Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  The worst of the burns had been on her hands and forearms. The heat there had been intensified by her burning sleeves. She is still extremely clumsy, eating only with difficulty and writing in a childish scrawl. She has worn elbow-length gloves, day and night, ever since leaving the hospital—she refused to go home from Portland until Aunt Loretta bought her the first pair. Only the aunts have ever seen her scarred hands uncovered, but thanks to the family grapevine I heard that Aunt Rose described them as “scaly dragon claws.” I’m glad never to have seen anything but the sleek, satin gloves.

  Her face, though it was burned less badly than her hands, is far more horrifying. As Delia so chillingly predicted before the aunts drove Francesca away, the scars never healed properly. Down her right cheek, from the outside of her eye to the edge of her lip, runs a large, wide, pinkish welt, unavoidably arresting, so that people cannot help staring at it. On her left cheek two similar welts form a V, one side reaching up to her eye, the other following her jawline to the ear. The point of the V healed in such a way that it pulled her mouth to one side, making her appear eternally disgusted. Her neck is marred by similar scars, but she always wears high-necked shirts and dresses, so those welts are covered. It is only her face that she has never been able to hide.

  Once, several years ago, I was speaking to a client of mine who, it turned out, had known Francesca when he was in Europe—for there she fled, soon after our summer at Shorecliff, and stayed even through the war. He said that when you first looked at her, all you could see, naturally enough, were the horrendous scars. But after a moment you felt her gaze. She had regained after a time the intense, defiant stare that had been her trademark expression. Her dark eyes were as lustrous and gleaming as they had always been, the lashes as long and curling, the brows as exquisitely shaped. So, this mutual friend told me, after a while you looked at her eyes rather than her scars, and it began to seem that a beautiful woman was concealed underneath the mutilated face, that the scars were the squares of some dreadful net thrown over her, and that she was looking out through the net as if she were a prisoner, caught by her own disfigurement.

  “But really,” he said, as if he were telling me something new, “she’s a beautiful woman—in spite of everything, a truly beautiful woman.”

  “You will never know how beautiful,” I said shortly, and I turned the conversation to other things. I did not need a stranger to inform me of Francesca’s mauled perfection.

  It may be true that her eyes remain captivating, that her hair has grown back, that she has, after all, found life livable even without the asset of her flawless beauty. I hope it is true. But all I can think when I hear her name is that every morning she looks in the mirror and sees a horrifying distortion of herself, and that the distortion is the result of an action I took, unforgivable in intent and more unforgivable in result.

  When I was in college, five or six years after the summer at Shorecliff, Francesca made a gesture that in its compassion indicated just how much she had changed from her former self. She came to visit me at Columbia and, holding me with that fierce gaze of hers, told me that she knew I blamed myself for what had happened. She said she wanted me to forgive myself as she had forgiven me. Then she told me how, months after she had left the hospital, after the first shock had worn off and she had finally started to accept that she would be disfigured for the rest of her life, she realized that, in a strange way, the scars had freed her from a fate that had plagued her ever since she was young. She told me she had known since she was little, perhaps twelve or thirteen, that she was destined to look very much like her mother when she grew up—that she would be as beautiful as Loretta, if not more so. Moreover, she knew she had also inherited Loretta’s temper, her wildness, her passion, her inability to be calm and quiet and to think before acting. A fear began to haunt her that she was doomed to make the same mistakes her mother had made. She watched herself causing schoolroom dramas and breaking boys’ hearts, and she worried that no matter what she did, her energy—“some fire within me,” as she put it—would drive her toward a life similar to her mother’s.

