Daughters of the Revolution Read online

  Also by Carolyn Cooke

  The Bostons

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Carolyn Cooke

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cooke, Carolyn, [date]

  Daughters of the Revolution / Carolyn Cooke. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59661-1

  1. School principals—Fiction. 2. Preparatory school students—

  Fiction. 3. Preparatory schools—New England—Fiction.

  4. New England—Fiction. 5. School integration—Fiction.

  6. Social conflict—Fiction. 7. Teenage boys—Fiction. 8. Teenage

  girls—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.O55495D38 2011

  813′.6—dc22 2011002743

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket image: Falling in Trees 6, 2007

  © Elijah Gowin. Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1

  For Randall Babtkis

  and for Zack and Callie Babtkis

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Saved Man

  The Big Bang

  The Strangler

  The Seducer

  God-Father

  The First Girl

  The Greedy Girl

  Why We Love Hell

  A Cold Case

  EV in New York

  The Graduate

  The Ordination of Women

  Himself

  The Death of God

  Souls of the Drowned

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A Note About the Author

  1963

  THE SAVED MAN

  Heck Hellman, walking home from gross anatomy and his basement cadaver, felt buoyed by the sleazy promise of spring: a yellow sky above, the gray snow on the ground turned to a slush that poured sloppily down the storm drains to the ocean.

  He climbed the stairs up the side of the house, calling their new kitten’s name—Graham Greene!—into the empty air. Mrs. O’Greefe, the landlady, immediately appeared behind him, her dress pulling tight against her body, and told him cats ran away all the time, hid out. “They’re like children,” she said. “They’ll suffer and die rather than show they want you.”

  “Do they?” Heck asked.

  “That they do, Mr. Hellman.”

  Mrs. O’Greefe’s husband was in prison—“incarcerated,” Mrs. O’Greefe said—for killing a man in a bar under “compromised” circumstances. Mrs. O’Greefe had once owned her own hair salon in town, but she was now reduced to renting out half her house, living downstairs in one bedroom with a hot plate and a shower stall, watching Heck’s small family revel in the comforts she’d once known. She longed to have her husband back, she told Heck one night when, drunk, she came up the back stairs to change a fuse. Sometimes she couldn’t sleep, thinking about it. Who wouldn’t miss marriage? she asked Heck gently, her eyes red. She wished she still had it all.

  A dish of milk sat on the porch, looking rained on and sooty. Heck’s daughter, EV, insisted on feeding the kitten great troughs of milk, and used the stuff up that way. The sinister look of the milk in the bowl made Heck imagine Graham Greene had run afoul of a car, as their previous cats had done.

  It was a shabby house, all they could afford. The staircase up the side separated Heck and his wife Lil’s quarters from Mrs. O’Greefe’s. Just beyond the storm door, Lil stirred Rob Roys in an old mayonnaise jar. EV, three years old, knelt on the floor and stared deeply into the rubber plant. Heck caught the ghost of his own face in the glass.

  Part of him belonged here—to this family, in this kitchen. The checkerboard flooring ran partway up the walls. “Coved linoleum,” Mrs. O’Greefe had told them with pride before they took the rental. “Never any water damage!”

  He closed the door behind him and set down his briefcase—his father’s briefcase, too good to throw away, though his father had repaired the broken handle with a wire hanger and the case was no longer handsome, or easy to hold. A tang of formaldehyde and phenol hung in the air, which came, Heck realized, from himself.

  The child looked up and ran toward him, leaping through the air. Lil called, “Careful, Eavieeee!” as she always did, drawing out the name, and as always he dropped the wire-handled briefcase and caught his daughter in his arms. Her hands attached to his face like suction cups. Then Lil handed Heck his glass and kissed him; the first sip of scotch melted on his tongue.

  In the kitchen, Lil stuffed green peppers with hash. EV dropped to the floor and played with two tiny dolls in the potted rubber plant. She moved them around in the dirt and spoke in each of their voices.

