Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  I expected him to say something about how he never lied or never let down a client, and I said, “What?” resentfully.

  “He’s really smart,” Philip said. “I’ve only spoken to him a few times, but he’s really, really smart. He’s maybe the smartest man I know. I think he’s even smarter than Uncle Cedric.” Tom threw a pillow at him, but he ignored it. “Anyway, I think that’s worth something,” he told me.

  I had never thought of my father that way, but Philip was right. He was extremely intelligent—it was what made him such a successful lawyer. And though Philip was trying to be nice, he was also sincere, and that made me feel a little better.

  Pamela also offered me an unexpected bit of comfort. We were dawdling in my room, and I must have hinted at how worried I was. She was looking out the window—I wasn’t sure she was even paying attention—but eventually she said without turning around, “Well, at least you never have to feel embarrassed by him. Uncle Richard never acts like an idiot.” It was a perspective on my father I had never considered—up to that time fear and resentment had pushed out any possibility of embarrassment. But like Philip’s observation, it was undeniably true.

  The next two days were spent in unpleasant anticipation. My father was arriving on Friday evening. Aunt Margery, the official driver of the rattletrap, my mother, and I were all going to Pensbottom to meet him. The prospect of entering the town, scene of Francesca and Charlie’s glorious escape, enlivened me somewhat, but I found that the closer we got, the more anxious I became. I was sitting alone in the backseat. Halfway there, after some intense calculation, I said, “Mother, I’ll let you sit in the backseat with Father on the ride back, so that you can talk with him.” Mother laughed and said it was sweet of me.

  The train arrived ten minutes after we reached the station. My mother insisted that we get out of the car and line up alongside it, the way Pamela and Aunt Margery had when my mother and I came. My father was the fifth person off the train. He was wearing a black, pinstriped suit, undoubtedly the one he had worn to the office, and a homburg hat. He looked distinguished and very tall. My mother came up only to his shoulder, and she wasn’t particularly short for a woman. When she saw him stepping down from the car, she ran forward with a bright smile and said, “I’m so glad to see you, Richard!” Then she put her arms around him, and he kissed her. I couldn’t analyze the emotion in that greeting because my father was approaching the car. First he said hello to Margery, and she said, “It’s nice to see you, Richard.” Then he said, “Hello, Richard. How have you been?” He never called me Junior—a mark in his favor.

  “Hello, Father,” I said, swallowing. It was a terrible, awkward hello.

  He ruffled my hair but didn’t smile or hug me. “You’ll have to tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  “Playing with the cousins, mostly.”

  “Had some fun?”

  “Yes, lots.”

  “Been a good boy? Been a good son to your mother?”

  “Richard has been a delightful son, as he always is.” My mother smiled at me with her special smile, signifying our membership in a private, two-person club.

  “Well, I’m famished,” my father said. “Let’s drive home.” I resented his calling Shorecliff home.

  Thanks to my preemptive strike on the ride down, I had the comfort of Aunt Margery’s cushiony body next to mine on the ride back. Mother and Father spent nearly the whole thirty minutes mute, and Aunt Margery, usually garrulous to a fault, was cowed into silence.

  When we arrived at home, the same formal greetings were handed out on all sides. My father shook hands with the other men, smiled a lips-only smile at the women, nodded at all his nieces and nephews, and considered his duty done. Aunt Rose—for once taking on the role of chef—gave him a wonderful meal that he acknowledged with conventional compliments, and then he sat back at the dinner table and engaged in shop talk with Uncle Frank and Uncle Cedric.

  I was relieved to see that Uncle Kurt, though appearing to pay attention to their conversation, contributed very little and at times glanced over and winked at me. Sometimes, when I went to his room in the mornings, instead of launching into a story about his wartime adventures he would ask me for advice on some unimportant matter or probe my feelings on a certain topic. When Francesca and Charlie ran away to Pensbottom, Uncle Kurt and I had a man-to-man talk about it, weighing the pros and cons. In hindsight, it was maybe hypocritical of Uncle Kurt to indulge me in these discussions, but at the time I felt privileged and, for once, valued for my intelligence. That night I knew I would find solace in his room the next morning, when I could complain to him, in an adult manner of course, about my father’s visit.

