The Hazards of Good Breeding (29 page)

22

R
OSITA DOES NOT NEED
an alarm—there is the baby to wake her. He cries at one
A.M
. and then three and then again at five. And anyway she is not really asleep, has not really slept at all. Outside the windows there is still blackness when she wakes to hear him stirring—the elegant, uninteresting blackness of night in this part of the world. Smooth layers of black field, blacker trees, and then the paler black, star-dotted sky above these. No scratch and rustle of chickens waking in their coops; no vague humps of cows or pigs against the grass. There is no uneven shine of abandoned machinery, empty gasoline cans, a shovel, a hoe, a homemade swing, to reflect otherwise unnoticed starlight as there would be in her country. Neither is there the drift of complex shadows under streetlights, behind parked cars, on rotting cluttered porches, or the wail of sirens, screech of tires, occasional shout of laughter or smashed glass that there is at this time of night in Roxbury. Just blank, orderly darkness, as pristine and indifferent as the pane of glass on the window.

The rustling among the clean cotton sheets becomes crying—a thin bleating sound coming from the lungs of the newborn. Rosita rouses herself from the half sleep she has been in and makes her way through the darkness to the bassinet. It is a beautiful carved oak piece, which all the Dunlap children have slept in for two generations. The daughter explained this to Rosita as if there were something funny about it, as if it were ridiculous. Rosita nodded back politely; what could be ridiculous about a sturdy, time-tested bed? She knows the girl less than Jack or Eliot, since she came home only for vacations, or sometimes, once in a great while, for dinner when Rosita lived here.

Rosita reaches down and picks up the baby, brings him to her breast. She would like to sing or pat him on the back and whisper something in Spanish, call him her little
pajarito
, as she used to call Roberto. But then he will learn to love the sound of her voice and she does not want this. He sucks hungrily and with great concentration, as if he is starving—one tiny hand resting on her breastbone. It is good he has such passion for the things that sustain him.

Rosita walks over to the window with the baby still at her breast and looks out into the paling darkness. In the east, over the trees, the sky is turning a faint pinkish gray.
Here is your world
, she thinks to the baby, who does not have a name yet.
Here is what you will know
. He stops sucking for a moment, and blinks up at her almost as if he can hear her through the silence. The little hand flutters on her chest.
Benjamin
, the name pops back into her mind, she read it somewhere,
Benjamin
—it has such a kind, gentle sound. But she is not going to be the one who names him. She is giving up this right.

When he has fallen back asleep, Rosita lays him down on the sheets again and arranges the checked quilt over him—another hand-me-down from his brothers and sister, soft and warm and well made. Then she pulls on the pair of jeans and blouse she has laid out and folds the blanket on her own bed, pulls off the sheets and pillowcase, makes them into a neat bundle, which she will bring downstairs and put on top of the washing machine. Sitting on the bare mattress, she slips into her athletic socks and sneakers, which will be hot in this weather, but she has a long way to travel and they will be more practical than her sandals. In the bassinet, the baby continues sleeping.

She does not really think of him as hers—she would have given him up for adoption if Jack Dunlap had not shown up on her doorstep. She did not want to bring another child into this world after Roberto. She had filled out the forms already: filed them with the woman at the agency, who was not kind when she called to withdraw the application yesterday. It is better that the baby grow up here as a Dunlap than with strangers, though; this way Rosita can know he will have a fine life. She can know he will go to a good school and get a good education and have all the opportunities Roberto never had. He will never have to use ten-year-old out-of-date books in a one-room schoolhouse or get used to the sound of machine gun fire. He will not have to walk eleven miles home from his grandmother's one Thursday through a corner of jungle outside Marquetalia where the FARC guerrilla fighters happen to be training. And he will have enough clothes and food and money to become fat and confident, to assume that goodness is rewarded, that life is full of pleasant surprises, and that God is wise and full of love.

There was a moment when Rosita first came back from the hospital, that she allowed herself to imagine staying, to imagine raising this baby in the safe, protected confines of the Dunlap family, insulated by the reassuring shield of money and history's favor. But there is no real place for her here. She does not know how to raise a child in this world, which is as stark and impenetrable as the manicured darkness outside the window. It is too closed to enter even with the right key, too full of unspoken rules and hidden traps for her to ever feel free in it. And Jack is too much a part and product of its rock-hard heart to bring her into it, even if he thinks this is what he is doing.

