Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  “Boys!” Cedric called. “Step back. This is no time to joke around. There aren’t any ledges here—it’s a straight drop if you fall. Boys!”

  Uncle Frank tried to coax them back too, with no success. Charlie, Tom, and Philip, with Fisher only a few inches behind them, stared as if mesmerized by the waves crashing against the gray face of the cliff. Finally Uncle Kurt said, “Boys, you’re being stupid. Smart men don’t flirt with danger when they don’t have to. Step back now. Save your courage for some other day—right now you’re just being foolhardy.”

  The rebuke roused them, and they stepped back to where I was standing, a good fifteen feet from the edge. I watched Cedric wipe the sweat off his forehead and his neck. None of the boys realized how awful those few moments had been for everyone watching them. After that summer I never dared to go near a cliff’s edge, not because of the height itself but because of the fear and shock that I associated with cliffs, background as they were to everything at Shorecliff.

  Still I was intrigued when Philip said, “I bet someone has jumped off this cliff and lived.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Cedric. “The water isn’t deep enough. The force of a person’s fall would carry him to the bottom, and he’d be smashed on the rocks.”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” said Uncle Frank. “It’s time to keep walking, kids.”

  “No, I bet someone’s done it,” Philip said. I saw then, by the way he was staring out over the cliff, that he was fixated on the idea. “I bet they went far back there in the grass and sprinted up and flew over the edge.”

  “Sorry, Philip,” said Cedric. “It can’t be done.”

  The other cousins hovered to one side in various degrees of abstraction, but Isabella and Tom listened with interest to Philip’s comments. He could always count on those two as an audience. Tom moved one step closer to the cliff and said, “Wouldn’t that be great, to dive over the edge and soar out over the water? I bet it would be a good place for hang gliding, Philip. I bet you could do it that way, if you had the things they use in the mountains.”

  “Hey, that’s right,” said Philip.

  “I’d jump,” said Isabella, stepping up to him. “I bet I could make it if there were a deep enough place in the water.”

  Philip looked at her and said, “You would never have the nerve to do that.” He turned away to Tom, and Isabella stared after him with her mouth open.

  “It’s not a question of nerve,” said Uncle Kurt sharply. “It’s a question of common sense. None of you are going to be jumping off a cliff any time soon. If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were suicidal. Now come on.”

  Pamela, standing next to me, decided it was time to join forces with the adults. “I agree with Uncle Kurt,” she said. “It’s stupid to do something unsafe.” The other cousins ignored her. I pretended that she and I had no connection. Sometimes Pamela was infuriatingly obtuse about what made our older cousins wonderful.

  After that the walk couldn’t recover its former cheerfulness. Though the sun was beating down on us, we walked in silence, well away from the cliff. In half an hour the grassy hills to our right melted into woods, and the strip of open land we walked on became narrower, only ten yards between the edge of the cliff and the line of trees. Uncle Frank called a halt for lunch, and we investigated the baskets the aunts had hurriedly prepared for us. Eating was the most enjoyable part of the expedition.

  While I was munching my way through a turkey sandwich, I noticed that Francesca had retreated to the underbrush at the edge of the woods and was eating there by herself. Uncle Kurt noticed at the same time and called out to her, but she just waved a hand and kept eating, her eyes turned away from us.

  “I’m worried about that girl,” Kurt said in an undertone to Frank and Cedric.

  After we had packed up the baskets, we continued to head south for about fifteen minutes. Then Charlie and Yvette, in an unusual alliance, went up to Uncle Frank. Charlie said, “Look, Dad, maybe we should turn around and head back. We don’t want to be walking by the cliff when it gets dark.”

  “But we haven’t gone so far that we can’t be back before nightfall,” Frank protested. “I was going to keep going south until at least two or three.”

  Charlie hesitated and then said, “The truth is we’re all pretty bored, Dad. I don’t think anyone is having such a great time walking along doing nothing.”

