God knows what they talked about on that half-hour drive to town. When I imagined Charlie and Francesca in the rattletrap, I could picture their faces and postures and expressions, but the words themselves were inaudible. Charlie was in the driver’s seat, his big athlete’s hands clasping the wheel in what was meant to be a casual, experienced way, though inside he must have been thrilled by driving, not to mention by the beauty in the passenger seat. Francesca would have been lounging beside him, stretching her glorious legs, insinuating herself all over the seat, maybe even putting her arm across his shoulders, and then ruining her own effect with the spontaneous, rippling laugh that was such an essential part of her seductive powers. The contrast between her attempts to be an enchantress and her mockery of those same attempts made her absolutely irresistible. Certainly Charlie couldn’t withstand her. His blond hair plastered to his red face, he laughed at her, egged her on, and reveled in every second of her attention—though he probably didn’t take it any more seriously than she did, at least not in those early days.
In spite of Francesca’s enthusiasm, Pensbottom was not the ideal scene for excitement, and a letdown was inevitable. Besides the train station, the town boasted a cluster of residential houses, a post office, a market, a general goods store, a church, and one strange and pathetic attempt at a museum that was nothing more than a converted colonial house. The place had none of the invigorating fresh air of a seaside village and none of the clean, wholesome friendliness of a Midwestern settlement. It was just a backwoods town, filled with uninteresting inhabitants—though my view, of course, was colored by years of Hatfield scorn. In any case, there was nothing for two young adventurers to do there. In that respect it was greatly inferior to the beach.
When Charlie and Francesca arrived in Pensbottom, they drove to the train station, partly out of habit and partly because it was the first turnoff when coming from Shorecliff. They rattled along until they had reached the tracks, and then, somewhat uncertainly, Charlie switched off the engine. They listened for a while to the total silence that enveloped the town. The stationhouse was dark and abandoned, the platform equally so. Not a single person roamed the village.
“Well,” said Francesca, turning to Charlie, “what do we do?” At that moment, Francesca later reported, they both felt like “incredible idiots.” Nevertheless, they held on to enough of their enthusiasm to get out and explore. They left the rattletrap by the station, thinking it would be the best place to stage a getaway if one became necessary, and went into town on foot.
“If only there were a nightclub—or a speakeasy,” Francesca sighed.
“Why, what would you do if there was one?” Charlie asked.
“I’d stroll up and say, ‘Give me a martini with a twist, bartender.’” She smiled and sashayed to Charlie’s side. Then she broke the pose, chuckling. “That’s my mother’s drink of choice.”
“My mother doesn’t drink,” replied Charlie.
“What a surprise—Aunt Margery isn’t a drinker. Let’s go, Charlie.”
When Isabella was telling me the story, she said, “Of course they wouldn’t really have gone into a speakeasy.” But I wasn’t so sure. Alcohol loomed large in our family as a vice abhorred by the aunts above all others—I wasn’t sure why, except that they disapproved of intemperance in general. But Francesca, I knew, was capable of anything, so the fact that Prohibition was still in place made the story much more comfortable.
The destination Charlie and Francesca finally decided on was comic in its contrast with illegal drinking establishments. When they turned onto Main Street, they saw the steeple of the church, and Charlie said, “Do you want to see if it’s open?”
“Are you planning to desecrate the altar?” Francesca asked.
“Of course not.” Charlie was genuinely insulted at her question. “I just want to see what it’s like inside.”
“Does that count as breaking in?”
“You can’t break into a church. They’re open to everybody. I think.”
“But what if we’re caught?”
“We’ll say we wanted to come in to find shelter and pray.”
“For our lost parents,” Francesca giggled.
The church was a typical Protestant house of worship, an austere white building that looked gray in the darkness, with a squat steeple and wide front steps leading up to double doors. The doors weren’t locked, and Charlie and Francesca slipped in without making a sound. The inside was lit only by the faint glow coming through the windows, and since the moon was a crescent that night, it was almost impossible to see anything. They walked slowly down the aisle, keeping their hands on the pews to guide them and getting an impression of a lot of open space over their heads. Their eyes adjusted eventually, but Francesca said there wasn’t much to see. By the far wall was a white altar.
According to Isabella, Francesca told this part of the story very seriously, as if something important and meaningful had happened in the church. “She said it was as if a woolen quilt had fallen all around them, muffling them from the outside world. A great peace settled on her soul, and she felt a contentment she had never felt before. At the same time she felt uplifted, as if she were expanding to fill the church, and a light seemed to shine in her mind!”
“Did she really say all that?” I knew perfectly well Francesca would never have said anything of the sort.
“Well, no,” said Isabella, breaking from her narration. “I got that from a book I read once where the character converts to the Catholic Church. That’s exactly what it feels like when you convert, at least according to that book.”
“But Francesca wasn’t converting. What did she actually say?”
“She just said that it was silent and peaceful and that it killed their mood completely, but she still didn’t want to leave.”
“That’s more like it.”
“You have no flair for the dramatic, Richard.”
After a moment or two Charlie turned to Francesca and said, “It’s pretty solemn in here, isn’t it? Sort of gives me the creeps.”
