“You must have outdone yourself in Portland this time, my boy,” Frank was saying. “Normally a man like you wouldn’t think twice about waking up for a six o’clock train.”
“Well, you know.” Uncle Kurt chuckled, and there was something strange in the laugh, a bit of shame, a bit of discomfort. I recognized the sound I would have made if I had done something bad in school and were trying to laugh it off.
“I just don’t see how you couldn’t have done better than ten with my money,” Uncle Cedric said after a pause. “That was a precious fifty dollars I gave you, especially since I had to snatch it from under Rose’s nose. Where was your legendary skill?”
“I did the best I could, all right?”
“Well, it seems like a lot of trouble to go through just for ten bucks.”
“I’m content with getting sixty back for my fifty,” Uncle Frank said. “After all, it’s easy enough for us, Cedric. Give the man some slack.”
“I always keep your money in the small but safe games.” Kurt cleared his throat, and I felt even more acutely that he was experiencing some species of discomfort—regret or remorse or humiliation.
“What is it, Kurt?” Cedric asked. “Where’s your own money?”
“To tell you the truth, fellows, I lost it all. And then some.” The last phrase he added in an undertone. “With my own money I just can’t resist the big chance. After all, a dollar here and a dollar there… The long and short of it is I got myself into a high-stakes game.”
I heard an intake of breath. “Have you got anything left?” Uncle Frank asked.
“Not a cent.” False heartiness laced Kurt’s voice. “But don’t worry. A little debt never hurt anyone. I’ll win it all back soon enough. I think I’ve found a good place now—reliable and honest, which is the important thing. If I hadn’t been so distracted, I wouldn’t have lost it in the first place. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll—”
“Distracted by what?”
“Oh, well… There’s a girl involved with the place, and I—well, I got distracted. You know how it is.”
“You lost your money because you were messing around with some floozy? Exactly what kind of a place was it?” Uncle Cedric said.
“Cedric, I hear that tone of disapproval. The day has been too long for me to be told I’ve been a bad boy.”
There was a silence. Then Cedric said, “You’re right. I worry about you, but in the end it’s none of my business. A man your age has the right to do what he wants.”
“I wish I knew why you’ve been staying cooped up here all summer—” Uncle Frank began.
Uncle Kurt cut him off. “We’ve been over this before, Frank. There are the kids to think about, and the fact that I like being at Shorecliff, and the importance of my work and how much I get done here. But the main point is that if I weren’t here the girls would want to know why. They’d find out somehow—you know how they are. And can you imagine Rose condoning all this? Certainly not. She’d remember Eberhardt. She’d compare me with Loretta. She’d run the whole gamut of accusation, and Margery and Caroline would back her up.”
“Where are they all, anyway?” Frank said. “I thought they’d stay up to tell us how late it is.”
“The real truth is you’re ashamed,” Cedric broke in. “And I am too, God knows. I wish I’d never gone along with it.”
“No more sermons, I said!”
I had been shivering for a good while, and now I felt as if I were about to cry. My heart was pounding so loudly I was sure it would rattle the bench of the phone booth, but the uncles continued talking until their conversation dwindled into the mundane, and eventually they plodded upstairs. As they went, a scattering of pigs emerged from the upper floors. I discovered later that I had been the only pig on the first floor and thus the only person close enough to hear their conversation. Bedroom lights flicked on, and Tom, peering down from the third floor and seeing the uncles, bellowed that the game was over and tore down to greet them.
I emerged from the phone booth, trying not to listen as Uncle Kurt described the deer that got away. Cedric and Frank were loaded down with rabbits and pheasants, and when I got upstairs I found that Uncle Kurt was holding a bag of game too. I didn’t speak, even when Kurt smiled at me and said hello. The other cousins ignored me. I went to my mother, who had come out of her bedroom in her wonderful yellow nightgown, and told her I was very tired and wanted to go to bed right away. My face must have matched my words, for she felt my forehead and agreed that sleep was the best solution. Accordingly, I retired to the third floor and sat on my bed.