  “I’m a nickel,” one doll said.

  “I’m a penny,” said the other.

  “No sign of the kitten?” Heck asked Lil. She shook her head, but EV looked up from her dolls and said, “I see him.”

  “Graham Greene isn’t here,” Lil told her gently. “Remember we looked for him outside?”

  “I see him,” EV insisted.

  “Where is he, then?” asked Heck, smiling.

  “Gone,” EV said.

  “But where has he gone?”

  “Graham Greene gone dead!”

  “He isn’t dead, honey,” Lil said. “He’s just out and about.”

  Lil shot Heck a tragic look and sipped her drink. She was wearing dungarees and an old navy wool sweater. He’d knit the sweater himself when he was fifteen; his mother had taught him how. Both the dungarees and the sweater looked as if they could slip off her body without her unfastening anything. Two chopsticks held her dark hair up, but barely.

  “So,” she said, sipping. “Hard day at the corpse?”

  Heck didn’t like the way she referred to Mrs. X., his cadaver, as a corpse. Mrs. X.’s face was always covered with a cloth, but he’d removed her lungs and ovaries, studied the structure of her ruined knee, and squinted through sections of her circulatory system like a boy looking down the dark tube of a seashell.

  “So,” he said, “tomorrow I’m meeting Rebozos to see that German kayak.”

  “Really, Heck? In this weather?”

  “We might take it out for a few minutes along the shore.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Rebozos wants us to have it while he’s in Mexico this summer. We could have good times with a boat.”

  “With a baby,” Lil added witheringly.

  “EV’s not a baby. Are you a baby, EV?”

  “I’m your baby,” EV said, her voice going up like a rocket. Then her voice came back down and she said, “And I am Mommy’s baby.”

  “I asked you not to call me Mommy,” Lil said. “I don’t like it.”

  “What do you want her to call you?” Heck asked, surprised.

  Lil touched the chopsticks in her hair. “You can call me Mei-Mei.”

  “My-My-My,” said EV.

  “See?” said Lil.

  Heck got
down on the floor and played with EV. He lay on his back and lifted her so that her round stomach rested against the bottoms of his feet. He spread her little arms across his hands. “Airplane!” she shouted. A line of drool dropped from her mouth onto Heck’s cheek.

  “Mrs. O’Greefe told me today that a certain person might be p-a-r-o-l-e-d and coming home—coming here,” Lil said. “I think she’s not as happy about it as she lets on.” They’d joked before about the murderer returning: “Over my dead body,” Lil had said.

  “That could be arranged,” he’d said.

  Mrs. O’Greefe had made her husband’s felony sound like a failure of communication, one she expected Lil and Heck to understand, like a political crime, or a tragic misunderstanding between black and Irish. She made it sound as if Mr. O’Greefe was not only the perpetrator of the crime he had committed but also the victim.

  When Heck brought the new kitten home, Lil had been on a Graham Greene jag. She’d read The Man Within, The Third Man, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American and The Heart of the Matter, all in the time it had taken Heck to get halfway through The Power and the Glory. When she’d finished, she’d looked around hungrily, and he’d given his book over.

  Heck went out one last time and called unsuccessfully for the kitten in the dark. What kitten ever came when called? Then he brushed his teeth, stripped down to his shorts, climbed into bed and waited for Lil to finish her drink. They took turns in the evenings, reading to EV and putting her to bed. His wife called the quarter hour that followed this ritual—the dregs of her second Rob Roy—the “moment of bliss” she needed to survive, but it seemed less like bliss to Heck than a romantic sorrow he tried to avoid. He heard the scratchy record playing Billie Holiday, and the ice knocking in her glass as she lifted it, then set it down. (The blond-wood table wore her rings.) He skimmed the Globe in bed while he waited for her, but his mind was on the contemptuous spit of rain against the windows. Massachusetts had consecrated its first black bishop, who was also to be the summer minister on Capawak Island. The Boston Strangler had struck again, an older woman, sixty-three. Total annihilation was mutually assured: Anyone could push a button and destroy everyone else. A draft of air carried the scent of Lil’s perfume. Heck tried to imagine everything he knew and cared for blown to bits—baseball, his wife’s mouth, his wife, his baby daughter—atomized. He looked across the bed to the blocky tower of her reading: Tropic of Cancer—a dirty book, she promised—Ship of Fools, the Graham Greene novels. Whenever he finally finished a book Lil said had changed her life, she was on to something else.

