“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 th
e 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.
When at last we wandered back to the house—at a leisurely pace now; none of us was eager to return to bed—we found Shorecliff still undisturbed, the windows as dark as before and the door welcoming because it was closed. We had spent more than two hours at the shore, and the moon was a distant quarter dollar in the sky. The night was now simply your average summer night, splendid only in that it was warm and caressing on the skin.
We were covered in sand, and I’m sure that all of us suffered from sand in our beds for many days afterward, though Isabella kindly came to my room the next day and shook out my sheets for me. We had no idea what to do with our towels and suits, not wanting to hang them on the clothes line. Eventually we hung them out our windows, and Aunt Edie on her early morning walk found three crumpled towels at the back of the house, where they had landed after falling from the sills in the night. They were the only signs of our escapade, and she mentioned them at breakfast with the mildest of acerbic comments.
On our way up the stairs there was a moment of panic. From Uncle Kurt’s room, the door of which was next to the stairwell, we suddenly heard a frantic shout. All of us froze, each on a different stair, a line of eleven sandy children. Finally Tom mouthed, “He talks in his sleep.” We hovered uncertainly. Then the strange cry sounded again, and we were convinced: only sleep could distort his voice so much. Smiles rippled down the line, and we continued onward to the safety of our bedrooms.
This was when I first learned that Uncle Kurt talked in his sleep. Among the other cousins it became a joke to decipher his slurred and anxious cries. We knew he had been having a nightmare, but the word itself had been almost incomprehensible. Tom’s hypothesis was that Uncle Kurt had been crying, “I can’t see! I can’t see!” Fisher suggested that it might have been “Tennessee!” but this possibility was discarded with great scorn and hilarity.
In fact only I knew the truth behind that scream, and I had known it at once, when I was standing on the stairs. I never told anyone, though, and I never felt any pleasure in possessing the key to Kurt’s nightmare. As I stood by my window at the end of the night, replaying the events in my head, it bothered me that the expedition had ended on such an unsettling note. I didn’t want to be reminded of Uncle Kurt’s suffering when I was surrounded by my admiring and admired cousins. But I could not forget Uncle Kurt’s voice as he shouted that word: “Hennessey! Hennessey!”
It was only when I heard him yelling his friend’s name that I realized something must have happened to Hennessey. Uncle Kurt must have had a reason for never mentioning him in casual conversation, never bringing him, now that the war was over, to visit us at Shorecliff. I couldn’t work up the courage to ask him for the story behind Hennessey’s absence, the story in which his last illusions of war’s glory must have been torn down, and he never told me about it. But I was convinced after that night that Hennessey had died an awful death and that Uncle Kurt felt responsible for it.
Over the course of the summer, Fisher’s suggestion of “Tennessee!” became a sort of battle cry among the older cousins. They would bellow it at times of excitement, as a cheer or as a shout of derision. It became distorted even further as it passed into their vocabulary, and by the time it was an established joke, it had lost most of its similarity to Uncle Kurt’s sleeping cry. But toward the end of the summer, when he heard them shouting it—by sheer chance he had never heard it before—Uncle Kurt looked up from the newspaper he was reading with a frantic, almost angry look in his eyes that changed after a moment to bewilderment and then to pain. Tom saw his expression and later mentioned it to the other cousins, and from that point on they always made certain Kurt wasn’t within hearing distance before they shouted the word. With a constraint placed upon it, the joke lost its spontaneity, and “Tennessee!” died a rapid death. I never forgot it, though, and I’m sure Uncle Kurt didn’t either. It must be strange to hear one’s darkest nightmare revived in bright sunlight in a joyous cry.
5
A Day with Fisher
As one might imagine, since there were eleven children in the house, I never got much time alone with individual cousins. With Pamela, of course, I spent hours in that children’s play that loses its flavor entirely when discussed in later years, and I would have occasional conversations with Tom or Philip and quiet moments with Isabella, but for the most part group activities were the order of the day. While this was exciting, it was also exhausting, and it made those rare hours with a single person times to remember. Fisher was an especially elusive cousin, and there was only one day that I spent with him alone.
