Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  “I was only joking,” Francesca said, her voice breaking.

  “Thank God Loretta isn’t here,” Aunt Rose muttered.

  It was then that my mother told Francesca and Charlie about how frightened she had been when the phone rang. My mother could be shattering when she was upset or angry, mostly because she never lightened the solemnity by even the hint of a smile. Francesca felt a wave of guilt and started to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Caroline!” she blurted out. “I didn’t know that would happen. I didn’t mean to scare you!”

  “Of course you didn’t know it would happen,” said my mother, “but that’s exactly why it’s dangerous to act so thoughtlessly. You can never tell what will happen because of impetuous behavior.”

  There was a moment of silence, during which Francesca sobbed dramatically. I suspected her of enjoying her position as the penitent maiden—one never knew how much guilt Francesca truly felt, and it seemed unlike her to cry so easily.

  Then the silence was broken in an unexpected and, for us eavesdroppers, a thrilling way. Aunt Edie, who had said nothing up to this point, suddenly burst out, “I want to speak! I’m just as much related to these children as all of you are, and I ought to get a say in what happens.”

  Aunt Rose snapped, “What are you talking about, Edie? Don’t be absurd.”

  “Don’t get excited, Edie,” said Uncle Cedric. “They’re both safe—that’s the main thing.”

  Edie, however, paid no attention. “None of you understand!” she exclaimed. “I’m apparently the only one who can see what’s happening. And if you think I’m going to stand by while that shameless jezebel leads the other children into sin, you can think again. It’s clear to me that Charlie has been seduced by this girl here, who is an exact replica of Loretta as far as I’m concerned. And I won’t have it in this house!”

  On the stairs, we were all impressed by her tirade. But, as was usual with Edie’s rants, we couldn’t take her outrage seriously. No one would deny that Francesca was a seductress—even I knew she was, though I didn’t understand the more sordid implications of the term, and when I looked up “jezebel,” the definition was “wife of Ahab, Phoenician”—but it was an insult to Charlie to suppose he had no choice in the matter.

  He was the first to say it. “That’s not true, Aunt Edie,” he protested. “I’m as much to blame as Francesca is. I drove the car, after all.” A tinge of pride crept into his voice.

  “She lured you into it,” Aunt Edie proclaimed. “And I’m not surprised. That girl has been on the warpath of lust ever since she got here. What did I say in the first week? What did I say about a house filled with children at this age?”

  “That’s enough, Edie,” said my mother.

  At the same time Uncle Frank said, “Edie, you’re being positively indecent. Let’s not blame Francesca for anything more than what actually happened. Charlie’s my son, but I’m clearheaded enough to see when he’s at fault. You made a mistake, son, and I hope you regret it.”

  “I do,” said Charlie. In reaction to Edie’s hysteria, everyone else was acting very upright and reasonable and man-to-man.

  “I promised Mr. Ballantine that we would take you to Pensbottom so you could apologize to him personally,” said my mother. “Are you willing to go?”

  “Of course,” said Francesca angelically. Inwardly, she later reported to Isabella, she was seething. “That stupid, snotty little man,” she said. “The day I apologize to him with any sincerity is the day I die.”

  Nevertheless, Aunt Margery and my mother drove Charlie and Francesca into town the next morning. By daylight, Pensbottom lost its last meager trappings of romance. The main street was covered in dust because of a recent heat wave, and the buildings that huddled on either side looked like two rows of the proverbial small potatoes. “Uncle Harold was right,” Charlie said when they came back. “Pensbottom is obscene. It wasn’t worth it.” But Francesca said, “Oh, what did Uncle Harold know?”

  Charlie Ballantine was standing on the steps of the church, self-importance pouring out of him. “So here are the Hatfields,” he said. “I’m glad you saw fit to come and apologize—not too high and mighty after all. As the church warden for Pensbottom, I will be very happy to accept your apology for trespassing on this sacred property.”

  “That will do, Mr. Ballantine,” said Aunt Margery. From the moment he started talking, she had bristled with indignation. “My son and niece are here to say they’re sorry, and that’s all. We’re not here to listen to your comments.”

