The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  4

  ROCK WAKES UP with a start. He is looking into a pair of gray eyes, ringed by bushy eyebrows, also gray, and alarmingly close. There is a tight, vertiginous feeling in his chest as if he can’t breathe, which is, he realizes, because he is being held up by the collar of his shirt.

  “What the hell is this?” Jack Dunlap says, giving Rock, via the shirt, a surprisingly successful shake.

  Rock pats the bed behind him, worried for a moment that—but no, the bed is dry. Mr. Dunlap is simply referring to him, here on the bed. “Mr. Dunlap,” he says. “Sorry—I just—”

  Jack Dunlap is not an exceptionally tall man, but something about the long, craggy shape of his head makes his height seem imposing. There is also something wild about his appearance—his gaunt cheeks and the wiry gray hair that grows in an upward tangle from his receding hairline and his eyebrows give him the impression of having recently returned from a harrowing sailing trip or three weeks without provisions in an African jungle. He does not recognize Rock, that much is clear.

  “Rock Coughlin,” Rock says, and reflexively begins to extend his hand but thinks better of it. Jack’s fingers still have a solid grasp on a good few inches of his shirt.

  “Oh,” Jack says, releasing his grasp. He looks momentarily confused but no warmer or more welcoming than he did two minutes ago.

  “I was hanging out with Caroline—she told me to wait.” Rock’s legs are extended awkwardly before him in the middle of Jack’s messy bed, but he is not sure it is safe yet to slide over to the edge.

  “Here? In my room?” Jack says. His eyebrows quiver slightly when he speaks. The air in the room is hot and smells close. Not only are the shades down, but the windows are shut, Rock realizes. And the air-conditioning isn’t working.

  “No—no, no, no” Rock repeats vigorously. “I just—I was looking for something and I got so tired I just—”

  But Jack does not appear to be listening. His eyes have narrowed and he is nodding his head almost imperceptibly. “Did you drive here?”

  “Yes, yes, sir,” Rock says, finally standing, having scooted as gracefully as possible to the edge of the bed. He thinks, for one terrifying moment, that he can see the joint from his back pocket lying in a coil of greasy burgundy sheeting. And Jack Dunlap would be just the sort to call the cops. Would be overjoyed to put Rock on the McCarthy list—but then this is the new millennium. There is no McCarthy list. Rock is obsessed with the McCarthy list. He has smoked his joint already, he remembers suddenly, thrown the butt out the window. Thank God.

  “Is that your car out front?” Jack says, flipping a shade up with a snap and rapping on the glass.

  “Seven hundred bucks and it’s yours,” Rock says. “Manual steering and seats of genuine flesh-colored vinyl.” The thrill of relief that it is not his joint, that he will not become the victim of some complex capitalist insecurity scapegoating process, makes him take this tone, even though he knows, as soon as he has spoken, it is inappropriate.

  Jack doesn’t smile.

  “I need a ride to BCD,” he says.

  “Oh,” Rock says. He should have seen this coming. “At your service.” He taps his hand to an imaginary cap. “Explorer needs a break?”

  “The Explorer just died on me. And your friend Caroline took the Jeep.” Jack pronounces each word with strenuous precision and enough venom to cover both subject and listener.

  “Oh,” Rock says, rubbing his shirt collar smooth. “Right.” He is about to have to spend twenty minutes in the car with the man who single-handedly prevented the town of Concord from building affordable housing for the elderly and drove his own wife insane. And not as his new friend and confidant, but as his impromptu chauffeur.

  A PAIR OF SPARKLY drugstore sunglasses, purple, sitting, hot as fired bullets, on the dash. Seven empty Gatorade bottles, a pack of Marlboros, a crumpled Martha Stewart Living magazine, CD cases, drugstore receipts, and crumbs. Millions of unidentifiable crumbs on the floor, on the grubby gray seat cushion, in the cracks of the armrest, the ashtray, the leather well of the emergency brake, as if the boy has somehow pulverized three-quarters of anything—animal, vegetable, or mineral—that has passed through the four doors of his car. What kind of person lives like this?

