Shorecliff (24 page)

Nevertheless, once she had assumed responsibility for the dining room, Francesca’s sizable bossy streak resurfaced, and she did not, in the end, allow Yvette to say a single word about the place cards. She refused to listen to any advice from anyone, and when Delia Robierre suggested that the streamers could stretch across the dining room ceiling, Francesca dismissed her at once. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “That doesn’t fit in with the plan at all. I’ll call you when I’m ready.” The streamers ended up in swags across the windows, the flowers loomed in enormous bouquets on the side tables, the place cards were decorated with enchanting watercolor swirls, and all of these sprang from Francesca’s imagination. I saw a glint of pride in her eyes when I returned a chair Tom had purloined before Francesca could stop him. Yet when at last we all came in to admire her work, the glint had died out. She looked at her dazzling creation and said, “Is everyone happy?” and then walked out of the room. During our buffet dinner in the kitchen that evening, she appeared for only ten minutes before vanishing into her room again.

Charlie and I were the only cousins not assigned specific tasks by the trio of designers, but they soon commandeered Charlie as a means of transporting heavy objects, and I served equally well as a messenger and vehicle of excitement. I felt almost delirious as I raced from cousin to cousin, shouting urgent messages, carrying flowers here and there, pulling oars and tugging ropes. It was the time pressure that got to me and to all of us. Only one day, and the aunts were waiting! When Tom burst into the kitchen, against orders, to ask for all the chairs, the aunts feigned indignation only for a second or two. Aunt Rose, mixing batter at the counter, told us to get out—cooking and baking made her mad, and she fought frustration by adopting a martinet’s discipline. Aunt Margery, however, waved us in. My mother had taken the Edie shift, and they were off on a long walk to the shore.

“What are you children doing out there?” Aunt Margery said, smiling at us. Charlie and I had come with Tom as a moving crew.

“You’ll see tomorrow,” said Tom. “We’ll need all the chairs.” He scanned the room. Four of the chairs were the same size, with high wooden backs. Two were old and wicker-bottomed and had lived in the kitchen for years. “Those won’t work,” he said as Charlie picked one up. “We’ll take the four high-backed ones and search for two other things the same height.”

“Aren’t there enough chairs in the dining room?” Margery asked. She knew perfectly well we were planning something on the lawn.

“Francesca won’t let us in there,” said Tom. “Besides, we need more.”

I myself located the last two chairs for the tent. They were in my room, burdened by my long-forgotten adventure novels. While Tom and Charlie searched the house, I went straight to my room to examine them, and when I had lugged one downstairs, Tom clapped me on the back and said, “It’s perfect, pal,” which made my day.

The erection of the tent took two hours and strained everyone’s patience. First we had to lash the oars upright to the chair backs, a task that seemed simple when Fisher told us what to do but proved to be Herculean. At one point Tom hurled down a length of twine and said, “This goddamn oar is giving me hell!” Ten minutes later, when my oar had slid down for the thousandth time onto the seat, I said, “I can’t get the damn oar to stay on!” Philip chuckled and came over to me. “That’s the stuff, buddy,” he said. His oar was securely lashed, and Fisher was already maneuvering the chair into place. “What you have to do is make sure the rope crosses itself, see?” He leaned over to show me the right tying method, and I inwardly gloated that my first venture into profanity had been met with equanimity, as if such language were only to be expected from a grown man of thirteen.

Once we had positioned all six chairs, the oars poking into the sky above them exactly according to Fisher’s measurements, we were faced with the problem of the tent itself.

“Haven’t you been figuring that out?” Tom asked Isabella.

“No, I thought you were going to deal with it,” she said. “I’ve been working on the table problem.”

The tent proved a stumper for some time. The only thing we could think of that would be even remotely large enough was all of our bedsheets put together. Tom and Isabella ran up to strip the beds and came out ten minutes later, their arms overflowing with fabric—white, blue, flowered. Each sheet looked ludicrously small when we spread them all on the grass.

“What are we going to sleep on tonight?” asked Charlie.

“It’s the middle of summer,” Isabella retorted. “We’re hardy—we’ll do without.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Yvette, who had come to view our incompetence. “Are we going to have a patchwork quilt over our heads?”

“Think of it as a parquet ceiling,” Philip said, grinning.