  He lay on his back, stroking himself and thinking about the morning. The plan was to meet Archer Rebozos at the boathouse at seven. Then, if it wasn’t raining, they’d take the kayak along the shore off Wilde Point. This is what he’d told Lil. In fact, Rebozos had talked about going farther, eight miles out, to Capawak—a classic test for Wampanoag braves. Heck hadn’t mentioned the eight-mile trip. He knew Lil wouldn’t like it.

  Heck had offered to take sandwiches. Otherwise, Rebozos might suggest going out for lunch, and Heck had just a dollar in his wallet until Friday. It was a hell of a way to live, Lil supporting all three of them with her job as a detective for the Better Business Bureau. He was only near the end of his first year of medical school, an old man at twenty-nine. He’d wanted to be a minister, had flirted with divinity until his mid-twenties. He still believed, somehow, in it. (“That’s a strange idea,” his mother said when he confessed.) For Heck not to be too much like his father, that’s what his mother wanted.

  Now Heck carried his father’s briefcase. He carried his father’s thermos, so he wouldn’t have to spend a nickel at the coffee shop. Heck’s father had been an extravagant figure who always bought the best of everything and wore it to shreds. When he died, at forty-nine, Heck’s mother could not bring herself to give away his shoes and bespoke suits. The wingtips Heck wore every day to school were thinned by wear but beautifully soft. Old as they were—Heck’s father had died the spring Heck graduated from high school, twelve years ago, and the shoes had been ancient then—they still smelled faintly of the citrusy chemical his father had used to clean them, the secret of which had gone down with him.

  Now Heck was not anything like his father. He studied physiology and gross anatomy and worked on Mrs. X., peeling away her epidermis, dermis and subcutaneous tissue to examine the loaded liver, the black lungs. The work was different from what he’d expected; it shocked him. He had not yet seen her face.

  He wanted a day on the water—the challenge, the experience of the crossing. Lil liked, on Saturdays, to go swimming at the Y pool while he made French toast with EV. Lil no longer spoke about becoming a professional swimmer, which had been anyway a dream. He couldn’t blame her for wanting things. He wanted things, too: He wanted her. They had always rubbed up against each other well. She’d dated his roommate first, then someone else he knew. At first, she had pretended not to like him. Walking by him at a dance, she’d bumped into his chair, which had produced an encouraging buzz between them. One evening, he’d called her up—“Is this Lily Field?”—and invited her out for a drink. To his surprise, she didn’t pretend to be busy; she didn’t make him wait. They went to a cheap place on Charles Street. He never had money except the disheveled-looking bills his mother flung at him at lunch on Sunday afternoons. He threw these untidy dollars on the bar, glad to see them go.

  “You’ve brought me to a tawdry barroom,” Lil accused him. She was beautiful, her hair held up somehow by two chopsticks; she laughed at him. She took his hand and then—not that night, but the next one—she kissed him at the door of the apartment building where she lived with three other girls in a demimonde of ashtrays and underpants. She kissed him under the stone lintel, hard on the lips. She demanded that he talk. She gave him books to read, and she swam for two hours every day. He began to think about what he could tell his mother—because from his mother’s point of view, Lil was not better than Maeve, the last girl he’d brought home.

