The Hazards of Good Breeding (9 page)

9

T
HE LAST TIME
Caroline saw Skip Krasdale, he was com
ing 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, in 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.

“Just a minute, I told you I'm phoning,” an impatient, gravelly voice is saying on the other end of the line when she lifts the receiver.

“Lilo,” Caroline says, wishing she hadn't picked up.

“To whom am I speaking?” Lilo demands haughtily.

“Caroline,” Caroline sighs. Lilo, or Helen Whittier Dunlap, as she is formally known, is for all intents and purposes her grandmother, the aunt who raised Jack after his parents' car wreck—a job she carried out with, from what Caroline can tell, all the love and good feeling of one of those Harlow wire monkeys.

“Caroline
Dunlap
?”

“Lilo, its me, Caroline. How are you?”

“I have been better.” There is a significant pause on the other end of the line. Caroline does not rush to fill it. “I have something here I think you might be interested in.”

“Oh, really?” Caroline slides the lobster skewer back out of her hair, which falls in a swish around her shoulders. The implement smells faintly of the sea and unpolished silver.

“It's not something I take any pleasure in telling you about—you know I don't like to involve myself in family dramas and you can imagine my discomfort at being the person . . .” Caroline rolls her eyes. Lilo is, contrary to her assertions, the primary chronicler, purveyor, and producer of family drama for the Dunlaps. “. . . and so I thought, ‘Well, what is this motley getup lying on my wing chair and how can I get rid of it?' ” Lilo is saying. The punch line, Caroline has guessed long ago, is that her father has—God forbid—left his jacket on some visit to her. “So I picked it up and . . .” But Caroline is not listening anymore.

Her father has emerged in the doorway, wearing a battered green cap of his grandfather's that looks, to Caroline, like something a cartoon character would wear.
Lilo
, she mouths at him. “I'm not here,” he says, loud enough to express disregard for the fact that Lilo can quite possibly hear him.

“Lilo?” Caroline says. “Dad isn't home and I'm running out the door now to a wedding. Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Well,” Lilo says, “you
can
and you
may
also—I do think you should come by—”

“Okay, I'll call you tomorrow,” Caroline says brightly. “Bye-bye.” She replaces the receiver.

I
n the car, Jack Dunlap pulls
the invitation out of his breast pocket and lays it against the windshield, as if without it he would have no idea how to find First Parish Church or the Ponkatawset Club. As if he didn't know Concord like the back of his hand or belong to the club for eighteen years and go there as a boy every Sunday with his grandfather. Since he withdrew his membership, Jack has become a virtual denier of the club's existence. “The Ponkatawset Club!” he'll say scornfully. “Oh, you mean Disneyland.” This is, as far as Caroline can tell, in reference to the new spa facilities in the locker rooms, the expanded membership, the renovated dining area, which includes a whole wall of tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. Unlike most successful men of his generation, her father has an almost violent distaste for anything, other than cars and property, that smacks of luxury. Caroline is all for his new disgust with the place, albeit for different reasons. It has had two nonwhite members in its entire history, costs $30,000 a year to belong to, and seems to lower the threshold for acceptable conversation topics to include blow-by-blow recounts of golf plays and car-buying searches. God forbid anyone bring up, for instance, Bosnia. Not that Caroline herself is anything but hopelessly uninformed on the matter, but at least—well, at least she is ashamed of her ignorance.

“So,” her father says, startling Caroline out of her thoughts. They have passed the last five minutes of the drive in silence, having covered the bulk of accessible conversation topics (the Red Sox, the new addition to the Hibberts' house, rumors of the recent fall from grace of Jack's old undergraduate men's club) already. “You had a good visit with your mother?”

“Mm-hmm,” Caroline nods.

“She seemed”—he pauses—“well to you?”

“Fine.” Caroline is suspicious of this line of questioning. Her father loves to try to draw her into conversations that allow him the opportunity to make condescending or wry comments about everything from her mother's propensity for being startled to her famously poor cooking abilities. These are not the whole story, though, which makes such conversations especially uncomfortable. There was the night shortly after Faith moved out, for instance, that Caroline found him organizing the old shoe box of photos that Faith had for years bemoaned not having enough time or energy, or whatever it was, to sort through. He was pasting them into a beautiful leather-bound album with black pages, and labeling each with a special white pencil he had bought for the occasion. It was late—maybe two
A.M
., the night black and hard with the bite of coming winter, when Caroline came home to find him surrounded by neat piles of stiff-backed, formal-looking photos of his courtship and early years of marriage. It was nothing, he had said gruffly, just a little necessary cleanup. But she had seen his face, in that moment of turning when she walked in. And the address of Lucy's home in Greenwich where Faith was staying, neatly penciled in his hand on a piece of paper clipped to the inside cover. There had been the awkward moment of pure silence—no wind outside or clank of radiators or scuffling of the dogs (where were they?) to diffuse the intensity of his absolute aloneness here at the kitchen table, reconstructing his failed marriage in the early hours of the morning.
Well
, Caroline had said finally—she was a little drunk—
it's getting really cold out
. His denial was fierce enough to be contagious.

“Did she mention anything about Eliot visiting?” her father asks.

“Sometime before camp,” Caroline says.

“Well—if she can figure out—”

“I think it's a good idea,” Caroline interrupts. “I mean, she's going to have him for all his vacations next year anyway, right? So he might as well get used to visiting.” She pauses. “What else does he have to do? He has three weeks before camp and no school, and it does seem so lonely that he's just—like right now—going to be all by himself at home. I don't understand, I guess, why he never got a new babysitter after Rosita moved away—you don't really think he's too old—”

Her father pulls up directly behind the van in front of them and flashes his brights. “He's almost eleven,” he says.

“Okay—but at least a housekeeper, or someone who's home sometimes. I could find out about my friend Sarah's old housekeeper,” Caroline begins again. “She might be able to work, since she doesn't work for her family anymore—”

“You know, Caroline,” her father says in his chilliest voice, “Eliot and I
have
been okay for the last year without your assistance.”

Caroline feels the blood rush to her ears. “Right,” she says, surprised to find her throat has constricted. “I didn't realize it was such a touchy subject.”

“It is not a ‘touchy subject.' ” He flashes his lights again, three times fast now, and the van that has been lurching along in front of them pulls over.
BILLERICA SENIOR CENTER
is printed on the side of it in navy lettering. Above this, a series of pale faces stare back through the glass squares of their windows at her like a sort of woeful, reproving chorus. As Jack accelerates past it, the driver glares out his window at Caroline.

“I could,” her father says after a while, clearing his throat, “take Eliot down with me next week.”

“To New York?” Caroline says.

He nods, stiff-jawed, and flicks on the blinker to turn onto Main Street.

“Okay.” She shrugs and looks back out the window. There is an Indian tour group climbing off a bus, blinking their eyes in the slanted evening sunlight.

“If you wanted, you could come, too,” he says without looking at her. “I could get the three of us tickets to something before Eliot goes to your mother's.”

Caroline turns to see if he is joking. But he looks absolutely serious, if uncomfortable. Her father, it occurs to her as almost wondrous, is trying to make some sort of amends for being such an asshole. “That's nice of you,” she says, almost to see if he will retract it. Niceness is not a quality that he has respect for.