At fifteen, the Delias were inseparable. They had clung to each other from the first moment they met, and different though they were, we thought of them as a pair. Delia Robierre had light brown hair cut in a bob. She was stocky and freckly—more so than either Tom or Isabella—and easily pleased, with an infectious giggle that rang through the house. Delia Ybarra was destined to be nearly as great a beauty as Francesca. She had black curly hair as short as a boy’s, a swanlike neck, snapping black eyes, tiny feet. There was more mischief in her than in Delia Robierre, though she presented a more serious front. Combined, they were a dangerous formula, not least because, as nearly the youngest cousins, they were constantly trying to prove themselves. I thought the two Delias owed Pamela and me a debt of gratitude—it was only because we were there to be excluded that they were allowed in on the colloquies of the older cousins. They knew this, but for them it required resentment rather than gratitude, so I avoided them as much as possible. In any case, they were small fry. Neither of them counted in comparison with the glorious older cousins.
I don’t remember what they were all saying at that first meeting. Francesca was probably leading them in declarations of discontent. Coming from Manhattan where, according to Philip, young men often lined up outside the Ybarra residence to see her and where Aunt Loretta—despite raised eyebrows from the more cautious mothers in their set—let her gallivant through the streets with these eager escorts until after midnight, Francesca undoubtedly thought of Shorecliff as a desert wasteland. Her aunts said she was spoiled and, believing in education for girls as well as boys, frequently asked why she had not gone to college. But Loretta was skeptical of the value of a formal education, and she was proud, besides, of her own adventurous past. The lessons of real life, she was fond of saying, taught more than any college professor could imagine. When Francesca refused flat-out to consider Barnard or any other college, Loretta accepted her refusal without a murmur, and she stood by that decision in spite of the fact that Yvette was bound for Bryn Mawr in the fall and Isabella had been looking forward to Radcliffe since she was ten years old. Francesca defiantly took the route of the debutante, and though Loretta could barely afford her evening gowns, let alone the expense of hosting parties, she helped Francesca hide the difference between our Hatfield shabbiness and the fortunes of the New York elite. When her sisters remonstrated with her, Loretta said that she refused to deprive Francesca of the thrill of youth simply because of a lack of money.
Given the dazzling whirl she had been forced to abandon for the summer, it was hardly surprising that from the beginning, at Shorecliff, Francesca was determined not to enjoy herself except by means of rebellion. But that did not mean that she sulked or snapped or made life miserable. On the contrary, though she painted the summerhouse as a prison, she made it come to life for all of us.
Eventually, that first evening, she indicated that the audience was over, and we all filed out, in spite of the fact that the meeting had taken place in Isabella’s room—Francesca instantly became queen of any room she entered. We were bunched up at the door, and I looked back to find Francesca nodding knowingly on Isabella’s bed. “Wait until Tom comes,” she said, half closing her eyes. “Then you’ll see. Wait for Tom.”
* * *
Wait for Tom was exactly what we did. He didn’t come for a week, and during that week two events of importance occurred. The first was that Aunt Loretta left. The announcement was made on the second night, when we were all crowded around the long table in the dining room, a room used only once a day for our immense dinners. When Loretta said, “I’m going to return to New York tomorrow,” I was baffled. She was prone to these sudden moves—apparently it was one such move that had taken her to Europe in the first place. Even so, the adults were clearly as mystified as we were. There was some talk about business needing to be taken care of, a financial situation gone awry, but that seemed insufficient reason for her to abandon our precious summer vacation.
Only her own children were unaffected by the news. Francesca gave her mother a look I found hard to identify; it was a strange, stony glance that seemed to combine resentment with empathy. Of course, I was always on the alert where my older cousins were concerned, and I was particularly alive to Francesca’s expressions. To me she was a prophetess for nearly all of that summer, and I might have endowed her face with more subtlety than it really expressed. While she glowered, Philip continued to eat without any change whatsoever. Neither asked Loretta why she was going, which seemed to me to be filial negligence on a criminal level, excusable only because of Philip’s secret mental life as a revolutionary. As for Cordelia, she was wrapped up in something Delia Robierre was saying. She looked up for half a second and said, “Oh, don’t go, Mommy!” and then turned back to Delia. This was more negligence, and I wondered what the children’s relationship with Aunt Loretta could possibly be like.
