Shorecliff (5 page)

I wandered over to her, wanting her opinion on the new arrival.

“I think we’ve lost him,” she said, speaking before I could say anything. “What do you think of her?”

“I think she’s nice,” I said. It delighted me that Isabella was treating me as someone with a worthy opinion, so I tried to sound grave. “But she’s not like us.”

“No, she’s not like us.”

Lorelei came often after that day, but we never knew when she would arrive or leave. Tom insisted that we hold croquet tournaments regularly, and he played with his head turned toward the woods. Being Tom, he continued to win often, in spite of being so obviously distracted, except for the times when Lorelei appeared. Then he would claim her as his partner and smile as she condemned him to second or third place. After that first tournament, the games were mostly between only five or six of us at a time. Pamela played only rarely, and the Delias usually bowed out. I tried to claim a mallet in every game but was frequently pushed aside by Philip or Francesca or Isabella. The aunts, probably because they knew how silly they had looked fighting over the mallet, never played again, though I often caught Aunt Edie observing our games with a gimlet eye.

For the most part, Lorelei remained for me a character in the distance, a figure complemented by Tom standing possessively beside her. Once or twice, though, I got to speak with her alone. One morning Tom slept late, and so we weren’t dragged out onto the croquet field. I was on the lawn—by myself, since Pamela had opted to remain at the breakfast table—and, for lack of anything more interesting to do, I drifted in the direction of the woods. Lorelei appeared the way she always did, as if out of the grass. I waved and ran toward her. She wore clothes that emphasized her countryness—starched white blouses and skirts that flared out to well below her knees. Sometimes I thought they made her look old-fashioned, but most of the time she just seemed foreign—foreign to our family, our customs, our whole way of thinking.

“Hello, Richard,” she said. She had needed to hear our names only once, and afterward she remembered them perfectly, never mixing any of us up.

“We’re not playing croquet,” I said, coming to a halt beside her. “Tom wanted to sleep late.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m not good at it anyway.”

“Yes, you are. You’re very good,” I said dutifully.

“Liar,” she replied, smiling at me. Even when Lorelei said things like that, she seemed to be asking permission to say them, showing with her big eyes what a harmless creature she was. She never told us much about her life, but the aunts had interrogated her early on and established that during the school year she went to a girls’ boarding school in New Hampshire and that she wanted to go to college. My mother in particular was pleased that Lorelei was being “properly educated,” but to me and I suspect to the rest of the cousins, including Tom, she seemed entirely unsophisticated and natural. Aunt Edie called her, with some sarcasm, “Tom’s wood nymph.”

“Do you think your family would mind if I came into the kitchen for a moment?” Lorelei asked. It was the first time she had ever requested anything or volunteered a wish of her own, and I was the one she had chosen to ask. This filled me with pride.

“Of course you can come in. We’ll be happy to have you.” With which grandiose remark I led her into the kitchen to exclamations of delight from its inhabitants. She stayed for several hours that day before flitting away, refusing offers of lunch, shy of wearing out her welcome.

All the cousins seemed to like her, though I sometimes thought Isabella begrudged her presence. I asked her about it once, having crept into her room when no one else was there. She was lying on her bed, looking at the ceiling, something she often did when she wanted to think. I sat at the foot of the bed and distracted her with idle chatter. When I mentioned Lorelei, a slight frown appeared on her face.

“Don’t you like Lorelei?” I said.

“Why? Is she downstairs or something?”

“She and Tom went for a walk along the cliff.”

Isabella propped herself on her elbows. “Yes, I like Lorelei,” she said. “Don’t you? She’s friendly and modest and sweet. I like her a lot.”

“Really?”

Isabella looked over the top of my head, which was usually the signal that she was going to unveil her innermost emotions. “The truth is, Richard, I like her a lot for herself, but I’m not sure I like her being here. It sort of takes Tom away from us, don’t you think? He’s preoccupied with her, and now he’s having this big adventure, and we’re…well…”

“What big adventure?”

It was the wrong question. Isabella burst out laughing and said, “An adventure into the unknown!” in her booming radio voice.

