My parents’ conversation did not last much longer. Francesca’s sobs became audible, and my mother, hearing them, let out a gasp and rushed to her. In her worry that Francesca had overheard the conversation, she didn’t notice me in the corner, and when they found me later it didn’t matter anymore. Francesca became hysterical when my mother wrapped her arms around her. My father came to the doorway of the kitchen and looked at the two of them huddled on the floor. It was one of the few times I’ve seen a look resembling remorse on his face. After a moment he turned around, and I heard the screen door of the kitchen slam shut. He had gone outside to escape.
Aunt Margery heard the commotion soon enough, and within a few minutes the first floor was swarming with so many relatives that Francesca suddenly rose like a missile from her heap on the floor, shrieked wordlessly, and flew up the stairs. The children wandered from room to room, weaving in and out among the adults and asking what had happened. My mother refused to tell them, but at the same time she needed to let the aunts and uncles know of Loretta’s disgrace. For a few minutes there was an impasse. Then Tom and Philip caught sight of me. They knew my talents as an eavesdropper, and they quickly realized that I knew all there was to know. I was hustled upstairs, followed by a pack of cousins.
Yet after they had placed me on Philip’s bed, when I saw him and Cordelia gazing at me, thirsting for knowledge, I refused to say anything. “Ask Francesca!” I hiccupped, nearly crying myself and wrapping my arms over my face so I wouldn’t have to see them anymore. “I won’t tell you. Ask Francesca.” Though I didn’t understand fully what had happened with Aunt Loretta, I had seen Francesca’s reaction, and I had no intention of witnessing a repeat performance from her siblings.
At first Francesca refused to speak to anyone, but after an hour she let Philip into her room. In any case, before the night was over everyone knew the secret. It was inevitable in a house filled with so many loud talkers. Aunt Margery soon worked herself into one of her semi-hysterical states, and her exclamations, combined with Aunt Rose’s booming tirades, broadcast Loretta’s scandal through the house.
I might as well set the record straight now regarding Loretta’s activities. My mother had a long talk with her at the end of that summer, and Loretta told her the story of her disgrace. No one except my father questioned her confession. She had never, in fact, gone around with more than one man at once, and only one had brought her into the public eye. Unfortunately he was a notorious celebrity, a forty-year-old bachelor named Joel Ambersen, known for his conquests of women, his twin penchants for extravagant clothing and exotic animals, and his endless funds. Loretta, once connected to him, was helpless against the flood of gossip. I don’t believe she was such a scarlet woman as the press and society circles painted her. No one could question her fondness for men, but it was her equal fondness for glamour and excitement that struck the finishing blow. Loretta could never resist a man who lived on the edge, and this particular tycoon, the heir to his father’s hard-earned millions, had lived with ostentatious recklessness since he was eighteen. So people laughed and sneered at Loretta and marveled at what she would do for money. That was part of what Francesca resented. I remember her crying at one point that night, “She wouldn’t do it for money! She doesn’t care about money!” And she was right—Loretta acted only out of love, though she loved the thrill of passion as much as the man himself.
The worst part was that it soon became clear, from snippets we read in week-old gossip columns, that Loretta’s millionaire had thought of her as no more than a passing indulgence. There were claims that Loretta had called the scorn of society upon herself by trying to win her lover back when he had obviously left her. Rumors flew that she had stood in the rain on his street corner, that she had screamed at him and his new date in a restaurant, that she had offered herself again and again and been rejected. Who could hear such stories about her mother and not feel that her touchstone had been unveiled and derided as a sham?
When Philip heard the news he didn’t say anything informative. I was lurking in the corridor when he came out of Francesca’s bedroom, and I knew that he knew, but his eyes passed over me as if barely registering my existence, and he said, “If anyone wants to know where I am, I’ve gone for a walk.” Then he went down the stairs and out the front door. It was after midnight, but no one cared about rules that night.
