Shorecliff (18 page)

“But Francesca?” Edie insisted.

My mother sighed. “I don’t know. Loretta’s own set is generous about these things, I believe. They won’t have been the ones spreading the rumors, so maybe they’ll be polite enough to ignore the whole business. The more sensible women might even be especially kind to Francesca—I’d like to think so. But one thing’s certain,” she added as Edie opened her mouth to speak. “The last thing Francesca is worried about right now is her position in society. She’s grieving over her mother, not herself. Hearing the story the way she did must have been an awful experience, especially for someone like Francesca—so headstrong and wholehearted about everything. She doesn’t need anything more to worry about, and you shouldn’t add to her burden by bringing this up with her.”

“Of course not,” said Edie. “But someone needs to think about it.”

“I’ll talk to Loretta, and we’ll see what can be done. In any case, I hope we’re not the type of hidebound family who thinks Francesca’s life will be made or broken by the number of names on her dance card.” She cocked an eyebrow at Edie and in doing so caught sight of me hanging over the railing. “Run away, Richard,” she said.

She spoke affectionately but firmly, and as a result I didn’t hear a word of her phone conversation with Loretta. Instead I went upstairs to ponder the array of ominous phrases I had picked up from Edie’s remarks.

For the next few days I felt so shaken by the typhoon of emotions in the house that I, like Cordelia, spent a great deal of time alone in my room. Interacting with the cousins frightened me. The Ybarra children were set apart, and the other cousins tiptoed around them for fear of saying something out of place. Our jazz parties were a thing of the past, and when I went into Tom and Philip’s room one evening, I saw that Philip had dismantled his Victrola. We could not listen to music, much less dance, when Aunt Loretta was in such straits. Everyone who had heard Delia’s halting description of her mother alone in New York was tormented by the thought that no one was comforting Loretta. Pamela was especially dismayed by the idea. She would come to my room and sit wordlessly next to me on the bed, and after a while she would say, “It’s so horrible. Just horrible. Imagine everyone laughing at her, and she’s all by herself, and there’s nothing she can say to make them understand.”

Our solemnity infected all of Shorecliff. Even the air seemed tamped down, as if the house had been muffled. Uncle Kurt, who had returned from hunting with Frank and Cedric only the day before my father arrived, said one evening at the dinner table that he was afraid they had made a mistake and come back to the wrong address. The joke didn’t go over well. Uncle Kurt’s gaze traveled to each of the Ybarra children in turn as they picked at their food. I usually treasured the fact that he limited his niece-and-nephew attention to me, but when I saw him eyeing the Ybarras, I felt relieved. Uncle Kurt, of all the adults, seemed most well equipped to handle sadness.

I was thus only momentarily surprised when, four or five days later, I knocked on Uncle Kurt’s door and found Cordelia sitting by his desk. I stared at her, thinking how novel it was to encounter her without another Delia by her side. Her grief had redefined her as an individual, and by doing so it had made her once again a stranger.

“Good morning, Richard,” Uncle Kurt said. “Delia and I were just having a talk. Would you mind coming back later?” Delia didn’t look at me.

“No, I don’t mind,” I said.

“Thanks, buddy,” said Uncle Kurt. He had picked up the habit of calling me “buddy” from hearing Tom and Philip say it so often.

An hour later, when Delia came out, I happened to be on the stairs. She didn’t seem as if she were about to cry, so I risked a question. “What did you talk about?”

“Lots of things,” she said. I felt almost happy at hearing her disdainful voice. She spoke as if she considered me infinitely younger and more ignorant than she was, but it sounded wonderful because that was the way she always spoke to me—her voice was no longer plangent with tears.

“Did Uncle Kurt tell you a story?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he mention Hennessey?”

“Who’s Hennessey?”

“What did he tell you about?”

“Let him tell you if he wants to. I’m not going to say it all over again.”

