Shorecliff (6 page)

My mother remained adamantly in favor of Lorelei throughout the next three months. Some of the other aunts had doubts, however, and Edie was rabid on the subject.

“It’s disgusting!” she said once during an impromptu Aunt Conference in the kitchen. I liked to eavesdrop on these discussions by lurking behind the stove. None of them could scold me for spying, since they knew I was there, but they were almost certain to forget my presence as their argument grew more heated. (The conferences always turned into arguments.) At the moment Aunt Edie held the floor, and she was conjuring up a demonic vision of Tom’s activities with Lorelei. “You know young people,” she snapped. “The way they lust after each other is revolting. It’s positively morbid.” This was one of Edie’s pet words. “God knows what they do when they’re alone. The mind boggles. Rose, you’re letting that boy run into sin as if he were on a galloping horse. It’s not good for him. You should keep them from seeing each other.”

Rose opened her mouth to reply, but before she could begin my mother spoke. It was one of the few times I’ve heard her speak sharply to anyone. “Don’t be ridiculous, Edie,” she said. “The only times they’re alone together are when they go on walks along the cliff. They’re never out of sight of the house, or if they are, they’re in the woods near Condor’s cottage. I think the way you’re talking is disgraceful. There’s nothing wrong with young people spending time together. They’re enjoying themselves.”

“Tom is enjoying himself too much,” Aunt Edie retorted.

“He’s neglecting the family,” Aunt Margery said.

“Rubbish,” said my mother. “He’s with us constantly. His cousins adore him. They all like Lorelei because he does, and besides, she’s a sweet, innocent girl. I think she was very lonely at the farm with no one her age to talk to. It would be cruel to stop her from visiting.”

I was stunned to hear my mother talking with such force, and I wondered if she ever spoke that way to my father. I doubted it then, and I doubt it now, but I respected her more after I heard her reprimanding Aunt Edie. It took nerve, the sort of nerve I could understand and admire, unlike the very different sort of nerve it must have taken to live with my father.

“Have it your way, Caroline,” Aunt Edie said. “But just you watch them the next time they’re playing one of their interminable croquet games. You watch the way they look at each other. I tell you, it’s nearly obscene.”

My mother laughed at that, and Margery joined in. The argument ended merrily, as they so often did. But I heard the phrase “it’s nearly obscene” as if it were on a record playing over and over again. I knew what “obscene” meant, in a formless sort of way, and the next time I saw Tom and Lorelei together I watched them eagerly. It was, of course, during a morning croquet game. Lorelei strode over the grass, looking as usual as if she had emerged from a fairy tale, and Tom waited for her and offered her his mallet. I examined their eyes, but I didn’t see a satyric expression on either face.

In the end I don’t think Aunt Edie interpreted their relationship correctly. There was lust enough and to spare in that packed old house of ours, and Tom certainly felt his share of it, but I don’t think his attraction to Lorelei was obscene, nor even entirely physical. I believe that what had captured him in Lorelei was what had captured us in him—the living spirit of romance and the possibility, so enchanting for all the cousins, of what might happen between the two of them. At the beginning of that summer, Tom seemed to hold on to Lorelei with the trembling excitement of a little boy sheltering a baby bird in his hands—hardly breathing, amazed that he has been given the privilege of holding all that life in his hands, feeling the bird’s heart beating like a telegraph signal against his skin. The present then is so thrilling that it is impossible to reflect on it; one can only wait, panting, for the future to unfold.

I
broke my mother’s injunction not to disturb Uncle Kurt in the mornings within days of it being issued. Before that summer I had never been in close quarters with Kurt for more than a day or two at a time, when he came to visit in New York, and during those weekends I had never found the opportunity for leisurely tête-à-têtes. Once I knew that he was holed up in his room at Shorecliff alone, it was impossible not to try to gain access to the inner sanctum. Accordingly, one morning, as Tom led a squadron onto the lawn for the morning croquet game, I slid out of my seat and darted from the kitchen. I waited for a few moments to see if someone would miss me, but I was more inconsequential than I imagined, and I crept all the way to Uncle Kurt’s closed door on the second floor without anyone noticing my absence.