Francesca smiled ruefully. “It’s certainly put a damper on the night anyway. Should we leave?”
“No. I like it in here.”
“So do I. But,” she added with an effort, “we can’t stand around here all night doing nothing. What would we tell the others?”
When Charlie and Francesca closed the door behind them and stood on the church portico, they felt as one does after emerging from a cave or a musty old house—as if the outside air has never been so fresh. All their excitement came rushing back redoubled.
“Let’s take the town by storm!” Charlie said.
Francesca was laughing at this idea as they made their way down the steps, and so she didn’t notice the man standing at the bottom. Neither cousin had seen him. He took her arm with the abruptness of a ghost appearing in a movie.
“Hey, you kids!” he said. “What are you doing in the church at this hour?”
First Francesca screamed—“like a stupid schoolgirl,” she told Isabella. But then her better nature recovered itself. She jerked her arm out of the man’s grasp and said, “We were praying for our dead parents!” before breaking into a storm of laughter.
“Run!” roared Charlie, and they pelted down the street.
The man ran after them, shouting at them to stop, and lights started flicking on in a few windows over the shops. At first the man called them “kids,” but then Charlie heard him shout, “Church vandals!” and started to get worried.
“We didn’t take anything—honest!” he yelled, not slowing down. He told Francesca to hold her hands out so the man could see there was nothing in them.
“We looked like two chickens who had just been axed,” Francesca told Isabella. “There we were, running with our heads down and our hands waving on either side of us. We looked like a couple of ninnies.” Her eyes were shining as she said it. That chase down Main Street had made the whole trip worthwhile. “It’s not every night you’r
e accused of vandalizing a church,” she said.
When the man saw their empty hands he slowed down, and then another man appeared in a doorway and called, “What’s going on, Charlie?”
“That nearly foiled us,” Francesca said later. “Charlie, idiot that he is, skids to a halt. It never occurred to him that he has a ridiculously common name. I don’t think the men noticed, though. So I grabbed him and kept on running.”
As they turned the corner to go to the train station, they heard the other Charlie saying, “A couple of kids goofing around in the church, damn their eyes. It’s shameless behavior, shameless.”
“Did you see their faces?” said the second man.
“No, I didn’t get a good look at them. The girl has a head of dark curly hair, though. And the boy’s blond.”
That was all Charlie and Francesca heard before the buildings cut them off from the street, but in all likelihood the next words were “Some of the Hatfield crew, I’d bet. Good-for-nothing rich brats.”
They arrived at the rattletrap panting and laughing. The night had been a success, and all they needed now was a clean getaway. They leapt into the car, the doors screeching on their hinges as they banged them shut, and Charlie started the engine.
Francesca told Isabella that they laughed like lunatics all the way back, and I was even more envious of that ride home than I had been of their ride toward Pensbottom. There are few things more satisfying than reliving danger when it is safely over. No car followed them on the road out to Shorecliff, no shouts or horns threatened to cut short their victory. Indeed they passed no car on the road at all—the route to Shorecliff almost never saw any traffic. Charlie drove at a slick pace. He was so wound up that he pressed hard on the accelerator and made it to Shorecliff in a record twenty-five minutes.
But when they pulled up at the fence and turned the engine off, they weren’t laughing anymore. The lights in Shorecliff were ablaze, and they knew they hadn’t gotten away with anything.
“It was the most crushing disappointment,” Francesca said later, and as Isabella told me the story I could feel the apprehension that must have hit Francesca and Charlie when they saw the lights shining over the lawn. It was not as if they were going to face one or two angry parents: up to nine adults might be waiting for them, reprimands at the ready.
“The first thing I wondered,” said Francesca, “was how they could have found out. I assumed that someone had checked our beds—or maybe that someone had ratted.” Here she gave Isabella a murderous glance and then laughed. “Not really, of course. I didn’t think for a moment of what it actually was. And that made it ten times more awful. Especially when Aunt Caroline described going downstairs. But anyway,” she added, pounding her fist on the bed, “let them scream! It was worth it. We had a wonderful night.”
What had happened at Shorecliff was as follows. No one had woken up to check on Francesca or Charlie. Isabella, after lying in bed for half an hour thinking of all the adventures they might have, had fallen into delightful dreams. The house got bigger at night, in the darkness and the silence. The rooms expanded into gargantuan caverns, and time moved more slowly. Even the curtains in the open windows seemed to billow against the sills at half speed. Everyone was asleep.
Then, in all that silence, the phone began to ring. Only the adults could hear it; the children on the third floor were too far away. Even imagining that shrill sound in the dead of night gave me the creeps. The number at Shorecliff was, of course, private. But the fact that the house had only one phone and that it was situated in the ornate wooden booth in the hall gave the illusion of its being a public phone. Everyone knows how mysterious it is to hear a public phone ring on the street, and when we received calls at Shorecliff the effect was reproduced on an only slightly less startling scale. During the day, we could easily laugh off the sensation that the outside world was reaching in to disrupt us; most of the time one cousin or another would dash over and snatch up the receiver after the second ring. But to hear that phantom phone ringing in the middle of the night was another matter. My mother said it jerked her out of a sound sleep. She lay rigid, willing it to stop. In a few minutes Aunt Margery appeared in her doorway and whispered, “Caroline? Who could be calling us at this hour?”