  “Well, I see that turning out destructive children hasn’t affected your pride. But perhaps the children themselves will be more polite?”

  My mother took Aunt Margery’s arm to prevent her from saying anything.

  “First of all, we didn’t vandalize the church,” Francesca said.

  “But,” said Charlie, “we apologize for entering it at night.”

  “Even though we didn’t know it wasn’t permitted.”

  “And we’re sorry we were rude to you.”

  “It won’t happen again,” said Francesca. She was openly wearing a malicious grin at this point, but Aunt Margery and my mother were so offended by Charlie Ballantine’s manner that they didn’t scold her.

  Mr. Ballantine stared at Francesca and Charlie in disbelief. “You call that an apology?” he asked. Then he turned to the aunts. “Are you going to let them get away with that? If you do, you’re as bad as they are.”

  “They both said they were sorry and that it wouldn’t happen again!” Aunt Margery burst out. “And that’s all we can expect. After all, entering an open church isn’t a crime. They didn’t really do anything wrong. What punishment they receive will come from us—not from you!” The last word she essentially spat. Charlie Ballantine responded by spitting in the usual sense at her feet. From that moment there was war—albeit a cold war—between Shorecliff and Pensbottom.

  On the ride home Aunt Margery was too outraged at Mr. Ballantine’s behavior to comment on anything else. “To think the townspeople feel that way,” she gasped, “and we’ve been in total ignorance! All our lives we’ve thought of Pensbottom as a welcoming place. And the people there are like vipers in the grass! They’ve struck our heel, Caroline—they’ve stabbed us in the back. They’ve given us the Judas kiss!”

  “Now, Margery,” said my mother, “Charlie Ballantine is one man. I’m sure the rest of the town doesn’t feel the way he does. He’s clearly obsessed with the church and thinks of it as his private property.”

  “That’s another thing!” Margery fumed. “What I said was true. A church is a house of God. It’s open to all comers. If they didn’t want people to come in, they should have locked the door at night. What sort of security is that?”

  “I agree he seemed very unreasonable. And it’s disgraceful to spit before children, or before anyone for that matter. He was abominably rude.”

  “What did you two do in the church, anyway?” Aunt Margery asked, twisting her head around to see into the backseat.

  “We just walked in and stood quietly in the aisle,” Francesca said. “Honest.”

  “We were very respectful,” Charlie said.

  They didn’t say anything more, but I’ll bet they had a more meaningful experience in the church that night than Charlie Ballantine ever had.

  “I hope you realize,” my mother said as they pulled up to Shorecliff, “that what you two said to Mr. Ballantine doesn’t pass as an apology. We allowed it because we were as horrified by him as you were. But if you ever apologize to one of us like that, you’ll find we aren’t as forgiving. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Aunt Caroline,” they answered. They suspected that they had escaped a severe punishment thanks to Mr. Ballantine, and they were right. They were confined to the house for a week and required to eat meals in the kitchen while we ate in the dining room. But for Francesca and Charlie, eating alone was more of a present than a punishment, and after two dinners of segregation Uncle
Kurt, a smile stretching across his face, came into the kitchen where the two cousins were roaring with laughter over some joke and said, “All right, kids. You win. Come on back to the dining room and quit that braying—you sound like donkeys.”

  The morning after the escapade, Francesca narrated the whole story to Isabella. I wanted to know what had happened so badly that as Francesca was finishing the story I burst into the room and said, “Can I just sit in the corner?”

  The girls laughed. Isabella patted the bed next to her and said, “You don’t have to sit in the corner. You can have the seat of honor.”

