The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  “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.

  CAROLINE 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.

  The stitch in Caroline’s side has blossomed into a full-fledged cramp and her lungs hurt now, too. Keep running or you will die, she tells herself. Keep running or you will be stuck here forever. The threats are effe
ctive. She is a superstitious person. There is a pain in her chest that might be her heart, although, of course, statistically it probably isn’t. She is unlikely to drop dead of a heart attack or heat exhaustion. But there are always those freakish cases: the long-distance runner who jogs every day and then, rounding his favorite corner one bright, beautiful morning, collapses—dead; the woman who walks out of her split-level ranch house in the safest town in Iowa, into the arms of a gun-toting madman and off all the charts of sociological probability. Caroline is at the top of the pyramid of data on heart disease and life span, rare viruses and violent deaths; she lives in that slim, coveted triangle of money and health and education where the odds are always in your favor. She is young and white and female. She uses birth control and takes vitamins and has health insurance. She eats vegetables and wears sunscreen and does not work with heavy objects or chemical products. She lives in a Western country with calcium in the orange juice and fluoride in the water. And even so, she feels unsafe! What if she were at the long, squat bottom of this same pyramid? What if she woke up every morning knowing she was twice as likely to have a heart attack or get AIDS or die in her sleep or be the victim of a violent crime? She would probably be bedridden by the sheer horror of anticipation. But then, if she was on the bottom, would she even know the pyramid existed? Isn’t it the people on top who are aware of statistical probabilities and sociological predictions? The thought is absurd though—if she were on the bottom, surely she wouldn’t need a pyramid to tell her so. The whole train of thought actually succeeds in making her feel three times as certain she is having a heat stroke.

  “Hey,” comes a voice from behind her, startling enough to make her leap off the pavement. She hasn’t even heard the battered blue Buick Skylark approach.

  She sees first the long black hair, and then the man leaning across the seat to the passenger side. Stephan—the moviemaker she talked to at the play yesterday. “Oh,” she says, from the ditch she has skipped off the road into. “You gave me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry. I thought you heard me behind you.” He extends his hand through the open window.

  Caroline has to scrabble up out of the ditch to accept it. Her own hand looks sweaty and bloated from running. “Hi,” she says stupidly. He is wearing a snug light gray T-shirt—she can see the long wiry muscles in his upper arms extend and retract as he pulls his hand away. Something about this makes her think of beef jerky. Makes her think of sex, actually. According to Rock, the guy is screwing Denise. Caroline can feel her face getting hotter, standing there, mud soaking through one sneaker. The fact that she has determined the nature of his familiarity does not add to her composure; he was the filmmaker she and her best friend Abby referred to as “Roman Pol-cute-ski” after seeing his movie in their senior film class.

  “I don’t want to interrupt your run. I gave your wallet to your little brother—you left it on the bench where we were talking yesterday.”

  “I did? I didn’t even notice—that’s so nice of you to have brought it out here.”

  “No problem. I had to come out here anyway.” He has a very intense gaze and almost yellowy green eyes.

  “Oh, for your—for the movie?”

  “Yeah. . . .” He sighs and shifts his weight against the flesh-colored vinyl car seat, which makes a wheezing, crackling sound. “Trying to rustle up some interviews. You know Mamie Starks?”

  “She—yeah—she was a friend of my mother’s.” Caroline regrets this as soon as it is out of her mouth. She does not want to have to try to explain the was, and more importantly she doesn’t want to be implicated by her acquaintance with Mamie Starks, a woman whose burning ambition is to make sure the Boston Cotillion stops its slippery slide toward becoming open to just anyone.

  “Oh, yeah?” he nods his head in a thoughtful way—but as if he is thinking about something else, actually.

  “Not really good friends,” Caroline adds.

  Stephan stops nodding and looks right at her. “So now that you’ve graduated, you have something lined up for the summer?”

  “Something? No. I mean, I did—I was going to move to San Francisco, but I didn’t.”

  “And you like film—that class you were telling me about yesterday, you learned something about production and all that?”

  “Some.” Caroline feels herself blushing again.

  “Well, how about working for me in sort of a production assistant/liaison position? I mean, you know this place, you like film, I need a little help with the material. I can’t pay you, but it would be good experience and I know some people in the field I could connect you with.”

  “Oh,” Caroline has finally stopped feeling her heart beating in her face. “That’s nice of you. . . .”

  “Think about it,” Stephan says, giving the car door his arm has been resting on a final-sounding pat. “We’ll talk later—you’ll be there tomorrow, right? At this wedding?”

  “What wed— Skip Krasdale’s?”

  Stephan pulls a scrap of paper from his back pocket. “Is that the same as Matthew Krasdale’s?” he says.

