Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Fisher said. “I love to see land unrolled like that, as if someone were showing me a giant map. Doesn’t it make you feel powerful?” He glanced at me as I nodded. Then he said, “How’s your head? Is the sun too strong?”

  “No, I like it. Can we walk across the field?”

  “Let’s have lunch here.”

  We sat on the grass, half in the shade of two maples towering above us, and Fisher laid out our sandwiches and cookies on the linen napkin my mother had provided as if we were sitting down to a formal meal. He unscrewed the tops of both water bottles and put one in front of each of us.

  “How’s that for a meal?”

  “The best I ever saw.”

  “I’m just as hungry, pal.”

  As we ate, Fisher and I had a philosophical conversation. Normally he wasn’t one to talk, but that day he plied me with questions. No one could help being comfortable with Fisher, but at the same time I felt tense because I wanted so much to give him the right answers. I remember thinking, “I don’t even know what he means,” and then taking a stab at it, looking at him to make sure I’d said what he wanted. From his expression you would have thought I was the perfect companion, but I couldn’t feel the same confidence in myself.

  “What’s your opinion of all this, Richard?” he asked, munching.

  “All what?”

  “Oh, all this—Shorecliff, the family, your crazy cousins. You like it?”

  “Sure I do. I love it! Being here with all of you is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “Really? Are you having fun?”

  “Yes, every day!”

  “You don’t go to boarding school, do you?”

  “No.” I knew he did, but I was too shy to ask him about it. I couldn’t tell whether his question meant that I didn’t know what I was missing or that I didn’t know how much I should appreciate the summer.

  “I wish I could remember that birdcall.” He spent a few minutes whistling and then glanced at me again with the endearing, hangdog smile that charmed everyone. “Sometimes I wish I could stay in the woods all day with some kind of sound recorder and get all the calls. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I don’t know a lot of birdcalls.”

  “But doing something like that is just an example. I mean really focusing on something until you understand it—even if it’s just a little thing.”

  I had no idea what he meant and offered only silence as an answer. After a few moments, looking around the fields, I was inspired to ask what I thought was an adult question. “So what do you think of Lorelei?” I asked, taking a manly sip of water.

  “Lorelei? I think she’s very nice. I’m glad Tom is friends with her.”

  “She doesn’t talk much.”

  “Neither do I. Neither do you, for that matter.” He smiled at me, and I pondered the idea that I might be a silent type.

  “Richard, doesn’t it seem like this summer is going by too fast?”

  “How many more weeks?”

  “Oh, thousands. But I mean, here we are, and the days keep going by. I always think the future is so far away, but one day I’ll wake up and there it will be. What then, buddy?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think will happen?”

  “Well, you know, one day I made this carving in Dad’s workshop. At least, I wanted to do this carving, and of course it didn’t look at all the way I wanted, but it was supposed to be this man stepping out of a patch of woods and coming up against a big wall—bam, right in front of him. Sort of like us coming out of these woods, only instead of fields you have to picture a wall. A nice wall, maybe a brick wall or one of those Italian walls that you can picture around a villa or something. And in the wall there was supposed to be a door, a little curved door in the wall. Can you picture it?”

  “Yes,” I said, mystified.

  “Well, there you go. The future seems like that to me sometimes, a mysterious door in a wall. You don’t have to open it now, but someday you’ll have to because there won’t be anywhere else to go, and who knows what’s on the other side? It might even be disappointing.” He paused. “Of course the carving didn’t come out. Dad says you have to be trained to carve pictures like that. He says it’s a form of sculpture. I think he likes me to do it, but he also says it would be more practical for me to stick to furniture. I hate the lathe, though. Have you ever used a lathe?”

  “No.”

  “Everyone says it’s so satisfying and smooth. I think it feels like cheating.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’s no good telling you that if you’ve never used one. Someday you’ll have to come visit, and then Dad and Charlie and I can show you around the shop. Charlie’s really good, you know. Better than I am.”

  “I bet he’s not.”

