Shorecliff (11 page)

“Can’t you explain it?” I ventured to sit on the bed, and she inched away from me toward the pillow.

“I’ll be better in the morning,” she said. Her voice now sounded snuffly and resigned.

I was itching to leave. “Did any of us do anything wrong?”

“Well, you obviously didn’t. You were gone all day with Fisher.”

“Did something happen today?”

“
No.
Go away.”

“Should I bring someone in to apologize?”

“No! No one’s done anything. It’s me. I’m fine. Go away.”

“Are you sure you won’t tell me what happened?”

Abruptly she lifted her head so that I could see her face, now blotchy with tears, and shouted, “Isn’t it obvious that I want to be left alone?”

That was enough to send me scuttling to the door, but it also wrung a flood of useless sympathy from me. I would have given anything to be able to comfort her. Seeing her ugly face was like a punch to the solar plexus.

There was nothing left to say, however. I slipped out, closing the door behind me, and went straight to my own room. The other cousins were waiting like sentinels at their bedroom doors, but I didn’t say a word to them. It was clear that they had heard the interaction from the hall. I was embarrassed and defeated, and all I wanted was to get away from inquiring eyes.

My mother didn’t come up to bid me good night that evening after dinner—an awkward and uncharacteristically quiet gathering—and I didn’t go down to her room. I think the aunts had decided it was best to leave all of us alone. Consequently, I stood for nearly an hour at my open window, looking through my telescope at the moon, which was pale and uninteresting but better than the ceiling. What I resented most was that Pamela’s inexplicable outburst had ruined my day with Fisher. Inevitably, whenever I thought of walking in the woods with him and seeing the Stephensons’ farm, I would also remember Pamela and her tear-covered face. Her one little outburst had as much emotional clout as an entire day of happiness—that’s what was so unfair. I suppose I wouldn’t remember that summer at Shorecliff so well if it hadn’t been for the bad times, but I wish I could remember only the moments of glory. Would they be any less glorious if they weren’t shadowed by misery?

Luckily for my peace of mind, there were many days at Shorecliff—at least in the first half of the summer—that didn’t end unsettlingly. On one marvelous occasion, not long after my walk with Fisher, the cousins closed the evening with a dance of joy, though we had dawdled through the earlier hours in ignorance of the holiday we were missing.

It was difficult to keep track of the days at Shorecliff. We had a number of clocks, some of them notoriously unreliable, but no calendars, and newspapers always arrived in a bunch a week late, when Aunt Margery drove to Pensbottom for supplies. The adults were usually better at remembering the date, but they were equally baffled when Uncle Kurt, one evening at the dinner table, said with a sudden grin, “Is anyone here aware of what day it is?” There was a chorus of “Well, let me see…” from the aunts and uncles. Then Kurt answered his own question: “The Fourth of July, of course!”

The room broke out in a deafening clamor. The Fourth of July, and we had wasted the whole day! Shock and chagrin rolled through the cousins. In New York the day was one of my favorites—swelteringly hot but filled with cheering crowds, the patter of firecrackers, and the rousing melodies of brass bands. At night fireworks would light up the sky over both rivers, so that nearly everyone in the city could catch a glimpse now and again.

Here in Shorecliff, we had heard not a peep. It had been a day like any other. Disappointment threatened to overwhelm me. Uncle Kurt was still talking, however. “The day may be over, but we’ve still got the evening. What’s for dessert?” He glanced at the aunts.

“Ice cream,” said Aunt Margery. “Caroline and I made it this morning.”

“Fine. We’ll take it out on the lawn. Go on, kids.”

Obediently we trooped outside into the dusk, not sure what we were supposed to do when we got there other than slap mosquitoes. Aunt Margery and my mother scooped out the ice cream and handed bowls through the kitchen’s screen door. We ate in a gloomy silence, broken every once in a while by Tom or Philip thinking of things we could have done that day but hadn’t.

“I bet they were selling firecrackers in Pensbottom,” said Tom.

“Hell, I bet they were selling bangsnaps and flags and watermelons and the whole works. Even a sleepy town like Pensbottom celebrates Independence Day.”

Uncle Kurt emerged to find eleven long faces drooping over empty bowls. “Well, boys and girls,” he said, still grinning. “Don’t look so down. See what I’ve got?”

He held out a slim box. It took us several seconds to realize it held sparklers. Our moods revived as if we had taken a miracle cure. To a background of shouts and clucks from the aunts, we threw down the bowls and held out our hands.

