally settled in the dark cavern of a yellow cab.

  “To BCD,” she says. “In Belmont.”

  “BCD,” he repeats. Faith is not sure if it is a question or an affirmation. He is very thin and his skin is so black it is almost bluish. His voice is surprisingly high and sorrowful-sounding.

  “Barton Country Day School—do you know where that is?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Oh, dear—I don’t know if I remember what street it’s on. It’s sort of modern-looking. I think—I hope—I have it written down somewhere . . . maybe you can just get started in that direction and I’ll try to find—I can always ask directions in Belmont. . . .” She lets her voice trail off.

  The driver does not answer but pulls out into the traffic of the terminal. So typical of her, to have forgotten the address! She roots around in her purse for her address book, which she can’t find, but then it comes to her. “Bethune Street,” she says. Up front the driver nods without turning.

  Outside, the familiar raggedy pink brick of Chelsea springs into view along the water, and in the distance the Bunker Hill Monument, which has always struck Faith as mean-looking, full of shabby puritanical delusions of grandeur.

  It is strongly air-conditioned in the backseat of the taxi. Faith leans her head against the slippery black vinyl. There is an almost overpowering smell of berries—sweet, artificial, but not at all unpleasant. It strikes her as effeminate, which gives her a surge of compassion for the driver, who seems vulnerable, someone so new to this country he has not yet absorbed its most basic gender prohibitions. Someone who is probably made fun of behind his back.

  “I can’t believe I forgot the name of that street,” Faith says aloud, in an excess of warm feeling toward him. “My children all went there, my husband—actually, my ex-husband. . . . It’s just I guess you don’t really think about it, when you go there every day—drop off, pick up, you just think school, not Bethune Street.”

  The driver looks at her in the rearview mirror without smiling or nodding, and Faith immediately regrets her words. He has a gaunt face and bloodshot eyes, as if he has been driving all night. He is probably from one of those awful, war-torn countries whose names Faith always confuses. His wife and children are probably halfway across the planet in some shanty with no toilet, or worse—they are probably dead. And now Faith has reminded him of them with this frivolous talk about school—as if he had the opportunity to “drop them off, pick them up”—her words ring inanely in her ears. His children probably never had the opportunity to learn to read.

  The driver turns the radio on and settles on a classical station, and the soft notes of a cello stream out of the speakers—not the rock and roll or easy listening or daytime talk show Faith expected. Maybe he is from somewhere gentler than she had imagined. Somewhere subtler and more full of longing than fear. Or maybe . . . maybe—is it possible to be somewhere both grim and full of longing?

  Faith does not know much about classical music, but she recognizes this piece—the low warble of cello strings and undulating motion that makes her think of someone running across a wide-open expanse of rolling hills in late afternoon sunshine.

  “Do you know what this is?” she asks, leaning forward.

  The driver looks at her in the rearview mirror. “Music,” he says.

  “Ah.” Faith nods and sits back. She rests her head against the smooth vinyl again and lets the sound take them both somewhere kinder and softer than here.

  OVER THE LAST FEW MONTHS, Jack Dunlap has become one of those people who do strange things in their sleep: he wakes up pounding the door to his closet, or sitting upright in his arm-chair, or slipping the key to the basement door into his left tennis sneaker. It gives him a feeling of shame and incompetence—what kind of man has he
become, that he doesn’t collapse into the immobilizing embrace of a deep slumber?

  This morning, Jack has a crick in his neck from having spent the night with his head propped against the bedside table. He is beginning the day early, because he has two missions to accomplish before he goes to Eliot’s performance. He has to swing by Colby Kesson, the poorly managed publishing business his company, Amerithon, is in the process of buying out, and bring his dog Caesar to the breeder’s. He has cleared the rest of his appointments before lunch. It is unfair, after all, that just because she divorced him, his ex-wife should be the only one to see their son in his end-of-the-school-year performance.

  When they arrive at the breeder’s, Caesar waits obediently for Jack to let him out, watching with bright, almost catlike eyes as a squirrel races up the trunk of a maple over Jack’s shoulder. He is a good hunter for a blue heeler: he has caught two rabbits and a crow in the last three months—a feat Brutus, the smaller and more timid of Jack’s two dogs, could never have accomplished. Jack loves his dogs, who are both descended from the first blue heeler in America, who belonged to Jack’s grandfather. Part shepherd, part Border collie, part dingo, there is a real animalness about them that is missing from so many breeds. Jack admires their firmness of intent and purpose. He trained them himself, and they are good dogs—obedient, watchful, and well behaved. He can feed them from the same dish, one at a time, and they won’t squabble as they did when they were puppies. Instead they will sit back, licking their chops, waiting their turns with patience.

  With Caesar trotting at his heels, Jack crosses the Ridgeways’ lawn to the side door of the house, which opens into a small concrete-floored room, off which Jim Ridgeway has several kennels. Jim is the biggest Australian cattle dog breeder in New England and he loves Jack’s dogs, whose height and speed and intelligence make their genes an excellent supply for local bloodlines. Jack lets Jim use them free of charge. The favor works both ways; Caesar especially is better behaved when he has mated. Neuter them, for Christ’s sake, Jack’s daughter Caroline says. Why do they need to be such stallions? But Jack has no intention of acting on this suggestion.