“I’ll answer it,” said my mother. She was very brave, that summer and always. I’ve never known her to turn from a crisis. But the ringing phone rattled her all the way to her bones. She couldn’t get rid of a dread that flooded through her from the first ring. As she walked down the stairs, her fears crystallized into a certainty that the phone was ringing to inform her of my father’s death. It was even more courageous of her to keep walking toward what she thought was her own bereavement, but she did, faster than ever so she could get the shock over with.
She felt an overpowering relief when she picked up the receiver and heard, after the operator’s mumbled introduction, an angry man’s voice saying, “Is that the Hatfields’ place? This is Charlie Ballantine. Two of your brood have just broken into our church.” It took her several moments and more than one repetition before she grasped what he was talking about, but at last she understood. The relief she felt at my father’s still being alive quelled most of the anger she would have felt toward Francesca and Charlie. For a long time after she hung up the phone, having apologized profusely and promised an in-person apology from the children the next day, she sat on the bench in the phone booth and rested her head against the glass.
But it occurred to her, while she was sitting there, that she had fallen in with Charlie Ballantine’s accusations without making any attempt to defend her own family. This realization energized her. She raced up the stairs, knocked on Francesca’s door, and flung it open. When she saw the empty bed, she knew at once that Mr. Ballantine’s description—“two young hooligans, the girl dark-haired, the boy blond, obviously Hatfields!”—had been correct. “The most awful thing,” she told Francesca later, “was that it didn’t occur to me to doubt what he’d said. I knew you were so careless and reckless that it was not only possible but probable that you’d gone off to Pensbottom in the middle of the night.”
My mother had just enough time to rouse the other adults—with the exception of Uncle Eberhardt, who refused to leave his bed—and gather them in the kitchen before the rattletrap returned. Even Uncle Kurt was there, sleepy and resentful in his blue pajamas, his hair sticking straight up. He told me later that it had taken “a hell of a long time” for Francesca and Charlie to enter the house after they’d gotten out of the car. “But I’m not surprised,” he said with a grin. “Something like that happened to me once in the army, and when you’re heading toward trouble from a superior, nothing can speed up your feet.”
With half-frightened, half-defensive expressions, the two delinquents finally slunk into the kitchen. By this time most of the children had woken up, and they were ranged on the second floor by the stairwell, listening with all their might. The only ones still in bed were Yvette and the Delias, who sometimes slept through uproars, much to their dismay. I was there, clutching the railings of the banister. As soon as I woke up I gravitated toward Isabella as the person most likely to tell me what was going on. In a moment she had acquainted me with the main points of the case, and I strained to hear the rise and fall of the rebukes for so heinous an offense.
Aunt Rose was the one who began the scolding. Aunt Margery had tried to claim the role of spokesperson, but it had been decided in a hurried colloquy that she would overstate the case and become too agitated. Aunt Edie was rejected for the same reasons, to her annoyance. Charlie told Tom later that even though he had been “terrified” during that hour in the kitchen, the sight of Aunt Edie’s embroidered nightcap was so absurd that he kept wanting to burst out laughing. “I guess it was mostly just nervousness,” he said, “but, my God, she looked like a bad-tempered mushroom in that cap!”
The first question Aunt Rose asked was “Did you just drive to Pensbottom and break into the church?”
&
nbsp; Both cousins had too much sense to deny the charge, and they nodded. Francesca said, “We didn’t break in. The door was open.” Then she asked what both of them had been dying to know ever since they’d seen the lights: “How did you find out?” She told Isabella that it had seemed for an awful moment as if the aunts had witchcraft on their side.
My mother answered. “Charlie Ballantine called just now and said he saw two Hatfield children emerging from the church and acting very disrespectfully on the steps. Do you know Mr. Ballantine?”
After a moment Francesca shuffled her feet and said, “He must have been that other Charlie, Charlie. The one who was running after us.”
“Running after you?” Aunt Margery repeated, her voice rising. “You started a chase?”
“Not on purpose!” Francesca protested. “We weren’t doing anything—really! We just wanted to go into Pensbottom, and we stepped into the church, but we didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”
“You haven’t even begun to get into trouble about the car,” Rose said.
Her warning started a barrage of adult commentary. “You’ve been unbelievably irresponsible,” wailed Aunt Margery.
“Do you think we make up rules just to bother you?” asked my mother.
“I’m disappointed in you, Charlie,” Uncle Frank said, adding the first man’s voice to the clamor.
“Damn stupid,” said Uncle Cedric.
“If you’re going to do something dumb, at least don’t get caught,” Uncle Kurt said, and he couldn’t resist smiling. That turned the scolding onto him. The adults shushed him violently, and for a few moments Francesca and Charlie thought they were going to get off lightly.
Finally Rose waved a hand. “Let’s get the facts straight,” she said. “Charlie Ballantine said that you, Francesca, claimed to have been praying for your dead parents in the church. Is this true?”
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