Shorecliff (28 page)

Yet that made the choice worse. The fact that if I did betray Kurt’s secret I would be doing it partly for glory made the treachery even more despicable. “No,” I said to myself. “I can’t do it. It’s my secret now too.” Having made the decision, I got into my pajamas, darted down the hall and back again in record toothbrushing time, and climbed into bed. My mother had given me her good-night kiss downstairs, so I expected no visitors. I lay on my back and waited to fall asleep.

As soon as I stopped moving, the uncles’ conversation replayed itself in my head. I heard again Kurt saying, “I got myself into a high-stakes game.” A month before, I wouldn’t necessarily have associated gambling with the family’s ruin, but now that Uncle Eberhardt had revealed his story, Kurt’s secret called to mind our straitened circumstances, our lost fortune and reputation, our inglorious descent from the great days of old.

Uncle Kurt himself seemed to have been replaced by another person. I couldn’t convince my mind to register his new character, to match the man I had revered for years with the sheepish gambler I had heard in the hall. Lying rigid in bed, I clutched the sheets with my fists. After a while I said out loud, “It can’t be true! It isn’t true!” I told myself that I had had a strange dream but had just woken up or—even better—was still in the dream. I looked at the bureau on the other side of the room and tried to believe that it was out of proportion, that my dreaming mind was distorting it. But it looked the way it always did in the moonlight, and I couldn’t persuade myself that I was asleep. Once again I heard Kurt’s awkward chuckle and pictured the scene of him with the eye-shadowed girl, surrounded by sordid luxury. “Not Uncle Kurt,” I thought. “It was someone else. Uncle Frank. I got their voices confused.”

Suddenly I thrashed under the bedspread, kicked it off, and leaped into a standing position. I threw open the door and raced down the hall, gripped by the feeling that if I didn’t tell Isabella immediately, my mind would be overwhelmed. I had forgotten that the cousins liked to congregate in her room at the end of the day, and when I burst in I found Tom, Charlie, Philip, Fisher, and the two Delias, in addition to Isabella. Pamela had gone off to join Yvette, and Francesca was cloistered in her bedroom. Desperately I sought out Isabella, who was standing by her bed, and ran to her, wanting to throw my arms around her but even in this crisis not quite daring to cross that line. Still, my entrance and frantic expression took her by surprise. The other cousins stopped talking and stared. I was breathing as raggedly as if I had run a mile down the hallway.

“What is it, Richard?” Isabella asked.

She sat on the bed and took my arm, forcing me to sit down next to her. Philip and Delia Robierre moved to one side so I could find space. I sat awkwardly, refusing to look at anyone. Isabella, sensing my distress, had taken my hand, and her touch lessened my desperation. Already I was recovering from my panic and taking a furtive pleasure in sitting so close to her and being the center of attention. I felt abruptly that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, since I would never again find the courage to clutch her hand, and I abandoned myself to an exaggerated performance of distress.

“Do you have something to tell me?” she asked.

I nodded. Then I remembered what I was agreeing to and said, raising my head, “But I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Would you like the others to leave? We can ask them to go away.”

Fisher was the only one who made any move to depart. The others glanced at him in surprise. Then Tom said, “Oh! right.” He got up too, but he couldn’t stop himself from hesitating. Watching him from under my eyelids, I saw that he wanted to hear what I was going to say. From that moment, the secret was doomed.

“No,” I said hurriedly. “No, they don’t have to leave.”

“Well, what is it then, darling?”

“It’s…a secret,” I stammered after a pause.

“Your secret?”

“No, not my secret.” I was impressed by her interrogation skills.

“Are you supposed to know about it?”

“No. I heard it by…accident. It wasn’t my fault! I couldn’t get out fast enough.”

“No one’s blaming you,” Isabella said, stroking my hair. “You’d better tell us, and then we’ll tell you what we think about it. Won’t that be best?”

I gave myself up to her coaxing. “Uncle Kurt didn’t go hunting,” I began.

That caught their attention.

“What are you talking about?” Tom asked, and I went from there. Still holding Isabella’s hand, I told them every horrible detail. I forgot that I was speaking about Uncle Kurt. I simply constructed the most suspenseful story I could manage, and the cousins repaid me with open mouths and raised eyebrows. By the end I was so enchanted at being the focal point of the room that I forgot to be upset.

“It can’t be true,” Isabella said when I had run out of things to say. I was pleased to note that her reaction was exactly what mine had been.

“Of course it’s true. Don’t be stupid,” said Philip. “It makes perfect sense. Uncle Kurt has always seemed strange, and now we know why.”

