Shorecliff

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T
he summer when I was thirteen years old changed everything for me. Looking back on it now, I can fill in the gaps with what I learned later, but at the time it seemed like a story unto itself, and that is the way I want to tell it. When I got back to school in September, I thought to myself, “I’ve been through hell this past month, and not one of you knows a goddamn thing about it.” I’d picked up swearing that summer, but it wasn’t the worst thing I had picked up, and it wasn’t the most lasting. What I like to remember best are the mornings in Uncle Kurt’s room when he would regale me with tales of the war. But what I remember most vividly is a bright patch of flames surrounding something so horrible I couldn’t bear to look at it. That comes at the end. I will take my time getting there.

It began on a train. My mother and I were traveling up to Maine from New York at the beginning of June, riding a series of day trains. I always hoped uselessly for one long ride on a sleeper, but the view through the windows still offered plenty of fodder for my imagination. At thirteen I was short, stocky, and brown-haired. My round face refused to lengthen into manliness, though my mother claimed she could see cheekbones; to me it seemed unpleasantly chubby. My limbs were only just beginning to replace baby fat with muscle. The combination made me appear bulky but tough, and I had withstood much friendly roughhousing from bigger boys at school. My eyes were too small, and one limp frond of hair drooped over them and tickled my nose. My aunts told me I had a cherubic smile.

I spent nearly the entire trip from New York to Maine in a state of euphoria. My mother and I were traveling alone. My father was staying in New York and planned to remain there for the rest of the summer, a situation that only my mother pretended to object to. He was a stern, humorless lawyer; I was frightened of him and didn’t like being near him. Now, years later, I feel the same way, though for different reasons. At the time his death-grip on life unnerved me, and now that death is coming to grip him instead, I prefer not to stand in its way. My mother, however, was an angel. She let me sit on my own, stationing herself several rows behind me, and as I looked out the window I imagined myself an explorer heading into the unknown, either on the back of an elephant or at the bow of a steamship as the mood struck me. For some reason being on a train, exciting as these vehicles were whenever I wasn’t riding in one, never seemed thrilling enough from the inside.

We were headed up to Shorecliff. It was the old family place; not the Killing family—that murderous surname had been given to me by my father—but the Hatfield family, my mother’s clan. My mother had four sisters and, originally, two brothers. All but one of the sisters had children, and all of the families were coming for the summer. It was the first time we had all gathered in one place for an extended period. My Aunt Rose had put her foot down some months before and said that the fact that we had never before spent time at Shorecliff as a complete, united family was a crime. This summer, she announced, was the perfect opportunity to remedy the situation. Her sisters agreed. With varying amounts of difficulty, they convinced the men involved that fighting the combined forces of the Hatfield women would be futile once they had decided on a course of action. As a result, here we were.

I had traveled to Shorecliff many times before—my mother took me up for a week or two every summer—but we were often the only visitors, and I had never encountered more than a few family members at a time there. Now the thought of months with all of my cousins and aunts and uncles made bursts of pleasure explode in my stomach. I, Richard Killing II, had no brothers or sisters. My father approved of one son and heir, no more and no less. But I had inherited my mother’s love of large families, and since I had no other option, I adopted my cousins as members of my immediate family. The fact that I rarely saw them, and that they were all older than I was, didn’t stop me. Depending on my mood, I was either the hero or the chronicler of my family. Their exploits, created by my own fancy for the most part, filled my imagination year in and year out, at school, at home, and most of all when I was trapped in my father’s study.

The personages of the sprawling Hatfield family will drift into the story as they please, but I must mention Uncle Kurt now, before the others appear. Uncle Kurt was my mother’s only surviving brother. Harold had been killed in the Great War, but Kurt had returned home swathed in laurels. He had been a private, a sailor, an ambulance driver, a pilot… It was a mystery to me how he managed to cover so many branches of the U.S. military, but I could not believe that he made up all the stories for my benefit. Some of them, maybe, but surely not all of the hundreds he spun for me that summer.

