The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  “I’m not,” Caroline blushes. “I just—I think it’ll be good to see who’s around and whatever.”

  “Oh?” Jack raises his eyebrows. “You mean all the personalityless drones?” Jack enjoys the fact this is what Caroline called her brothers’ childhood acquaintances during a fight she had with Jack Jr. at Christmas.

  “I didn’t really mean that. Oh, El—you’re so sweet!” she says, accepting the plate Eliot is handing her with a carefully quartered sandwich. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Eliot says, turning his attention to a new slice of bread.

  “Is that okay, El, if Dad and I are both out tomorrow night?” Caroline says, switching into her concerned voice. “Do you mind being here by yourself?”

  Jack does not want to be a part of some new wave of concern Caroline is brewing up. She has the uncanny ability to make him feel irresponsible as a father—like someone around whom the world is about to fall. “I’ll be in my study,” he says, picking his briefcase back up. “If the phone rings.”

  “You don’t mind old Sir Percy?” Jack can hear Caroline saying, and Eliot murmurs something in response that elicits laughter from his sister. Jack has no idea what they are talking about. And he has forgotten to ask Caroline about this man who came by asking for her this morning.

  8

  SATURDAY LUNCH ON PEA ISLAND consists of cold lemon chicken, baby spinach salad with caraway seed vinaigrette, ropelike loaves of whole wheat sourdough bread, and three kinds of fresh chutney. For dessert there is mixed-berry tart and rice pudding. Lucy has employed an impossibly thin, undernourished-looking young Czech culinary student from the Cambridge Culinary Institute to assist/take charge of Pete and Lucy’s Cantonese housekeeper, Margaret, while they are on Pea Island.

  “He not wash potatoes enough,” Margaret complains to Faith, who has volunteered to help set the table. “Chicken too uncook—soft like for old lady.”

  “What’s that?” Faith says. She has been watching a spindly, antique-looking yacht drift across the dining room windows under power of one black sail. What does this signify? The fact of it out there on the calm blue water is unsettling.

  “Chicken too uncook,” Margaret repeats, dumping a pile of forks on the table for Faith to distribute. She is a short woman, built like a bulldog, given to wearing skin-tight polyester stretch pants. Most of the time she lets the muscles of her face remain completely slack, which has the effect of making her seem permanently nonplussed, even hostile.

  “In his country,” Margaret says, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “they not wash hands before cook.”

  “Well, I’m sure he knows, from his school—” Faith begins uncertainly.

  “Europe people not know how is clean,” Margaret cuts her off. “Like in India.” Her voice seems to be rising somewhat incautiously and Faith darts a glance at the swinging door to the kitchen. “They eat meat not even wash hands from go to bathroom.”

  Faith shakes her head sympathetically, feeling somewhat less enthusiastic about the delicious smells emanating from the kitchen.

  “You know Denny?” Margaret says after a pause.

  “Denny?” Faith repeats, hoping she is not one of the Eintopfs—but no, she is quite sure they are Wendy, Sue, Whistler, and Bee—or is it Fee?

  “She make mess also.”

  “Oh,” Faith says. “Too bad.”

  “She make cook all over kitchen mess and with dirty fingernail. Always talk talk,” here she slips into a mimicking tone. “‘Margaret, you know my friend . . .’ ”

  Faith loses track of what Margaret is saying. But it is clear Denny does not meet with Margaret’s approval. Unlike Felice, who helps take care of Faith’s New York apartment (this is how Faith likes to think of it—“helps take care,” like something a friend or concerned relation would do), there is a moral force that emanates from Margaret. Even in silence, at the edges of the situation, she is constantly making judgments. Faith is never quite sure how Margaret feels about her. In a way, they are friends after all these years of visits—Faith has always taken the time to inquire about Margaret’s bad back and nieces in Shanghai, and always offers to help in the kitchen. Margaret, in turn, sends Faith Christmas cards and enlists her in long complaining conversations over Lucy and Pete’s daughter, the price of fresh vegetables, the priest in her church, sex on television. But within this, Faith senses a note of personal reproval, as if each of the wrongdoings Margaret catalogues has been carefully selected to mirror some wrongdoing of Faith’s own—some harm Faith has inflicted upon Margaret, caused by the mere, but irrevocable, fact of her existence.

