The Good House: A Novel

by Leary, Ann

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  For Denis

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Ann Leary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  one

  I can walk through a house once and know more about its occupants than a psychiatrist could after a year of sessions. I remember joking about this one evening with Peter Newbold, the shrink who rents the office upstairs from mine.

  “The next time you get a new patient,” I offered, “I’ll sneak to their house for a walk-through. While you jot down notes about their history, dreams, whatever, I’ll shine a flashlight into the attic, open a few cupboards, and have a peek at the bedrooms. Later, when we compare notes, I’ll have the clearer picture of the person’s mental health, guaranteed.” I was teasing the doctor, of course, but I’ve been selling houses since he was in primary school, and I stand by my theory.

  I like a house that looks lived in. General wear and tear is a healthy sign; a house that’s too antiseptic speaks as much to me of domestic discord as a house in complete disarray. Alcoholics, hoarders, binge eaters, addicts, sexual deviants, philanderers, depressives—you name it, I can see it all in the worn edges of their nests. You catch the smoky reek of stale scotch and cigarettes despite the desperate abundance of vanilla-scented candles. The animal stench oozes up between the floorboards, even though the cat lady and her minions were removed months before. The marital bedroom that’s become his, the cluttered guest room that’s now clearly hers—well, you get the idea.

  I don’t have to go inside the house to make a diagnosis; the curbside analysis is usually enough. The McAllister house is a perfect example. In fact, I’d love to compare my original observations regarding Rebecca McAllister with Peter. She was depressed, for one. I drove past the McAllisters’ one morning in late May, not long after they’d moved in, and there she was, out in the early-morning haze, planting annuals all along the garden path. It wasn’t even seven A.M., but it was clear that she had been at it for hours. She was in a rather sheer white nightshirt, which was damp with sweat and covered with soil. People were starting to drive by, but Rebecca had become so absorbed in her gardening that it apparently hadn’t occurred to her to put on some proper clothes.

  I stopped and said hello from my car window. We chatted for a few minutes about the weather, about how the kids were adjusting to their new school, but as we talked, I sensed a sadness in the way Rebecca planted—a mournfulness, as if she were placing each seedling in a tiny plot, a tiny little grave. And they were bright red impatiens that she was planting. There’s always something frantic about that kind of bold color choice for the front of a house. I said good-bye, and when I glanced back at Rebecca through my rearview mirror, it looked, from that distance, like there was a thin trail of blood leading all the way from the house to the spot where she knelt.

  “I told her I would do the planting, but she likes to do it herself,” Linda Barlow, the McAllisters’ landscaper, told me later that day at the post office. “I think she’s lonely up there. I almost never see the husband.”

  Linda knew I had sold them the house, and she seemed to imply that I had been derelict, somehow, in assuring the healthy acclimation of one of Wendover’s newest treasures—the McAllisters. The “wonderful McAllisters,” as Wendy Heatherton liked to call them. Wendy Heatherton and I had actually cobrokered the sale. I had the listing; Wendy, from Sotheby’s, had the wonderful McAllisters.

  “It takes time,” I said to Linda.

  “I guess,” she replied.

  “Wendy Heatherton’s having a party for them next weekend. They’ll meet some nice people there.”

  “Oh yeah, all the nice, fancy people.” Linda laughed. “You going?”

  “I have to,” I said. I was flipping through my mail. It was mostly bills. Bills and junk.

  “Is it hard going to parties for you? I mean … now?” Linda touched my wrist gently and softened her voice when she said this.

  “What do you mean, ‘now’?” I shot back.

  “Oh, nothing … Hildy,” she stammered.

  “Well, good night, Linda,” I said, and turned so that she wouldn’t see how red my face had become. Imagine Linda Barlow worrying about whether it’s hard for me to go to parties. I hadn’t seen poor Linda at a party since we were in high school.

  And the way she pitied Rebecca McAllister. Rebecca was married to one of the wealthiest men in New England, had two lovely children, and lived on an estate that had once belonged to Judge Raymond Barlow—Linda’s own grandfather. Linda had grown up playing at that big old house, with those gorgeous views of the harbor and the islands, but, you know, the family money had run out, the property had exchanged hands a few times, and now Linda lived in an apartment above the pharmacy in Wendover Crossing. Rebecca paid Linda to tend to some of the very same heirloom perennials—the luscious peonies, the fragrant tea rose, lilac, and honeysuckle bushes, and all the bright beds of lilies, daffodils, and irises—that her own grandmother had planted there over half a century ago.

  So while it was laughable, really, that she might worry about me, it was positively absurd that she pitied Rebecca. I show homes to a lot of important people—politicians, doctors, lawyers, even the occasional celebrity—but the first time I saw Rebecca, the day I showed her the Barlow place, I have to admit, I was a little at a loss for words. A line from a poem that I had helped one of my daughters memorize for school, many years before, came to mind.

  I knew a woman, lovely in her bones.

