The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  Once there, he turns and faces Jack, puts his forepaws up against the incline. From where Jack stands, he looks surprisingly small and very dark, differentiated from the black earth around him only by the sheen of bluish silver where the dappled sunlight plays over his coat. His eyes, turned up to Jack’s, look deep and inscrutable, a limpid cowlike brown. A dog that attacks once will attack again—Jack can hear his grandfather say it. This is one of the hazards of good breeding. Jack should have put Caesar down when he attacked that deliveryman two years ago. There is something innately aggressive in the dog—he has more than his genetic share of dingo. Jack tells himself this, but there is a part of him that suspects it is a makeshift explanation, that the dog’s actions stem in fact from the way he was raised, from following a precise series of instructions Jack is not even aware of having given.

  Jack pulls the gun out of the case he has been carrying—he has not fired it for years and it feels heavier, colder than he remembered. He loads the bullets and then slides and locks the chamber. Forgive me, he thinks, raising his arm. But it sounds ridiculous—inadequate. Jack does not, he realizes as he thinks it, believe in forgiveness. Caesar shifts his weight, backs uneasily farther into the hole.

  Good boy, Jack thinks, but this, too, is too trite to say out loud. He would like to express something firmer and stronger, but also loving—more like a benediction, but what words are there in his language to express such a thing? So he is silent. He breathes in the smell of rotting leaves, live wood, the fresh-cut grass. Then he fires a bullet cleanly into the smooth strip of velvety fur between the dog’s open eyes. One paw scrabbles against the dirt and his body falls over, unnaturally—his back legs twisted, head at an impossible angle. Jack stands absolutely still, staring, and he has a feeling of being between worlds—alone with this animal who was just a moment ago living but is now dead. He is alive and Caesar is dead. And even so, across this most absolute division, he is more connected to this creature than any other living thing he can think of.

  Jack stands for a full minute, feet planted in the dry leaves. There is the electric hum of a golf cart on the other side of the fence, the rustle of some small animal in the undergrowth. And below this, there is a dull drone of silence, which seems to repeat the words he has left unsaid in his ears.

  Then Jack scrabbles down into the hole and cups a hand around Caesar’s nose. It is still wet and cold—but not breathing, there is not even the tiniest stir of air against his palm. Tenderly, he arranges the body, shifts the heavy back legs, adjusts the head, centers it, and climbs back out of the hole. He is sweating and his appendages feel oddly numb. But he picks up the shovel and sinks it into the pile of fresh earth beside him, lifts a shovelful, and holds it suspended over the grave for a moment—soil, small stones, and broken twigs. Then he overturns it, and the clods rain down on the animal’s soft body and slide through the smooth fur, which is not yet ready to receive them.

  THIS EVENING, CAROLINE breaks into a jog almost as soon as her feet hit the gravel. Over the last few days she has developed the smooth, blank feeling of a stone rubbed round and flat in the tumult of a stormy sea. Her father is going to marry Rosita. He informed her of this last night, when she came upon him in the dusky hall, looking out the window at Rosita and the baby. She couldn’t tell if it was an announcement or a request for . . . what? Her blessing? “Oh,” was the only response she could muster before slipping, almost dizzy, out to the kitchen.

  She should, in a way, have seen this coming as soon as he brought Rosita back to Concord. It is, after all, the way his world works: there are rules and precepts he follows like bright lanterns guaranteed to lead even the blindest man across a narrow rope bridge. You get a woman pregnant, she becomes your wife. The problem is, Caroline’s mind is still balking at the fact that he slept with her to begin with. It gives Caroline a prickly, nauseous feeling. He had sex with her! And she is so young, not so much older than Caroline herself. She was his employee, for Christ’s sake! Eliot’s babysitter!