I was painfully jealous that Uncle Kurt had told her a story I had not yet heard, but I couldn’t get up the courage to ask him about it. Instead I waited on tenterhooks for the cousin grapevine to pull through. Eventually, it did. Cordelia, coming across Delia Robierre sitting sadly in their room, at last relented and sat down next to her. Hearing their voices, Isabella ran down to find them talking earnestly, gazing into each other’s faces the way they always did when wrapped up in a story or a plan. Another cousin might have discreetly slipped away, but Isabella burst in, declaring how happy she was to see them together again. As soon as she heard that Delia Ybarra had been conversing with Uncle Kurt, she ran to find Francesca, and together the two older girls demanded all the details of the story Kurt had told. Soon afterward, with her usual dramatic flair, Isabella told the story to me.

One of Uncle Kurt’s most beloved officers had been named Captain Kerrigan. Delia couldn’t remember where Kurt had been stationed at the time or what his company was doing there—details I would never have neglected—but she knew that Uncle Kurt idolized Captain Kerrigan. All the men loved him. Through the heaviest gunfire he not only kept his cool but remained compassionate toward the men in his charge. Many of the officers, at least according to Uncle Kurt, were monsters of discipline who considered kindness a flaw in an officer’s character. But Captain Kerrigan didn’t subscribe to that mindset, and he gained almost perfect obedience from his company.

Their devotion was augmented by his unflinching bravery. Apparently he was once sitting in an empty lookout post, comforting a private who had been frightened into gibberish by a recent attack, when an unexploded shell hurtled down and thumped into the mud right next to them. The private shrieked and scrambled down the trench in a panic, but Captain Kerrigan glanced at the shell, stood up as casually as if he were getting out of bed, and walked away without looking back. The private described this incident to the rest of the company, and from that point on Captain Kerrigan had the loyalty of every man under his command.

One day another private was making Captain Kerrigan’s bed—really just an army cot. When he lifted up the mattress—an old, moldy, hay-filled mattress plundered from an abandoned peasant’s cottage—he found a stack of photographs held together with a piece of string. They were pornographic photographs, showing naked women in all sorts of horrible positions and doing things, as Uncle Kurt told Delia, that no one would ever want to see a woman doing. “Of course,” Kurt said, “nine out of every ten soldiers had pictures of women tucked away somewhere, lots of them racy enough to lay your Aunt Edie out flat. But these were different. They weren’t just racy—they made you sick.” Delia reported this statement word for word, upon Francesca’s request, but that was as much detail as we got about the photographs, and for a long time I had to make do with Philip’s curt definition of pornography—“sex pictures.” My own dictionary, in a return to nineteenth-century vagueness, defined it as “books or photographs of an explicit and compromising nature.”

The private who found the pictures felt horribly guilty at discovering Captain Kerrigan’s secret weakness. He was so bewildered that he walked straight out and showed the pictures to Uncle Kurt, who also felt that Captain Kerrigan had been defiled. How could they respect him, knowing that every night he was lusting over disgusting images? Uncle Kurt made his friend put the photographs back, and when Captain Kerrigan went into the dugout that night, neither Kurt nor his friend made any comment. They didn’t tell the other men in the company. It was heartbreaking enough that they themselves wouldn’t be able to think of him anymore without connecting him to pornography of the vilest sort.

Uncle Kurt told Delia that for a long time he didn’t even like to speak to Captain Kerrigan because he felt too guilty knowing the captain’s secret and too disgusted by the secret itself. But Captain Kerrigan was Kurt’s commanding officer, and he had to interact with him every day, whether he wanted to or not. Captain Kerrigan never guessed that anyone had discovered the pictures, and eventually Uncle Kurt found himself pretending that he didn’t know about them, or at least forgetting their existence for long stretches of time. He ended up feeling more affectionate toward Captain Kerrigan than before, simply because he knew that underneath the captain’s godlike exterior was a man as fallible as the rest of them.

“No one,” Uncle Kurt told Delia, “is so courageous and so strong that he has no weaknesses. Your mother is no different from anyone else. All of us are upset by her situation because so many people know about her weakness. But all of us also know what a magnificent woman she is. Just because she has a weakness doesn’t mean she’s any less the person we love.” Then he asked her, “Do you think she’s done anything wrong?” and Delia said, “I wish she wouldn’t do it for the money.” Uncle Kurt said, “Do you know for sure that’s why she’s doing it?” Delia agreed that she didn’t, and Uncle Kurt told her to withhold judgment until they had more information. He was wise in this suggestion, for as I said, we later found out that Aunt Loretta had been involved notoriously with only one man, and she had refused to accept presents from him.

