The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  Caroline has a sudden memory of visiting Lilo, when she was much younger, maybe fifteen years ago, or even longer than that, and Lilo still lived on Beacon Hill in the house with the long churchlike windows and old-fashioned iron boot-scrape at the door. There had a been a lunch of some kind—all Lilo’s best silver and china out on the table and some sort of molded fish pudding, little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and Harriet’s brittle, crumbly brownies. And a minister? Or a diplomat? Some old bowlegged Roosevelt whom Lilo wanted desperately to impress. And she had seated everyone around the table and made some sort of toast about how sad it was that this distinguished guest had come back to Boston to find the Somerset Club, like so many of Boston’s most venerable organizations, so changed in its membership. Lilo had been smug with self-satisfaction at having been, even as a woman (and therefore not a member), so intimately acquainted with the club’s workings and so devastated by its apparent degeneration—the whole of her remarks addressed like a loving serenade to this bowlegged bald man. And then, after she had seated herself back at the head of the table, he had stood and begun his own speech with a casual remark that actually the club had needed a good shake-up—that it was in danger of becoming downright provincial. Caroline had happened to look at Lilo at that moment and her face had been completely distorted by dismay and uncertainty, as if suddenly the earth had heaved under her feet or the moon had bounced in its orbit. It was the same shocked, almost childish bewilderment that had registered on the old woman’s face in the lobby of the west wing this afternoon.

  “. . . clown collection.”

  “What?” Caroline asks, startled out of her train of thought.

  “That’s quite a clown collection,” Stephan repeats. Caroline is once again in the room alone with him.

  “I know.” Caroline grimaces. “No one’s told her clowns have turned into the exclusive property of serial killers, poltergeists, and child molesters.” Her voice comes out sounding more sorrowful than she intended.

  “The fall of the clown.” Stephan laughs anyway. “There’s a good documentary subject.”

  It is hot in the cluttered room—the sunlight cuts a woolly swath across the pink sofa on which Caroline is sitting. “It’s funny to think clowns used to just be, you know, cheerful,” she says distractedly. She is trying to come up with a casual way to ask if Lilo’s full name will be used in the movie (why on earth didn’t she ask him to begin with?), when Lilo herself calls Caroline’s name from the bedroom.

  “Coming,” she says automatically, and pulls herself up off the stuffy embrace of the sofa.

  In the bedroom, Lilo is sitting at her dressing table in a shocking state of undress—baggy pizza-dough-like white flab hanging over the top of some impossible flesh-colored girdle and stiff white brassiere. There are about twenty-five colorful dresses spread out on the bed in front of a dismayed-looking Harriet.

  “You are a woman now, so I am turning to you,” Lilo begins with an elaborate, theatrically knowing look. Caroline has a sudden fear she is about to describe some awful age-related feminine problem. “There is something I really think you should see.”

  “Right now?” Caroline asks, thinking of Stephan sitting on the other side of the wall, but Lilo is already reaching behind a row of china boxes along the top of her windowsill.

  “Here,” she says, straightening up and holding something small and square in her hand. Her eyes are gleaming. “A philatic.” She pronounces the word with a breathy sense of victory.

  “A—” Caroline begins, and then realizes that it is a wrapped condom—a prophylactic. She stifles the burst of laughter that has risen in her throat.

  “Far be it from me to tell your father what he should or should not do in the privacy of your home, but I find it humiliating to have him leaving this sort of paraphernalia in his wake like a common gigolo.”

  The laughter freezes in Caroline’s throat and she can only stare at the shiny plastic perched incongruously between Lilo’s fingers. “What did he—? You mean he gave this to you?” she can only stammer. She has a sudden horrific image of her father as some sort of nursing home marauder, intentionally shocking the woman who raised him—and who else? Has he gone completely insane?

  “Gave it to me!” Lilo snorts dramatically. “Well, you could say so, although I don’t think he intended to.”

