The Hatfields have no Irish blood in them, nor have the Robierres, who as far as I know are wholly French in origin. I had no idea where Cedric could have picked up the art of step dancing, but after a few more moments of hesitation, he got to his feet amid applause from the cousins. Tom, Isabella, and Delia Robierre were laughing—they had seen their father in action many times. “Just you wait,” Tom said to Philip. “This is one of Dad’s greatest talents.”
Cedric stood in front of us, his shirt and trousers hanging loosely on his thin frame. The field was bathed in the last of the daylight, the almost blue glow that comes before the sun disappears. Uncle Cedric’s face as he looked down at us was in shadow, and because he was standing with his back to the sun, we had to squint to see him.
“I haven’t done this for years,” he repeated. Then he added, with a sidelong glance at us, “It’s been known to some as the French step dance.” He kicked out a leg and raised one arm above his head, curling the other arm in front of him the way a ballerina might before the orchestra begins. Immediately he was transformed into a man I had never seen before. Under his breath, he began to say, “Da da da. Da da da da.” He didn’t say it with any tune, or even with any voice. He was simply whispering the rhythm to himself. Then he launched into his dance, jumping and spinning and waving his arms. When I saw Irish step dancing in later years I could think only of Uncle Cedric, even though his dance bore almost no resemblance to it. His extravagant moves were, I suspect, entirely his own creation. As soon as I saw him in action, I began to doubt Rose’s claim that he had won prizes. Nevertheless, we were all mesmerized, partly by his jerky movements and exuberant leaps, partly by his total lack of self-consciousness, partly by the almost bored tone in which he whispered, “Da da da da da. Da da.” His own children continued to laugh softly, not derisively but in support, forming a sort of background chorus. The rest of us sat in silence, our eyes following every dash and twirl. As Cedric danced, the field became darker, and he became a more and more mysterious figure as the edge of his silhouette sharpened into a black line against the sky.
The dance went on for quite a while, and I had time to think, “Isn’t it strange that this is the man I’ve always known, the man who is married to Aunt Rose?” This brought to mind my most formidable aunt, whose breath I could feel on my neck as she watched her husband. It struck me for the first time as more than a genealogical fact that Rose and Cedric were a married couple, that they shared a house and children and presumably loved each other, that in all particulars they lived as man and wife. This seemed incredible, and the gap between them seemed to widen as I watched Cedric’s dance. Given her sense of dignity, I knew Aunt Rose would not be caught dead in such a compromising position, one vulnerable to the attacks of ridicule. It was surprising enough that she had encouraged her husband to dance in the first place. I had thought Cedric possessed a similar sense of dignity, an insistence on the sobriety of his person, but in ten seconds of French step dancing, he had obliterated that impression beyond recall. The Robierre marriage, therefore, seemed more inexplicable than ever.
At this point in my reverie, Uncle Cedric performed an impressive gallop from one end of our picnic cloth to the other, and I was reminded of Isabella’s chaotic movements. I saw his children in him—Tom’s unstoppable enthusiasm, Isabella’s long limbs, even Delia’s sturdy balance. Amiable, quiet Delia Robierre, who that summer lived in the shadow of Delia Ybarra, often adopted Cedric’s unflappable demeanor. Both he and his youngest daughter could project an air of being as unexcitable as a boulder, so assured in their movements and calm in their decisions that their competence seemed unassailable and their judgments, when they came, irrevocable. Delia held less of this power at fifteen, but whenever it appeared no one could deny the resemblance between her and her father.
On the other hand, Tom’s insistence on getting his own way—indeed, on his right to get his own way—came from his mother. So did Isabella’s tornadoes of passion, equal in size whether they stormed over a game of croquet or the rights of women, and Delia’s unswerving loyalty to her friends. These characteristics were unmistakably the legacy of Aunt Rose, who commanded us with the assurance of Napoleon and flew into rages over late sleepers but who would, I knew, unhesitatingly defend any member of her large family. These Rose traits—Hatfield traits, really—melded so lovably, so seamlessly, with the Robierre traits in her three children that I seemed to see, in a brief flash of emotional clarity, the bonds that joined her so closely with them and with her husband.
