Shorecliff (21 page)

“They’re good for something more than the soul in Tom’s case,” Philip said, and the cousins burst out laughing.

I thought it was rude to laugh at jokes like that in Lorelei’s presence. I wanted to say hello to her so I could receive a personalized version of her angelic smile, but shyness prevented me. The most I could do was edge toward her, inadvertently bringing my mother along with me.

With her usual perceptiveness, Lorelei spotted me in spite of my silence. “Hello, Richard,” she said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

I nodded.

“It’s time he was in bed,” my mother said, joining the traitorous forces. “I’m so glad you’re here to tell us where to go. It felt absurd to be lost, knowing how close we must be. Would you like to walk back with us? I’m sure it’s very late.”

“After midnight,” said Lorelei. “I should be going home myself. But I’ll walk with you as far as the wood.”

Within five minutes we could make out a smudge of black trees against the deep blue of the sky, and soon we were crunching twigs and leaves underfoot. Cedric slapped his thigh and burst into self-recrimination. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been able to find the wood himself.

“I should go back,” said Lorelei. She had been walking with Tom, who had taken her hand as soon as we were on the move.

“I’ll walk you home,” said Tom.

This recalled Cedric from his frustration. “Certainly not, young man!” he cried, putting an arm around Tom’s shoulder and forcing him to walk forward. “Plenty of time for all that in later years. I’m sorry to deprive you of your guardian, my dear,” he added over his shoulder to Lorelei, “but as you’ve just shown us, you know your way around better than we do.”

“Please come and have lunch with us tomorrow,” my mother said. Before my father’s visit, Lorelei had come almost every day to our house, but it seemed since then as if she had been deliberately staying away.

“I will,” said Lorelei, smiling. “Good night, everyone. Good night, Tom.” She waved at us and walked quickly back across the fields. Within moments she had blended into the darkness.

As I turned to follow my mother through the woods, I caught sight of Yvette’s face, staring after Lorelei. I had permitted myself an inner smirk of satisfaction when I heard Cedric’s naiveté—as if anything he could say would prevent Tom from slipping out and returning to the farm as soon as we were all in bed! To me, however, the secret was something glamorous, something exciting that I could admire from a distance. I had forgotten the intensity of Yvette’s feelings until I saw the look on her face as she gazed over the field. There was jealousy, of course, but also exasperation, as if she wanted to leap up and scream and throw her arms out and be as un-Wight-like as possible. She didn’t do any of these things, but it would have been better if she had. As it was, all her frustration stayed bottled inside, and when it finally found expression, it did much more harm than her previous outbursts.

One more thing happened that night before I climbed into bed. Exercising great stealth, I kept watch from behind my bedroom door, and at last I was able to corner Isabella as she came out of the bathroom. “What did you and Philip talk about this afternoon?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she said, but there was a grin spreading over her face. Isabella knew she was a terrible liar. “We were just talking,” she went on without a pause.

“About what? What was Philip saying?”

“Why would you care?”

“I always want to know what Philip says. I think he’s very interesting.”

“So do I,” she said. “But as a matter of fact, we weren’t talking about anything. At least nothing I can say again. Philip has theories, you know, about the world, and he was telling them to me, I guess. I don’t remember.”

“But why did you go walking in the first place?”

Isabella shrugged. “We’re cousins,” she said, which seemed to me the most unhelpful explanation I had ever received—though, in its way, it held everything. She returned to her bedroom, leaving me alone in the bathroom doorway with my toothbrush. That was all I ever heard about their conversation. I think really it was the enchantment of the walk, rather than the substance of the talk, that mattered to Isabella. She had extracted what she wanted from the interaction without bothering over the superficialities. People never gave Isabella’s insight enough credit—they became distracted by her awkward extremities and forgot the grace that lurked at the center of her. But it was her helpless honesty that I loved most, the way her feelings shone out whether she liked it or not. That night she was overjoyed. I could read it in every gesture, and it made me love her more than ever.

