There is one person outside the family whose fate I must describe, for it is the only one that continued in the romantic trend of our summer at Shorecliff. Two years after our time there, Lorelei went down to Boston to attend Wellesley. In her third year she was befriended by a distinguished older man—I estimated that he was well over thirty when they met—who courted her indefatigably and married her within six months. Everyone who heard this news was stunned by it. The man, Carson Pitt, was extraordinarily wealthy and managed to sail through the Depression with barely a tremor. According to rumor he owned an estate in England, a villa in Italy, a hacienda in Mexico, and a mansion in New York. No one knew where he came from; he claimed to be “cosmopolitan” and refused to give any details about his origins. I met him only twice and found him charming, intelligent, and elusive, which, now that I think of it, is also an apt description of Lorelei.
She made the transition from farm girl to socialite with her usual grace and humility. I’ve sometimes wondered if she ever told her new husband about her romance with Tom—but I suspect she didn’t. She and Tom, so far as I knew, parted amicably at the end of that summer, each content to salt away the memories of their time together and to avoid remembering the cataclysmic event that marked its end. Unlike so many other secrets from Shorecliff, theirs had no grievous repercussions in the long term, and I would imagine that Lorelei’s modesty—not to mention her good sense—ensured that their relationship remained a secret to everyone outside the Hatfield family.
A few years after her wedding I received an invitation at my Columbia dormitory—I was a junior at the time—inviting me to a dinner party at the Pitt residence. I had forgotten Lorelei’s new name and almost threw out the invitation, but then Tom wrote to me, another unusual occurrence, and asked if I was going. He and I, the only cousins in New York at the time, were also the only Hatfields invited. We went to the party and were both so struck by Lorelei’s beauty—she wore green, I remember, and had jewels in her hair—that we simply gazed at her from afar for the entire evening. As we were leaving, Tom took me aside and said, “Don’t say a word to anyone about this, certainly not to Julie”—his fiancée, whom he later married—“but I never met a girl to match her. Not one.”
As for Tom himself, and Philip, and my beloved Isabella—the three I have missed most, whose characters have shaped mine, whose ambitions and joys I have imagined countless times—I only rarely see them, though I believe they still see each other with some frequency. Certainly Tom and Isabella remain close. It seems almost irrelevant to describe their careers, when their personalities are what matter to me. I’ve found it a painful irony that Tom too became a lawyer, one devoted to workers’ rights, underdogs, civil liberties—all the exciting facets of the law that I myself have been too timid to pursue. Tom brought his warm and effusive energy to the legal profession and turned it into something noble. He is, as he always was, a man to admire.
Philip, now an elegant and mysterious diplomat, I also admire with an uncomfortable intensity. He came back from the war more silent than ever, having witnessed atrocities in the Pacific that he never described. But the passion hadn’t died within him, and he now spends his time flying out on quiet missions to foreign countries, making use of his gift for languages and forging alliances with unnamed political figures. Cynics may say that diplomacy is just another business, but I believe that in his quest for significance and purpose Philip has found some satisfaction in his career. To me it embodies a steel-hearted romance, lived out in accordance with his uncompromising nature.
Isabella—where is the romance in her life? Perhaps nothing she did could match what I dreamed for her. She married, while still young, a Wall Street financier, a man hearty and competent, who worked stolidly through the bleak years of the 1930s but who is unable, I fear, to appreciate Isabella’s depths of feeling. She is surrounded now by a rambunctious, deafening brood of children, seven strong, and in that way she alone has fulfilled the Hatfield legacy of large and close-knit families. It is obvious to everyone that she puts her husband and her children above all else in life. But I cannot help feeling that some crucial part of her, some confused and yearning portion of her heart, has never found its way into the light.
Crushing though it is to acknowledge, Isabella never again behaved toward me with her old affection. I think she really believed that I meant something malicious by shoving her into Charlie. And, coward that I am, I have never known how to make it up to her. Yet I love her, and Tom, and Philip, more than I have ever loved anybody else. I know that they, like all of us, have grown older, but I would rather imagine them as they were at Shorecliff, before the night that changed everything, before my criminal idiocy destroyed Francesca: Philip distant and intriguing, his quiet, knowing comments taking us by surprise even as they made us laugh; Tom the golden boy, strong and assured, shining with excitement as he teetered on the edge of adulthood; and Isabella, awkward, loving, full of life, and barreling toward her own future though she had no idea what it might be. These many years later, their innermost characters remain unchanged.
