Shorecliff

by Ursula Deyoung

  They disturbed no one on their way out. The rest of us were either asleep or too busy planning to hear them leave. They got to the first floor without incident, and then, as they came into the front hall, Francesca banged her shin on a doorway. “Ow! Damn it!” she cried in an aggressive whisper. “Do you have a flashlight?”

  Charlie shook his head. Most of the cousins owned flashlights, but Francesca’s was dead, and Charlie’s had been lost. “Do we really need one?” he asked. “I don’t want to risk going back up.”

  “It would be a good thing to have.”

  “Francesca, I don’t know about this.” Charlie had remembered other necessities, and the scale of the whole business was rising before him. “We’ll need money for when we get to Portland, and we’ll probably have to buy gas for the rattletrap, and we don’t know where Uncle Kurt is in the city…”

  Francesca didn’t let him get any further. “Shut up!” she hissed, grabbing his arm with fingers like talons. “I have money. There’s an extra can of gas in the back of the rattletrap. And I don’t care where Uncle Kurt is in Portland, we’ll find him!” She tightened her grip and leaned close to him, looking, he told us, almost crazed in her determination. “This isn’t some kind of game to me, all right? I’m serious. I have to get out! And I’m going.” She released him and turned around, darting into the morning room next to the kitchen. “I don’t care whether you come or not,” he heard her saying. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Of course,” Charlie said to us later, “I had to go then.” And we all agreed.

  Francesca was rummaging in the closet where we had found the croquet set at the beginning of the summer. She emerged a moment later with the lantern Delia Robierre had spotted months before. The rest of us had forgotten its existence, but Francesca’s scheming mind had filed it away as a possible resource for later adventures.

  All Charlie said was “Matches?” He was determined to rein in her enthusiasm as much as he could.

  “There are some in the kitchen,” she replied.

  Minutes later they were out the door and in the rattletrap, praying it would start without too much vehicular hemming and hawing. It occurred to Charlie that it was ridiculous for two people who had never driven to Portland to attempt the trip in the middle of the night in such a rickety automobile. The probability that they would get lost was so high that Charlie was already going over the options for finding help as he turned the car and headed past the isolated fence posts in the direction of Pensbottom. Despite the rattletrap’s rumbles and bangs, no aunts appeared at the doorway and no lights flicked on in the house. Francesca, looking back, laughed a sultry, chuckling laugh and flung her arm around Charlie.

  “They have no idea,” she said. “They have absolutely no idea.” Her tone implied that she was shaking off their ignorance as if it were mud on her shoes. From now on, she told Charlie, she would know what was going on—in her own family and in life as well. When people talked about speakeasies and gambling and drinking, she would know what they meant because she would have experienced it all herself. “There’s no other way,” she said. “It might end in disaster, but if you don’t go, you’re just a naive little fool, doing what other people tell you to do. I’m tired of having my own family pull the wool over my eyes. They’ve had us trapped there all summer and pretended we were still eight years old, but we’re leaving now, and we’ll find Uncle Kurt and show him he’s not the only one who can go to Portland. Besides, he understands how I feel. And once we’re there he won’t have any choice but to take us with him.”

  Charlie had doubts about that, but he didn’t voice them. At this point he was also hoping they would find Uncle Kurt, simply so that he could guide them through the city and offer Francesca some protection against her own wildness.

  Miraculously the two of them drove all the way to Portland without once getting lost. I could easily believe that Francesca’s determination to follow Uncle Kurt was leading her forward. They reached the city sooner—far sooner—than they should have. “I don’t understand how it happened,” Charlie told us afterward. “I must have been driving too fast. Everyone said it was two hours from Pensbottom. But we got there in two hours, all the way from Shorecliff. I don’t know…” Even then he sounded nervous. “It was as if Francesca forced us to get there faster.”