I lurked in the rear of the crowd. I had seen sparklers, of course, but never held one, and the thought of handling a live firework gave me a sinking feeling. Nevertheless, the older boys were delighted, so of course I had to be too. With a succession of pops and sputterings, sparkler after sparkler bloomed into life. The cousins raced and jumped over the grass, the stars in their hands tracing red tangles in the air.

“Ready, Richard?” said Kurt. He bent down, gave me a stick, and held a match to its end. “Keep it away from your face,” he said, and my mother called out, “Don’t go too close to the others, Richard!” I could hear the aunts murmuring more and more fearfully, though even they couldn’t help commenting on the beauty of the scene—eleven giant fireflies dancing across the lawn.

Mine was the lowest to the ground and the shakiest. I was mesmerized by the bright, joyful violence of it, but visions of a burnt hand haunted me. I leaped here and there, wondering how long sparklers stayed lit and what would happen if I dropped mine.

Fortunately Uncle Kurt, as he so often did, divined what I was thinking. He came over and said, “How about letting me have a try, kiddo? Cedric and Frank are battling over the last one, so there’s none for me.” Gratefully I handed it over, and for the last three or four minutes of the fireworks’ short lives, I could watch the cousins in peace as they twirled through the darkness, lit by showers of sparks.

W
e had been at Shorecliff for a little over a month when an event occurred that involved, at first, only Charlie and Francesca. When I heard about it, I both hoped and feared that it had been inspired by the moonlight swim I had thought up. Neither Charlie nor Francesca would have deigned to tell me about it, but Isabella was in on the plan from its inception, and after it happened I came to her room and asked what it had all been about. Obligingly she gave me a spirited account of the night before, and I spent most of the day filling in the blanks with my own fabricated speeches and scenes—for it was certainly an adventure to excite the imagination.

Francesca and Charlie had wandered into Isabella’s bedroom one night in search of a remedy for their boredom. Isabella’s room often served as a council chamber—she possessed the rare combination of being both an excellent listener and an unbeatable enthusiast. The other cousins were all in bed, with the exception of Fisher, who frequently went outside after dark to look at the stars and listen for night birds.

Charlie and Francesca flopped down on the spare bed, treating Isabella as a Complaints Bureau to whom they could air their grievances.

“There’s not one damn thing to see or person to talk to in this hellhole, and I want to get out and revive my dying life,” Francesca announced.

Isabella replied, “Why don’t you?” which caused momentary confusion but was soon taken as a suggestion to leave Shorecliff. Within minutes the plan had been born.

“Where would we go?” Charlie asked. His was always the voice of practicality, probably because he had so much experience in carrying out college pranks.

“Anywhere!” Francesca replied, eyes sparkling.

“Pensbottom is really your only choice, unless you want to go for more than one night,” Isabella said. From the first she assumed that only Charlie and Francesca would be involved in the escape—they were the oldest and thus the most immune to parental retribution.

“Not more than one night,” Charlie said. “We don’t want to lose our beds here or anything like that.”

“Who cares how long it’s for as long as we get out in the first place?” Francesca said. “We’ll go to Pensbottom if there’s nowhere else. How do we get there?”

“It’s obvious,” said Charlie, and they exclaimed at the same time, “The rattletrap!”

This was when Charlie became fully invested in the plan. Driving the rattletrap, no matter the destination, was something he yearned for as much as Francesca yearned for a new setting. They decided on the following night as the best time for their escape and spent the next hour talking excitedly about the details.

For some time they toyed with the idea of inviting Tom and Philip to join them. “The more the merrier!” Francesca cried at first. But they concluded that Philip would not be a good man for the job. “He’s too introspective for games like that,” Isabella told me afterward. “He’s much too serious. He wouldn’t see the point.”

“I don’t think he’s serious all the time,” I answered.

“Of course he has a lighter side,” Isabella said sharply. “All geniuses do.”

Tom’s candidacy lasted longer, but eventually they decided that he would rather dream about Lorelei than go with them. This was said half in jest, but I think it arose from a feeling of jealousy. Tom, after all, was already having an adventure. The question ended when Charlie sighed, “Lucky bastard.” Having heard Uncle Kurt as well as Charlie use the word, I looked up “bastard” in the dictionary later and found “illegitimate child.” When I looked up “illegitimate,” it gave a series of definitions, one of which was “when pertaining to children, born out of wedlock.” I looked up “wedlock” and found “marriage.” With these clues my infant brain deduced that I should be having doubts about Aunt Rose and her husband. This will show what a sheltered life I led. The possibility that Rose and Cedric had never been properly married occupied me for a while, but in the end I decided that “lucky bastard” must be simply affectionate slang.