  Caroline nods, although Skip has certainly never been called Matthew in his life.

  “That’s the one, then.”

  “How do you know him? Or is this also for your movie?”

  “You got it.” Stephan grins. It is a slightly practiced-looking, sheepish grin, but handsome anyway. “My camera makes friends.”

  “Oh,” Caroline says. “Well, Skip is definitely a character.”

  Stephan’s eyes stay on her expectantly. “Is that a yes, you’ll be there?”

  “Ye-es,” Caroline says, despite the fact that she is certainly not expected—that in fact she turned down the invitation ages ago, kept her ex-boyfriend Dan up laughing the night she got it with imitations of Skip’s stilted speaking manner. “I’ll be there,” she adds, as if sounding authoritative will somehow change this.

  “All right, then. I’ll find you.”

  As the car pulls away, Caroline catches sight of her reflection in the rear window. Her head looks about five times too large for her body. She didn’t even put on deodorant this morning. And how is she supposed to just show up at Skip’s wedding? She no longer feels like running.

  It is a thought, certainly, to have a role helping this guy with his movie. How often has she told people that what she wants to do when she graduates is go into documentary film? Of course, it would mean she would have to stay in Concord for a while, which was not what she had in mind. But then, it’s not like she has any offers anywhere else. And with this on her résumé and some money saved up—she could waitress somewhere maybe, since her father surely won’t lend her a penny—she could go somewhere really great, Italy or Australia or Costa Rica or something, and work on some National Geographic documentary. The idea sends a dart of excitement through her for what feels like the first time in weeks. Plus, of course, she would be spending an awful lot of time with a handsome young documentary filmmaker. And what would Dan think about that?

  Caroline walks over to the roadside and stretches her stiff legs against the split-rail fence that runs along it. A faint breeze lifts her hair and cools the sweat on her scalp. In front of her, there is the fluorescent green of the Ponkatawset Golf Course—the carefully manicured rise and fall of hills and dells and neat white sand pits, a pond covered with blossoming Chinese lily pads.

  As she looks out at this, a pair of early morning riders appear at the crest of the hill, their helmeted heads round and hard as insects’. They are staring at her, she thinks for a moment, and lifts a hand uncertainly to wave. But then, they are looking the other way, she realizes, down at the flag on the ninth hole below them. Slowly—imperiously even—one of them nods his head and together they move in on it like explorers at the cusp of a new, and still colonizable, world.

  ONCE, WHEN ELIOT WAS SIX, he planted a tulip garden with his mother. Three rows of yellow, two of white, one red, then yellow again. He remembers the order still, and the feel
of the soil, cool and soft, with white crystalline fertilizer stones that seemed somehow good enough to eat—crisp, nourishing cereal for the plants. All right, good night, little guy, his mother had said, pushing earth back over a naked bulb he had placed in one of the holes. He needs his beauty sleep—in the spring he’ll pop his head back out and we’ll watch him grow.

  But in the spring his mother was “sick” and had forgotten all about the tulips. They pushed out sturdy and strong as she had predicted, but then froze in an unexpected May snowstorm, became brittle and weak before they blossomed. This is a memory Eliot cannot quite find a place for—the assured singsong of his mother’s prediction, and the feel of her hands, cool and capable, guiding his clumsy fingers through the dirt. It seems to feature a different person than the woman sitting across the table at lunch yesterday, whose hands fidget like a liar’s, whose eyes are paler and more nervous, the opposite of reassuring.

  What made her sick? Eliot asked his father once, knowing that the word did not really accurately speak to her condition but having no other at his disposal. Too many questions, his father answered. Eliot has never understood whether these were questions that she asked, or that were asked of her. But it was enough to make him stop questioning.

  There is the sound of the screen door slamming downstairs and Eliot freezes where he is kneeling, clutching the photo of Roberto he was about to replace in his desk drawer when he was struck by the thought of his mother and the flowers, and now he is stuck with it in plain sight in the middle of his room. The footsteps have reached the stairs now: Caroline’s—he recognizes the groan and squeak of floorboards under her feet. He glances at his watch—there are ten minutes before he is supposed to meet Forester outside to make arrangements. Caroline is in the hall now and here he is, still holding the picture. In a moment of inspiration, Eliot slips the photo under the wooden baseboard of the papier-mâché replica of Concord he is building just in time for her footsteps to reach his door.

  But to Eliot’s surprise she passes his room and continues, at a rapid pace, down the hall. This is almost unheard of. He is expecting her to come in, plomp herself down on the bed, and ask him whether he has had breakfast yet, whether he slept all right, what he is thinking about. To fall back on the bed and stare at the ceiling, sit up suddenly, and look at him with those concerned, searching eyes as if he is a leak she is trying to patch.