A huge choice now presented itself to me. In a few seconds, I had learned that Uncle Kurt, my hero, my upright soldier, spent his time away from Shorecliff at a gambling house in Portland in the company of loose women—“messing around with floozies,” in Cedric’s unforgettable words. At the time, of course, I didn’t know the term “floozy,” but I had recently gained a remarkable perspicuity about the influence of sex, and I had a good idea of what Uncle Kurt meant when he spoke about being distracted by a girl. The image I had created of Tom and Lorelei writhing in a field reappeared in my mind, only now Uncle Kurt was writhing with her, and the scene transformed into a red room with lots of tables, gilt chairs, and a glittering chandelier, and Lorelei became a woman with dark hair and blue eye shadow. I didn’t know what a gambling house looked like, but I borrowed freely from hotel lobbies I had seen—these being the most decadent places I had ever visited.
What crushed me, though, was not the gaudy cheapness of gambling halls and their denizens—as I say, I knew almost nothing about them—but the fact that I had heard in Kurt’s words his creeping shame. My uncle Kurt was someone who always told the truth; he was never afraid, and so he never had to lie. Yet here he was, lying to everyone, sneaking around because he was too embarrassed to tell us what he was really doing. That was what broke my heart.
Just thinking about him made it hard for me to breathe. I sat and heaved like a landed fish for about fifteen minutes, but the looming choice refused to leave my mind. The burden of knowledge was crushing me, and I knew that if I shared it, the weight would lessen. Yet by eavesdropping and overhearing Kurt’s secret, devastating though it was, I had acquired an obligation not to betray him. I had been so outraged by Yvette’s betrayal of Tom and Lorelei that I had vowed, while still quivering at the makeshift birthday table, never to be guilty of such treachery. Now, only a few days later, I was faced with the same temptation.
The truth was that on one level I wanted to tell simply because it would be such an astonishing revelation. I had just chanced upon what was easily the greatest remaining family secret, which would unseat one of the most adored Hatfields from his throne of virtue. How could I resist being the bearer of such stunning news? I imagined the shock on the cousins’ faces, the eagerness with which they would listen, the insistence with which they would ask for details. I knew I held in my hand a ticket for almost unlimited attention.
Yet that made the choice worse. The fact that if I did betray Kurt’s secret I would be doing it partly for glory made the treachery even more despicable. “No,” I said to myself. “I can’t do it. It’s my secret now too.” Having made the decision, I got into my pajamas, darted down the hall and back again in record toothbrushing time, and climbed into bed. My mother had given me her good-night kiss downstairs, so I expected no visitors. I lay on my back and waited to fall asleep.
As soon as I stopped moving, the uncles’ conversation replayed itself in my head. I heard again Kurt saying, “I got myself into a high-stakes game.” A month before, I wouldn’t necessarily have associated gambling with the family’s ruin, but now that Uncle Eberhardt had revealed his story, Kurt’s secret called to mind our straitened circumstances, our lost fortune and reputation, our inglorious descent from the great days of old.
Uncle Kurt himself seemed to have been replaced by another person. I couldn’t convince my mind to register his new character, to match the man I had reve
red for years with the sheepish gambler I had heard in the hall. Lying rigid in bed, I clutched the sheets with my fists. After a while I said out loud, “It can’t be true! It isn’t true!” I told myself that I had had a strange dream but had just woken up or—even better—was still in the dream. I looked at the bureau on the other side of the room and tried to believe that it was out of proportion, that my dreaming mind was distorting it. But it looked the way it always did in the moonlight, and I couldn’t persuade myself that I was asleep. Once again I heard Kurt’s awkward chuckle and pictured the scene of him with the eye-shadowed girl, surrounded by sordid luxury. “Not Uncle Kurt,” I thought. “It was someone else. Uncle Frank. I got their voices confused.”