“Don’t you remember?” Delia Ybarra cut in. “That story he told me about Captain Kerrigan and the pornography. Remember how he said everyone has weaknesses? I bet he was thinking of himself.”

“It’s just as bad,” Isabella said. “Just as bad as Captain Kerrigan. It’s disgusting. It’s awful! How could he do it?”

“It’s not that bad,” said Tom, taking the part of the worldly young man. “When there are pretty girls around…”

“I’m not talking about that!” she snapped. “The point is he’s been lying all this time to our parents and to us—to everyone in the family! He’s one great big deceiver.”

“He didn’t lie to everyone,” Philip said. “Your father and Uncle Frank both knew about it. If you want to get angry, don’t forget to be mad at them too.”

Isabella shot him a furious look. “It’s not the same,” she said.

“It’s pretty rotten,” said Charlie. “Dad and Uncle Cedric must head out from Pensbottom instead of from here, after dropping Uncle Kurt at the train. It’s a long way to go, just to help Uncle Kurt lie to all of us.”

We found out later that Charlie was more or less correct: the uncles would depart from Shorecliff with a flourish, heading northwest past Cedric’s hidden meadow, and then spend the day circling over to Pensbottom so that Kurt could catch the evening train to Portland. For the next few days Cedric and Frank would hunt in the wilderness near the town, and on the last day of each trip they would return to Pensbottom, pick up Kurt, and walk along the road back to Shorecliff. The loneliness of the route served them well—none of the townspeople remarked on their brief appearances in town, and they never met anyone on their three-hour trek home. To us, however, the smoothness of their subterfuge made it even more horrifying. We were forced to view all three men as practiced liars—and Uncle Kurt as the worst of all.

“I don’t understand what Uncle Kurt was doing at the gambling house,” said Delia Robierre. “I mean, of course”—she blushed—“I know what he was doing, but where did he get the money? Why did he go? What’s the…well, what’s the point?”

“The point is he was bored,” said Philip sharply. “That’s what Francesca would say, and she’s right. They understand each other. Uncle Kurt was bored here, and he went to Portland to make sure he was still alive.”

I didn’t know how to interpret that statement, and I felt it was a little shocking to join Francesca and Uncle Kurt together. The day before I would have felt it was doing Uncle Kurt an injustice. Now the situation had been reversed.

“Should we tell Francesca?” Tom asked after a tense silence.

“No,” said Isabella. “No. We shouldn’t tell anyone. You were right, Richard dear, this is too horrible a secret.”

“Of course we’re going to tell Francesca,” Philip retorted, glaring at her. “I’d tell her now, but I don’t want to wake her up if she’s asleep. Furthermore, Isabella, what right do you have to keep this a secret? I think it’s something the aunts should know.”

“The aunts!” Isabella repeated, horrified. “But we can’t tell them!”

“Have you considered where he’s getting the money?” Philip asked. “He’s in debt right now! He doesn’t have any money of his own. He must be borrowing from the aunts and pretending it’s for something else. He’s doing just what Uncle Eberhardt did when he was young, and we can’t let him keep going!”

“But it’s not our place to tell them,” Isabella said, sounding frightened.

“How would you like to be the one to break the news to my mother?” Tom asked, more practically. “I think we should keep this to ourselves for now.”

“But we will tell Francesca,” Cordelia said. It was a moment of Ybarran tribal unity.

“Should I wake her up?” Philip asked, half rising.

“No,” said Delia. “Tell her in the morning. You know she almost never sleeps.”

That was news to me. I would have thought more about it, but with the weight of knowledge off my shoulders, I began to feel exhausted. The exhilaration of being the messenger had waned. They knew the secret now, and my status shrank back down to irrelevant youngest in the room. I wanted to lean my head on Isabella’s shoulder but didn’t dare. The moment for dramatic movement had passed.

“Richard’s tired,” she said. “I’m going to tuck him into bed.”

Charlie laughed, which I thought was insulting. I appreciated her gesture, childlike as it made me seem. And besides, any moment alone with her was one to be treasured.

“Everyone else should go to bed too,” she went on. Her voice shook a little. She was even more upset than I was, since she was able to grasp more clearly the ramifications of my discovery.

When she had escorted me to my room and tucked the covers around me, I asked, “Is everything ruined even more now? Will everyone be even more miserable?”

“Of course not,” she answered, sitting down next to me. “Everything will be all right. After all,” she added, in an attempt to comfort herself as well as me, “Uncle Kurt hasn’t changed completely. He’s still the kind, good man he was before. He just has some worse secrets than we thought. But everyone has their weaknesses.”