  Jack has had a cold, splintery feeling in the pit of his stomach and a strange numbness at the top of his skull since leaving Colby Kesson this morning. But he is not going to let this interfere with his plans for the day. He has, after all, already canceled all his appointments between eleven and one to be able to go to his son’s performance. And Rosita’s life is not his concern. She has gotten herself . . . knocked up? impregnated? . . . Jack doesn’t even have the vocabulary for her state; in this context, the words he knows make him squeamish. In any case, it does not warrant looking into. He has a play to attend, a company to take over, a conference call at two—he takes four Advils and erects the list of his responsibilities like a wall of sandbags, blocking out the image of her dark head, the slim curve of her neck, the swell of pregnancy beneath her dress.

  Rock turns the key in the ignition and an impossible shouting and clanging comes from the car stereo before his hand darts out to shut it off. He casts a hesitant, apologetic look at Jack, who makes a point of staring straight ahead. Jack does not put his seat belt on; sitting in the passenger seat like an old person, or an incompetent, is bad enough. He can’t remember the last time he sat in a passenger seat—when he broke his arm, maybe. He was subject to Faith’s birdbrained efforts at the wheel until he hired a driver for four weeks. But that was ages ago.

  “So,” Rock says, coughing a little, as if the word itself is another handful of crumbs he has dredged up and tossed out into the air between them. “You canceled your meeting?”

  Jack glances over at the boy. “Meeting?” he repeats.

  Rock darts a nervous look at him out of the corner of his eye. “Eliot said something like you were gone all day—or, I mean, I thought they said you weren’t coming to. . . .” He lets his voice trail off.

  “Hmm,” Jack says. He has not really considered his children in his decision to go to BCD. Do they, it occurs to him, not want him there? The thought stings; this would be on Faith’s behalf.

  “Your son is quite a dramatist,” Rock says, after a pause. There is a fine layer of sweat standing out on his brow and he looks a little pale under his tan.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Jack responds after a few moments. The numbness at the top of his skull is blossoming into a full-fledged headache.

  He pulls out his cell phone, flips it open, and punches the autodial button for his secretary, but halfway through its ghostly beeping he remembers she is out today. He lets it finish dialing anyway, listens to her voice mail before stealthily punching the END button, but does not put the phone away. “Jane!” he barks convincingly. He had not planned on doing this, but now that his fingers have gotten ahead of him, he feels actually quite pleased with the ruse. “What’s the story with the Lambrecht deal? Papers come through?” He pauses, brows knit. “Read it to me.” This is brilliant. He doesn’t have to do anything but sit—offer an occasional, “Okay,” “Check that,” “Hmmmm”—this with a scowl.

  They are now driving down Main Street, past Patriot Real Estate, Minuteman Travel, storefronts hung with copper kettles and hand-knit sweaters patterned after the American flag. This is what Concord Center has become—a collection of freshly painted picket fences and quaint “shoppes,” immaculate houses, and tourist attraction graveyards. All this commoditizing and cutesifying of the world’s purest revolution! On the corner of Heywood Street, there is a new, hand-painted sign that proclaims, HISTORY HAPPENED HERE, as if history were some accident people could gape at and feel pleased to have avoided. It wasn’t like this when Jack came here to visit his grandfather as a boy. Or twenty years ago, when he bought the house back. Back then, it was still a simple, small town with no frilly amenities or attractions—“the dullest little nest of puritans you’ve ever laid ey
es on,” in the words of Jack’s aunt Helen, the self-centered Beacon Hill socialite who raised him after his parents died in a car crash. Which was exactly what Jack loved about it. The pandering cuteness of its new stores and restaurants makes him want to give up on New England and move out to Idaho or Wyoming, where being American is still a commitment, not just a happenstance.

  Rock makes his way onto Route 2, using no blinker, accelerating haphazardly, and braking in short choppy bursts. Jack would like to wrest the wheel from the boy’s hands. Instead he continues to frown and nod into the cell phone.

  “All right,” Jack says into the dead space on the other end of the line. Rock is pulling off Route 2 into Belmont now.

