Shorecliff Read online

  Pamela, when she came in a few minutes later, hovered in the doorway as I did. We were too young to be in on the feud, but we were old enough to listen to it with our hearts thumping and our eyes shining. With a beginning so dramatic, the summer could not fail to be as thrilling as I had imagined.

  “It’s too much!” Francesca was saying. Francesca was the daughter of Aunt Loretta, the wild one of my mother’s generation who had married a Spanish fugitive named Rodrigo Ybarra. We never learned how he had earned the title of fugitive, only that he had been running from the Spanish law. He and Loretta were married in Paris and lived there until Rodrigo died in a train accident during the war. Their youngest child, Cordelia, had been only five years old at the time. Loretta had moved back to America when the war ended, the wildness apparently crushed out of her. She brought three dark-haired, fiery children with her. It was impossible not to place them highest in my ranks of fascination, and Francesca, twenty-one years old, with cascades of nearly black hair and dark, glowing eyes, had the power to fell me with a single glance. When I entered the room she was stamping her foot, her hands clenched and her fine eyebrows drawn low over her eyes. Francesca in a rage was a sight to see.

  “It’s too much!” she was saying. “We’re stuck in this godforsaken dump all summer like sardines in a can. There’s no one to see and no place to go. And now we’re not even allowed to drive into town. How do you expect us to live?”

  The argument, I quickly divined, was about driving rights and the rattletrap. Thus far the adults had had sole use of the automobile. My grandfather’s decree that the women would ride and the men would drive had been broken the day after he died, but I’m sure he would have been pleased at the strictness with which the next generation was kept from the steering wheel.

  “Even if Francesca can’t drive it,” my cousin Charlie said, “there’s no reason why I can’t, and Tom too when he gets here.” Charlie was the oldest of the Wight children. A more different family from the Ybarra clan could not be imagined. Aunt Margery had married Frank Wight, a carpenter from upstate New York, and their four children were all blond and blue-eyed. Their two sons, Charlie and Fisher, had been raised in their father’s workshop, and each was handy with an ax and ingenious with a chisel. Charlie was twenty and muscular and exhibited his father’s red-faced shortness of breath, though in all other respects he was handsome. After two years at Cornell he had earned his stripes on the college football team, but what interested me far more was that some months earlier I had overheard his mother telling mine that Charlie “could never turn down a dare.” This, I thought, heralded great things for the summer.

  Charlie’s three siblings were all slender and graceful—mysterious attributes when one looked at their parents, though the Hatfields traditionally run thin. Eighteen-year-old Yvette, a pale and lofty girl I rarely had the courage to speak to, came after Charlie. Fisher, at sixteen, was equally skinny and sprite-like. He liked his father’s workshop, but he preferred to carve intricate scenes in blocks of wood while Uncle Frank taught Charlie the rudiments of furniture-building. Fisher went around perpetually in a dream, but the dream did not prevent him from picking up details with his misty blue eyes. Like Pamela, the youngest of the four, he soaked up information with quiet astuteness.

  “None of you will be driving anywhere,” Aunt Rose declared. She was the oldest aunt, with the voice of a general and a demeanor to match.

  Aunt Margery added, “Don’t you understand it’s not safe? Uncle Kurt has had years of practice, and I learned from him.”

  “Safety be damned,” Aunt Loretta growled. The one trace of wildness that remained in her was a tendency to swear, and her deep, sultry voice slid into a sailor’s bark when she was angry. “It’s not a matter of whether they’re able to drive the thing—it’s whether they’re allowed. And they’re not. Francesca, you can stamp all you like, but rules are rules. You’re here for the summer, and you might as well enjoy it.”

  “You realize we’ve got nothing to do,” said Francesca. She pressed herself against the wall, drawing herself up to her full, glorious height. Masses of dark hair curled out around her head. “We’re stuck here on top of each other. You all think of it as a fine holiday. You can chatter with each other all day, and the little ones, well”—she tossed us a look of contempt—“they’ll be satisfied with anything. But we older ones, what are we supposed to do? We’re a million miles from civilization. All we have is each other. Do you expect us to stand here for the next three months staring each other down?”