She never brought up the topic again, and I knew only that the inarticulate desperation which was always a part of her character intensified and began to shine in her eyes whenever Lorelei came and Tom fawned over her. Isabella would stand apart in one of her gawky postures and look at them with her eyebrows wrinkled in unconscious dismay.

She was not the only one displeased by Lorelei’s presence. I’ll never forget the croquet game when Yvette nearly killed Fisher. It was a five-man game—Tom, Isabella, Yvette, Fisher, and Philip. Fisher, with his usual earnestness, had advised me to stand on the sidelines and watch their strategies so I could improve my own skill.

Lorelei appeared from the woods, and I called out for Tom’s benefit, “Here she is!”

Tom’s face lit up. He waited, his mallet resting across his chest on one forearm, until she had walked up to us. She never ran. “Hi,” he said, smiling. I had taken to watching his face when he spoke to her. Tom had a signature grin, a big, unrestrained flashing of teeth, but he never showed it to Lorelei. The smiles he gave to her were subdued, as if he were holding something back or waiting for her to do something. Her smile, on the other hand, was the same for everyone.

Tom said, as he always did after greeting her, “Do you want to be my partner for the rest of the game?”

Lorelei nodded and said, “I won’t be any help to you.”

From two wickets behind Tom, Yvette asked, “Why can’t she take the sixth mallet? We only have five players.”

“Because I want her to play with me,” Tom said. He shielded his eyes to look at Yvette, who was standing with her back to the sun. “Besides, where would she start? We’re almost halfway through.”

Inconspicuously, I circled around so that I could be nearer to Yvette. I had sensed from her voice that she was more upset than she wanted to show.

“But she makes you lose,” Yvette said. “You’re always in the lead, and then you fall into last place because she’s so terrible.”

At first I thought that she was simply annoyed by Tom’s indifference to victory. I had to agree that it was irritating to see Tom, our best player, consistently lagging behind mediocre talents like Philip and Fisher because Lorelei would send his ball shooting toward the fence or rolling off weakly toward the woods. But I was shocked that Yvette had called Lorelei terrible to her face.

Tom obviously thought the same. “I’m teaching her how to play,” he said. “She’ll get better.” He put his arm protectively around Lorelei’s shoulder, and Yvette’s eyes widened.

“Fine, then!” she cried. “I’m not playing anymore. What’s the point of playing when nobody’s going to try to win?” She flung up one hand and hurled her mallet away from her, not looking to see where it would land. The mallet arced through the air, and Fisher, who was standing in a daydream, didn’t see it coming. It slammed into his shoulder, and he gave a yell and fell to the ground. If it had hit his head, I think he might have been killed or at least badly hurt.

Yvette was not always cold. When she saw that she had inadvertently assaulted her brother, she dashed toward him. The aunts, who had a preternatural sense for detecting injury among the children, poured from the house like a flock of starlings, cawing and flapping. We crowded around Fisher, whose blue eyes were covered with a film of tears. I thought it was a sign of bravery that none of the tears spilled onto his cheeks. He was all right, though his shoulder was purple for weeks afterward. It must have hurt like hell, but after that first surprised cry he didn’t say anything except “It’s not that bad. It wasn’t her fault.”

Tom got the game going again. “Don’t pay attention to her,” he said to Lorelei. “She gets too wound up in the game for her own good.”

I took Fisher’s place while he was escorted into the house for treatment by the aunts, and in no time I was in last place. I never did pick up the finer points of croquet; the interactions between the players were always so much more interesting than the game itself. Tom, for instance, was gentler with Lorelei that morning than I had ever seen him be with anyone. It was a side of himself that he never brought out for his cousins.

At least for me, Tom continued to be an object of adoration throughout the summer. Lorelei didn’t have enough courage to accompany us on family outings, and so our days at the seashore, our walks along the cliff, our game-filled evenings—all these were times when Tom escorted his cousins into whatever adventure he could think up for us. I liked best the times when I came across him in moments of quiet. He loved books, in spite of his questionable college record, and often he and Philip would spend rainy afternoons in their room, both reading on their beds. Tom read history and Philip philosophy, but they occasionally borrowed each other’s volumes—I can’t imagine how they managed to bring so many. I would peep in and watch their eyes moving across the pages. Philip read languidly, turning the page with an aristocratic hand while one leg dangled off the edge of the bed. Tom read with a scowl on his face, concentrating so hard that he would often sit scrunched up in a ball, his body curling around the book as if to absorb its information through osmosis.