I never found out what Philip thought about the whole thing. As far as I knew, he never discussed it with anyone, not even Tom. I suspect, however, that his mental life saved him from the full blow of his family coming to pieces. Francesca, after all, had patterned her life on her mother’s—Philip had always turned away from it. Now he simply averted his face yet further. Cordelia’s reaction showed itself only later, but from the first, Delia Robierre mourned with her. So did we all.
As for Francesca, after my father’s revelation her lightheartedness abandoned her. Maybe she had been trying to live the romantic dream she had of her mother’s life, and now, equipped with her new knowledge, every jokingly wanton move seemed like a step toward her mother’s fate. Maybe she was overcome with self-loathing at the possibility that she had been living off money raised by her mother’s affairs. Whatever the reason, Francesca’s fire was smothered in a stroke by my father’s words, and all that remained were its smoldering, angry coals. The extent to which we, her cousins, relied on Francesca’s energy, the extent to which we reveled in her mischief, her defiance, her throaty laugh, we learned only after we had been deprived of them and given her ghost.
Yes, it was indeed a sad day when my father came to Shorecliff. Our grief focused not simply on Loretta’s action but also on the plant we knew would grow from that seed—the humiliation she would feel, the sidelong jabs from newspapers, the eyebrows that would soar at every mention of her. Most poignant was the fact that within her own family her position had changed. From being the embodiment of romance and daring, she fell to being an object of regret and uncertainty. Had I discovered that one of my cousins was no longer worthy of admiration but instead deserved only pity and a touch of contempt, then maybe I would have felt what Loretta’s children felt.
The depression that now settled on our family, though it didn’t last in its full force for more than a week, was augmented by the simple fact that we were at Shorecliff. My father’s bomb of a story might not have been so earth-shattering if he hadn’t dropped it in the midst of our summer bliss. Regardless of the bickering and tantrums that so often interrupted our games, Shorecliff previously had seemed like an impregnable fortress. For the first two months we lived in an oasis, away from the fears and surprises of the real world. Even Yvette’s passion for Tom and his dalliance with Lorelei, though they set our pulses racing, were contained in the isolation of summertime, a portion of the year bracketed off from the rest of life. Shorecliff offered us an unshakable sense of safety—until my father came. After that all of our passions gripped more tightly, and there was no safety anymore.
My father, who had caused this tumult, left almost unnoticed the following day. Francesca never blamed him; she told me as much before the end of the summer. After all, he had not been responsible for Loretta’s actions, and in his own reptilian way, for his own self-preserving motives, he had been trying to save her from further humiliation by asking her family to put a stop to her antics. Still I lay on my bed that night, after climbing into it at last at three in the morning, and I stared at the ceiling and planned his punishment. I never contemplated violent punishments for my father—they seemed out of place for him, and besides, violence wasn’t cutting enough. Instead I planned elaborate public humiliations, grandiose versions of what I so often felt in his presence. Often, with vindictive pleasure, I imagined him realizing that he had been making a fool of himself in front of thousands of people he wanted to impress.
That night I imagined him feeling every ounce of what Aunt Loretta must have felt when she read the first snide remark about herself in the society columns, and never had his
humiliation seemed more deserved. It was his toneless, emotionless voice that most enraged me. I kept hearing him say, “It’s no better than prostitution.” I had looked up “prostitution” in my ancient dictionary and found “the practice of selling sexual favors for money,” which, once again, proved unexpectedly comprehensible. The idea that my father could speak so impassively about what he considered the prostitution of his own wife’s sister—that revolted me, especially with the image of Francesca’s reaction fresh in my mind. In my fantasy, I imagined a rock-hard voice just like his own blaring in his ear, “Richard Killing thinks he’s the most talented lawyer in New York. It’s a shame he doesn’t know what everyone’s saying about him, that he’s a deluded, incompetent, run-of-the-mill amateur. Pitiful, really. They’re all laughing at him down at the club.” Yes, I knew even then what would hurt him most.