  Fisher grinned at me. “He’s got four more years of experience, so of course he is. You want to keep going?”

  “Where are we going to go?”

  “Oh, I thought we could wander through this field toward the farmhouse. Maybe we could go visit Lorelei.”

  “She’s with Tom. I saw them by the cliff when we were leaving the house.”

  “Oh, that’s right, I remember. Well, let’s go through the field anyway, to explore.” Fisher stood up, packed up our lunch materials, and headed down one of the dirt alleys in the field nearest us. I was quiet, thinking about our conversation. It didn’t make much sense to me, but nevertheless it left a vivid impression, as if I had been presented with a view into a box that had always before been locked. I couldn’t understand what I’d seen, but I had still gotten the chance to look, and it made me feel grown-up and unsettled.

  We’d walked about halfway through the field, and I was wondering if it would be acceptable for me to say that I felt like going back, when Fisher turned to me and said, “Let’s give that old telescope a try. Since we have it, we might as well use it.”

  I had been carrying the telescope in my hand, its brass cylinder becoming warm and sweaty in my grasp. I gave it to him now, after wiping it on my shirt. He swept the far horizon over the wheat field and then gave it to me.

  “It’s an excellent instrument. Did your father give it to you?”

  “My mother,” I replied, holding the telescope to my eye.

  “Is your father ever coming up here to visit?”

  “I hope not.” I didn’t want to talk about my father, but I also didn’t want to tell Fisher not to talk about him, so I remained silent and hoped he would get the message.

  I examined the farmhouse through the telescope and then moved it in a long arc across the plowed field to look at the haystacks. At the base of one of them, indiscernible to us without the aid of the telescope, Tom and Lorelei were sitting side by side, huddling together to keep in the shade of the stack. Tom had his arm around Lorelei, and she was half looking at him and half looking down. She had on a bright green peasant skirt. As I got them into focus, Tom leaned over and started kissing her. I watched for five seconds and then felt scared. My heart started pounding.

  “There are Tom and Lorelei,” I said, handing the telescope to Fisher as if including him in the viewing would make it less of a violation. “They’re over there under that haystack. We can’t see them without the telescope because of the sun.”

  “I don’t see them,” said Fisher, swinging the telescope. “Where are—oh, I see. Look at that! I didn’t know they were coming back to the farm.” He watched in silence for a moment and then let out a low, knowing laugh that made me instantly jealous. I wanted to take the telescope, and I also wanted to interrogate him. I had never thought of Fisher in connection with sex before.

  “I guess we should leave them alone, boy scout. Let’s go back, what do you say?”

  He gave me the telescope. Of course after he had said we should leave them alone, I couldn’t use it again, but I kept my eyes riveted on the haystack in question.

  “Let’s go visit Condor. Come on,
Richard.”

  On our return to the woods we walked in single file. I couldn’t bring myself to forget about Tom and Lorelei, and I kept turning around in a futile effort to see them. My interest in Fisher, however, revived once we reached the trees. As we strolled toward Condor’s cottage, he entertained me with an extensive nature lesson, sometimes jokingly imitating a naturalist instructing his pupil, sometimes lapsing into his normal tones and telling me about the lives of birds and insects with as much excitement as I would have used when telling my friends about my cousins. The lesson made me love Fisher more than ever. I was filled with envy at the fact that he had another, fully satisfactory world to retire into when ours became too troublesome.

  Condor’s cottage was a dark building of weathered wood and black roof shingles. It was one story, and though it had many windows, it stood in the midst of a dense group of tall pines and thus was always shadowy inside. The cottage was an ideal setting for Condor, not to mention Uncle Eberhardt. The two men were about the same age and entirely disparate in size. Whereas Uncle Eberhardt, with the voluminous black cape on his back, seemed like a withered bat about to drop from its perch, Condor was a giant with the chest of an ox. He had so many muscles, and they were so crabbed from years of labor, that he appeared to have no neck, an enormous humpback, and spindly legs under his gargantuan torso. Yet in spite of these deformities he did not look like a hideous monster but rather like a mythic hero, aged now and not well enough to go on the road in search of hydras and sea monsters, but still a man of unlimited physical ability. His face was reddened and cracked, his features squashed into the center of it. His eyes were a penetrating blue. Francesca once surprised me by saying that Condor as a young man must have been devastatingly handsome. I’m sure he was, but to me it seemed like sacrilege, even in thought, to deprive him of his age and wisdom.