The boy can be a part of it, though, because he is young and unformed and will never have belonged anywhere but here. And Jack will be a good father—not because he is one already, but because he has decided to be. And he is the kind of man who lives by his decisions. He is a strange man and a lonely man, and a stubborn man, but he is also good. He is also the kind of man who picks up litter on the side of the road when he is walking, and goes to the nursing home once a month to visit the woman who raised him. He is the kind of man who asks his son's babysitter to marry him because he is responsible for her baby.

And the baby will have Eliot, who is such a good, sweet, quiet boy. It gives Rosita an ache at the back of her throat to think that she is leaving him, but already he is growing up. In the last six months Eliot's cheeks have become thinner and a stubborn hint of manhood has begun to steel itself inside him—she can smell it in his perspiration and hear it in the voice he uses when he corrects her English. He would leave her soon enough himself. She has seen the teenagers her cousin used to care for. They come by at Christmas with presents and sit on the sofa smiling too widely and speaking too slowly, bringing the glasses of supermarket eggnog she serves them back and forth too often from their lips. Rosita does not want to stay here to become an obligation to him. Or an embarrassment to her own son. This is not what she came to America for. She came with her own plans and dreams, and these mean too much for her to drop them and enter someone else's.

So she will go back to her own country and with the money she has saved working here she can begin, again, to try to find Roberto. She will have a good-sized bribe to offer now; she knows, after all, where to go looking. His father, who is not a kind or forgiving man, was one of the FARC fighters leading the training that day outside Marquetalia. This she has never explained to Eliot with his many questions. She can only pray, if she is right about it, that she will be able to track him down and buy her son back—that her son will still be living.

Rosita swings her duffel bag over her shoulder and lifts the bundle of sheets. She stops at the bassinet and looks at the baby. He is still lying as she left him, his tiny face barely outlined in the gray light—round cheek, round forehead, round swells of his eyes under his delicate closed eyelids.
You be good,
she thinks fiercely.
You love this man and this family and this house. You be strong and brave and smart
. Maybe, when she is back at home in her country, she will write to her boy, to explain herself while he is still young enough to forgive her.

D
ownstairs, Rosita passes t
hrough the front hall, the dining room with its unhappy-looking portraits of dead people and huge glossy table, the brown room where she and Jack once made love. It seems now like something that happened in another lifetime. For such a strong man, Jack was so unsure and trembling—not like any other man she has ever been with. It made her want to console him and care for him, it made her feel strong and capable.

Swinging through the door to the kitchen, Rosita hears a jangling of tags. Brutus. She freezes in place—she has forgotten about him. It is not that she is afraid, exactly; she has never been afraid of him. But she was also never afraid of Caesar. Respectful, wary, and cautious, yes, but never frightened. She is suddenly aware of the bandage on her neck, the faint smart of the dissolving stitches.
No barking,
she wills,
please, no barking
. If he begins barking and Jack comes down—Rosita cannot finish the thought. It is not that it will make her change her mind, or that she is afraid Jack will be angry or will try to stop her, just that suddenly there will be so much to be said. And this is a house that depends on the unspoken.

Brutus trots across the kitchen to her and sniffs at her legs, moving in a slow circle around her. Rosita stands absolutely still until he seems satisfied and sits down on the floor looking up at her. She takes a few cautious steps across the room and puts the bundle of sheets on the washing machine. Then she turns to the door, which the dog has parked himself in front of, and approaches slowly. He stares at her with his yellowy brown eyes and Rosita realizes that he has begun whining. He is probably sad that he has lost his brother and is now alone, the single member of his species. Empathy for him rises in Rosita for a moment. But as quickly, its warm tendrils stiffen inside her—here she is, walking off into the night away from her sleeping infant. Roberto is beyond her reach and she is tired and on her own and heading off into the world without anything in her stomach. She hates this dog in front of her for being scared and sorrowful and shut up in this house, when all the comforts and grace of good fortune lie around him in decaying abundance.

She stands still, staring into his eyes until he stops whining and lies down, dropping his head and shoulders with a last desperate sigh and licking his foreleg. Then she walks around him and lets herself out into the fresh almost-morning air, redolent of money—space and tended grass and herbs planted in beds of rich soil. Damp, perfectly cut flagstones. There is a cardinal on a branch outside the kitchen window that flies off as the door clicks shut behind her. Rosita adjusts the bag on her shoulder and starts up over the lawn toward the road, breathing deeply of everything she is leaving.