  During that first evening, my cousins walked around as if they had taken a vow of silence. Normally our dinners, held at the enormous table in the dining room, were rowdy to say the least. Food fights had been known to break out, riotous arguments raged from the salad through dessert, jokes were told, secrets were revealed. Dinnertime was one of my favorite times of each day. But when my father ate with us, my cousins were replaced by lifeless replicas of themselves. They all remembered to put their napkins in their laps. They spoke when they were spoken to and not before. They were so subdued that they didn’t even smile or exchange rebellious glances. I looked at them with despair in my heart. Would the rest of the summer be like this? Would my father, with one three-day visit, kill the life of Shorecliff altogether? I felt not only horror but guilt—he was, after all, my father, and I was convinced that my cousins condemned me on account of his presence.

  As soon as they had been released from the bondage of the dinner table—and Aunt Rose, in an unexpected show of compassion, exempted the two children on kitchen patrol from their duties—the cousins raced as one to the third floor. My father’s tentacles of sobriety did not reach up two flights of stairs.

  I had been held longer at the table as The Son, an additional punishment, and when I finally arrived upstairs, I went immediately to Pamela. I found her and Yvette sitting on their beds, talking. The rest of us never knew what the Wight girls said to each other. They got along well and almost never quarreled, possibly because their decorum prevented them from anything but passive aggression. I respected their sisterly bond, and I also found their combined reserve hard to face. Therefore, though they both politely turned to look at me when I entered the room, I didn’t ask Pamela to come with me. I just said, “I’ve gotten away.”

  “That’s good,” Pamela said.

  They waited; I left. The next door to try was Isabella’s. I found not only her but also Charlie, Francesca, and Tom. They were, I assume, having a meeting about how to fight the dragon. When Isabella called for me to come in, I closed the door and stood in front of it, feeling as if I were facing a panel of judges in a courthouse. Their stares, though not accusing, seemed as intimidating as my father’s cold gaze. Finally I exclaimed, “I don’t want my father to be here!” Then I burst into tears.

  Isabella leaped up and enfolded me in her gawky embrace. It was the first time she returned to her old habit of hugging me, and in the midst of my tears I thrilled at her touch. She dragged me to her bed as a sort of trophy, and as I sobbed on her bony shoulder I could feel Francesca rubbing my back. The boys patted my shoulders and told me not to worry. We Hatfields excel at empathy, though all four cousins must have known that my misery was exaggerated. My father, after all, was leaving that Sunday, and he was not deliberately attempting to spoil our fun. It would be easy to head out to Condor’s cottage or the shore the next day and avoid all contact with him. Nevertheless, they felt the magnitude of the situation as I saw it and suffered with me, and I was grateful to them for doing so.

  I was also grateful that they didn’t try to comfort me by vilifying my father. Tom kept saying, “He’s really not that bad, Richard. He’s just not like the rest of us, but that’s okay. After two months with us, you’d think you’d want someone who didn’t fly off the handle about everything.”

 
“None of us mind that he’s here,” Isabella said, which was a blatant lie.

  “And remember what Philip said,” Tom added.

  “What did Philip say?” Isabella asked.

  “He said that Uncle Richard was incredibly smart, which he is. Richard here ought to be proud of him. He’s one of the best lawyers in New York.”

  “The main thing, Richard,” Francesca told me, “is that you love your mother, and she chose to marry your father. You have to trust her about that. We all love Aunt Caroline, and we know she’s just as smart as Uncle Richard. She wouldn’t have married him if he weren’t a great man.” Francesca’s phrasing was a little odd, but her insights were sound, and her comfort was the most effective, though their pats and hugs all helped to quiet me.