I knocked. There was a muffled cry of “Come in!” That was all I needed.

Uncle Kurt’s room looked different from every other room in the house, mostly because of the cream-colored curtains he had draped over the windows. His room was at the front of the house, overlooking the lawn and the end of the road. It didn’t get much sun in the mornings, and what light did get in was filtered by the curtains into a yellow syrup that covered all the furniture. It made Uncle Kurt in his morning beard seem golden. The space was small and cluttered. His bed was shoved under the window, not quite at right angles, and the table he always sat at, fingers poised over the keys of the typewriter, was overflowing with books and papers and reams of typing paper. I asked him once why he knew how to type—an occupation, as far as I knew, reserved for women—and he told me it was one of the odd skills the army had taught him, like darning and bridge-building and how to tie a tourniquet. “Damn useful, all that stuff.”

I often caught a waft of tobacco smoke in the air when I came in, though Uncle Kurt was careful to hide his cigarettes in case I was one of the aunts. The Hatfield women disapproved as strongly of smoking as they did of drinking.

That first morning I found Uncle Kurt at the table, staring at a sheet of paper in the typewriter. When he turned around and saw me, he took the paper out of the carriage with one fluid movement and laid it facedown on the table. I was so awed by the appearance of the room that I didn’t think anything of this action, but if I had, I might have reconsidered my assumption that Uncle Kurt was always open with me.

“Mother told me not to bother you,” I said by way of introduction.

“So you came right up here and pounded on the door,” said Uncle Kurt, nodding. “That’s good, my boy. Break the rules while you’re young.”

“What are you writing?”

“Oh, various things.” He stretched and waved a hand at a chair next to the door. “Take a seat, Richard. Stay a while. Did you want anything in particular?”

“Are you writing about what happened to you in the war?”

Uncle Kurt laughed. He always met what I considered daring statements with an embracing laugh that was like a flood of warmth. “Is that what you came up here for? War stories? I’ve got hundreds of them stored up, you know. Mine, my company’s, other companies’…”

From that moment it was inevitable that I beg to hear them, and Kurt always obliged. I heard about his training, his fellow soldiers, his officers, his first battle. For the most part he left out the graphic details, but I was relentless in my requests for fighting scenes, and though I cringed at the gore, I rejoiced in the excitement.

“What was the scariest thing that ever happened to you?” I asked one day, scooting forward to the edge of my seat.

“The scariest thing? Kiddo, I went through so many scary moments that I can’t choose between them. There were far more than I ever want you to experience. But if you’d like to hear a scary story that didn’t take place during a battle, I can give you one. I’ve never forgotten it. It was when we were walking through the woods in the northern part of France.”

So it began. I sat rapt and motionless until the end.

“Our platoon had been cut off from the rest of the company, and we were trying to cut across in a southeastern diagonal to meet up with the others. My lieutenant—you remember him, Lieutenant Mange, the old Mangy Monster—had gotten us lost. That wasn’t a surprise to any of us. What we really resented was that he was making us slog through the woods during a snowstorm. His getting us lost had cost us all the time he’d set aside for resting, so we kept walking, hour after hour. It was rough going, let me tell you. We were exhausted from trudging so far, and the wind blew right through our uniforms. I felt as if I wasn’t wearing anything at all—no overcoat, no khaki, no underwear even. It was just me and the elements. The snow was the cold, wet, stinging kind that’s no fun to be in, not the Christmas kind everyone loves. The wind drove it into a kind of slushy hailstorm, and the branches above us kept getting overloaded with snow and dropping bucketfuls on our heads. It was an awful night. I still dream about it sometimes.