  Condor and Uncle Eberhardt were inseparable. They were almost as bad as the Delias, and from what my mother told me, they had been like that for decades. She could not remember a summer when it had not been most probable for Eberhardt to be found in Condor’s cottage. Condor had been hired by my grandparents when he was still a young man and they were a newly married couple, giddily wealthy, thrilled to be buying an extravagant summerhouse. In that same conversation about Condor, Francesca declared that Grandmother Hatfield had had an affair with him and that Uncle Kurt and my mother were the result. This was patently absurd, since both of them were Hatfields to the bone, but the suggestion unnerved me, so much so that Isabella beckoned me away to assure me that Francesca was an oversexed maniac who thought about nothing but her own insatiable lust. Not surprisingly, this explanation did not enlighten me. The word “oversexed” wasn’t even in my dictionary, though at that point in the summer any word with “sex” in it triggered an alarm bell in my mind.

  When Fisher and I arrived at the cottage, we found the door locked and the curtains drawn across the windows. Fisher knocked at the door, and from within we heard Eberhardt’s cracked, shrill voice shouting at us. “Keep away, whoever you are! If it’s one of you damn kids, go shove your snout somewhere else. You’re not wanted.” A low rumble sounded in response to this—Condor’s voice was unintelligible through the closed door. Then the knob rattled, the bolt shot back, and Condor appeared in the doorframe, bending to fit his head under the lintel, squinting from the sunlight. He was wearing, as he always wore, a spotlessly pressed dress shirt of a delicate pastel hue; that day it was mint green. I have no idea why Condor insisted on wearing the clothes a rich tycoon might have worn on his yacht in the Caribbean, but whenever he wasn’t working, he changed into his duck trousers and Oxford shirts. He had a Panama hat for the sun and a sporty fisherman’s sweater for colder days.

  “Hello, boys,” he growled. “How are you today?”

  “We’re very well, thank you,” said Fisher. “We just came to visit you and Uncle Eberhardt. If you’re busy, we can leave.”

  “We’re not exactly busy, but we have a surprise that I’m sure you’ll like.”

  Condor gestured us into the room. In the far corner, lit by a feeble desk lamp, Eberhardt crouched on a rickety stool, staring into a box on the floor. He looked more like a bat than ever, his knees sticking up to his chest and his elbows out at his sides.

  “Well, you’re in now, aren’t you?” he sneered when Condor shut the door behind us, cutting out almost all the light. “You’ll have to share in our little surprise. You like surprises, boy?” he asked me.

  I couldn’t decide whether or not he had really forgotten my name. “Yes, Uncle Eberhardt,” I said.

  “You’ll love this one. Condor found it in the woods. It’s not a good sign. A very bad sign. We’re going to have to kill it.” He leaned forward when he said these last words and grinned at us, revealing teeth which, in spite of the fact that he showed enthusiasm about food only during the dessert course, had remained straight and healthy into his old age. The combination of his thin, cracked lips and gleaming horse teeth was very disconcerting.

  Even Fisher was taken aback by Eberhardt’s latest pronouncement. He stuttered, “K-kill what, Uncle Eberhardt?”

  Eberhardt let out a high-pitched chuckle and bent over the box. “Kids!” he muttered.

  “We’re not going to kill it,” Condor reassured us. “Eberhardt knows that perfectly well. Would you like to see? I found it in the woods. I think its mother and siblings have all been killed or starved to death. Old Farmer Stephenson may have shot the mother.”