  “Can’t we go back now, Daddy?” Yvette broke in. “Maybe we could go for a swim or play croquet or bocce or something…”

  I could see that his two children understood Frank’s desire to give everyone a good day and felt guilty about cutting it short. But the hike was a failure. For whatever reason, while Cedric’s picnic had been redolent with summer romance, Frank’s hike was just a dreary trudge out and back, one of those warm-weather activities that leave you tired and sweaty and annoyed that you agreed to it in the first place. Maybe it was the lack of a destination. After all, as Charlie was quick to point out as soon as Uncle Frank had commanded an about-face—a command met with exaggerated cheers from the cousins—it was impossible to tell how long the cliff would continue in its present state. For all we knew it might stretch along the whole Maine coast. Sooner or later we would have had to turn back, and after we had retraced our steps for twenty minutes even Frank seemed relieved.

  On the walk back Francesca stayed as close to the woods as possible, and when the trees ended she drifted even further away onto the grassland. Uncle Kurt, by whose side I had stayed throughout the day, kept lifting his head and searching her out, his brow more and more wrinkled. Finally he changed his pace and strode toward her. In a moment of daring, I followed him. He didn’t seem to notice me, and neither did Francesca when he finally reached her.

  “Hello, kiddo,” said Uncle Kurt.

  Francesca shot him a quick smile. “Hi, Uncle Kurt,” she said.

  “You’ve been walking by yourself an awful lot. Are you happy out here, or do you want some company?”

  Francesca shrugged. In my puppy dog’s position three feet behind them, I couldn’t see her face, so I imagined her bleak expression. I knew she was wearing one, but I was hazy on the exact reasons for her bleakness; it seemed to me, from my heartless thirteen-year-old’s vantage point, that the shock of my father’s revelation about Aunt Loretta should be wearing off. After all, as I reasoned, we only had a few more weeks of summer, and it would be stupid to let them be ruined by news from a faraway city. The Ybarra children would have time enough to deal with their mother’s scandal when they got home. Why did they need to think about it at Shorecliff?

  As I had suspected when I met her on the cliff with Philip, Delia Ybarra was slowly coming around to a similar way of thinking. A few mornings before the hike, I had even seen her smile. It happened on the first day after my father’s visit that she emerged early enough to have breakfast with the rest of us. I watched her sitting at the kitchen table while she ate a bowl of cereal, her rambunctious hair limper than usual, as if it too were depressed. Delia Robierre stood next to her, eyeing the black curls as they drooped over the cereal. “Come on, Eel,” she said. “Are you coming out to Condor’s with me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cordelia. She bent lower over her cereal.

  “Are you going to stay like this for the rest of the summer?” Delia cried.

  There was a note of desperation in her voice that made Cordelia raise her head. “That would be pretty horrible, wouldn’t it?” she said, and for a moment her lips curved upward. Her normal smile was an infectious grin, but while this one made me think of a crown with the jewels stripped off, it was a smile nonetheless.

  “Look,” said Delia, bending confidentially over Cordelia’s head (a useless exercise, since she still didn’t whisper and I was one chair away). “I know things are bad right now for Aunt Loretta, but you aren’t helping her by sitting here moping. Do you think she’d be happy that you’re acting this way?”

  “How should I know,
when she’s so far away?”

  “Well, all right. Do you think I’m happy that you’re sitting here moping?”

  This was a much better question to ask. Cordelia looked up guiltily and said, “I guess not.”

  Triumphantly, Delia played her final card: “So why don’t you just let yourself be in a good mood? We’re going to visit Barnavelt. Isn’t that what you’ve been wanting to do?”

  Twenty minutes later I saw both of them hurtling at top speed across the lawn toward the woods where Condor’s cottage stood. And that, I felt, was a sensible way of dealing with disappointment, resentment, and all the other emotions that my father had brought uninvited to Shorecliff.

  Francesca, however, couldn’t shake off the demons so easily.