“Hennessey, my best pal—I’ve told you about him too; he was the one who stole that pair of boots from Old Mange, remember that?—anyway, this was before he’d stolen the boots, so the ones he was wearing still had holes in them on both sides. Poor old Hennessey—it was awful for him, but he was one of the toughest guys you’ll ever meet. He was a big blond giant, as friendly and sweet as a kindergarten teacher, and he had a great laugh, a big booming roar. He could set off a whole company when he got started. He wasn’t laughing that night, though. He kept slogging along next to me with his mouth in a straight line across his face and his eyes focused on the back of the man in front of him. I can still hear his boots through the snow—clump, clump, clump—and I knew with every step more snow was pouring in and freezing his feet. He was a brave man, Richard, one of the bravest I ever met.

“Anyway, we were walking along like that for what seemed like years, and suddenly Hennessey, who was a bit of a practical joker, leaned over and said, ‘You know, they say this wood is haunted.’ Now, ordinarily I’m not the sort of guy to let superstitions get to me. I’m not one of those guys who gets spooked in an empty house. But after hours of walking in the dark and the snow, ducking branches at every step and being so hungry—well, I was susceptible to the oldest trick in the book. Hennessey kept telling me about all the ghosts that were supposed to be in the forest—the ghosts of murdered men whose deaths had never been solved, whose murderers walked the earth without punishment. He laid it on pretty thick. And then suddenly he stopped in his tracks, grabbed my shoulder, and said, ‘What’s that?’ He was pointing behind a tree some feet away from us. I looked over, trying to see something, and he shouted, ‘Boo!’ right in my ear. I jumped a foot. Can you believe it? A five-year-old wouldn’t have taken that bait. But I took it, all right. The woods were beginning to get to me. Hennessey roared with laughter, and all the other men turned to look at us, to find out what was going on. Luckily Hennessey was laughing too hard to do anything except point at me, and then Old Mange shouted for us to keep walking.

“For the next hour or so Hennessey kept up a running narration for my benefit. He was almost enjoying himself by now. I bet he’d forgotten all about the holes in his boots. He was happiest when he was making a joke out of something, and now he kept pointing at bushes and trees and saying, ‘That one, for instance. They like to keep low to the ground. Just imagine some ax murderer crouching behind that bush, watching us, waiting until we’re right across from him before leaping out, right
now!
’ Then he’d grab my shoulder, and I’d shy like a frightened horse. I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you, Richard, but when you get in the mood sometimes, everything can seem scary. You’d think I would have been too exhausted, too hungry, too plain old worn out for Hennessey’s joking to have any effect, but I wasn’t. And the way our lanterns were bobbing around, it seemed as if the shadows really were moving next to us, as if the wood were full of ghosts.

“Then something else happened. Hennessey was saying, ‘Imagine a pair of eyes suddenly appearing from behind the tree—white, staring eyes looking at you as if they wanted to eat you up whole—eyes ready to kill you.’ I was trying not to look at the tree, so he took hold of my head, turned it around, and pointed straight at the tree. And right as I looked, a pair of eyes
did
pop out from behind that tree—white staring eyes exactly the way he’d described. I tell you, I’ve never been so goddamn scared in all my life. I was so scared I didn’t even scream, though it felt like my heart was about to explode. But the most terrifying thing of all was the sound Hennessey made. It wasn’t a shriek or a yell—it was more like an intake of breath combined with a moan, very sudden and choked. And that told me Hennessey was so scared that even he, even such a big man as he was, couldn’t scream out loud.

“Just as we thought we would die of fright, another pair of eyes popped out beside the first, and then another and another. They were all around us. The other men in our platoon noticed them, and then did we hear some screaming, let me tell you! It was a bunch of Germans—they’d been cut off from their company too, I guess, and now they’d discovered us and tried to surround us. We couldn’t see their bodies; it was too dark. Only their wild eyes stared out, reflecting the light of our lanterns.