  He gestured toward the box, and Fisher and I, sidling around to avoid touching Eberhardt’s cape, peered in. Cowering at the bottom was a minuscule red fox, clearly a young kit, its huge, sail-like ears flattened over its back; you could see the blood vessels in them through the skin. The kit was staring up at us with widened yellow eyes, terrified to the point of petrification. I didn’t think it was cute at all. I had no impulse to pet it or goggle over it. The expression in its eyes made me feel lost and angry. Uncle Kurt had recently told me the story of being surrounded in the forest by German soldiers, and it occurred to me that he and his companions must have felt the way the little fox felt now.

  “Are you going to set him free?” I said. I had to speak around a lump in my throat, which was extremely embarrassing, and I backed away so that I wouldn’t have to look into the fox’s eyes anymore.

  “Of course not!” Eberhardt snapped. “We’ve only just caught it!”

  “It would starve in the wild,” Condor said. “And besides, Farmer Stephenson is quick on the trigger and just as likely to shoot kits as vixens. It’s better if we keep it here and raise it as a tame fox. People do, you know. I’ve always wanted one.”

  I would have been more touched by this revelation of sentimentality in Condor if I hadn’t bent forward just then to look at the fox again. “He’s like…”

  “Yes, what is he like, Richard?”

  “He’s like—a little lost soldier,” I said, stammering because I was about to cry.

  Fisher put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Little Lost Soldier,” Eberhardt repeated, scrutinizing me. “An interesting epithet. Little Lost Soldier. His name is Barnavelt—I named him the moment I saw him—but you’ve come up with a good secondary name. You may be a more worthwhile child than the rest of those louts.” Fisher smiled at this, and Eberhardt, with his usual perspicacity, saw him do it. “You’re not included,” he said. “I’ve always known you were a bright boy. Don’t think I don’t notice just because I don’t care.”

  “Thanks for that,” Fisher answered. Sometimes he trod a surprising line between awkwardness and self-assurance.

  “Now then, Richard,” Condor said. “You were right in saying he’s like a little soldier. That fox is a fighter, and he’s not going to die of fright. He’s scared now, but he’s not going to be scared for long. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “But he’s young!” I said. I wanted to add, “Like me.”

  “All soldiers are young,” said Eberha
rdt. “Look at your Uncle Harold—picked off before he was out of his diapers, practically. Kurt came back still talking baby talk.”

  Condor took me by the hand—his own hand, the size of a small ham, engulfing mine—and led me into the tiny bedroom that opened off the main room. “You too, Fisher. And you, Eberhardt. Come in here. I’m going to show Richard something that I think will reassure him.”

  Eberhardt flapped a hand, but Condor repeated his request, and eventually the old man staggered into the bedroom with us and sat down on the bed. The fox was left alone in the living room. Condor went to the kitchen and came back with a saucer of milk. “I’m going to put this on the floor,” he said to me, “and then I’m going to tip the box gently on its side. You see how long it takes the fox to find the milk. Hide behind the doorframe now.”

  We hid, and Condor in the main room set down the saucer and slowly tilted the box until it was lying on its side. I imagined the fox slithering down and watching his view change. Condor retreated into the bedroom, and we watched. For a few minutes nothing happened. Then we saw a little black nose surrounded by whiskers poking out of the box. It was followed by the whole foxy face, complete with outsized ears. The fox sniffed, still quivering, looking disproportionately small in the dark room. Another few minutes passed before it emerged from the box, but soon after that it crept up to the saucer, nudged at the blue china, and then lapped cautiously at the milk. After the first few laps it set to work in earnest, and we could see its little sides heaving. When it was finished and looking around the room, I said, “Now it will be cold.”

  “You’re a natural caretaker, Richard. I’m planning to put a blanket on the bottom of that box so he can curl up at night. Are you satisfied now?”

  “I guess so,” I said, shrugging. But I wasn’t really. I still thought there was something not very nice about the whole business. On the other hand, I had seen that the fox was eating on its own and becoming curious about its surroundings. The blank fear was gone, and I relaxed.