The Good House: A Novel

by Leary, Ann

  “Why do you say you’re not psychic, Hildy?” Sharon asked. “I never would have been able to do that.”

  “It’s really not mind reading, I promise you,” I said.

  “It’s not even a major memory for me. It’s not something I’ve thought about in years, that bike,” said Brian. “I don’t know why I thought of it now.”

  “Did you tell him to think of a birthday?” Boatie asked.

  “No,” Mamie said. “Weren’t you listening? It could have been anything.”

  Peter said, “It could have been anything, but I believe that Hildy did tell him to think of a birthday. Am I right, Hildy?”

  “Perhaps.” I smiled.

  “Do you mind if I try to deconstruct what you just did?” Peter asked.

  “No. Go ahead. I’m the first to admit that it’s just a trick. Tell me what I did. This’ll be fun.”

  “Well, first, I noticed that you said a few things that were suggestions. Like you said you were going to ‘present’ some questions, and then you said, several times, ‘Try not to give anything away,’ so maybe the word present along with give and away formed a suggestion—that he think of a memory about a present or a gift.”

  “No, I don’t think she said those things,” said Brian. “I was listening to see if she was saying anything leading.”

  “She said them,” Peter said.

  “Did I? Hmmm.” I smiled. This was fun.

  “So that sort of narrowed it down to Christmas or a birthday. I think you said something like ‘by candlelight.’ Right? Something like that. Candles. Candlelight.”

  Mamie couldn’t help herself. She jumped right in. “Yes, Peter. You’re right. Who wouldn’t think of a birthday? Candles? Candlelight?”

  “More than once,” Peter continued, “Hildy ran two words together. ‘By candlelight’ became ‘bycandlelight.’ Say it fast—‘BYCANDLELIGHT.’ It sounds like ‘bike and delight.’ The bike word came through a couple times. I think she said ‘by kind of.’ Again, ‘bike-kindof.’ These words weren’t apparent to the others on a conscious level, but you had sort of anchored him with your touch and were able to access his subconscious a little, and so it’s possible you made the suggestion.”

  I just laughed. “I suppose anything’s possible.”

  “After that, it was a classic cold reading,” Peter said to Brian. “She was asking you questions and reading your responses in the way your eyes moved. She had her fingers on your pulse. She knows a little NLP, some neurolinguistic programming techniques.… Do you know what that is, Hildy?”

  I had never heard of it until then, so I shook my head.

  “They’re techniques to decipher signals people give subconsciously with their eye movements and other subtle body language.”

  “Oh, is that what it’s called?” I laughed. Imagine! There was actually a scientific term for something my cousin and I just figured out on our own.

  “Yes, and you’re very good at it.” Then to Brian, Peter said, “She was basically asking you yes or no questions and you answered her with subtle signals.”

  “I didn’t move my eyes, I know that. She told me not to move them,” said Brian.

  “Which made it almost impossible for you not to move them,” Peter said. “Then, once you had told her that it was not an indoor present, it was quite easy. What present would a ten-year-old have to go outside to see?”

  “That’s the part I don’t get. It could have been a pony,” said Mamie. “Anything.”

  “In Southie?” scoffed Boatie.

  “It’s all true,” I said.

  Mamie said, “There’s more to it. I’ve seen her do this too many times; it’s always different.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m impressed, Hildy,” said Peter.

  “Why, thank you, Peter,” I replied.

  I really was flattered. Peter is another reader, after all. That’s what psychiatry is based upon, I presume. I wondered, then, how easy it would be to read him. I had never read another good reader.

  I excused myself right after dessert, as usual, and was pleased to be heading out to my car dead sober. This is one of the things I’m truly grateful for the girls’ intervention. I used to float through the town in my Range Rover, quite drunk. I can admit that now. I thought I was being safe, that I actually drove better when I was drunk. I’d cruise along, tree by tree. House by house. Slowly. Slowly. Blinking and smiling. All aglow. Of course, it was like a bad dream the next day as I tried, in a mild panic, to recall the journey. But in truth, there were times I didn’t remember driving home at all, and now I was grateful that that craziness was all behind me. No more drunk driving. No regrets the next morning.

