The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

“Anything is possible.” Faith stretches her feet out as far as they will go under the dashboard. It sounds, actually, like something true rather than the absolving maxim she intended it to be. Her ex-husband is having a child with her son’s babysitter, her son has disappeared and returned, and she is now a woman who has had sex out of wedlock.

  “So you will see your son next week?” Jean Pierre asks. He is leaning forward slightly now that they have entered the octopus of Logan Airport.

  “Next week.” It has been settled that Eliot will come stay with Faith for the week before he heads off to Camp Chippewa, as well as the month afterward as originally planned. It will be a good way to ease into the arrangement for next year, in which she will have Eliot for all his vacations. Faith will take him to the Museum of Natural History, and to the restaurant at the boathouse in Central Park, which she has always wanted to go to herself. Of course, she doesn’t know if he will think either of interest; the idea of having him all to herself for a whole week sends butterflies through her stomach. But it is also, in some fundamental way, steadying. She is a mother whose son will come see her for a week; a mother who will cook dinner and make plans and offer instructions—these are, after all, things she is capable of.

  They have pulled off into the busy, taxi-filled strip in front of the shuttle terminal and Faith realizes Jean Pierre is looking expectantly at her. “What?” she says, and feels a sudden pang of nervousness, and something else, that shivery thrill of desire; she will miss him. He has been by her side for nearly forty-eight hours—he has had breakfast with her ex-husband and children, cooked soup for her daughter, slept on the first matching set of furniture she ever owned.

  “I asked when you will come to Paris—the week after?”

  Faith stares at him. “To Paris.” She can hear herself say it as if it is a new word she is learning.

  “What?” Jean Pierre smiles. He looks younger and more at ease now that they are pulled over, although he still has one hand on the wheel. She can’t tell if he is being serious. “You thought we would make no plan?”

  “No.” Faith feels herself smiling—a big, foolish, shy grin. “I don’t know.”

  “The week after next, then. Maybe on Wednesday—we will go to the mountains and eat cassoulet.”

  “Okay,” Faith says, laughing, although it feels almost possible.

  Their good-bye hug is awkward, with Faith on the curb and Jean Pierre on the street so that she feels like some giant oafish amazon, wrapping her arm around his dark head. “Faithey,” he says, holding her hand for a moment after she has turned, pressing her four cool fingers into his warm palm. “Bon voyage.” He lifts her hand to his mouth, kissing the flat of her wrist.

  Faith blushes and nearly trips over her suitcase, but rights herself and makes her way through the sliding glass doors without looking back. She recognizes the same posters she saw when she arrived—Venice, Alaska, Morocco, only this time they just seem like posters, not escape hatches from her life. People press past all around her, executives and maintenance men, midwestern tourists and baseball-cap-wearing teenagers, a group of veiled Islamic women, an Italian couple, a host of anonymous travelers on their way from one place to another—one meaning in the universe to the next. Faith wills herself not to look back. It is possible she will never see Jean Pierre again. It is possible he is already at this moment becoming a memory.

  But at the foot of the escalator she puts her bag down and looks anyway—and yes, he is still there, this small dark Frenchman, who, in response to her gaze, lifts his hand in a kind of salute. Faith feels gratitude well up inside her. Here she is, cast loose in a great, impersonal world of people, and someone is waving at her. She lifts her bag and steps onto the escalator. There is the moment of confusion as her bag is on one step, and she on another, and then stability—the hum of unseen machinery, the smooth glide of corrugated metal. It carries her upward to the world of departures and destinations with the precision of passing time.

  21

  THE MORNING AFTER Rosita is released from the hospital, Eliot tiptoes into her room early. It smells of the baby here—of powder and diaper cream and clean linen, and below this, of Rosita herself. The house has been quiet since Rosita and the baby arrived, has had a sort of suspended feeling that Eliot has not yet gotten used to. Eliot breathes in deeply, standing over the bassinet, watching the baby sleep, his translucent fingers curled against the white flannel sheet. With his shut eyes and the soft down of hair on his scalp, the baby has the unfinished quality of a newborn gerbil or hamster; the kind of fragility that is almost disgusting. Last night, when Eliot held him, he was surprised to feel the distinctive weight of flesh and blood.

