The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  “Just a minute, I told you I’m phoning,” an impatient, gravelly voice is saying on the other end of the line when she lifts the receiver.

  “Lilo,” Caroline says, wishing she hadn’t picked up.

  “To whom am I speaking?” Lilo demands haughtily.

  “Caroline,” Caroline sighs. Lilo, or Helen Whittier Dunlap, as she is formally known, is for all intents and purposes her grandmother, the aunt who raised Jack after his parents’ car wreck—a job she carried out with, from what Caroline can tell, all the love and good feeling of one of those Harlow wire monkeys.

  “Caroline Dunlap?”

  “Lilo, its me, Caroline. How are you?”

  “I have been better.” There is a significant pause on the other end of the line. Caroline does not rush to fill it. “I have something here I think you might be interested in.”

  “Oh, really?” Caroline slides the lobster skewer back out of her hair, which falls in a swish around her shoulders. The implement smells faintly of the sea and unpolished silver.

  “It’s not something I take any pleasure in telling you about—you know I don’t like to involve myself in family dramas and you can imagine my discomfort at being the person . . .” Caroline rolls her eyes. Lilo is, contrary to her assertions, the primary chronicler, purveyor, and producer of family drama for the Dunlaps. “. . . and so I thought, ‘Well, what is this motley getup lying on my wing chair and how can I get rid of it?’ ” Lilo is saying. The punch line, Caroline has guessed long ago, is that her father has—God forbid—left his jacket on some visit to her. “So I picked it up and . . .” But Caroline is not listening anymore.

  Her father has emerged in the doorway, wearing a battered green cap of his grandfather’s that looks, to Caroline, like something a cartoon character would wear. Lilo, she mouths at him. “I’m not here,” he says, loud enough to express disregard for the fact that Lilo can quite possibly hear him.

  “Lilo?” Caroline says. “Dad isn’t home and I’m running out the door now to a wedding. Can I call you tomorrow?”

  “Well,” Lilo says, “you can and you may also—I do think you should come by—”

  “Okay, I’ll call you tomorrow,” Caroline says brightly. “Bye-bye.” She replaces the receiver.

  In the car, Jack Dunlap pulls the invitation out of his breast pocket and lays it against the windshield, as if without it he would have no idea how to find First Parish Church or the Ponkatawset Club. As if he didn’t know Concord like the back of his hand or belong to the club for eighteen years and go there as a boy every Sunday with his grandfather. Since he withdrew his membership, Jack has become a virtual denier of the club’s existence. “The Ponkatawset Club!” he’ll say scornfully. “Oh, you mean Disneyland.” This is, as far as Caroline can tell, in reference to the new spa facilities in the locker rooms, the expanded membership, the renovated dining area, which includes a whole wall of tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. Unlike most successful men of his generation, her father has an almost violent distaste for anything, other than cars and property, that smacks of luxury. Caroline is all for his new disgust with the place, albeit for different reasons. It has had two nonwhite members in its entire history, costs $30,000 a year to belong to, and seems to lower the threshold for acceptable conversation topics to include blow-by-blow recounts of golf plays and car-buying searches. God forbid anyone bring up, for instance, Bosnia. Not that Caroline herself is anything but hopelessly uninformed on the matter, but at least—well, at least she is ashamed of her ignorance.

  “So,” her father says, startling Caroline out of her thoughts. They have passed the last five minutes of the drive in silence, having covered the bulk of accessible conversation topics (the Red Sox, the new addition to the Hibberts’ house, rumors of the recent fall from grace of Jack’s old undergraduate men’s club) already. “You had a good visit with your mother?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Caroline nods.

  “She seemed”—he pauses—“well to you?”