  I went at last to bed sedated after an hour of crying and coddling. The next day we played our traditional morning game of croquet, and Lorelei appeared. I watched with trepidation as Tom led her up to my father, but Lorelei never lost her poise. She was wearing a blue skirt and a white blouse, and her feet were bare. “Good morning, Mr. Killing,” she said. A smile fluttered on her lips without quite coming into existence. “It’s very nice to meet you.” That was all. We returned to the game, and my father returned to his conversation with Uncle Cedric and Uncle Frank at the sidelines. Though they both took up their usual posts in lawn chairs—sagging, moldy chairs that were ragged after years of steady use—my father stood beside them, wearing clothes that would have gone unremarked in his legal office, sipping a glass of lemonade and shading his eyes to watch us play.

  In the afternoon we went to visit Barnavelt. All eleven cousins stuck together that day, and Lorelei remained with us. Condor had never received such a large visitation. Soon after we arrived, though, we switched tactics and went to the shore—we were feeling restless and uncertain. It was one of Lorelei’s only appearances on the beach. She wasn’t wearing a bathing suit, but she picked up her skirt and dabbled in the shallows with Pamela and me while Tom cavorted farther out to show off for her.

  Dinner was a reenactment of the previous night’s meal. My father asked us for a report of the day’s events, and in the halting summaries we gave him, the fun and exuberance drained out of our activities, making us seem like colorless, uninteresting children. Other than this alarming loss of personality, we got through the meal unscathed, and eventually Aunt Rose nodded once again at whoever was on kitchen patrol and said, “Not tonight, you two. Go on upstairs.”

  It was later that night, when it was dark outside and we were retiring for bed, that my father showed his powers of destruction. He and my mother had ended up in the kitchen alone. I was with them for a while—it would have been a cozy family scene had different actors been playing the parts—but after I had suffered for fifteen minutes, they sent me to bed.

  It must be obvious by now that I spent half my time at Shorecliff in shameless eavesdropping. When I left the kitchen, I did not trot straight upstairs but instead lingered in the rarely used morning room adjacent to the kitchen. Tucked into the shadows and the dust, one could hear perfectly what was said in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure what I was listening for, perhaps a clue to my parents’ relationship, but I stood there, pressed against the wall, feeling the rapidly beating heart that spying invariably produces, even before anything has been discovered.

  “Well,” my father said. “Richard seems to have been staying out of trouble pretty well.”

  “He adores it here. Being with his cousins has done wonders for him,” my mother replied—ever loyal.

  “Yes, apparently he’s been enjoying the summer, though I wonder what influence those children can have on him. You know what I think of the Ybarras.”

  “They’re good children, all of them, Richard. You’ve seen for yourself.”

  “I’ve seen the look in Francesca’s eye, that’s what I’ve seen. Cedric and Frank told me about her incident with Charlie Wight. That boy is no better, it would seem, though I’m sure she dragged him along.”

  As my father said this I glanced at the doorway to the parlor and through that into the main entryway of Shorecliff, and I saw Francesca coming down the stairs. She walked noiselessly to the morning room where I was standing, acknowledging what I was doing with a mere lift of the head, and then froze when she heard my father’s voice. I assumed she had come down for a glass of water, or perhaps to see if the coast was clear for a late-night swim—one never knew with her. But she had not expected my parents to be on the ground floor. It was uncanny that she arrived directly before my father revealed the reason he had come up to Shorecliff, thus ensuring that she heard his story from beginning to end. Coincidence can be very cruel.

  “Caroline, it’s about the Ybarra family, or what’s left of it, that I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “I came up here to see you, of course, but also because I’ve been hearing ugly rumors about Loretta.”

  “Rumors?” echoed my mother, instantly on the alert. She had her fair share of Hatfield family pride, and her battle blood rose whenever someone hinted at an insult to the tribe.

  “Yes, rumors. The most disturbing part is that I’ve heard them from my own clients. I was mortified, as you can imagine, though naturally the most important thing is to save Loretta.”

  “Well, what are the rumors?” My mother’s voice was hard.

  “It’s difficult to say this, but the gist of it is that she’s become utterly brazen in her affairs. We’ve always known she was promiscuous—look at her marriage, for God’s sake. And it’s been no secret to her family that she has the tendencies of a nymphomaniac—”

  “If by ‘her family’ you mean her children, they certainly are not aware.”

