Shorecliff (23 page)

Charlie was in the room too, and one of the other cousins. Yvette probably, or Fisher. Charlie was pretending not to pay attention to what Isabella was saying, but his eyes kept coming back to me. He was finding Francesca’s withdrawal from Shorecliff life very disconcerting.

“They just—you know—talked about stuff,” I replied lamely. I realized then that I couldn’t possibly reproduce the conversation, and moreover that I had no desire to. It was something private between Francesca and Uncle Kurt, which I had been clever enough to overhear and could therefore analyze at my leisure. I needed no interference from my know-it-all cousins.

“Very descriptive,” Tom said, grinning at me.

“Did she seem upset?” asked Charlie.

“You must remember something they said!” Isabella insisted. “Give us a few lines. We’ve all been worried about her, Richard. Did Uncle Kurt cheer her up?”

“He made her mad,” I offered.

“Made her mad?” Isabella repeated, shocked. “How? What did he say, Richard? Now you have to tell us!”

She clutched my arms and shook me, only half-jokingly. I now imagined touching her at least twenty times a day, but her assault unnerved me. I would have preferred a safety zone between us.

“Knock it off, Isabella,” Philip said. It was his first contribution to the conversation. “Richard doesn’t have to say anything. He shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

With that comment he annoyed both me and Isabella, who felt he was missing the point. “Whether or not he ought to have been there, he was,” she said.

“That still doesn’t mean we should ask him about it,” Tom replied.

“Exactly,” said Philip. “It was a private conversation, and I don’t want to hear it. It’s pretty low to interrogate a little boy about people he was eavesdropping on.”

Once again he had offended both of us in one sentence. Isabella’s face grew bright red. I was overcome by sympathy and daringly brushed her arm with my hand. She said, “Come on, Richard—let’s go,” and I felt a sudden overwhelming need to protect her. But I was proud of her as well for not responding to Philip’s comment. His manner was infuriatingly arrogant, as if he were standing on a platform above us and prodding us with a long stick.

Isabella slammed the door behind us and stood in the hall, her cheeks burning. “I hate it when he does that!” She stomped her foot. “Of course I know it was a private conversation, but I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, and neither were you. We’re both worried about Francesca, that’s all. He’s so obnoxious! And Tom is just as bad.”

“Really, they didn’t say anything important,” I burst out, trying to be comforting. “Uncle Kurt was just trying to make her feel better.” I was lying shamelessly, since to my mind the conversation had been one of the most significant I’d ever heard, but I wanted Isabella to stop shouting.

“Of course, of course.” She bent over me, her body impossibly gangly but at the same time tantalizingly near, so that I could concentrate only on the patch of skin showing where her shirt lifted above the hemline of her skirt. In another moment I would put my hand on it. “And,” she said more quietly, “we have to remember that Philip has been upset recently too. He can’t be responsible for everything he says. Don’t be too angry with him, will you, Richard?”

The door swung open, and Tom, doing his Adonis act with only his pajama bottoms on, swung into the hall. “Everyone okay out here?” he asked.

“Yes, Richard and I are both fine,” Isabella said, putting her nose in the air. She prepared to stalk away to her bedroom, but the effect was ruined because she almost lost her balance as she turned.

“Sure you’re okay?” Tom said, laughing.

“Yes!” she snapped.

He knew she was angry then and stood in silence for a moment. But right before she reached her bedroom, he said, “Hey, Bella. Croquet tomorrow?” When she turned he was smiling in inquiry.

“All right,” she said, smiling too. She and Tom got into many spats, but they always declared peace moments after they had begun to argue. They were so similar that it was impossible for them to maintain full-blown anger against each other—the slightest hint of reconciliation on one side would bring the other skipping forward to make up.

I went to my room intending to ponder the meaning of Francesca’s discussion with Kurt. Once in the confines of my bed, however, my mind began to circle like a jackal around certain images I had picked up during the day: Francesca’s face as she glared at Uncle Kurt, her black eyebrows drawn low; the grace of her hands, which swung a little higher than other people’s when she was walking determinedly; Charlie’s gaze, which I had followed once on the hike to find that it was directed at Francesca’s calves, flashing in the sunlight. Her beauty, of course, was a magnet for everyone’s eyes, but lately I had been focusing on odd little bits of it, for reasons I couldn’t understand—it was as if I were observing a gemstone one facet at a time. The same held true for Isabella, but in her case fantasy was interwoven with the images. I dropped off to sleep at last, wondering why I hadn’t put my arms around her when she was upset about Philip. It would have been so easy, and then she would have been there, close and lovable, with all those long limbs hot beneath my hands.

