Shorecliff (19 page)

By the time I was within fifteen yards, I could see by their dark heads that they were Ybarras, and a few more feet revealed Philip and Delia. The pairing was an unexpected one, as odd as Tom with Pamela or Francesca with Fisher. In my experience, Philip and Delia treated each other with the distant respect of siblings who have nothing in common but also no grounds for quarreling. Now, watching their backs as they stared out to sea, I realized they did have something in common. For all her usual sparkle and flash, Cordelia had within her the same smoldering passion that Philip had, and she possessed, like him, a fierce and deep-rooted loyalty. It made sense for the two of them to seek each other out during an Ybarra catastrophe, and even more sense that they would do so privately, in accordance with Philip’s penchant for secrecy. I felt on seeing them a ripple of the pleasure one gains at discovering something logical, a piece that enhances rather than destroys the puzzle.

The sight also made me think of Philip in his capacity as a brother, a role I did not often consider where he was concerned. I imagined what it would be like to be the middle Ybarra child, with Francesca on one side and Cordelia on the other. The position seemed more intimidating than appealing—I couldn’t picture myself standing up to either girl. Later that evening, during dinner, I watched Tom and Delia Robierre as they giggled together across the table, and I realized that Tom too was an older brother and had grown up with an adoring Delia. This time I was seized with envy. I had spent a great deal of time that summer wishing I could insinuate myself into another branch of the Hatfield family, but it had always been as the youngest and most insignificant member. To have a younger sibling of my own—someone who would look up to me, respect me, perhaps even admire me—this was a fantasy I had never woven before.

We all knew, moreover, that Delia Robierre took Tom’s word as law, no matter what absurdities he produced. Her gullibility was a running joke among the cousins. Whenever Tom elicited from her an awed “Really?” and the rest of the cousins roared with laughter, I stayed in the background, congratulating myself on having avoided their mockery. But now I imagined myself in Tom’s place as the worldly-wise brother leading his younger sister down the garden path. It was a new aspect of family life for me to explore, and I daydreamed about it from that time onward.

Of course, no one could live with the extended Hatfield family for a summer and not realize that having younger siblings can also be a disadvantage. When I found Philip and Cordelia on the cliff, I soon saw the drawbacks in action.

It was impossible to approach anyone along that stretch of cliff without being seen, so I didn’t attempt to hide. Instead I strode through the brambles, breaking branches at every step and raising a hand in greeting—the image of an innocent walker, free of all intention to eavesdrop. When Philip and Delia finally turned around, I smiled and trotted across the remaining distance. “Hello,” I said. “I was just taking a walk. I didn’t know you were out here.”

Philip laughed. “Richard finds his way everywhere,” he said. “People who aren’t in the loop think there can be privacy at Shorecliff—in their bedrooms or outside. But we know better, don’t we, Richard? No matter where we are, you’ll find a way to be there too, a few steps behind.”

“He could be Shorecliff’s ghost,” said Delia. Her comments to me were usually dismissive, but today she seemed to be including me in the joke.

“Richard,” Philip said, beginning to walk along the cliff. He obviously expected me to fall into step beside him, so I did. Delia strolled along a pace or two behind us. “I’ve just been telling Delia that we should devote ourselves to higher learning and the examination of man. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. This was usually the most acceptable as well as the most honest answer.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it, Delia,” he went on, tossing the words over his shoulder, “since the foibles of man are what we’re trying to avoid.”

“You’ll make a great professor one day,” she replied. “You love to hear yourself talk. I think it’s stupid. You’re not saying anything at all.”

There lay the peril of a younger sister—she was apt to be sarcastic just when you most wanted unquestioning support. But I too thought Philip sounded pompous, and it spoiled the glamour of his loftiness. Even though I didn’t understand what he was saying, I recognized pretension when I heard it.

“The uncles are planning another hunting trip in a few days,” I said, rescuing him by changing the subject.

“That’s great for them. They have an escape.”

“But they said we could do something exciting tomorrow, if the sun comes out.”

“That would be a nice change.”

“I think it would be neat if we all went somewhere together—the aunts and uncles too.”

“Maybe we should devote ourselves to what Richard wants for the rest of the summer. What do you think, Delia?”

“It would probably be the best thing we could do,” she said.

