Shorecliff (3 page)

There came now an inevitable letdown. I sat on my bed and thought, “What now?” There was still half an hour before dinner. My clothes were unpacked, my books lined up on the desk tucked into the gabled window. My telescope lay on the table next to my bed. I had made all conceivable preparations, and now I had to find something to have prepared for. From down the hall I heard the rise and fall of cousinly voices. That sound, as steady as the ocean crashing against the cliff, formed the background of my summer at Shorecliff. Always around the corner, up the stairs, in the distance, those voices sparred and tangled, speaking of things I half understood and yearned to know more of. It took excruciating courage to approach them, to appear in the doorway of whichever bedroom or alcove the group had chosen as a headquarters.

This time they were in the room occupied by Isabella Robierre. All of them were there except Yvette, Pamela, and Philip—the Wight girls had a way of making themselves scarce, and Philip generally disliked group discussions. The others had piled onto the two beds—Isabella, like me, had a room to herself, but hers had been furnished to house two people, and the spare bed served as a useful lounging place. Together the cousins formed a physical barrier as intimidating as their conversation. When I appeared before them, the talk died and they all looked at me. The pressure from those six pairs of eyes! They seemed twice as many. Then Isabella extricated herself from the pile and swooped down on me.

Isabella. She was the one cousin to whom no description of mine could do justice. All the others could be categorized in one way or another: Philip the revolutionary, Charlie the athlete, Francesca the blazing beauty, Tom the student, Fisher the dreamer, the two Delias identifiable in tandem. Isabella was not like the others. She was not as beautiful as Francesca nor as graceful as Yvette. She could be awkward and blunt. Sometimes she didn’t know what to say. But there was an energy in her that surpassed all the others, an openness, an abandon. She was the only cousin who had ever hugged me and tousled me and tossed me around, and I had loved every minute of it—which made it all the more crushing this summer when she flung herself toward me, took in at a glance how much older I had grown since our last meeting, and stumbled to a halt with her hands still open, trying too late to pretend that there was no awkwardness in her movements. She felt, I suppose, that I was too old now to be cuddled, that I was no longer a child—though I wouldn’t have minded. I would have relished the contact.

That summer, at seventeen, Isabella was recovering from a recent growth spurt and moved like a baby giraffe, all long legs and spindly arms. She was not as tall as Francesca, but she was taller than most of us, and her body was especially noticeable because it was so gangly. She had light brown hair, as all the Robierres did. It was straight and uninteresting, and she tied it back at the nape of her neck, letting a few wisps frame her face. Her hands and feet often gestured in unexpected directions, demanding to be noticed. Whenever the cousins were in a group, the two who stood out irresistibly were Isabella and Francesca.

Isabella stood in front of me now, not touching me but grinning her goofy, all-consuming grin. “Look at our Richard!” she cried.

I stared back at her, smiling like an imbecile.

“Don’t make such a song and dance.” Charlie yawned. “He won’t know how we should entertain ourselves any more than we do.”

Isabella laughed and beckoned me to the foot of her bed. I sat next to her and remembered how she used to hold me in her lap, even when I weighed nearly as much as she did. Now it seemed that not only her lap but all parts of her body were forbidden territory. I pondered this change, trying to ignore the snooty looks I kept receiving from the two Delias, who were seated on the other bed and clearly thought I should be kept from the room.

The two Delias’ story shows the Hatfield tendency to create feuds out of thin air. When Aunt Rose and Aunt Loretta were pregnant with their last children, they got into a discussion of baby names. Rose had gone over to Paris to visit Loretta, who was still living there with Rodrigo. The two sisters’ relationship was uneasy at best. Rose had raised the loudest cry against Rodrigo, and Loretta had always objected vociferously to Rose’s high-handed control over the Hatfield family. Yet in many ways they were the most similar of the Hatfield sisters. They didn’t like to admit it, but when they were together and managed to avoid fighting, they often laughed louder and harder than with anyone else.