9
One Delia
The day after my father dropped the bomb, the day he left, my mother tried to call Aunt Loretta and bring her up to Shorecliff, partly so that she could get away from New York and partly to show her children that she hadn’t turned into an ogre as a result of her sins. The aunts were more upset than one might imagine given that they, unlike Loretta’s children, had been aware of her promiscuous tendencies. They had not known, however, that she was continuing to indulge them.
There was a family story, so familiar that all of us knew it, of how Loretta had first met Rodrigo. She had been in Barcelona, shopping for trinkets to send home to her brothers and sisters, when a man bumped into her from behind. Loretta’s bags went flying. Cheap necklaces clattered along the plaza, tangling around women’s ankles and dogs’ legs. Loretta’s temper always simmered just below boiling point, and it now exploded. Leaving the innocent passersby to pick up her dropped belongings, she whirled around and attacked the tall, dark stranger with a barrage of American-accented Spanish. At once she attracted a ring of rubberneckers, and merchants came from behind their stalls to calm her. The stranger grabbed hold of her, putting his hands on her shoulders, and said, “My God, you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Come to dinner with me.” When I was young, this struck me as a ridiculous thing to say, and I thought Loretta was even more ridiculous to accept his offer, but that’s what she did.
Aunt Rose claimed that when Loretta told her later about the meeting, she spoke with her eyes glazed and her lips parted. “Rose,” she said, clutching her sister’s hand, “the minute he looked at me, I knew I would never want another man. Rodrigo is the man of my life.” It poses a problem when the man of your life dies after only twelve years of marriage. Since his death Loretta had been involved with nearly a dozen men, but her sisters only found out about the strength of her desires on the day when my father revealed her public shame.
The aunts, therefore, were in favor of calling Loretta. Aunt Margery was particularly incensed. “It’s not the thing itself I mind,” she exclaimed, “it’s what she’s doing to her own children. Let her play whatever godforsaken games she likes. But at least let the children keep their self-respect! Don’t let them think that on top of being a wild woman, their mother would sell herself for money! It’s a damned shame is what it is.” That was the one time I ever heard Aunt Margery swear.
Aunt Edie was the only adult in the house who minded Loretta’s behavior in itself. Most of them were angry, as Margery was, because they were worried about the Ybarra children. But Aunt Edie was horrified that her sister was still heading down the road to sin—a journey that Edie seemed to think Loretta had begun with her marriage to Rodrigo, if not before. The morning after my father’s revelation, Aunt Edie cornered a handful of cousins—Isabella, Charlie, Yvette, and Fisher—and lectured them for a good twenty minutes about the dangers of promiscuous sex, though she used archaic euphemisms rather than direct explanations. Her arguments might have been more convincing if she hadn’t explicitly warned Charlie away from Francesca. As soon as the four cousins escaped, they thundered upstairs and reported the lecture to the rest of us. My worldly knowledge was expanding in leaps and bounds.
While the cousins were marveling over Aunt Edie’s paranoia, my mother was in the kitchen debating with Margery and Uncle Cedric the advantages of a phone call to Loretta. Edie lurked outside the closed door, still puffed up from her lecture.
When I went downstairs, I found her pacing back and forth like a sentry. “Children aren’t allowed in there,” she rapped, shooing me away.
“I need to speak to Mother,” I replied.
“What has happened in this family is not fit for a child’s ears,” she announced. “Your mother is engaged in the missionary work of rescuing a lost soul. A soul that in my opinion is irrevocably lost.”
“Aunt Loretta’s not lost at all. She’s in New York. We all know where she is.”
“You missed my metaphor, Richard. I meant lost in a figurative sense.”
I had not missed her metaphor; I was attempting to lure her attention away from the door, and at this point I succeeded. Darting past her, I burst into the kitchen to hear Cedric saying, “—if only to get her away from the newspapers and gossipmongers.”
“Richard, didn’t Aunt Edie tell you not to come in here?” My mother was standing up. She made her way to the hall without further comment—a sign that she was truly distracted, since under normal circumstances she would never have let me be so rude without a more extensive reprimand—and disappeared into the phone booth.