  “Well, how—”

  “As I told you on the telephone, he left his golf jacket here a few months ago, and since he didn’t seem to care to pick it up I thought I’d let Terrence Reed have it,” Lilo says, settling herself into high storytelling mode, “and I wanted to have it pressed and cleaned—it looked decrepit, you know, your mother never keeps you all even halfway neat and tidy.” She looks reprovingly at Caroline here—they have reached a stalemate on the matter of Jack and Faith’s divorce, which Lilo refuses to acknowledge. “So I made Harriet help me go through the pockets to make sure we wouldn’t lose any of his personal belongings down there in the laundry room—they’ll just pocket any extras, you know, they stole four of my lipsticks that way and Mary Daimler’s gold pin . . .” Lilo’s voice trails away. “And,” she resumes, returning to the story. But she seems stuck here. “And . . .”

  “And when you went through the pockets of the jacket you found . . . ?”

  “Yes!” Lilo snaps. “Right there, for everyone to see. Imagine! Imagine my having to look Harriet in the face after such a thing. My own nephew, a common gigolo.”

  Harriet, who is helping Lilo step into her lavender gown, looks unimpressed by this revelation of Lilo’s scruples.

  It is possible that this is all an invention. But then, Lilo is holding a condom in her hand. To the best of Caroline’s knowledge her father has not dated, not even flirted with, anyone since he has been divorced. After all, what sort of woman would be able to hold a decent conversation, let alone a romance, with a man who refers to Oprah Winfrey as “that fat black woman with a big mouth”? Just picturing him on a date is impossible. An image of him soliciting a prostitute—some thick red-lipped drag queen—rears up in Caroline’s mind and gives her a violent head rush. The backs of her knees have begun to sweat.

  “Well, I don’t know—” she begins.

  “You will have to tell your mother to manage this—it really looks terrible for her reputation,” Lilo says, standing. “Wish me well, my dear.” She adjusts the collar of her dress and sweeps out into the sitting room. “If this is too bold, I have plenty of other softer colors,” Caroline can hear her saying.

  She sits down on the chair Lilo has just vacated and looks out the window. The idea of sitting through another five outfit changes, or whatever else Lilo has planned, seems almost excruciating. She is a truly crazy woman and now Caroline has opened the door for her to be truly crazy on film, possibly in front of a national audience. What if, for instance, he wins Sundance? She will forever be known as the great-niece of an offensive snob, and in addition—her palms begin to sweat—her father will probably disown her.

  As she watches, the same orderly she saw earlier is parking a row of wheelchairs in the bright sun along a narrow rose garden. From here, the old people in them could be sacks of laundry. It makes Caroline anxious—all this gleamingly white skin out under the hot sun.

  “I suppose you want to hear about my brief and tragic marriage to Cy Gifford,” she can hear Lilo saying. In front of her, the condom in its bright blue package is still sitting, like a visitor from another planet, on Lilo’s shaker dressing table.

  WAITING FOR CAROLINE to come back from Lilo’s and pick him up from gathering up the contents of his cubby at school, Eliot stares at the bright display of second-grade paintings of The Midnight Messenger, artistic compliments to Friday’s performance. In one brilliant interpretation directly across from him, “Foriners Get Out” is printed in a speech bubble coming from Paul Revere’s lips. It is giving Eliot a headache; he can see the scraggly letters even with his eyes closed.

  He is trying to avoid Jen Edwards, who
is here with her mother, at the other side of the lobby. Jen is an anxious girl, one year younger than Eliot is, and overly excitable. The school has her under constant food surveillance because she is missing the gene that makes people stop eating when they are full. Eliot imagines it like a little rubber plug that has slipped down into Jen’s gullet, leaving her throat and stomach to gape wide, pink, and glistening with greed. It makes him feel unsafe around her, as if she is that much more likely to turn cannibal.

  Eliot is also trying to avoid Forester’s mother, Anne Kittridge, who is yakking away with his drama teacher at the opposite side of the room. Especially after Forester’s run-in with Rock yesterday, Eliot does not want to invite her attention. Who knows what Forester might have said to Rock, what Rock might have said to the Mrs. “Mrs. Big Nose,” Rosita always called Mrs. Kittridge, who, in turn, always referred to Rosita as “your maid,” as in “Eliot, shouldn’t your maid be here by now to get you?”