“God knows what would have happened if Lieutenant Mange hadn’t shouted, ‘Scatter!’ at the top of his lungs. Boy, we scattered. We ran like hell. I even lost Hennessey in the crush. I dove forward between two pairs of eyes and galloped into the woods. Damn near poked my own eyes out because I kept running into branches. I heard shouts all around me, but after a while they became fainter, and when ten minutes had gone by I’d had enough aimless running. I stopped and looked around. I had one little lantern with me that I’d been hiding under my coat—that was all. Then I felt another type of fear, Richard. This wasn’t the sudden terror you feel when something startles you, the way those eyes startled me. This was the sick, deadening apprehension you feel when you’re all alone in the middle of a big snow-covered forest, cut off from your comrades. There’s nothing like it. I hope you never experience it, kiddo, because it comes awfully close to—well, you could almost call it despair.

“I knew there was a good chance I would die if I didn’t keep walking, and my only hope now was to find Hennessey and Lieutenant Mange and the others. So I wandered in a new direction. But I didn’t dare call out because I knew the Germans were still nearby. I just walked on trying to make as little noise as possible. That part of the night I don’t like to think about. The cold and snow and darkness seemed ten times more horrible now that I had to face them alone. I started missing Hennessey’s silly jokes, even though I’d been about to throttle him earlier. I must have walked for about half an hour—or maybe it was less, twenty minutes, but it felt like years—when I heard someone crashing toward me from my left. Before I could think better of it, I cried, ‘Is that you, Hennessey?’ Then the man stepped into the circle of light my lantern cast, and I saw it was one of the Germans.

“He’d lost his helmet, and his blond hair was all spiked up and covered in snow. His face was white too because it was so cold, and there was snow in his eyebrows. He didn’t have a light at all, poor devil. He’d been staggering along in complete darkness. But he was holding his gun out, aimed in front of him, so that when he came up to me the barrel almost touched my chest. Then I felt yet another type of fear. I guess I experienced all the colors in the fear rainbow that night, Richard. This was the gut-wrenching terror you feel when you know your life depends on another man’s nerve. I could hear him panting—his breathing was ragged and hoarse, as if he’d been sprinting for miles—and I could tell he was scared practically out of his wits. That meant at any moment he might panic and pull the trigger. So I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, looking into his big eyes. My stomach felt as if it were slithering out of me. I wanted to throw up my hands and shout, ‘Stop, stop, I can’t take it anymore!’ But I didn’t say a word.

“The German was getting more and more worked up. He was breathing faster, and his shoulders were heaving up and down. That’s how scared men get in these types of situations, Richard. It’s not the sort of thing you ever want to see. Finally he jerked the gun a little—making me jump, I can tell you—and he said, ‘I’ll shoot!’ He didn’t have a very strong accent.

“When he said that, I should have been even more scared. He was threatening me, after all. But for some reason it calmed me down. I think it was because I knew then what sort of scared he was—he was filled with the fear that’s so paralyzing you can’t do anything except shake. So I didn’t panic. I raised my arms slowly, away from my gun to show that I wasn’t going to attack him, and I asked, ‘Where are the other American soldiers?’ I figured he would at least understand the word ‘American.’

“As it turns out, I think he must have known a lot of English because he pointed behind him and said, ‘They’re over there, not very far from here.’ He turned back to face me, stared for a second with his eyes even wider, and then burst into tears. Yes, Richard, he just started sobbing right there, with the tears rolling down through the melted snow on his cheeks. He kept clutching his gun so that it pointed at me in a wobbly sort of way, but I wasn’t scared of him at all anymore. I stepped to one side. That poor bastard—I felt the most god-awful pity for him then. German or not, enemy or not, he was a pathetic sight. I think he was younger than I was, and so frightened to be there facing me that he was about to lose his mind. And then, the shame of telling me what I wanted to know—I could tell that was the last straw. Being in that position and losing his nerve and giving the enemy information, the last scrap of his manliness thrown away… Richard, my boy, one of the worst things about war is the way it makes men feel about themselves. If he lived through it, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks the memory of that moment still makes him shudder with self-loathing. Poor bastard.