  * * *

  It wasn’t even eleven when I arrived home. The girls were thrilled to see me. I have two dogs, both bitches—Babs and Molly—both mutts. Babs is part terrier and she can be nasty. You wouldn’t want to approach her with an outstretched hand if you didn’t know her. Best to let her approach you, which she will, usually with fangs bared. Molly is a Border collie mix, which puts her IQ level just a few notches above my own, and that’s trying at times. She’s also one of those dogs who smiles when she greets you—she pulls her lips back to reveal her teeth and narrows her eyes in a show of ridiculous supplication, which I find equally trying, especially when she throws in some whining, as she did that night.

  I opened the front door and the girls flew from the house and raced over to the garage ahead of me. Our garage is an old boathouse. I say ours, though it’s only the dogs and me who live here now. I’m right on the saltwater Anawam River, which feeds into the Atlantic just about a hundred yards downstream. I have my ex-husband Scott’s old MG out there in the boathouse. He left it behind. For the longest time, I kept badgering him to take it. At one point, Emily said he had given it to her, but she lives in New York, so I’m stuck with it in my garage. It hasn’t been driven in years. Mice have nested under its hood and bits of their nests can be seen on the front seat.

  The dogs whined and pawed at the old wooden boathouse door until I raised it, and then they shot inside and sniffed excitedly around the corners of the leaning structure with their tails erect. I fumbled in my purse for my keys. Babs once killed a rat in the boathouse, and the girls have never quite gotten past that thrill. They’re always in hunt mode when we’re in there. Me, too, actually. My heart starts racing when I unlock the trunk, the “boot,” of the old MG. There I keep my wine. That’s all I drink now. Wine. No more of the hard stuff. I order wine online from a vineyard in California. I’ve developed quite a taste for California wine. I don’t know why I so rarely drank it before. I felt wine gave me a worse hangover than vodka. But now I try not to overdo it. I try, but in all honesty, sometimes I don’t remember going to bed at night. So what? I’d like to go back to Hazelden and bring that up in “group” one day. It might make for an interesting discussion. Is a blackout really a blackout if nobody is there to see it? Not even yourself? I say no. It’s like the tree falling in the woods. Who cares?

  But most nights, I just have a few glasses. I’ve come to love my nightly party of one. I’ve no need to go out with others—all the bothersome others—with their judgments and their quick looks between them. Stolen pleasures are always more thrilling than those come by honestly. It’s what I imagine makes adulterous love affairs so exciting, having a wickedness concealed beneath one’s everyday mantle of goodness. Anyway, I’m not completely alone with my wine, since the girls are always there, too, and sometimes, if it’s a warm night and there’s a moon, I undress on the patio and walk down to the river, where the dogs and I go for a swim. The night of Wendy’s party was one of those nights, though there wasn’t much of a moon. It was just an unseasonably warm May night. Wendy had been ranting all evening about how she always “conjures” the best weather for her parties. Now I sat on the patio with my wine and my dogs, and after my second or third glass, I was, finally, blissfully, at home.

  At Hazelden, all these AA speakers us
ed to come to the meetings at night to tell us their stories, and some of them were quite funny, while others were heartbreaking, of course. One night, a guy started his speech by saying, “I was born three drinks short of comfortable…,” and that’s when I actually wondered if my daughters might have been right about my drinking. Up until then, I was confident that I didn’t belong there. I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic. If my daughters wanted to see a real alcoholic, they should have met my mother. She wouldn’t drink for weeks at a time, but then she’d go on a binge and would be drunk for days. My dad would go out searching for her in local bars. Sometimes we’d find her passed out on the kitchen floor after school. I never drank before five. Never drank alone (before rehab). But I knew what that guy meant about the way he was born three drinks short. It made me think about the first beer I ever drank, down at North Beach with a bunch of kids one summer night. It made me think about that first exquisite relief. It made me think about my ex-husband, Scott, who always said I should stop after the third drink. “That’s when you get out of control,” he’d say. I had no idea what he was talking about. After a couple drinks is when I start to feel in control.