Finally Francesca said it would be better with just the two of them anyway, and I can easily imagine in what manner she said it, her eyebrows raised, that unforgettable feline expression creeping across her face.

The next night began smoothly. At one o’clock, the hour they had appointed as the earliest at which all aunts and uncles would be asleep, Francesca and Charlie tiptoed down to the front door. Isabella waved good-bye from the top of the stairs. Charlie was wearing his usual outfit of brown slacks and light shirt, but Francesca had on a black skirt, a black blouse, and a black shawl around her shoulders. Isabella was particularly struck by the shawl. We had no idea where Francesca had found it—we guessed one of Shorecliff’s many closets—and we couldn’t figure out why she would want to wear it. Nevertheless, it added to the mood. “She looked like a gypsy!” Isabella told me, and that, I suspect, was the desired effect.

Francesca and Charlie galloped across the yard to the fence, where the rattletrap was languishing from lack of use. They hopped in, and Charlie, who had lifted the key from its hook in the kitchen, started the car. The rattletrap always made a terrific noise when the engine first came to life, and they must have spent a good few moments frozen with apprehension as the car cleared its throat and prepared for action. No one emerged from the house, however, and soon Charlie and Francesca were bouncing along on the road to Pensbottom, giddy with the success of their departure.

God knows what they talked about on that half-hour drive to town. When I imagined Charlie and Francesca in the rattletrap, I could picture their faces and postures and expressions, but the words themselves were inaudible. Charlie was in the driver’s seat, his big athlete’s hands clasping the wheel in what was meant to be a casual, experienced way, though inside he must have been thrilled by driving, not to mention by the beauty in the passenger seat. Francesca would have been lounging beside him, stretching her glorious legs, insinuating herself all over the seat, maybe even putting her arm across his shoulders, and then ruining her own effect with the spontaneous, rippling laugh that was such an essential part of her seductive powers. The contrast between her attempts to be an enchantress and her mockery of those same attempts made her absolutely irresistible. Certainly Charlie couldn’t withstand her. His blond hair plastered to his red face, he laughed at her, egged her on, and reveled in every second of her attention—though he probably didn’t take it any more seriously than she did, at least not in those early days.

In spite of Francesca’s enthusiasm, Pensbottom was not the ideal scene for excitement, and a letdown was inevitable. Besides the train station, the town boasted a cluster of residential houses, a post office, a market, a general goods store, a church, and one strange and pathetic attempt at a museum that was nothing more than a converted colonial house. The place had none of the invigorating fresh air of a seaside village and none of the clean, wholesome friendliness of a Midwestern settlement. It was just a backwoods town, filled with uninteresting inhabitants—though my view, of course, was colored by years of Hatfield scorn. In any case, there was nothing for two young adventurers to do there. In that respect it was greatly inferior to the beach.

When Charlie and Francesca arrived in Pensbottom, they drove to the train station, partly out of habit and partly because it was the first turnoff when coming from Shorecliff. They rattled along until they had reached the tracks, and then, somewhat uncertainly, Charlie switched off the engine. They listened for a while to the total silence that enveloped the town. The stationhouse was dark and abandoned, the platform equally so. Not a single person roamed the village.

“Well,” said Francesca, turning to Charlie, “what do we do?” At that moment, Francesca later reported, they both felt like “incredible idiots.” Nevertheless, they held on to enough of their enthusiasm to get out and explore. They left the rattletrap by the station, thinking it would be the best place to stage a getaway if one became necessary, and went into town on foot.

“If only there were a nightclub—or a speakeasy,” Francesca sighed.

“Why, what would you do if there was one?” Charlie asked.

“I’d stroll up and say, ‘Give me a martini with a twist, bartender.’” She smiled and sashayed to Charlie’s side. Then she broke the pose, chuckling. “That’s my mother’s drink of choice.”

“My mother doesn’t drink,” replied Charlie.

“What a surprise—Aunt Margery isn’t a drinker. Let’s go, Charlie.”

When Isabella was telling me the story, she said, “Of course they wouldn’t really have gone into a speakeasy.” But I wasn’t so sure. Alcohol loomed large in our family as a vice abhorred by the aunts above all others—I wasn’t sure why, except that they disapproved of intemperance in general. But Francesca, I knew, was capable of anything, so the fact that Prohibition was still in place made the story much more comfortable.

