Shorecliff (8 page)

“That’s not fair!” Isabella cried, staring at her mother with horror in her eyes. “It was an accident—it doesn’t mean we’re not responsible.”

“Charlie saved me,” said Delia Ybarra. At this point she was enjoying the spotlight cast on her. The terror had worn off, and all that was left was the glamour of nearly dying.

“Yes, Charlie saved her, which proves that we are responsible,” Francesca said. “Besides, you can’t take the beach away from us. If we can’t go down there and swim, we’ll have absolutely nothing to do and we’ll go insane.”

“That’s absurd,” Rose snorted. “There are plenty of things to do here. You’re all spoiled and willful, that’s what the problem is. A more disgusting pack of children I never saw. You’re not going.”

“Now, Rose,” my mother said. She glanced around at us, smiling. “Of course you’re not disgusting, my dears. A little headstrong, perhaps.”

“Some of us don’t even go in the water,” Yvette said from her corner. In fact Yvette swam often, but she was also skilled in debate and knew that the best tactic was to draw the aunts’ attention away from the water. “I do nothing but sunbathe down there, and there’s nothing dangerous in that.”

“How about our games?” asked Tom. “The sand is the softest surface around. If we played catch on the grass, we’d get cut up in no time. The shore is the safest place.”

“And what about Pamela and Richard?” Francesca added, bringing us in without compunction. “You know how they love to go off and collect shells or whatever it is they do. You never go in the water, do you, kids? You’re too scared.”

“As they should be,” said Aunt Rose.

“That’s my point,” said Francesca. “They know better than to charge into the ocean. Just because Delia is an idiot doesn’t mean the rest of us should suffer.”

“I’m not an idiot!” Delia cried. “You were yelling at me, and I was trying to get away from you!”

“I was telling her not to play so close to the water—wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?” Francesca waved her hands at the other cousins, and they nodded. “If you tell us the beach is forbidden,” she went on, “how are you going to keep us from going?”

“Let’s not descend to the level of fighting dogs,” Aunt Margery said, frowning at her. “It’s not a question of us keeping you prisoner, Francesca. We’re worried about your safety, as we have to be, being your aunts. You don’t have to snap at us and be rude.”

“If you don’t want to keep us prisoners, then let us go to the goddamn beach!”

“Francesca, you are out of line.” Rose stood up and put her hands on the table, looking at us from under lowered eyebrows. “The final word about the shore is that you have betrayed the trust we placed in you. If Loretta were here, she would be taking off her belt right now. Thank God she isn’t and has been spared the terror of hearing that her own daughter nearly drowned.”

“She wouldn’t be taking off her belt,” Cordelia interrupted.

Rose, disconcerted, broke off her speech. “What?”

“I said she wouldn’t be taking off her belt. She never beats us.”

“That was metaphorical, Delia. The point is I’m glad she’s not here to witness how disgracefully her children are behaving. The final word on the beach—”

“The final word on the beach,” said my mother, cutting in, “is that you must all give us your solemn words of honor not to go anywhere near the water when there’s an undertow as bad as there was today. Do all of you swear?”

Aunt Rose was still gaping impotently as we raised our right hands and swore. I don’t think my mother smoothed things over like that simply to gain our adoration, though that was a by-
product
of her diplomacy. She realized what Rose on her high ground couldn’t see, which was that if the shore were denied us, a mutiny would not be long in the making. A vision had already sprung up in my head of Francesca sneaking down the stairs at night—or perhaps climbing down a ladder made of sheets from her bedroom window—and loping off to the beach by the light of the moon. The chaos resulting from such a rebellion would be irremediable. My mother the peacemaker had saved the day without allowing Aunt Rose to lose much face. We all admired her for that.

“Richard,” she added, “it’s especially important that you understand how serious this is. Do you know that if you go in the ocean after a storm, you could drown?”

I nodded, scowling at her implication that I was young enough to be so abysmally ignorant.

“Did you see what happened to Delia?”

“Yes, Mother, I saw it. I’m not a baby. I won’t go near the water unless an older cousin is with me.”

“The same goes for you, Pamela,” Margery said.

Pamela nodded. “Richard and I prefer to go crabbing anyway,” she said haughtily. There was something so assured in Pamela’s poise that even though it was preposterously exaggerated, no one laughed when she made statements like that. I was grateful for her dignity because it allowed her to sail through difficult situations with ease, trailing me in her wake.