  But everybody’s different. Why must we all be the same? I’d like to ask my daughters that. The way they carried on that night about all the damage I had done. Damage. Tess smoked pot all through high school and managed to get into Wesleyan and graduate magna cum laude. Emily, well, Emily’s a sculptor. She has a lifestyle in New York that she could never afford without my support. But do I get any thanks? Of course not. I know I sound bitter, but in truth, it’s fine. It’s better this way. No more worrying that the hosts will stop serving drinks before I’ve had enough. No more regrets the next day.

  Now I stay at home in the evenings and slip serenely into myself. They’d think it was sad, my daughters, but those are some of the happiest moments of my life, when I can change comfortably back into myself. Not every night anymore. Not every night, no. But that night, after Wendy’s party, there was a rather cordial atmosphere in the lovely darkness on my terrace, and by the time I had poured the last of the bottle into my glass, I was fully transformed. I was myself. I was myself again.

  I dropped my skirt and stepped out of my underpants. I pulled off my blouse and unhooked my frayed old bra. I’m sixty. My belly is flabby, my tits sag, and my legs are skinny. I haven’t worn a bathing suit in years, but I do like to swim. I love the water, always have, and I like the feeling of the night against my skin.

  Like I said, there wasn’t much of a moon, but I know the trail by heart, and padding along the sandy, pine needle–strewn path with my dogs at my side, I felt like some kind of primitive huntress, like an Anawam squaw, perhaps. When I reached the river’s edge, I sipped my wine and felt the soft silt of the riverbed easing around my feet, then climbing up my ankles like a pair of ghostly silken stockings. I took a last sip, then dropped my empty glass onto the soft sand and poured myself into the icy river, which made me laugh and gasp and my dogs bark with the utter exhilaration of it all. How thoroughly delicious was that wine. And I had a case of it. There would be enough. There would always be enough for me.

  three

  Sometimes I wake up too early. It’s a problem. I read in a magazine that it comes with being middle-aged. Apparently, it’s a hormonal thing. I have no trouble falling asleep, especially after concluding an evening with a little wine, but I tend to awaken with a start at exactly three A.M. filled with dread and self-loathing. It’s my nocturnal sojourn to my own little hell, where I’m visited by the cast of demons who delight in reminding me of my daily wretchedness, my lifelong wickedness. An inventory of the previous day’s missteps is reviewed, followed by the unscrolling of a decades-long catalog of my own sins, spites, regrets, and grudges. Sometimes I turn on the TV and watch an old movie and fall back to sleep. I always feel better after dawn.

  In the three A.M. blackness after the McAllister party, though, I just lay there and, instead of turning on the TV, thought about Rebecca, and this managed to keep the night monsters at bay. I was a little fascinated by Rebecca. I had been ever since the day I first showed her their future home. There had been a calamity during that showing and Rebecca had performed a bit of magic. (Magic almost always guarantees a sale; any broker will tell you this.) I had been rather captivated by Rebecca ever since.

  The calamity had involved one of the Leighton ponies. Though a lot of us still call it the old Barlow place, the McAllisters didn’t buy the property from the Barlow family; they bought it from a rich Boston family named Leighton. Elsa Leighton had decided to raise Welsh ponies there. Very fancy Welsh ponies. The daughters were part of the horse-show set. The Leightons came up only on the weekends and they had hired Frank Getchell to run the farm for them. Wendover still has a number of horse farms. We’re only a short drive from the Westfield Hunt Club in South Hamilton, and Frank grew up working on a few farms. So the Leightons were the sellers when Wendy called me to say that she had these wonderful McAllisters looking for a house. She said that she had shown them all the best properties and they hadn’t seen anything they liked. So, she figured, why not show them the old Barlow place?

