The Hazards of Good Breeding Read Online Free

like any other city: an uneven grid of rectangles broken up by more rectangles, looped together by a few sinewy ribbons of road. Last week, Faith had a computer installed in her apartment so she could e-mail with her children—a possibility that seems incredible to her still. The technician pulled out a flat metal panel covered with tiny squares and rectangles, called, what was it? it had such a sad, human-sounding name—the motherboard, that was it. It housed all the information the computer would ever need to carry out its operations, he explained, the mechanical equivalent of DNA. From here, the city looks remarkably like this thing; the shiny channels of highways, the smooth square tops of buildings. It seems almost mystical, this repetition of structure—as if both are reflections of the same archetypal image of order.
    When the plane touches down, Boston looks brighter and sunnier than Faith expected. It looks hot, in fact, the way the leaves on the trees sag and the grass is that deep, almost blurry shade of green. The captain makes an elaborate announcement about what gate they will be pulling into in the same falsely enthusiastic, sidewalk-salesman voice he has used throughout the flight to fill passengers in on everything from cruising altitude to obscure geographical features of the Connecticut coastline. “Eighty-eight degrees and rising,” he confirms Faith’s suspicions. She is certainly wearing all the wrong things. The pink-and-white-striped blouse she has on is long-sleeved and her linen pants are lined! She will sweat through Eliot’s performance—through her first visit back to Concord since she left it. The thought sends a shimmery burst of adrenaline from her gut to her heart. She is just going to a play, she tells herself. Just a morning, and then lunch with her children, and then she will be off. At least the twins, who have come to intimidate her with their baseball caps and loud voices and aggressive, uncommunicative way of speaking, are off in Colorado. And most importantly, Jack won’t be there; she is lucky, really, to have this opportunity to see the place without him. It could be so much worse.
    The fact remains, though, that Faith dreads this morning at the play: all the hugs of sympathetic neighbors, curious glances of familiar strangers, and nosy, condescending “how are you’s” and “so good to see you back here’s” of all the Barton Country Day mothers she has not seen since what Dr. Marcus suggests she think of as her “time-out,” a term he accompanies with a refereelike gesture.
    Faith is a small, slim woman, only five-foot-five. Her limbs and fingers are long and nervous; when she sits down and crosses her legs it is almost impossible to stop the anxious back-and-forth movement of her size-six foot. She is pretty also—her features are delicate, indistinct, and give the impression of being somehow watery, as if, faced with something really shocking or gruesome, they would melt. This is misleading, though. In fact, Faith has been privy to more shocking, gruesome things than many women of her class and age group. When she was nineteen, for example, her older brother was decapitated in an auto accident with Faith seated right beside him. There was an elm tree, a Bloody Mary in his hand, a tremendous sound of smashing machinery. She emerged from the overturned car with two cuts above her right eyebrow and a sprained wrist.
    Faith manages to get her own bag out of the overhead compartment, wrestles it down the aisle and into the cool, antiseptic-smelling airport. Then she joins the masses of official, business-suited people streaming down the long gray hall to the taxi line out front. She feels like an impostor, someone who shouldn’t be allowed to take such a professional, early morning plane.
    â€œWhere you going?” the driver asks when Faith is finally settled in the dark cavern of a yellow cab.
    â€œTo