  What the reality of this marriage will be is nearly unimaginable to Caroline—what will they do, for instance, at Christmas? Or Thanksgiving? She tries to imagine Lilo absorbing the news, or, for that matter, her brothers. They are such fascists she can imagine they will refuse to come home. It would almost make her pity Rosita if she weren’t suspicious that on some level maybe all has worked out just as she has planned it. After all, Jack Dunlap is no small catch economically speaking. This thought will certainly be foremost in the minds of Mamie Starks and Gloria Edwards—of that Caroline can be fairly certain. But it was strange the other night, watching her father escort Rosita across the driveway, one hand placed at her elbow and his head bowed beside her. He did not look weary, or resigned, or stoic, but rather protective—even tender. Which doesn’t quite fit Caroline’s picture. It was at once mysterious and deeply creepy.

  And then there is Eliot to be considered. Two days ago, before Rosita came back, he helped Caroline carry the bassinet down from the attic. When it was in place, he hung a photograph of a small brown boy above it. “So he will know his brother,” he announced and Caroline could make out suddenly, in stark relief, the gulf of information that had risen up between them—the picture like a plank that he had thrown across. “He is Rosita’s . . . ?” she began, making her way tentatively as an acrophobe across the gully. “Where is he?”

  “Missing,” Eliot said. On his lips, the word had a hollow sound to it—the hiss of wind in an empty canyon.

  “Was he—was it—?” Caroline began, realizing she didn’t even know what country Rosita came from. “From here, or in Rosita’s country?”

  Eliot’s eyes had rested, almost pityingly, on hers for a moment. “Missing means in both places.”

  This was an explanation for something larger than the question Caroline had posed; she can see this, although she is not sure how to frame the question it answers.

  At the turn along the far side of the golf course, Caroline becomes aware of a car that has slowed down and is driving along behind her. Could it be—her heart gives a momentary jump in her chest. She hasn’t yet girded herself to call Stephan and officially renounce her role as “production liaison,” although he has probably gathered this is coming. There was a moment, after she knocked down his camera, that she saw in sudden stark clarity what he was doing there beside her: making a movie about the Dunlaps. How stupid she was not to see this! All those questions and conversations and attempts to set up interviews with her father weren’t just part of some larger, less centralized project; they were at the heart of what he was after. He probably knew about Rosita the whole time. Caroline is almost ready to suspect that he knew what he was doing when he left the door open for the dogs to run through. After all, didn’t he say he usually finds whatever it is he sets out to? As long, that is, as he keeps his vision of it simple. And possibly the truth about her family is too complicated to make a good movie. But she has only herself to blame for having served everything up for him to simplify in the eye of the camera.

  The car now motoring along beside her is not the blue Skylark, though, she realizes with relief. It is, instead, Rock’s brown Toyota.

  “What’s this?” Rock leans out the window. “A New Year’s resolution?”

  “No.” Caroline slows down. “Just me, jogging.”

  To her surprise, Rock pulls up onto the shoulder of the road, climbs out, and slams the door behind him. In the absence of the car’s engine, an ordinary, cheerful silence springs up around them, populated by the sound of crickets, distant traffic, and the buzz of a chain saw on the other side of the hill.

  Rock looks different this evening. His hair is still damp from the shower and neatly parted in a way that makes him look boyish. “Walk with me for a minute,” he says.

  I’m running, Caroline is about to protest, but there is something new and earnest about the way he is acting that stops her. And, she realizes with some surprise, she is actually glad to see him.

  “Y
ou know how you said you wanted to get out of here?” Rock says falling into step beside her.

  “I did?” Caroline says.

  “The other day. At the wedding.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, I have an idea.” Rock swings around so that he is walking backward, directly in front of her. He is wearing a white button-down shirt above a pair of clean, respectable-looking khakis. There is something alarming about this. Is he—the absurd idea flashes through her—about to propose to her?

  “You can come to Tibet with me. We can go live in that monastery I was telling you about—I have a picture of it now and it’s amazing—they take “wanderers,” women, too, for six months at a time. I mean even outside the religion—forget the religion—you just pitch in at their farm and take turns doing chores and stuff and then you take these amazing hikes and read and learn to meditate. . . .” He is slightly out of breath, still walking rapidly backward in front of her.