She didn’t seem to be speaking sarcastically, and I was so startled to hear something friendly from her that I didn’t say anything more. Of all the cousins, Cordelia was normally the last to be interested in my wants and welfare. But she was also the one most liable to bring out surprises, as I had discovered in the past week. For several minutes I felt buoyed up invincibly. I was relieved to see her outside, seeking the solace of Philip’s wisdom, even if she did reply to it with barbed remarks. It seemed proof that the Ybarras were once more prepared to philosophize and bicker and offer me the snatches of camaraderie I found so thrilling. Though certainly not carefree, they were no longer acting as if their mother’s disgrace had crushed them into complete dejection, and I dared to hope that their willingness to talk to me heralded a return to cheerful days.

T
he exciting thing that my uncles had planned was a surprise picnic dinner. Unexpectedly, it was Uncle Cedric who spearheaded the venture. Emerging from his cocoon of silent observation, he announced his plan, organized the trip, ordered picnic foods from the aunts, suggested that we bring the tools of both athletes and naturalists, and selected the path we were to follow—west along the cliff until it curved northward and then inland to a small meadow that he had discovered on a hunting trip several years ago. Eberhardt and Edie declined to accompany us, and Uncle Kurt, to my disappointment, begged off, using his writing as an excuse. The other aunts and Uncle Frank laughingly agreed to come along, but Cedric was the leader. It was the first time that summer that either he or Frank played any sort of role in family events. As if to give its blessing to the expedition, the sun shone brightly and dispelled, at least for a while, the shadows my father had cast around the house.

Francesca didn’t come with us that afternoon, but the other cousins were all there: Fisher, bursting with delight at the thought of conversing scientifically with Uncle Cedric on our several-mile hike; Delia and Delia, appearing together for the first time after Delia Ybarra’s days of invisibility; Charlie and Tom, eager to walk with the uncles; Yvette, Pamela, and Isabella in a trio, looking beautiful against the green grass and sunny sky; and Philip, as so often, walking alone.

Pamela was exceptionally agreeable on this expedition, and I spent most of my time with her after we arrived at the hidden field. During the hike I stayed by my mother’s side, where I could observe my cousins unnoticed. Once we got to the meadow, the aunts formed a cluster on a blanket in one sunlit corner, the uncles spread out a miniature camp in another, and the cousins claimed all the territory in between, racing back and forth for sheer joy at being in an alien field. This field had the additional advantage of being situated in an unexpected location within a depressingly dark forest. When Uncle Cedric first led us into the wood, we all groaned in unison, but the abrupt transition from damp pine needles to cushion-soft grass made the gloomy interlude worth it. It would have been impossible to predict the meadow’s existence had Uncle Cedric not promised it to us ahead of time. We stood on its edge, feasting our eyes on the sunlight over the sloping expanse, and Uncle Cedric said, “It’s all ours. There’s no one else around for miles.”

Charlie and Tom arranged a game of badminton, and Fisher, who had belied his frail figure by heroically lugging the bocce balls all the way from Shorecliff, began to coax various cousins into the game. Yvette proved surprisingly adept, and soon the badminton players abandoned their tournament to contest her superiority. Charlie could never resist an athletic challenge. Philip and Isabella and even Uncle Frank joined in. I was debating the pros and cons of taking part—the possible glory of making a hit balanced by the shame of being unable to throw a bocce ball more than a few feet—when Pamela appeared at my side and said, “Let’s explore the border.” She often made suggestions of this sort, giving me a kernel of an idea to work with and then looking on as I nourished it to life. Now she walked by my side as I instructed her on the proper way to conduct a border patrol, using the terminology Uncle Kurt had been feeding me all summer. We discovered that the underbrush was especially thick around the edge of the field—part of its allure, since it made the place seem more private—and that if you hid in the bushes only a few yards away from someone else, you became very difficult to find. Much of the afternoon was spent analyzing this phenomenon.

We were still at it when we observed the most interesting aspect of Uncle Cedric’s picnic. I was crouched in a holly bush, trying to ignore the pokes and jabs from its serrated leaves and waiting for Pamela’s bland face to stare into mine when she finally found my hiding place. Through the branches I could catch glimpses of the field, sunlit cracks that yielded fleeting views of the cousins. In one light-filled slice I suddenly caught sight of Philip and Isabella, walking together toward the meadow’s edge. This was an unusual combination and an intriguing one. I knew of Isabella’s fascination with Philip, of course. Ever since the day Delia Ybarra had almost drowned, Isabella had been drawn to the lofty secrecy that hung around him. Philip, however, never seemed to have much time for her, at least not more time than he had for any of the cousins except Tom. Other than tossing me a word or two during a game or joking with me in the evenings as I passed his door to brush my teeth, Philip had hardly spoken to me, and I suspected that for most of us the story was the same. Yet here he was with Isabella, trailing off toward the far end of the field.