Suddenly I thrashed under the bedspread, kicked it off, and leaped into a standing position. I threw open the door and raced down the hall, gripped by the feeling that if I didn’t tell Isabella immediately, my mind would be overwhelmed. I had forgotten that the cousins liked to congregate in her room at the end of the day, and when I burst in I found Tom, Charlie, Philip, Fisher, and the two Delias, in addition to Isabella. Pamela had gone off to join Yvette, and Francesca was cloistered in her bedroom. Desperately I sought out Isabella, who was standing by her bed, and ran to her, wanting to throw my arms around her but even in this crisis not quite daring to cross that line. Still, my entrance and frantic expression took her by surprise. The other cousins stopped talking and stared. I was breathing as raggedly as if I had run a mile down the hallway.
“What is it, Richard?” Isabella asked.
She sat on the bed and took my arm, forcing me to sit down next to her. Philip and Delia Robierre moved to one side so I could find space. I sat awkwardly, refusing to look at anyone. Isabella, sensing my distress, had taken my hand, and her touch lessened my desperation. Already I was recovering from my panic and taking a furtive pleasure in sitting so close to her and being the center of attention. I felt abruptly that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, since I would never again find the courage to clutch her hand, and I abandoned myself to an exaggerated performance of distress.
“Do you have something to tell me?” she asked.
I nodded. Then I remembered what I was agreeing to and said, raising my head, “But I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Would you like the others to leave? We can ask them to go away.”
Fisher was the only one who made any move to depart. The others glanced at him in surprise. Then Tom said, “Oh! right.” He got up too, but he couldn’t stop himself from hesitating. Watching him from under my eyelids, I saw that he wanted to hear what I was going to say. From that moment, the secret was doomed.
“No,” I said hurriedly. “No, they don’t have to leave.”
“Well, what is it then, darling?”
“It’s…a secret,” I stammered after a pause.
“Your secret?”
“No, not my secret.” I was impressed by her interrogation skills.
“Are you supposed to know about it?”
“No. I heard it by…accident. It wasn’t my fault! I couldn’t get out fast enough.”
“No one’s blaming you,” Isabella said, stroking my hair. “You’d better tell us, and then we’ll tell you what we think about it. Won’t that be best?”
I gave myself up to her coaxing. “Uncle Kurt didn’t go hunting,” I began.
That caught their attention.
“What are you talking about?” Tom asked, and I went from there. Still holding Isabella’s hand, I told them every horrible detail. I forgot that I was speaking about Uncle Kurt. I simply constructed the most suspenseful story I could manage, and the cousins repaid me with open mouths and raised eyebrows. By the end I was so enchanted at being the focal point of the room that I forgot to be upset.
“It can’t be true,” Isabella said when I had run out of things to say. I was pleased to note that her reaction was exactly what mine had been.
“Of course it’s true. Don’t be stupid,” said Philip. “It makes perfect sense. Uncle Kurt has always seemed strange, and now we know why.”
“Don’t you remember?” Delia Ybarra cut in. “That story he told me about Captain Kerrigan and the pornography. Remember how he said everyone has weaknesses? I bet he was thinking of himself.”
“It’s just as bad,” Isabella said. “Just as bad as Captain Kerrigan. It’s disgusting. It’s awful! How could he do it?”
“It’s not that bad,” said Tom, taking the part of the worldly young man. “When there are pretty girls around…”
“I’m not talking about that!” she snapped. “The point is he’s been lying all this time to our parents and to us—to everyone in the family! He’s one great big deceiver.”
“He didn’t lie to everyone,” Philip said. “Your father and Uncle Frank both knew about it. If you want to get angry, don’t forget to be mad at them too.”
Isabella shot him a furious look. “It’s not the same,” she said.
“It’s pretty rotten,” said Charlie. “Dad and Uncle Cedric must head out from Pensbottom instead of from here, after dropping Uncle Kurt at the train. It’s a long way to go, just to help Uncle Kurt lie to all of us.”