My thoughts raced in this way all through Cedric’s dance. But when he finally pulled himself to a halt and sat down on the gingham cloth, I simply said to myself that I liked Aunt Rose much more than I had before. With his ridiculous parody of a step dance, Cedric had placed his wife in a far more favorable light.
After the dance it was obvious that the party was over. Nothing could eclipse Cedric’s triumph, and we packed up the baskets and gathered the bocce balls with the sated languor that is nearly, though not quite, the best part of any picnic. Night was falling rapidly, and my mother and Aunt Margery began to voice some concerns that we would lose our way in the dark, that we might (this in a whisper) lose someone over the cliff. Uncle Cedric waved a hand. “Don’t worry, girls,” he said. “Frank and I have that all figured out. We’re going to cut across the Stephenson farm and avoid the cliff altogether. We’ll strike for Shorecliff inland.”
At the mention of the Stephenson farm my eyes swiveled to find Tom. I knew he would be alert and poised, listening for more fragments of Lorelei’s name. I discovered him, however, looking away into the trees by the edge of the meadow. Only the tips of his ears burned in the dying sunlight. The Robierres’ extremities tended to give them away—Isabella’s legs, Tom’s ears, Delia’s hands, which she clasped and unclasped when she was nervous.
The aunts were in favor of the alternate route home, especially since the sun soon disappeared; they were eager to get back to the homestead. Cedric struck a course through the belt of trees girdling the hidden meadow and led us south. The moon rose over the tops of the pines, and though it wasn’t as big as it had seemed on the night of our nocturnal jaunt to the shore, we all admired it. The time passed quickly, and we hardly noticed when we crossed the line from gentle wilderness to farmland.
As usual, I was keeping a close eye on the cousins. The Delias and Pamela walked behind Uncle Cedric. Pamela occasionally changed allegiances and traveled with the two Delias when she got bored with me. I didn’t mind much because I knew they would soon turn her away, and her absences gave me time to track the other cousins. Fisher was walking by himself, his shoulders sagging from the weight of the bocce balls, though he did not voice a single complaint about having to carrying them. He was probably comforting himself by listening for owls, something he did often that summer with great enthusiasm. The three aunts walked in the middle, serving as the center of a straggling family web. Then came Yvette and Isabella and finally, lagging behind everyone, Tom and Philip.
Isabella was near the aunts, but she was walking in a bizarre fashion—lolloping forward and backward. Eventually I realized that the reason for her gait was that she was trying to walk with Philip and Tom but couldn’t get up the nerve to break into their conversation. All my efforts to overhear their discussion were in vain. They were used to my exploits by this time, and whenever I neared they grew quiet and grinned at me. I knew they wouldn’t have minded much if I had heard them—on Tom’s side, for one thing, it would be all Lorelei, an intrigue I knew about already. No, they liked to frustrate me out of adolescent sadism, a trait I recognized and understood. I didn’t mind, either. The night was too warm and peaceful to be annoyed about anything. For long stretches of the walk I strolled alongside my mother, who was sharing the task of carrying the picnic basket with Margery and Rose. The three of them passed the time by talking about the good old days when they had been girls at Shorecliff.
More than an hour had passed when Cedric stop
ped. We were walking in a field that had recently been mown, and the chaff crept up my legs and itched horribly. I hopped on one foot and scratched while the aunts inquired about the halt.
“Well, Cedric?” Rose asked. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” said Cedric, pausing between each word. He was turning in a circle, peering into the darkness.
“You’re lost,” said Rose. “This is wonderful. So much for your navigating skills. I would have thought you’d know this whole area like the back of your hand! Do you realize we have young children here who need to be in bed?” I took this as a personal insult. “Who came up with the idea for this shortcut anyway?”
“It was me, darling, and I still think it was a good idea,” said Cedric. “It’s just a matter of orientation. Fisher, you don’t know where we are, do you?”