  Eliot knows it is not really his doing that the baby is here, in Concord, or for that matter, that Rosita has returned; his plan was, for all intents and purposes, a failure. He is lucky to still be alive—or, in any case this was the central idea of the pickup truck driver, who must have repeated it at least twenty-five times to the police officer. Often enough that Eliot began to believe it. He knows he got no farther than Lexington, a mere foot away from Concord on the mound of his reproachful papier-mâché project, and that he only put up a total of eight flyers, which Rosita has certainly not seen. Still, there is a piece of him that feels responsible for setting a great wheel in motion, a cause-and-effect chain informed by cosmic rather than earthly logic. Blacksmith is, after all, all right—was found shuffling, saddle askew, through some elderly Lexington resident’s peony garden. And Rosita is here, isn’t she? The great sense of defeat and despair that Eliot felt upon being delivered by police officers to his mother here at the house has given way to a subtle optimism. A certain confidence in his powers. He could feel something shifting in the way the trees lined up with the sky for that last stretch that Blacksmith bolted—a door to his world creaking open just enough to make room for this new life. And so, in this way, the baby belongs to him. He will teach him how to speak English. He will show him how to climb the fir tree and look over the golf course, how to ride a horse and how to microwave dinner. He will read him stories and plant flowers with him and never allow him to be bored or sad or alone.

  “Mijo,” Rosita whispers, placing her cool hand on Eliot’s head. He has not even heard her come back in. “Your father is wanting you downstairs. You can watch the baby sleeping later—he will still be here.”

  Eliot looks up at her—in the months since he has last seen her, her face has become thinner and older. She has a purple bruise around her eye and a bandage along the line of her shoulder and the low part of her neck. Her voice sounds exactly the same, though—light and flexible over the English consonants.

  “Why?” Eliot whispers back, although he knows she will not have an answer. They have not spoken about where she has been for the last six months or what has happened to make his father bring her back here. In a way, he understands that the answer to both is the baby. What he understands less is what is going to happen now. Eliot would like to ask Rosita herself, but there is something about the arrangement that makes him shy to ask questions. That makes him feel he has to pretend he doesn’t notice that now everything is different.

  “I don’t know,” she says, and then smiles, ruffling his hair. “Go see.”

  Eliot ducks out from under her hand and goes downstairs, careful to shut the door behind him quietly. He pads down the hall in his slippers, scuffing them slightly along the floorboards. Shuffle-up-agus—what was it his mother said she called him when he was very little? He could almost remember—that smooth, kind voice and a cool, thin hand grasping his. A little skip of nervous excitement rises through him at the thought—he is going to visit her, for the first time alone, one week from tomorrow.

  Downstairs, in the library, his father is bent over the table under the window. It is dim in here. Even when the drapes are tied back, they keep the sunlight out.

  “What?” Eliot says from the doorway, and his father looks up, stares at him for a moment.

 
“Here.” His father slides a paper across the table—white, with a dark photo in the center, their telephone number across the bottom. Eliot is not surprised; he was upstairs when the police came by early this morning. He says nothing, just looks from Roberto’s grainy face to the horse and rider sculpture on the mantel.

  “You made this?”

  “Yes,” Eliot says.

  His father sits back down and under him the ancient Harvard chair creaks. “He was . . . ?” he begins, and clears his throat. “He is . . . ?”

  Eliot stares at his father. Even now, he does not recognize Roberto. Or does not know him to recognize. It is not exactly that Eliot is surprised by this—but it confirms something. His father may have brought Rosita back here, but he is not the one who knows her best.

  “Roberto,” Eliot says. “His mother is Rosita.”

  Jack nods as if he has been expecting this. “He has been missing—” he begins and then stops abruptly for a moment. “For how long?”

  “Three years,” Eliot says.

  His father’s face is completely in shadow now. “From Colombia—he was kidnapped?”