Delia said that Uncle Kurt had spoken to her in a way no one else ever had. Francesca didn’t find his story nearly as comforting as Delia did and was scornful at how much faith her sister put in his reassurances. But I understood why Delia had been relieved. It was not so much what he said as how he said it, the way he looked at you while he was speaking, that made Uncle Kurt’s stories so magical. He could deliver a riveting tale and all the while make you feel that his attention was riveted on you.

The day after I found Delia in his room, I knocked on his door. The first thing he asked was “How are you feeling, trooper?”

I told him I didn’t like seeing all the cousins so upset, and he said, “I couldn’t agree with you more, Richard. I couldn’t agree with you more. Are you upset?”

In all honesty, I hadn’t been hit as hard as they had been, and after a moment of deliberation I said, “Only because they are.”

Uncle Kurt laughed and said, “That’s the way of the world, kiddo.” He was full of taglines like that. No matter how hackneyed, they seemed profound when he said them, and once again I felt bowled over by his infinite knowledge.

The Aunt Loretta Incident, as I thought of it, never really went away. Francesca permanently lost her earlier manner, and we could all feel the remnants of shock lurking underneath our daily routine, as if a poisonous gas were leaking up to us from New York. But gradually things went more or less back to normal. The adults were eager to bury the incident and pretend it had never happened. I sympathized with them, since I believed their determination stemmed from an anxiety not to have their summer ruined any further. The Ybarra children took longer than the aunts and uncles, but eventually they too seemed to make a decision not to think about their mother unless forced to do so.

About a week after my father’s visit, we woke up to an overcast day, gray and cloudy. On such days Shorecliff fell victim to a cruelly cold wind off the ocean, a wind that felt impossible during the summertime, as if just beyond our sight a winter storm had whipped itself up over the waves and were blowing toward us. No one did anything that afternoon. The older cousins shut themselves in their rooms. They often did this, excluding me and Pamela. The aunts were in the dining room, surrounding a pile of mending like a flock of hens gathered around a heap of seed. Pamela, with what I considered snooty disdain, declined to play with me. In desperation I decided to go out. My mother was surprised and alarmed. She became almost like Aunt Edie during bad weather—it called up unreasonable fears that I would catch cold. I swathed myself in a sweater and jacket and insisted on stepping out the front door. Once beyond her grasp, I was glad I had insisted. The cold air slapped at me, but it was a refreshing slap, and I felt wide awake. After a few moments of deliberation I stumped off, a lone intrepid explorer, toward the cliff.

The cliff played a central role in our life at Shorecliff. We used it as a path to walk along, a lookout place, a focal point for our daily play. The adults were not happy about this, for the cliff, though it descended down to the surf in great rocky ledges rather than one sheer face, remained dangerous. There are limits to the powers of adult regulation, however, and with the cliff only forty yards from the house, they couldn’t keep us away from it. Of course, it was the danger that drew us. The risk joined with the possibility of exploring was a combination no child could resist.

Near Shorecliff the coast turned sharply. If you walked west along it, you could trace a line above the patch of woods hiding Condor’s cottage and see a glimpse of the Stephenson farm before the coast swung northward again. I had found Tom meandering along that elbow of the coastline more than once. He would grin sheepishly and assume I knew why he was there, which I did. Tom’s visits to Lorelei had tapered off drastically during the week after my father’s visit—he must have felt uncomfortable enjoying himself when his cousins were unhappy. After a few days, though, his enforced celibacy became too difficult, and when Lorelei appeared at the screen door of the kitchen one day, he swooped down on her, becoming once again an ephemeral figure in our lives.

The afternoon of my bad-weather walk, I assumed the cliff would be deserted, and indeed the stretch I initially approached, the portion behind Shorecliff, seemed utterly desolate. I watched the gray sea for a while—it was singularly unappetizing in its overcast state and melted into the clouds not far out from shore. I decided to walk east toward the beach where we swam, and after five minutes of desultory strolling I was surprised to see two figures coming into view above the brambles and blueberries.