  Eliot could make Rosita laugh until she was practically weeping by imitating Mrs. Kittridge’s intense stare, always leveled at the bridge of your nose, and her brisk, determined stride. A pang of missing Rosita sweeps up from his abdomen. He has not gotten a postcard from her for a long time now. He does not believe she has forgotten about him, but he is afraid she has maybe moved in with another family. That there is maybe another boy she has become friends with. Or worse, that she is in trouble or danger, or has gone missing like Roberto. He pushes this out of his mind—he cannot allow himself to think it.

  When Caroline finally shows up, the lobby is nearly empty. She seems distracted and a little discombobulated—so sorry she is late—Lilo was being difficult, so sorry he has been waiting, how was getting all his stuff? Is he happy to be leaving the place for a whole summer? Eliot answers her questions minimally with an exaggerated calm. Her face looks flushed and her hair is messy. She has picked up sandwiches though, and iced tea and a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies. Eliot isn’t really in the mood to go for a picnic but she will certainly be crushed if he says so, and worse yet, she will launch into her million and one questions mode: why doesn’t he want to go? Is something wrong? Why doesn’t he want to talk about it?

  In the car, Caroline sings along to the radio, slightly off-key. Love is a rose but you better not pick it, it only grows when it’s on the vine. Her voice sounds small and childish, one beat behind the lyrics. It is hot out and Eliot would like to turn on the air-conditioning, but Caroline insists on driving with the windows rolled down, the hot wind rustling the pages of the newspaper on the back dashboard.

  “Do you know, El,” Caroline says, breaking off her singing, “when Dad last visited Lilo?”

  “I don’t know.” Eliot keeps his eyes on the world flying past outside his window.

  There is a ripping sound as one of the sheets of paper slaps up against the back window.

  “He was mad at her because she gave his jacket away,” Eliot adds.

  Caroline frowns. Eliot could ask why she wants to know, why she is using that voice, but he has more important things to think about. And anyway, he hates to visit Lilo. The stuffy smell of gravy and mothballs, the clowns on the wall, the way Lilo always confuses him with his brothers. The last time he was there, Lilo told a story about a little boy who died because his mother forgot him in the backseat of her car with the windows rolled up.

  The slope of Old Burial Ground and the shady ridge of the hill are, at least, a little cooler than the hot pavement; there is a sort of temperate bunkerlike climate created by the ancient gravestones. No one has been buried here for over a hundred years and the stones jut out of the earth at haphazard angles, as if every fifty years or so they have been upset by some massive, irritable, earthly shrug. Eliot came here once with Rosita last fall. Prudence, Ezekial, Rebeka, and Jedediah, she had sounded out the unfamiliar names, in a way that transformed the stern, humorless syllables into lighter, more interesting sounds.

  Today, the area behind the maintenance shed is blocked off by yellow plastic CAUTION streamers, behind which there is a fresh pile of earth mounded almost five feet high and a stack of plastic-wrapped gravestones leaning against a tree. Restoration of some sort. Eliot averts his eyes from this and climbs farther up, with Caroline huffing and puffing behind him with the brown paper bag of goodies. At the top he sits down against a dark slate stone that protrudes from the earth at a perfect comfortable angle for reclining. At the top of this, a chiseled wreath of roses and a skull are barely visible and the name is worn away almost entirely. Eliot is pleased to have rediscovered it; it is exactly where he sat when he came with Rosita.

  “I don’t think you should sit there,” Caroline says, dropping to the ground at the base of a wide oak tree beside it.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s so old—it might fall over.” There is a note of urgency in her voice.

  “No, it won’t. It’s been like this for hundreds of years.”

  “Well, it’s disrespectful.”

  “Why?”

  “It just is—you wouldn’t like someone sitting on your grave, would you?”

  Eliot considers this. On his grave. He would be below the earth. Dead. “I wouldn’t mind,” he says, feeling the cold of the slate rise through the thin cotton of his T-shirt.