  Eliot nods. Through the diamond of window framed by the drapes, the world looks bright and sunny; the grass is a brilliant emerald green. Eliot stands very still.

  “Why did you do this?”

  Eliot shrugs and looks down at his slippers. But then in a way he wants to explain it—and not just the obvious part that he wanted to find Rosita, but everything: Blacksmith and his costume, and the trail linking the two worlds and Roberto himself, and the harsh place he comes from. “Because he’s missing and nobody here knows,” Eliot says.

  He waits, almost without breathing, for his father to respond. It is not a challenge, but a fact he has offered like a flag run up to see if there is enough wind—to see if Jack Dunlap has something that will address the reality that there was this boy in the world who is now gone and no one misses.

  “You can’t just take off like that,” his father says finally, in a gruff voice, and Eliot feels any hope he had of a satisfying response leave his body like a puff of smoke.

  But also he feels, in that moment, the absolute presence of Roberto there beside him. And it makes him powerful. He is not alone; he has Roberto. He has this boy who knows more than his own father about the world, who has seen all its events transpire from the other side of the thin, invisible membrane beneath everyone’s feet, separating the good from the bad, the safe from the threatened, the living from the dead. And he, Eliot, knows him and sees him and has him. He is his. Behind Eliot the old grandfather clock ticks steadily—in five minutes the ancient springs and interlocking wheels will work themselves up into a series of groaning, creaking gongs.

  Jack rises and walks over to the cold fireplace, turns to look at Eliot again.

  Eliot says nothing. There is the sound of someone’s footsteps on the floor above, Rosita’s or Caroline’s, and the faint cry of the baby. Outside, Brutus lopes across the lawn. This time the silence persists for long enough that it begins to solidify around them. Eliot wonders if his legs have frozen from standing so still, if he can, in fact, even move them.

  “It wasn’t completely wrong of you,” Jack says finally.

  Eliot looks up at his father, standing with his back to the gaping black hole of the fireplace. He looks old and uncertain, smaller than usual. “I know,” Eliot says. “It wasn’t completely wrong of you, either.”

  THE GARAGE SMELLS of damp concrete and metal, gasoline, lumber, and now slightly of dog. This is where Caesar has been since the night he attacked Rosita. He has not been neglected: Wheelie has put his L.L. Bean bed in the corner, fed and walked him, and administered his monthly heartworm medication. But all the same, when he approaches Jack there is something wan about him—his coat looks duller than usual and his paws bigger and mangier, like the feet of some clumsy beast. He wags his tail low, with a note of contrition. When Jack leans down to scratch his head, he stands absolutely still, and leans gently against Jack’s knees in the greenish fluorescent light.

  “Okay,” Jack says firmly. “Come.” He opens the door and walks out onto the driveway. “Heel.” Caesar trots along beside him, the picture of restrained excitement, refusing what must be a slew of nearly overwhelming invitations to his senses after the last few days in the garage. He is well trained, after all; Jack spent hours practicing commands with him, punishing wayward behavior, rewarding his attention. With Caesar at his heels, Jack makes his way off the gravel onto the grass, across the lawn toward the little wood he looks at from his bedroom window every morning. The grass has been cut recently and smells fresh. Sharp, fragrant little spears cling to the sides of Jack’s shoes. He can see a figure move across the kitchen window—Caroline back from her jog, or Rosita, he can’t make out which from here. Over in the corner next to the table there is a baby bed Caroline found in the attic, which they have set up for the baby to lie in when Rosita is downstairs.

  In the last four days the house has come to feel unfamiliar to Jack. There are diapers in the upstairs bathroom, a rocking chair in the kitchen, and the hushed tones of his own son singing lullabies. Everywhere there is the warm, claustrophobic smell of mother and child. Last night Jack was aware of Rosita lying on the other side of the wall in her old bedroom. He woke thinking he could hear her breathing, could hear her shifting her weight on the bed. When they are married, will she move into his room?

