Shorecliff (9 page)

When at last we wandered back to the house—at a leisurely pace now; none of us was eager to return to bed—we found Shorecliff still undisturbed, the windows as dark as before and the door welcoming because it was closed. We had spent more than two hours at the shore, and the moon was a distant quarter dollar in the sky. The night was now simply your average summer night, splendid only in that it was warm and caressing on the skin.

We were covered in sand, and I’m sure that all of us suffered from sand in our beds for many days afterward, though Isabella kindly came to my room the next day and shook out my sheets for me. We had no idea what to do with our towels and suits, not wanting to hang them on the clothes line. Eventually we hung them out our windows, and Aunt Edie on her early morning walk found three crumpled towels at the back of the house, where they had landed after falling from the sills in the night. They were the only signs of our escapade, and she mentioned them at breakfast with the mildest of acerbic comments.

On our way up the stairs there was a moment of panic. From Uncle Kurt’s room, the door of which was next to the stairwell, we suddenly heard a frantic shout. All of us froze, each on a different stair, a line of eleven sandy children. Finally Tom mouthed, “He talks in his sleep.” We hovered uncertainly. Then the strange cry sounded again, and we were convinced: only sleep could distort his voice so much. Smiles rippled down the line, and we continued onward to the safety of our bedrooms.

This was when I first learned that Uncle Kurt talked in his sleep. Among the other cousins it became a joke to decipher his slurred and anxious cries. We knew he had been having a nightmare, but the word itself had been almost incomprehensible. Tom’s hypothesis was that Uncle Kurt had been crying, “I can’t see! I can’t see!” Fisher suggested that it might have been “Tennessee!” but this possibility was discarded with great scorn and hilarity.

In fact only I knew the truth behind that scream, and I had known it at once, when I was standing on the stairs. I never told anyone, though, and I never felt any pleasure in possessing the key to Kurt’s nightmare. As I stood by my window at the end of the night, replaying the events in my head, it bothered me that the expedition had ended on such an unsettling note. I didn’t want to be reminded of Uncle Kurt’s suffering when I was surrounded by my admiring and admired cousins. But I could not forget Uncle Kurt’s voice as he shouted that word: “Hennessey! Hennessey!”

It was only when I heard him yelling his friend’s name that I realized something must have happened to Hennessey. Uncle Kurt must have had a reason for never mentioning him in casual conversation, never bringing him, now that the war was over, to visit us at Shorecliff. I couldn’t work up the courage to ask him for the story behind Hennessey’s absence, the story in which his last illusions of war’s glory must have been torn down, and he never told me about it. But I was convinced after that night that Hennessey had died an awful death and that Uncle Kurt felt responsible for it.

Over the course of the summer, Fisher’s suggestion of “Tennessee!” became a sort of battle cry among the older cousins. They would bellow it at times of excitement, as a cheer or as a shout of derision. It became distorted even further as it passed into their vocabulary, and by the time it was an established joke, it had lost most of its similarity to Uncle Kurt’s sleeping cry. But toward the end of the summer, when he heard them shouting it—by sheer chance he had never heard it before—Uncle Kurt looked up from the newspaper he was reading with a frantic, almost angry look in his eyes that changed after a moment to bewilderment and then to pain. Tom saw his expression and later mentioned it to the other cousins, and from that point on they always made certain Kurt wasn’t within hearing distance before they shouted the word. With a constraint placed upon it, the joke lost its spontaneity, and “Tennessee!” died a rapid death. I never forgot it, though, and I’m sure Uncle Kurt didn’t either. It must be strange to hear one’s darkest nightmare revived in bright sunlight in a joyous cry.

A
s one might imagine, since there were eleven children in the house, I never got much time alone with individual cousins. With Pamela, of course, I spent hours in that children’s play that loses its flavor entirely when discussed in later years, and I would have occasional conversations with Tom or Philip and quiet moments with Isabella, but for the most part group activities were the order of the day. While this was exciting, it was also exhausting, and it made those rare hours with a single person times to remember. Fisher was an especially elusive cousin, and there was only one day that I spent with him alone.