  “She ask about you, too, sometime.”

  “Me?” Faith exclaims in genuine surprise, stopping her napkin folding. “I don’t know Denny.”

  “She ask, ‘you know Faith husband? He used work with Rock.’”

  “With Rock!” Faith says, and then realizes they are talking about Rock Coughlin, Sr.’s fiancée. “Oh—Denise,” she says involuntarily.

  “ ‘You know Faith husband?’ ” Margaret continues. “ ‘He ever make bother you?’ ” Margaret stops her hands for a moment in the bristly pile of silverware she is sorting and for a split second looks Faith directly in the eye. “I told her no,” she says in an angry voice. “He not my business.”

  “Oh,” Faith says again. She has not followed the story. How would Jack have bothered Margaret? But there is something in Margaret’s tone that makes her feel indebted to her—makes her feel that she has been protected or stood up for. “Thank you,” she finds herself saying.

  Margaret shrugs. “I not like gossip.”

  Despite Margaret’s hygienic suspicions, the lunch turns out to be delicious. “Get out here and take a bow,” Pete bellows into the kitchen at Jiri, the Czech culinary student, after sampling each dish. “Best damn chicken I’ve ever had—Lucy, get this recipe in that book of yours.” After all these years, Pete still has Yonkers in his voice. Jiri, who looks all of thirteen years old, with his scrawny neck coming out of a too-large white cooking smock, shuffles in and out of the kitchen unsmilingly. Margaret is nowhere to be seen.

  Faith has spent the meal hearing Emmett, Lucy’s uninvited stepbrother, recount the adventures of starting two now-failed ski resorts in Steamboat Springs. “Who wants all that root vegetable stew and arugala salad they serve at Taos or Sun Valley?” he is saying. “I said, ‘Let people pick a nice piece of beef and slap it on the grill themselves.’” He has an oddly clear, addled voice that gives the impression of a great pressure building against his diaphragm from the inside. Faith remembers him from her debutante days as a handsome, reckless playboy most famous for having gotten some girl from Philadelphia pregnant and getting into frequent fistfights. He has, since then, thickened and gone bald, or shaved his head, or some combination of both, which gives him the fuzzy, half-cocked appearance of a newborn eagle. He has also, according to Lucy, squandered his inheritance and abandoned two hotel enterprises, three marriages, and countless fix-it projects around Pea Island.

  Faith has given up nodding understandingly, which doesn’t affect Emmett’s monologue in the slightest. The crinkly map with Eliot’s violent warning is now resting under her mattress upstairs, having been unfolded, refolded, and unfolded again, at least six times. The paper itself is irrelevant at this point, having been replicated, with exacting precision, in Faith’s mind. She can peruse the map at leisure while she sits pushing a stringy piece of mango through the creamy sauce on her plate.

  She should, she tells herself, stop being silly. She should be relieved that the paper was a map, not some dreadful confession. But the map seems frightening in its surprising neutrality —what is a map, after all, but a recording? An unbiased look at the most stolid and feelingless of elements—the ground itself. For Eliot to have guarded it with such sinister threats seems to hint at a deeper, darker, more disturbing secret, like one of those scary movies in which the murderer is a beautiful woman who turns out to be a man.

&
nbsp; Under the table Emmett’s bare knee has found Faith’s and is pressing insistently against it. “He’s a great guy,” he is saying. “A real ass-kicker. A lot like Jack, actually.” His knuckles graze her knee.

  Faith nearly drops her coffee cup.

  “Who’s this?” one of the Eintopfs, an affable, round-faced man with squinty eyes and a Bahamas T-shirt that says WE BE JAMMIN’, under a colorful cutout of a Rastafarian, interjects. Faith has no idea and no desire to hear the answer. Excusing herself before Emmett can direct more nonsense at her, she makes her way around a chatty knot of Eintopfs to Lucy’s end of the table, where Lucy and a leathery-faced woman with a square chin and tennis whites on are discussing—could it be?—Handi Wipes.

  “Luce—” Faith whispers, “I’m going to go lie down—”

  “My oldest friend, Faith Dunlap,” Lucy says, clapping an arm around Faith’s waist. “Did you know Wendy’s parents knew your parents?”