  He feels shy around Rosita now, more than he once did, and especially so in the presence of his children. There is a sort of awe that has come over him now that he has begun to grasp the immensity of what he doesn’t know about her. She has a son who is missing. This is a huge and impossible thing—Jack recognizes this on one level. But it has only strengthened his conviction that he is doing the right thing, transforming her life—and his own. It feels wild and reckless and at the same time predetermined.

  Last night, at dusk, Jack caught sight of Rosita out the hall window, sitting in one of the stiff-backed Adirondack chairs looking out over the field behind the house into the darkened wood. The seat was angled away from him, so he could see only the semi-profile of her face and the slender curve of her arm along the chair’s. There was something so solitary about her, so absolutely still and contained and unfathomable, it brought an unfamiliar tightness to Jack’s throat. She is strong and good and, in a certain way, old-fashioned, and looking at her fills him with an inexplicable kind of peace or comfort. He is delivering her from poverty and her angry brother-in-law, who would have thrown her out on the street to raise her son in what, Jack shudders to think of it, would surely have been destitute conditions, but here, too—it struck him for the first time—it will not be easy.

  Quietly he let himself out the back door and walked toward her. She didn’t hear him until he was quite close behind her and shuffled his feet in the grass to give her warning. And she didn’t jump, as Faith would have, or exclaim, like Caroline, but just turned, eyebrows slightly raised, to observe him approaching. The white bandage on her neck made a crinkling sound, and in her arms, he realized, the baby was sleeping. He stopped just short of the chair beside her, startled by this second, unexpected presence. “It’s okay,” she whispered, and smiled—a thin, effortful ghost of the one Jack remembers from that wintry March day in the hallway.

  “Do you want anything?” he whispered. “A drink?”

  She shook her head, keeping her eyes on his.

  “Rosita,” he said, dropping onto the broad arm of the chair opposite her. Her name is still uncomfortable for him to say—he has always, even when she lived here before, avoided using it. There was the sound of crickets, a night bird trilling, the creak of the painted boards beneath him. “I think”—he was surprised to find his mouth dry—“we should get married.”

  There was a stirring at her breast, the baby kicking lightly in his swaddling.

  “You want to hold him?” Rosita asked, as if she had not heard him.

  Jack stared at her in
confusion, drawing back, but then she was already rising a little from her seat, holding the baby out to him. He couldn’t think how to accept it—where to put his arms—but then it was in his hands already. He was holding a small, warm body. A terrified, responsible feeling gripped him, but gave way to something else, softer and more incredible—a sense of wonder: out of the chaotic jungle of circumstances and irresponsible actions has come this.

  The clear black eyes blinked up at him, struggling to focus, and one tiny, almost transparent hand opened and closed, grasping, finding nothing, grasping again. Jack extended one of his own leathery fingers and the baby closed his little ones around it and blinked with the surprise of having grasped an object where before there was just air. Jack stared at the tiny, perfectly formed hand—at the distillation of hundreds of years of evolution, small amendments to bone density and muscle mass; skin texture, color, thickness, and the proportion of flesh to blood to skeleton. He had brought this little person into the world—this little individual, already marked by something difficult and utterly human, a singularity of being that exceeds all requirements for survival and defies the concise and economical workings of the universe.

  There was a creaking of wood—Rosita changing position, leaning forward. “Jack,” she said. Yack. It had, in the last moments, become too dark to make out her expression, but he could feel the pressure of—yes, it was—her hand, on his knee. “You are a good man.”

  And he could only sit and stare, captive to this simple, but utterly unfamiliar assertion.

  When he and Caesar have reached the wood, there is the snap of branches under Jack’s feet, the swish of ferns against his trousers, and the nostalgic bleat of a bold midafternoon cricket. To the side of the oldest beech tree in the stand, Jack has dug a hole—four feet long and four feet deep. He has been up since early morning working on this; his shirtfront is streaked with dirt and sweat and the shovel he used is still propped against the tree. “Go on,” he orders Caesar, who looks up at him with his ears perked in confusion. “Go on,” Jack says again, firmly, pointing into the hole. The dog looks into it and back at Jack, forehead wrinkled and tail quivering. And then—awkwardly, it seems—he slides down the uneven side of the embankment and into the darkness.