Yet thinking about her talk with Philip filled me with another feeling that I had difficulty analyzing. I was all too familiar with envy—I had spent much of that summer wishing I could be part of every interaction I witnessed. This time, though, I knew that simply being part of Isabella’s conversation with Philip wouldn’t have been enough. I imagined myself in Philip’s place, next to her on the field. She would talk to me, I would watch her face… But what would she say? How would I act? I couldn’t picture any of the details. The picnic taught me to covet something more, not just her company but her attention, her delight—even, unarticulated though it was, her yearning.

After a moment or two of standing alone in the hallway and wading through these thoughts, I remembered how happy she had been, and I reasoned that—putting aside all question of attraction—I too would be overjoyed if Philip had picked me as a confidant. I slowed down as I passed his bedroom, peering in as if taking casual stock of the room. Tom was sitting cross-legged on his bed without a shirt on. He waved to me. Philip was lying on his back with his hands behind his head. Neither of them was reading, but they hadn’t been talking either. I wondered how often they sat together saying nothing. When Tom beckoned me in, Philip sat up, got his toothbrush, and disappeared for the bathroom.

“Who are you looking for?” Tom asked me.

“I don’t know. No one.”

“Did you have a good time today?”

“I sure did. That field was the perfect place to play games.”

“You’ve got that right. And it got everyone’s mind off things—don’t you agree?”

“Yes, it did.” I was thrilled. Tom had deigned to ask my opinion of a serious matter, as if I were his equal.

Then he added, grinning, “The end of the night was pretty entertaining, too.” I knew he was talking about Lorelei, but I couldn’t think of a way to respond, so with a quick “Good night,” I retreated.

I almost ran into Philip in the hall. Toothbrush still in hand, he trotted down the staircase, and I leaned over the banister so that I could see his back as he knocked on Francesca’s door.

“Francesca? Are you in there? Can I come in?” he called. A moment later he said, “Just for a minute.” Then he opened the door and slipped inside.

In the excitement of the day, I had almost forgotten Francesca. I decided it was no use waiting for Philip to come back upstairs, since I wouldn’t have the courage to ask him what they had been talking about anyway. Instead I got into bed and tried to imagine Francesca all alone in Shorecliff that day, with only Aunt Edie and Great-Uncle Eberhardt for company, rebuffed by Uncle Kurt as he worked in his room, whiling away the hours until we came back.

Later, when I had fallen asleep, I was visited by a dream that haunted me for many days. As I drifted off I had been thinking of Francesca’s sadness, but the dream was about something quite different. At first I was walking with Isabella in the field, just as I had imagined earlier that evening, replacing Philip. Isabella was beaming at me. It seemed natural to reach out to her, and then she was hugging me, crushing me with a delicious fierceness that I recognized from the years before that summer. This time, though, I hugged her back, and it was not the same, for I sensed her body against mine—and from there the dream hurtled forward, both frightening and exhilarating, as if I were inhaling a forbidden drug.

For a time I stroked Isabella’s back and sides, reveling in a heavenly but misty pleasure. Then I discovered she was Lorelei, and I felt horrified, but, logically it seemed, I realized I was Tom, which made everything all right. Being Tom, I moved my hands in experienced passes over Lorelei’s body and thought to myself, “So this is how it’s done.” Then, abruptly, Lorelei was Isabella again, submitting to my caresses. At this point I was floundering back to reality, yet for one unforgettable instant the vividness of the dream increased, as happens sometimes when dreams continue to the point of wakefulness. My hands were on Isabella’s waist, and I could feel the heat of her body beneath her shirt. Then I awoke, my hands tingling, and I lay there thinking desperately that I should not have had the dream. I tried to forget it, but it remained a burning image in my mind, and I could not help savoring it, reliving the feeling of her warmth. It had never occurred to me that her body would be hot to the touch. That was what made the dream so real, for it showed me something entirely new but unquestionably accurate.

When Isabella came down to the kitchen that morning, I took one look at her, and my dream, which was rapidly becoming a malignant entity in my brain, leaped up as if it were mocking me. I stared at her, and though I tried to stop myself, I knew I was looking at her body in a way I never had before.

