Shorecliff (34 page)

The rest of the cousins have to some degree kept up the close relationships that arose during the summer at Shorecliff. Francesca and Charlie remained friends and would see each other on Francesca’s rare trips to America. But Charlie, alone among the cousins, did not survive the Second World War. As soon as hostilities were declared in Europe, he dropped everything, abandoning the Wight carpentry business, and began training as an officer. When America joined the fight, he sailed for Britain. Two years later he was lost, and all the crosses and honors bestowed on him after death could not fill the hole left in our family.

After the war, Francesca stopped returning to America altogether—I suspect because Charlie was no longer here to greet her. Most of the family has gone over at one time or another to visit her. Loretta in particular has kept up a fierce and passionate connection with her oldest daughter. Somewhat ironically, Loretta extracted herself from the realm of scandal immediately after our summer at Shorecliff. Francesca’s tragedy woke her up from what had become, in truth, a despairing lifestyle, and she stopped pursuing Joel Ambersen, permanently and without qualms, as soon as she was summoned to the hospital in Portland. In the end, she told Francesca, though she had convinced herself that her one path to happiness lay with that dubious millionaire, the break caused her no heartache at all. She was focused, by that point, on Francesca’s recovery. And though her appetite for men never left her, she ceased to run after them with such ostentatious recklessness. The scandal sheets soon tired of her, and she never gave them more meat to feed upon.

I should mention that Francesca, by the sheer force of her personality, succeeded in taking European society by storm. To this day she is a staple in French and Italian gossip columns—I once found a clipping that referred to her as “the notorious scarred beauty, Francesca Ybarra.” Of all the cities she has conquered, Vienna is apparently her favorite, but she has spent considerable time in desolate Berlin and several years in London. For a long time none of us could understand how she earned her money. She made it clear from the start that she was not living off men, married or otherwise—one could almost hear the unspoken phrase “like my mother.” Cordelia was the one who finagled the answer out of her: it appears that when Francesca first returned to Paris, an old family friend, dating back to the time when Loretta and Rodrigo lived in the city with their three young children, helped set her up as a governess in a wealthy family’s home. The father was an old man with a young wife who had died giving birth to her last child, and he grew to rely on Francesca without reserve. In the few years before his death, he became besotted with her, and she found that in his will he had bequeathed her enough money to live in luxury for the rest of her days. “Every night,” Francesca told Delia, “I give thanks to Monsieur Durand. I don’t have much use for God, but Monsieur Durand made my life bearable, scars and all.”

The two Delias, always inseparable, kept up their attachment as if oblivious to the hindrance of distance, writing to each other regularly and journeying between Cambridge and New York every few months. Delia Robierre entered a medical school and became a beloved pediatrician in Boston. Her excellent reputation has put her in much demand, and her husband once told me that because she can’t bear to turn anyone away, she often slaves night and day for her patients. As for Delia Ybarra, she headed to journalism school without a moment’s indecision and is now a respected reporter. Her first break came during her time in France after the war, when she lived with Francesca and wrote stories about the heroes of the Resistance. Some years later, after reporting on condemned political figures and guerrilla warfare in several dangerous countries—journeys no doubt instigated by her fierce Ybarran blood—she came back to New York to write for
The
Times.
I rarely see her; she lives a busy and sociable life, moving in circles far removed from mine.

Fisher went to Harvard, at least partly to foster the friendship that had grown up between him and Uncle Cedric—a friendship, I should say, that remained strong until Cedric’s death two years ago. While there, Fisher’s interest in birds grew into a passion. He eventually received a Ph.D. in ornithology and became one of the world’s experts on warblers. Charlie’s death in the war dealt him a terrible but unseen blow. After it happened he was, if anything, more kind and gentle to the rest of us, but Pamela once remarked that Fisher felt an unspeakable guilt for gliding safely through the war in an American intelligence unit while Charlie was facing German guns. In 1946 Fisher returned to Harvard to teach, and you can still find him there, lecturing in the Agassiz Museum or dreamily wandering through the Mount Auburn Cemetery, binoculars and notebook in hand.