Other times I would hear music coming from their room, and that meant Tom was dancing. Philip had thrilled us all by bringing an old wind-up Victrola to Shorecliff, along with an extensive collection of jazz records—King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington. He himself never danced, but Francesca, after all her Manhattan escapades, was an expert at the Charleston and the Shimmy, and she would dance with Tom, who capered along enthusiastically and managed to look handsome even while mixing up all the steps. Once they attempted the Lindy Hop, a dance requiring a flight through the air like Charles Lindbergh’s. It ended with Francesca on the floor, laughing hysterically—the only time I ever saw her stumble. I found the sight of her dancing so dazzling that I could hardly watch her, and when other cousins joined in, the room became a magnificent pandemonium.

Yvette was a natural dancer, sleek and weightless. Her technique outshone even Francesca’s, and she delighted us sometimes by wearing a beaded flapper dress for the occasion—an article of clothing she carefully concealed from the aunts. Isabella was as enthusiastic as Tom but far less skilled. She often let me jump around with her, to my joy. Charlie was all flash and exuberance and constantly tried to lure Francesca away from Tom, to the accompaniment of catcalls from the other cousins. The Delias liked to make up steps of their own, and Pamela sometimes tried to follow their lead, but she was too shy to dance energetically and often sat out. Fisher also sat on the sidelines next to Philip, who manned the Victrola with the air of a musical connoisseur. But Tom was the leader of these gatherings. In the early days at Shorecliff I would frequently hear music bursting into life in their room, and I would know that Tom had instructed Philip to put on some jazz and let him dance.

Some mornings I encountered Tom in the hall outside our rooms. He would be in his pajamas, his hair tousled from the pillow. “Hey there, buddy,” he would say. “Why are you up so early? Don’t you need your sleep?”

“What are we doing today?” I would ask.

“God knows!” he would say. “Don’t ask me, buddy. I just live here.”

Of course the truth was that he was a typical college freshman, cocksure and overeager, all too ready to put down his elders and place himself above the rest of us. But he was also intelligent and passionate, and a student in everything. He looked around him with an interest that was contagious, and that was why we followed him so willingly—he saw things in a more exciting light than we did. Francesca brought about the same effect, vivifying her midnight imagination for us with terrifying immediacy, but Tom’s visions were bright and sun-filled, and the hint of vulnerability in him, which in Isabella dominated her character, put the finishing touch on his magnetism.

One day I was looking out the window of my bedroom with my telescope. I frequently scanned the horizon in this way, hoping in vain for battleships on the sea or strangers on the cliff, and I often saw things that captured my fancy. On this afternoon, I spotted Tom and Lorelei standing dangerously near the cliff’s edge. He had his arm around her waist, and she was clasping his upper arm. The wind was blowing her hair out and making her skirt swirl. Tom had on the white dress shirt he always insisted on wearing. The two looked supremely romantic. His mouth was moving; I was sure he was saying something vitally important, something to make her swoon. She was listening to him with her eyes wide. There had been a storm the night before, and the waves were still so big that occasionally they threw a shower of spray over the top of the cliff.

I asked my mother that day whether Tom was in love with Lorelei.

“Why do you think so?” she asked.

I explained that they were always together when Lorelei came, that Tom wouldn’t let the rest of us come near her, and that he looked at her in a way that he never used with anyone else.

“I think there’s a good chance that if you asked him, he would say he was in love with her.” My mother had a way of sidestepping questions she didn’t want to answer.

“Do you like her?” I asked.

“I think she’s a lovely girl. And, you know, Fred Stephenson has been a friend of our family for a long time. We should invite him to lunch.”

The aunts repeated this sentiment many times that summer, but I have yet to lay eyes on Fred Stephenson. The truth was that the Hatfields, with one notable exception, were uninterested in their neighbors.