  Caroline stares at him incredulously. “Rock,” she says finally. “My father’s going to marry Rosita.”

  Rock doesn’t say anything for a moment and falls back into step beside her. “I know,” he says after a pause.

  “He told you?”

  Rock shrugs. “I just figured—I mean, it’s not like he’s just going to live with her, right? And, you know”—he looks straight at Caroline—“he likes her.”

  Caroline says nothing. It stings her that Rock should have seen this.

  “Carol,” Rock says. “That’s all the more reason to come. Your father’s on to his own thing, Eliot will be happy to have Rosita around—”

  “Rock.” Caroline comes to a complete stop. “You should go to Tibet. You keep talking about it. You should just go.” She finds her voice rising in exasperation. “You don’t need me, and it’s not my thing. It’s not what I want to do right now.”

  “I am.” He is smiling, a small, almost wry smile. “I already have my ticket.”

  “You do?” Caroline stops short and the roof of a barn below catches the setting sun, sends a sharp bolt of light up into her eyes.

  “I bought it this morning.”

  Caroline is surprised to find a little dark space opening up inside her, like the feeling of being the only person left in a room that has cleared out suddenly. She can hear the slam of the door echoing, the dying reverberations of voices.

  “It’s about time, I figured.” He shrugs.

  Caroline stares at him.

  “Listen, I’ll let you keep going,” Rock says. “Maybe we can have dinner or something before I go.”

  “When is that?” Caroline manages to ask.

  “Next week—cheap last-minute deal.” He says it almost sheepishly.

  Caroline raises one hand to shade her eyes from the slanted evening sunlight and looks up at him. The wind has rumpled his neatly brushed hair and he has managed, as they are walking, to roll one of his shirtsleeves up above the elbow. He looks more like the usual Rock again than the one who climbed out of the car. He looks, also, quite handsome. Maybe I will come, she wants to say—or, don’t go—but before she has opened her mouth, he leans forward and kisses her lightly on the forehead. “See you,” he says with a little salutelike wave. Then he turns on his heel and walks into the warm wind, which makes cartoonish balloons of his shirt and trousers. Caroline watches him open the car door, settle himself into the seat, and fiddle with the stereo. Then he swings the car into an abrupt U-turn and disappears around the bend.

  For a long moment Caroline stands at the crest of the hill, looking back over the valley below. How strange that she, Caroline, seems to be the only one stuck here with no immediate plans for the future. Rock is going off to Tibet, her father is marrying Rosita, her mother has a French lover, and Eliot—well, who knows what Eliot is doing.

  As she looks out over the valley, a dark spot separates itself from the small plane that has been hovering just above the hillside, and blossoms into a billowy cloud of red and then a perfect bright half circle with a black speck suspended from it—a sky diver. Some person dropping from a plane to feel the thrill of being alive, the wonder of the universe, and the immense relativity of his existence right here in the unremarkable dip of the Concord Valley. Caroline watches the slow descent at first with something like scorn, but this gives way to a sort of benevolent appreciation of the fact that for this moment, from where he is, this quiet, infinitely tame, set-in-its-ways small town in the heart of New England must be transformed into the archetypal backdrop of life on this planet.

  The sight lifts Caroline’s spirits enough to pick one foot up again and put it in front of the other. It could be worse, after all, than to be here, in one of the most fortunate spots on the face of the earth. She will have to stay for a while and make sure Eliot is all right. Maybe she should make her own movie about this place and all its obsolete ways and absurd foibles, one that doesn’t try to be so clean and simple. Slowly, she presses her stiffening muscles back into action. And step after step she retraces her steps down the hill, back to Memorial Road and the Dellars’ field and the whole lot of mixed blessings, lucky circumstances, and defective precepts she comes from.

