Shorecliff (33 page)
In despair I turned back to Francesca, and everything became jumbled. The scene seemed like an oil painting melting into a puddle of colors, the figures running together in a hideous confusion of pain and distress. Aunts poured from the house, cousins swept out from the woods. Silhouettes, sharpening against the sunrise, swarmed around the figure that riveted our eyes, Francesca rolling on the ground, fire all over her.
Aunt Rose, the only aunt who had had the presence of mind to glance out her bedroom window before dashing down the stairs, emerged with the heavy brown parlor carpet dragging behind her. She reached Francesca in a flash, threw the rug over her, and leaped on top of the writhing bundle. Somehow she managed to roll Francesca up in the rug, difficult as that must have been: It took some time to suffocate the flames.
In the sudden darkness after they had been smothered, a new sound curled up from Francesca in the rug, even more heart-wrenching than her earlier screams. She was wailing in pain, crying and keening like a dying seagull. The sound made me fall onto the ground and curl into a ball. It was too terrible to listen to, and yet I couldn’t escape it. I knew then, with a nauseating knot in my stomach, that it was my fault—completely and inescapably my fault.
I stayed huddled on the ground for who knows how long, forgotten for a time even by my mother, hearing nothing except the chaotic babble of voices above me, and through it all Francesca’s knife-like cries. I learned afterward that Aunt Rose and my mother were the only people who had kept any useful grasp on the situation. Aunt Margery was so hysterical she could hardly breathe, and Aunt Edie was near fainting. The cousins were either stunned into immobility or dissolved in tears. With a supreme effort of will, however, the two Hatfield women who had always taken charge managed to do so again now.
My mother called the Pensbottom police and explained the situation. She and Rose had decided that, unreliable though the car was, they would still be able to reach the town faster by driving in the rattletrap than by waiting for a swifter vehicle to come for Francesca. My mother called, however, so that the Pensbottom police would hold the morning train. After the long, passionate, pointless drama of her night drive to Portland, Francesca returned to the city the very next morning, wrapped in a rug, bald and burned and shouting in pain so loudly, my mother told us later, that the whole train knew of the calamity before they reached Portland.
There are two things I remember happening before the aunts carried Francesca to the car and rattled off to Pensbottom. The first was that Aunt Rose caught sight of the gasoline can sitting innocently on the grass. Peeking through my fingers, I saw her look from the can to Francesca and back again, then at the rattletrap, then back to the can. Her mind was running through the possible scenarios that could have led to Francesca’s immolation. Later, of course, she learned exactly what had happened, but I suspect, given Rose’s hawklike nature, that she glommed onto the correct explanation simply by examining those three objects—the can, the car, the rug holding Francesca—as if they were pieces of evidence at a murder trial.
Had there really been a trial, I would have been the defendant, and a jury of my family members would have pronounced me guilty. For it became clear to me, in the ensuing days, that the true source of danger at Shorecliff was not the undertow at the beach, nor the dark woods, nor the cliff itself, which lurked in so many of the aunts’ fears. No, the danger at Shorecliff was in me—I was its agent, with all my misguided hopes and worries, and it gathered itself into one irrevocable movement when I pushed Isabella into Charlie’s back.
The other thing I remember is something Delia Ybarra said. It has rung in my ears ever since. My mother had filled the rattletrap’s tank with what was left of the gasoline in the can, and Aunt Rose picked up Francesca, still invisible in the rug. She had to ignore Francesca’s screams of renewed pain as the rug pressed against raw skin, but she struggled as quickly as she could to the rattletrap, and my mother helped her lay Francesca along the backseat.
As they arranged her, Cordelia suddenly cried out, as if there had been a new catastrophe, and turned to Delia Robierre. “Burns never heal, do they?” she sobbed. “Burns never heal!” The agony in her voice, the implication of her words, the knowledge that I had destroyed her sister—the most beautiful woman I had ever known—all this put a seal on my guilt that nothing could break.
