Shorecliff (2 page)

“But I’d seen it before, Richard.”

“Before me right now?”

Pamela did not respond.

That was a typical conversation between us. I was an irritating little boy—at least my father often said so. On the other hand, Pamela was infernally silent. She had no sense of debate.

Because my grandfather’s funds had run out before a carriage house for Shorecliff could be built, the rattletrap lived in a cleared patch of dirt at the end of the road. Rain pelted it, snow covered it, heat warmed it, cold cracked it. It was miraculous that it hadn’t fallen apart completely, that it still chugged its way successfully down the long, lonely road to Pensbottom and came back loaded with the week’s supplies every Monday afternoon, year after year. My mother told me that she remembered her father buying the car when she was a girl, as a last extravagance after the family fortune had been lost. Despite endless questions on my part, she remained vague on the details of this catastrophe, but she loved telling me about the sunnier aspects of her youth. She said that when her father had bought the rattletrap in 1908, it had been a gleaming new automobile, the first Model T in Maine, a marvel in its time. The only reason no one had sold it later to pay the family’s debts was that her father had put his foot down. “I won’t let any of you touch it,” he said. “It’s for the girls to ride in and the boys to drive. We can’t afford a horse and carriage now to replace it—it’s all we have. And God knows anyone who arrives at Shorecliff wants to be sure there’s a way to escape.”

The walk from the car to the house was heaven. I was carrying all my own luggage—a suitcase, a valise full of adventure stories, and a telescope. Pamela and Aunt Margery helped Mother with the other things. I ran ahead. Shorecliff soared above me, the white walls like the stones girding a castle. The paint on the clapboards was peeling, and I indulged the urge many a time to chip away at it with my fingernails. Beneath it the wood was hard and knotty. I often contemplated it, thinking how many storms it had survived. The door opened, and that achingly familiar smell wafted out at me. For a moment my excitement blossomed into a delightful pain. Here I was…

The hall was dark because umbrella stands and heaped coats always obscured the strips of windows on either side of the door. I flung down my suitcase, books, and telescope and ran through the archway to the left into the main parlor—another dark, little-used room. Considering our numbers, it was strange that we lived so determinedly in the back of the house where the kitchen was. I jogged through the parlor without a glance; the furniture might as well have been shrouded in dustsheets. Onward to the addition, airy and light when the rest of the house was swamped in darkness.

Crossing the morning room (majestic in name only—it was an empty anteroom signaling the beginning of the lived-in portion of the house), I heard raised voices from the kitchen. A second later came a cry of impatience, unmistakably issuing from the lungs of Francesca Ybarra. We had arrived in time for an argument.

In fact, as my mother said later, battle royal was raging in the kitchen. The aunts sat at the table, and lined on either side of them, leaning on the stove, kicking the chairs, were my illustrious cousins. They had been separated by sex—I didn’t know why. Three boys glowered by the left wall; five girls fumed by the right. It was an overwhelming array, and I realized that it had been well over a year since I had seen most of them. Even the ones I most often encountered, the Wights, had grown older and more distant, and the mysterious Ybarras and Robierres were so different from the way I had remembered them as to be almost unrecognizable.

Pamela, when she came in a few minutes later, hovered in the doorway as I did. We were too young to be in on the feud, but we were old enough to listen to it with our hearts thumping and our eyes shining. With a beginning so dramatic, the summer could not fail to be as thrilling as I had imagined.

“It’s too much!” Francesca was saying. Francesca was the daughter of Aunt Loretta, the wild one of my mother’s generation who had married a Spanish fugitive named Rodrigo Ybarra. We never learned how he had earned the title of fugitive, only that he had been running from the Spanish law. He and Loretta were married in Paris and lived there until Rodrigo died in a train accident during the war. Their youngest child, Cordelia, had been only five years old at the time. Loretta had moved back to America when the war ended, the wildness apparently crushed out of her. She brought three dark-haired, fiery children with her. It was impossible not to place them highest in my ranks of fascination, and Francesca, twenty-one years old, with cascades of nearly black hair and dark, glowing eyes, had the power to fell me with a single glance. When I entered the room she was stamping her foot, her hands clenched and her fine eyebrows drawn low over her eyes. Francesca in a rage was a sight to see.

“It’s too much!” she was saying. “We’re stuck in this godforsaken dump all summer like sardines in a can. There’s no one to see and no place to go. And now we’re not even allowed to drive into town. How do you expect us to live?”