  Most of the brokers in the area had just about given up on the Barlow place at that point. Some believed the Leightons were asking too much—it was listed at $2.2 million. Yes, it had almost twenty acres and was up on scenic Wendover Rise, with views of the tidal marshes and the Atlantic Ocean and the tiny Cape Ann islands beyond, but the house had been built in the early 1700s, and like all true Colonial homes, it was small, dark, and stood right on the road. Everybody who wants an estate in Wendover wants to have a quaint antique set far back from the road, with plenty of privacy. There’s really no such thing. Colonists needed to have their houses right on the road. They liked their neighbors to be able to see them. Buyers find this concept hard to grasp, for some reason, no matter how much you try to explain about the original owners’ fear of the Indians and wild animals that were wandering about when the house was built. I had sold the home to the Leightons, and now that they had listed it back with me, I told them to sit tight with their price. I always felt they had overpaid, and I didn’t want them to take too big a loss on the place.

  But, well, the Leightons needed to sell. Their star had been rising when I had sold them the house—Tom Leighton had just made partner at Bear Stearns. Now it was falling. Bear Stearns had dissolved. The Leightons were divorcing. One of the young riders was in a drug-rehab place. That’s life. That’s how I make my living, anyway.

  The McAllister showing was early on a spring morning, and when I pulled up, Wendy and Rebecca were already walking toward the front door and Rebecca’s two young sons were chasing each other around the yard. I wandered over to them and introduced myself, but I noticed Rebecca looking skeptically out at the road. Bubbly Wendy apparently noticed it, too, because she placed one hand on my wrist and one on Rebecca’s, forming a sort of human chain, with Wendy as its effervescent central link. “Hildy,” she gushed, “I was just telling Rebecca that the house is close to the road, but it’s such a quiet country lane.…”

  Wendy’s been in the business long enough to know better than to offer up that little enchantment, and sure enough, no sooner were the words out of her mouth than a rattling diesel-engine pickup roared past the house, followed by a motorcycle and then, after a few beats, a rickety school bus.

  “Liam,” Rebecca called to her elder son, “take Ben’s hand, honey. Don’t let him go near the road.” Liam was around six years old, and Ben around four. They were clearly adopted children, as I knew from Googling Brian that he wasn’t South American. The boys appeared to be South American or Mexican. “Hispanic,” my daughters would have corrected me. They were well-behaved boys, but I’m never overjoyed when people bring their kids to a showing. They just distract everybody.

  “They’re so adorable,” I said to Rebecca, then, motioning toward the front door, added, “Let’s go inside, shall we?”

  I knew the other
places that Wendy had shown Rebecca. Basically, everything at the top of the market. The Leightons had made the Barlow house charming enough—exposing beams, refinishing the woodwork around the huge walk-in fireplace—but it was a weekend house. The kitchen was tiny, as were the bedrooms, and, the kiss of death, no master bath. But I showed her around anyway, and as we gazed out one of the upstairs windows, Rebecca said, “Are those ponies part of this farm?”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you, Rebecca’s a horse person,” Wendy chirped.

  “Well. Let’s go look at the barns and the paddocks, shall we?” I said.

  Honestly, how could Wendy not have mentioned that? The best thing about the property was all the expensive horse fencing the Leightons had put in, and the massive barn they had restored. Wendy’s sales figures are surprisingly good. I don’t know how she sells a thing.

  Rebecca’s boys were chasing each other from room to room when Rebecca called, “Boys. Come on, we’re going to go see some ponies.” They ran downstairs and out the back door with us.

  We were all wandering up the drive toward the barn just as Frank Getchell, the caretaker, pulled up in his pickup.

  Frank is an old hippie. He’s short and somewhat stocky. He wears his gray hair in a ponytail, but his tanned, weathered scalp is taking over. Soon there’ll be nothing for the ponytail to cling to. He always wears beat-up jeans and old cowboy boots. A flannel shirt covers his paunch.

  “Hi, Frankie,” I said.

  “Hey, Hil,” Frank replied. He stole a glance at Rebecca and the kids, then stared straight ahead. Frankie Getchell can be a little awkward around people he doesn’t know.

  “Frank, you know Wendy, and this is Rebecca McAllister, and her boys. She wanted to see the barn.”

  “Ride up with me, if you want,” Frank muttered, still looking ahead. “We got two overdue mares and I got a feeling one of ’em might’ve dropped her foal last night.”