Then the car was gone, and a blanket of unearthly silence settled over Shorecliff. Still curled on the ground, I saw my cousins standing in odd positions over the lawn, stiff and isolated, staring at the ground, the sky, the woods, the house—anything but each other. For a while we must have looked like a graveyard for old statuary, or a discarded collection of mourning sculptures, for each face was distorted in a grimace of grief. I saw Yvette, who had burst out of the house with the aunts, standing bewildered and helpless, an outsider even in this final crisis. And I saw Lorelei—the first hint I got that she had played any role in the night’s events—near Tom, of course, with her hands clasped in front of her, gazing at her feet.
Eventually we all went into the house. Fisher came over and helped me stand up. He said nothing; no one was speaking. I fled to my room, too shaken even to think, and sat on my bed for endless hours until my mother came back. She brought nothing of Francesca but the burned brown rug.
W
e stayed at Shorecliff for some days after the accident. For me they passed as days in a prison. With the exception of the times when we gathered to hear first Charlie’s and then Uncle Kurt’s stories of the night, I spoke to no one except my mother, Lorelei, and occasionally some aunts and uncles. The older cousins, I suppose, must have conversed among themselves, but I was no longer welcome in their discussions, and I would rather have died than listen outside their doors. I kept hearing Isabella’s scornful voice saying, “I’m not going to eavesdrop on them, Richard.” My favorite hobby, the activity that had made the summer the most exciting of my life, had been condemned by the cousin I worshipped above all others.
She, moreover, refused to speak to me. One awful time in those few days I ran into her in the hallway, and instead of slinking past her, as I had before, I looked into her eyes. This took immense courage, but it was the courage of desperation. I found it physically painful not to have her affection anymore. My voice cracking, I said, “Hi, Isabella.” As she looked back at me, her face suffused with misery, I could see the vision of Francesca rising before her. I believe she tried not to blame me for what had happened, but Isabella never could control her emotions, and I had been the cause of something unbearable. So she just stared at me wordlessly and backed away, stumbling as she always did. After that I could do nothing except crouch in my room, awaiting visits from my mother, who herself was too distracted by Francesca’s plight to comfort me with more than fleeting caresses.
We went to visit Francesca at the hospital in Portland a few days after the accident. I was forced to go—had I been given a choice I would have fled to New York and never seen Francesca again. The aunts marshaled us into groups and drove us in relays to the train station. The hospital was enormous and cold and blindingly white, like the mazes they build for rats in laboratories. Suddenly I saw Aunt Margery framed in the doorway of one of the rooms—the morning after the accident she had gathered herself together and gone to Portland, and she stayed with Francesca even after Aunt Loretta arrived. I marveled at how out of place she looked in that sterile environment. When we went into the room the strangeness grew so great I almost started to cry. The creature sitting in the bed was swathed in white bandages, head and all, as if a mummy had come to the hospital for treatment. There were two black slits where the eyes should be, a tiny hole for the nose, and another black slit for the mouth. The idea that Francesca was encased in this mummy suit was grotesque. None of us wanted to believe it.
“Come over here, children,” Aunt Margery said. “Francesca, your brother and sister and cousins are here to visit you.” Like a herd of dumb beasts we gathered around the bed, staring at the mummy and willing Francesca to appear behind us, looking as she had always looked, breathtakingly beautiful, and laughing at the mix-up.
“Say something!” Aunt Rose hissed in our ears.
There was an intolerable pause. Finally Tom cleared his throat and said, “We’re really sorry, Francesca. We’re really, really, really sorry.”
The mummy didn’t respond. It didn’t even move.
“She hasn’t been speaking,” Aunt Loretta whispered to my mother.
Somehow I had been pushed into the position nearest Francesca on the left side of the bed—the last place I wanted to be—and from my vantage point I could look up into the slits the doctors had left for her eyes. The lights above the bed were glaring, and in their shadowless light I saw that her eyelids were closed behind the slits. For some reason this filled me with terror. It occurred to me that she might be dead under all those bandages, and we would never know. The thought made my chest contract. I wanted to ask the aunts and receive the reassurance of their contemptuous answer, but I couldn’t speak. After a few minutes we were led out of the room, still acting like obedient cattle, and I was left haunted by the idea that Francesca might have departed forever while we stood talking to her corpse.