  “Fine.” Caroline is suspicious of this line of questioning. Her father loves to try to draw her into conversations that allow him the opportunity to make condescending or wry comments about everything from her mother’s propensity for being startled to her famously poor cooking abilities. These are not the whole story, though, which makes such conversations especially uncomfortable. There was the night shortly after Faith moved out, for instance, that Caroline found him organizing the old shoe box of photos that Faith had for years bemoaned not having enough time or energy, or whatever it was, to sort through. He was pasting them into a beautiful leather-bound album with black pages, and labeling each with a special white pencil he had bought for the occasion. It was late—maybe two A.M., the night black and hard with the bite of coming winter, when Caroline came home to find him surrounded by neat piles of stiff-backed, formal-looking photos of his courtship and early years of marriage. It was nothing, he had said gruffly, just a little necessary cleanup. But she had seen his face, in that moment of turning when she walked in. And the address of Lucy’s home in Greenwich where Faith was staying, neatly penciled in his hand on a piece of paper clipped to the inside cover. There had been the awkward moment of pure silence—no wind outside or clank of radiators or scuffling of the dogs (where were they?) to diffuse the intensity of his absolute aloneness here at the kitchen table, reconstructing his failed marriage in the early hours of the morning. Well, Caroline had said finally—she was a little drunk—it’s getting really cold out. His denial was fierce enough to be contagious.

  “Did she mention anything about Eliot visiting?” her father asks.

  “Sometime before camp,” Caroline says.

  “Well—if she can figure out—”

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Caroline interrupts. “I mean, she’s going to have him for all his vacations next year anyway, right? So he might as well get used to visiting.” She pauses. “What else does he have to do? He has three weeks before camp and no school, and it does seem so lonely that he’s just—like right now—going to be all by himself at home. I don’t understand, I guess, why he never got a new babysitter after Rosita moved away—you don’t really think he’s too old—”

  Her father pulls up directly behind the van in front of them and flashes his brights. “He’s almost eleven,” he says.

  “Okay—but at least a housekeeper, or someone who’s home sometimes. I could find out about my friend Sarah’s old housekeeper,” Caroline begins again. “She might be able to work, since she doesn’t work for her family anymore—”

  “You know, Caroline,” her father says in his chilliest voice, “Eliot and I have been okay for the last year without your assistance.”

  Caroline feels the blood rush to her ears. “Right,” she says, surprised to find her throat has constricted. “I didn’t realize it was such a touchy subject.”

  “It is not a ‘touchy subject.’ ” He flashes his lights again, three times fast now, and the van that has been lurching along in front of them pulls over. BILLERICA SENIOR CENTER is printed on the side of it in navy lettering. Above this, a series of pale faces stare back through the glass squares of their windows at her like a sort of woeful, reproving chorus. As Jack accelerates past it, the driver glares out his window at Caroline.

  “I could,” her father says after a while, clearing his throat, “take Eliot down with me next week.”

  “To New York?” Caroline says.

  He nods, stiff-jawed, and flicks on the blinker to turn onto Main Street.

  “Okay.” She shrugs and looks back out the window. There is an Indian tour group climbing off a bus, blinking their eyes in the slanted evening sunlight.

  “If you wanted, you could come, too,” he says without looking at her. “I could get the three of us tickets to something before Eliot goes to your mother’s.”

  Caroline turns to see if he is joking. But he looks absolutely serious, if uncomfortable. Her father, it occurs to her as almost wondrous, is trying to make some sort
of amends for being such an asshole. “That’s nice of you,” she says, almost to see if he will retract it. Niceness is not a quality that he has respect for.

  They are now in view of First Parish Church, the steps of which are dotted with latecomers. Her father pulls into a parking place on the other side of the street from it. “Well,” he says brusquely, opening his door. “Just a thought.”

  Caroline pauses for a moment before opening her own door and watches him making his way around the front of the car to her side. He has a very upright stride, which seems suddenly, as he navigates the narrow space between his front fender and the back of the station wagon ahead of it, fragile in its rigidity. She can count on half a hand the times she has ever seen him offer anything approximating a gesture of contrition. It should make her angry, but as he turns to wait for her, eyebrows raised, she feels instead a swell of compassion. He is a man who knows so little about affection that he can’t even invite his children to New York without feeling embarrassed. “Coming,” she says, opening the door and climbing out into the humid air of evening.

