Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  “If you still want to,” she said, “of course you can go.”

  She left the room, and I was left to ponder the wry sadness with which she had spoken her last words. It took me some time to realize that now, when I imagined listening to Kurt’s war stories, I felt not excitement but unease.

  14

  Woods

  Francesca cornered me an hour after she woke up the next morning. Philip hadn’t lost any time in telling her about Uncle Kurt, and when she came after me, her black hair unbrushed and even more wild than usual, she looked terrifying. I was by myself near the cliff, going for a stroll before coming back to visit my mother in her bedroom. I hadn’t been expecting company, and when I turned around after gazing for a while at the flat, gray sea, I was startled to see her bearing down on me. She was wearing a skirt with her little nightdress on top, and I concluded that Philip had sprung the news on her while she was dressing.

  “All right, Richard,” she said when she had gotten close enough to speak. “Tell me exactly what they said. Come on, right now.”

  “What do you mean, Francesca?” I was so alarmed that my instincts regressed to those of a five-year-old: I thought I could buy time by playing innocent.

  “You know exactly what I mean. None of you creeps last night bothered to wake me up, so I didn’t hear the story. Tell me exactly what they said.”

  “About Uncle Kurt?” I faltered. I had been trying, without much success, not to think about him on my morning walk.

  “Who the hell else!”

  I paused, looked out to sea again, and mumbled, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Francesca grabbed my shoulders. She was so grim I thought she might slap me. In a strange way, with a thirteen-year-old’s thirst for violence and sensation, I hoped she would. But she restricted herself to shaking me.

  “Tell me now, you little brat!” she cried. “He’s been going to Portland all this time. He’s been lying to all of us. He’s slept with prostitutes and gambled away our family money and been a cheating, poker-playing charlatan. Tell me the whole story! What did he say? What did Uncle Cedric and Uncle Frank say?”

  “But you know everything already,” I quavered.

  “I want the details!” she roared.

  “I—I don’t remember them. Really, Francesca, I can’t remember!”

  “Well, try.”

  She let go of my shoulders and crossed her arms, presenting me with a fearsome display of a woman on the rampage. Surreptitiously I drank her in while I thought up various imaginary details to give to her, since it was true that I couldn’t remember what the uncles had said. I had been so shocked by the content of their discussion and afterward so horrified while brooding over Uncle Kurt’s treachery that most of their precise words had flown from my memory. But Francesca was standing there, staring at me with stormy eyes. Her crossed arms pushed up her normally near-flat chest, and I was mesmerized by the perfection of the smooth olive skin below her throat. The nightdress was quite revealing and on a more buxom woman would have been risqué. On Francesca, slender and willowy as she was, it merely emphasized the grace of her figure. Her black hair, pressed by her night’s sleep into an enormous crown of waving curls, completed the picture of an Amazon ready for battle. I had to tell her something.

  “Uncle Kurt told them he had been distracted by a girl,” I began. “Uncle Cedric called her a floozy.” So far it was the truth. “She was one of the women at the gambling house, and she played poker.” This was pure invention. “He played with her the whole time he was there, and she stole all his money. He went dancing with her, too.” I felt this was an inspiration. “There was a dance floor in the gambling house. They danced all night and played poker and…and…”

  “Yes?” said Francesca. Her eyes glittered. I could almost see her stretching out her hands, trying to reach the noisy, flashing chaos of the imaginary place I was describing.

  “And there was drinking,” I whispered, adding the finishing touch.

  Unexpectedly Francesca laughed. “Of course there was drinking, you idiot. You don’t understand half of what you heard.”

  That was the sort of statement that made me resent Francesca. I waited for a few moments, but she was lost in thought. She stared out beyond the cliff, her arms still crossed. Eventually I asked, “So what do you think?”

  “Think? What do I think?” She turned to me. “I think they’re all a bunch of goddamned hypocrites. And I can’t believe he’s been having the time of his life all summer while we’ve been rotting here in this shit-hole.”

  I tried to display my debonair acceptance of her cursing—an attempt that probably made me look apoplectic—and said, “Well, this is only the fifth hunting trip they’ve been on.”