Certainly it was nothing like the relationship I had with my own mother. She, as the flipside of my father, had always been a warm and sheltering haven. She was not an assertive person—any loudness she might have had had been drained out of her long ago by the browbeating of six strong-minded older siblings—but she possessed a wordless determination that filled me with relief and admiration. When my father snapped at me or shooed me away, she would hold open her arms and with that gesture express not only her love for me but her disapproval of my father’s behavior. Even when I was little, I understood her meaning and prayed that he did too. Now that I’m older, I know he did understand it. Sometimes I can find it in my heart to pity him—not often, though. My mother did not play a large role in that summer at Shorecliff, at least not an ostentatious one. Nevertheless, she was there, acting as my subterranean rock of security. Had she been absent, I could not have done half the daring things I carried out in the company of my wild cousins.
The second important event was the return of the uncles—Frank, Cedric, and Kurt—from their first hunting trip to the woodlands northwest of Shorecliff. Great-Uncle Eberhardt had not been on this trip. He did not approve of guns, nor of killing animals for sport, nor of conversing with other humans unless it was with Condor, the groundskeeper at Shorecliff. Condor was Uncle Eberhardt’s constant companion, and Eberhardt spent many long days at Condor’s cottage in the strip of woods separating Shorecliff from the surrounding farmland. When the other men were away on their hunting expeditions, Eberhardt moved to the cottage entirely, appearing at the house only occasionally for meals. He said that the company of women and children without respite was too much for any man and a death recipe for an old man like himself. As a result, he appeared to return when the rest of the men did, though in fact he had been within reach all the time.
Fantastical though it may be, I remember Uncle Eberhardt wearing a black cape. It seems impossible now that he actually wore one in that day and age, in the middle of the summer, but that is my memory of him. Thus Uncle Eberhardt stalked through the back door into the kitchen with the rest of the men, his back bent so that the cape swung over his shoulders and cast a shadow around his feet. He had a rough, hair-dotted face that never failed to scare me, beetled brows and squinting eyes, the remains of a white head of hair, and gnarled, bony hands. He was a gruesome creature from a child’s fevered dream, but for all that, he was our uncle, and in our way we appreciated him. He tolerated nothing and approved of nothing; he was Aunt Edie times ten. They did not get on well together.
“How was Condor, Uncle Eberhardt?” Rose asked. It gave me great pleasure to see her, the tallest and most imposing of my aunts, quelled by Eberhardt’s lightning gaze.
“Condor’s well enough, girl,” Eberhardt growled.
Aunt Margery and my mother smiled behind Rose’s back. As with most of my family members, Eberhardt for them was simultaneously a terror and a joke. He knew it as well as anyone and chuckled as he made his way out of the room.
Then Uncle Frank and Uncle Cedric filed in, shuffling like delinquent schoolboys. Frank Wight was the carpenter wh
o had married Margery, and he looked the part. A bigger but more subdued version of Charlie, he was brawny and blond, the sort of man who both pleased children and annoyed them. He was forever swinging me around, ruffling my hair, slapping my shoulder in what was meant to be a friendly pat. It was irritating to be manhandled, but at the same time he never talked down to me. He treated me as a miniature human rather than as a member of a different species, and I appreciated his matter-of-fact tone. That day he even let me look at the rabbit carcasses, which I had an extreme urge to do until the moment before he took them out of the bag, at which point I felt an anticipatory nausea and fled.
Cedric Robierre, the paleontologist from Boston, was utterly different from Frank. He was not an absentminded professor but rather a tall, businesslike man with an air of competence. He gave the impression of wearing a suit, though naturally during the summer he preferred linen trousers and an open-collared shirt, and on hunting trips he invariably wore a red plaid jacket. It was clear that his true home was in the esoteric chambers of Harvard. I liked Uncle Cedric much more than Uncle Frank because with Cedric, as with Philip Ybarra, I could sense a mighty brain pulsating behind his forehead. I loved the feeling that the minds of the people around me were working all the time, thinking new thoughts, turning over old ideas, pushing unknown boundaries.