The destination Charlie and Francesca finally decided on was comic in its contrast with illegal drinking establishments. When they turned onto Main Street, they saw the steeple of the church, and Charlie said, “Do you want to see if it’s open?”

“Are you planning to desecrate the altar?” Francesca asked.

“Of course not.” Charlie was genuinely insulted at her question. “I just want to see what it’s like inside.”

“Does that count as breaking in?”

“You can’t break into a church. They’re open to everybody. I think.”

“But what if we’re caught?”

“We’ll say we wanted to come in to find shelter and pray.”

“For our lost parents,” Francesca giggled.

The church was a typical Protestant house of worship, an austere white building that looked gray in the darkness, with a squat steeple and wide front steps leading up to double doors. The doors weren’t locked, and Charlie and Francesca slipped in without making a sound. The inside was lit only by the faint glow coming through the windows, and since the moon was a crescent that night, it was almost impossible to see anything. They walked slowly down the aisle, keeping their hands on the pews to guide them and getting an impression of a lot of open space over their heads. Their eyes adjusted eventually, but Francesca said there wasn’t much to see. By the far wall was a white altar.

According to Isabella, Francesca told this part of the story very seriously, as if something important and meaningful had happened in the church. “She said it was as if a woolen quilt had fallen all around them, muffling them from the outside world. A great peace settled on her soul, and she felt a contentment she had never felt before. At the same time she felt uplifted, as if she were expanding to fill the church, and a light seemed to shine in her mind!”

“Did she really say all that?” I knew perfectly well Francesca would never have said anything of the sort.

“Well, no,” said Isabella, breaking from her narration. “I got that from a book I read once where the character converts to the Catholic Church. That’s exactly what it feels like when you convert, at least according to that book.”

“But Francesca wasn’t converting. What did she actually say?”

“She just said that it was silent and peaceful and that it killed their mood completely, but she still didn’t want to leave.”

“That’s more like it.”

“You have no flair for the dramatic, Richard.”

After a moment or two Charlie turned to Francesca and said, “It’s pretty solemn in here, isn’t it? Sort of gives me the creeps.”

Francesca smiled ruefully. “It’s certainly put a damper on the night anyway. Should we leave?”

“No. I like it in here.”

“So do I. But,” she added with an effort, “we can’t stand around here all night doing nothing. What would we tell the others?”

When Charlie and Francesca closed the door behind them and stood on the church portico, they felt as one does after emerging from a cave or a musty old house—as if the outside air has never been so fresh. All their excitement came rushing back redoubled.

“Let’s take the town by storm!” Charlie said.

Francesca was laughing at this idea as they made their way down the steps, and so she didn’t notice the man standing at the bottom. Neither cousin had seen him. He took her arm with the abruptness of a ghost appearing in a movie.

“Hey, you kids!” he said. “What are you doing in the church at this hour?”

First Francesca screamed—“like a stupid schoolgirl,” she told Isabella. But then her better nature recovered itself. She jerked her arm out of the man’s grasp and said, “We were praying for our dead parents!” before breaking into a storm of laughter.

“Run!” roared Charlie, and they pelted down the street.

The man ran after them, shouting at them to stop, and lights started flicking on in a few windows over the shops. At first the man called them “kids,” but then Charlie heard him shout, “Church vandals!” and started to get worried.

“We didn’t take anything—honest!” he yelled, not slowing down. He told Francesca to hold her hands out so the man could see there was nothing in them.

“We looked like two chickens who had just been axed,” Francesca told Isabella. “There we were, running with our heads down and our hands waving on either side of us. We looked like a couple of ninnies.” Her eyes were shining as she said it. That chase down Main Street had made the whole trip worthwhile. “It’s not every night you’re accused of vandalizing a church,” she said.

When the man saw their empty hands he slowed down, and then another man appeared in a doorway and called, “What’s going on, Charlie?”

“That nearly foiled us,” Francesca said later. “Charlie, idiot that he is, skids to a halt. It never occurred to him that he has a ridiculously common name. I don’t think the men noticed, though. So I grabbed him and kept on running.”

As they turned the corner to go to the train station, they heard the other Charlie saying, “A couple of kids goofing around in the church, damn their eyes. It’s shameless behavior, shameless.”

“Did you see their faces?” said the second man.

“No, I didn’t get a good look at them. The girl has a head of dark curly hair, though. And the boy’s blond.”