Shorecliff (7 page)

“I wanted to say thank you. I even wanted to tell him everything would be all right. But anything I said would have made it worse. So I moved down alongside the barrel of his gun until I was standing next to him, met his eyes once more, and walked past him into the woods. I thought he might shoot me in the back just to get back his self-respect. But he didn’t. I walked on for a little bit, and then I heard a thump. I looked back. As far as I could make out from the light of my lantern, he’d fallen onto his knees. Kneeling there…I wish I hadn’t seen that.”

Unexpectedly, Uncle Kurt stopped talking. He looked out the window and said nothing for a few moments.

“And then what happened?” I asked at last, unable to restrain myself.

“Well, then I found Hennessey and the others, and we dragged ourselves along until morning, and by that time we’d found the rest of the company.”

“What happened to the German?”

“I don’t know, buddy. I never found out. That’s the end of the story.”

That was all I got out of him that day. He had drifted away, it seemed reluctantly, into a pensive silence.

Not all of Kurt’s stories were so grim and unsettling. Many of them would end with a punch line and a laugh. But all of them were riddled with comments about the awful things war did to people. They didn’t stop me from glorifying him, but they did stop me from glorifying war itself. I admired him all the more for being so wise, for being able to criticize the very thing that had made him a god.

Once, later in the summer, my mother discovered me in Uncle Kurt’s room. She opened the door right as Kurt was reaching the climax of one of his stories.

“Richard,” she said, “what have I told you about bothering your Uncle Kurt in the mornings? I’m surprised at you. Run along now.”

“Don’t worry,” Kurt said, smiling at me in a conspiratorial way that filled me with pleasure and pride. “Richard here doesn’t bother me at all. He comes up for news of the war.”

My mother looked at him with a crease on her forehead. “But, Kurt,” she said, “isn’t it—well, troubling for you to think back over all those memories? Are you sure it’s good for you?”

“Now, Caroline.” Kurt laughed, but it was a soft, strained laugh that I didn’t like at all. “I think about the war with or without Richard. At least when he’s here I have a captivated audience rather than a captive one. I’ve relived my stories many times, but they’re new for him. Aren’t they, my boy?”

“Yes, Uncle Kurt,” I whispered.

“But aren’t you working?” My mother glanced at the typewriter and the facedown sheets of paper.

“Yes, I’m working,” Kurt said. He gave her a level stare and added, “In all the many times Richard has come here, he has never once looked at my typewriter the way you just did. He’s content to hear my stories directly from me, without prying.”

My mother got the hint and left. I treasured Kurt’s comment, though I felt guilty too, knowing how false it was. In fact I had shot many a furtive glance at his desk, wondering what he was writing and if it was anything like the stories he told me. He never noticed. I don’t think Kurt realized how abstracted he became while telling those stories, how often he would look at the window, his eyes locked on something far away.

My mother never scolded me again about bothering Uncle Kurt, but I tried to keep my visits private anyway. It would have taken away half their excitement if I hadn’t felt that I was on forbidden ground. Of course I often felt the urge to boast to my cousins about Kurt’s stories, but I valiantly resisted mentioning them.

All too soon, however, it became clear that the cousins knew my secret and simply weren’t interested, which meant that I could refer to my talks with Kurt freely, without fear of being usurped as his audience.

Once, on my way back to the beach, still sandy from previous exploits, I saw Isabella lying on her bed and tiptoed in to ask why she wasn’t at the shore.

“The shore’s not a good place for me right now, kid,” she replied, her words muffled by the pillow. She had crushed her face into it so that I could see only one eye and half of her distorted mouth. She didn’t seem to be crying or even particularly unhappy. She spoke in a bored monotone.

I was baffled. “Are you sick?” I asked.

“Not in any way that you’d understand.”

“Are you sad?”

“I guess you could say so.” This was said after a sizable pause.