  Her silence didn’t stop Uncle Kurt from walking with her. “I’ll just stay here, if you don’t mind,” he said. Francesca did not reply, and he went on, “You’ve been pretty unhappy lately.”

  Francesca tossed her hair. “Let’s not beat around the bush, Uncle Kurt. My mother is a whore, and I’m a little upset about it. Does that satisfy you?”

  “No. She’s not a whore, and if your Uncle Richard implied that she was, he was exaggerating—you know that as well as I do. His story came as a shock to all of us, but it seems to me you’re upset about more than that.”

  “Did you ever find out that your mother was no better than a dolled-up prostitute? That she wasn’t anything like the person you thought she was?”

  To me her voice sounded like a whiplash, but Uncle Kurt remained unruffled. He looked into the distance and said, “No, it wasn’t my mother.” This was a classic Uncle Kurt answer—cryptic, unexpected, and unanswerable.

  Francesca certainly couldn’t think of a response. It was obvious he hadn’t meant Loretta. I could see Francesca almost speaking, twice jerking her head around and opening her mouth, but she never came out with her question.

  Finally he spoke again. “So you’re upset about Loretta. That’s okay—the rest of us are shaken too. We’re still trying to have a good time, though.”

  “Right,” Francesca broke in. “Dance the night away while they’re murdering the hostages upstairs.”

  Uncle Kurt nodded slowly, as if considering the merits of the comparison. “Is that the way you think of it?” he asked at last.

  “Oh… no, of course it’s not!” she said. “There’s just no point in anything anymore. I’ve been bored all summer, but now it’s a thousand times worse because I know it won’t get better when I go back to New York. What’s the point of doing anything there either? You know how it is—parties, dancing, dressing up. It all seemed new and exciting last year, but really it’s just more people being fake and hypocritical. Everyone runs around pretending they don’t care about the rules, but they still do. And I know now that if I ever do anything—anything that isn’t dull and conventional—they’ll be watching me, and this is how it will end up: with people saying horrible things about me and accusing me of being the town harlot.”

  She broke off, and Uncle Kurt began to say something, then stopped. Francesca had spoken more in these few minutes than she had in all the days since my father’s visit, and Kurt must have thought it would be good for her to keep talking. Already the rush of indignation had brought back her lost sparkle.

  “Mother always says I shouldn’t worry about what will happen later,” she went on. “‘Dive into each day.’ ‘Grab the bull by the horns.’ But she’s wrong. She’s wrong! Now when I go to parties people will whisper and ask me about her and make comments. That’s if I’m even invited to parties anymore. Either way, I can’t stand the idea of anyone talking about her! And I don’t want to go anywhere at all if it means I’ll end up regretting everything in twenty years.” She took a deep breath and let it out in a ferocious sigh. “So what’s left? If you don’t go out and find excitement, life isn’t worth living. The people who stay inside being proper and polite may be safe, but they don’t know anything—and I refuse to be one of them. I’d rather die!”

  There was a long pause. Then she stopped walking and scowled at Uncle Kurt. “Does that satisfy you? Am I heartless enough now? No, I’m not ashamed of my sex-crazed mother. I’m not shocked that she’s not an angel. I just wish she had told me about it herself, that’s all, instead of letting me hear it from Uncle Richard.” She spat the name, and I didn’t spare a shred of pity for him. To my mind, he deserved all her loathing. “If you ask me the world is sordid and disgusting and mercenary and perverted!” she burst out. “And I don’t see why Mother made me come up here. I don’t see how living in this sunshiny, falsely cheerful summerhouse is fixing anything.”

  She had finished her speech at last, and now she waited for a reply, but Uncle Kurt didn’t offer one. Eventually she broke her pose and kept walking. Then he said, “You’re right, it’s not fixing anything.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “We’re all having a good time. Or most of us, anyway.”

  “I’m not. And besides, what’s the point of having a good time if everything is going to end in misery? Don’t you feel worried, Uncle Kurt?”