  There was a moment of silence, during which Francesca fixed her gaze on the aunts and the rest of the cousins followed her lead.

  Then my Aunt Edie entered the fray. Edie was the maiden aunt of the family, and she lived the part with a vengeance. She was angular, bony, and long-nosed. Her black hair, parted down the middle, was always knotted at the back of her head. None of us had any difficulty understanding why she had never married—no man in his right mind would come within ten yards of her. She had no mercy, her morals were lifted from Victorian guides to proper etiquette, and she saw the worst in everybody and everything. But the sheer force of her will made her remarks carry weight in family discussions.

  Now she looked down her nose at the three boys—Charlie, Fisher, and Francesca’s brother, Philip, who was eighteen, black-haired, and invariably aloof. Then she examined the five girls—Francesca, Yvette, Tom’s sister Isabella, and the two Delias, whose story must be saved for later. Even Pamela and I were not exempt from Aunt Edie’s scathing glance; for an instant her nose pointed at us, and we felt the impact of an unknown accusation. Then she made her proclamation. “This house,” she said, “is primed for incest.”

  Incest. What did it mean? I had never heard the word before. Even in my ignorance, though, I sensed a scandalous undertone. The rest of the family—with the exception of Pamela, who also didn’t know what it meant—dissolved into laughter. Without meaning to, Aunt Edie had ended the fight. There were a few minutes of hilarity, in which I saw Francesca raise her eyebrows at Charlie with an expression that combined humor, disdain, and mocking salaciousness. Aunt Edie caught the last of it and shouted, “Heathens!” which redoubled my cousins’ laughter.

  My mother, who had come in for the last of the argument, laughed with the rest of them and then sent me up to my room with my luggage. The other mothers shooed their children off too. They wanted a chance to discuss the situation among themselves before dinner. I went upstairs with my bags, lagging behind the others. We passed straight through the second floor, the forbidden kingdom of adult sleeping quarters. Each of the seven bedrooms there housed an adult or two. As the oldest cousin, Francesca had demanded a room on the second floor. It alarmed me to think that she could now be counted as an adult—it made her seem capable of anything.

  Philip lived in the room next to mine on the third floor. For the moment he was alone, since his roommate, Tom, had yet to arrive. Though they were both eighteen, Philip had not yet started college. I didn’t understand why, and no one ever bothered to explain it to me. When I passed his room he called to me from inside, and obediently I barged in, my valise of books banging against the doorframe.

  “How are you, midget?” he said, looking me over.

  Philip seemed the most Spanish of the Ybarras, and I imagined Rodrigo as an older version of him. He wore his black hair slicked back from his forehead, and he had low eyebrows and dark, glowing eyes like Francesca’s. He read constantly, but whereas I devoured boys’ adventure novels, he read philosophy and incendiary texts. There was a hint of secrecy in all his actions that I admired and appreciated—he once told me that he thought of himself as an anarchist. This meant he had little time for humor, but if you caught him in an off moment, he could be friendly in a biting sort of way.

  “What does ‘incest’ mean?” I asked him.

  Philip let out a burst of laughter. “You want to join the fun, do you?”

  “I just want to know what it means.”<
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  “Well, it means a lot of old busybodies clucking over other people’s business. That’s what it ends up meaning anyway.”

  I dropped my bags on the floor and dug through the valise for my dictionary. In a way this was my most precious book, since without it I wouldn’t have been able to understand half of what my family members said. It was an ancient, beat-up volume that my mother had given to me long ago. When I looked up “incest,” I found “indecent relations between blood-relatives.”

  “My God, how old is that thing?” Philip said. “It’s a lie anyway. Sisters and brothers, my friend. That’s the only thing that counts. All of us cousins—we’re safe. So you don’t have to worry.”

  “Don’t have to worry about what?”

  “Indecent relations,” he said, grinning.