Fisher initiated it. A fount of kindliness lurked behind those dreamy eyes, and it’s possible he had noticed how frantically I tried to be part of the group, how ardently I admired my older cousins. That makes it sound as if he were condescendingly giving me some time with the great man, but Fisher would never have thought of himself that way. It’s more likely that he simply felt like giving me a nice day with a friendly confidant. At any rate, one morning after we’d been at Shorecliff for about a month, he showed up at my bedroom door.
“Hi there, Richard,” he said. “What’s cooking?”
Tom had gone off with Lorelei for the day, and Francesca had decided to organize an outdoor game in which I was not invited to participate. I told him, sulkily no doubt, what Francesca’s plans were, and he replied, “But what are your plans, boy scout?”
“I don’t have any plans,” I said, trying to make this sound deliberate. “I might find Pamela and go somewhere with her.”
“Any interest in going somewhere with me?”
I stared at him. “What, you mean like a walk or something?”
“Yeah, that’s right. I thought we could make a day of it. You know where I’ve been wanting to walk to? The Stephenson farm, where Lorelei lives. She’s always talking about it”—an exaggeration; Lorelei didn’t “always talk” about anything—“but we’ve never seen it. What do you say?”
“I’d love to. You mean just me?”
“I figured you’d make a good companion. You’re a good walker, right? And you could bring that telescope of yours.” He nodded to the telescope lying on my bedside table, and I clutched it eagerly. The offer was too good to be true, and my one thought was to set off immediately before he could change his mind.
When Fisher made plans, he made them well. He meant it when he said he wanted to make a day of it, and on our way out through the kitchen he asked my mother for a bag of sandwiches and some ice water in bottles. I was amazed. Picnics were usually huge expeditions, and here was a picnic being prepared for just the two of us.
“I think it’s a lovely idea, Fisher,” my mother said.
“I’ll put some cookies in,” Margery added.
They beamed at us. We had won full approval from the adult sector. This sort of activity—demure walks in small groups—was their rarely fulfilled ideal of cousinly exercise.
Fisher and I headed west over the grass toward the belt of woods separating Shorecliff from the Stephenson farm. Our rambling walk through the trees and into the fields beyond took much longer than I had anticipated, though Fisher probably had the day planned from the first minute. His leisurely pace covered more ground than it appeared to. He held the lunch bag in one hand, swinging it w
ith every step, and most of the time he didn’t talk to me. When we were in the woods he kept his head tilted upward to see any birds that might fly overhead. One time he grabbed my arm and stood stock-still, and we listened to a birdcall that sounded to me like all the other birdcalls surrounding us.
“Gosh!” he said, after we had stood for over a minute. “Wow!”
“What was it, Fisher?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never heard it before. Wow! I’ll have to ask Uncle Cedric. I bet he’ll know.” It was the first I’d heard about Uncle Cedric knowing birdcalls. Fisher spent a lot of the afternoon whistling under his breath and trying to imitate the string of notes we’d heard. By the evening he said he had messed it up so much that he would never be able to reproduce it, and sure enough when he whistled it for Uncle Cedric, all he got was a chuckle. “The call of a lesser nuthatch,” Cedric said, “one Fisher Wight by name.”
The woods between the Stephensons and us were mostly pine, but there were patches of maple and oak and a surprising number of enormous old beeches. The strip was wider than I had thought it would be, and when we were in the middle we couldn’t see Condor’s cottage, even though we knew it was only about a quarter mile north of us. That isn’t surprising in a wood, but I had been convinced we would see it.
“Are we lost?” I asked.
“No, we’re not lost. On our way back we’ll stop at Condor’s and say hello, what do you say? Maybe Uncle Eberhardt will be there too.”
I nodded. Condor was an appealing but threatening proposition, and Uncle Eberhardt only increased the stakes, but if Fisher was game, then I was too.
We emerged beside the Stephenson fields close to noon. The woods were on slightly higher ground than the farm, so when we stood on the grassy strip beside them, we could see large swaths of cultivated land undulating into the distance. It was a disconcerting view, as if somehow it were being changed and expanded in a funhouse mirror but we couldn’t see the trick. Right in front of us the crop was green and small, with wide dirt alleys between the rows that we could easily walk along. Further west was an impenetrable field of wheat rustling in the breeze, and to our right lay a plowed field dotted with haystacks. Across that was a little farmhouse next to a big barn complex with multiple silos.
Shorecliff Page 8