  ROCK IS GOING to Skip Krasdale’s wedding for two reasons: (a) Caroline will be there and (b) staying home while Denise “helps” his father pack for Pea Island will possibly kill him. Until last week, Denise was to accompany her fiancé on the trip and Rock Jr. was to have the “duplex” to himself for a blissful six days. But Denise has decided she has “too much work” and that Rock Sr. needs “alone time” with his old friends before they get married. Rock Jr. suspects there are other factors at work here—namely Stephan Dartman, a.k.a. Denise’s boy toy.

  Through the closed door to his father’s bedroom, Rock has already started to hear things like: “You’re bringing your tennis racket? God help us,” and “You don’t need that old sweater—Jesus, what would you do without me? Walk around looking like Archie Bunker?” Rock Sr., as portrayed by his fiancée, is a bumbling idiot barely capable of dressing himself, let alone interacting in social situations. “You’re hopeless, Coughlin,” is one of Denise’s favorite ways to punctuate cocktail party stories. “Can you believe this guy?” Rock Sr. will just stand there, looking tired and slightly distracted, but accepting the pathetic vision of himself Denise proffers as if it were no less fair than a parking ticket or a jury duty summons. Rock is in no mood to play audience to this show.

  By the time Rock arrives at the white clapboard church on Thorough Street he has had ample time to remember the two distinct reasons why he was not going to go in the first place: (a) he will have to see his mother and (b) he hates the groom. Skip Krasdale is Rock’s third cousin. A solemn, self-proclaimed moralist, Skip is comfortable making pronouncements about politics, culture, and members of the Coughlin family with the kind of authority generally reserved for veterans of foreign wars and ancient southern matriarchs—not twenty-eight-year-olds with a Harvard education and six years of institutional investment work under their belts. Rock has never heard the guy laugh at anything other than the kind of joke that can be written up in the minutes of a men’s club. Neither, for that matter, has Rock ever seen Skip wear a pair of jeans.

  It isn’t until the reception that Rock even catches sight of Caroline. He has, as expected, been cornered by his mother, who is attempting to explain the essential nature of a daily yoga routine to him. “You’ll have so much more energy, Rock,” she is saying. “You need to care for your body first and the rest will follow. Really. I can see everything so much more clearly now that I’m working with Ravi. He’s so grounded. He would be really good for you.”

  Since her divorce she has become an avid consumer of new dietary strategies, meditational techniques, and homeopathy workshops. Her body has been kickboxed, treadmilled, stepped, and yogaed into a stringy fat-free mass of muscle and sharp jutting bones, wrapped in a mysterious year-round nut-brown tan. Even her eyes have acquired an intense, stripped-down way of looking at things, as if everything they take in has, like her body, been honed to its bare essentials. To Rock, she looks about twenty times older than she did when she was an unhappy, out-of-shape drunk. But she feels good—she feels great, in fact. This is what she is trying to explain to Rock. “Right,” Rock says intermittently. He has heard enough New Age rhetoric at Bensen’s Organic to last a lifetime. “Excellent.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he is watching Caroline talk to some tall European guy with slicked-back hair pulled into a little ponytail—no American would have hair like that. Caroline is talking quite seriously, nodding her head and standing with one hand cradling the other elbow. She has one of those thin, extra-naked-looking bodies, all long bones and bright eyes, no padding to speak of, and a certain condensed quietness about her that attracts attention in a roomful of people, like a gap in a mouthful of teeth. Talking to this guy, she looks so focused and interested, nodding her head and asking questions. When she talks to Rock, there is always something faintly distracted about her, as if some secret but essential part of her is missing—off sitting on a windowsill, staring into the dusk somewhere.