I asked, “What’s parquet?”

No one answered because at that moment Aunt Rose exploded from the kitchen with a rolling pin in her hand. “None of you will be defacing our bedsheets!” she shouted.

“No one’s going to deface anything, Mom,” Tom answered. “We’re just working on the tent. Have you got any ideas? Or any large bedspreads or anything like that?”

“Tent?” Aunt Rose repeated, staring in bewilderment at the oars on the chairs. “What are you children doing?”

“We’re making a tent for Aunt Edie,” Tom explained with elaborate patience. “You told us to make it a special day for her, and that’s what we’re doing.”

“How much of the house have you ruined already?” she asked.

“None of it,” said Tom. “It’s all going to be sparkling clean for tomorrow.”

Eventually we made the tent out of the bedsheets by tying the corners wherever they came together. The knots gave the tent a lumpy look, as if it had contracted a strange disease, but the technique was surprisingly effective. When we lashed the sheets to the oars, the tent, though small, low, and rickety, was still unmistakably a tent.

Tom and Charlie did the lion’s share of the lashing. Philip, his aesthete’s nature reasserting itself, stood back and directed them. When Tom and Charlie, panting and sweating, finally wrestled the enormous cloth mosaic into position over our heads, Philip smiled up at it and said, “It looks like we’ve got ourselves a tent, fellas.”

“I like that ‘we,’” Charlie answered.

Isabella came racing over to us. At this point the sun was setting, polishing her with a red-bronze gleam, and most of us were secretly wishing we’d never heard of Aunt Edie’s birthday. But Isabella remained as chipper as she’d been when she woke up that morning. Her capacity for enthusiasm was incredible. “Yvette wants torches,” she announced. “Oh, the tent looks perfect! Everything is working out!”

“What do you mean, torches?” Tom said. “Is she going to burn down Shorecliff?”

“No, she wants to put a ring of torches around the tent so that it will glow with poetic fires while we eat.”

“Poetic fires?” echoed Philip.

“She said that part, but I can see what she meant. The whole family sitting around a table set with a white cloth and endless cakes, while the torches flicker in the ocean breeze!” Isabella leaped around us.

Tom and Philip stared at her and said in unison, “I’m not looking for them.”

Pamela, who had come on the same mission, said, “I’ll ask Mother.”

It turned out that Yvette had inherited her love of torches from Aunt Margery. “Don’t you remember?” said my mother, when we asked the aunts. “We had that summer evening party, and Margery insisted that we have it outside with torches all around the edge of the lawn. We wouldn’t have thrown them out.”

No one in the Hatfield family had ever thrown anything out. The torches were no exception, though tracking them down took some doing. Early in the hunt, Delia and Delia suggested Condor’s cottage as a potential location. After they had set off I said, “That’s unfair. They’re just going to visit Barnavelt.”

“Who cares, buddy?” Tom replied, throwing himself onto the grass under the tent. (We had not yet constructed the table—that was part of the flurry of the next day while Aunt Edie finished her breakfast in bed.) “This has been a crazy afternoon,” he went on, “and I’m already starting to feel like an idiot. God knows what I’ll feel like tomorrow.”

“The tent looks nice,” I commented, trying to make him feel better.

“Yeah, it does,” he said. “‘What did you do with your summer, Tom?’ ‘Well, you’ll be impressed, boys—I built a tent.’”

“Who would you say that to?”

“I hope to God no one at all.”

I was standing over him, admiring the length of his legs and mentally comparing my stubby arms with his muscular ones, when I glanced up and discovered four figures hurrying across the twilit lawn. I recognized them immediately—the two Delias, Uncle Eberhardt, and Condor—but their arms were full of bulky objects, and with a delighted shock I saw a flash of orange moving by their heels. When they saw me looking, Delia and Delia made quiet signals and gestured at Tom, so I didn’t say anything.

“What are you looking at, buddy?” he asked from below.

“Uh…nothing.” I wasn’t very good at deception.

“No?” Tom propped himself on one elbow. “Who is that?” he asked. His view was hampered by the ring of chairs forming the bottom of the tent.