  “That’s five more hunting trips than I’ve been on,” she retorted. “And don’t call them hunting trips, Richard. Call them whoring trips. Call them gambling trips. Call them lying trips. That high-and-mighty bastard.”

  She glanced at me, realized she was speaking to a thirteen-year-old, and strode off toward the house. I stayed behind, mouthing some of her more shocking turns of phrase and feeling daring for almost using my vocal chords when I said them.

  * * *

  There now remained only one and a half more weeks at Shorecliff before we all dispersed to our respective homes. If our naked souls had been revealed, I suspect we all would have shown a longing to return to our humdrum lives, if only to escape what had become a nightmarish cycle of revelations concerning our family members.

  I remember Philip lounging on Isabella’s spare bed a few days after my encounter with Francesca. Isabella, Tom, and I were the only other people in the room. Philip glanced at us, his dark eyes full of playful malice, and without warning he raised a hand and began to count. “My lovely mother—a painted whore,” he said, ticking one finger. “Great-Uncle Eberhardt—a wandering gambler. Darling Yvette—a lust-filled sex fiend. Old Tommy here—a lust-filled satyr. Gentle Lorelei—a lust-filled seductress. Uncle Kurt—a lying, promiscuous poker player.” He looked at us.

  Tom was grinning, not even pretending to appear shamefaced. When he wasn’t grinding his teeth over Yvette’s treachery, he was patting himself on the back for being such an accomplished ladies’ man.

  “Who’s next?” said Philip, staring at each of us. “Who will be the next family member to reveal a dark and loathsome secret? Richard?” He whipped his head toward me. “What have you been doing with Pamela all these weeks?”

  “Stop that,” said Isabella. She smacked Philip on the shoulder, but at the same time she looked at me with worried eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it, Isabella,” I said, feigning nonchalance. I had been doing that a lot, now that I was so frequently allowed to hear the older cousins’ discussions.

  “Well, what about you, Isabella?” Philip went on. “Any secrets you’d like to share with us? Anything deep and dark and shocking?” His eyes locked with hers as he said this. He was in an unusually humorous mood, but I shivered at the aggression in his words. Half afraid and half intrigued, I was sure there was more to the conversation than I could understand.

  Isabella, reddening slightly, slid off the bed and went to stand in the corner, the farthest point in the room from Philip. “I don’t like this game,” she said. “Tell us what you’re getting at and stop joking around. Richard doesn’t like it, and neither do I. You’re being unpleasant.”

  “Richard likes it, don’t you, pal?” he asked, widening his eyes.

  I said nothing. I had learned, over the summer, that the best policy when confronted by a confusing cousin was to remain silent.

  Abruptly Philip dropped his persona. He looked at Isabella, his face grave, and said, “I’m just pointing out how many awful things we’ve learned this summer. I’m wondering if we’re going to get out of here with any of us unscathed.”

  “I hope we do,” said Isabella. “I don’t want to learn anymore. I want everyone to keep whatever secrets they have.”<
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  “Really, Bella?” Tom gave her a friendly smile.

  “Yes,” she replied. She stomped out of the room, and Tom and Philip grinned at each other. Isabella’s mood swings had grown extreme. After my revelation about Uncle Kurt, she became completely erratic. In my head I compared her to a metronome with the weight at its tip, which flops all the way down and then rises up only to hurtle down again on the other side.

  The morning following this conversation, the uncles announced that they had had such success on their last hunting trip—their bags, all three of them, had been loaded with game for the aunts to cook—that they were planning one more jaunt before we left Shorecliff. They would return the day before moving day, since the aunts required their presence for the endless hours of cleaning and packing that brought each stay at Shorecliff to a close.