  “Which doesn’t he have to worry about?” said another voice at the door. It was Yvette Wight. She reminded me of a ghost: her hair was much whiter than her siblings’, more of an ash-blond than a gold, and her lips and eyes were equally washed out. She moved to fit her appearance, gliding from room to room without any noise. One of her favorite occupations was interrupting conversations in this fashion. “Should he not worry about the indecency, or the relations?” she asked.

  “Why, Yvette, what are you suggesting?” Philip said. He lay back on his bed and lounged, and there was something challenging in his attitude.

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I was just wondering which you meant.”

  “Well, which would you have meant?”

  “Neither,” she sniffed. “I’ve read Mansfield Park. Besides, we didn’t grow up with each other. I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

  Philip sat upright. “Yvette!” he exclaimed. He was still joking, but I heard a note of surprise in his voice. “That’s practically a proposition!”

  “Don’t be stupid, Philip,” she said. She glided away, and I retired to my own bedroom. It had been a typical conversation between cousins, a tossing sea on which I strove to keep afloat. I had no idea what they were talking about, and probably they didn’t either. All of them enjoyed throwing the ball of innuendo around their circle, keeping it aloft for as long as possible. I stood outside the group, watching and listening. The first thing I did in my room was look up “proposition.” The dictionary defined it as “a suggestion or proposal,” which didn’t help at all.

  The idea of a web of attractions between relatives was less shocking than it might have been to my Hatfield cousins because, as Yvette had pointed out, we hadn’t grown up together. I saw Pamela regularly because my mother was closest with Aunt Margery, and she believed that Pamela was a good playmate for me. But even so we spent time with each other only two or three times a year, when our two families visited Shorecliff or when the Wights came down to New York City. Most of the year they lived in upstate New York, in Uncle Frank’s hometown. The Ybarras lived near us in Manhattan, the original home of the vast Hatfield tribe, but we never visited them, and my mother once unwisely let slip that this was because my father disliked them, thereby confirming my theory that he had not a scrap of human feeling in him. Tom’s family, the Robierre clan, lived in Boston so that his father, Cedric, a professor of paleontology, could be close to Harvard. Uncle Kurt moved around the country at will—at least that’s how it seemed to me. Aunt Edie lived in Saratoga Springs, plaguing the nearby Wights. I never knew where my Great-Uncle Eberhardt resided when he wasn’t stalking around Shorecliff like an enormous predatory bat. I suspect New York. At any rate, the various branches of the family rarely saw each other, and for the older cousins it must have seemed as if they had been locked for the summer in a cage of strangers—the kind of long-known stranger one can rely on as a lifetime fixture without really understanding at all.

  There came now an inevitable letdown. I sat on my bed and thought, “What now?” There was still half an hour before dinner. My clothes were unpacked, my books lined up on the desk tucked into the gabled window. My telescope lay on the table next to my bed. I had made all conceivable preparations, and now I had to find something to have prepared for. From down the hall I heard the rise and fall of cousinly voices. That sound, as steady as the ocean crashing against the cliff, formed the background of my summer at Shorecliff. Always around the corner, up the stairs, in the distance, those voices sparred and tangled, speaking of things I half understood and yearned to know more of. It took excruciating courage to approach them, to appear in the doorway of whichever bedroom or alcove the group had chosen as a headquarters.

  This time they were in the room occupied by Isabella Robierre. All of them were there except Yvette, Pamela, and Philip—the Wight girls had a way of making themselves scarce, and Philip generally disliked group discussions. The others had piled onto the two beds—Isabella, like me, had a room to herself, but hers had been furnished to house two people, and the spare bed served as a useful lounging place. Together the cousins formed a physical barrier as intimidating as their conversation. When I appeared before them, the talk died and they all looked at me. The pressure from those six pairs of eyes! They seemed twice as many. Then Isabella extricated herself from the pile and swooped down on me.

