Shorecliff

by Ursula DeYoung

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A winning debut novel about a 1920s New England family and the secrets revealed when they reunite over one long summer. Spending the summer of 1928 in a big house on the Maine coast with his 10 older cousins and a gaggle of aunts and uncles seems like a dream come true to lonely 13-year-old Richard. But as he wanders through the bustling house, Richard witnesses scenes and conversations not meant for him and watches as the family he adores disintegrates into a tangle of lust, jealousy, and betrayal. At first only an avid spectator, Richard soon finds himself drawn into the confusion, battling with his first experience of infatuation and forced to cover for his relatives' romantic intrigues. With jump-off-the-page characters and a captivating sense of place, Shorecliff examines the bonds of loyalty and rivalry that can both knit a family together and drive it apart.

Release date: July 23, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 353

Sample

1

The summer when I was thirteen years old changed everything for me. Looking back on it now, I can fill in the gaps with what I learned later, but at the time it seemed like a story unto itself, and that is the way I want to tell it. When I got back to school in September, I thought to myself, “I’ve been through hell this past month, and not one of you knows a goddamn thing about it.” I’d picked up swearing that summer, but it wasn’t the worst thing I had picked up, and it wasn’t the most lasting. What I like to remember best are the mornings in Uncle Kurt’s room when he would regale me with tales of the war. But what I remember most vividly is a bright patch of flames surrounding something so horrible I couldn’t bear to look at it. That comes at the end. I will take my time getting there.


*  *  *

It began on a train. My mother and I were traveling up to Maine from New York at the beginning of June, riding a series of day trains. I always hoped uselessly for one long ride on a sleeper, but the view through the windows still offered plenty of fodder for my imagination. At thirteen I was short, stocky, and brown-haired. My round face refused to lengthen into manliness, though my mother claimed she could see cheekbones; to me it seemed unpleasantly chubby. My limbs were only just beginning to replace baby fat with muscle. The combination made me appear bulky but tough, and I had withstood much friendly roughhousing from bigger boys at school. My eyes were too small, and one limp frond of hair drooped over them and tickled my nose. My aunts told me I had a cherubic smile.

I spent nearly the entire trip from New York to Maine in a state of euphoria. My mother and I were traveling alone. My father was staying in New York and planned to remain there for the rest of the summer, a situation that only my mother pretended to object to. He was a stern, humorless lawyer; I was frightened of him and didn’t like being near him. Now, years later, I feel the same way, though for different reasons. At the time his death-grip on life unnerved me, and now that death is coming to grip him instead, I prefer not to stand in its way. My mother, however, was an angel. She let me sit on my own, stationing herself several rows behind me, and as I looked out the window I imagined myself an explorer heading into the unknown, either on the back of an elephant or at the bow of a steamship as the mood struck me. For some reason being on a train, exciting as these vehicles were whenever I wasn’t riding in one, never seemed thrilling enough from the inside.

We were headed up to Shorecliff. It was the old family place; not the Killing family—that murderous surname had been given to me by my father—but the Hatfield family, my mother’s clan. My mother had four sisters and, originally, two brothers. All but one of the sisters had children, and all of the families were coming for the summer. It was the first time we had all gathered in one place for an extended period. My Aunt Rose had put her foot down some months before and said that the fact that we had never before spent time at Shorecliff as a complete, united family was a crime. This summer, she announced, was the perfect opportunity to remedy the situation. Her sisters agreed. With varying amounts of difficulty, they convinced the men involved that fighting the combined forces of the Hatfield women would be futile once they had decided on a course of action. As a result, here we were.

I had traveled to Shorecliff many times before—my mother took me up for a week or two every summer—but we were often the only visitors, and I had never encountered more than a few family members at a time there. Now the thought of months with all of my cousins and aunts and uncles made bursts of pleasure explode in my stomach. I, Richard Killing II, had no brothers or sisters. My father approved of one son and heir, no more and no less. But I had inherited my mother’s love of large families, and since I had no other option, I adopted my cousins as members of my immediate family. The fact that I rarely saw them, and that they were all older than I was, didn’t stop me. Depending on my mood, I was either the hero or the chronicler of my family. Their exploits, created by my own fancy for the most part, filled my imagination year in and year out, at school, at home, and most of all when I was trapped in my father’s study.