  What this meant was that it was only one-thirty in the morning when they began to walk through the busy streets, after parking the car in the city center. The dangers of a city at night, even a relatively small one like Portland, hadn’t been real to Charlie before that moment. Having grown up in a country town, he wasn’t used to the lights and clamor that fill a city through the witching hours. Francesca, hardened or believing herself hardened by a lifetime in New York, felt no fear at all. Charlie took her arm, hoping no one would think the rattletrap worth stealing, and they wandered the streets aimlessly for some time. At first they avoided eye contact with passersby and simply hunted for crowds and likely-looking buildings. After a while, however, Charlie grew desperate, and he began to ask, like the greenest yokel, which way they should turn for the speakeasies. Most of the people they asked laughed in their faces or reminded them, rivaling their innocence, that Portland had been a dry town for decades. Some looked Francesca up and down appreciatively—“That made me want to punch them out, I can tell you,” said Charlie. But one man obligingly directed them toward the waterfront, the seediest, most unsavory part of town, where the dance halls and whorehouses and backroom bars were located.

  Good luck aided them in their quest to find Uncle Kurt. He usually frequented a far more exclusive poker circle than anything Francesca and Charlie could have found. Kurt said later, to the circle of aunts who gathered to interrogate him, how fortunate it was that he had stopped first to have a drink at a more popular place, one the city authorities silently condoned. “It would have been more fortunate,” Aunt Rose responded, “if you’d gone hunting with Frank and Cedric the way you were supposed to.”

  Francesca and Charlie tried to visit four different places before they found the one where Uncle Kurt was having his quick drink. Two of these—unmarked bars that they identified by the tide of drunken voices seeping through the windows—didn’t let them in at all, and the other two were nearly empty. The novelty of the chase was wearing off by the time they got to the fifth place, a dance hall, and Charlie harbored a secret but increasingly pressing desire to give in and find a hotel where they could sleep. The full idiocy of their scheme became clear to him only as they were picking their way through that grimy part of town, passing streetwalkers and bums and men off merchant ships who stood crying outside the gambling houses because they had just lost everything they owned.

  “Really,” he told us, shuddering, “it was a horrible place. I don’t care what Francesca said, I’m not glad to have seen it. I wish we’d never gone.” Francesca must have been feeling the same way, but of course she didn’t admit it. She told him not to be a fool, that they would find Kurt eventually. She led him fearlessly down one dark alley after another until they found a sordid, dirty establishment called The Tap Shoes, crowded with made-up women in tawdry dresses and men so drunk they couldn’t dance.

  Uncle Kurt saw them as soon as they came in. “I’ve never been so damn surprised in my whole life,” he said. “When they walked through that door, I almost dropped my drink.”

  Francesca’s triumph in finding Uncle Kurt lasted longer than Charlie’s. Kurt marched them out the door and gave them a talking-to that probably gained an edge by coming after several whiskeys. Charlie listened with an air so hopeless and resigned that Uncle Kurt said it seemed as if he didn’t even know where he was. Francesca, on the other hand, would nod seriously and then burst into gales of laughter and shout, “We found you—I knew we would!” It was a long time before she came down from her victory. The fact that her ridiculous plan had worked, that her determination had paid off, made her almost giddy. The whole night began to seem unreal, as if anything the
y set out to do would happen simply because they willed it.

  In truth Francesca’s plan ended with finding Uncle Kurt. According to her fantastic vision of the night, once in his care they would simply follow him from one adventure to the next. Ultimately, though, I don’t think she was concerned with those specifics. It was the initial gesture that had captivated her, the desperation of abandoning all caution and flying headlong into the underground world that, for the Hatfield family, was forbidden above all others.

  “Give me a drink!” she said to Uncle Kurt, still laughing and with a voice so full of excitement, he said, that it sounded as if she were drunk already.