  I’d missed most of it, of course, but I did hear Francesca talking about apologizing to Charlie Ballantine. “The biggest reason it made me so mad,” she said, “was that he was horning in on a wonderful night. We’d had an adventure, Charlie and I, and then this weasel of a man—who I would shoot without hesitation, if I had a rifle—had to wreck everything with his stupid arrogance. But the only thing that really matters is how excited we were, driving to Pensbottom.” She dissolved into laughter. “And then driving home feeling as if we’d really done something, even in Pensbottom, even in that dead little town. It was great—I’d never take it back! And I’m sorry I frightened Aunt Caroline, I really am,” she added, turning to me, “but that wasn’t my fault, was it? It was Charlie Ballantine’s fault, that son of a bitch. I feel guilty about it, but I’m not going to let him ruin my fun.” She was standing in front of us, and now she threw up her arms in a stage-actress gesture and said with a triumphant grin, “I got out, kids! I escaped from this old prison of a house, and I had a night on the town!”

  7

  Fox

  Nearly a week after the Pensbottom incident, when the uproar resulting from it was dying down, I woke up early one morning. Usually I awoke around seven o’clock, which was two hours earlier than any of my cousins but half an hour later than most of my aunts and uncles. This gave me the opportunity to have all the adults to myself over breakfast, a privilege that seemed daunting every morning when I stepped into the kitchen but lent me a feeling of superiority when the older cousins wandered down hours later to face leftovers and dishes in the sink. The mornings also gave me the chance to hear treasured gossip and to test the wind of adult opinion. Perhaps assuming, as so many adults do, that children are either not interested in or not capable of understanding their conversation—an assumption fatal to secrecy but vital to the education of children—the aunts and uncles would often discuss their offspring in front of me, giving me clues not only to their own attitudes but also to the true natures of my cousins.

  That morning I found the sun shining on me at six o’clock rather than seven. I don’t know what woke me—perhaps an unsettling dream—but I felt disoriented and lay in bed for a while staring at the window, waiting for familiarity to return. Eventually I decided to get out of bed and go downstairs. Tiptoeing down when no one else was awake was a new and pleasant experience. I surveyed the ground floor awash with virgin sunlight, and all thought of my dream was swept away by exhilaration.

  As soon as I got into the kitchen, the audacious idea struck me of making my own breakfast. I loved pancakes, but I knew they would be too difficult—I had never followed a recipe—so I decided on eggs and began to rummage through the icebox. I remember noticing that the kitchen door to the outside was open, only the screen door remaining closed to keep out mosquitoes, but Shorecliff was so isolated that there was no fear of thieves, and we often kept the doors open all night.

  I was so startled that I nearly dropped an egg when the screen door banged behind me and a voice said, “What are you doing up so early?”

  Tom was standing by the door, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms covered in grass stains and soaked through at his ankles. He was barefoot, and his chest was heaving slightly. I think he had been running. The sunlight cascading through the door gave his tanned skin an almost molten glow. His hair was ruffled, and his torso, lean and muscular from months of exercise, seemed to me a paragon of manliness. After the first shock of his entrance, I was struck dumb by the glory of his appearance. I knew I would never look like that.

  “Well, pal,” he said, grinning at me, “cat got your tongue? Sneaking something to eat before anyone else comes down? What are you up to?”

  The way he spoke, the way he was holding his hands at his sides, the way he stood with his feet apart, not lounging but as if he were filled with some private excitement—all these things showed me that he had been doing something thrilling.

  I answered, “I’m getting breakfast. Where have you been?”

  Tom laughed and folded his arms. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. “I’ve been spending some time on the couch of Venus, my friend. I’ve been experiencing connubial bliss.”

  “Connubial” was beyond me (I later looked it up in my trusty dictionary and found “pertaining to marriage,” which was no help since Tom wasn’t married). I did know, however, what bliss was. It went without question, furthermore, that Tom had been with Lorelei, and though I couldn’t fill in the details, I had learned on my walk with Fisher what kind of activities Tom and Lorelei engaged in. So I asked with ravenous curiosity, “Did you like it?”

  He laughed again in the same way, uncertain and a little distracted, as if he too were experiencing the disorientation I had felt on waking. “It was great stuff, kid,” he said. “Great stuff. You ever hear anyone running down connubial bliss, you tell them they’ve got it wrong. Have you got that?”

