Carolyn Cooke - Daughters of the Revolution

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 principalsFiction. 2. Preparatory school students
Fiction. 3. Preparatory schoolsNew EnglandFiction.
4. New EnglandFiction. 5. School integrationFiction.
6. Social conflictFiction. 7. Teenage boysFiction. 8. Teenage
girlsFiction. I. Title.
PS3553.O55495D38 2011
813.6dc22 2011002743

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors 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

H eck 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 kittens nameGraham Greene!into the empty air. Mrs. OGreefe, the landlady, immediately appeared behind him, her dress pulling tight against her body, and told him cats ran away all the time, hid out. Theyre like children, she said. Theyll suffer and die rather than show they want you.

Do they? Heck asked.

That they do, Mr. Hellman.

Mrs. OGreefes husband was in prisonincarcerated, Mrs. OGreefe saidfor killing a man in a bar under compromised circumstances. Mrs. OGreefe 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 Hecks small family revel in the comforts shed 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 couldnt sleep, thinking about it. Who wouldnt 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. Hecks 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 Lils quarters from Mrs. OGreefes. 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 hereto this family, in this kitchen. The checkerboard flooring ran partway up the walls. Coved linoleum, Mrs. OGreefe had told them with pride before they took the rental. Never any water damage!

He closed the door behind him and set down his briefcasehis fathers 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.

Im a nickel, one doll said.

Im 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 isnt 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 isnt dead, honey, Lil said. Hes just out and about.

Lil shot Heck a tragic look and sipped her drink. She was wearing dungarees and an old navy wool sweater. Hed 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 didnt like the way she referred to Mrs. X., his cadaver, as a corpse. Mrs. X.s face was always covered with a cloth, but hed 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 Im 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 wouldnt.

Rebozos wants us to have it while hes in Mexico this summer. We could have good times with a boat.

With a baby, Lil added witheringly.

EVs not a baby. Are you a baby, EV?

Im your baby, EV said, her voice going up like a rocket. Then her voice came back down and she said, And I am Mommys baby.

I asked you not to call me Mommy, Lil said. I dont 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 Hecks cheek.

Mrs. OGreefe told me today that a certain person might be p-a-r-o-l-e-d and coming homecoming here, Lil said. I think shes not as happy about it as she lets on. Theyd joked before about the murderer returning: Over my dead body, Lil had said.

That could be arranged, hed said.

Mrs. OGreefe had made her husbands 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. OGreefe was not only the perpetrator of the crime he had committed but also the victim.