  That was the last straw for Uncle Kurt. I had never seen him angry, and from what Charlie told us, I never wanted to. The aunts’ wrath, of course, was fearsome, but it was also familiar. Making Uncle Kurt mad, according to Charlie, was utterly different. “The worst part,” he said, “was that it wasn’t like an uncle yelling at his niece and nephew. It was one adult furious with two other adults. Really furious—it sounded at first as if he hated me. Not that he shouted or jumped around or anything. He just stood there and spoke in that awful voice…” Charlie trailed off, and he wouldn’t elaborate further. But none of us wanted more details.

  Uncle Kurt told Charlie he had been irresponsible and careless to an unforgivable degree. “Did you ever stop to imagine,” he asked, “what would have happened if you two had been attacked in this city? This isn’t a place for children, and it’s especially not a place for a young woman as innocent and impulsive as Francesca. How,” he said, turning to Charlie, “how could you have brought her here?” That was the worst question of all, and Charlie didn’t have an answer.

  With Francesca Uncle Kurt was almost gentle. He took her by the shoulders and said, “Francesca, this isn’t what you want. You don’t want my kind of life. It’s not a happy one, believe me. You weren’t made for secrecy and lies and breaking the law. Do you understand me?” Francesca looked at him with that black-eyed stare of hers. She was listening, but she wasn’t going to agree with what he said. Not one of the rest of us could have looked into Uncle Kurt’s face with the unwavering defiance she showed then. “I could see it in her eyes,” he said to the aunts. “That passion! She wasn’t going to give up a single moment of her independence.” Even so, he kept trying to reason with her. “You’ll have a long, adventure-filled life,” he told her. “You’ll do all sorts of things we’ll be stunned to hear about. But you’re young. Believe it or not, you’re still young. And there will be time for all that in the future.”

  Francesca waited until he was finished and then shot him a knowing, feline smile. “I bet if you were in my position, you wouldn’t give in either—would you, Uncle Kurt?”

  Uncle Kurt didn’t answer. He let go of her and turned to Charlie. And then he made a horrible mistake. “Take her home,” he said. “Take her home right now. Drive back, tell the aunts whatever you want, but make sure she doesn’t leave Shorecliff again.” As an afterthought he added, “Will you be able to find your way?”

  Charlie nodded. At the time, he told us, Uncle Kurt was so terrifying that it didn’t occur to Charlie to ask him to come back with them. He was too angry, too distant, too firmly planted in a world they could see only from the outside. Also, Charlie added, Francesca was worrying him. He suspected that if she had been any other girl she would have been crying, but because she would suffer anything rather than break down when being reprimanded, she transformed all her feelings into a kind of frantic impudence. “But she was tired,” Charlie said. “I could see by the way she was standing. So I thought it really would be the best thing to get her home as fast as possible.”

  Charlie led Francesca away before she could say anything else to Uncle Kurt, and they made the long walk back to the rattletrap. They drove up to Shorecliff without incident. The whole trip had gone by so fast that it wasn’t even light when they got back. Once again, the ride had taken a disturbingly short time. Of course, Charlie was driving fast in his haste to return Francesca to safety, but even so it was not yet five o’clock when they pulled up to the lonely fence outside Shorecliff.

  And why, we all asked, hadn’t Uncle Kurt come back with them? Aunt Rose didn’t spare him. “You sent two children who had already been up all night, who had driven on roads they had never seen before into a city they had never been to, who had just been wandering through the most disgusting part of that city—you let those two children drive back all alone to Shorecliff in the middle of the night!”

  That was when my mother put a hand on Rose’s arm and stopped her from saying any more because Uncle Kurt had put his face in his hands and started to cry. He knew too well what it would have meant, had he acted as the responsible adult he was asking Charlie to be in his stead.

  But the fact that Uncle Kurt didn’t escort Charlie and Francesca home arose from the same force that led him to gamble and drink and deceive his family in the first place. That night he was faced with the choice of protecting Charlie and Francesca or avoiding for one more brief night the condemnation of his sisters—something he had been trying to escape all summer. Of course, there was also his plan to salvage the money he had lost and his desire to pursue the girl who had “distracted him” into losing it. She was a shadowy, alarming figure who appeared only in my imagination, but I was sure she had played a role in his decision to stay in Portland. Ultimately, however, I think he was simply too scared to return to Shorecliff.