“You told me,” I said, remembering an incident that had happened several weeks before, “that Uncle Kurt had too many secrets of his own to have time for yours. Remember?”

Isabella laughed. “Yes, I remember. I didn’t think his secrets would be like this, though. I was thinking more of the war.”

“What are your secrets, Bella?” I asked, trying to come closer to her by using the nickname.

She looked down at me. “They’re nothing. Nothing important. They don’t really mean anything. Good night, Richard.”

“Isabella,” I said as she rose from the bed. “Should I stop going to visit Uncle Kurt in the mornings, to listen to his stories? I was looking forward—” I broke off, feeling only now, selfish brute that I was, as if tears were truly imminent.

“If you still want to,” she said, “of course you can go.”

She left the room, and I was left to ponder the wry sadness with which she had spoken her last words. It took me some time to realize that now, when I imagined listening to Kurt’s war stories, I felt not excitement but unease.

F
rancesca cornered me an hour after she woke up the next morning. Philip hadn’t lost any time in telling her about Uncle Kurt, and when she came after me, her black hair unbrushed and even more wild than usual, she looked terrifying. I was by myself near the cliff, going for a stroll before coming back to visit my mother in her bedroom. I hadn’t been expecting company, and when I turned around after gazing for a while at the flat, gray sea, I was startled to see her bearing down on me. She was wearing a skirt with her little nightdress on top, and I concluded that Philip had sprung the news on her while she was dressing.

“All right, Richard,” she said when she had gotten close enough to speak. “Tell me exactly what they said. Come on, right now.”

“What do you mean, Francesca?” I was so alarmed that my instincts regressed to those of a five-year-old: I thought I could buy time by playing innocent.

“You know exactly what I mean. None of you creeps last night bothered to wake me up, so I didn’t hear the story. Tell me exactly what they said.”

“About Uncle Kurt?” I faltered. I had been trying, without much success, not to think about him on my morning walk.

“Who the hell else!”

I paused, looked out to sea again, and mumbled, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Francesca grabbed my shoulders. She was so grim I thought she might slap me. In a strange way, with a thirteen-year-old’s thirst for violence and sensation, I hoped she would. But she restricted herself to shaking me.

“Tell me now, you little brat!” she cried. “He’s been going to Portland all this time. He’s been lying to all of us. He’s slept with prostitutes and gambled away our family money and been a cheating, poker-playing charlatan. Tell me the whole story! What did he say? What did Uncle Cedric and Uncle Frank say?”

“But you know everything already,” I quavered.

“I want the details!” she roared.

“I—I don’t remember them. Really, Francesca, I can’t remember!”

“Well, try.”

She let go of my shoulders and crossed her arms, presenting me with a fearsome display of a woman on the rampage. Surreptitiously I drank her in while I thought up various imaginary details to give to her, since it was true that I couldn’t remember what the uncles had said. I had been so shocked by the content of their discussion and afterward so horrified while brooding over Uncle Kurt’s treachery that most of their precise words had flown from my memory. But Francesca was standing there, staring at me with stormy eyes. Her crossed arms pushed up her normally near-flat chest, and I was mesmerized by the perfection of the smooth olive skin below her throat. The nightdress was quite revealing and on a more buxom woman would have been risqué. On Francesca, slender and willowy as she was, it merely emphasized the grace of her figure. Her black hair, pressed by her night’s sleep into an enormous crown of waving curls, completed the picture of an Amazon ready for battle. I had to tell her something.

“Uncle Kurt told them he had been distracted by a girl,” I began. “Uncle Cedric called her a floozy.” So far it was the truth. “She was one of the women at the gambling house, and she played poker.” This was pure invention. “He played with her the whole time he was there, and she stole all his money. He went dancing with her, too.” I felt this was an inspiration. “There was a dance floor in the gambling house. They danced all night and played poker and…and…”

“Yes?” said Francesca. Her eyes glittered. I could almost see her stretching out her hands, trying to reach the noisy, flashing chaos of the imaginary place I was describing.

“And there was drinking,” I whispered, adding the finishing touch.

Unexpectedly Francesca laughed. “Of course there was drinking, you idiot. You don’t understand half of what you heard.”

That was the sort of statement that made me resent Francesca. I waited for a few moments, but she was lost in thought. She stared out beyond the cliff, her arms still crossed. Eventually I asked, “So what do you think?”

“Think? What do I think?” She turned to me. “I think they’re all a bunch of goddamned hypocrites. And I can’t believe he’s been having the time of his life all summer while we’ve been rotting here in this shit-hole.”

I tried to display my debonair acceptance of her cursing—an attempt that probably made me look apoplectic—and said, “Well, this is only the fifth hunting trip they’ve been on.”