The personages of the sprawling Hatfield family will drift into the story as they please, but I must mention Uncle Kurt now, before the others appear. Uncle Kurt was my mother’s only surviving brother. Harold had been killed in the Great War, but Kurt had returned home swathed in laurels. He had been a private, a sailor, an ambulance driver, a pilot… It was a mystery to me how he managed to cover so many branches of the U.S. military, but I could not believe that he made up all the stories for my benefit. Some of them, maybe, but surely not all of the hundreds he spun for me that summer.

Uncle Kurt was tall and handsome, with brown hair slicked back in the soldier’s fashion and an upright posture that put my stubby figure to shame. I remember him in khaki; whether or not he really wore it I can’t say, since my youthful imagination surrounded him with the splendor of war. What is certain, however, is that he was exciting and lighthearted and unfailingly kind to me. He was by far the friendliest male I had ever encountered. I adored him without reservation, and on the rare occasions when I saw him, I followed him around like a puppy. My mother claimed that Uncle Kurt lived like a mallard duck, gliding through life and letting all its miseries slide off his back. Before that summer at Shorecliff, I thought so too.

The train ride was long, so long that after we changed in Boston my excitement wore off, leaving a dull residue that threatened to turn into disappointment before we had even arrived. I tried to keep my anticipation alive, but eventually I moved back to sit next to my mother and went to sleep, soaking up her reassurance without speaking. We arrived at last in the evening, after a final change in Portland onto a tiny local train, and I woke up to my mother pointing out the window.

“There’s Aunt Margery with the car,” she said.

Margery Wight was one of her many sisters, and the most important thing about her, as far as I was concerned, was that she had a daughter, Pamela. Pamela and I felt an automatic affinity because we were the closest to each other in age. She was thirteen that summer too, due to turn fourteen in September. I had turned thirteen in May, and therefore, though I thought of her as being my own age, she thought of me as being nearly a year younger than she was. Usually she didn’t let the gap interfere with our friendship, however. I was grateful to her for being the one person in the family I could justifiably call a playmate. She had two older brothers, both objects of fascination for me, and an older sister, Yvette, with whom she shared a bedroom at Shorecliff.

Pamela had come with Aunt Margery to pick us up in the old black rattletrap that was the only means to get to Shorecliff. Pensbottom, the nearest town with a railway station, was a shabby, boring, colorless place, miles inland from the coast. I remember almost nothing about it. Uncle Harold had once said that the town was as obscene as its name, and since the statement had quickly become a family legend, we tried to spend as little time as possible within the town’s boundaries. Shorecliff was a half-hour drive from the station, well away from Pensbottom’s obscenity and cleansed by the sharp air that blew in off the ocean.

My mother and I stepped off the train, and Margery, a heavy, full-figured woman, thudded forward to embrace my mother with a cry of “Caroline!” that made the other people on the platform turn their heads. Margery had been blessed with an enormous bust, and the men in the family joked that she had kept it all to herself. The other sisters were thin and agile, built like fine china and so flat-chested that the low-slung dresses of the era made them look like boys. My mother, I had always been proud to note, either possessed a more womanly figure or else dressed well enough to seem more feminine than most of her sisters did. However she did it, she looked like a proper woman. Aunt Margery, in contrast, needed no help at all. She crowded the rest of her sisters out. Each year I looked expectantly at Pamela’s upper body, waiting for her to follow suit, but she remained as obstinately flat as all the other women in the family.

She was standing by the car. While Aunt Margery smothered me with her bosom, I craned my neck to see the slim figure leaning against the rattletrap’s door. Pamela was wearing a blue dress, reminiscent of a sailor suit, and her blond hair was pulled back with a  ribbon on top and flowed halfway down her back. She claimed it was boring, but in the sunlight aureoles of gold would form around the ribbon. I loved to walk behind her and marvel at how round and luminous her head was. The day we arrived was cloudy, but I could see even from within Aunt Margery’s embrace that Pamela’s hair was glinting with light from somewhere.