  During the summer at Shorecliff, when my father revealed to us what Loretta’s life was really like, the fear in Francesca grew exponentially. She became almost frantic in her desire not to follow her mother’s example, though she adored Loretta—that was part of the problem. Her own antics with Charlie disgusted her even as they entertained her. She would laugh and shoot him a come-hither look, and all the while she would scorn herself inwardly, despairing of her character. Then the accident happened, and when she finally emerged from the hell of the initial trauma, she looked in the mirror one morning and realized that she no longer looked like Loretta, that she was no longer in danger of following the same impetuous path because, as she said with a wry laugh, a face like hers had little chance of inspiring the necessary passions for such a life. Thus, unexpectedly, her scars gave her a new freedom, and she seems to have appreciated it throughout her life. For apparently she has not had such a bad time of it in Europe.

  I wasn’t comforted by her visit. I greeted her confidences, naturally, with polite responses, but when she left my dormitory I breathed a sigh of relief that was almost a sob. It had been unbearable to watch her speak and see the mutilation I had caused all over her face. I felt no relief in knowing such a face would never inspire passions—on the contrary, her words were salt poured into a wound I fear will never heal. How could she have imagined that I, who had known her in all her youthful splendor, would find reassurance in the knowledge that she would never gain the rewards such splendor deserves? I have never doubted that she could still be loved—no one who has spent time with Francesca could doubt that. But even if a man were smitten by the unstoppable woman behind the scars and the gloves and the stilted manner she has adopted since the accident, he still wouldn’t see the former beauty that crowned her personality so perfectly. He would never know what she ought to have looked like, nor how gloriously reckless she once was.

  Aside from this memorable visit, I have not had much contact with Francesca or indeed with any of my cousins in the thirty years that have passed since that summer. We have never gathered again as a family except briefly at weddings and funerals. Not surprisingly, I have never gone back to Shorecliff, though a few of the other cousins have made the trip now and again, and for years its only full-time inhabitants were Condor, Uncle Eberhardt, and Barnavelt, who remained happily ensconced in Condor’s cottage until his death years later. Uncle Eberhardt, soon after our summer there, installed himself in the main house and announced to the family that he had become Shorecliff’s caretaker. The three of them, therefore—caretaker, groundskeeper, and fox—grew gray at Shorecliff while the rest of us dispersed, drifting further and further from the one place that had drawn us together.

  For months in New York, after that summer, I found myself missing my cousins with a physical, gut-clenching intensity. Guilt-ridden as I was, I hated to think about Francesca and Isabella—and of course I thought about them nonstop. The others I missed more straightforwardly: after all, Tom, Philip, Pamela, Fisher, and the others had been as central in my thoughts as the two girls whose faces I could now never escape. My cousins had served before that summer as vague mythical figures to idolize, and their allure was infinitely more powerful after three months of living with them. When I was home again in our dull, brown apartment in Manhattan, confronted every morning by my father’s emotionless stare over the breakfast cereal, I yearned so desperately for Isabella, for Tom and Philip, for the old Francesca in all her wildness, that I thought my heart was sure to burst. At night I dreamed kaleidoscope dreams set at Shorecliff, decorated by cousinly bits and pieces—Philip’s piercing eyes and Pamela’s golden ball of hair; the two Delias, fair and dark; and always Isabella staring at me, thinking I was a traitor, in the infernal light from Francesca going up in flames.

  Of course I saw them again over the years. Pamela continues to be one of the background figures of my lif
e, a strange, haughty confidant to whom I tell my secrets unwillingly and yet with invariable relief. She has yet to give me advice, but I trust her steadfastness, as I always did. Yvette and she remain close, and I have occasionally found the two sisters together in Pamela’s New York apartment. Yvette has softened over time, and when I see her now I often contrast her present character with her tempestuous past. I felt sorry for her then—of all the cousins she undoubtedly had the loneliest time, perhaps even the saddest time, at Shorecliff before Francesca’s tragedy. Now she is very gentle, and Pamela tells me that she has made a successful career for herself in the office of a fashion magazine, where she draws illustrations and designs layouts with typical Wight neatness and clarity. She has three children whose last name is Wrycek but who come from the Wight mold. My favorite is Josiah, a waiflike boy of twelve who has white-blond hair and a startling solemnity of expression. Pamela herself married a grave, silent man who works long hours at his accounting firm and has never said more than one sentence at a time to me. I imagine them eating their late dinners in a soundless room, entirely content in watching each other’s serenity.