The question of baby names was a serious one with the Hatfields. A host of preferences and responsibilities had to be taken into account, and it was only with these two last children that Rose and Loretta finally felt they had free rein. Loretta had taken care of Rodrigo’s requirements with Francesca and Philip. For Rose, Tom had been my grandfather’s name, and Isabella was the name of Cedric’s favorite sister. Now a clear horizon lay before them. The two women drank their tea, ate their croissants, patted their stomachs, and tossed names back and forth. Loretta suggested Delia. Rose glommed onto it like a snake snatching its prey—at least that is Loretta’s version of the story. Rose herself claims she thought of it first, but none of us has ever believed her.

“I love it,” she said. “I want that one. It’s mine.”

“I came up with it!” Loretta protested.

But Rose refused to back down. The talk developed into an argument and then an out-and-out fight. At last Rose flounced off and soon after returned to America, swearing that she would send the government a birth certificate first. That was exactly how it came about. Alas for Loretta, though she was due first, Rose gave birth prematurely (deliberately, Loretta claimed) and chose the name Delia while crowing in triumph. Two weeks later Loretta gave birth to her own baby and lay there in the Paris hospital bed, arguing with Rodrigo over the morals of also naming their daughter Delia. Rodrigo disapproved of sibling rivalry. At last Loretta said, “
Cor
delia then,” and lay back exhausted on the pillows. From that point on the second Delia’s name was always pronounced in that strange way, with the emphasis on the first syllable, for no one ever used her full first name except to distinguish her from the other Delia. Loretta rejected Cordie as a nickname, and so, despite Rose’s exaggerated shock, the Hatfield family contained two Delias.

At fifteen, the Delias were inseparable. They had clung to each other from the first moment they met, and different though they were, we thought of them as a pair. Delia Robierre had light brown hair cut in a bob. She was stocky and freckly—more so than either Tom or Isabella—and easily pleased, with an infectious giggle that rang through the house. Delia Ybarra was destined to be nearly as great a beauty as Francesca. She had black curly hair as short as a boy’s, a swanlike neck, snapping black eyes, tiny feet. There was more mischief in her than in Delia Robierre, though she presented a more serious front. Combined, they were a dangerous formula, not least because, as nearly the youngest cousins, they were constantly trying to prove themselves. I thought the two Delias owed Pamela and me a debt of gratitude—it was only because we were there to be excluded that they were allowed in on the colloquies of the older cousins. They knew this, but for them it required resentment rather than gratitude, so I avoided them as much as possible. In any case, they were small fry. Neither of them counted in comparison with the glorious older cousins.

I don’t remember what they were all saying at that first meeting. Francesca was probably leading them in declarations of discontent. Coming from Manhattan where, according to Philip, young men often lined up outside the Ybarra residence to see her and where Aunt Loretta—despite raised eyebrows from the more cautious mothers in their set—let her gallivant through the streets with these eager escorts until after midnight, Francesca undoubtedly thought of Shorecliff as a desert wasteland. Her aunts said she was spoiled and, believing in education for girls as well as boys, frequently asked why she had not gone to college. But Loretta was skeptical of the value of a formal education, and she was proud, besides, of her own adventurous past. The lessons of real life, she was fond of saying, taught more than any college professor could imagine. When Francesca refused flat-out to consider Barnard or any other college, Loretta accepted her refusal without a murmur, and she stood by that decision in spite of the fact that Yvette was bound for Bryn Mawr in the fall and Isabella had been looking forward to Radcliffe since she was ten years old. Francesca defiantly took the route of the debutante, and though Loretta could barely afford her evening gowns, let alone the expense of hosting parties, she helped Francesca hide the difference between our Hatfield shabbiness and the fortunes of the New York elite. When her sisters remonstrated with her, Loretta said that she refused to deprive Francesca of the thrill of youth simply because of a lack of money.

Given the dazzling whirl she had been forced to abandon for the summer, it was hardly surprising that from the beginning, at Shorecliff, Francesca was determined not to enjoy herself except by means of rebellion. But that did not mean that she sulked or snapped or made life miserable. On the contrary, though she painted the summerhouse as a prison, she made it come to life for all of us.