  The news that the uncles were going on yet another trip—“Number six!” Francesca exclaimed in outrage—caused a flurry of conversation among the cousins. Many speculations were voiced as to why they were planning another trip so soon after the last one. Philip was of the opinion that Uncle Kurt’s debt was becoming unmanageable and that he was planning to chance the last of the family money in one wild, all-night poker game. Tom said it was obviously a case of infatuation: the girl who had distracted Kurt on the previous trip held him in her clutches, and he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Francesca suggested that Kurt simply couldn’t stand the sight of Shorecliff anymore and was escaping once and for all. No one entertained for an instant the idea that the uncles might actually want to go hunting. Among us, naiveté on that scale had been eradicated.

  We watched their preparations warily, from doorways and windows. Not one of us dared to come too close. The uncles had become untouchable. Cedric and Frank had lied to us all summer, and Uncle Kurt had deceived us on a grander scale than any of us could have previously believed possible.

  I stayed away from him altogether. The afternoon after my eavesdropping from the phone booth, he had discovered me in the kitchen and said cheerily, “Why didn’t you come for a story this morning, kiddo? I was looking forward to one of our nostalgic sessions. Gotten bored with me, have you?” The truth was I had stood outside his door for five minutes debating whether or not to knock. I could picture so well the excitement of the story he would tell, the smile on his face, the thoughtful questions he would ask me. And I imagined sitting in front of him on the little chair, knowing he had been in Portland. Eventually I walked back down the stairs and went out to the cliff, where Francesca cornered me. That afternoon, when he asked why I hadn’t come, I replied, “I guess I forgot. You’ve been away for the last couple days, after all.” He ruffled my hair and left the room, and I breathed a sigh of relief, as if I had overcome an obstacle. Then I almost burst into tears at the thought of my beloved Uncle Kurt being an obstacle.

  After Philip’s speech about family members’ secrets, I began to wonder which cousin or aunt or uncle would be the next to reveal a scandalous past. So many secrets had been uncovered that more seemed inevitable. I began to look expectantly at each person I came across—and, as often happens, the more I looked around the more I saw.

  Like the inhabitants of a bombed city, the Shorecliff population had scattered under the shock of disillusionment. Morning croquet games were a thing of the past, and after my experience in the phone booth, none of us felt like playing Piggy Wants a Signal. The aunts had been driven into near silence by the fiasco of Aunt Edie’s birthday. For the most part they kept to themselves, holding murmured conversations in the kitchen, their perennial stronghold. Whenever we came in, they would glance sideways at us and stop talking. Then they would wait with open impatience for us to leave. Even my mother seemed distant, and during my visits to her room she would often simply stroke my hair, sigh, and continue reading her book.

  The uncles too kept a low profile, though this was nothing new. Uncle Eberhardt sensed the cloud of disgrace descending on him whenever he neared the main house and retired permanently to Condor’s cottage. In spite of his presence there, we spent hours at the cottage in those last few weeks. Barnavelt was growing into a gleaming, strong, adolescent fox with an adorable temperament and a keen nose for mischief. He was allowed to run free in the cottage and divided his time between his own wooden house and Condor’s ankles. Outside he stayed on his leash. Condor rarely left the cottage without him, and we often came across them in the woods, tracking an animal or tearing up brambles or planting saplings.

  Delia and Delia spent the majority of their time with Condor and Barnavelt. I wondered what Condor thought about their shadowing of him. Having been a solitary man all his life, he must have thought it strange to acquire two young girls as constant companions, especially since they often didn’t speak, instead communicating with each other simply through expressive glances. They were as devoted to Barnavelt as Condor was and cooed over him constantly. Whenever Condor slipped on the collar at the end of the leash, they would cringe as if Barnavelt were being whipped. They still believed that Condor should return the fox to the wild, though he had explained many times how unfit Barnavelt was now for anything except posh living among humans. Uncle Eberhardt was openly infuriated by the Delias’ incessant comings and goings, and he usually greeted their entrance with a barrage of complaints. The two Delias and Condor ignored him. Condor, ever the gentleman, would shoot his pastel cuffs and say, “Good morning, girls,” as if they had not been dropping by every day.