I was frozen by an onslaught of pity and awe. It occurred to me that I might stroke her hair, the way my mother still stroked mine when I was upset, but I discarded the idea. A thirteen-year-old boy could not stroke a seventeen-year-old girl’s hair—it would have been sacrilege of the most terrible kind. Nor could I present her with sympathy. She had rejected my offered ear, and clearly my ignorance made it an offense even to be standing in her room. “Do you want me to go get someone?” I ventured.

“No, there’s no one I want to talk to.”

That was when I had my flash of inspiration. “You could talk to Uncle Kurt!” I exclaimed. “He’s so old and smart, he’ll know exactly what to say.”

Isabella smiled into the pillow. “Uncle Kurt’s not a good person to talk to when you’re upset. He has too many secrets of his own to worry about other people’s.”

“Uncle Kurt doesn’t have any secrets!” I said, horrified. As soon as I said it I realized I was wrong. “Or at least, his secrets are all good secrets.”

Isabella laughed again. “There’s no such thing as a good secret, Richard.”

Her statement was so sweeping that I couldn’t help but stand there, squinting up my eyes, trying to prove her wrong. Of course there are good secrets—surprise birthday parties, for instance. I thought of that one in under ten seconds, but before I could say it, I heard a laugh in the doorway.

It was Francesca, tossing her long, curly hair away from her bathing suit. The suit was a rich green, with nothing but two thin straps to hold it up and an almost nonexistent skirt—more modest than the ones girls wear nowadays, but still shockingly revealing by our family’s standards.

“No such thing as a good secret?” she echoed, her eyes sparkling. “I don’t think that’s true! I can think of a lot of good secrets.” She laughed her throaty laugh again and said, “Right, Richard?”

“I was being serious, Francesca,” Isabella said. She had sat up as soon as Francesca came into the room.

Francesca smiled at Isabella without malice, looked at me for a second or two, and left. From the hallway we heard, “Are you coming to the beach, Isabella?”

“You go on without me,” Isabella called.

There was a moment of silence that I felt to be extremely awkward.

“Will you be all right?” I asked at last.

“Oh, yes, I’ll be fine.” She was still sitting up, waggling her feet at me. “Run away to the beach, little boy. Don’t worry about me. What have you all been doing down there anyway?”

“Tom and Philip had a swimming race,” I answered, ready to give her the full details in spite of her condescending tone. “Charlie was the judge, and he and Tom got into a water fight. Pamela and I went exploring down the shore by the cliff, and the Delias are building a sandcastle. Fisher decided to hunt for crabs—but only unusual ones, he said. Yvette is sunbathing. And that’s everyone because Francesca came back here with me. I wanted to get my telescope.”

“Can you see down to the shore from here with your telescope?”

“No, of course not.” I laughed, thinking she was trying to be funny. “The shore is half a mile away and below the cliff. The furthest I can see from my window is to the edge of the woods. Sometimes I can see boats out at sea too, but not very well. I’m not good at focusing it.” I was hitting my stride. Conversation with Isabella always seemed easy. “So are you going to come back with us?” I asked, assuming that, having heard the enticements of the beach, Isabella wouldn’t be able to resist.

She said, “No, I’m going to stay here. You can tell me all about it when you get back. I’ll be waiting for you.”

I shrugged and left. My cousins spent a lot of time lying on their beds. Considering how dark and gloomy the third floor of Shorecliff was, even on the brightest days, it was impressive that they were so willing to give up the outdoors. But I guess misery is more satisfying when you wallow in darkness. Being sad in the sunlight is harder to pull off.

Francesca was loitering on the stairs, waiting for me. She surprised me sometimes by her consideration—I never expected any from her. “So she’s not coming?” she asked. When I shook my head, she said, “Well, that’s her choice. Come on.”

W
e went to the seashore constantly, nearly every day. Most of the older cousins were intrepid swimmers and ventured into the freezing waves even on windy days that would have seen me huddling in bed were it not for the fact that I refused to be left behind. The water we swam in was cold enough to make our skin go numb after a few minutes, and the aunts and uncles never went in past their knees. But the children were fearless.