The argument, I quickly divined, was about driving rights and the rattletrap. Thus far the adults had had sole use of the automobile. My grandfather’s decree that the women would ride and the men would drive had been broken the day after he died, but I’m sure he would have been pleased at the strictness with which the next generation was kept from the steering wheel.

“Even if Francesca can’t drive it,” my cousin Charlie said, “there’s no reason why I can’t, and Tom too when he gets here.” Charlie was the oldest of the Wight children. A more different family from the Ybarra clan could not be imagined. Aunt Margery had married Frank Wight, a carpenter from upstate New York, and their four children were all blond and blue-eyed. Their two sons, Charlie and Fisher, had been raised in their father’s workshop, and each was handy with an ax and ingenious with a chisel. Charlie was twenty and muscular and exhibited his father’s red-faced shortness of breath, though in all other respects he was handsome. After two years at Cornell he had earned his stripes on the college football team, but what interested me far more was that some months earlier I had overheard his mother telling mine that Charlie “could never turn down a dare.” This, I thought, heralded great things for the summer.

Charlie’s three siblings were all slender and graceful—mysterious attributes when one looked at their parents, though the Hatfields traditionally run thin. Eighteen-year-old Yvette, a pale and lofty girl I rarely had the courage to speak to, came after Charlie. Fisher, at sixteen, was equally skinny and sprite-like. He liked his father’s workshop, but he preferred to carve intricate scenes in blocks of wood while Uncle Frank taught Charlie the rudiments of furniture-building. Fisher went around perpetually in a dream, but the dream did not prevent him from picking up details with his misty blue eyes. Like Pamela, the youngest of the four, he soaked up information with quiet astuteness.

“None of you will be driving anywhere,” Aunt Rose declared. She was the oldest aunt, with the voice of a general and a demeanor to match.

Aunt Margery added, “Don’t you understand it’s not safe? Uncle Kurt has had years of practice, and I learned from him.”

“Safety be damned,” Aunt Loretta growled. The one trace of wildness that remained in her was a tendency to swear, and her deep, sultry voice slid into a sailor’s bark when she was angry. “It’s not a matter of whether they’re able to drive the thing—it’s whether they’re allowed. And they’re not. Francesca, you can stamp all you like, but rules are rules. You’re here for the summer, and you might as well enjoy it.”

“You realize we’ve got nothing to do,” said Francesca. She pressed herself against the wall, drawing herself up to her full, glorious height. Masses of dark hair curled out around her head. “We’re stuck here on top of each other. You all think of it as a fine holiday. You can chatter with each other all day, and the little ones, well”—she tossed us a look of contempt—“they’ll be satisfied with anything. But we older ones, what are we supposed to do? We’re a million miles from civilization. All we have is each other. Do you expect us to stand here for the next three months staring each other down?”

There was a moment of silence, during which Francesca fixed her gaze on the aunts and the rest of the cousins followed her lead.

Then my Aunt Edie entered the fray. Edie was the maiden aunt of the family, and she lived the part with a vengeance. She was angular, bony, and long-nosed. Her black hair, parted down the middle, was always knotted at the back of her head. None of us had any difficulty understanding why she had never married—no man in his right mind would come within ten yards of her. She had no mercy, her morals were lifted from Victorian guides to proper etiquette, and she saw the worst in everybody and everything. But the sheer force of her will made her remarks carry weight in family discussions.

Now she looked down her nose at the three boys—Charlie, Fisher, and Francesca’s brother, Philip, who was eighteen, black-haired, and invariably aloof. Then she examined the five girls—Francesca, Yvette, Tom’s sister Isabella, and the two Delias, whose story must be saved for later. Even Pamela and I were not exempt from Aunt Edie’s scathing glance; for an instant her nose pointed at us, and we felt the impact of an unknown accusation. Then she made her proclamation. “This house,” she said, “is primed for incest.”

Incest. What did it mean? I had never heard the word before. Even in my ignorance, though, I sensed a scandalous undertone. The rest of the family—with the exception of Pamela, who also didn’t know what it meant—dissolved into laughter. Without meaning to, Aunt Edie had ended the fight. There were a few minutes of hilarity, in which I saw Francesca raise her eyebrows at Charlie with an expression that combined humor, disdain, and mocking salaciousness. Aunt Edie caught the last of it and shouted, “Heathens!” which redoubled my cousins’ laughter.

My mother, who had come in for the last of the argument, laughed with the rest of them and then sent me up to my room with my luggage. The other mothers shooed their children off too. They wanted a chance to discuss the situation among themselves before dinner. I went upstairs with my bags, lagging behind the others. We passed straight through the second floor, the forbidden kingdom of adult sleeping quarters. Each of the seven bedrooms there housed an adult or two. As the oldest cousin, Francesca had demanded a room on the second floor. It alarmed me to think that she could now be counted as an adult—it made her seem capable of anything.

