The Good House: A Novel (16 page)

“Oh?” I said, slightly puzzled.

“It’s … you know, he’s obsessed with his penis. Peter told me it’s normal for boys to have dreams like that. I love telling Peter about our dreams, mine and the kids. He’s so good at analyzing them.”

“Really? You tell him your dreams? Like when you’re …
together
?” I whispered.

“Of course. Dreams are so fascinating. They’re full of information about us.”

“Mine aren’t. I tend to dream about houses all the time. It’s because I’m in real estate, I guess.”

“No!” Rebecca exclaimed. “The other day I was reading a book Peter gave me about dreams, and it said that houses in dreams always represent the self. If you dream about being up in an attic or on top of a house, it represents your intellect or a search for something spiritual. The basement represents your subconscious impulses, primitive longings, sexuality. Where are you in the dreams about your house?” she asked.

“I think I’m always in the kitchen.”

“That means you have an appetite for something. You want to fill some kind of void.”

I laughed good-naturedly. Rebecca acted as if she were an expert in analysis, solely based on her romance with Peter. I looked at my watch.

“Five o’clock, how about a glass of wine?”

“Okay, just one, though.”

At night, at least once or twice a week, when Brian was staying in town, Rebecca would leave the boys with the nanny, after they went to bed, and she’d come sit by the fire with me and we’d have a little wine. It was usually a Tuesday or Wednesday. Thursday was her night with Peter. Fridays, Brian would be home for the weekend.

Rebecca was such pleasant company that I literally rejoiced in our friendship. She was very funny. Being an outsider, she had hysterically comic takes on a lot of the people I had known my whole life, people whose eccentricities were so much a part of the fabric of my hometown that I didn’t see their irregularities until she pointed them out. For example, the Winston boys—Ed and Phil Winston. Identical twins who still, now in their late eighties, dressed in matching outfits for their afternoon walk through the Crossing. Anorexic old Diana Merchant, who, despite her advanced age, wore halter tops and heels at the grocery store. And crazy Nell Hamlyn, whose goats got loose all the time and terrorized Rebecca’s horses. Rebecca did a great impersonation of Linda Barlow, who helped her out with the gardening and barn chores. I had known Linda all her life, so I had never noticed how manly she was until Rebecca strode across my living room, barking at me in Linda’s gutteral, gruff manner.

We would laugh until we cried some nights, Rebecca and I. She was clearly dissatisfied with her husband and told stories of his outrageously egomaniacal behavior, which would sometimes make us choke on our wine. She also told me of the real source of her dissatisfaction with him: He was a womanizer and a cheat. He had had an affair with a young model the year before they moved up here. There had been a photograph in the
Boston Herald
showing the two, seated together, right on the floor of the Garden at a Celtics game. He had told Rebecca that the affair was over. But she didn’t believe him. And, oddly, she didn’t appear to care. She told me that she had cared very much at first. It was one of the causes of her depression when they had first moved here—his infidelity and her years-long grief over her own infertility. She was terrified of being abandoned by Brian, and feared that everything she did was driving him further and further away. She’d immediately regretted moving up here because she couldn’t keep as close an eye on him. Laughing about it now, she recalled the way she used to phone him at all hours of the night at their place in Boston and accuse him of being with his girlfriend, then tell him she wanted to sell the Barlow place and move back.

“Imagine,” she said now. “I was out of my mind. Moving up here was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

I got the sense that she had come to consider her marriage with Brian McAllister a failed attempt at love. A botched effort. Now, of course, she had found the real thing in Peter Newbold.

I told her about Scott’s leaving me for Richard. She’d had no idea. Everybody in town knows that Scott left me for a man, but Rebecca hadn’t a clue, nor did she know about Linda Barlow’s son, who was killed, as an infant, in a car accident, in which Linda, the driver, only received a few scrapes. I chose not to tell Rebecca; she would have felt awful for making fun of Linda. Rebecca meant no harm with her witty commentaries. She seemed to sail about the town on a different course than us townies, unaware of the steady undercurrents we had known and understood our whole lives. She knew only what she could observe—the surface of things—and I learned, through Rebecca, how funny things can be, sometimes, if you just look at them on a surface level.