  Isabella, Philip, and Tom spent most of their time together. Although, a week after Aunt Edie’s party, both he and Yvette were allowed out of the house in the company of cousins, Tom still chafed under the close supervision of the aunts, and visits to Lorelei were out of the question. Isabella and Philip would go for walks on occasion, and there was one swimming expedition in those final days, when the air was so humid that not to be in the water would have been torture. Otherwise the three of them lolled on the lawn or in the boys’ room, talking idly or playing listless card games. I divided my time between them and Pamela, who remained primly uninterested in scandal and pretended she knew nothing of the goings-on that had fragmented the family. I found her company, as always, soothing but unsatisfying.

  Yvette, disdaining the aunts’ announcement that she could once more go outside, lurked in her room, visited only by Pamela, Fisher, and Isabella, whose powers of empathy sometimes got the better of her. We all considered that Yvette had behaved unpardonably to Tom, and I suspected that the other cousins were, like me, too frightened to approach her. She reminded me of an untamed beast at the circus who cannot be groomed into a presentable show animal because there is no circus hand willing to enter its cage. On a certain level, as I’ve said, I sympathized with her. But wounding Lorelei, who had borne a large part of Yvette’s accusation, seemed unforgivable. Lorelei was to me the epitome of blameless purity. It didn’t matter that she and Tom were sleeping together—she remained a quiet, gentle spirit, and neither I nor the other cousins could tolerate the callousness with which Yvette had thrown her to the wolves.

  The wolves, in this case, were our aunts. Had Lorelei not tactfully disappeared from Shorecliff, they would have put their collective foot down about her entering the house. The result was that we almost never saw her. One time when Pamela and I had wandered into the woods bordering the Stephenson property, I looked up and caught sight of her in the sunlight, silhouetted against the green field and the bright blue of the sky. My first impulse was to run to her, but then I thought about what I would say, and I didn’t move. I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t be rude or awkward. When we got home, I felt I had been equally rude by not approaching her, and I worried that she had seen me.

  Fisher had chosen to deal with the family crises by vanishing from the house. He traveled in wide circles around the countryside, hunting for birds. His absence was painful to me, since I valued more than I had realized the calm sweetness of his company. He lent to Shorecliff a reassuring feeling that after all ther
e were good, wise people in the world. Of all of us, he possessed the most bountiful supply of kindness. Occasionally I saw him speaking with Charlie, Pamela, or Aunt Margery, but for the most part he would crouch in a bush or stroll on the moor, armed with my telescope. He had long ago commandeered it, or rather accepted my offer of it—I was proud to have something he wanted.

  The weather remained idyllic—warm but not hot, breezy rather than muggy, bright and brisk and inviting. Of course there was the occasional gray morning and one or two violent thundershowers. A few times, when the sky lowered and presented its dark underside, I thought it might change to match our mood, but the clouds always evaporated, and the sun always returned.

  Oddly enough, it was Charlie who seemed most at a loss in the few days before the uncles’ last hunting trip. Charlie was, on the whole, an uncomplicated young man. He liked fun and excitement, and he loved his family. He had none of Aunt Margery’s tendency to fuss, but he had inherited her gift for watchfulness and Uncle Frank’s stolidity of mind and body. He was intelligent enough and good-hearted, but he did not hold the depths of passion that the other cousins were capable of plumbing. Therefore, when they retired to their corners to mull over the news of Uncle Kurt and the tragedy of Aunt Loretta, Charlie was left empty-handed. He had been dismayed by the unveiling of family secrets, but more because it meant the breaking up of our circle than because he was troubled by what he heard. After all, if given the chance, he would have been thrilled to visit a gambling house filled with beautiful women. That is what I speculated about him, and I suspect Francesca speculated in a similar manner.

  Francesca was not a girl to lie around doing nothing. Her idleness, which she had imposed on herself as a sort of mourning in honor of her mother, did not suit her personality at all, which is perhaps why it seemed to distort her so dramatically. The story I told her about Uncle Kurt’s gambling in Portland galvanized her. I have no doubt her crazy, impossible idea was near fully formed by the end of her interview with me that morning by the cliff. The only person in whom she confided her scheme was Charlie, thereby rescuing him from boredom. When she heard that the uncles were going on a sixth hunting trip, she finalized her plans.