Fisher initiated it. A fount of kindliness lurked behind those dreamy eyes, and it’s possible he had noticed how frantically I tried to be part of the group, how ardently I admired my older cousins. That makes it sound as if he were condescendingly giving me some time with the great man, but Fisher would never have thought of himself that way. It’s more likely that he simply felt like giving me a nice day with a friendly confidant. At any rate, one morning after we’d been at Shorecliff for about a month, he showed up at my bedroom door.

“Hi there, Richard,” he said. “What’s cooking?”

Tom had gone off with Lorelei for the day, and Francesca had decided to organize an outdoor game in which I was not invited to participate. I told him, sulkily no doubt, what Francesca’s plans were, and he replied, “But what are your plans, boy scout?”

“I don’t have any plans,” I said, trying to make this sound deliberate. “I might find Pamela and go somewhere with her.”

“Any interest in going somewhere with me?”

I stared at him. “What, you mean like a walk or something?”

“Yeah, that’s right. I thought we could make a day of it. You know where I’ve been wanting to walk to? The Stephenson farm, where Lorelei lives. She’s always talking about it”—an exaggeration; Lorelei didn’t “always talk” about anything—“but we’ve never seen it. What do you say?”

“I’d love to. You mean just me?”

“I figured you’d make a good companion. You’re a good walker, right? And you could bring that telescope of yours.” He nodded to the telescope lying on my bedside table, and I clutched it eagerly. The offer was too good to be true, and my one thought was to set off immediately before he could change his mind.

When Fisher made plans, he made them well. He meant it when he said he wanted to make a day of it, and on our way out through the kitchen he asked my mother for a bag of sandwiches and some ice water in bottles. I was amazed. Picnics were usually huge expeditions, and here was a picnic being prepared for just the two of us.

“I think it’s a lovely idea, Fisher,” my mother said.

“I’ll put some cookies in,” Margery added.

They beamed at us. We had won full approval from the adult sector. This sort of activity—demure walks in small groups—was their rarely fulfilled ideal of cousinly exercise.

Fisher and I headed west over the grass toward the belt of woods separating Shorecliff from the Stephenson farm. Our rambling walk through the trees and into the fields beyond took much longer than I had anticipated, though Fisher probably had the day planned from the first minute. His leisurely pace covered more ground than it appeared to. He held the lunch bag in one hand, swinging it with every step, and most of the time he didn’t talk to me. When we were in the woods he kept his head tilted upward to see any birds that might fly overhead. One time he grabbed my arm and stood stock-still, and we listened to a birdcall that sounded to me like all the other birdcalls surrounding us.

“Gosh!” he said, after we had stood for over a minute. “Wow!”

“What was it, Fisher?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard it before. Wow! I’ll have to ask Uncle Cedric. I bet he’ll know.” It was the first I’d heard about Uncle Cedric knowing birdcalls. Fisher spent a lot of the afternoon whistling under his breath and trying to imitate the string of notes we’d heard. By the evening he said he had messed it up so much that he would never be able to reproduce it, and sure enough when he whistled it for Uncle Cedric, all he got was a chuckle. “The call of a lesser nuthatch,” Cedric said, “one Fisher Wight by name.”

The woods between the Stephensons and us were mostly pine, but there were patches of maple and oak and a surprising number of enormous old beeches. The strip was wider than I had thought it would be, and when we were in the middle we couldn’t see Condor’s cottage, even though we knew it was only about a quarter mile north of us. That isn’t surprising in a wood, but I had been convinced we would see it.

“Are we lost?” I asked.

“No, we’re not lost. On our way back we’ll stop at Condor’s and say hello, what do you say? Maybe Uncle Eberhardt will be there too.”

I nodded. Condor was an appealing but threatening proposition, and Uncle Eberhardt only increased the stakes, but if Fisher was game, then I was too.

We emerged beside the Stephenson fields close to noon. The woods were on slightly higher ground than the farm, so when we stood on the grassy strip beside them, we could see large swaths of cultivated land undulating into the distance. It was a disconcerting view, as if somehow it were being changed and expanded in a funhouse mirror but we couldn’t see the trick. Right in front of us the crop was green and small, with wide dirt alleys between the rows that we could easily walk along. Further west was an impenetrable field of wheat rustling in the breeze, and to our right lay a plowed field dotted with haystacks. Across that was a little farmhouse next to a big barn complex with multiple silos.

“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.