Uncle Kurt was tall and handsome, with brown hair slicked back in the soldier’s fashion and an upright posture that put my stubby figure to shame. I remember him in khaki; whether or not he really wore it I can’t say, since my youthful imagination surrounded him with the splendor of war. What is certain, however, is that he was exciting and lighthearted and unfailingly kind to me. He was by far the friendliest male I had ever encountered. I adored him without reservation, and on the rare occasions when I saw him, I followed him around like a puppy. My mother claimed that Uncle Kurt lived like a mallard duck, gliding through life and letting all its miseries slide off his back. Before that summer at Shorecliff, I thought so too.

The train ride was long, so long that after we changed in Boston my excitement wore off, leaving a dull residue that threatened to turn into disappointment before we had even arrived. I tried to keep my anticipation alive, but eventually I moved back to sit next to my mother and went to sleep, soaking up her reassurance without speaking. We arrived at last in the evening, after a final change in Portland onto a tiny local train, and I woke up to my mother pointing out the window.

“There’s Aunt Margery with the car,” she said.

Margery Wight was one of her many sisters, and the most important thing about her, as far as I was concerned, was that she had a daughter, Pamela. Pamela and I felt an automatic affinity because we were the closest to each other in age. She was thirteen that summer too, due to turn fourteen in September. I had turned thirteen in May, and therefore, though I thought of her as being my own age, she thought of me as being nearly a year younger than she was. Usually she didn’t let the gap interfere with our friendship, however. I was grateful to her for being the one person in the family I could justifiably call a playmate. She had two older brothers, both objects of fascination for me, and an older sister, Yvette, with whom she shared a bedroom at Shorecliff.

Pamela had come with Aunt Margery to pick us up in the old black rattletrap that was the only means to get to Shorecliff. Pensbottom, the nearest town with a railway station, was a shabby, boring, colorless place, miles inland from the coast. I remember almost nothing about it. Uncle Harold had once said that the town was as obscene as its name, and since the statement had quickly become a family legend, we tried to spend as little time as possible within the town’s boundaries. Shorecliff was a half-hour drive from the station, well away from Pensbottom’s obscenity and cleansed by the sharp air that blew in off the ocean.

My mother and I stepped off the train, and Margery, a heavy, full-figured woman, thudded forward to embrace my mother with a cry of “Caroline!” that made the other people on the platform turn their heads. Margery had been blessed with an enormous bust, and the men in the family joked that she had kept it all to herself. The other sisters were thin and agile, built like fine china and so flat-chested that the low-slung dresses of the era made them look like boys. My mother, I had always been proud to note, either possessed a more womanly figure or else dressed well enough to seem more feminine than most of her sisters did. However she did it, she looked like a proper woman. Aunt Margery, in contrast, needed no help at all. She crowded the rest of her sisters out. Each year I looked expectantly at Pamela’s upper body, waiting for her to follow suit, but she remained as obstinately flat as all the other women in the family.

She was standing by the car. While Aunt Margery smothered me with her bosom, I craned my neck to see the slim figure leaning against the rattletrap’s door. Pamela was wearing a blue dress, reminiscent of a sailor suit, and her blond hair was pulled back with a  ribbon on top and flowed halfway down her back. She claimed it was boring, but in the sunlight aureoles of gold would form around the ribbon. I loved to walk behind her and marvel at how round and luminous her head was. The day we arrived was cloudy, but I could see even from within Aunt Margery’s embrace that Pamela’s hair was glinting with light from somewhere.

Her greeting was notably less effusive than her mother’s had been. “Hello,” she said, moving away from the door.

“Hello,” I said.

Aunt Margery opened the back door for us—the front seat was taken up with Shorecliff’s weekly food supply—and we got in, Mother first, then me, then Pamela. Pamela looked out the window for most of the trip. Her habit of remaining silent and keeping her gray eyes averted always puzzled me—I could never decide whether the silence masked deep thought or mere serenity. Sometimes I suspected awkwardness, but if that was the case she veiled it masterfully. Whatever its cause, her reserve made her a perfect listener. I could talk at her for hours, and she would sit quietly, nodding at times and wandering over my face with her big, solemn eyes. When I finished she would decline to give me a single word of advice. If I was lucky, I might get an opinion. Needless to say, she sometimes exasperated me, but for the most part her quietness was well suited to fascinating an impetuous, imaginative boy like me, who rarely had anyone with whom I could share my innumerable ideas.