Of course she wasn’t dead. In fact, by some standards, Francesca was lucky. After months of recuperation, she returned to life—ravaged almost beyond recognition and scarred, people said, in personality as well as appearance. It was many years before she possessed anything resembling her old vivacity. But she was functional; she had survived. Miraculously, her hair grew back almost as thick and luxuriant as it had been before. That was an immense blessing, and it was a lasting relief to her family to see those familiar black curls, even if they did now tumble around a stranger’s face.
The worst of the burns had been on her hands and forearms. The heat there had been intensified by her burning sleeves. She is still extremely clumsy, eating only with difficulty and writing in a childish scrawl. She has worn elbow-length gloves, day and night, ever since leaving the hospital—she refused to go home from Portland until Aunt Loretta bought her the first pair. Only the aunts have ever seen her scarred hands uncovered, but thanks to the family grapevine I heard that Aunt Rose described them as “scaly dragon claws.” I’m glad never to have seen anything but the sleek, satin gloves.
Her face, though it was burned less badly than her hands, is far more horrifying. As Delia so chillingly predicted before the aunts drove Francesca away, the scars never healed properly. Down her right cheek, from the outside of her eye to the edge of her lip, runs a large, wide, pinkish welt, unavoidably arresting, so that people cannot help staring at it. On her left cheek two similar welts form a V, one side reaching up to her eye, the other following her jawline to the ear. The point of the V healed in such a way that it pulled her mouth to one side, making her appear eternally disgusted. Her neck is marred by similar scars, but she always wears high-necked shirts and dresses, so those welts are covered. It is only her face that she has never been able to hide.
Once, several years ago, I was speaking to a client of mine who, it turned out, had known Francesca when he was in Europe—for there she fled, soon after our summer at Shorecliff, and stayed even through the war. He said that when you first looked at her, all you could see, naturally enough, were the horrendous scars. But after a moment you felt her gaze. She had regained after a time the intense, defiant stare that had been her trademark expression. Her dark eyes were as lustrous and gleaming as they had always been, the lashes as long and curling, the brows as exquisitely shaped. So, this mutual friend told me, after a while you looked at her eyes rather than her scars, and it began to seem that a beautiful woman was concealed underneath the mutilated face, that the scars were the squares of some dreadful net thrown over her, and that she was looking out through the net as if she were a prisoner, caught by her own disfigurement.
“But really,” he said, as if he were telling me something new, “she’s a beautiful woman—in spite of everything, a truly beautiful woman.”
“You will never know how beautiful,” I said shortly, and I turned the conversation to other things. I did not need a stranger to inform me of Francesca’s mauled perfection.
It may be true that her eyes remain captivating, that her hair has grown back, that she has, after all, found life livable even without the asset of her flawless beauty. I hope it is true. But all I can think when I hear her name is that every morning she looks in the mirror and sees a horrifying distortion of herself, and that the distortion is the result of an action I took, unforgivable in intent and more unforgivable in result.
When I was in college, five or six years after the summer at Shorecliff, Francesca made a gesture that in its compassion indicated just how much she had changed from her former self. She came to visit me at Columbia and, holding me with that fierce gaze of hers, told me that she knew I blamed myself for what had happened. She said she wanted me to forgive myself as she had forgiven me. Then she told me how, months after she had left the hospital, after the first shock had worn off and she had finally started to accept that she would be disfigured for the rest of her life, she realized that, in a strange way, the scars had freed her from a fate that had plagued her ever since she was young. She told me she had known since she was little, perhaps twelve or thirteen, that she was destined to look very much like her mother when she grew up—that she would be as beautiful as Loretta, if not more so. Moreover, she knew she had also inherited Loretta’s temper, her wildness, her passion, her inability to be calm and quiet and to think before acting. A fear began to haunt her that she was doomed to make the same mistakes her mother had made. She watched herself causing schoolroom dramas and breaking boys’ hearts, and she worried that no matter what she did, her energy—“some fire within me,” as she put it—would drive her toward a life similar to her mother’s.