T
he day after our unsuccessful hike, the uncles departed on their hunting trip and I discovered why they had chosen to leave then and not later. Aunt Edie’s birthday had appeared on the horizon.

The truth was that Aunt Edie had been a disappointment to us kids. We were so used to her scandalized outbursts when she visited our families that we had expected her to continue her performance throughout the summer. In fact, however, Aunt Edie viewed Shorecliff as a place of rest, where she could retire into herself and speak only to whichever of her sisters happened to be there at the same time. The presence of eleven nieces and nephews disgusted her. We were a nuisance and a bore, and our foibles and rowdy antics horrified her. Nevertheless, she remained loyal to her idea of Shorecliff as a sacred place of quietude, and for the most part she kept away from us. I’m sure she had no idea what disappointment she caused us by her silence. Tom went so far as to say that Aunt Edie had conceived a new tactic for infuriating us, which was simply to say nothing and thus deprive us of her astounding statements. When her reserve did crack and an acrid comment came flying out, we would respond with grins of delight.

The day of Aunt Edie’s birthday, however, was a different matter altogether. I had been present for only one other of these hallowed occasions, when she made an appearance in New York for the great day. All I remember from that event was Edie’s wrath-filled face as she surveyed the inadequate restaurant to which my mother had escorted her. This year, secure in her dominance at Shorecliff, Aunt Edie would tolerate no such mediocrity. Of course she did not dictate her wishes for the celebration in so many words—that would have been indecorous. But the way she began to eye Aunt Rose as soon as the uncles trudged off in search of game; the way her thin lips smirked when Aunt Margery called an impromptu family gathering in the kitchen, excepting Edie; the way she strode around the house with a new sense of ownership—all these signs demonstrated Aunt Edie’s insistence that her party be successful.

To the cousins, the news came as a shock. Aunt Margery closed us into the kitchen and announced without preamble that in two days Aunt Edie’s birthday would be upon us. “This is the most important day of the summer, as far as Edie is concerned,” she said, “and we must all work very hard to make it a properly festive celebration. That means I’ll need help from all of you. Is that clear?”

Francesca was seated at the table, outlining designs on the soft wood with a fork. “What exactly will this help entail, Aunt Margery?” she asked. I was not alone in hearing rebellion in her words.

“‘Help’ in this case means anything we ask of you, Francesca,” said Aunt Rose. She leveled her hawklike stare at Francesca. “It’s our responsibility to make Aunt Edie’s day a happy one—one she feels is worthy of her. Do you understand?”

Pamela said, “Are we all going to give her presents?” and received the glares of eight outraged cousins. Fisher never got outraged at anyone, and I withheld my glare out of loyalty, though I was struck by the same alarm at her comment—what on earth could I give to Aunt Edie?

“There’s no way we can all give her presents,” Yvette said. “There’s nothing here we can give her, and if we went to Pensbottom we wouldn’t find anything either.”

“You will not be giving her presents,” my mother broke in. “Your present—the present from all of you children—will be the lovely way you decorate the house for the occasion. You will gather flowers and put up streamers and perhaps make little cards for her—anything you think is appropriate.”

“Streamers?” Charlie repeated skeptically.

“We thought ahead,” said Aunt Rose. She lifted two large canvas bags onto the table with the air of a magician completing a trick, and we saw that they were jammed with party supplies—streamers, balloons, party hats, place cards, fancy napkins, colored candles—all the trappings of an American birthday. I remember thinking how strange it was that the person for whom all these decorations had been bought was turning not four but forty-seven.

“But she’ll know about it beforehand,” Isabella objected. “She’ll see us setting everything up.”

“We plan to keep her occupied,” said Aunt Margery. “We’ll take it in shifts while the rest of us prepare. Tomorrow is the set-up day, and the day after is the birthday itself. The main thing to remember is that Aunt Edie not only knows this is coming, she expects it to be as grand as we can make it.”

“I wish I’d taken up hunting,” Tom said.