“I don’t have a good sense of direction,” Fisher confessed.
“Anyone here got an inner compass?” Uncle Frank asked. He said it jokingly, as he said most things, but I sensed a note of genuine concern in his voice. Grown men hate being lost, and it makes it worse when there are women and children hanging around, demanding solutions.
No one, it appeared, had an inner compass. I have never been able to distinguish the cardinal directions, and at the time, as the youngest of the group, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I should pay attention to where we were going. At that age you are led everywhere; the responsibility for knowing where you’re going has not yet crashed onto your shoulders, and you live in happy ignorance of road maps, wrong directions, and faulty estimates of time.
“It seems to me Shorecliff is this way,” Uncle Frank said, waving a hand.
“No, no, that’s dead west, Frank,” Cedric replied. “You’ve gotten turned around as we walked. I’m almost positive it’s that way.” He pointed in another direction, not quite opposite to the one Frank had chosen.
“You’re both wrong. It’s this way,” said Charlie. As the oldest male cousin, he often took part in the uncles’ discussions. He was pointing in a third direction.
“Who knew the Stephensons had all these damn fields?” Frank said irritably.
I glanced at Tom—he would know. Philip nudged him, and Tom winked at me, pulling his mouth down so he looked like a clown. But he didn’t have enough brazenness to flaunt his knowledge in front of the adults, and throughout their baffled conversation he remained silent. The rest of the cousins organized a game of freeze tag, and I joined in with vigor, though it meant losing track of what the uncles were saying.
After ten minutes of debate, my mother interrupted them. “It seems to me that not one of you has any idea where to go,” she said. They fell silent and looked at her. “The one thing we do know,” she went on, “is that we’re on the Stephenson property. I suggest we continue walking until we find a familiar landmark. As long as we’re on harvested fields, we can’t be too far off. Isn’t that right, Cedric? Sooner or later we’ve got to hit either the farmhouse or the woods next to Shorecliff.”
“But the Craddock farm borders the Stephenson fields,” Cedric said. “What if we wander into those?”
“We could go this way,” Tom suggested, guilt finally getting the better of him.
But his father asked dismissively, “What makes you say that?” and of course Tom didn’t have an answer.
“Sooner or later we’ll hit a farmhouse,” my mother repeated.
“In any case,” Margery added, butting in, “it’s not doing us any good to stand here doing nothing. Richard and Pamela are exhausted. They should have been in bed hours ago.”
Since I was at this moment sprinting after Isabella in the game of freeze tag, Aunt Margery’s words seemed unjust, and I skidded to a halt to object to them, allowing Isabella to skip out of harm’s way. Cedric had agreed, however, and in a moment we were marching along again, this time behind a blind leader. Now that it was clear we didn’t know where we were going, the darkness around us seemed thicker, the distances longer, the stars further away. The group pulled more and more tightly together, until we were walking in a small huddle. I had a firm grip on my mother’s hand, and Pamela had found Aunt Margery. The Delias lurked by Aunt Rose, which was a measure of their nervousness. The only person at ease was Tom. He swung along behind us, his hands brushing audibly against his shorts. He wasn’t exactly relaxed, for I noticed that he was holding himself straight and glancing from side to side over the fields; but he didn’t look as if he were walking in a strange place. I knew he must have been there many times before.
Another ten minutes passed, and we hadn’t found anything resembling a farmhouse or a stretch of woods. Our humor had died at this point, and we trudged in silence. The warmth of the night had lost its charm. The moon was merely a hard white pebble in the sky. This night taught me how big the world was: I realized that if one farm could encompass such never-ending tracts of land, then the world itself must be unfathomably enormous. How many countless farms were there, in how many countless countries and continents? I felt dizzy trying to think about them all at once.
“You look concerned, Richard,” Uncle Cedric said. “Are you scared? We’ll get home all right.”
“I’m not scared,” I answered. “There are just too many farms in the world.”