Her greeting was notably less effusive than her mother’s had been. “Hello,” she said, moving away from the door.

“Hello,” I said.

Aunt Margery opened the back door for us—the front seat was taken up with Shorecliff’s weekly food supply—and we got in, Mother first, then me, then Pamela. Pamela looked out the window for most of the trip. Her habit of remaining silent and keeping her gray eyes averted always puzzled me—I could never decide whether the silence masked deep thought or mere serenity. Sometimes I suspected awkwardness, but if that was the case she veiled it masterfully. Whatever its cause, her reserve made her a perfect listener. I could talk at her for hours, and she would sit quietly, nodding at times and wandering over my face with her big, solemn eyes. When I finished she would decline to give me a single word of advice. If I was lucky, I might get an opinion. Needless to say, she sometimes exasperated me, but for the most part her quietness was well suited to fascinating an impetuous, imaginative boy like me, who rarely had anyone with whom I could share my innumerable ideas.

Pamela said nothing on the car ride, but Aunt Margery talked incessantly from the driver’s seat. “Everyone else is already here. You two are the last to arrive except for Tom, who’s still down at Harvard. He’s going to join us after the seventh. I heard, you know”—here she turned around and attempted to speak over the seat, the car swerving—“that he barely made it through his first year. Naturally Rose is keeping quiet. She always was closemouthed about her children, which I think is unnatural when you’re talking to your own sister. But that’s what Isabella said, and if she doesn’t know the truth about her brother, who will? The other children are here, and the men have already gone off on a hunting trip. Thank the Lord we women get at least part of the summer to ourselves! If you can say ‘ourselves’ when we’re stuck with all the children in a lunatic house—that’s what Edie calls it. Just imagine, we counted it all up last night: with you here now, we’ll have nineteen people in the house! When Tom comes it’ll be twenty. It’s beyond me how Charlie has no trouble being where his father and I want him to be, while Tom is always causing a fuss. He’s inherited Rose’s stubbornness if you ask me.”

Aunt Margery had a knack for talking rubbish that only avoided being intolerably boring by referring constantly to people we knew. Any news of the cousins was nectar to me, and Tom’s exploits at college rose before me full of potential, though in fact I never heard anything about them. On she talked, on we drove, and within half an hour we were approaching the towering white front of Shorecliff.

The house itself was a massive clapboarded box, with a little box built off of one side that contained the kitchen, a morning room, and some closets. The big box contained everything else—bedroom after bedroom, parlor after parlor, a library, a study, a dining room. It was a gargantuan mansion that had ceased moving forward in time at some point before the turn of the century, and I loved every inch of it. My favorite places were the telephone booth in the front hall and my little bedroom in the attic. We had no servants, the Hatfield money having been lost long before I was born. But the advantage of this was an array of bedrooms in the attic that had been fobbed off on us children. I had the last one, the original nesting place of the under-kitchen maid, no doubt. It was small, dark, musty, and cramped, but I had it all to myself, which was more than most of the other cousins could say.

Outside Shorecliff, at its front and sides, was a large, open expanse of grass. We all pretended it was a rolling lawn, but since the cliff for which the house was named dropped to the ocean only forty yards north of the building, the grass on the supposed lawn was salty and sea bitten, more dune grass than lawn grass. It cut our feet raw when we first came, but by the end of the summer those of us who had persevered in running barefoot had developed calluses able to withstand, for a few moments at least, the heat of a campfire.

There was nothing else around Shorecliff. The road stopped twenty feet from the front door, and a stretch of split-rail fence marked its end. I never understood that fence. It had perhaps five or six posts in all, and it kept nothing out and nothing in. There was no conceivable purpose to it, but it served as an excellent lookout post and climbing site. Away to the west, following the meandering line of the coast, was a stretch of woods, and if you walked through it for twenty minutes, you would pass first a little cottage and then the boundary of our property. Beyond the woods came civilization in the form of hayfields and cow barns. To the east of Shorecliff, after ten minutes’ walk through brambles and blueberries, came the shore again—more inviting, though still rocky and wave-battered, and the place where we did all our swimming. Shorecliff was truly a desolate place, a long way from any policeman, any doctor, any prying eye or gossiping mouth.