Luckily for me, the trajectory of my game of Hide and Seek with Pamela led in their direction, so I didn’t have to point them out when her blond head appeared. I wasn’t sure how she would take a confidence of this sort—one that verged on being gossip. I suspected she would look at me with half-closed eyes and say in her best impersonation of Yvette, “I don’t know why you would mention that.”

If Pamela noticed that our game was speeding up, she didn’t say anything. I found her with record speed and concealed myself in absurdly ill-chosen spots. We advanced around the edge of the field, and eventually, as I leaned against the soft bark of a beech tree, I could crane my head and see Philip and Isabella walking aimlessly back and forth by the border, like sheep presented with a picket fence. It was obvious that they were using the walk as an excuse to talk—their heads, one black and one brown, like the Delias’ heads when they conversed, were bent intimately toward each other. I saw a flash of Isabella’s wide eyes as she stared at Philip’s face.

Pretense at this point had to be abandoned. When Pamela found me and said, “That wasn’t a very good hiding place at all,” I replied, “Never mind that now. I want to hear what they’re saying.”

Pamela attempted to see the cousins in question and crashed into a bush with unpardonable carelessness. “It’s just Philip and Isabella.”

“Quiet!” I hissed. “I’m going to crawl forward and listen. You don’t have to come.”

“I wouldn’t want to,” she sniffed. “It would be eavesdropping.”

“Tell it to your sister,” I said, turning away. I had picked up retorts like that from the older cousins, especially Tom.

Thanks to the thick undergrowth, I was able to weasel my way to within a few feet of Philip and Isabella without being noticed.

“Do you really think that’s the way it should be, though?” Isabella was saying, sounding more serious than I had ever heard her.

“That’s the way it is, like it or not,” answered Philip.

A shout erupted from the other end of the field. “Philip! Isabella! Come back here. It’s time for dinner.”

Philip turned to Isabella, and for a fraction of a second he looked awkward. “I guess we should go back,” he said.

Isabella answered with a shy smile and a shrug. “Guess so.” They turned toward the others, Isabella with studied casualness. I could see her smile growing irresistibly into a grin. As they walked back, her legs became more and more unruly, until she was bouncing along at Philip’s side like a puppy. Philip glanced at her and laughed his philosopher’s laugh. Isabella laughed too and steadied herself, but I had read everything from her limbs.

What surprised me, however, was that, different as Isabella’s goofy gestures were from Yvette’s icy stares at Tom, they conveyed the same message. It disconcerted me to realize that I now understood something about Isabella because of my earlier observation of Yvette. As for Philip, I had never seen him behave awkwardly before, but there had been uncertainty in his manner with Isabella, as if he didn’t know quite how he had landed there and was not willing to admit how much it pleased him.

“Do you know where Pamela and Richard are?” Uncle Cedric bellowed.

“Let’s go. They’re calling us,” Pamela said from behind me.

I turned around, gloating that she had followed me after prissily refusing to eavesdrop. But my gloating soon turned to alarm—she was preparing to plunge out into the open at exactly the point where Philip and Isabella had been standing.

“Not there,” I said, grabbing her arm. “It will be obvious we’ve been listening to them. We have to go farther on.”

“I wasn’t listening to them.”

“Yes, you were. You were right behind me.”

“I just came to pull you away.”

“It’s obvious that you came to hear what they were saying.”

We were still arguing when we emerged at last onto the grass, and at once we were confronted by the searching faces of the two people I had been trying to avoid. Isabella almost cannoned into us. “There you are!” she said. “It’s time for dinner.”

She tossed her head and, to my immense satisfaction, left Philip to Pamela in favor of racing me down to the other end of the field, where the aunts had spread a luxurious repast on a red gingham cloth. Aunt Margery was responsible for the little details that made our expeditions seem like entries in a booklet of American traditions. There were sandwiches for all, each according to our tastes, and several types of pies for dessert—blueberry, rhubarb, lemon.

While we were eating Charlie related the events of the bocce game. Yvette, to everyone’s surprise, had held her own against the onslaught of more than half a dozen relatives and carried her team to victory. Charlie was still in shock.