  Caroline frowns and takes their sandwiches out of the bag, puts them on the napkin she has spread on the ground in front of her.

  “I would be dead anyway,” he adds. “I wouldn’t be watching.”

  “Well, of course, but—I don’t know.” A gust of wind blows through the leaves overhead. “I just think it’s sort of creepy.”

  Eliot closes his eyes. Leans the bulb of his own skull against the stone. Caroline is spoiling this place—making it as if all these graves are actually full of unforgiving, hawklike observers. As if the dead don’t have better things to do than criticize the living. It’s just a place—a quiet, peaceful place of . . . how did Rosita say it? A home for finished people. He and Caroline should never have come here.

  “Here.” Caroline hands him a sandwich. “Whatever—I’m probably just being silly.” Below them, an ambulance wails its way around Monument Square and a small group of tourists stops at the base of the cemetery to read the ubiquitous round blue informational sign. One of them glares reprovingly up at them and Eliot has the urge to stick his tongue out.

  “So what should we do this weekend, El?” Caroline says in a forcedly cheerful, change-the-topic tone of voice. “Let’s make fun plans now that I’m back.”

  “Okay.” Eliot takes a bite of the sandwich.

  “We could go to the beach or to Canobie Lake Park.” Above their heads another burst of warm wind sweeps through the oak tree, tossing the leaves into a papery frenzy. Eliot closes his eyes and lets the insides of his eyelids flicker from orange to black, orange to black, in time with the sunlight filtering through the leaves.

  “Or we could just go on a real picnic, with a basket and everything,” Caroline adds. “Somewhere interesting.”

  “Okay,” Eliot says.

  “We could go somewhere outside of Concord, like, I don’t know, Gloucester, or Manchester, or Marblehead.”

  “We could go to Roxbury.” He says it without really thinking and clamps his mouth shut as soon as it is out.

  “To Roxbury?” Caroline looks over at him. “Why do you want to go there?”

  “No reason,” he says into his bottle of iced tea.

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s really a good place for a picnic. I mean—” Caroline lowers the sandwich she has been holding.

  Eliot shrugs and presses his shoulders more firmly against the cold gravestone.

  “What made you think of it?” Caroline gives him a long, evaluative look, with her head tilted to one side. In her lap her fingers have twisted themselves into an anxious knot. They are long and thin, but strong-looking, with short, half-moon-arched nails—like their mother’s, actually. Eliot lifts his eyes and finds she is still looking at him, the exaspe
ration replaced with a puzzled, searching look.

  “Nothing,” he says. “Really.”

  Below them, the tourists are regrouping, pushing on to the next historical site with their cameras and backpacks and flimsy sun visors. They move as a whole, one or two lagging behind or getting ahead, but all within a certain set perimeter like the cells of some gelatinous see-through sea creature.

  “Well,” Caroline says, reaching out and smoothing a lock of hair behind Eliot’s ear. “We’ll go somewhere fun anyway. I think we need to.” There is a red splotch of prickly heat standing out on her collarbone. She looks tired.

  Eliot feels a flash of love and something like pity for her. “It’s all right here,” he says. “It’s not so bad, Car.”

  WHEN JACK LEAVES the house, he is planning on getting an oil change and possibly a haircut. He has not looked up Rosita’s address with the intention of going to find it, but simply because Eliot’s question about whether she has sent him her new address has reminded him that he could find it if he was so inclined. He has never, after all, seen where she came from—or, more to the point, where he sent her back to. It was Wheelie who delivered the letter and check Jack wrote terminating her employment. Which, in retrospect, makes Jack uncomfortable. He should have done it himself, really.

  Jack flips the radio on and tunes in to the news. A fire in Belmont, a suicide gunman in Jerusalem, a new development in prostate cancer research. He is not really listening. Instead of exiting Route 2 in Lexington, though, he finds himself going on to 128, which will take him south toward Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. He flips the radio back off and without it, the car seems exceptionally quiet. There is the hum of air-conditioning, the faint crinkle of leather when Jack shifts gears, and, indistinctly, the sound of his own breathing.