I saw the house first, over Pamela’s shoulder, and shouted with joy. All the enthusiasm in me that had expired on the train rose to life again. “There it is!” I cried. “I see it! We’re here, Mother, we’re really here!”

“Isn’t it wonderful,” sighed my mother.

“I saw it before you, didn’t I, Pamela? You weren’t watching for it, were you?”

“But I’d seen it before, Richard.”

“Before me right now?”

Pamela did not respond.

That was a typical conversation between us. I was an irritating little boy—at least my father often said so. On the other hand, Pamela was infernally silent. She had no sense of debate.

Because my grandfather’s funds had run out before a carriage house for Shorecliff could be built, the rattletrap lived in a cleared patch of dirt at the end of the road. Rain pelted it, snow covered it, heat warmed it, cold cracked it. It was miraculous that it hadn’t fallen apart completely, that it still chugged its way successfully down the long, lonely road to Pensbottom and came back loaded with the week’s supplies every Monday afternoon, year after year. My mother told me that she remembered her father buying the car when she was a girl, as a last extravagance after the family fortune had been lost. Despite endless questions on my part, she remained vague on the details of this catastrophe, but she loved telling me about the sunnier aspects of her youth. She said that when her father had bought the rattletrap in 1908, it had been a gleaming new automobile, the first Model T in Maine, a marvel in its time. The only reason no one had sold it later to pay the family’s debts was that her father had put his foot down. “I won’t let any of you touch it,” he said. “It’s for the girls to ride in and the boys to drive. We can’t afford a horse and carriage now to replace it—it’s all we have. And God knows anyone who arrives at Shorecliff wants to be sure there’s a way to escape.”

The walk from the car to the house was heaven. I was carrying all my own luggage—a suitcase, a valise full of adventure stories, and a telescope. Pamela and Aunt Margery helped Mother with the other things. I ran ahead. Shorecliff soared above me, the white walls like the stones girding a castle. The paint on the clapboards was peeling, and I indulged the urge many a time to chip away at it with my fingernails. Beneath it the wood was hard and knotty. I often contemplated it, thinking how many storms it had survived. The door opened, and that achingly familiar smell wafted out at me. For a moment my excitement blossomed into a delightful pain. Here I was…

The hall was dark because umbrella stands and heaped coats always obscured the strips of windows on either side of the door. I flung down my suitcase, books, and telescope and ran through the archway to the left into the main parlor—another dark, little-used room. Considering our numbers, it was strange that we lived so determinedly in the back of the house where the kitchen was. I jogged through the parlor without a glance; the furniture might as well have been shrouded in dustsheets. Onward to the addition, airy and light when the rest of the house was swamped in darkness.

Crossing the morning room (majestic in name only—it was an empty anteroom signaling the beginning of the lived-in portion of the house), I heard raised voices from the kitchen. A second later came a cry of impatience, unmistakably issuing from the lungs of Francesca Ybarra. We had arrived in time for an argument.

In fact, as my mother said later, battle royal was raging in the kitchen. The aunts sat at the table, and lined on either side of them, leaning on the stove, kicking the chairs, were my illustrious cousins. They had been separated by sex—I didn’t know why. Three boys glowered by the left wall; five girls fumed by the right. It was an overwhelming array, and I realized that it had been well over a year since I had seen most of them. Even the ones I most often encountered, the Wights, had grown older and more distant, and the mysterious Ybarras and Robierres were so different from the way I had remembered them as to be almost unrecognizable.

Pamela, when she came in a few minutes later, hovered in the doorway as I did. We were too young to be in on the feud, but we were old enough to listen to it with our hearts thumping and our eyes shining. With a beginning so dramatic, the summer could not fail to be as thrilling as I had imagined.