During the summer at Shorecliff, when my father revealed to us what Loretta’s life was really like, the fear in Francesca grew exponentially. She became almost frantic in her desire not to follow her mother’s example, though she adored Loretta—that was part of the problem. Her own antics with Charlie disgusted her even as they entertained her. She would laugh and shoot him a come-hither look, and all the while she would scorn herself inwardly, despairing of her character. Then the accident happened, and when she finally emerged from the hell of the initial trauma, she looked in the mirror one morning and realized that she no longer looked like Loretta, that she was no longer in danger of following the same impetuous path because, as she said with a wry laugh, a face like hers had little chance of inspiring the necessary passions for such a life. Thus, unexpectedly, her scars gave her a new freedom, and she seems to have appreciated it throughout her life. For apparently she has not had such a bad time of it in Europe.
I wasn’t comforted by her visit. I greeted her confidences, naturally, with polite responses, but when she left my dormitory I breathed a sigh of relief that was almost a sob. It had been unbearable to watch her speak and see the mutilation I had caused all over her face. I felt no relief in knowing such a face would never inspire passions—on the contrary, her words were salt poured into a wound I fear will never heal. How could she have imagined that I, who had known her in all her youthful splendor, would find reassurance in the knowledge that she would never gain the rewards such splendor deserves? I have never doubted that she could still be loved—no one who has spent time with Francesca could doubt that. But even if a man were smitten by the unstoppable woman behind the scars and the gloves and the stilted manner she has adopted since the accident, he still wouldn’t see the former beauty that crowned her personality so perfectly. He would never know what she ought to have looked like, nor how gloriously reckless she once was.
Aside from this memorable visit, I have not had much contact with Francesca or indeed with any of my cousins in the thirty years that have passed since that summer. We have never gathered again as a family except briefly at weddings and funerals. Not surprisingly, I have never gone back to Shorecliff, though a few of the other cousins have made the trip now and again, and for years its only full-time inhabitants were Condor, Uncle Eberhardt, and Barnavelt, who remained happily ensconced in Condor’s cottage until his death years later. Uncle Eberhardt, soon after our summer there, installed himself in the main house and announced to the family that he had become Shorecliff’s caretaker. The three of them, therefore—caretaker, groundskeeper, and fox—grew gray at Shorecliff while the rest of us dispersed, drifting further and further from the one place that had drawn us together.
For months in New York, after that summer, I found myself missing my cousins with a physical, gut-clenching intensity. Guilt-ridden as I was, I hated to think about Francesca and Isabella—and of course I thought about them nonstop. The others I missed more straightforwardly: after all, Tom, Philip, Pamela, Fisher, and the others had been as central in my thoughts as the two girls whose faces I could now never escape. My cousins had served before that summer as vague mythical figures to idolize, and their allure was infinitely more powerful after three months of living with them. When I was home again in our dull, brown apartment in Manhattan, confronted every morning by my father’s emotionless stare over the breakfast cereal, I yearned so desperately for Isabella, for Tom and Philip, for the old Francesca in all her wildness, that I thought my heart was sure to burst. At night I dreamed kaleidoscope dreams set at Shorecliff, decorated by cousinly bits and pieces—Philip’s piercing eyes and Pamela’s golden ball of hair; the two Delias, fair and dark; and always Isabella staring at me, thinking I was a traitor, in the infernal light from Francesca going up in flames.
Of course I saw them again over the years. Pamela continues to be one of the background figures of my life, a strange, haughty confidant to whom I tell my secrets unwillingly and yet with invariable relief. She has yet to give me advice, but I trust her steadfastness, as I always did. Yvette and she remain close, and I have occasionally found the two sisters together in Pamela’s New York apartment. Yvette has softened over time, and when I see her now I often contrast her present character with her tempestuous past. I felt sorry for her then—of all the cousins she undoubtedly had the loneliest time, perhaps even the saddest time, at Shorecliff before Francesca’s tragedy. Now she is very gentle, and Pamela tells me that she has made a successful career for herself in the office of a fashion magazine, where she draws illustrations and designs layouts with typical Wight neatness and clarity. She has three children whose last name is Wrycek but who come from the Wight mold. My favorite is Josiah, a waiflike boy of twelve who has white-blond hair and a startling solemnity of expression. Pamela herself married a grave, silent man who works long hours at his accounting firm and has never said more than one sentence at a time to me. I imagine them eating their late dinners in a soundless room, entirely content in watching each other’s serenity.