“With a little help from all of you,” my mother replied, “I’m sure everyone will have fun. After all, it’s only two days, and we’ll be providing you with lots of cake.”

We filed out of the kitchen, subdued by the knowledge that we had only that afternoon and evening before the slavery commenced.

“This summer has gone to hell,” Charlie said as we spilled out onto the lawn. He glanced at Francesca, a habit he found unbreakable.

“I wasn’t aware that it had ever been anywhere else,” she answered.

Isabella and Tom loitered by the croquet mallets, considering a possible game. Isabella was in her thoughtful pose, meaning that she was resting her cheek on one fist and had twisted her legs around each other so that her feet stuck out at odd angles. She assumed this position, entirely unconsciously, whenever she was preoccupied by an idea. Lately she had taken to twisting herself into her thinker’s knot nearly every hour. I often stood in front of her and tried to meet her gaze, which she directed toward the ground during these meditative interludes. At the beginning of the summer I usually found laughter or incipient joy in her round brown eyes, but in the past week I had twice surprised a look of distress. This time I was pleased to see her face suffused with excitement, and as soon as she caught sight of me she raised her head and looked at Tom.

“We have to do this birthday, right?” she said. “There’s no way we can get out of it. So let’s really do it properly. Don’t you think, Tom? Let’s give Aunt Edie a birthday she’ll never forget. And we can transform the house! We’ll plan out the whole day. It will be spectacular. You have to imagine”—here she bounded onto the lawn and turned to gesture at the house—“the entire front of Shorecliff covered in a curtain of flowers, and we’ll tie candles in among them so that at night we can light up the whole lawn.”

“You’ll burn down the house,” Charlie interrupted.

“Do you see any flowers around here?” Delia Ybarra asked, craning her neck as if searching the grass.

“That’s not the point,” said Isabella. It was difficult, when she got excited like this, to bring her down from the plane of fantasy. “We could have the party out here on the lawn, on a long table, with torches all around. We could bring out the Victrola and put flowers everywhere—maybe a path of flowers leading to Aunt Edie’s chair!—and there would be a different flower for each person at every place. What do you think, Tom?” In the end it was always Tom’s approval she sought out.

This time, Tom turned to Philip. “Do you think we could make a tent?” he asked. “I mean like one of those big marquees they use for weddings and things?”

“Well,” said Philip, surveying the lawn with a designer’s eye, “we might be able to, if it didn’t have to be too big. How long would the table be?” He asked the question of Isabella, and right then we knew that the plan was happening and that there were three masterminds in charge of the affair.

The following day, which we spent scurrying here and there on absurd missions entrusted to us by these three, was one of my favorites of the summer. It came after my father’s visit, after Francesca’s withdrawal from cousinly camaraderie, after Uncle Frank’s strange hike, after the beginning of Isabella’s moodiness, and only one day before the evening that heralded catastrophe—yet somehow it still managed to be filled with boisterous anticipation and a delight in the company of cousins and siblings.

Perhaps the thrill arose partly because we were preparing for the only holiday we celebrated properly that summer. On the Fourth of July the family had been struck by a collective forgetfulness, but for Aunt Edie’s birthday we had time to get ready, to soak for twenty-four hours in anticipation. That, as far as I was concerned, made it far superior to our Independence Day.

Isabella, Philip, and Tom spent much of the morning standing in a triangle on the lawn, speaking with the greatest seriousness about the preparations. Charlie and Francesca thought they were being ludicrously childish, and their own bond was renewed by the sarcastic remarks they tossed back and forth. Yet they showed as much good humor as the rest of us in complying with the orders our three leaders barked at us. Everyone was relieved to be engaged in something harmless and silly, not to mention generous—for we bathed in a pleasant sense that our latest game was also a charitable act. Aunt Edie must have sensed the same thing. She would never have admitted how much it touched her to see us careening around the house all day, our arms loaded with paints and flowers and bedsheets (these for the tent), but I saw her face once through a window as we were trying to make the tent stay up and caught an expression of almost girlish joy.