  As Rock watches, the European turns and reveals himself to be Stephan—Ste-fan, who has shed his ripped T-shirt in favor of a smartly fitted tuxedo. Did Caroline invite him here? Rock stares at the two of them, or at Caroline, more precisely, until he realizes he is waiting—with the muscle-tight tension of someone watching a child learn how to bike-ride—for the slippery S curve of Caroline’s hair draped over her shoulder to fall straight. Jesus! As if this would be a fucking tragedy! The whole joyless high church ceremony, with its stark readings from the King James Bible, cautionary homily, and silent, floorboard-creaking, dress-rustling exchanging of rings has really wound him up. His cummerbund feels too tight to draw a good deep breath. And the air in the tent smells musky—twice breathed.

  Rock downs the rest of his Manhattan and heads back to the bar. When his glass is replenished (his third drink already), he makes his way toward Caroline, who is still talking to Stephan. “The European” is how Rock prefers to think of him. It would make a good name for a contender of Stone Cold Steve Austin or The Undertaker on late-night wrestling.

  When Rock gets to the spot where Caroline and he should be, though, they are nowhere in sight. He has been delayed by a forced exchange of hand slaps with the groom’s brothers—a triumvirate of blond fraternity boys with beefy necks and bad hearing, whom Rock hates even more than he did five minutes ago. The band has struck up a tepid re-creation of Sinatra’s “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and on the raised platform the bride and groom are making their way, workman-like, around the floor: Skip with his usual stiff, constipated look and his wan little bride dragging slightly, like a deflating blow-up doll. In the far right corner of the tent a bird has gotten in under the billowy canvas and is fluttering frantically against it, gathering a crowd at least as large as that collected around the dance floor. In the middle of all this, Rock spots Caroline—still talking to Stephan!—now closer to the seafood bar. They have been joined by a hefty, pouf-haired girl in a dress that makes her look like Nancy Reagan. And Stephan has whipped out his video camera.

  “Carol,” Rock calls from a little too far away, and all three turn to look at him as if he is possibly dangerous. Calling Caroline Carol gives Rock a particularly satisfying kind of amusement. “Hey.”

  “Hi, Rock,” Caroline says graciously. “You remember Stephan—and you know Mindy, don’t you? We all went to dancing school together,” she offers by way of explanation, putting her hand on the girl’s purple shoulder in that giggly, expansive way that she gets when she is drinking. There is a faint dart of white skin running up from the top of her strapless dress to the nape of her neck, the ghost of some impossibly thin bathing suit tie.

  “Sure,” Rock says, extending his hand. “I think you know my father’s fiancée, Denise Meirhoffer, don’t you?” He has donned his Bob Hope voice despite his best intentions not to.

  “Oh.” Stephan looks genuinely startled. “Of course.”

  “I remember you,” Nancy Reagan inter
rupts, turning to Rock. “You were suspended with Sam Daedalus, weren’t you? For smoking or something—or for sending an obscene fax? Or letter? What was it?” She has a rapid, aggressive way of speaking and a slight nostril flare that accompanies her vowel sounds.

  “That wasn’t me,” Rock lies.

  “Of course it was,” Caroline pats his arm. “Rocky the rebel. Do any of you need a drink?”

  Rock looks at her in dismay. She is going to use him as her out, leave him to steer this motley conversation crew. Rock gulps at the drink in his hand, but can’t really make enough headway to justify tagging along. Anyway, he has already been zeroed in on by Mindy, who is asking, nostrils aflare: Where does he live now? What does he do? How does he know Skip?

  Rock keeps his answers to a minimum. Stephan seems to be checking the fit of his tuxedo, looking surreptitiously over his shoulder toward his ass.

  “So Denise says you’re from Cambridge.” Rock turns to Stephan, cutting Mindy off in midquestion.

  “What’s that?” Stephan asks.

  “So you’re from Cambridge?” Rock immediately regrets the so, which there was no good reason to repeat. Standing across from him, Mindy looks wounded.

  “Not really. I lived there for a few years during high school.”

  “Hmm,” Rock says. “And now you live in LA?”

  “Actually”—Stephan is unzipping his camera bag now, casting an eye around the room—for good scenes to film, presumably—“I just spent a year in Europe.”

  “Really. I was just thinking you looked kind of European,” Rock is saying before he can stop himself. “The ’do or something.”

  Stephan raises his eyebrows.