  Isabella. She was the one cousin to whom no description of mine could do justice. All the others could be categorized in one way or another: Philip the revolutionary, Charlie the athlete, Francesca the blazing beauty, Tom the student, Fisher the dreamer, the two Delias identifiable in tandem. Isabella was not like the others. She was not as beautiful as Francesca nor as graceful as Yvette. She could be awkward and blunt. Sometimes she didn’t know what to say. But there was an energy in her that surpassed all the others, an openness, an abandon. She was the only cousin who had ever hugged me and tousled me and tossed me around, and I had loved every minute of it—which made it all the more crushing this summer when she flung herself toward me, took in at a glance how much older I had grown since our last meeting, and stumbled to a halt with her hands still open, trying too late to pretend that there was no awkwardness in her movements. She felt, I suppose, that I was too old now to be cuddled, that I was no longer a child—though I wouldn’t have minded. I would have relished the contact.

  That summer, at seventeen, Isabella was recovering from a recent growth spurt and moved like a baby giraffe, all long legs and spindly arms. She was not as tall as Francesca, but she was taller than most of us, and her body was especially noticeable because it was so gangly. She had light brown hair, as all the Robierres did. It was straight and uninteresting, and she tied it back at the nape of her neck, letting a few wisps frame her face. Her hands and feet often gestured in unexpected directions, demanding to be noticed. Whenever the cousins were in a group, the two who stood out irresistibly were Isabella and Francesca.

  Isabella stood in front of me now, not touching me but grinning her goofy, all-consuming grin. “Look at our Richard!” she cried.

  I stared back at her, smiling like an imbecile.

  “Don’t make such a song and dance.” Charlie yawned. “He won’t know how we should entertain ourselves any more than we do.”

  Isabella laughed and beckoned me to the foot of her bed. I sat next to her and remembered how she used to hold me in her lap, even when I weighed nearly as much as she did. Now it seemed that not only her lap but all parts of her body were forbidden territory. I pondered this change, trying to ignore the snooty looks I kept receiving from the two Delias, who were seated on the other bed and clearly thought I should be kept from the room.

  The two Delias’ story shows the Hatfield tendency to create feuds out of thin air. When Aunt Rose and Aunt Loretta were pregnant with their last children, they got into a discussion of baby names. Rose had gone over to Paris to visit Loretta, who was still living there with Rodrigo. The two sisters’ relationship was uneasy at best. Rose had raised the loudest cry against Rodrigo, and Loretta had always objected vociferously to Rose’s high-handed control over the Hatfield family. Yet in many ways they were the most similar of the Hatfie
ld sisters. They didn’t like to admit it, but when they were together and managed to avoid fighting, they often laughed louder and harder than with anyone else.

  The question of baby names was a serious one with the Hatfields. A host of preferences and responsibilities had to be taken into account, and it was only with these two last children that Rose and Loretta finally felt they had free rein. Loretta had taken care of Rodrigo’s requirements with Francesca and Philip. For Rose, Tom had been my grandfather’s name, and Isabella was the name of Cedric’s favorite sister. Now a clear horizon lay before them. The two women drank their tea, ate their croissants, patted their stomachs, and tossed names back and forth. Loretta suggested Delia. Rose glommed onto it like a snake snatching its prey—at least that is Loretta’s version of the story. Rose herself claims she thought of it first, but none of us has ever believed her.

  “I love it,” she said. “I want that one. It’s mine.”

  “I came up with it!” Loretta protested.

  But Rose refused to back down. The talk developed into an argument and then an out-and-out fight. At last Rose flounced off and soon after returned to America, swearing that she would send the government a birth certificate first. That was exactly how it came about. Alas for Loretta, though she was due first, Rose gave birth prematurely (deliberately, Loretta claimed) and chose the name Delia while crowing in triumph. Two weeks later Loretta gave birth to her own baby and lay there in the Paris hospital bed, arguing with Rodrigo over the morals of also naming their daughter Delia. Rodrigo disapproved of sibling rivalry. At last Loretta said, “Cordelia then,” and lay back exhausted on the pillows. From that point on the second Delia’s name was always pronounced in that strange way, with the emphasis on the first syllable, for no one ever used her full first name except to distinguish her from the other Delia. Loretta rejected Cordie as a nickname, and so, despite Rose’s exaggerated shock, the Hatfield family contained two Delias.