Pamela said nothing on the car ride, but Aunt Margery talked incessantly from the driver’s seat. “Everyone else is already here. You two are the last to arrive except for Tom, who’s still down at Harvard. He’s going to join us after the seventh. I heard, you know”—here she turned around and attempted to speak over the seat, the car swerving—“that he barely made it through his first year. Naturally Rose is keeping quiet. She always was closemouthed about her children, which I think is unnatural when you’re talking to your own sister. But that’s what Isabella said, and if she doesn’t know the truth about her brother, who will? The other children are here, and the men have already gone off on a hunting trip. Thank the Lord we women get at least part of the summer to ourselves! If you can say ‘ourselves’ when we’re stuck with all the children in a lunatic house—that’s what Edie calls it. Just imagine, we counted it all up last night: with you here now, we’ll have nineteen people in the house! When Tom comes it’ll be twenty. It’s beyond me how Charlie has no trouble being where his father and I want him to be, while Tom is always causing a fuss. He’s inherited Rose’s stubbornness if you ask me.”

Aunt Margery had a knack for talking rubbish that only avoided being intolerably boring by referring constantly to people we knew. Any news of the cousins was nectar to me, and Tom’s exploits at college rose before me full of potential, though in fact I never heard anything about them. On she talked, on we drove, and within half an hour we were approaching the towering white front of Shorecliff.

The house itself was a massive clapboarded box, with a little box built off of one side that contained the kitchen, a morning room, and some closets. The big box contained everything else—bedroom after bedroom, parlor after parlor, a library, a study, a dining room. It was a gargantuan mansion that had ceased moving forward in time at some point before the turn of the century, and I loved every inch of it. My favorite places were the telephone booth in the front hall and my little bedroom in the attic. We had no servants, the Hatfield money having been lost long before I was born. But the advantage of this was an array of bedrooms in the attic that had been fobbed off on us children. I had the last one, the original nesting place of the under-kitchen maid, no doubt. It was small, dark, musty, and cramped, but I had it all to myself, which was more than most of the other cousins could say.

Outside Shorecliff, at its front and sides, was a large, open expanse of grass. We all pretended it was a rolling lawn, but since the cliff for which the house was named dropped to the ocean only forty yards north of the building, the grass on the supposed lawn was salty and sea bitten, more dune grass than lawn grass. It cut our feet raw when we first came, but by the end of the summer those of us who had persevered in running barefoot had developed calluses able to withstand, for a few moments at least, the heat of a campfire.

There was nothing else around Shorecliff. The road stopped twenty feet from the front door, and a stretch of split-rail fence marked its end. I never understood that fence. It had perhaps five or six posts in all, and it kept nothing out and nothing in. There was no conceivable purpose to it, but it served as an excellent lookout post and climbing site. Away to the west, following the meandering line of the coast, was a stretch of woods, and if you walked through it for twenty minutes, you would pass first a little cottage and then the boundary of our property. Beyond the woods came civilization in the form of hayfields and cow barns. To the east of Shorecliff, after ten minutes’ walk through brambles and blueberries, came the shore again—more inviting, though still rocky and wave-battered, and the place where we did all our swimming. Shorecliff was truly a desolate place, a long way from any policeman, any doctor, any prying eye or gossiping mouth.

I saw the house first, over Pamela’s shoulder, and shouted with joy. All the enthusiasm in me that had expired on the train rose to life again. “There it is!” I cried. “I see it! We’re here, Mother, we’re really here!”

“Isn’t it wonderful,” sighed my mother.

“I saw it before you, didn’t I, Pamela? You weren’t watching for it, were you?”