  The rest of the cousins have to some degree kept up the close relationships that arose during the summer at Shorecliff. Francesca and Charlie remained friends and would see each other on Francesca’s rare trips to America. But Charlie, alone among the cousins, did not survive the Second World War. As soon as hostilities were declared in Europe, he dropped everything, abandoning the Wight carpentry business, and began training as an officer. When America joined the fight, he sailed for Britain. Two years later he was lost, and all the crosses and honors bestowed on him after death could not fill the hole left in our family.

  After the war, Francesca stopped returning to America altogether—I suspect because Charlie was no longer here to greet her. Most of the family has gone over at one time or another to visit her. Loretta in particular has kept up a fierce and passionate connection with her oldest daughter. Somewhat ironically, Loretta extracted herself from the realm of scandal immediately after our summer at Shorecliff. Francesca’s tragedy woke her up from what had become, in truth, a despairing lifestyle, and she stopped pursuing Joel Ambersen, permanently and without qualms, as soon as she was summoned to the hospital in Portland. In the end, she told Francesca, though she had convinced herself that her one path to happiness lay with that dubious millionaire, the break caused her no heartache at all. She was focused, by that point, on Francesca’s recovery. And though her appetite for men never left her, she ceased to run after them with such ostentatious recklessness. The scandal sheets soon tired of her, and she never gave them more meat to feed upon.

  I should mention that Francesca, by the sheer force of her personality, succeeded in taking European society by storm. To this day she is a staple in French and Italian gossip columns—I once found a clipping that referred to her as “the notorious scarred beauty, Francesca Ybarra.” Of all the cities she has conquered, Vienna is apparently her favorite, but she has spent considerable time in desolate Berlin and several years in London. For a long time none of us could understand how she earned her money. She made it clear from the start that she was not living off men, married or otherwise—one could almost hear the unspoken phrase “like my mother.” Cordelia was the one who finagled the answer out of her: it appears that when Francesca first returned to Paris, an old family friend, dating back to the time when Loretta and Rodrigo lived in the city with their three young children, helped set her up as a governess in a wealthy family’s home. The father was an old man with a young wife who had died giving birth to her last child, and he grew to rely on Francesca without reserve. In the few years before his death, he became besotted with her, and she found that in his will he had bequeathed her enough money to live in luxury for the rest of her days. “Every night,” Francesca told Delia, “I give thanks to Monsieur Durand. I don’t have much use for God, but Monsieur Durand made my life bearable, scars and all.”

  The two Delias, always inseparable, kept up their attachment as if oblivious to the hindrance of distance, writing to each other regularly and journeying between Cambridge and New York every few months. Delia Robierre entered a medical school and became a beloved pediatrician in Boston. Her excellent reputation has put her in much demand, and her husband once told me that because she can’t bear to turn anyone away, she often slaves night and day for her patients. As for Delia Ybarra, she headed to journalism school without a moment’s indecision and is now a respected reporter. Her first break came during her time in France after the war, when she lived with Francesca and wrote stories about the heroes of the Resistance. Some years later, after reporting on condemned political figures and guerrilla warfare in several dangerous countries—journeys no doubt instigated by her fierce Ybarran blood—she came back to New York to write for The Times. I rarely see her; she lives a busy and sociable life, moving in circles far removed from mine.

  Fisher went to Harvard, at least partly to foster the friendship that had grown up between him and Uncle Cedric—a friendship, I should say, that remained strong until Cedric’s death two years ago. While there, Fisher’s interest in birds grew into a passion. He eventually received a Ph.D. in ornithology and became one of the world’s experts on warblers. Charlie’s death in the war dealt him a terrible but unseen blow. After it happened he was, if anything, more kind and gentle to the rest of us, but Pamela once remarked that Fisher felt an unspeakable guilt for gliding safely through the war in an American intelligence unit while Charlie was facing German guns. In 1946 Fisher returned to Harvard to teach, and you can still find him there, lecturing in the Agassiz Museum or dreamily wandering through the Mount Auburn Cemetery, binoculars and notebook in hand.

