The Hazards of Good Breeding
Read The Hazards of Good Breeding Online
Authors: Jessica Shattuck
THE HAZARDS OF GOOD BREEDING
Jessica Shattuck
T
HE
D
UNLAP HOUSE SITS
on the western slope of the third largest hill in Middlesex County, like a dark spot between the green fields of the Ponkatawset Golf Course and the Marret School for the Blind. It is an austere place, built in 1820, with black shutters, a peaked carpenter's roof, and a slight list to its mahogany-stained clapboards, as if a power-ful magnet under the old root cellar is gradually pulling the whole structure back into the earth.
There has been a house on this spot since 1747, when the first John Forsythe Dunlap turned in his barrister's wig, bought three chickens and two pigs, and moved west from Boston to farm the land. According to the
Old Houses of Concord
pamphlet put out by the local chapter of the DAR, the house he built was burnt to the ground by his daughter Abigail in protest of his domineering ways. According to the current John Forsythe (known as Jack) Dunlap this is hogwash. He has conducted his own research on the matter and determined that it was the Ponkatawset Indians who set fire to the property in one of their fierce, but little discussed, raids. And while in most things Jack is a private and uncommunicative man, he likes to tell this story. This is in part to set the record straightâhe cannot let the truth fall victim to a bunch of gossiping DAR membersâand in part because he loves the great American drama of property ownership, which is more vivid in his version of the story.
For the last 254 years, minus a brief interlude Jack thinks of as “the occupation,” the house has remained in Dunlap-Whiteside family hands. Jack himself bought the house back from the interloping owners, a Swiss couple named the Neiderbergers, whom he remembers as weak-chinned, soulless-looking people who had the gall to install a Jacuzzi in the two-hundred-year-old butter churn room, carve skylights into the kitchen, and paint the ancient clapboards a cheerful butter yellow. Mr. Neiderberger had made millions selling some marvel of Swiss engineering, which he described at length to Jack during their one conversation, but Jack was thinking of the ancient Franklin stove the man had had melted into ball bearings and heard nothing but white noise.
Jack's ex-wife, Faith, remembers the couple as sweet and sorrowfully childless, and she liked the house the way it looked under their care. She had to stand aside, though, and watch as Jack restored its original gloomy colors and awkward proportions, as he ripped up the comfortable wall-to-wall carpeting and tore out the offending Jacuzzi. The skylights in the breakfast room were her one triumph; Jack couldn't take them out without putting in a whole new roof. On sunny winter days she could find refuge on the sofa beneath them with her favorite plaid throw blanket and a copy of
People
. But even there, in her woolly pool of sunlight, the presence of all the dark rooms beyond the doorway made itself felt. She has never, even for a moment, missed one thing about the place, which has, in retrospect, come to seem like the stern and joyless embodiment of her marriage.
When Jack and Faith's daughter Caroline is at home, she likes to count new cracks in the ceilings, moth holes in the curtains, and dead flies in the window sashes. It has come to seem funny to herâall this opulent decrepitude and self-consciously maintained lack of creature comfort. But at the same time, it is the house she grew up in. Which makes it all she really knows. Over the holidays when she is back from school, she burns candles in her bedroom and listens to weepy female vocalists and Led Zeppelin. This seems to clear the way for the present, which otherwise enters 23 Memorial Road stillborn.
For Eliot Dunlap, the youngest of Jack and Faith's children, the house is not just his home, but his worldâa disparate collection of cities and states, geographies and regions, each with its own climate, history, and culture. The dining room, for instance, is a repressive totalitarian state; the pink and white guest room, an inviting, but neglected warm-weather island. His favorite places are outside the house: the dappled clearing in the middle of the rhododendron bushes, and the small wood of red pines, golden beeches, and startling white birch trees that separates the Dunlap's field from the Ponkatawset Golf Course. Eliot calls this Sarajevo; it is a name he has heard somewhere before, which seems as lovely and mysterious as this place is. At dusk, he likes to collect lost golf balls buried here among the pine needles, elephant ear ferns, roots, and fallen branches. In the last reflective light of evening, these glimmer a soft and otherworldly purple. And from above, the wood takes on the look of a sieveâa universe full of tiny, bright, unpatchable holes.