O
n the day before the uncles had arranged to leave for their hunting expedition, Uncle Frank announced at breakfast that he had devised a scheme to rival Cedric’s picnic. The intervening days had witnessed a return to the moping pessimism that had clouded Shorecliff since my father’s visit. We attempted a few halfhearted games of croquet, and Philip and Isabella, testing out their new comradeship, spearheaded a trip to the shore, but the day was cloudy, and they did not meet with much success.
Uncle
Frank, I think, wanted to be the hero who brought back the lightheartedness Uncle Cedric had briefly captured at the picnic. Pamela and I were the only cousins in the kitchen when Frank made his announcement, but the aunts listened politely, and as he talked a few of the older kids straggled in, drawn by the volume of his voice, which tended toward the deafening when he was excited.

“We went north with Cedric,” he said. “I propose a journey south. We’ve been living for months now alongside that cliff, and we’ve never followed it. Who wants to map the coastline with me?” He swung around to Charlie and Fisher, who had appeared in the doorway. “What do you say, boys?” he asked. “A hike along the coastline. We’ll see how long it takes before the cliff peters out.”

“But we know where it peters out, Dad,” said Charlie. “We go to the shore all the time, remember?”

“Don’t be silly, Charlie. That’s only a little gap in the line of the cliff. It starts again half a mile further on. Didn’t you know that?”

Charlie shrugged, uninterested, but Pamela and I were intrigued. I had been bitten by the exploration bug since the picnic. The idea of heading out from Shorecliff into the unknown was enormously appealing, and I treasured the long hours of enforced proximity to my cousins.

“Let’s go!” I said. “Pamela, don’t you want to go?”

“I guess so,” said Pamela.

Poor Uncle Frank looked crestfallen. The aunts, however, settled the matter.

“Today is cleaning day,” said Aunt Rose. “We were going to kick all of you out of the house anyway. A hike sounds like the ideal solution. Richard, go wake up the other children and tell them they’re going on a hike with Uncle Frank.”

Aunt Rose frequently gave me the unpleasant task of awakening my cousins, a task sure to end in insults and thrown pillows. But I did it with relish, simply for the sake of staring in awe at Tom and Philip still asleep, their sheets tangled, their feet hanging off the beds, both of them bigger and more masculine than I imagined I would ever be. I liked also to wake Isabella because, unlike the other cousins, she didn’t meet my whispers with abuse but with sleepy smiles and a chuckle muffled by the pillow. Then she would gaze at me, her eyes glazed by sleep, until she pulled herself into wakefulness.

On the rare occasions when Charlie and Fisher were still asleep when I made my rounds, they welcomed my entrance with polite thank-yous that made me feel guilty. The two Delias were the easiest to wake because as soon as one of them opened her eyes and saw the other in the opposite bed, she was sure to begin making faces and giggling. Yvette, on the other hand, was especially acidic in the mornings. I would come into her room, admire her river of hair, and say, “Yvette, Aunt Rose says everyone has to wake up.” I’m sure she always heard me the first time, but she never deigned to answer, so I would repeat myself five or six times. There was no possibility of shaking Yvette awake—I would never have dared to touch her. After countless repetitions of my request, she would explode from the covers, her hair flying around her face, shoot me a poisonous look, and snap, “
Fine!
I heard you.” Then she would fall back onto the pillow. She was always the last one to make her way downstairs, but I figured that my task was done when I got her response.

The cousin I most feared waking was Francesca. Not only did I have to enter her bedroom, which was nerve-racking enough, I then had to jerk her out of her dreams. Francesca was one of those people who look like aliens when they’re asleep. She slept on her back with her head thrown to one side, so that I had to circle the bed to find her face. Then I would look at her for a few minutes, marveling at the stranger living in Francesca’s body. Her hair tumbled onto the pillow in so many curls that it looked knotted, and her hands often crept up to her face in the night, her knuckles pressing against her chin. Her mouth would be open the tiniest bit, and her irises would be rampaging around under her eyelids. After my father’s visit, I found the prospect of waking Francesca almost unbearably intimidating, but I knew that if I came downstairs without doing so, Aunt Rose would send me back up, so I slipped through her door and tiptoed around the bed. For a long time I simply watched her dream, imagining that her face looked sadder than usual, that her mouth was turned down at the corners, and that there were traces of tear lines along her nose.