Francesca, in particular, would not be denied her daily swim. Probably this was largely for the purpose of wearing her green suit, but nevertheless she thrived in the water, hurling herself into oncoming rollers like a selkie. She boasted that Aunt Loretta was a magnificent swimmer and had taught her all the strokes, though in fact the boys were much more skilled at withstanding the waves than she was. She had a strange habit of crouching in the shallows, her black hair resting on the surface, and then exploding upward with her hands above her head as if she were diving into the air. The gesture seemed to embody our pleasure in the water. The boys also reveled in dodging waves and starting water fights. Pamela and I went in on occasion, usually when there were several aunts nearby and the ocean was so calm that the older cousins deemed it boring and sunbathed instead. I preferred to feel the water swishing gently against my legs, beckoning me onward. Conquering the sea as a foe felt like a distasteful and pointless exercise, but embracing it as a friend was a delight each time.

There was nothing between the house and the beach except the coarse grass that abounded around Shorecliff and a sprawling patch of wild roses and blueberries. We children thought nothing of trotting for ten minutes or so through this thicket and then bursting onto the sand, but for the aunts and uncles it was a chore—whenever they came, they brought lawn chairs and baskets of food and bags of books, as if they meant to be there all day. Then they would stay for an hour or two and depart, while we, who were constantly racing between the house and the beach, could spend all day there without thinking anything of it.

We went to the shore so often that for the most part our times there melted into one another, and maybe that’s why my memory of it seems so magical, built as it is out of so many different mornings, so many lazy afternoons. But one event stands out from the collage, a fear-filled hour that formed one of the milestones of the summer.

The two Delias were fond of building sandcastles. They constructed forts, palaces, villas, once even the Taj Mahal. Proudly they pointed out similarities between their lumpy creations and the sources of their inspirations. Delia Ybarra insisted on using the wettest sand, and so the two of them could usually be found at the edge of the water, piling up bulwarks against the oncoming tide and shouting with happy dismay when the icy waves burst through their walls and flooded the castles’ moats. The rest of us liked the Delias best when they were at the shore. Too often they retreated into their own world of giggles and gossip, but at the beach they played in our midst, and we could run up to tease them or throw water on them, knowing we would receive good-humored smiles in return. Occasionally they even let us dig a trench for them or strengthen a rampart.

One blustery morning, the day after a storm of near-hurricane proportions had kept us prisoners in the house for an entire afternoon, we trooped to the shore, hoping that the water would calm down after a few hours of sunlight. The older girls lay in decorous poses on the dry sand at the top of the beach, and the boys ran footraces and tossed a ball back and forth. Fisher wandered up onto the dunes, where the grass, tall and coarse, whipped against one’s legs like birch canes. The two Delias, undaunted by the towering waves, headed toward the waterline to begin their latest project, a miniature version of the palace at Versailles. They made a picturesque couple as they trotted down the beach, Delia Ybarra in a bright red bathing suit that tied around her neck and contrasted with her black curls, Delia Robierre in a yellow suit barely distinguishable from her tan skin and light brown hair.

Versailles did not fare well under the Delias’ hands. The force of the water was too strong for their sloppy walls, and the foundations they kept laying out dissolved with every fresh wave. The girls rapidly became frustrated, and Francesca chose that moment to turn on her matronly manner. It was clear to the rest of us that she acted the mother only for the pleasure of exerting authority. She was too absorbed in her own existence and too blithely confident that everything would turn out all right ever to be genuinely concerned that we might be injured or lost.

Catching sight of the Delias framed by a menacing wave, she propped herself up on her elbows and called, “Delia and Delia! The waves are too big. Come away from the water.”

Delia Ybarra, without hesitation, armed herself for war. She stood over the feeble beginnings of Versailles, her hands on her hips, and shouted, “How would you know? You haven’t been near the water, you sissy!” As part of her defiance she took several steps backward, and a wave nearly toppled her. Delia Robierre, remaining faithfully by her side, hung onto her arm and looked nervously behind them. Both of the girls were already shivering.