C
AROLINE
D
UNLAP HAS ALWAYS
been surrounded
by crazy men. First of all, there is her father, who wakes at five every morning to build Revolutionary War dioramas and sleeps with his grandfather's ancient nine-gauge pistol under his pillow. Then there are her identical-twin older brothers, who are famous throughout the New England Independent School League for having swung, Flying Wallendaâstyle, from the St. Stephan's Chapel bell tower into the headmaster's bathroom on a string of knotted dress shirts. There is also Wheelie Barrett, the retired NHL player who mows the Dunlaps' lawn and believes the 747s flying en route to Logan drop gelatinous sewage by-products over the roses and boxwood bushes behind the house. Then there are the hundreds of salesclerks, bus passengers, male flight attendants, paper delivery boys, bank tellers, and lost pedestrians who have a much higher incidence of insanity in Caroline's life than in anyone else's she knows. (Just yesterday a man sitting on a park bench beside her got up and tried to urinate on a pigeon.)
Last on the list, there is Rock Coughlin, who is, at this moment, sitting cross-legged on the floor at the foot of Caroline's childhood bed.
Caroline blinks to make sure she is awake and pulls herself up onto one elbow, knocking her shoulder against the headboard.
“Good morning.” Rock grins before she is even fully upright.
“Rock!” Caroline looks at the ancient E.T. alarm clock on the bedside table. Seven forty-seven, its eyes blink at her. “What are you doing here?”
“Welcoming you back.” Rock says this as if she has asked him what color his hair is, or if he is breathing.
“While I was sleeping?” Caroline stares at him.
“You looked so peaceful. I didn't want to wake you.”
“Hmm,” Caroline says, reaching for the pack of cigarettes beside her bed. “That's creepy.”
“You did the right thing, you know. Coming back here. You would have hated San Francisco. The whole city is like a fucking telecommunications ad and everyone is into mountain biking and fleece vests and . . .”
Caroline lights her cigarette and takes a drag. She sweeps her eyes around the room. From floor to ceiling, it is populated by the hopeful, temporary objects of her childhood: James Dean posters, trophies, an empty glass hamster cage, her ancient dilapidated dollhouse. In the middle of this her duffel bags and crates of CDs, toiletries, and poster rolls look out of place, like garbage washed up on some innocent New England beach.
Within the few minutes it has taken her to fully absorb this, Rock has launched into a story about a group of monks he met in Harvard Square, an orange T-shirt he was wearing, and the possibility that itâor they? or some combination of circumstances?ârepresents his calling. Caroline is not really listening, though. She has to figure out how to reclaim her morning from him; Rock has been known to spend hours in the company of those who don't want his. At Quilton, the boarding school he and Caroline both went to, he was famous for following Kirstin Hedrin to a bikini wax during their breakup.
Caroline already has to take her little brother, Eliot, to his school play this morning, which will have its challenges without Rock trailing after her with some dilettantish dilemma about his spiritual future. Her mother is making her first trip back to Concord since she left it last year to be at the play for one thing, which is sure to be traumatic. Faith Dunlap nearly collapses upon contact with her dry cleaner, not to mention the bevy of ex-golf partners and country club pals she is sure to run into at the Barton Country Day School.
“. . . I mean, they don't ask everyone to come live with them,” Rock is saying. “What if they just saw something, like a halo over my headâsome sign invisible to most people?”
“I don't think Buddhists believe in halos,” Caroline says.
Rock ignores her. He has begun running his hand along her bookshelf, rocking every third book forward. For the first time, it occurs to her he might be slightly serious. “You're too old to become a monk anyway, Rocky,” Caroline sighs. “Those guys practically start training in utero.”
“That's the whole point, though. They wanted me to come because there was a link between us, something that would make me able to learn their prayers or meditations or whatever faster than, you know, you or your brothers or any other normal American.”
“Oh, right, of course,” Caroline says, blowing a cloud of smoke out the open window.