Finally I said in a reedy whisper, “Francesca, it’s time to wake up.” Of course that did nothing. The worst thing about the whole procedure was that she slept so deeply I was often forced to shake her. This morning was one of those times. After repeated whispers that rose in volume without effect, I gathered my courage and found one of her shoulders. When at last she did waken, her eyes sprang open like window shades hurtling upward. “Yes?” she said frantically, as if I were about to tell her something of the utmost importance. She always said that. I think her mind woke a few moments after her body, so the urgency of her question arose from her dream emotions.

“Francesca, it’s time to wake up,” I quavered for the hundredth time.

There was a long pause while her wide eyes searched my face, her hands gripping the covers. Then she relaxed, and her head sank back into her hair. “Okay, Richard,” she sighed. “I’ll get up.”

Eventually, that morning, we were all shepherded out the front door. Because no aunts were coming with us, we had to stand around while Cedric, Frank, and Kurt received extensive instructions as to our safekeeping. Not one of the cousins was left behind. Several of them were still rubbing their eyes and yawning, and none of them looked happy to be awake before nine.

The hike was ill-omened from the beginning. Most of us, by then, were yearning for something we couldn’t have: Isabella watched Philip, I watched Isabella, Yvette watched Tom, Charlie watched Francesca. As for Francesca herself, I suspect it was our hike by the cliff that pushed her into true desperation—I can remember her so well, straining at her fetters as she stalked along, impelled by the irksome, meaningless duty of enforced family activities.

For unknown reasons, Great-Uncle Eberhardt was flapping around by the door, waiting for us to leave. Uncle Kurt, who always tried to be courteous to Eberhardt, said, “Are you coming with us? It looks like it will be a nice day to walk.”

“Certainly not when you have all these children with you,” Eberhardt replied. “Besides, I’m going to spend the day with Condor. Today is an important day for Barnavelt.” He glared with one eye half closed at the younger cousins—Pamela and me, the two Delias, and Fisher—knowing that any mention of the fox would grab our attention.

“What’s going to happen to him?” asked Fisher.

“He’s going for a walk too,” Uncle Eberhardt said after a dramatic pause.

“A walk?” I repeated. “By himself?”

“Of course not, you stupid boy!” cried Eberhardt. “Condor and I are going with him. He’ll be on a leash.”

“A leash?” shrieked Delia Ybarra. “But that’s cruel! He’s a wild animal. You can’t tie him up like that—he’ll go crazy!”

“Can’t you let him go now that he’s old enough to take care of himself?” asked Delia Robierre. “You wouldn’t want him to spend his whole life in Condor’s cottage.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” said Eberhardt. “That’s why we’re taking him on a walk. He’s going to see the world…just like you.” He grinned, showing us his elephantine teeth, and stalked away toward the woods before the Delias could continue their campaign for Barnavelt’s freedom.

Uncle Frank and Uncle Cedric took the lead for the hike. They strode to the cliff’s edge, a long tail of children weaving lackadaisically behind them, with Uncle Kurt bringing up the rear. “Are you ready, kids?” roared Uncle Frank. “We’re off!”

Uncle Kurt had predicted a nice day, which did later turn out to be the case, but at that hour of the morning the sky was whitish gray, and none of us could respond to Uncle Frank’s shout with enthusiasm. For more than an hour, we trailed along without saying much at all. We passed the shore where we went to swim and, as Frank had predicted, found the cliff again half a mile south of it. Uncle Kurt walked next to me and Pamela and told us stories of his leaves in London, the older cousins surreptitiously listening as eagerly as we were. Gradually the sun broke through the sheet of clouds and turned the day cheerful. The cousins woke up in the warmth and began to talk and joke—mostly about pushing each other off the cliff.

As we progressed further south, the land to our right remained wild, showing us nothing but long stretches of desolate dune grass. The cliff itself, however, became more formidable. The ledges that we often thought of as safety nets disappeared and left a sheer drop to the rocks and surf below. Around noon Uncle Frank strode to the edge, looked down, staggered back, and told us we were to keep at least ten feet between us and the cliff at all times. Naturally this provoked a wave of interest. The boys, openly disobeying his order, rushed to the edge and teetered there, gazing down in ebullient confrontation of the danger. I saw terror on the uncles’ faces. They were afraid to go and pull the boys back for fear they would lose their balance.