  “Put it on my desk for Monday morning. Top of the pile.” On the sidewalk, there is a young woman pushing a stroller on the corner, dark-skinned with long black hair lying in a braid down her back, glistening silver-blue in the sun. It stops Jack for a moment—that otherworldly color and the stretch of her brown arm. But she has a broad, placid-looking face and wide hips—she is entirely unfamiliar. “Thanks,” he says, and flips the end of the phone back up.

  “Important call?” the boy asks. There is a hint of sarcasm to his voice—and something else, maybe a leer. Is he on to the farce? It doesn’t really matter. Jack clamps his teeth together and stares out the window.

  “Left,” he says at the corner of Bethune Street, although the boy obviously knows where he is going—has gotten them this far. “Turn here.” He gestures with his chin. Then he reaches for the small pocketknife he has attached to his key chain and begins cleaning his nails. But behind the wall of sandbags his mind has constructed, there is a single white sail rising with the murky waters, forcing his eye.

  5

  ELIOT IS STANDING in the dimly lit alcove between the stage and the changing room away from the other children with their waving hobbyhorses and Pilgrim’s bonnets and exaggerated cases of stage fright. “Eliot.” He can hear his name being hissed in Jen Edwards’s hysterical little voice. “Where’s Eliot?”

  He says nothing, but freezes with the photograph he is holding pinched between his thumb and forefinger. The face of the boy staring up at him registers nothing—his eyes remain dark and a little wary, his mouth quiet, possibly suppressing something—an idea or a smile. After all, he is just a photo. He can’t hear Jen calling. Eliot almost forgets this sometimes—the boy’s eyes are so full of mysterious kinship, it is as though they must be thinking the same thing. “Roberto is a quiet boy like you,” Rosita has told him. “This mark you have on your shoulder—he has the same one.” Roberto’s skin is a pale caramel color and his hair is black and curly, not an Afro, exactly, but thicker and fuller than Eliot’s own hair. Eliot does not know many black children. There is a boy named Winston in the grade above him at BCD and there is Dominique on his soccer team. Which makes Roberto different. Eliot imagines Roberto would understand what it is like to be among other children and even in their presence feel apart. Do black children have as many friends as white children? Eliot asked his father once, and his father looked at him strangely. I don’t know, he answered. It depends on what kind of friends you mean. Eliot had the feeling this was a question he was not supposed to ask. Maybe because his father feels that in some way Eliot himself is black. Looking at the photograph of Roberto makes Eliot happy. He likes to imagine he goes to school with him—that together they do more interesting things than the other children: build models and read books and create inventions that will someday make them famous. Only this is impossible because Roberto is missing: has disappeared into the jungle of Colombia, where he and Rosita come from, which from what Eliot understands is worse than being dead.

  “Eliot,” Jen Edwards exclaims, poking her panicky round face around the old lockers that obscure the alcove from view. “You’re next! Go! Go!”

  “Okay,” Eliot says, sliding the photograph into the pocket of his tunic, and pushes past her onto the stage, bumping one cardboard buckle off on the way out.

  “The British are coming, the British are coming,” he shouts as practiced. It is bright out on the stage; he finds himself squinting, struggling to enter the scene—to become a part of the loud, brash colors and movement. The stillness of Roberto’s face sticks to him like a woolly coat thrown over his head.

  “The British! The British!” the chorus shouts, jumping up and down. Eliot realizes that he doesn’t have the stupid hobbyhorse he is supposed to ride away on. Out of the corner of his eye he can see the man with a video camera. He has almost forgotten about him. If Eliot is good enough, his drama teacher says, he will be famous. The man is making a movie. Eliot would like to start over—would like to get his prop and begin again, the right way. He looks straight into the dark eye of the lens. There is something cruel about its glassy, lidless surface, as if its inability to blink makes it unable to forgive.

  “Our homes will burn / Our luck will turn!” the children onstage are singing and one on each side of him snatches his hands, draws him into the dance they have been practicing for weeks, but Eliot is not ready yet. This is too fast. Too wild. Across the circle Greta Paley isn’t even following the steps, just jumping and flinging about her arms, her mouth wide open in some fleshy, teeth-chattering version of a grin. Whirring around the circle, Eliot is aware of the man with the camera again—there at the corner of the audience, watching and recording, catching all the discordant notes and missteps.