  Uncle Kurt surprised me by laughing. “Not a bit,” he said. “And I don’t see any reason not to have some fun while you can. Why not? What else is there to do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She feigned sulking, but I could see from her profile that the conversation was putting her in a good mood. “You know what I really want? I want something exciting to happen! Something I could really care about, something I could feel passionate about. Then I would be all right. But I don’t even know what it would be. And the days keep going by, and nothing happens, and I can’t stand having to wait and wait and wait!” She shrieked the last word loudly enough for the other cousins to look at her in surprise.

  “Now you’ve gotten that out of your system,” Kurt said.

  Francesca sped ahead, not wanting to show that she was enjoying herself for the first time in more than a week. By the time Kurt caught up with her, her smile had faded. “What’s the good of talking to you, anyway?” she said. “You’re an adult. You can go where you want, do what you want.”

  “Even adults can be frustrated. And I too was once twenty-one.”

  “When you were twenty-one you were in the army!”

  “And there were other things to worry about.”

  “Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry. I know I don’t have any right to complain. I know I’m sounding like a spoiled brat. That’s the point, don’t you understand? I know I’m being an idiot, but I can’t help it. It’s this place, and these people—all my wholesome family members, and not one of them will say anything to me about my mother being the opposite of wholesome. They just tiptoe around pretending nothing has happened. Doesn’t it make you sick?”

  “Now I think you’re being unjust to your family, which I can’t accept. And, you know, I can understand feeling bored and out of place here.” She looked at him incredulously and saw that he was being sincere. “I know what it’s like to be your age, to want to be out there doing something—anything. Right now you don’t know how to value what you have here because you don’t know what to compare it with. But you have your family! Do you know what some people would give for that? I’m being serious. Look at me, Francesca.”

  I had never seen Uncle Kurt so solemn, and neither had Francesca. She was as unnerved as I was. And I knew Kurt had made a mistake in springing that sermon on her. It wiped the levity from her face and brought back the dreary straight line to her lips, the line that made it seem impossible that she would ever smile again. “I’m looking at you, Uncle Kurt,” she said. “I know what you’re saying.” Then she turned her head away and muttered, “But I’m still bored.”

  At this point I proved my age by doing something moronic. I stepped forward and said, “My mother told me intelligent people are never bored.”

  Francesca stiffened and turned. Incredible though it seemed to me, she hadn’t realized I was there until tha
t moment. She looked at me without speaking and then, loading her voice with contempt, replied, “On the contrary, Richard, it’s stupid people who are never bored. Their minds are so empty they can stand like sheep and let their brains rot. But imagine some genius like—like Isaac Newton, or Aristotle—in a cage. Imagine telling him to play with a rubber ball in a corner. Or imagine putting Shakespeare in a prison cell. Don’t you think they would be bored, Richard? Don’t you think they would go crazy with their minds running around in circles?”

  Uncle Kurt gave her a round of applause and said, “Now where does that put you? Are you before or after Isaac Newton?”

  Francesca laughed out of the side of her mouth. “I was just trying to prove him wrong,” she said. “They’re the extreme cases.”

  “Well, anyway,” he said, jerking his head in my direction. “It seems like Richard’s onto something. Maybe you should listen to him.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I should.” For a second I thought she might smile, but she didn’t, and when she walked away from us this time, Uncle Kurt didn’t follow her.

  Instead he patted my shoulder and said, “I guess our effort to cheer her up didn’t work, did it, pal?”

  Morosely, I shook my head. The full idiocy of my interruption was only then hitting me. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” I said in a monotone.

  “Sure you should have. Why not? I wasn’t getting anywhere with her. She’s at a difficult age, Richard. You’ll know what I mean when you get there. And she’s going through a rough time too, right now.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t feel up to discussing with Uncle Kurt such an obviously forbidden topic as Aunt Loretta.

  After a pause he said, “Do you think she was right?”

  “Right about what?”

  “About intelligent people being bored. Newton in a cage, Shakespeare in a cell. Do you agree with her?”