 Eventually, that first evening, she indicated that the audience was over, and we all filed out, in spite of the fact that the meeting had taken place in Isabella’s room—Francesca instantly became queen of any room she entered. We were bunched up at the door, and I looked back to find Francesca nodding knowingly on Isabella’s bed. “Wait until Tom comes,” she said, half closing her eyes. “Then you’ll see. Wait for Tom.”

Wait for Tom was exactly what we did. He didn’t come for a week, and during that week two events of importance occurred. The first was that Aunt Loretta left. The announcement was made on the second night, when we were all crowded around the long table in the dining room, a room used only once a day for our immense dinners. When Loretta said, “I’m going to return to New York tomorrow,” I was baffled. She was prone to these sudden moves—apparently it was one such move that had taken her to Europe in the first place. Even so, the adults were clearly as mystified as we were. There was some talk about business needing to be taken care of, a financial situation gone awry, but that seemed insufficient reason for her to abandon our precious summer vacation.

Only her own children were unaffected by the news. Francesca gave her mother a look I found hard to identify; it was a strange, stony glance that seemed to combine resentment with empathy. Of course, I was always on the alert where my older cousins were concerned, and I was particularly alive to Francesca’s expressions. To me she was a prophetess for nearly all of that summer, and I might have endowed her face with more subtlety than it really expressed. While she glowered, Philip continued to eat without any change whatsoever. Neither asked Loretta why she was going, which seemed to me to be filial negligence on a criminal level, excusable only because of Philip’s secret mental life as a revolutionary. As for Cordelia, she was wrapped up in something Delia Robierre was saying. She looked up for half a second and said, “Oh, don’t go, Mommy!” and then turned back to Delia. This was more negligence, and I wondered what the children’s relationship with Aunt Loretta could possibly be like.

Certainly it was nothing like the relationship I had with my own mother. She, as the flipside of my father, had always been a warm and sheltering haven. She was not an assertive person—any loudness she might have had had been drained out of her long ago by the browbeating of six strong-minded older siblings—but she possessed a wordless determination that filled me with relief and admiration. When my father snapped at me or shooed me away, she would hold open her arms and with that gesture express not only her love for me but her disapproval of my father’s behavior. Even when I was little, I understood her meaning and prayed that he did too. Now that I’m older, I know he did understand it. Sometimes I can find it in my heart to pity him—not often, though. My mother did not play a large role in that summer at Shorecliff, at least not an ostentatious one. Nevertheless, she was there, acting as my subterranean rock of security. Had she been absent, I could not have done half the daring things I carried out in the company of my wild cousins.

The second important event was the return of the uncles—Frank, Cedric, and Kurt—from their first hunting trip to the woodlands northwest of Shorecliff. Great-Uncle Eberhardt had not been on this trip. He did not approve of guns, nor of killing animals for sport, nor of conversing with other humans unless it was with Condor, the groundskeeper at Shorecliff. Condor was Uncle Eberhardt’s constant companion, and Eberhardt spent many long days at Condor’s cottage in the strip of woods separating Shorecliff from the surrounding farmland. When the other men were away on their hunting expeditions, Eberhardt moved to the cottage entirely, appearing at the house only occasionally for meals. He said that the company of women and children without respite was too much for any man and a death recipe for an old man like himself. As a result, he appeared to return when the rest of the men did, though in fact he had been within reach all the time.

Fantastical though it may be, I remember Uncle Eberhardt wearing a black cape. It seems impossible now that he actually wore one in that day and age, in the middle of the summer, but that is my memory of him. Thus Uncle Eberhardt stalked through the back door into the kitchen with the rest of the men, his back bent so that the cape swung over his shoulders and cast a shadow around his feet. He had a rough, hair-dotted face that never failed to scare me, beetled brows and squinting eyes, the remains of a white head of hair, and gnarled, bony hands. He was a gruesome creature from a child’s fevered dream, but for all that, he was our uncle, and in our way we appreciated him. He tolerated nothing and approved of nothing; he was Aunt Edie times ten. They did not get on well together.

“How was Condor, Uncle Eberhardt?” Rose asked. It gave me great pleasure to see her, the tallest and most imposing of my aunts, quelled by Eberhardt’s lightning gaze.