The four arrivals burst in on us. The bulky objects proved to be Aunt Margery’s torches, and the flash of orange at their ankles resolved itself into Barnavelt on a leash. Someone must have seen them from the house because in seconds the doors poured with exiting cousins, and Barnavelt received the tribute he deserved.

“It’s a shame he’s on a leash, though,” said Isabella. We had formed a circle around Condor and the fox.

“More than a shame,” said Delia Ybarra. “He’s a wild animal in captivity!”

Condor rolled his eyes. Though the moldy torches on their long sticks had muddied his shirt—pale blue with shiny white buttons—he looked as dignified and oversized as ever. “I’ve heard that one before, Delia,” he said.

“Well, it’s true!” she said.

The argument that ensued over the morality of putting Barnavelt on a leash was the last event of the evening, at least for me. My mother came to whisk me off to a quick supper and bed.

After a long night of fox-filled dreams on a bare mattress, I was awoken by Isabella hurling me bodily out of bed. “It’s time!” she shouted, throwing clothes at me so hurriedly that I didn’t have time to be embarrassed by her handling my underwear. “Come on, hurry up! We still haven’t made the outdoor table!”

During the sunlit portion of the day, everything happened as planned. The aunts presented Aunt Edie with a lavish breakfast in bed, which she accepted as her due. After one look at her black hair, sticking out in stringy spikes all over her head, I fled from this ritual and devoted myself to running around outside with the rest of the cousins.

Tom and Charlie were battling the quandary of the outdoor table. They had met the challenge by the time Edie was dressed, but only by means of a titanic struggle with five bed boards my grandmother had insisted on installing in the Shorecliff beds years ago. They laid the boards atop four small tables appropriated from the house. Every tablecloth in the linen cupboard was in action by the time we had finished, and when Yvette positioned the flower vases, the giant table began to wobble.

“If this tips over…” she said, glaring at Tom.

“Nothing’s going to tip over, Yvette. Have faith.”

And nothing did tip over. We had lunch in the dining room, and Francesca’s decorating efforts elicited a smile of pleasure from Aunt Edie’s usually lemon-pursed lips. Francesca was wearing her fanciest pleated skirt for the occasion—none of the rest of us had thought to dress up—but her face retained its listless, absent expression. “I’m glad you like it,” she said, barely looking at Aunt Edie.

Nevertheless, the meal was cheery: the scent from the flowers was intoxicating, the place cards sparked much exclamation, and the food, prepared by the aunts the day before, received rave reviews. Aunt Edie in a party hat was a strange sight. Her horsey face registered gaiety only with difficulty, but she wore the hat at a jaunty angle far back on her head. Tom said later that the way she looked made him think of a gargoyle on stilts, which was a perfect comparison though not entirely logical.

The afternoon was taken up by another aunts-only stroll to the shore. Philip said this change of pace showed the plethora of activities possible at Shorecliff. I didn’t know what “plethora” meant, but there was no need for the dictionary because the sarcasm in his voice explained it all.

While they were gone, Yvette and Isabella joined forces to prepare the outdoor table for the evening feast. These few hours of preparation saw Yvette at her best. She flitted here and there like a beam of light, darting from the house to the tent and back again, carrying chairs so delicately that they seemed weightless in her hands. In comparison with Isabella, who preferred to gallop whenever she was carrying out a task she found exciting, Yvette seemed incorporeal. When she placed something on the table, a flower or a plate or a place card, she put it down exactly where she thought it should go, looked at it for a second, and went on to the next task. Isabella would plunk something down with a thud, stare at it, wander around it, reposition it, stare at it again, and so forth. Together, however, the two of them formed an efficient partnership.

Philip planted the torches for them. Isabella stood at his side and pointed at the ground where she wanted each one, and he drove the end of the shaft into the ground and twisted it until it was standing reasonably upright.

“If we start a brushfire, I’m blaming you,” he told her.

“We’ll be safe,” she said. “I trust you.”

Often, since Uncle Cedric’s picnic, I had seen Philip and Isabella chatting together, each showing such newborn interest that the other might have been a stranger at Shorecliff. Their march around the tent as they set up the torches progressed more and more slowly and involved more and more discussion. Normally, of course, I would have crept close enough to hear, but I found myself captured by unexpected emotion. I could imagine so vividly Isabella’s face from Philip’s vantage point, how enchanting her smile would be at close range.