  This made me look at Francesca, whose connection with Loretta I had almost forgotten in my eagerness to memorize every word I didn’t recognize for later research in my dictionary. The definition for “nymphomaniac” was unexpectedly frank: “a person obsessed with sexual relations.” Afterward I was never able to think of my Aunt Loretta without remembering that word.

  One glance at Francesca, however, drove all vocabulary questions out of my head. She wasn’t trying to hide herself. She was standing in the doorway to the parlor, and I’m sure if my parents had craned their heads they could have seen her. Her hands clutched the doorframe on either side of her, and her coquettish little nightie, pale blue with lace around the neck and ruffles on the shoulders, barely reached mid-thigh. With her black curls tumbling loose, she looked like a seductress herself, but her face wore an expression of such heartbreaking shock that it destroyed any suggestion of sexuality. Francesca occasionally seemed much older than twenty-one, mature in her manners, her knowledge, her language. But when she heard of her mother’s habits, her face showed the innocence of a seven-year-old whose world has been demolished, and I, looking on from my corner, felt as if I were witnessing something no one should be allowed to see.

  Nor did the horror stop there. My father had merely been laying the groundwork for his story. “In any event,” he went on, “whether or not her children knew, the rest of us did, and we were prepared to accept her behavior, or at least resign ourselves to it, as long as she remained discreet.”

  “Your method of resigning yourself was to forbid me to see her in New York,” my mother interrupted.

  “Caroline, that is not the point. I didn’t want to cut you off from your own sister, but we are not a rich family, and my business is sensitive to reputation. In any case, Mr. Karlevich—you remember him, the man with the fraud case against his uncle—told me a few days ago that someone had mentioned Loretta to him in frankly revolting terms. As he related them to me, this other man’s words were ‘that slut Loretta Ybarra, apparently an in-law of Mr. Killing’s.’ You can imagine my dismay.”

  There was a pause. My mother didn’t say anything. Francesca had jerked her head back at the word “slut,” so I knew it was important. Tears began to roll down her cheeks, but she kept her head thrown back with her neck rigid, so that it look
ed oddly as if she were bound to the doorframe, her hands clutching the wooden posts. She was waiting for more, and it came.

  “I don’t know what Loretta wants or what she’s thinking when she gets herself into these situations, but it seems she’s not only involved herself with several different prominent men, she’s done it publicly. If she’d set out to become the town harlot, she couldn’t have done a better job. And I can’t have my practice suffering from this woman’s behavior. Really, Caroline, whether or not she’s your sister, it’s little better than prostitution.”

  “That’s enough, Richard!” my mother said, and from the way she said it I knew she was crying. Apparently she hadn’t known the extent to which Loretta’s passions ruled her life.

  “If she’s acting this way to support her children, surely she knows that we would gladly lend her money rather than see her throw herself and her family away in this manner. In any case, it’s time you all got her in hand. If she keeps it up—”

  “Stop, Richard! I’ve heard what you had to say.”

  I dared another glance at Francesca. My position had become intolerably embarrassing, but since Francesca was blocking my one avenue of escape, I could do nothing except cower in my corner, trying not to look at her too often and striving both to hear and not to hear the conversation in the kitchen. By this time Francesca was crying in the stifled way that causes one’s face to swell up and become bright red. She kept half bending over, as if she were being attacked by bouts of nausea—maybe she was.

  What made it so unbearable was that Francesca had always adored her mother. Her conversation was sprinkled with constant references to Loretta: she could learn to speak a language fluently in two months; she had turned heads all over Europe; she wasn’t afraid to stand up to anybody. Francesca modeled much of her arrogance and wildness on what she believed her mother’s behavior to be, but whereas Francesca’s unruliness was rooted in her innocence, Loretta’s had been born of experience and cynicism and God knows what else. As I watched Francesca in the doorway, it seemed as if a great weight descended on her, and I imagined it to be not disgust with her mother but rather an overwhelming helplessness, for nothing now could save Loretta from humiliation.