  “Yes,” Faith says politely. “We were talking about that this morning.”

  “Faith and I have known each other since, when? Ninth grade, is it, Faithey?” Lucy says for the benefit of the near half of the table, which is now smiling up at her with benevolent interest, as if she is a child who has been called in to say good night to her parents’ dinner party.

  “Right,” Faith says, forcing a smile. It occurs to Faith that Lucy has described her to these people as a recently released mental patient. At the far end of the table she can still hear Emmett jabbering at least five decibels louder than necessary. The French cousin, she realizes idly, does not seem to be present.

  “Wonderful,” one of the Eintopf’s says.

  “Our access to embarrassing Lucy stories!” another quips.

  Faith’s smile feels as if it is made of heavy, crumbling plaster of paris.

  “I’m going upstairs to take a little rest,” she whispers to Lucy when the group’s thirst for entertainment has redirected itself to a college friend of Pete’s, who is offering up imitations of Pete as a Harvard sophomore. “Okay, Faithey,” Lucy says distractedly. “You do that.”

  Faith wakes up with the image of the bike trail spread out before her. She can tell from the light that she has slept longer than she intended to—the bright strip of sunshine on the green-painted floorboards has yellowed and lengthened into a rectangle the size of a gravestone. The thought of the map transports her seamlessly from sleep to waking, and before anything else has had the chance to enter her mind, she is sitting up on the cot, looking out over the overgrown flagstone terrace at the water, seeing instead the dark path, marked roads, and the paler, thicker line of the Charles River.

  There is a movement below—a hand waving from the terrace that jars Faith from this train of thought. She realizes that she has been staring, gape-mouthed out at the sea, her forehead resting on the glass windowpane.

  Someone—Jean Pierre—is now motioning with his arms for her to open the window. Obediently, but not without resentment, Faith complies.

  “You are looking sad,” he says. “Come have a cocktail.” He is still wearing the fishing hat, but has changed into a short-sleeved navy blue shirt and olive green trousers. Twice this morning, Faith bumped into him speed-walking around the island in a tiny pair of nylon shorts and no shirt. His chest was startlingly there—round and firm and brown with a gold cross nestled in the symmetrical covering of dark curly hair like a dropped coin. He has showered and shaved and looks much milder and less intimidating now that he is fully clothed.

  “Oh, no,” Faith says. “I mean—I have to change and get ready and I’ll come down—aren’t we having cocktails on the front porch?”

  Jean Pierre smiles and shrugs. “Maybe these Eintopfs” (he says the word with a certain degree of derision) “are on the porch. I thought you were not in such a mood—yet.”

  “Oh, no—yes—well, I’ve got to get changed,” Faith says lamely.

  “And I will bring you a cocktail here. Which one?” Jean Pierre is still sitting, arm draped confidently over the bench, smiling up at her.

  “Which cocktail?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, all right—gin—no, a glass of wine would be fine. Thank you.” Faith pulls down the shade. How does one refuse such an offer without being impolite? This is exactly the sort of thing she needs to remember. Say what you mean, Dr. Marcus says. Think of your own wants—not what other people want from you. But the more Faith ventures out into the world beyond her apartment, the more she cannot imagine Dr. Marcus in it. Does he have friends? Acquaintances? Does he go away for weekends? Or to cocktail parties? In her mind’s eye he stands out among a crowd of people—a bright-colored Lego man whose feelings are as solid and uncomplicated as plastic bath toys. It would make her giggle if she didn’t see the map on the cracking gray backside of the shade she is pulling down—insistent in its offering of information as incomprehensible as writing on some ancient cave wall.

  9

  THE LAST TIME Caroline saw Skip Krasdale, he was coming out of the Harvard Club wearing a yellow V-neck sweater with a pink-collared shirt tucked into it like a pair of pig’s ears. Other than the extra pounds he has put on, he looks exactly like he did when he was fourteen: blank-eyed, blond, stoop-shouldered, and vaguely sneering. He has the pale, translucent sort of face that gives the impression his nose is always running. When Caroline was twelve, he “accidentally” used his BB gun to shoot her guinea pig, Dora. That was when he was friends with her brothers. Now he disapproves of their “party-boy” lifestyle, according to Jack Jr. who in turn thinks Skip has become a priggish, overworked bore. Caroline thinks both sides are right about each other.