“That’s five more hunting trips than I’ve been on,” she retorted. “And don’t call them hunting trips, Richard. Call them whoring trips. Call them gambling trips. Call them lying trips. That high-and-mighty bastard.”

She glanced at me, realized she was speaking to a thirteen-year-old, and strode off toward the house. I stayed behind, mouthing some of her more shocking turns of phrase and feeling daring for almost using my vocal chords when I said them.

There now remained only one and a half more weeks at Shorecliff before we all dispersed to our respective homes. If our naked souls had been revealed, I suspect we all would have shown a longing to return to our humdrum lives, if only to escape what had become a nightmarish cycle of revelations concerning our family members.

I remember Philip lounging on Isabella’s spare bed a few days after my encounter with Francesca. Isabella, Tom, and I were the only other people in the room. Philip glanced at us, his dark eyes full of playful malice, and without warning he raised a hand and began to count. “My lovely mother—a painted whore,” he said, ticking one finger. “Great-Uncle Eberhardt—a wandering gambler. Darling Yvette—a lust-filled sex fiend. Old Tommy here—a lust-filled satyr. Gentle Lorelei—a lust-filled seductress. Uncle Kurt—a lying, promiscuous poker player.” He looked at us.

Tom was grinning, not even pretending to appear shamefaced. When he wasn’t grinding his teeth over Yvette’s treachery, he was patting himself on the back for being such an accomplished ladies’ man.

“Who’s next?” said Philip, staring at each of us. “Who will be the next family member to reveal a dark and loathsome secret? Richard?” He whipped his head toward me. “What have you been doing with Pamela all these weeks?”

“Stop that,” said Isabella. She smacked Philip on the shoulder, but at the same time she looked at me with worried eyes.

“Don’t worry about it, Isabella,” I said, feigning nonchalance. I had been doing that a lot, now that I was so frequently allowed to hear the older cousins’ discussions.

“Well, what about you, Isabella?” Philip went on. “Any secrets you’d like to share with us? Anything deep and dark and shocking?” His eyes locked with hers as he said this. He was in an unusually humorous mood, but I shivered at the aggression in his words. Half afraid and half intrigued, I was sure there was more to the conversation than I could understand.

Isabella, reddening slightly, slid off the bed and went to stand in the corner, the farthest point in the room from Philip. “I don’t like this game,” she said. “Tell us what you’re getting at and stop joking around. Richard doesn’t like it, and neither do I. You’re being unpleasant.”

“Richard likes it, don’t you, pal?” he asked, widening his eyes.

I said nothing. I had learned, over the summer, that the best policy when confronted by a confusing cousin was to remain silent.

Abruptly Philip dropped his persona. He looked at Isabella, his face grave, and said, “I’m just pointing out how many awful things we’ve learned this summer. I’m wondering if we’re going to get out of here with any of us unscathed.”

“I hope we do,” said Isabella. “I don’t want to learn anymore. I want everyone to keep whatever secrets they have.”

“Really, Bella?” Tom gave her a friendly smile.

“Yes,” she replied. She stomped out of the room, and Tom and Philip grinned at each other. Isabella’s mood swings had grown extreme. After my revelation about Uncle Kurt, she became completely erratic. In my head I compared her to a metronome with the weight at its tip, which flops all the way down and then rises up only to hurtle down again on the other side.

The morning following this conversation, the uncles announced that they had had such success on their last hunting trip—their bags, all three of them, had been loaded with game for the aunts to cook—that they were planning one more jaunt before we left Shorecliff. They would return the day before moving day, since the aunts required their presence for the endless hours of cleaning and packing that brought each stay at Shorecliff to a close.

The news that the uncles were going on yet another trip—“Number six!” Francesca exclaimed in outrage—caused a flurry of conversation among the cousins. Many speculations were voiced as to why they were planning another trip so soon after the last one. Philip was of the opinion that Uncle Kurt’s debt was becoming unmanageable and that he was planning to chance the last of the family money in one wild, all-night poker game. Tom said it was obviously a case of infatuation: the girl who had distracted Kurt on the previous trip held him in her clutches, and he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Francesca suggested that Kurt simply couldn’t stand the sight of Shorecliff anymore and was escaping once and for all. No one entertained for an instant the idea that the uncles might actually want to go hunting. Among us, naiveté on that scale had been eradicated.

We watched their preparations warily, from doorways and windows. Not one of us dared to come too close. The uncles had become untouchable. Cedric and Frank had lied to us all summer, and Uncle Kurt had deceived us on a grander scale than any of us could have previously believed possible.