Here I sit now, and at this point it seems futile not to admit that I am in my father’s study in my father’s chair, surrounded by my father’s books and writing at my father’s desk. I even have some of his clients. The younger ones like me better, but the older ones say I lack his standards. I know I have inherited his looks as well as his legal practice, but I maintain, with every ounce of my will, that it is not the same man sitting at this desk—not at all the same man. My trusty Victorian dictionary, which withstood Philip’s mockery so many times, sits at my elbow (I still prefer its definitions to any other’s), and that alone marks me as a different man. I will not go to my grave as Richard Killing II, dutiful son of his father. I am responsible for destroying Francesca’s beauty, a fact that put me in a cage of guilt. Even through the war, which I sweated out on various battleships, I could not escape from that cage. But before the war, before the accident, I was a carefree boy drunk on the rapture of living with ten older cousins, and I still hold the memories of that boy. I have tried to keep alive the joy I felt in my cousins’ world. For that reason I will close now, not with a reminder of Francesca’s injuries, but with a scene that has lasted in my memory, a brief snapshot unsullied by anything that happened afterward.
We were playing croquet one morning, not long after we had first come to Shorecliff, when Francesca was still lighthearted and full of mischief, when Yvette wasn’t gripped by jealousy, when the aunts chatted on the sidelines unaware of their husbands’ and brother’s deceit. It was a bright, warm, breezy day, and I was filled with ecstatic anticipation of the months to come. I glanced at Tom, whose turn it was to play, and saw him looking at Isabella, standing by his side. They were sharing some joke, one of their many sibling jokes that the rest of us never heard. Tom had an expression of shocked delight on his face, as if he were startled by the brilliance of whatever Isabella had said, and her face was gradually taken over by her wide, goofy grin. Then she roared with laughter, and Philip, behind her, watched her laugh with an affectionate, sardonic smile on his face. He shook his head, obviously thinking she was a lunatic—but back in those days we were all innocently lunatics, and we appreciated each other’s eccentricities. Tom caught Philip’s eye as Isabella howled, and he laughed again, saying something I couldn’t hear.
That is what I want to remember of my last summer at Shorecliff—not the flames and the tears and the terrifying emotions that ransacked our hearts, but the many moments in our jokes and games when the sunlight framed for an instant one shout, one smile, one off-kilter glance.
Acknowledgments
I would like to extend grateful thanks to Katherine Stirling, always my first reader; to Bill Hamilton, who helped in the early shaping of this book; to Andrea Walker, for her generous guidance into the publishing industry; to Lisa Grubka, my magnificent agent, and her colleagues; to Asya Muchnick, my equally magnificent editor at Little, Brown, and the many people th
ere who helped bring this book to print; to Andrew Goulet, for agreeing to write the screenplay; to Ben Cosgrove, for introducing me to Maine; to Frank Kiley and Gill Stumpf, for countless games of Piggy (among other things); to my father, who bears no resemblance to the elder Richard Killing, and to my mother, who is just like Caroline; and finally, most importantly, to my siblings, Colin, Ghilly, and Sonia, to my sister-in-law, Valentine, and to my three cousins, Cicso, Austin, and Santiago, with all of whom I have spent many wonderful summers entirely devoid of drama.
About the Author
Ursula DeYoung grew up in New England. She studied at Harvard and Oxford, and in 2011 her first book was published—a biography of nineteenth-century physicist John Tyndall called A Vision of Modern Science. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome
The Hatfield Family in 1928
1: Arrival
2: Croquet
3: War Stories
4: Shore
5: A Day with Fisher
6: Pensbottom
7: Fox
8: New York
9: One Delia
10: Picnic
11: Hike
12: Aunt Edie’s Birthday
13: Phone Booth
14: Woods
15: Rattletrap
16: Aftermath
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Ursula DeYoung
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover photograph © ClassicStock/Masterfile
Cover copyright © 2013 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: July 2013
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ISBN: 978-0-316-21340-0
Shorecliff Page 33