  In his explanation to the aunts, Kurt said in faltering tones that he realized Charlie’s character was stronger and steadier than his own. It had been easier to stay and cope with the problems he already had than to go back with the two children and face more, so that was what he did. “I’m ashamed,” he said, closing his eyes. “I’m so ashamed.”

  I was there, watching this display. Never before or since has an idol of mine crumbled so devastatingly. He had arrived back at Shorecliff with the other uncles a day later, full of repentance, and found utter disaster. I don’t think he ever forgave himself, any more than I did.

  Charlie and Francesca returned to Shorecliff and pulled to a halt in the rattletrap’s usual place. The house was still dark. Though they didn’t know it, nearly all of their cousins were at this moment wandering in the woods by the Stephensons’ farm. For a few minutes they sat in silence, partly waiting for signs of angry aunts and partly resting from the night’s excitement. Francesca hadn’t said much on the drive home, and whenever Charlie glanced at her she either turned away from him, staring out the window, or peered out at the road ahead, her eyes burning with intensity. “To be honest,” he said to us, “I was a little scared of her. She was over the top the whole time.”

  As a result, when they arrived at Shorecliff and were sitting in the car, Charlie didn’t dare say anything. He waited for her to make the first move.

  Eventually she turned to look at him. “So,” she said heavily, “we’re back at Shorecliff again.”

  “Yes.”

  “No matter how hard you try to get away from this place, it drags you back. Look at Uncle Kurt—he always comes back too. We don’t have a chance. We’re far too young.” She spat the last word. Then she looked into Charlie’s face, contemplating a new idea.

  Here Charlie stopped telling the story. He looked into the distance, his mouth half open.

  “Well?” said Tom. We were all eager to hear what had happened next, not so much because the story was unfinished but because by that time we were desperate for every snippet of Francesca’s thoughts and words and actions.

  “What happened then?” asked Isabella.

  “Well,” said Charlie, looking down and blushing—all the Wight children blushed easily, they had such pale skin—“well, if you really want to know, what happened then is that she kissed me.”

  “She what?” said Philip blankly.

  “Kissed you?” Tom echoed. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean just that: she kissed me. On the mouth. It w
as a real kiss.”

  We were speechless. Finally, Tom sputtered, “Was it—was it—was it—” He couldn’t finish.

  Isabella said, “Did it go on for a long time?”

  “A pretty long time,” said Charlie.

  “What did you say when it was over?” Tom demanded. He seemed almost offended that something so shocking had happened without his knowledge.

  “Uh—well—I’d suddenly thought of it, see. I said we should fill up the gas tank so that no one would notice how much gas we’d used.”

  In the midst of our sadness, Tom laughed. It was such a ridiculous thing to say after being kissed by a beautiful girl—especially when the beautiful girl was a cousin, fulfilling at last the promise of scandal that had been floating between her and Charlie since the beginning of the summer. Then Tom remembered what Charlie’s comment had led to, and he stopped laughing, and we all sat in silence.

  * * *

  When I looked through the telescope after emerging from the woods, right before the sun broke over the horizon, I saw three people standing by the rattletrap: Charlie, Francesca, and Philip. They were huddled around something I couldn’t see properly by the feeble light of the match Charlie held in his hand. Matches were the only source of light they had, thanks to Francesca’s silly notion of taking the lantern—empty of kerosene, as it turned out—instead of a flashlight. In any case, their position by the rattletrap was so unexpected that I was completely befuddled. Through the storm of love and envy whirling within me, curiosity reached out and took hold. I would still do something magnificent, something to make Isabella see how worthy I was of her attention, but first I would find out what was going on.