Philip lived in the room next to mine on the third floor. For the moment he was alone, since his roommate, Tom, had yet to arrive. Though they were both eighteen, Philip had not yet started college. I didn’t understand why, and no one ever bothered to explain it to me. When I passed his room he called to me from inside, and obediently I barged in, my valise of books banging against the doorframe.

“How are you, midget?” he said, looking me over.

Philip seemed the most Spanish of the Ybarras, and I imagined Rodrigo as an older version of him. He wore his black hair slicked back from his forehead, and he had low eyebrows and dark, glowing eyes like Francesca’s. He read constantly, but whereas I devoured boys’ adventure novels, he read philosophy and incendiary texts. There was a hint of secrecy in all his actions that I admired and appreciated—he once told me that he thought of himself as an anarchist. This meant he had little time for humor, but if you caught him in an off moment, he could be friendly in a biting sort of way.

“What does ‘incest’ mean?” I asked him.

Philip let out a burst of laughter. “You want to join the fun, do you?”

“I just want to know what it means.”

“Well, it means a lot of old busybodies clucking over other people’s business. That’s what it ends up meaning anyway.”

I dropped my bags on the floor and dug through the valise for my dictionary. In a way this was my most precious book, since without it I wouldn’t have been able to understand half of what my family members said. It was an ancient, beat-up volume that my mother had given to me long ago. When I looked up “incest,” I found “indecent relations between blood-relatives.”

“My God, how old is that thing?” Philip said. “It’s a lie anyway. Sisters and brothers, my friend. That’s the only thing that counts. All of us cousins—we’re safe. So you don’t have to worry.”

“Don’t have to worry about what?”

“Indecent relations,” he said, grinning.

“Which doesn’t he have to worry about?” said another voice at the door. It was Yvette Wight. She reminded me of a ghost: her hair was much whiter than her siblings’, more of an ash-blond than a gold, and her lips and eyes were equally washed out. She moved to fit her appearance, gliding from room to room without any noise. One of her favorite occupations was interrupting conversations in this fashion. “Should he not worry about the indecency, or the relations?” she asked.

“Why, Yvette, what are you suggesting?” Philip said. He lay back on his bed and lounged, and there was something challenging in his attitude.

“I’m not suggesting anything. I was just wondering which you meant.”

“Well, which would you have meant?”

“Neither,” she sniffed. “I’ve read
Mansfield Park.
Besides, we didn’t grow up with each other. I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

Philip sat upright. “Yvette!” he exclaimed. He was still joking, but I heard a note of surprise in his voice. “That’s practically a proposition!”

“Don’t be stupid, Philip,” she said. She glided away, and I retired to my own bedroom. It had been a typical conversation between cousins, a tossing sea on which I strove to keep afloat. I had no idea what they were talking about, and probably they didn’t either. All of them enjoyed throwing the ball of innuendo around their circle, keeping it aloft for as long as possible. I stood outside the group, watching and listening. The first thing I did in my room was look up “proposition.” The dictionary defined it as “a suggestion or proposal,” which didn’t help at all.

The idea of a web of attractions between relatives was less shocking than it might have been to my Hatfield cousins because, as Yvette had pointed out, we hadn’t grown up together. I saw Pamela regularly because my mother was closest with Aunt Margery, and she believed that Pamela was a good playmate for me. But even so we spent time with each other only two or three times a year, when our two families visited Shorecliff or when the Wights came down to New York City. Most of the year they lived in upstate New York, in Uncle Frank’s hometown. The Ybarras lived near us in Manhattan, the original home of the vast Hatfield tribe, but we never visited them, and my mother once unwisely let slip that this was because my father disliked them, thereby confirming my theory that he had not a scrap of human feeling in him. Tom’s family, the Robierre clan, lived in Boston so that his father, Cedric, a professor of paleontology, could be close to Harvard. Uncle Kurt moved around the country at will—at least that’s how it seemed to me. Aunt Edie lived in Saratoga Springs, plaguing the nearby Wights. I never knew where my Great-Uncle Eberhardt resided when he wasn’t stalking around Shorecliff like an enormous predatory bat. I suspect New York. At any rate, the various branches of the family rarely saw each other, and for the older cousins it must have seemed as if they had been locked for the summer in a cage of strangers—the kind of long-known stranger one can rely on as a lifetime fixture without really understanding at all.