Tom’s idea for the tent was the main point of interest for most of the cousins. The fripperies of streamers and flowers left the majority of them cold, but the tent appealed to all of us. On the day before the birthday, those of us who came down to the kitchen early found Fisher, surrounded by flour-covered aunts and fluttering recipes, sketching a plan for the tent’s erection complete with angle measurements and strategies for wind resistance. I was so excited by the professional appearance of his design that I raced upstairs to rouse Tom and Philip. On the landing I encountered Isabella peering down the stairwell, still in her nightgown, enthralled by a vision of what the house would look like by the evening.

“Fisher has a sketch!” I cried, pounding on Tom’s and Philip’s doors.

“A what?” said Isabella.

“He’s sketching out the tent!”

At this moment Fisher himself came up the stairs, gazing at the piece of paper in his hands. The aunts had banished him from the kitchen, and for the rest of the day, whenever we wanted food, we had to stand at one of the kitchen’s two doors and accept whatever scraps they handed to us.

“I’ll need poles,” Fisher said. “We’ll need to have six poles of equal length, and they’ll need to be very tall. I would prefer eight, but that’s probably too much to ask.”

His request resulted in a surprising discovery. In the top-to-bottom hunt that followed, we unearthed countless artifacts from the days of the aunts’ and uncles’ childhoods, and eventually, in a dust-filled closet we had previously ignored, Philip discovered six weathered oars. Never had I seen him so excited as when he backed out of the closet, an oar in each hand and the dust in his hair so thick it looked as if he had suddenly gone gray. He was grinning one of those grins that are painful to the cheek muscles, and when he shouted to Isabella and Tom, his voice rose in an unexpected squeak. Part of his excitement over the oars was simply the pleasure of finding something that exactly fit his requirements. But all that day I was surprised by his enthusiasm. It seemed unlike him to become so involved in the mundane matter of someone’s birthday. On the other hand, one can’t be a philosopher every day.

Armed with two oars each, Tom, Isabella, and Philip lumbered out the front door, banging the walls with oar heads and oar handles and leaving Charlie to muse over the absence of a boat. Fisher was outside pacing the ground and looking at his sketch. Luckily it was a beautiful day, sunny but not enervatingly hot, and garnished, every once in a while,with an elusive salty breeze off the ocean.

“Look what we found!” Philip crowed, depositing his oars with a clatter at Fisher’s feet. The oars, once white, were now brown with filth and covered in cobwebs. Fisher’s raised eyebrows were not unreasonable. However, when Tom and Isabella had thrown theirs too onto the heap and stood back in triumph, it did seem harsh that Fisher’s only comment was “But they’re much too short.”

Philip’s grin disappeared. He looked at Fisher for a moment with his usual eyes-half-closed expression, indicating the unspeakable superiority of the philosopher to the common man. Then he glanced at Tom and Isabella, saw that they were trying not to laugh, and burst out laughing himself.

“That’s true, Fisher,” he said. “Mathematically, you’re correct. But don’t you think it’s incredible that we found six poles an hour after you asked for them?”

“Couldn’t we tie them onto other things and make them taller?” Isabella asked.

“Chairs!” bellowed Tom. He turned around, preparing to storm the house and remove all the dining room chairs. Just as he took off, he collided with the two Delias and Pamela, who had trekked across from the woods with armfuls of flowers. Behind them stood Lorelei, bearing a similar load.

“Lorelei knows all about flowers,” Delia Robierre said.

Isabella had sent the Delias and Pamela on a flower-hunting mission, and we were impressed with their resourcefulness in going to Lorelei. It didn’t come as a surprise that Lorelei was a botanical authority. She seemed to be an expert on all aspects of nature, though except for her bond with Barnavelt she had rarely shown us her talents. Today she had led Pamela and the Delias to all the right spots for wildflowers, and Tom beamed like a proud husband.

“Bring the flowers to Yvette,” Isabella instructed. Yvette had volunteered to do the flower arrangements but refused to go hunting for the flowers.

Francesca had announced that she would set up the table in the dining room for the next day’s luncheon—prelude to the grand finale of the outdoor dinner. She had nothing but skepticism for the plan of the tent, but with her new muted behavior came an unexpected vein of malleability. She said that she would take care of the table settings and follow Yvette’s advice on the place cards—both very uncharacteristic statements. Remembering her comments to Uncle Kurt on the hike, I suspected her offer arose from an overwhelming sense of emptiness. It didn’t matter to her what she or anyone did at Shorecliff, since all our activities were painted for her in the same dreary shade.