He also has a modest but devoted fan base in the artistic world for some relief panels he carved with the likenesses of unusual birds. These panels are said to be completely accurate, and the workmanship on them is so elaborate that a reporter from an obscure art journal ran a piece on Fisher entitled “The Audubon of Wood.” This article circulated through the family, and when I read it I wrote to Fisher congratulating him on his success. He replied with a friendly letter, thanking me for my note and raving about some subspecies of oriole. At the end he wrote, “As far as the article is concerned, it’s a perfect example of why I don’t like artsy people. My little carvings can’t hold a candle to Audubon’s big paintings.”

The members of the previous generation have lived their lives peacefully in the old grooves, watching the vagaries of their children and bickering, as always, among themselves. The Hatfields pride themselves on their longevity—of my mother’s siblings, only Aunt Edie has died. Philip said at her funeral that she died of boredom, which is callous but probably accurate. Poor Edie lived in the wrong century—she would have been a knockout maiden aunt in Victorian times, chaperoning nieces and laying down the laws of decorum, but she was born just too late; when we were growing up she tended to seem like an unnecessary appendage to the Hatfield family. Eberhardt, the last of my grandparents’ generation, died ten years ago, having carried on well into his nineties. The rest are living still, even Rose, who celebrated her eightieth birthday last year. My mother lives with my father in the country, but sometimes she comes to visit me in Manhattan, and when she does it feels almost like old times, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table, sipping our tea and picking through the morning mail.

Uncle Kurt, the only one of my aunts and uncles who had a longstanding effect on me, disappeared again after that summer. I have seen him only five or six times in all the years that have passed. But I forgave him for his deceitfulness and his double life even before I left Shorecliff, when I heard him speaking to my mother about his trips to Portland. “It’s never a good move to hide something, Caroline,” he told her. “I ought to have known that. But I learned during the war to hide everything I could—when you have no privacy it becomes an obsession, and old habits die hard. I’m sorry I lied to all of you—I can’t tell you how sorry. For Francesca’s sake and for mine too.” The way he said it made me feel better about him. It no longer seemed shameful to be disappointed in someone I had idolized. I discovered that admiration acquires an additional tang if it is mixed with pity. I’ve spent the rest of my life imagining what it would be like to be reconciled with Uncle Kurt without having any real desire to know him well. He is better as a symbol, a figure in one of his stories, than as a friend.

Three or four years after our summer at Shorecliff, those stories of his went public. It turned out that the manuscript Uncle Kurt had been working on that summer was exactly what we suspected—a collection of stories about his experiences in the Great War. The collection was an immediate success, and Kurt was looked on as a prize to have at parties and literary gatherings. Life in the spotlight suited Uncle Kurt. He surprised me a year after his book’s publication by writing me a letter in which he assured me that his days of leading a double life were over, that he found the excitement of being a well-known author enough to assuage his thirst for adventure, and that he hoped he would eventually regain my respect. “I felt worst about deceiving you, Richard,” he wrote. “You seemed to look up to me—I appreciated that more than you know.” I guessed that this cryptic statement was similar to the remark he had made to Charlie and Francesca in Portland about his life not being happy, and I replied that he had always had my respect and that I hoped he was enjoying himself more in the limelight than he had in the shadows. I didn’t add that the postscript of his letter was what interested me most. He wrote, “P.S. The stories in the book aren’t nearly as good as the ones I told you at Shorecliff. You’ve always been my best listener—I think that’s why.” I read this statement with a sense of pride—I was, after all, only eighteen at the time—and also with relief, for I had perused his collection and thought the stories were mediocre at best and not nearly as thrilling as the ones he had captivated me with on those mornings at Shorecliff.

There is one person outside the family whose fate I must describe, for it is the only one that continued in the romantic trend of our summer at Shorecliff. Two years after our time there, Lorelei went down to Boston to attend Wellesley. In her third year she was befriended by a distinguished older man—I estimated that he was well over thirty when they met—who courted her indefatigably and married her within six months. Everyone who heard this news was stunned by it. The man, Carson Pitt, was extraordinarily wealthy and managed to sail through the Depression with barely a tremor. According to rumor he owned an estate in England, a villa in Italy, a hacienda in Mexico, and a mansion in New York. No one knew where he came from; he claimed to be “cosmopolitan” and refused to give any details about his origins. I met him only twice and found him charming, intelligent, and elusive, which, now that I think of it, is also an apt description of Lorelei.