Behind Frank and Cedric strode Uncle Kurt, the best uncle of all. When he came in he spied me before anyone else, even though I was the shortest, and said, “How’s my youngest soldier!” Then he hugged me. How well I remember the feel of that crisp khaki against my skin! When he let me go I stared at him, breathless, while he leaned against the doorframe—a figure bathed in light, my personal war hero.
Three days later the day came. Tom Robierre, a celebrity by default because he was the last to arrive, the last unknown who might catapult excitement into our lives, was arriving by the 6:30 train into Pensbottom. The town was so small that it merited only two trains a day from Portland, one early and one late. All of our arrivals thus took place in the evening, necessitating a late dinner. The plan was that while my mother stayed behind to cook, Aunt Margery would drive the rattletrap to the station with Aunt Rose, Tom’s mother, in the front seat and his sisters Isabella and Delia in the back. There was a momentary upset, however, when Delia announced that she had no interest in meeting the train.
“Don’t you want to see your own brother?” Aunt Rose asked.
“I’ll see him when he gets here,” Delia said, shrugging. “Besides, Delia and I are going to the shore—can we?”
“Alone?”
“We’ll be with each other.” That was the Delian answer for everything. Behind her, Delia Ybarra erupted into giggles. “Seriously,” Delia Robierre went on, adopting the solemn voice she found effective when negotiating with her parents, “of course I want to see Tom, but I know Philip is much more interested in meeting him at the station.”
This was true. Philip and Tom had a bond that I envied and admired. I tried to emulate their offhand interactions, and for years afterward I would catch myself thinking, “What would Tom do?” or “What would Philip think?” It was unusual for Philip to come out of his lair, mental and physical, with enough vigor to state that he wanted something, but in this case he did step forward and say, “I want to meet him.”
The aunts were suitably impressed. Now that Loretta was gone, the Ybarra children had become hopelessly mysterious to the other aunts. My mother, of course, was intimidated by nothing and no one, but she rarely intervened in situations like this one. As far as I was concerned, she was a Buddha, sitting quietly in her chair with a calm smile on her lips, hoarding all the answers. Aunt Rose was the one who dealt out decrees. She often reminded me of an admiral inspecting a ship, shouting orders, pacing the decks, directing her crew with unerring confidence. Aunt Margery, the family fussbudget, was more hotheaded and impulsive, though she also did most of the work in the house. She talked nonstop and often worked herself into states of half-hysterical emotion—I don’t know how Yvette and Fisher and Pamela, with all their unflappable poise, could have come from her and Frank. As for Aunt Edie, her antiquated ideas of proper behavior made her as alien to us as we were to her. They were a disparate family, the Hatfield girls.
Aunt Margery, Aunt Rose, Isabella, and Philip rattled off to meet Tom. From my vantage point on the furthest fencepost, I could see Isabella turning to say something to Philip, then his elusive gleam of teeth, then her fit of laughter. I hadn’t wanted to go meet Tom before, but now that Isabella and Philip were enjoying a private party in the backseat of the rattletrap, I was filled with jealousy. There were so many of us that moments with only one or two others were precious, no matter who those others were, and Isabella and Philip were the crème de la crème. I spent the hour until they returned daydreaming on the fencepost about what they were saying, deaf to Pamela’s remark that I would get splinters on my behind. She departed with the others, and I was thus the first to see the little cloud of dust that signaled the approach of the old black car. In my excitement I tried to stand on the post. A shriek came from behind me—Aunt Edie had witnessed my antics. The whole crew came tumbling out the front door, and I was deprived of my sentinel’s prize. But it didn’t matter, for the rattletrap was chugging toward us with three young heads in the back now, Tom sandwiched between Philip and Isabella. We waved and shouted. Uncle Kurt stood next to me and held me steady on the post, laughing his contagious, gunfire laugh. Tom was getting a Hatfield Special.