Uncle Cedric quoted my reply for the rest of the summer. The older cousins too found plenty of opportunities to make fun of me for it. Tom in particular liked to race up and say, “Richard, Richard! They’ve just discovered another farm in Bolivia! Are you all right? Can you still stand?” Regardless of these jibes, however, the number of farms in the world seemed to me a reasonable cause for metaphysical concern, and Uncle Cedric knew what I was talking about, underneath his teasing.
In spite of his laughter, he was beginning to be frustrated; I could tell by his stiff-legged walk and the way his neck jerked when he turned his head. As soon as I noticed his distress, I felt sorry for him. I knew he was worried that his glorious picnic might end as a failure. I wanted to tell him that the first part of the day would still be good, that a bad ending doesn’t mean a bad whole. This was one of the summer’s most valuable lessons to me, and I thought he might benefit from it.
I never had a chance to tell him, though. Yvette was looking across what must have been the seventeenth field we had traversed and said, “There’s someone walking over there. Look!”
Instantly Tom was by her side. “Where?” he said. “I don’t see anything. Are you sure?”
A wave of laughter rolled through us, and I knew that if it had still been light I would have seen the backs of Tom’s ears glowing a sheepish red.
“I think it’s a man,” Yvette said vindictively, glaring at Tom.
Tom paid no attention to her. He had caught sight of the silhouette striding across the field, and he waved at it, yelling like a banshee. Then we all saw it and began to wave and shout, and after a few minutes the figure resolved into Lorelei. The sight of her walking toward us in the darkness is one of my favorite images of her. She looked absolutely tranquil, as if her proper place in the world were among fallen stalks of grain in a midnight field. Her white blouse glowed silver in the moonlight, and her skirt swished around her legs. She was barefoot, as always. Her hair, falling in thick tresses on either side of her face, made her face look paler than ever.
She smiled at us shyly when she got near enough to see our expressions. “Hel-hello, everybody,” she stammered. She got nervous when she had to talk to more than two people at once.
“Thank God you’re here,” Tom said, stepping out to meet her. He didn’t kiss her or even touch her, but we knew he was claiming possession.
“We’re lost, Lorelei,” said Aunt Margery. “Could you point us in the direction of home? We’ve been walking for hours.”
“Of course we know it’s ridiculous to be lost within a half mile of our own house,” Cedric added. “But these fields—they turn you around.”
“I used to get lost all the time at night, when I was little
,” said Lorelei. She was trying to make Uncle Cedric feel better, and she succeeded, though coming from anybody else what she said might have sounded condescending. “You’re walking south now,” she continued, “but Shorecliff is east of here. You’ve been walking just out of sight of the woods where Condor’s cottage is. But you would have hit the road soon. So you would have made it home on your own in less than an hour.” I thought it was gallant of her to refuse any credit for putting us on the right path.
“Are you having a nice walk?” Tom asked. At once I detected an inaudible second conversation. He was speaking in a constrained manner that could only indicate the use of code.
“Very pleasant, thank you,” she responded. She was always polite to everyone, even Tom. I’m sure she was equally polite to him when they were alone. “I often walk around the farm at night. I’m not a very good sleeper.”
“My dear girl, you must try to fix that,” said Cedric. “Sleep is essential for a sound mind in a sound body.”
“She’s fine, Dad,” Tom said, scowling at Uncle Cedric. “Night walks are good for the soul.”
“They’re good for something more than the soul in Tom’s case,” Philip said, and the cousins burst out laughing.
I thought it was rude to laugh at jokes like that in Lorelei’s presence. I wanted to say hello to her so I could receive a personalized version of her angelic smile, but shyness prevented me. The most I could do was edge toward her, inadvertently bringing my mother along with me.
With her usual perceptiveness, Lorelei spotted me in spite of my silence. “Hello, Richard,” she said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
I nodded.
“It’s time he was in bed,” my mother said, joining the traitorous forces. “I’m so glad you’re here to tell us where to go. It felt absurd to be lost, knowing how close we must be. Would you like to walk back with us? I’m sure it’s very late.”
Shorecliff Page 19