“And what were you two doing?” my mother asked me.

“We were exploring the border,” I replied.

I didn’t say anything more; I had no intention of revealing our whereabouts or allowing Pamela to say anything about my tendency to overhear things. Instead I watched Philip and Isabella closely. Philip had returned to Tom’s side, and Isabella was sitting by herself at one corner of the gingham cloth, apparently lost in contemplation of her sandwich. I inched my way over to her, and she smiled at me absentmindedly. Clearly I would learn nothing more until I could talk to her in private.

For a while we concentrated on the business of eating, enjoying a leisurely meal. At last, however, as Aunt Margery sliced up the pies, conversation revived, and the talk drifted to the subject of dancing. A few of the cousins stood up to prance over the field, and Yvette soaked up some praise from the adults for her unaccompanied Charleston. We were not a musical family, in spite of our penchant for jazz, and all of us that evening regretted not being able to complement our outbursts of energy with melodies. Isabella and Tom cavorted around the circle, and then my mother said, “Rose has told me about your talent in that direction, Cedric. Won’t you show us a step or two?”

Cedric smiled into his mustache and shook his head. “Certainly not. I couldn’t do it now. It’s been years,” he said.

Aunt Rose glared at him. She had been in her element, lording over the picnic baskets and doling out food with the exactitude of a drill sergeant. Consequently her color was up, her eyes were glittering, and she would not tolerate rebellion in her mate. “Of course you’ll remember it,” she said. “Cedric,” she added to Uncle Frank, “won several prizes for his Irish step dancing when we were newlyweds.”

The Hatfields have no Irish blood in them, nor have the Robierres, who as far as I know are wholly French in origin. I had no idea where Cedric could have picked up the art of step dancing, but after a few more moments of hesitation, he got to his feet amid applause from the cousins. Tom, Isabella, and Delia Robierre were laughing—they had seen their father in action many times. “Just you wait,” Tom said to Philip. “This is one of Dad’s greatest
talents
.”

Cedric stood in front of us, his shirt and trousers hanging loosely on his thin frame. The field was bathed in the last of the daylight, the almost blue glow that comes before the sun disappears. Uncle Cedric’s face as he looked down at us was in shadow, and because he was standing with his back to the sun, we had to squint to see him.

“I haven’t done this for years,” he repeated. Then he added, with a sidelong glance at us, “It’s been known to some as the French step dance.” He kicked out a leg and raised one arm above his head, curling the other arm in front of him the way a ballerina might before the orchestra begins. Immediately he was transformed into a man I had never seen before. Under his breath, he began to say, “Da da da. Da da da da.” He didn’t say it with any tune, or even with any voice. He was simply whispering the rhythm to himself. Then he launched into his dance, jumping and spinning and waving his arms. When I saw Irish step dancing in later years I could think only of Uncle Cedric, even though his dance bore almost no resemblance to it. His extravagant moves were, I suspect, entirely his own creation. As soon as I saw him in action, I began to doubt Rose’s claim that he had won prizes. Nevertheless, we were all mesmerized, partly by his jerky movements and exuberant leaps, partly by his total lack of self-consciousness, partly by the almost bored tone in which he whispered, “Da da da da da. Da da.” His own children continued to laugh softly, not derisively but in support, forming a sort of background chorus. The rest of us sat in silence, our eyes following every dash and twirl. As Cedric danced, the field became darker, and he became a more and more mysterious figure as the edge of his silhouette sharpened into a black line against the sky.

The dance went on for quite a while, and I had time to think, “Isn’t it strange that this is the man I’ve always known, the man who is married to Aunt Rose?” This brought to mind my most formidable aunt, whose breath I could feel on my neck as she watched her husband. It struck me for the first time as more than a genealogical fact that Rose and Cedric were a married couple, that they shared a house and children and presumably loved each other, that in all particulars they lived as man and wife. This seemed incredible, and the gap between them seemed to widen as I watched Cedric’s dance. Given her sense of dignity, I knew Aunt Rose would not be caught dead in such a compromising position, one vulnerable to the attacks of ridicule. It was surprising enough that she had encouraged her husband to dance in the first place. I had thought Cedric possessed a similar sense of dignity, an insistence on the sobriety of his person, but in ten seconds of French step dancing, he had obliterated that impression beyond recall. The Robierre marriage, therefore, seemed more inexplicable than ever.