The conflict petered out after Pamela’s remark, but I had been struck by my romantic image of Francesca skipping down to the beach in the moonlight. A week or so after the day Delia nearly drowned, I found myself in Tom and Philip’s room, trying ineffectually to impress them. I had covered the topics of my telescope, my books, my position at school (beat-up dreamer, if the truth be known), and my dictionary. They remained unmoved. So I forged ahead: “Do you know what I think would be really neat? If Francesca and a bunch of you snuck out to the beach at night and went swimming in the moonlight. Wouldn’t that be neat, guys? Wouldn’t it?”

For the first time, Philip raised his head. Tom was more polite about appearing to pay attention to me, but now his eyes focused rather than remaining glazed in thought. “Sneak off to the shore and swim in the moonlight, you young delinquent?” he said. “It takes a criminal mind to think up shenanigans like that at your age.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Philip shortly.

“I wonder if Lorelei would come.” Tom murmured this to himself, though both Philip and I heard him.

“I think that would be a two-person-only venture, then,” Philip said.

“You’re right. And Francesca has to be in on this. Meaning that Charlie has to be in on it”—they grinned—“and Isabella, of course. Who else?”

“Yvette’s a priss.”

“The Delias are unsafe.”

“Fisher would be bored.”

“No, he wouldn’t be bored. I think the idea would appeal to him. And how about this guy?” Tom indicated me with his head.

“He thought of it,” Philip said, shrugging. He didn’t smile, but I had learned by this time that Philip didn’t always express affection directly. His eyes were soft as he looked at me, and I beamed.

“How about Pamela?” Tom asked me. “She’s your girlfriend, buddy. What do you say? Do we bring her?”

“She’s not my
girlfriend,
” I said, reddening and tapping the floor with one toe. “But I think she’d like to come.”

“That’s settled,” said Tom. “We’ll do it tonight. It’s almost a full moon—that’s good enough, isn’t it, Richard?”

I was thrilled to have Tom asking for my advice, as if what I thought mattered. I told him that a near-full moon would be just as good, and Tom and Philip began discussing the details of the expedition. I preferred to gloat alone in my bedroom, glorying in being the creator of a daring plan.

The chosen cousins—handpicked in a private council at which I, for once, was present—were soon informed, and Tom decided on one o’clock in the morning as the best hour to start. The adults would have gone to bed by then. We would meet in the main hall by the phone booth.

Francesca, when Tom told her about it, turned to me with glowing eyes and said, “He’s a boy after my own heart.” Her enthusiasm, I suspect, was partly due to an incident from the day before that had provided great amusement for us and horror for the aunts. A bunch of cousins, including Pamela and me, had somehow washed up in the sunny ground-floor room at the back of the house where the aunts liked to read. We kids rarely wasted time in the house when we weren’t in our bedrooms or in the kitchen, but today we had taken over the back room and were all laughing at Charlie’s clowning.

On the spur of the moment, Francesca, who had been leaning on the back of Charlie’s chair, skirted around and threw herself into his lap. She had no motivation for the move, other than an instant’s whim. She settled herself like an affectionate kitten—though Charlie must have felt more as if he were handling a full-grown lynx—and twined her arms around his neck. Charlie kept his eyes locked on hers, a dazed smile on his face, afraid to move lest she dart away. It was all lighthearted, but with Francesca one could never quite predict what would happen. The rest of us were mesmerized. She stroked Charlie’s hair, drew one finger down his throat to his collar, threw back her head as if she were in a Victorian melodrama, and then, with an impish giggle, curled over him so that her forehead was touching his, her wonderful hair falling down to hide their faces.

At this moment Aunt Edie and Aunt Margery entered the room. To be fair to them, Francesca’s position was entirely brazen, and they had not seen her teasing expression before she engulfed Charlie. With a batlike screech, Aunt Edie clutched her throat and staggered backward—in her way she was as accomplished in melodrama as Francesca. Margery, with less show but more force, let out one shocked “Oh!” and marched up to the pair of them.

Francesca dissolved into gales of laughter. She exchanged a glance of incredulous delight with Charlie and then, leaping up from his lap, mimed embarrassment, replicating Aunt Edie’s gestures with uncanny accuracy. The rest of us roared along with her.

Five minutes later, hauled before a tribunal of aunts in the kitchen, Francesca was no longer laughing.