“It’s too much!” Francesca was saying. Francesca was the daughter of Aunt Loretta, the wild one of my mother’s generation who had married a Spanish fugitive named Rodrigo Ybarra. We never learned how he had earned the title of fugitive, only that he had been running from the Spanish law. He and Loretta were married in Paris and lived there until Rodrigo died in a train accident during the war. Their youngest child, Cordelia, had been only five years old at the time. Loretta had moved back to America when the war ended, the wildness apparently crushed out of her. She brought three dark-haired, fiery children with her. It was impossible not to place them highest in my ranks of fascination, and Francesca, twenty-one years old, with cascades of nearly black hair and dark, glowing eyes, had the power to fell me with a single glance. When I entered the room she was stamping her foot, her hands clenched and her fine eyebrows drawn low over her eyes. Francesca in a rage was a sight to see.

“It’s too much!” she was saying. “We’re stuck in this godforsaken dump all summer like sardines in a can. There’s no one to see and no place to go. And now we’re not even allowed to drive into town. How do you expect us to live?”

The argument, I quickly divined, was about driving rights and the rattletrap. Thus far the adults had had sole use of the automobile. My grandfather’s decree that the women would ride and the men would drive had been broken the day after he died, but I’m sure he would have been pleased at the strictness with which the next generation was kept from the steering wheel.

“Even if Francesca can’t drive it,” my cousin Charlie said, “there’s no reason why I can’t, and Tom too when he gets here.” Charlie was the oldest of the Wight children. A more different family from the Ybarra clan could not be imagined. Aunt Margery had married Frank Wight, a carpenter from upstate New York, and their four children were all blond and blue-eyed. Their two sons, Charlie and Fisher, had been raised in their father’s workshop, and each was handy with an ax and ingenious with a chisel. Charlie was twenty and muscular and exhibited his father’s red-faced shortness of breath, though in all other respects he was handsome. After two years at Cornell he had earned his stripes on the college football team, but what interested me far more was that some months earlier I had overheard his mother telling mine that Charlie “could never turn down a dare.” This, I thought, heralded great things for the summer.

Charlie’s three siblings were all slender and graceful—mysterious attributes when one looked at their parents, though the Hatfields traditionally run thin. Eighteen-year-old Yvette, a pale and lofty girl I rarely had the courage to speak to, came after Charlie. Fisher, at sixteen, was equally skinny and sprite-like. He liked his father’s workshop, but he preferred to carve intricate scenes in blocks of wood while Uncle Frank taught Charlie the rudiments of furniture-building. Fisher went around perpetually in a dream, but the dream did not prevent him from picking up details with his misty blue eyes. Like Pamela, the youngest of the four, he soaked up information with quiet astuteness.

“None of you will be driving anywhere,” Aunt Rose declared. She was the oldest aunt, with the voice of a general and a demeanor to match.

Aunt Margery added, “Don’t you understand it’s not safe? Uncle Kurt has had years of practice, and I learned from him.”

“Safety be damned,” Aunt Loretta growled. The one trace of wildness that remained in her was a tendency to swear, and her deep, sultry voice slid into a sailor’s bark when she was angry. “It’s not a matter of whether they’re able to drive the thing—it’s whether they’re allowed. And they’re not. Francesca, you can stamp all you like, but rules are rules. You’re here for the summer, and you might as well enjoy it.”

“You realize we’ve got nothing to do,” said Francesca. She pressed herself against the wall, drawing herself up to her full, glorious height. Masses of dark hair curled out around her head. “We’re stuck here on top of each other. You all think of it as a fine holiday. You can chatter with each other all day, and the little ones, well”—she tossed us a look of contempt—“they’ll be satisfied with anything. But we older ones, what are we supposed to do? We’re a million miles from civilization. All we have is each other. Do you expect us to stand here for the next three months staring each other down?”

There was a moment of silence, during which Francesca fixed her gaze on the aunts and the rest of the cousins followed her lead.