The ball game stopped, and the older cousins—with the exception of Fisher, who was still up on the hill—gathered around Francesca. A fight was cause to drop everything and watch.

“I’m not joking, Delia!” Francesca called, standing up and cupping her hand to her mouth. There was no need to do this—she was just theatrically emphasizing the strength of the wind.

“Neither am I!” Delia roared.

“Come here right now, you little brat! Or I’ll come down there and drag you out by force!”

A mischievous smile crossed Delia’s lips. “I’d like to see you try,” she said, and turned around to splash as fast as she could into the next wave. There was a moment of confusion. Delia Robierre, after a useless lunge after her, retreated to the water’s edge and started jumping up and down, calling, “Delia! Delia, come out!”

Delia Ybarra’s head surfaced after a few seconds, her black hair dripping onto her forehead. The wave had dazed her. Then the undertow grabbed her legs and whirled her out to sea. Pamela and I, lurking behind the older cousins, were so terrified at the speed with which she rushed into the water that we joined hands and remained linked for the rest of the crisis. Beyond the breaking surf, we could see Delia’s black head bobbing for an instant and a white hand flailing beside it. Then another wave engulfed her.

For one dull moment no one moved and our minds refused to work. It couldn’t be true, we thought. It wasn’t really happening. But it was, and Delia Robierre proved it by turning around with her face red and crumpled and her hands held out. “Somebody save her!” she sobbed, her teeth chattering. After that, the situation became sickeningly real.

Cordelia was whisked away so rapidly that within seconds her face was only a white blur, though even from the shore I could see her desperate efforts to swim toward us and then her head swiveling as the next gigantic wave rolled over her. Much of the time, because of these waves, she was lost to view. But Delia Robierre mirrored her panic, and her fear is what remains most vividly in my memory. She was in such agony that she kept dancing in and out of the water, as if she were being pulled by a cord toward her cousin. After her one plea for help, she kept her back to us, crying for Delia over and over again. Her pain was made all the more unbearable by the fact that she was screaming her own name.

I stared at her and at Cordelia’s tossing hands, my whole body trembling with hysteria. Pamela stood beside me, her fingers digging into mine; later I discovered that she had drawn blood.

The older cousins had been thrown into confusion by Delia Robierre’s cry. Yvette held her hands to her cheeks and shouted incessantly, “Come back, come back!” Francesca, suddenly plunging into action, took a few determined steps forward. But Isabella grabbed her arm. “You can’t!” she said, her voice wobbly with distress. “You know you’re terrible at swimming through big waves. We’ll lose you too!” Then she turned to her brother. “Tom!” she cried. “Go on out there. You’re our best swimmer. Go now—quickly!”

But Tom wore the same crumpled red face his sister Delia was wearing. He didn’t show it to us at first. Then he turned his head, and we saw the tears streaming into his mouth. “I can’t go!” he said, his voice cracking. “Somebody else save her. Please, somebody save her!”

Afterward I remembered this moment with awe—the great, invincible Tom, who had honored us by giving up a walk with Lorelei to spend a day at the beach, collapsed in tears. He was so distraught that no one thought of pressing him further, but his appeal to the others made my terror rise to an intolerable pitch. I was convulsed by sobs when I heard Philip say, “It’s okay, Tom. Don’t worry about it. I’m going.” He had stripped off his shirt and was already knee-deep in the water.

“But you’re a worse swimmer than Tom!” Isabella exclaimed.

“Do you think I’m going to let my sister drown?” He spoke over his shoulder, his voice loaded with hostility. She didn’t answer, and he stepped forward and was immediately buffeted by an oncoming wave.

Philip’s lithe brown body was not built to withstand an ocean stirred up by a storm, and he lost his agility in the water. It made no sense that he, of all the older cousins, was the first to go out to Delia, but he had spoken with such assurance that the rest were temporarily immobilized. Isabella stared at him as he flailed in the waves and then put an arm around her sister, whose voice, hoarse and despairing, was still flying over the water.