  “It was two by the village clock, / When he came to the bridge in Concord town. / He heard the bleating of the flock, / And the twitter of birds among the trees, / And felt the breath of the morning breeze,” Jen Edwards begins in her hyperenunciated voice.

  Eliot swings his leg over his invisible hobbyhorse and turns to ride toward the audience in the grand semicircle his drama teacher has planned. The door at the back of the theater opens, spilling a triangle of light into the darkness just as Eliot makes it to the apex of his circle, the very front edge of the stage. One form and then another appear in the doorway: his father, followed by Rock Coughlin. Eliot thinks of his mother, out there in the darkness. She will crumple when she sees them, or worse. And it will be his fault—how many times has he told her that his father won’t be there? Automatically, his feet come to a complete stop; his hands forget the reins. Around him he can feel the other children slowing down, bumbling into a silent confusion. There is nothing to do but wait, frozen in the spotlight of responsibility, for the thing—whatever it is—that will happen between them, here, now that his parents are together in the same room.

  INSIDE THE BCD LADIES’ ROOM, it smells of Lysol and diabetic urine. Faith runs her hands over her hair and pats on a little lip gloss—she has stopped wearing the garish pink lipstick in vogue around here. The play is over, and beyond the bathroom door Mamie Starks is surely assembling the masses: Anne Hibbins, or Lady H, as Faith has heard caddies at the club refer to her, and Gloria Edwards must be here because Faith spotted their children up onstage. To think that she and Gloria had their fortieth birthday parties together—a Caribbean-themed evening at the club featuring jerked chicken and piña coladas, a whole coterie of caterers in hula skirts. And that was only five years ago!

  She takes a deep breath and tries to focus on what is important. Eliot, her son who looked so small and vulnerable onstage, stumbling through the performance, battling demons unknown to her and coming suddenly to a complete stop. Watching him, for the first time since arriving, Faith felt the full weight of her motherhood. Here was her own son onstage—this sweet blond boy, this delicate faltering creature, grew from her body!

  This is not a good time to get emotional, though. She should think of some clever, thoughtful things to say to him—no, to ask him. Asking is better than telling. And listening—really, listening is the best of all. A good mother is a good listener. Faith, on the other hand, finds herself almost unable to hear, let alone listen, at least half the time. Her brain is loud with its own frantic flipping through possible things to say.
“Relax and it’ll come to you,” Dr. Marcus says. “What’s the worst thing that could happen—there’s a pause? Good conversations are full of thoughtful pauses.” But this is not what Faith was taught. Faith was taught that silence indicates stupidity—or worse, shyness. Smooth, charming chatter—this was what her mother raised her to know. “And look what it got you,” Dr. Marcus says. “Jack Dunlap.” But here Faith and he do not see eye to eye. Despite all the miserably rugged ski vacations and grim observances of obscure traditions, the bullying and stoic silence and lack of affection that dominated her twenty-four years of marriage, she still sees Jack as having been a catch. Still feels proud that she, of all the pretty Pine Manor girls—and she really was just a girl, not even twenty yet—was the one who snagged him. So perverse but so true!

  Faith takes a deep breath and steps out into the buzz and holler of the lobby, the indistinct sea of madras shorts and yellow polo shirts, children racing through the crowd with the residue of lemon squares and brownies on their fingers, followed by a lumbering Irish setter, who is trotting after them obligingly. “He’s coming, he’s coming, here he comes,” one of the little boys is screaming in a mix of real blood-chilling terror and excitement. Stay calm, Faith tells herself. Calm. She lets the word reverberate in her head. It is a perfect word, really. Repeating it almost accomplishes the task. It makes her think of the glassy black puddles that formed in the driveway of the house she grew up in—the edges of the world, she had imagined them, wormholes that could suck a person through and out the other side to China, or maybe to another universe completely.

  Suddenly someone has hold of her elbow. It is a firm grasp (not Mamie Starks’s, but Caroline’s, thankfully), but almost before Faith has had the chance to appreciate this, her eyes have found a straight line through the whir of bodies to what might as well be a ticking bomb, or a dead body: Jack. He is looking right at her, exploding the word calm into four letters that tumble heavily through her brain, catching and tearing on the delicate tent of assurance she has attempted to erect.