At the moment, Rock actually looks almost childishâhe is twenty-four years old, but with his shaggy brown hair flattened and explosive-looking on one side (his pillow? or has he fallen asleep on the beach again?), skinny legs, and bleach-stained green shirt, he could easily still be in high school. He has lost weight over the last year, mulching gardens and breeding asparagus or whatever it is he was doing at the organic farm he worked at.
Caroline herself looks exactly the same, though. She glances at the face reflected in the pink Miss Piggy mirror hanging over Rock's head. She has just graduated from college, broken up with her boyfriend of two years, and, on account of this, thrown any semblance of plans for her immediate future out the window; she would like, at least, to look tired. But the face that stares back out at her is remarkably smooth and calmâhardly different than it was a year ago, or, for that matter, ten years ago when she was twelve: straight blond hair cut to her shoulders, gray eyes, silvery eyebrows, and sharp, straight features that manage, without fail, to give the impression of competence and reserve.
“I mean, what if I just passed up the one thing I was really meant to do in my lifeâthe one really meaningful thing?” Rock continues. “I mean, it's not like I'm stemming the tide here. Like there's even any tide to be stemmed here.” His book-rocking has become feverish. “You know what I mean?”
Caroline swings her legs over the side of the bed. “I do, actually.” She stubs the cigarette out in the water glass beside the alarm clock. “I don't know if hanging out in a robe and decoding parchment papers or whatever all day is the answer, but”âshe stands up and looks down at himâ“maybe.”
Rock stops harassing the books, leaving his right index finger on her high school copy of
Moby-Dick
. “Hmm.” He chews on his bottom lip, flummoxed by her concession. “I guess it might drive me crazy.”
Outside on the lawn Caroline can see Wheelie rounding the edge of the garage on his new Gatorade-orange tractor mower. He has a pink linen napkin tied over his head: protection against the sewage.
“It might just do that,” Caroline says, standing up. “Rocky?” She pushes a hand through her hair. “I really have to get dressed now.”
C
AROLINE
'
S YOUNGER BROTHER,
Eliot, the dregs of his parents' conjugal activity, has made it to age ten with a certain degree of graceâvirtually unheard of in men of the Dunlap family. He is a slender boy, small for his age, with snowy blond hair and a high-cheekboned, almost Slavic-looking face. There is something secretive, but not dishonest, about his demeanor that comes, maybe, because in his lifetime he has already had so much exposure to silence. He has a birthmark shaped like a Christmas tree on his left shoulder and wide, speckled gray-blue eyes, which are, not without reason, exceptionally wary.
This morning, he is sitting in the kitchen, fully costumed, mouthing the lines he has to recite in his school play, and cutting a banana into his bowl of cornflakes. He has been interrupted once, by a shaggy apparition that turned out to be Rock Coughlin rapping on the front door, but since then he has sat in meditative silence. Occasionally there is a rattling, thumping sound as Brutus, one of his father's beloved blue heelers, throws himself against the wire gate pulled shut between the mudroom and the kitchen. Eliot checks his watch: in twenty minutes Caroline is supposed to drive him to school, but he has not heard the shower turn on upstairs yet.
The play is his drama teacher's musical adaptation of “Paul Revere's Ride,” the Longfellow poem, which is one of Eliot's favorites. He loves the acute sense of urgency and fate embedded in the story. He loves the lilt of “One if by land, two if by sea / and I on the opposite shore shall be,” and the dark garbled images of phantom ships and huge black hulks, the reflections and silence and eager ears that populate the second verse, which makes him think of fairies. Most of all he likes the phrase “a shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark” as if the weight of the man's deed has transformed him into some vague and formidable agent of the future, the way darkness transforms a laundry pile into a body or a hunchback with an evil eye.
The play is not without its challenges, thoughâthe essential role of a horse (not allowed in the theater), the school requirement that drama productions include dance (which is hardly organic to the story), and the varied ages and skills of the actors (from Lucy Poole, who is not yet fully toilet-trained, to Eliot himself, who can recite the whole poem by heart). Eliot has been awake since six this morning with a gnawing premonition of disaster.