“Boys!” Cedric called. “Step back. This is no time to joke around. There aren’t any ledges here—it’s a straight drop if you fall. Boys!”

Uncle Frank tried to coax them back too, with no success. Charlie, Tom, and Philip, with Fisher only a few inches behind them, stared as if mesmerized by the waves crashing against the gray face of the cliff. Finally Uncle Kurt said, “Boys, you’re being stupid. Smart men don’t flirt with danger when they don’t have to. Step back now. Save your courage for some other day—right now you’re just being foolhardy.”

The rebuke roused them, and they stepped back to where I was standing, a good fifteen feet from the edge. I watched Cedric wipe the sweat off his forehead and his neck. None of the boys realized how awful those few moments had been for everyone watching them. After that summer I never dared to go near a cliff’s edge, not because of the height itself but because of the fear and shock that I associated with cliffs, background as they were to everything at Shorecliff.

Still I was intrigued when Philip said, “I bet someone has jumped off this cliff and lived.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Cedric. “The water isn’t deep enough. The force of a person’s fall would carry him to the bottom, and he’d be smashed on the rocks.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” said Uncle Frank. “It’s time to keep walking, kids.”

“No, I bet someone’s done it,” Philip said. I saw then, by the way he was staring out over the cliff, that he was fixated on the idea. “I bet they went far back there in the grass and sprinted up and flew over the edge.”

“Sorry, Philip,” said Cedric. “It can’t be done.”

The other cousins hovered to one side in various degrees of abstraction, but Isabella and Tom listened with interest to Philip’s comments. He could always count on those two as an audience. Tom moved one step closer to the cliff and said, “Wouldn’t that be great, to dive over the edge and soar out over the water? I bet it would be a good place for hang gliding, Philip. I bet you could do it that way, if you had the things they use in the mountains.”

“Hey, that’s right,” said Philip.

“I’d jump,” said Isabella, stepping up to him. “I bet I could make it if there were a deep enough place in the water.”

Philip looked at her and said, “You would never have the nerve to do that.” He turned away to Tom, and Isabella stared after him with her mouth open.

“It’s not a question of nerve,” said Uncle Kurt sharply. “It’s a question of common sense. None of you are going to be jumping off a cliff any time soon. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were suicidal. Now come on.”

Pamela, standing next to me, decided it was time to join forces with the adults. “I agree with Uncle Kurt,” she said. “It’s stupid to do something unsafe.” The other cousins ignored her. I pretended that she and I had no connection. Sometimes Pamela was infuriatingly obtuse about what made our older cousins wonderful.

After that the walk couldn’t recover its former cheerfulness. Though the sun was beating down on us, we walked in silence, well away from the cliff. In half an hour the grassy hills to our right melted into woods, and the strip of open land we walked on became narrower, only ten yards between the edge of the cliff and the line of trees. Uncle Frank called a halt for lunch, and we investigated the baskets the aunts had hurriedly prepared for us. Eating was the most enjoyable part of the expedition.

While I was munching my way through a turkey sandwich, I noticed that Francesca had retreated to the underbrush at the edge of the woods and was eating there by herself. Uncle Kurt noticed at the same time and called out to her, but she just waved a hand and kept eating, her eyes turned away from us.

“I’m worried about that girl,” Kurt said in an undertone to Frank and Cedric.

After we had packed up the baskets, we continued to head south for about fifteen minutes. Then Charlie and Yvette, in an unusual alliance, went up to Uncle Frank. Charlie said, “Look, Dad, maybe we should turn around and head back. We don’t want to be walking by the cliff when it gets dark.”

“But we haven’t gone so far that we can’t be back before nightfall,” Frank protested. “I was going to keep going south until at least two or three.”

Charlie hesitated and then said, “The truth is we’re all pretty bored, Dad. I don’t think anyone is having such a great time walking along doing nothing.”

“Can’t we go back now, Daddy?” Yvette broke in. “Maybe we could go for a swim or play croquet or bocce or something…”