The rattletrap pulled to a halt, and the rear door closest to us flew open, creaking on its hinges. There was a moment when all we could see were Isabella’s endless arms and legs, flailing like a trapped octopus as she tried to get out before her brother. In the end she scrambled almost into the dust before finding her footing and scooting to one side. Her mouth was stretched in a grin that seemed to cut her face in half—she didn’t mind making a fool of herself as long as she knew why people were laughing. Philip, meanwhile, had emerged on the far side with his usual serpentine dignity. We ignored him.
Tom was luxuriating in this imperial arrival. He had enough dramatic sense to wait a second or two before following Isabella. Then he slithered out feet first. He was still wearing his student’s outfit of white shirt and tweed suit. We fell silent. I was leaning against Uncle Kurt’s shoulder. Tom stood next to the car, squinting from the sun. Like Isabella and Delia, he had light brown hair that sat atop a comfortable, snub-nosed face. But he, much more than his sisters, had inherited his father’s handsomeness. He was magnetically attractive, and now he stood before us, allowing us to drink in the sight of him.
“Hi, everyone,” he said, waving a sheepish hand.
Such casual words—and yet, to me, they were the beginning of everything.
2
Croquet
The morning after he arrived, Tom proved our theories about his talent for action by suggesting a family tournament of croquet. We were all in the kitchen, eating breakfast in the Hatfield fashion, which was to come at will and linger for as long as the food held out. My mother and Margery usually prepared the meals, Rose being too lazy and Edie too pernickety to do well in the culinary realm.
“Is there a croquet set here?” Charlie asked. “I’ve never seen one.”
“You’ve never looked,” said Aunt Margery. “Of course there’s one. We played croquet all the time when we were young, didn’t we, Caroline?”
“I remember perhaps one or two games,” my mother replied, smiling.
We found the set in one of the closets by the kitchen, a forgotten hideaway filled with antique sports equipment. Charlie crowed over an ancient baseball bat, and I located a bag of heavy balls that no one could identify. A few days later I asked Uncle Kurt about them, and he said they were bocce balls. He offered to teach me how to play but never did, so they remained a mystery until much later in the summer. Tom, of course, found the croquet bag, a big, unwieldy, canvas sack full of sharp wickets and clattering mallets. In uncov
ering the bag he threw a pile of litter into the room behind him, and Delia Robierre picked up an ancient kerosene lantern, stained with age. “What’s this?” she asked, amused to find a reminder of the age of gas lighting—which, in those days, was not so many years in the past. But Tom had no time for distractions, and the lantern was returned to the closet with all the other paraphernalia.
“Outside, everyone!” he ordered. He had a way of taking command that made us forget how short he was, how slender and insignificant his boy’s figure appeared as he strode onto the lawn. Only next to Uncle Kurt, who was so obviously a man, did his leadership falter. Kurt would have played, I was sure, but he was still in bed, recovering from the hunting expedition, which, according to Uncle Cedric, had been tiring for all concerned. That hadn’t stopped either Cedric or Frank from being present at the opening of the grand tournament, but, in typical fashion, they said they would sit by the sidelines and produced lawn chairs to carry out this plan.
“Lemonade for our parched throats, sun hats for our balding heads, lawn chairs for our tired legs—it’s all we need,” Uncle Frank declared.
“Anyone would think you were two twittering old aunties,” Francesca said.
“I don’t believe any child coming from the Hatfield family should describe an aunt as a twitterer,” Cedric replied. He had a dry monotone that perfectly set off his careful jokes.
Francesca laughed and turned around to demand the first mallet.
“There are only six,” Tom said.
“Play in pairs,” my mother suggested. “We often did that.”
“We don’t want to play,” the Delias said. They spoke in unison with uncanny frequency, standing next to each other, pale and dark, stocky and skinny, straight-haired and curly-haired, and each grinning the same Cheshire-cat grin, as if between the two of them they were hiding a raft of secrets.
Shorecliff Page 3