THE HAZARDS
OF GOOD
BREEDING

Jessica Shattuck

READING GROUP GUIDE

THE AUTHOR ON HER WORK

A
few summers ago, I was visiting friends at their summer house—a rambling, pedigreed old house on the Massachusetts shore. It was a bright, beautiful, hot July day and it was absolutely quiet—people were napping, or reading on the big old front porch, or lying out on the dock below, listening to the slap of waves. I decided to take a walk.

From this quiet corner of the world I ventured down a dirt road, which turned to pavement, and which brought me to the next town over—home to a whole different New England beach scene. Here the houses were chockablock, lining the street across from the water, their windows decorated with flags and cardboard cutouts of sea shells, their decks full of coolers of beer and collapsible beach chairs. There were people playing radios and games of football, lots of movement, activity, and noise. It was less than a mile away from the house I had come from but it felt like an altogether different, and in many ways more vibrant, world.

There was a melancholy that came with the peace and quiet of the secluded place I was visiting and, in contrast, a frenetic, contagious energy in this less exclusive, more modern place I had walked to. And the contrast was interesting to me. The Waspy old New England house seemed like part of an obsolete story, a vestige of a onetime American dream. This crowded strip of row houses seemed closer to the heart of the new America—a place where people long to be Hollywood celebrities, not members of old families, where the immigrant success story trumps lineage any day.

It made me think of people caught between these two worlds—by choice, by inertia, or by circumstance—people living in an America much larger than the one they were raised to inhabit. And with that came Faith Dunlap, a woman stunted by her lifelong adherence to other people's sense of right and wrong, and her ex-husband, Jack, an arrogant man, resistant to change and isolated by his own stubbornness. And then their children, Caroline and Eliot, both struggling to break out of the claustrophobic and increasingly irrelevant social order their family lives by.

Of course, at the time what happened was more immediate. I imagined Caroline Dunlap, a young woman in some ways like myself at her age, and in other ways not at all, coming home to a house much like the one I had left on that hot summer day. And then her mother, Faith, packing her suitcase—a fragile but resilient woman completely unlike my mother, but yet so familiar to me it was as if I'd known her my whole life. And then Eliot, Rock, and finally Jack Dunlap, who I was a little bit afraid of, but who I knew I would have to give a voice. And the book took off from there. I wrote the first hundred pages at a racing clip and then had to stop and unravel where it was all going: what exactly Eliot was up to, what Jack was going to do, how Caroline and Faith would be affected by the outsiders they had taken up with. I came to love my characters, for all their flaws, and I miss them now that I'm done writing the book.

I think of
The Hazards of Good Breeding
as being about individuals and families and love and frustration more than I think of it as being specifically about WASPs. The Dunlaps, like so many people out there, have hemmed themselves in with their own traditions, sense of propriety, and social insularity—and they are each struggling, in their own ways, to realize essential connections between their lives and the lives of others outside the narrow slice of the world they inhabit. Whether they succeed or not is up to each reader to decide for him- or herself.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How does Caroline Dunlap change over the course of the novel? How might her choices for postcollege life have taken a new direction?

2. Jack Dunlap is an inscrutable man to all who know him. How does Shattuck manage to elicit our sympathy for him?

3.
The Hazards of Good Breeding
is a comedy of manners with dark undercurrents. How do these come to the surface over the course of the novel? What do they reveal about the Dunlaps' world?

4. Why is Faith Dunlap attracted to Jean Pierre?

5. The novel is very much about people's public front versus their interior worlds. How does the theme of role-playing manifest itself throughout the novel?

6.
The Hazards of Good Breeding
is told from five different perspectives. How does this shifting point of view (first we see through Caroline's eyes, then Eliot's, then Rock's, etc.) affect our reading of the book and our understanding of the events that unfold?

7. What does Paul Revere's ride embody for Eliot Dunlap?

8. Is Jack in love with Rosita?

9. Describe the role of humor in Shattuck's society portrait. Given that this is in some ways a story about a fragmented family at a moment of crisis, why didn't she choose a more sober tone?

10. What does Caroline realize from her experiences with Stefan?

11. Caroline is initially dismissive of Rock Coughlin. What accounts for her change of heart by the novel's end?

12. How does Shattuck's story relate to a larger portrait of contemporary America?

13. How does
The Hazards of Good Breeding
fit into the American literary tradition of authors like John Cheever and John Updike? What other writers' work does Shattuck's novel call to mind?

14. What are the “hazards of good breeding” in this book?

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