“Who is she calling?” I asked.
“Your Aunt Loretta,” Uncle Cedric said.
“But she didn’t listen to what I had to say.”
“Well, what did you have to say?”
“I wanted to tell her that Delia is crying. She’s in her room and won’t let anyone in, not even the other Delia. None of us know what to—” I looked up, hearing a crash. There Cordelia was, hurtling down the stairs, her face distorted into ugliness.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been against all of my private rules to report a cousin’s crying to the adults. Not only would the older cousins have flayed me alive, but I would have been consumed by my own guilt. This, however, was a different matter. Most of us, at one time or another during that turbulent summer, had been seen to cry. I myself, just two nights ago, had been nearly hysterical in Isabella’s room about my father’s arrival. Pamela had gone through her temper tantrum, and Yvette, while rarely gushing tears, had been upset many times. The Delias, however, had been so delightedly wrapped up in each other that I had never seen either of them look more than passingly solemn, except for the crisis of Cordelia’s near-drowning. Even then, Delia Robierre had been the one in tears. It was shocking now to see Delia Ybarra cry, and unthinkable that either Delia would lock the other out.
We had been laughing over Francesca’s irreverent plans for a future with Charlie. “We’ll name our first child Edie,” she had declared, “and Aunt Edie will shriek and faint at the baptismal ceremony. The child will be a drooling idiot, and when it gets older we’ll make my mother her godmother.” I didn’t understand any of this—I was laughing partly from relief and partly from nervousness. It was reassuring that Francesca was no longer hysterical, but the way she spoke now differed from the way she had spoken in the past when making her wilder remarks. Before she found out about her mother, she would wear a little half-smile of excitement and raise her eyebrows until she reached the high point of the joke, then burst into a gale of laughter. Now she spoke with a flat, humorless smile on her face, and her voice was bitter, as if she were trying to wound herself with her words.
Isabella and I laughed out of a sense of duty, not from real appreciation, and our lame, thin giggles were still hovering in the air when a strange sound came from the spare bed. We looked over and saw Cordelia’s head hanging over her lap. Her short curls hid her eyes, but we could hear well enough. She was crying in a painful, donkeylike way. Beside her, Delia Robierre dissolved at once into sympathetic tears, but when she put her hand on Cordelia’s shoulder,
Cordelia shrugged her off. Francesca’s hard face changed then into a look of horror.
“How—could—you!” Cordelia gulped, drawing in ragged breaths and letting them out with her shoulders heaving. I was worried that she would throw up in her lap, but she was simply sobbing with the body-shaking heaves of a person who rarely cries but who abandons herself utterly when she does.
Francesca stood in a rush and moved toward her. She obviously wanted to comfort her sister, but even for Francesca Delia was too daunting at that moment. Instead she hovered, exchanging glances with Delia Robierre. It was one of the few times I saw her hesitate. Charlie had been sitting on the spare bed too, and he had to force himself not to move away. I saw him inching toward the footboard.
“When Mother is all alone in New York, and everyone is making fun of her, and now you’re mocking her like all the rest of them. Her own daughter…”
After that, Francesca never made another joke to us about her mother’s antics. It was a long time before I heard her make a joke about anything.
“Right now,” Delia went on, “she thinks that no one loves her at all. But I’m going to get on the train back to New York, and she’ll see…” Here she broke down beyond the power of speech, and then, before any of us could stop her, she bolted from the room and ran down the hall to her own bedroom. Delia Robierre was a few steps behind, but when she tried the door it was locked, and in spite of all her pleas, the other Delia remained silent and the door stayed ominously shut. In the ensuing confusion I slipped downstairs, where I found my mother about to call Aunt Loretta.
Cordelia seemed to know what my mother was doing by instinct. Having burst out of her room and raced down the stairs, she didn’t even glance at me or Uncle Cedric or Aunt Edie. She flung open the folding door of the phone booth and took my mother’s arm, not violently but with enough force that my mother looked up in alarm and put the receiver back on the hook.
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