  Rebecca was probably thirty or thirty-one at the time. I had Googled Brian McAllister before the showing and had expected to meet an older woman. People must think he’s her father is what I thought then, except for the fact that there was something very wise and understanding about her face, a sort of serenity in her expression that women don’t usually acquire until their kids are grown. Rebecca’s hair is dark, almost black, and that morning it had been pulled up into a messy ponytail with a colorful little scarf around it, but it was easy to see that when she let it down, it was quite long and wavy. She shook my hand and smiled at me. She’s one of those women who smiles mostly with her eyes, and her eyes appeared to be gray one minute, green the next. I guess it had to do with the light.

  She was a little thin then, but her whole frame is tiny, and she wasn’t as gaunt as she later seemed. She was petite. She was beautiful. She moved in circles, and those circles moved, same poem, although I still don’t recall the name of the poet, but she was one of those effortlessly graceful women who make you feel like an ogress if you stand too close. I’m not fat, but I could lose a few. Wendy Heatherton is slim, but she’s had all sorts of liposuctioning and flesh tucking. I don’t know who the hell she thought she was kidding when she was carrying
on about that gallbladder operation a few years back.

  It’s a well-known fact that the McAllisters had sunk a fortune into the yearlong renovation of the old Barlow place. Brian McAllister, for those who don’t know, is one of the founders of R. E. Kerwin, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. He grew up in the bottom of a three-decker in South Boston, with four brothers and a sister, and had become a billionaire before he turned fifty. Had he married somebody else, he probably would have been living in a mansion in Wellesley or Weston with a full staff, but he had married Rebecca, who, having grown up with a staff, and distant parents, liked to do things herself.

  How do I know so much about the McAllisters? It’s not just from their house. I know pretty much everything that happens in this town. One way or another, it gets back to me. I’m an old townie; the eighth-great-granddaughter of Sarah Good, one of the accused witches tried and hanged in Salem. My clients love it when I drop that into a conversation. That I descend from the witch called, so delightfully and ironically, Goodwife Good. (Yes, I always laugh with them, as if it had never occurred to me until they said it, Good ol’ Goody Good, ha-ha.) That and the fact that my family has been in Salem and here in nearby Wendover, Massachusetts, since the 1600s.

  My husband, Scott, used to tell me that I’d have been hanged as a witch myself had I lived in another time. He meant it as a sort of compliment, believe it or not, and it’s true, I do rather fit the profile, especially now that I’m on the darker side of middle age. My first name is Hilda, which my children have always told me sounds like a witch’s name, but I’m called Hildy. I live alone; my daughters are grown and my husband is no longer my husband. I talk to animals. I guess that would have been a red flag. And some people think I have powers of intuition, psychic powers, which I don’t. I just know a few tricks. I have a certain type of knowledge when it comes to people and, like I said, I tend to know everybody’s business.

  Well, I make it my business to know everybody’s business. I’m the top real-estate agent in a town whose main industries are antiques and real estate. It used to be shipbuilding and clams, but the last boatyard in Wendover closed down more than thirty years ago. Now, those of us who aren’t living off brand-new hedge-fund money are selling inflated waterfront properties to those who are. You can still clam here—the tidal marsh down by Getchell’s Cove is a good spot—but you can’t make your living off clams anymore. Even the clams at Clem’s Famous Fried Clams are poured into those dark vats of grease from freezer bags shipped down from Nova Scotia. No, the best way to make money up here now is through real estate: the selling, managing, improving, and maintaining of these priceless waterfront acres that used to be marshland and farms but that were recently described in Boston magazine as “the North Shore’s New Gold Coast.”

  Brian McAllister happens to own Boston magazine. The day we met, after I showed him his future house, he pointed to a copy of it folded up on the seat next to me in the car and said, “Hey, that’s my magazine you got there, Hildy.”

  “Really? Oh well, take it. My copy must be around here someplace.”

  “No.” Brian laughed. “I own it. Boston mag. I’m the publisher. Bought it last year with a friend.”

  You’re a wicked big deal, a real hotshot is what I thought. I hate rich people. Well, I’m doing all right myself these days, but I hate all the other rich people.

  “It’s one of my favorite magazines,” I said.

  I was showing him a two-million-dollar house, after all, a house that I knew his wife had already gutted and restored in her mind; had mentally painted and furnished and plumbed and wired and dramatically lit during the few short days since I had shown it to her.

  “I bet we can give you a special advertising rate in the real-estate section, if you want,” Brian said.

  “That would be great, Brian, thanks,” I said.

  And I hated him a little bit less.

  two

  Wendy Heatherton always likes to throw a party for her wonderful clients. It’s her way of thanking them for their business and also a way of introducing them to other people Wendy thinks are wonderful. Her son Alex and his boyfriend, Daniel, always do all the preparations. Daniel is an interior decorator. Alex collects antiques. For the McAllister party, they decided that dinner would be in the garden. Alex and Daniel set a series of long banquet tables under a blooming magnolia tree. They hung paper lanterns in the tree’s branches. Then they covered the tables with some of Wendy’s antique white linen tablecloths, and used her best silver and china and crystal, which was rather unexpected and delightful at an outdoor dinner. They had bunches of fragrant lilacs flouncing over the sides of tall silver vases. Citronella torches lined the path from house to table and were also planted in the ground around the table, to keep the bugs away. It was “magical,” everybody told Wendy and Alex and Daniel. And it really was.