  22

  ROSITA DOES NOT NEED an alarm—there is the baby to wake her. He cries at one A.M. and then three and then again at five. And anyway she is not really asleep, has not really slept at all. Outside the windows there is still blackness when she wakes to hear him stirring—the elegant, uninteresting blackness of night in this part of the world. Smooth layers of black field, blacker trees, and then the paler black, star-dotted sky above these. No scratch and rustle of chickens waking in their coops; no vague humps of cows or pigs against the grass. There is no uneven shine of abandoned machinery, empty gasoline cans, a shovel, a hoe, a homemade swing, to reflect otherwise unnoticed starlight as there would be in her country. Neither is there the drift of complex shadows under streetlights, behind parked cars, on rotting cluttered porches, or the wail of sirens, screech of tires, occasional shout of laughter or smashed glass that there is at this time of night in Roxbury. Just blank, orderly darkness, as pristine and indifferent as the pane of glass on the window.

  The rustling among the clean cotton sheets becomes crying—a thin bleating sound coming from the lungs of the newborn. Rosita rouses herself from the half sleep she has been in and makes her way through the darkness to the bassinet. It is a beautiful carved oak piece, which all the Dunlap children have slept in for two generations. The daughter explained this to Rosita as if there were something funny about it, as if it were ridiculous. Rosita nodded back politely; what could be ridiculous about a sturdy, time-tested bed? She knows the girl less than Jack or Eliot, since she came home only for vacations, or sometimes, once in a great while, for dinner when Rosita lived here.

  Rosita reaches down and picks up the baby, brings him to her breast. She would like to sing or pat him on the back and whisper something in Spanish, call him her little pajarito, as she used to call Roberto. But then he will learn to love the sound of her voice and she does not want this. He sucks hungrily and with great concentration, as if he is starving—one tiny hand resting on her breastbone. It is good he has such passion for the things that sustain him.

  Rosita walks over to the window with the baby still at her breast and looks out into the paling darkness. In the east, over the trees, the sky is turning a faint pinkish gray. Here is your world, she thinks to the baby, who does not have a name yet. Here is what you will know. He stops sucking for a moment, and blinks up at her almost as if he can hear her through the silence. The little hand flutters on her chest. Benjamin, the name pops back into her mind, she read it somewhere, Benjamin—it has such a kind, gentle sound. But she is not going to be the one who names him. She is giving up this right.

  When he has fallen back asleep, Rosita lays him down on the sheets again and arranges the checked quilt over him—another hand-me-down from his brothers and sister, soft and warm and well made. Then she pulls on the pair of jeans and blouse
she has laid out and folds the blanket on her own bed, pulls off the sheets and pillowcase, makes them into a neat bundle, which she will bring downstairs and put on top of the washing machine. Sitting on the bare mattress, she slips into her athletic socks and sneakers, which will be hot in this weather, but she has a long way to travel and they will be more practical than her sandals. In the bassinet, the baby continues sleeping.

  She does not really think of him as hers—she would have given him up for adoption if Jack Dunlap had not shown up on her doorstep. She did not want to bring another child into this world after Roberto. She had filled out the forms already: filed them with the woman at the agency, who was not kind when she called to withdraw the application yesterday. It is better that the baby grow up here as a Dunlap than with strangers, though; this way Rosita can know he will have a fine life. She can know he will go to a good school and get a good education and have all the opportunities Roberto never had. He will never have to use ten-year-old out-of-date books in a one-room schoolhouse or get used to the sound of machine gun fire. He will not have to walk eleven miles home from his grandmother’s one Thursday through a corner of jungle outside Marquetalia where the FARC guerrilla fighters happen to be training. And he will have enough clothes and food and money to become fat and confident, to assume that goodness is rewarded, that life is full of pleasant surprises, and that God is wise and full of love.

  There was a moment when Rosita first came back from the hospital, that she allowed herself to imagine staying, to imagine raising this baby in the safe, protected confines of the Dunlap family, insulated by the reassuring shield of money and history’s favor. But there is no real place for her here. She does not know how to raise a child in this world, which is as stark and impenetrable as the manicured darkness outside the window. It is too closed to enter even with the right key, too full of unspoken rules and hidden traps for her to ever feel free in it. And Jack is too much a part and product of its rock-hard heart to bring her into it, even if he thinks this is what he is doing.