During this time, I became aware of a change in Peter Newbold’s behavior toward me whenever we crossed paths at work. I don’t think I was imagining it. Peter has always been a thoughtful and considerate neighbor and tenant, but he became particularly solicitous during those weeks after Rebecca’s first visit to my house. One Friday morning, we both arrived at the office at the same time and he held the door open for me, but then, instead of jogging up the steps, as he usually did, he stopped to ask me how I was doing.

“I’m great, Peter. How about you?” I was actually quite hungover.

“Good, good, Hildy.”

“Are Elise and Sam coming up this weekend?”

“They’re gonna try to come up tomorrow night, I hope. Elise teaches a workshop on Saturday mornings now, and Sam likes to hang in Cambridge with his friends.…”

“Of course,” I said. I suspected Peter had been with Rebecca the night before. I wondered if he could smell last night’s wine on me. I had been lonely the night before and had drunk a little more than usual. My head was splitting. I realized I was feeling a bit angry at Peter as I stood there fumbling about with my keys. I blamed him for my hangover—he had hijacked my drinking buddy, and that’s why I kept drinking long after I should have gone to bed the night before.

Who the fuck do you think you’re kidding?
I thought, glancing up at his tousled hair and his slightly exhausted expression. At the same time, I was aware of a strange excitement I felt in the knowledge that he had been with Rebecca the night before. He had been with my Rebecca. Nobody knew this but Peter and Rebecca and me. And I knew it without having been told. I finally found my keys and was about to turn to unlock my office door, when I said to Peter, “I’m sure you’re aware that I’ve been seeing a lot of Rebecca lately.” My head was throbbing. I think I must have still been a little tipsy from the night before and that’s what made me say it.

“Rebecca…” Peter said.

“Yes, I gather you’ve been nice enough to allow her to do some painting on your beach.”

“Oh. Yes. Rebecca McAllister. Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“I’m so glad they moved to town. Though I don’t know him at all. Brian McAllister. It seems like he’s not up here much,” I said.

“No?” Peter replied. I was trying to get a reading on him. He was cool, when he should have been sweating. He must have been taught this in shrink school, taught to be blank, not to reveal thoughts.

“Well, have a nice weekend,” I said, finally finding the right key and unlocking my door.

“You, too, Hildy,” Peter said, and I felt him watch me as I entered my office.

*   *   *

My friend Allie Dyer baby-sat for Peter Newbold from the time he was a toddler until he was about eight years old. Peter’s father, David Newbold, was almost fifty when Peter was born, and Dr. Newbold had a busy local practice. His mother, Colette, was in her twenties, and Mrs. Newbold had a very busy social life. It seemed that she was never at home, especially during the summer months. So she hired Allie Dyer as a full-time sitter. Colette Newbold played tennis daily. She also played bridge and golf and kept a horse at Westfield Hunt Club. She was on numerous town committees and was an active member of the Anawam Beach Club and the Wendover Yacht Club, in addition to the hunt club. She was the one who started the charity luncheon at Westfield’s big August horse show.

When Peter was little, Allie would baby-sit him at the Newbolds’ house on Wind Point Road. Every morning, after Colette breezed out in her tennis togs or riding britches, Mamie and Lindsey and I would ride our bikes over, and we’d sun ourselves on the beach in front of the Newbolds’ house, then devour whatever they had in their refrigerator. Colette never complained. She didn’t seem to mind who was watching Peter, as long as it wasn’t her.