We found out later that Charlie was more or less correct: the uncles would depart from Shorecliff with a flourish, heading northwest past Cedric’s hidden meadow, and then spend the day circling over to Pensbottom so that Kurt could catch the evening train to Portland. For the next few days Cedric and Frank would hunt in the wilderness near the town, and on the last day of each trip they would return to Pensbottom, pick up Kurt, and walk along the road back to Shorecliff. The loneliness of the route served them well—none of the townspeople remarked on their brief appearances in town, and they never met anyone on their three-hour trek home. To us, however, the smoothness of their subterfuge made it even more horrifying. We were forced to view all three men as practiced liars—and Uncle Kurt as the worst of all.
“I don’t understand what Uncle Kurt was doing at the gambling house,” said Delia Robierre. “I mean, of course”—she blushed—“I know what he was doing, but where did he get the money? Why did he go? What’s the…well, what’s the point?”
“The point is he was bored,” said Philip sharply. “That’s what Francesca would say, and she’s right. They understand each other. Uncle Kurt was bored here, and he went to Portland to make sure he was still alive.”
I didn’t know how to interpret that statement, and I felt it was a little shocking to join Francesca and Uncle Kurt together. The day before I would have felt it was doing Uncle Kurt an injustice. Now the situation had been reversed.
“Should we tell Francesca?” Tom asked after a tense silence.
“No,” said Isabella. “No. We shouldn’t tell anyone. You were right, Richard dear, this is too horrible a secret.”
“Of course we’re going to tell Francesca,” Philip retorted, glaring at her. “I’d tell her now, but I don’t want to wake her up if she’s asleep. Furthermore, Isabella, what right do you have to keep this a secret? I think it’s something the aunts should know.”
“The aunts!” Isabella repeated, horrified. “But we can’t tell them!”
“Have you considered where he’s getting the money?” Philip asked. “He’s in debt right now! He doesn’t have any money of his own. He must be borrowing from the aunts and pretending it’s for something else. He’s doing just what Uncle Eberhardt did when he was young, and we can’t let him keep going!”
“But it’s not our place to tell them,” Isabella said, sounding frightened.
“How would you like to be the one to break the news to my mother?” Tom asked, more practically. “I think we should keep this to ourselves for now.”
“But we will tell Francesca,” Cordelia said. It was a moment of Ybarran tribal unity.
“Should I wake her up?” Philip asked, half rising.
“No,” said Delia. “Tell her in the morning. You know she almost never sleeps.”
That was ne
ws to me. I would have thought more about it, but with the weight of knowledge off my shoulders, I began to feel exhausted. The exhilaration of being the messenger had waned. They knew the secret now, and my status shrank back down to irrelevant youngest in the room. I wanted to lean my head on Isabella’s shoulder but didn’t dare. The moment for dramatic movement had passed.
“Richard’s tired,” she said. “I’m going to tuck him into bed.”
Charlie laughed, which I thought was insulting. I appreciated her gesture, childlike as it made me seem. And besides, any moment alone with her was one to be treasured.
“Everyone else should go to bed too,” she went on. Her voice shook a little. She was even more upset than I was, since she was able to grasp more clearly the ramifications of my discovery.
When she had escorted me to my room and tucked the covers around me, I asked, “Is everything ruined even more now? Will everyone be even more miserable?”
“Of course not,” she answered, sitting down next to me. “Everything will be all right. After all,” she added, in an attempt to comfort herself as well as me, “Uncle Kurt hasn’t changed completely. He’s still the kind, good man he was before. He just has some worse secrets than we thought. But everyone has their weaknesses.”
“You told me,” I said, remembering an incident that had happened several weeks before, “that Uncle Kurt had too many secrets of his own to have time for yours. Remember?”
Isabella laughed. “Yes, I remember. I didn’t think his secrets would be like this, though. I was thinking more of the war.”
“What are your secrets, Bella?” I asked, trying to come closer to her by using the nickname.
She looked down at me. “They’re nothing. Nothing important. They don’t really mean anything. Good night, Richard.”
“Isabella,” I said as she rose from the bed. “Should I stop going to visit Uncle Kurt in the mornings, to listen to his stories? I was looking forward—” I broke off, feeling only now, selfish brute that I was, as if tears were truly imminent.
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