  He also has a modest but devoted fan base in the artistic world for some relief panels he carved with the likenesses of unusual birds. These panels are said to be completely accurate, and the workmanship on them is so elaborate that a reporter from an obscure art journal ran a piece on Fisher entitled “The Audubon of Wood.” This article circulated through the family, and when I read it I wrote to Fisher congratulating him on his success. He replied with a friendly letter, thanking me for my note and raving about some subspecies of oriole. At the end he wrote, “As far as the article is concerned, it’s a perfect example of why I don’t like artsy people. My little carvings can’t hold a candle to Audubon’s big paintings.”

  The members of the previous generation have lived their lives peacefully in the old grooves, watching the vagaries of their children and bickering, as always, among themselves. The Hatfields pride themselves on their longevity—of my mother’s siblings, only Aunt Edie has died. Philip said at her funeral that she died of boredom, which is callous but probably accurate. Poor Edie lived in the wrong century—she would have been a knockout maiden aunt in Victorian times, chaperoning nieces and laying down the laws of decorum, but she was born just too late; when we were growing up she tended to seem like an unnecessary appendage to the Hatfield family. Eberhardt, the last of my grandparents’ generation, died ten years ago, having carried on well into his nineties. The rest are living still, even Rose, who celebrated her eightieth birthday last year. My mother lives with my father in the country, but sometimes she comes to visit me in Manhattan, and when she does it feels almost like old times, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table, sipping our tea and picking through the morning mail.

  Uncle Kurt, the only one of my aunts and uncles who had a longstanding effect on me, disappeared again after that summer. I have seen him only five or six times in all the years that have passed. But I forgave him for his deceitfulness and his double life even before I left Shorecliff, when I heard him speaking to my mother about his trips to Portland. “It’s never a good move to hide something, Caroline,” he told her. “I ought to have known that. But I learned during the war to hide everything I could—when you have no privacy it becomes an obsession, and old habits die hard. I’m sorry I lied to all of you—I can’t tell you how sorry
. For Francesca’s sake and for mine too.” The way he said it made me feel better about him. It no longer seemed shameful to be disappointed in someone I had idolized. I discovered that admiration acquires an additional tang if it is mixed with pity. I’ve spent the rest of my life imagining what it would be like to be reconciled with Uncle Kurt without having any real desire to know him well. He is better as a symbol, a figure in one of his stories, than as a friend.

  Three or four years after our summer at Shorecliff, those stories of his went public. It turned out that the manuscript Uncle Kurt had been working on that summer was exactly what we suspected—a collection of stories about his experiences in the Great War. The collection was an immediate success, and Kurt was looked on as a prize to have at parties and literary gatherings. Life in the spotlight suited Uncle Kurt. He surprised me a year after his book’s publication by writing me a letter in which he assured me that his days of leading a double life were over, that he found the excitement of being a well-known author enough to assuage his thirst for adventure, and that he hoped he would eventually regain my respect. “I felt worst about deceiving you, Richard,” he wrote. “You seemed to look up to me—I appreciated that more than you know.” I guessed that this cryptic statement was similar to the remark he had made to Charlie and Francesca in Portland about his life not being happy, and I replied that he had always had my respect and that I hoped he was enjoying himself more in the limelight than he had in the shadows. I didn’t add that the postscript of his letter was what interested me most. He wrote, “P.S. The stories in the book aren’t nearly as good as the ones I told you at Shorecliff. You’ve always been my best listener—I think that’s why.” I read this statement with a sense of pride—I was, after all, only eighteen at the time—and also with relief, for I had perused his collection and thought the stories were mediocre at best and not nearly as thrilling as the ones he had captivated me with on those mornings at Shorecliff.