I stayed away from him altogether. The afternoon after my eavesdropping from the phone booth, he had discovered me in the kitchen and said cheerily, “Why didn’t you come for a story this morning, kiddo? I was looking forward to one of our nostalgic sessions. Gotten bored with me, have you?” The truth was I had stood outside his door for five minutes debating whether or not to knock. I could picture so well the excitement of the story he would tell, the smile on his face, the thoughtful questions he would ask me. And I imagined sitting in front of him on the little chair, knowing he had been in Portland. Eventually I walked back down the stairs and went out to the cliff, where Francesca cornered me. That afternoon, when he asked why I hadn’t come, I replied, “I guess I forgot. You’ve been away for the last couple days, after all.” He ruffled my hair and left the room, and I breathed a sigh of relief, as if I had overcome an obstacle. Then I almost burst into tears at the thought of my beloved Uncle Kurt being an obstacle.

After Philip’s speech about family members’ secrets, I began to wonder which cousin or aunt or uncle would be the next to reveal a scandalous past. So many secrets had been uncovered that more seemed inevitable. I began to look expectantly at each person I came across—and, as often happens, the more I looked around the more I saw.

Like the inhabitants of a bombed city, the Shorecliff population had scattered under the shock of disillusionment. Morning croquet games were a thing of the past, and after my experience in the phone booth, none of us felt like playing Piggy Wants a Signal. The aunts had been driven into near silence by the fiasco of Aunt Edie’s birthday. For the most part they kept to themselves, holding murmured conversations in the kitchen, their perennial stronghold. Whenever we came in, they would glance sideways at us and stop talking. Then they would wait with open impatience for us to leave. Even my mother seemed distant, and during my visits to her room she would often simply stroke my hair, sigh, and continue reading her book.

The uncles too kept a low profile, though this was nothing new. Uncle Eberhardt sensed the cloud of disgrace descending on him whenever he neared the main house and retired permanently to Condor’s cottage. In spite of his presence there, we spent hours at the cottage in those last few weeks. Barnavelt was growing into a gleaming, strong, adolescent fox with an adorable temperament and a keen nose for mischief. He was allowed to run free in the cottage and divided his time between his own wooden house and Condor’s ankles. Outside he stayed on his leash. Condor rarely left the cottage without him, and we often came across them in the woods, tracking an animal or tearing up brambles or planting saplings.

Delia and Delia spent the majority of their time with Condor and Barnavelt. I wondered what Condor thought about their shadowing of him. Having been a solitary man all his life, he must have thought it strange to acquire two young girls as constant companions, especially since they often didn’t speak, instead communicating with each other simply through expressive glances. They were as devoted to Barnavelt as Condor was and cooed over him constantly. Whenever Condor slipped on the collar at the end of the leash, they would cringe as if Barnavelt were being whipped. They still believed that Condor should return the fox to the wild, though he had explained many times how unfit Barnavelt was now for anything except posh living among humans. Uncle Eberhardt was openly infuriated by the Delias’ incessant comings and goings, and he usually greeted their entrance with a barrage of complaints. The two Delias and Condor ignored him. Condor, ever the gentleman, would shoot his pastel cuffs and say, “Good morning, girls,” as if they had not been dropping by every day.

Isabella, Philip, and Tom spent most of their time together. Although, a week after Aunt Edie’s party, both he and Yvette were allowed out of the house in the company of cousins, Tom still chafed under the close supervision of the aunts, and visits to Lorelei were out of the question. Isabella and Philip would go for walks on occasion, and there was one swimming expedition in those final days, when the air was so humid that not to be in the water would have been torture. Otherwise the three of them lolled on the lawn or in the boys’ room, talking idly or playing listless card games. I divided my time between them and Pamela, who remained primly uninterested in scandal and pretended she knew nothing of the goings-on that had fragmented the family. I found her company, as always, soothing but unsatisfying.

Yvette, disdaining the aunts’ announcement that she could once more go outside, lurked in her room, visited only by Pamela, Fisher, and Isabella, whose powers of empathy sometimes got the better of her. We all considered that Yvette had behaved unpardonably to Tom, and I suspected that the other cousins were, like me, too frightened to approach her. She reminded me of an untamed beast at the circus who cannot be groomed into a presentable show animal because there is no circus hand willing to enter its cage. On a certain level, as I’ve said, I sympathized with her. But wounding Lorelei, who had borne a large part of Yvette’s accusation, seemed unforgivable. Lorelei was to me the epitome of blameless purity. It didn’t matter that she and Tom were sleeping together—she remained a quiet, gentle spirit, and neither I nor the other cousins could tolerate the callousness with which Yvette had thrown her to the wolves.