  I was nodding when I heard a snort of derision from the doorway leading into the rest of the house. Yvette was standing there in a sleeveless blue nightgown. Her ash-blond hair hung all the way down her back, and her arms were bare. She had lovely arms, skinny and rounded, the muscles well defined because she was so slim. Whenever I saw them I wanted to wrap my fingers around the flesh just above her elbow, and even during this early-​morning confrontation I admired her. She would have looked beautiful in the sunlight except that she was obviously burning with a constrained emotion I couldn’t identify.

  “Is that what you like to tell little boys, Tom?” she said. “All about ‘connubial bliss’? That’s pretty low, if the best audience you can get is your youngest cousin. Why don’t you announce it at the dinner table? I’m sure your mother would love to hear what you’ve been doing.”

  “Leave it alone, Yvette,” Tom said. I could tell he was trying to hang on to his earlier mood of triumph. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  In an instant I became an invisible watcher. What I saw now was that Yvette couldn’t keep her eyes off Tom’s body; they wandered over his hair, his hands, his chest, his bare feet. She avoided his eyes, probably because they were now staring at her with mounting irritation, but even I in my ignorance could feel the force pulling Yvette toward him.

  There was a long pause in the conversation, and during that pause I did some rapid thinking. I saw that Yvette was angry with Tom, and I remembered Lorelei kissing Tom under the haystack, and I deduced that Yvette wished she had been in Lorelei’s place. In this way I came to my first understanding of the many layers beneath my cousins’ behavior toward each other.

  “Aren’t you going to tell Richard what you did with Lorelei?” Yvette asked.

  “No. I think he knows all he needs to know, don’t you, pal?” Tom turned to me, and I shrugged, trying to look inconspicuous.

  “Don’t you feel bad?” Yvette burst out. I knew she was losing her hold over her anger. “Don’t you feel bad sneaking out at night like that, lying to your parents, lying to all of us?”

  “I’m not doing anything wrong,” said Tom. There was a shade of defensiveness in his voice.

  “If you’re not doing anything wrong, then why are you hiding it? Why don’t you tell Aunt Rose you’ll be running over to the Stephensons’ farm to make love with their daughter every night? If it’s not wrong.”

  “Look,” said Tom, shifting on one foot, “how do you know about all this any
way? What have you got to do with it?”

  “I happened to wake up early, and I looked out my window and saw you racing across the yard from the direction of the farm.” Yvette was on her moral high horse now. She had regained her self-control and was lording it over Tom, confident that her knowledge gave her power. “It was a logical conclusion,” she added. “After all, it’s no secret that you’re swooning over Lorelei. It’s disgusting, the way you drop everything and run for her. I bet you’d do anything for her.” The way she said it made it sound like an accusation.

  “Look, Yvette, seriously—you’re not going to tell anyone, are you? You have to agree it’s not really wrong. Where’s the harm in it?”

  “Don’t you feel bad that you’ve abandoned us for so long? That you’re constantly running over to see her and leaving us all behind?” She tried to make the last phrase sarcastic and failed.

  “I haven’t abandoned all of you. Don’t be silly. Anyway, half the time Lorelei comes over here to spend time with us. So you can’t really be angry about that.”

  “What do you know about me being angry? I’m not angry.”

  “Well… If you’re not angry, you won’t say anything, right? Come on, Yvette, this is important. We both know my mother would blow up if she found out about it.”

  “I don’t think it’s nice to lie to your mother.”

  “Nice or not!” Tom exclaimed, slapping his hand on the doorframe. “I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone, all right? Is that so much to ask?”

  “What do you think, Richard?” Yvette asked, turning to me. “Do you think it’s a lot to ask?”

  In spite of my realizations during the discussion, I was still floundering for a foothold, and their rapid exchange had bewildered me. “A lot to ask?” I repeated, looking to Tom for help.

  “You know how it is, buddy,” he said. “My mother wouldn’t be happy if she knew I had been out at night.”

  “Doing what?” prompted Yvette.

  “I was visiting Lorelei. And it’s sort of secret. You won’t tell, will you?”