In the end it was Charlie who rescued Cordelia. While Philip battled the surf in front of us, trying to break through into the trough where she was whirling, Charlie took off his shirt and ran down the beach so that he could take advantage of the undertow’s current. Then he plunged in, forging through the water like an elephant shouldering its way through underbrush. He came to Delia, who had exhausted herself by fruitless struggling, and, wrapping one arm around her, dog-paddled to shore.

When he finally staggered with her onto the beach, we crowded toward them in such a rush that we almost knocked them down. Delia Robierre was the first. Even before Delia Ybarra’s feet left the water, her counterpart had embraced her nearly to the point of suffocation. Charlie tugged them up onto dry sand and then let them fall over each other in earnest. They were soon swamped by the rest of us. Delia, still coughing water, was hugged by Francesca, Yvette, even Philip, who had splashed out of the waves with some difficulty. We were giddy from feeling so many emotions in such a short time and hardly knew what we were saying. I hung on to one of Delia’s cold hands, unwilling to push myself forward but also unwilling to let go of my connection with her.

Through the uproar, however, released at last from the nauseating ache of fear, I kept an eye on Tom and Philip. Neither seemed to be embarrassed by their dramatic failures. After the initial clamor over the rescue, Philip wrapped a towel around his waist and rubbed another through his hair, staring at the sea. Tom, meanwhile, was directing the celebration of Delia’s safety. His tears had disappeared as if they had never been, and the horrible squashed-tomato appearance of his face had vanished. He and Isabella, always the leaders in shows of emotion, were now heading the pack in hilarious joy. The Delias themselves were already laughing, the rush of relief making them all the more exuberant.

We encountered Fisher halfway to Shorecliff. He called out something about a kingfisher, but his ornithological surprises were lost in the explosion of explanations that greeted him. Unshaken by the emotions we had just lived through, he seemed like an alien creature, strangely calm even after hearing about Delia’s ordeal. His cool blue eyes widened in surprise and sympathy, and he patted her shoulder, but it was nothing to the typhoon of love and relief the rest of us felt.

The aunts, on the other hand, reacted with a satisfactory amount of panic. They clutched at Delia, who was becoming displeased at so much manhandling, reprimanded Francesca for negligence, and scolded all of us for going to the beach so soon after a storm.

“It’s a good thing Loretta wasn’t here,” Rose said to my mother over Delia’s head. “She probably would have gone down there with them and been drowned herself.”

My mother smiled and stroked Delia’s hair. Francesca explained how manfully Charlie had plunged into the water to get Delia, and he stood to one side and blushed. It was odd—before we entered the house, I had been imagining how we would describe Philip’s self-sacrificing efforts or Tom’s flurry of tears. But adults can be disconcertingly concrete. The aunts were concerned with one thing only—Delia’s safety—and they did not care about the other extraordinary events that had accompanied her brush with death. Charlie was the one who had saved her from the sea, and thus, in their eyes, he was the only other cousin who had played an important role. But I was already marshaling the bits and pieces from the shore that had imprinted themselves on my mind: the white smudge of Cordelia’s face in the waves, Delia Robierre’s piercing cries, Tom’s tears, Philip’s struggles—these isolated fragments became my memory of the disaster.

The aunts were so alarmed by Delia’s near-calamity that they tried to ban us from the shore. The attempt led to a family argument of the type I had encountered on first arriving that summer. Once again the cousins lined themselves along the walls of the kitchen, and once again the aunts ranged themselves around the table. Aunt Edie, luckily for us, was confined to her bed with a headache, and the uncles were on another hunting trip—or maybe they were out visiting Condor.

Aunt Rose opened the discussion with typical bluntness. “It’s obvious to us,” she said, “that you children are not as responsible as we thought you were. Of course, as the oldest, Francesca ought to have been keeping an eye on you, but we can’t put all the blame on her. You’re all equally guilty—especially you, Cordelia—and none of you are allowed to go down to the shore again unless we’re with you. Is that understood?”