Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  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.

  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 demo
nic 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.

  3

  War Stories

  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 dro
ve 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.