She made the transition from farm girl to socialite with her usual grace and humility. I’ve sometimes wondered if she ever told her new husband about her romance with Tom—but I suspect she didn’t. She and Tom, so far as I knew, parted amicably at the end of that summer, each content to salt away the memories of their time together and to avoid remembering the cataclysmic event that marked its end. Unlike so many other secrets from Shorecliff, theirs had no grievous repercussions in the long term, and I would imagine that Lorelei’s modesty—not to mention her good sense—ensured that their relationship remained a secret to everyone outside the Hatfield family.

A few years after her wedding I received an invitation at my Columbia dormitory—I was a junior at the time—inviting me to a dinner party at the Pitt residence. I had forgotten Lorelei’s new name and almost threw out the invitation, but then Tom wrote to me, another unusual occurrence, and asked if I was going. He and I, the only cousins in New York at the time, were also the only Hatfields invited. We went to the party and were both so struck by Lorelei’s beauty—she wore green, I remember, and had jewels in her hair—that we simply gazed at her from afar for the entire evening. As we were leaving, Tom took me aside and said, “Don’t say a word to anyone about this, certainly not to Julie”—his fiancée, whom he later married—“but I never met a girl to match her. Not one.”

As for Tom himself, and Philip, and my beloved Isabella—the three I have missed most, whose characters have shaped mine, whose ambitions and joys I have imagined countless times—I only rarely see them, though I believe they still see each other with some frequency. Certainly Tom and Isabella remain close. It seems almost irrelevant to describe their careers, when their personalities are what matter to me. I’ve found it a painful irony that Tom too became a lawyer, one devoted to workers’ rights, underdogs, civil liberties—all the exciting facets of the law that I myself have been too timid to pursue. Tom brought his warm and effusive energy to the legal profession and turned it into something noble. He is, as he always was, a man to admire.

Philip, now an elegant and mysterious diplomat, I also admire with an uncomfortable intensity. He came back from the war more silent than ever, having witnessed atrocities in the Pacific that he never described. But the passion hadn’t died within him, and he now spends his time flying out on quiet missions to foreign countries, making use of his gift for languages and forging alliances with unnamed political figures. Cynics may say that diplomacy is just another business, but I believe that in his quest for significance and purpose Philip has found some satisfaction in his career. To me it embodies a steel-hearted romance, lived out in accordance with his uncompromising nature.

Isabella—where is the romance in her life? Perhaps nothing she did could match what I dreamed for her. She married, while still young, a Wall Street financier, a man hearty and competent, who worked stolidly through the bleak years of the 1930s but who is unable, I fear, to appreciate Isabella’s depths of feeling. She is surrounded now by a rambunctious, deafening brood of children, seven strong, and in that way she alone has fulfilled the Hatfield legacy of large and close-knit families. It is obvious to everyone that she puts her husband and her children above all else in life. But I cannot help feeling that some crucial part of her, some confused and yearning portion of her heart, has never found its way into the light.

Crushing though it is to acknowledge, Isabella never again behaved toward me with her old affection. I think she really believed that I meant something malicious by shoving her into Charlie. And, coward that I am, I have never known how to make it up to her. Yet I love her, and Tom, and Philip, more than I have ever loved anybody else. I know that they, like all of us, have grown older, but I would rather imagine them as they were at Shorecliff, before the night that changed everything, before my criminal idiocy destroyed Francesca: Philip distant and intriguing, his quiet, knowing comments taking us by surprise even as they made us laugh; Tom the golden boy, strong and assured, shining with excitement as he teetered on the edge of adulthood; and Isabella, awkward, loving, full of life, and barreling toward her own future though she had no idea what it might be. These many years later, their innermost characters remain unchanged.