  The party began at seven, but I didn’t arrive until close to eight, because I don’t drink cocktails anymore. I’m in “recovery.” I don’t go to a lot of parties, but when I do, I try to arrive just before dinner is served and I leave right after dessert. The night of the McAllister party, I arrived at the same time as Peter and Elise Newbold. Peter, Elise, and their son, Sam, live in Cambridge during the week because Peter is a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in nearby Belmont. He has a small private practice in Cambridge as well as here in Wendover, but he sees patients in Wendover only on Fridays and the occasional Saturday.

  As we walked up the Heathertons’ front steps, Peter clapped my shoulder and said, “Well, at least we’ll know one person at this party.” Then he said to his wife, “Elise, you know Hildy Good, right?”

  Elise offered a sarcastic “No, Peter, I’ve never heard of Hildy Good.”

  Peter had been renting an office from me, upstairs from my offices at Good Realty, for years, but I’ve really only met Elise a few times. She teaches writing workshops in Cambridge, but I can’t quite recall what kind of writing she actually does herself. Poetry maybe. Since Sam had become a teenager, he hadn’t liked leaving his friends to come to Wendover for the weekends, and I’d always had the sense that Elise never liked coming here at all, so in recent years, Peter had spent many weekends up here alone. He told me it was actually good for him, as he was writing a new book—The Psychology of Communities, I believe it was.

  When we entered the house, a young woman ushered us through the living room and out onto the back patio, where cocktails were being served. She asked us what we’d like to drink and Peter asked for a beer. Elise asked what kind of white wine they were serving and, after wrinkling her nose at the two options, finally settled on the Pinot Grigio.

  I ordered a club soda with a slice of lime.

  * * *

  My daughters, Tess and Emily, had surprised me with my very own “intervention” almost two years prior, the little dears. Emily lives in New York, but Tess lives in Marblehead, which is only about twenty minutes from here. One cold November evening, Tess and Michael, my son-in-law, invited me over for dinner. Their son Grady was just an infant at the time, and I was thrilled to go over for a visit. Tess had been distant since the baby had been born. Distant toward me, that is; she had Michael’s mother, Nancy, over all the time.

  “I’d love to watch Grady, anytime,” I used to say to Tess. “You and Michael should go out to dinner and a movie some night. Leave Grady with me.”

  “Nancy lives right here in Marblehead. I’d hate for you to have to come all that way,” Tess would say. I told her I didn’t mind in the least, but then, she never did ask, so I guessed she really didn’t want to bother me.

  So that night I had driven to Marblehead and was surprised to see two cars in Tess and Michael’s driveway, in addition to their own cars.

  “Hello?” I called cheerfully as I opened the door. I was feeling quite good. I had had a closing that afternoon and had celebrated with my clients at the Warwick Tavern afterward. I only had one or two drinks. Maybe three, tops. I wandered into Tess’s livi
ng room and was shocked to see that Emily was there, too, and she had brought her boyfriend, Adam, all the way from New York with her. And Sue Peterson was there. My secretary Sue. There was another woman, a stout woman with short, brassy hair. (Truthfully, the woman’s hair was orange.) Everybody had been sitting, but when I entered the living room, they all stood up. They were all smiling sympathetically at me, and my first thought was that something had happened to Grady. My legs actually became weak. It was hard to stand.

  “Mom,” Tess said, blinking back tears. “Come sit down.”

  I let her lead me over to the sofa, and there I sat, with Tess on one side of me, Emily on the other. I was still in a panic about the baby. That’s something about me that Tess and Emily have never been able to appreciate. That everything I have ever done is for them. That my first concern is always for their well-being. Theirs and now little Grady’s.

  I think everybody knows what happens at these things. The girls took turns reading aloud the excruciatingly elaborate details of my alleged sodden crimes. The day I drank too much at Emily’s graduation party. The night I “passed out” (their words, not mine—I was napping) before Thanksgiving dinner. The times I had “staggered” out to my car and how worried they always were when I insisted on driving myself home. Then, of course, the DUI. I had been pulled over the summer before, on my way home from Mamie Lang’s. Mamie is my oldest friend—we’ve known each other since third grade—and one night we had a little too much to drink, and as I drove home, I watched the moon out of my passenger window. I was driving past the salt marshes and that bright orange moon seemed to tumble along the tips of the wispy sea grass, right alongside me, chasing me, like a playful balloon. I was on Atlantic Avenue, and when I came to the stop sign at Route 122, I saw the car. I was stopping. But I misjudged the distance, I guess, and rear-ended it. I barely tapped it. I put a tiny dent in the fender, that’s all, but, just my luck, it was a state trooper. Trooper Sprenger. Had to be Sprenger. Our other local trooper used to date Emily, and our only town cop, Sleepy Haskell, is my brother Judd’s best friend. I had never even met Sprenger before that night. He had no idea who I was.