“Your behavior is a disgrace!” Margery said. “You and Charlie are close relations, and intimacy of that kind is completely inappropriate.”

“It’s simply revolting!” Edie gasped from her chair in the corner.

“Oh, please,” Francesca scoffed. “We weren’t doing anything, for God’s sake. We were just joking around.”

“In front of the children?” Aunt Rose asked, taking command. “In front of Pamela and Richard? I don’t want you acting as an example even for Isabella, who’s old enough to realize that you believe you’re ‘just joking around,’ as you say. I’m afraid to think what Charlie imagines about your intentions.”

“The fact is you’re utterly out of hand!” Margery exclaimed. She was getting more and more worked up. “Maybe you don’t grasp the implications of your actions, but that’s no excuse. It’s not correct behavior for a young woman!”

“What’s not correct,” Francesca snapped back, “is boxing up eleven kids in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere for an entire summer.”

From my position outside the screen door, glued to the side of the house in my eagerness to hear every word, I blazed with admiration for her. She showed such magnificent bravery, standing up to the most fearsome aunts without a tremor. The scolding ended indecisively, but the confrontation left Francesca itching for further rebellion, and I was not surprised the next day when she threw herself into my scheme for a late-night visit to the shore.

The only hitch in our plans was a predictable one. Pamela did not succeed in leaving her bedroom without waking Yvette, and hisses of outrage broke out in consequence. The noise woke Delia and Delia, who appeared and demanded explanations. The boys, clad only in their bathing suits, with towels draped over their shoulders, paced back and forth and whispered to each other.

“What are the girls doing, anyway?”

“They blew it. Yvette and the Delias are coming.”

“Who cares? Let’s go.”

“Sure you want to come, Fisher?”

“Yes, I think it will be exciting.”

“Me too, buddy. Has someone gotten Francesca?”

“She’s probably down by the phone booth.”

“Shut up, you idiot! What the hell are you doing?”

“I stubbed my toe!”

“Shut up!”

“Both of you be quiet.”

The girls emerged. Luckily Yvette, though quick to voice complaints, did not feel overly resentful at having been initially left out of the plan. The thrill of sneaking through the house spread even to her, and one of her rare smiles burst into bloom as we crept down the stairs. “Not bad, Richard,” she whispered.

We found Francesca, as predicted, fidgeting by the phone booth. “It took you long enough,” she growled, stalking to the door. “At this rate Aunt Edie will be coming down in her swimming tent, ready for a morning dip. Are you ready?”

We followed her. She set off at a run across the grass, reveling in the brisk, salty breeze that rushed in off the ocean. I had never been out so late before, and I was stunned by the transformation of the house, the lawn, the woods, the fence. The moon was rising and hovered, enormous, over the cliff, as if someone had cut out a gigantic circle of tinfoil and hung it in the sky. The light silvered all the blades of grass on the lawn. It changed Shorecliff from an old, peeling country house into a shining treasure box.

Pamela stayed with me; I think even she was overwhelmed. As we moved away from the house, she made a wide-eyed comment that I’ve always remembered. “It’s like a different place,” she said. “And what if it really is, and we’ve been magically transported here?”

The others galloped over the grass, exulting in the mystic sense of freedom that fast movement gains in darkness. I watched them, nine dark silhouettes fanning out over the grass like a handful of black spiders sent scurrying across a floor. Francesca’s hair streamed behind her, Isabella’s giraffe-like limbs could be recognized at a glance, and the two Delias ran hand in hand, urging each other to greater speeds. Eventually Pamela and I sprinted after them. There was no sound other than the wind blustering past us and the waves, as always, crashing against the cliff. We didn’t want to speak until we had reached the safety of the shore, where even with their superhuman hearing the aunts wouldn’t be able to detect our triumphant yells.

Once at the beach, the majority of the cousins careened, shouting, into the frigid water. Fisher stayed on the dunes and admired the scene from above. Yvette sat to one side and covered herself with sand. Pamela went to join her, but I was surrounded by my older cousins, lifted up, splashed with water, pounded until my back was sore, grinned at by Isabella, laughed at by Francesca. What heaven that night swim was! They were all so grateful to me for coming up with the plan, and so pleased and amused that I had been the one to think of it, that they showered me with praise. Of the nightly excursions that followed, there was not one that matched the innocent pleasure of our first venture into the nocturnal world, nor one that went so smoothly—with no discoveries, no recriminations, no lost secrets, no betrayals.