  There will be so many boys like Skip at his wedding, boys Caroline grew up with who are in their mid-twenties now, well launched into inevitable futures of gradual hair loss, back problems, and knee surgery; of cool, polite marriages to blond girls whose health and athletic prowess had everyone fooled, for a brief window of time, into calling them pretty; of desperate, distraction-seeking love affairs with golf, paddle tennis, squash, and backgammon; of memberships at the Ponkatawset Club and coat-and-tie thirtieth birthday parties; of having the same conversations with the same people in the same mind-numbingly dull places forever. Their very existence feels stifling to her—what do people like Skip Krasdale or Pete Duffey or her brothers, for that matter, think about driving alone at twilight, or leaning on an empty porch rail at sunset? Their weekend plans? Their bank accounts? Do they ever feel the overwhelming presence of all the other people who have stared, or are staring simultaneously into the growing dark?

  They are certainly fine subjects for Stephan’s movie, these strange last adherents to a thoroughly disproven way of living—the children of bystanders of the sixties, of parents whose whole generation passed them by while they stood on the sidelines scratching their heads and staring into stiff drinks, hampered by their own wealth and good breeding. They are already two steps removed from the dynamic center of the species. Which makes their blind, self-satisfied preservation of their grandparents’ ways all the more absurd and at the same time desperate.

  It is exciting, actually, to imagine capturing this on camera. It has not taken much for Caroline to decide to be Stephan’s production assistant or whatever title he’s going to come up with for her. Not only because she has nothing else lined up, either. The more she has thought about it, the more the idea of actually making something of all the ridiculous bits and pieces of experience she has collected growing up here appeals to her. How wonderful would it be, for instance, to capture Honey Walter talking about that ridiculous girls final club she started at Harvard? Or to interview Welty Reed about his gun collection? Why didn’t she think of making a movie like this herself? There were grants she could have applied for and film department resources she could have made use of if she had just been organized, had just taken advantage of the opportunities laid out before her.

  Of course, Caroline is not different from all these people herself, i
n all manner of background and upbringing—a fact that is abundantly apparent as she rifles through her formal dresses for something interesting and unpreppy to mark her as apart from Stephan’s subjects. Her reflection in the mirror is neat, clean, and all-American—not all that different from the little blond no-makeup-wearing girls who get married to people like Skip Krasdale and Pete Duffey. But she has a different future in store for herself, one in which she will read good books and visit exotic places and meet thoughtful, eccentric, and interesting people. She can go abroad if she saves enough money—live with her friend Miriam in her mud hut in Bali, an adventure her father would certainly never underwrite. Or apply to film school, or move to Paris and write some witty, insightful article about this antiquated corner of the world she comes from.

  Caroline decides on a gray strapless dress and puts it down on the bed beside her black sweater. It is getting late—they will need to get going in fifteen minutes to make it to the wedding. Her father has not even changed yet. She can see him out the window right now: a solitary figure on the back lawn, dark against the gold grass in the evening sunlight. He is throwing what looks like some sort of baton for the dogs to chase after: picking it up, bringing his arm back, hurling it toward the woods with the two dogs close behind it. He stands for a moment watching them, in a pose half defiant, half unsure, as if he is not certain they will actually come back to him with it.

  Caroline leans toward the window, which is open, to call out to him. But something stops her and she stays quiet instead, one hand on the peeling sill, watching him stoop, draw back, throw again, and then stand still in the odd, uncertain posture. His shadow stretches like a long thin minute hand across the gleaming gold grass.

  When she is dressed and ready, Caroline goes downstairs and sits down at the kitchen table. Her father has finally gone upstairs to get ready. They will be late, as usual, which ordinarily she wouldn’t mind, but which, in light of her already precarious position as unexpected guest, she doesn’t relish. Caroline reaches into the drawer under the table for one of the silver lobster skewering implements she used to put up her hair with in high school. But just as she is sliding this into a slippery, makeshift bun she has created, the telephone rings.