When Allie was old enough to drive, we took Peter everywhere with us. He was probably five or six years old when we started taking him to North Beach, where we’d meet up with boys and flirt and swill Cokes and smoke cigarettes and run around in the surf in our bikinis. Allie was making a dollar an hour, as long as we had Peter with us, so we always had him along. Peter picked up all our slang, which amused us. We taught him to wolf-whistle at pretty girls we didn’t know, and when the girls would turn and look, we’d convulse with laughter, little Peter giggling loudest of all. We taught him to give the peace sign out of Allie’s car window. We taught him to give the finger, the four of us shrieking with laughter at the astonished faces of the little old lades he flipped off. Mamie still has a photo of Peter with sunglasses and a cigarette dangling from his lips when he couldn’t have been more than seven. Another time, we took his picture as he posed on Mamie’s boyfriend’s motorcycle. We put a bandanna on his head and made him look like Peter Fonda in
Easy Rider.
He loved hanging out with us, and we usually forgot about the facts of his tender age and his gender when it was just Peter and us girls. We’d be splayed across the sand in our bikinis, talking about boys and who was making it with whom, and Peter would just sit there and listen. We’d complain about our periods and about our parents and school, and Peter would just be drawing in the sand, taking it all in. We often had plans for the evening that we would discuss throughout the day, and Peter would sometimes beg to be included, which made us laugh. But there were times when Colette needed a nighttime sitter, so we took him to parties on the beach, or to the movies or to one of our homes. We got the sense he was lonely at home with his parents. He didn’t have many friends his own age, but when we asked him about this, he said they were all immature. No wonder. He spent most of his early years with a bunch of teenagers. Sometimes when he assumed he would be included in what we were doing, we had to remind him that he wasn’t really our friend.

“You can come, as long as Allie’s getting paid,” Mamie would say, and Allie would shoot her a disapproving glance. Peter had a little crush on Allie. We all knew it, and Mamie’s comments were bound to have hurt his feelings.

“Well, it’s the truth,” Mamie would mutter. “No point in letting him think there’s any other reason he’s hanging out with us. He’s friggin’ eight. We’re his paid friends.”

“MAMIE,” Allie would say, giving Peter a little hug. But it was true. And Peter knew it.

Here’s a very sweet story about Peter Newbold: Once, on his birthday, he received a ten-dollar bill from his grandparents. His mother asked him what he was going to spend it on. He told her that he wanted to spend it on ten hours with Allie. Mrs. Newbold told this story to Allie when Peter wasn’t in earshot, and they both laughed and agreed that it was adorable, but later Allie told me that it made her feel uncomfortable. Soon after that, Allie’s family moved to New Hampshire and the rest of us got our jobs at the Wendover Yacht Club, so we didn’t see Peter much anymore. Still, I’ve often thought that those summers spent listening to us girls and all our crazy talk prepared him for his vocation as a shrink. He was always a good listener

When Peter started up his private practice in Wendover, he worked first from an office above his garage and then, about ten years ago, he started renting the office upstairs from me. One February evening, several years ago, we were snowed in, and as we waited for one of Frankie’s crew to come with a plow, we sat in my reception area and split a bottle of champagne that a client had sent me. Peter told me about his work at McLean Hospital. He had gone there, years ago, to complete his residency and had stayed on as staff psychiatrist when he was finished. He had become quite interested in schizophrenia during those early years—in fact, that was considered his specialty. He had published numerous papers on the subject—clinical papers that were meant to be read by other professionals. He also had always had his private practice in Cambridge, as well as up here, with what he called the “worried well.”

His work with the severely ill had inspired him to write a book about “attachment.” It was called
Of Human Bonding.
This was a book written for the general public, more or less a pop-psychology book, I guess. He signed a copy and gave it to me, but I confess, I never read it until after the whole situation with Rebecca, and then I scoured it, desperate to find out everything I possibly could about Peter Newbold. Normally, I read only novels. But that night, waiting for the plow, I asked him about the book. It had just come out a few months earlier. He talked a little bit about the parent/infant bond. About how important it was. Stuff everybody knows, really. He talked about childhood traumas. Then, in the middle of our little chat, he suddenly said, “For example, when your mother committed suicide, you were how old … ten? Eleven?”

I was completely floored by this. I wasn’t surprised Peter knew about my mother. Most people in town knew about her, so he would have heard about it, even though he was very young at the time. But I don’t think anybody, in all those many years since her death, had actually stated the fact of her death so plainly to me until Peter did so that afternoon. People referred to my mother’s “tragic” or “untimely” death, but never, ever, her “suicide.” Not even my father. It was actually several years into our marriage before I told Scott, one drunken evening, about the way my mother died. Then I instantly regretted it, because he, the lover of history, wanted to know every detail. He was surprised that I had never had any kind of grief counseling or therapy when it happened.