Eliot shifts in his seat and his knickers make a synthetic peeling sound on the stool. His costume is something of a sore spot. The knickers are all rightâa bright, shiny royal blueâbut the tunic is too fussy. It was originally sewn for his drama teacher's son, who was Aladdin for Halloween. Eliot and his teacher have made a pact to keep this quiet. Unlike most of the other Barton Country Day mothers, Eliot's mother no longer lives in the greater Boston area, and would not have the wherewithal to sew her son a costume even if she did. For his head, Eliot and his drama teacher have constructed a tricornered hat from triangles of thick brown felt glued and stapled together in a haphazard heap, which bears a surprising resemblance to a stack of pancakes. Eliot keeps this at school, in a carefully tented paper bag at the bottom of his cubby.
“One if by land, two if by sea,” Eliot says bravely into the empty kitchen but the image of himself forming a sweaty-handed bridge with Josh Hopkins intrudes on the rhythm of the language and erases the next verse from his head. It will be his mother's first trip back to Concord in one year.
Will Penny Harley's mother be there? Will Anne Kittridge? And should I wear pants or a skirt or is it a kind of blue jeans thing?
she wanted to know on the phone last night. Eliot did his best to provide answers. The conversation left him with a tight, hard feeling in his stomach, which makes his digesting cornflakes feel like bird food.
When Eliot is done with his cereal, he drops lightly to the floor and pads across the linoleum to the sink, careful not to knock off the cardboard buckles he has taped to his bedroom slippers. He rinses his bowl, places it in the dish rack, and then stands still for a moment, spoon poised in midair, staring out the window. There is a cardinal perched on a branch of the apple tree, not more than five feet from the house. His babysitter, Rosita, always said if you can stare at a bird and count to twenty before it flies away, it will bring you a wish. Eliot counts slowly, spelling
Mississippi
between every number. He knows what he will wish for: Rosita's return. He misses the way she hums when she washes dishes and nods her head when she listens, the way her lips form the words when she is reading recipes or the directions on the back of cleaning supplies. There is something reassuring about the presence of her solid brown body in the house, about the sharp sting of Spanish she speaks into the telephone. She has been gone for almost six months now.
“Hey, if it isn't Rex Harrison,” Rock Coughlin's voice shoots through the doorway, frightening the bird away. Eliot has just gotten to nineteen.
“Elâwhat are you doing?” Caroline says from behind him. She has been home for less than a day and already she has taken the bossy, worried tone of someone on the lookout for disaster. “Aren't you supposed to get dressed at school?”
Eliot puts the spoon in the dish rack and turns around without answering.
“What's the part? Aladdin?” Rock asks.
“No.” Eliot stiffens.
“You look great,” Caroline adds hastily.
Eliot lifts his backpack off the counter and looks straight at her. “Can we go?” he asks.
“I'll stay here and wait for you,” Rock announces from the table, where he is noisily rifling through the newspaper.
Caroline and Eliot both turn to stare at him, gape-mouthed. The idea of him here in the house when they are gone and the only sound is the hum of the refrigerator and the tinkle of the wind chime makes Eliot start sweating.
“It'll be a while,” Caroline says, frowning. “I have errands to do when it's over.”
“No problemâmaybe I'll play a little frizz with D.D.”
“ âD.D.'?” Caroline raises her eyebrows.
“Daddy Dunlap,” Rock says, grinning.
Alarm shoots through Eliot. “He doesn't like Frisbee,” he says automatically.
“Oh, sure he doesâI'll show him the old over-easy.”
“Whatever that is.” Caroline glares at the top of his head. “Anyway, I don't thinkâ” she cuts herself off and a strange stricken look comes over her face. “Oh, Elâyou don't thinkâdo you think he'll come to your play this morning?”
“No,” Eliot says firmly. He has had to assure his mother of this fact at least once every phone call for the last six weeks. “He has a meeting.”
“Okay,” Caroline says uncertainly. The possibility of their mother and father in the same room seems to dull her worry about Rock, who is still sitting, now with the antique chair tipped up on its back legs, at their kitchen table. Eliot does not feel similarly liberated.
Caroline follows his gaze to Rock and shrugs, lifting her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Don't burn the house down,” she says to Rock, jingling her car keys.