  In the end, they eloped—she took a long weekend from school and they borrowed Rebozos’s car and drove to Elkton, Maryland, where they were married by a justice of the peace with a scar across his neck. Lil wore a silk suit—a cheap silk suit, she said disdainfully—and afterward they spent the night in a crumbly hotel Lil found charming. They slept together, ate pancakes, drank stingers in the lounge, then drove home at the last possible moment, leaving at four in the morning so Lil could be back by ten for her class, The Radical Dramas of Bertolt Brecht.

  Lil had savings, “money from my Grammy,” she said. She used it for a deposit and several months’ rent on a two-room apartment on the wrong side of the Hill. Here Lil produced the empty mayonnaise jar in which he stirred their first Rob Roys, and she began to cook—BLTs and Welsh rarebit. It was better than life. They each played new parts, performing scenes of domestic comfort and sexual freedom. They met at three for what Lil called “love in the afternoon.” Then she stood in her baby-doll pajamas over the stove while he mixed drinks. At home, his mother nagged him about medical school, why he must become a doctor—he must do it for himself. How proud his father and grandfather would be! In the apartment, Lil drew him out and encouraged him, until he felt medical school had been his own idea and there was no danger of his life veering in a direction he did not want to go.

  Their daughter had not yet learned to breathe fluently. Her breathing lacked some essential quality—continuity, rhythm—every breath was different. He wondered at this lack of organization, focus, will or instinct. Heck could hear Lil now, in EV’s room, her respiration loud and instructional.

  Lil walked into the bedroom, said, “Hello, finally,” then undressed. She peeled off the turtleneck sweater and pulled her blue jeans down over her hips without unzipping them. She slid the chopsticks from her hair, which fell darkly around her shoulders, climbed into bed, laid her head on his arm. He pressed against her. “You want to do something?” he asked, parting the curtain of h
air with his fingers and whispering into her ear. He reached his other hand between her legs, guided by heat.

  She answered by climbing up, sliding on like a ring. He closed his eyes, then opened them. Light from the ceiling fixture poured down on her shoulders, her muscles long and elastic from swimming. Her face looked elegant and remote as she began to move. Her teeth gleamed.

  A fearful glow of fertility surrounded her. If Heck asked whether she’d put in the Thing—the rubber cap that pushed unpleasantly back at him—she might stop to check again on EV, who might wake up. Or he could take her as she was and run the risk.

  He received the pressure of her body against his, pressed back. She opened more to receive him, and he felt he could expand infinitely to fill the space she’d made. He played with this sensation, tested its boundaries. She cried out—but softly—and he rolled on top of her. Her eyes closed and she disappeared into a private zone, which freed them. Then she came, holding him tightly, with her legs wrapped around his back, her face flushed and blurry. The walls of her body beat against him in delicate paroxysms. He thrust up into her several times before pulling away, and she returned to the present, to the bedroom, to her usual intense focus. She slithered down under the sheet, where she kissed and licked him until pins rose up from underneath his skin and he exploded.

  A gray, ordinary darkness woke him. His wife lay beside him in a fetal ball. He dressed in his warmest, lightest clothes—twill pants, thermal shirt, varsity jacket, crew socks and sneakers—and walked into the kitchen. The sky turned pink at the edges and the thermometer on the porch read thirty-nine degrees. The kitten’s milk had turned opalescent in the rain, which continued to fall lightly into the bare maples.

  He plugged in the percolator, which he’d loaded with coffee the night before, and heated water in the kettle to prime the thermos. He mixed two tins of deviled ham with mayonnaise and pickle relish and made sandwiches, which he wrapped neatly in waxed paper; he didn’t want Rebozos to feel he was slumming. Heck wished he had homemade cookies to put into the lunch, something beyond price. But Lil didn’t make cookies; she didn’t keep sweets in the house. Two apples sat in a bowl on the kitchen table. They’d begun to shrivel, but they might revive in the cold. The milk carton in the refrigerator was nearly empty, so he cooked and ate his oats with water. Rebozos liked milk in his coffee, so Heck heated the rest of it in a Revere pan, poured the milk and coffee into the thermos and tightened the suction.