Then my Aunt Edie entered the fray. Edie was the maiden aunt of the family, and she lived the part with a vengeance. She was angular, bony, and long-nosed. Her black hair, parted down the middle, was always knotted at the back of her head. None of us had any difficulty understanding why she had never married—no man in his right mind would come within ten yards of her. She had no mercy, her morals were lifted from Victorian guides to proper etiquette, and she saw the worst in everybody and everything. But the sheer force of her will made her remarks carry weight in family discussions.

Now she looked down her nose at the three boys—Charlie, Fisher, and Francesca’s brother, Philip, who was eighteen, black-haired, and invariably aloof. Then she examined the five girls—Francesca, Yvette, Tom’s sister Isabella, and the two Delias, whose story must be saved for later. Even Pamela and I were not exempt from Aunt Edie’s scathing glance; for an instant her nose pointed at us, and we felt the impact of an unknown accusation. Then she made her proclamation. “This house,” she said, “is primed for incest.”

Incest. What did it mean? I had never heard the word before. Even in my ignorance, though, I sensed a scandalous undertone. The rest of the family—with the exception of Pamela, who also didn’t know what it meant—dissolved into laughter. Without meaning to, Aunt Edie had ended the fight. There were a few minutes of hilarity, in which I saw Francesca raise her eyebrows at Charlie with an expression that combined humor, disdain, and mocking salaciousness. Aunt Edie caught the last of it and shouted, “Heathens!” which redoubled my cousins’ laughter.

My mother, who had come in for the last of the argument, laughed with the rest of them and then sent me up to my room with my luggage. The other mothers shooed their children off too. They wanted a chance to discuss the situation among themselves before dinner. I went upstairs with my bags, lagging behind the others. We passed straight through the second floor, the forbidden kingdom of adult sleeping quarters. Each of the seven bedrooms there housed an adult or two. As the oldest cousin, Francesca had demanded a room on the second floor. It alarmed me to think that she could now be counted as an adult—it made her seem capable of anything.

Philip lived in the room next to mine on the third floor. For the moment he was alone, since his roommate, Tom, had yet to arrive. Though they were both eighteen, Philip had not yet started college. I didn’t understand why, and no one ever bothered to explain it to me. When I passed his room he called to me from inside, and obediently I barged in, my valise of books banging against the doorframe.

“How are you, midget?” he said, looking me over.

Philip seemed the most Spanish of the Ybarras, and I imagined Rodrigo as an older version of him. He wore his black hair slicked back from his forehead, and he had low eyebrows and dark, glowing eyes like Francesca’s. He read constantly, but whereas I devoured boys’ adventure novels, he read philosophy and incendiary texts. There was a hint of secrecy in all his actions that I admired and appreciated—he once told me that he thought of himself as an anarchist. This meant he had little time for humor, but if you caught him in an off moment, he could be friendly in a biting sort of way.

“What does ‘incest’ mean?” I asked him.

Philip let out a burst of laughter. “You want to join the fun, do you?”

“I just want to know what it means.”

“Well, it means a lot of old busybodies clucking over other people’s business. That’s what it ends up meaning anyway.”

I dropped my bags on the floor and dug through the valise for my dictionary. In a way this was my most precious book, since without it I wouldn’t have been able to understand half of what my family members said. It was an ancient, beat-up volume that my mother had given to me long ago. When I looked up “incest,” I found “indecent relations between blood-relatives.”

“My God, how old is that thing?” Philip said. “It’s a lie anyway. Sisters and brothers, my friend. That’s the only thing that counts. All of us cousins—we’re safe. So you don’t have to worry.”

“Don’t have to worry about what?”

“Indecent relations,” he said, grinning.

“Which doesn’t he have to worry about?” said another voice at the door. It was Yvette Wight. She reminded me of a ghost: her hair was much whiter than her siblings’, more of an ash-blond than a gold, and her lips and eyes were equally washed out. She moved to fit her appearance, gliding from room to room without any noise. One of her favorite occupations was interrupting conversations in this fashion. “Should he not worry about the indecency, or the relations?” she asked.

“Why, Yvette, what are you suggesting?” Philip said. He lay back on his bed and lounged, and there was something challenging in his attitude.

“I’m not suggesting anything. I was just wondering which you meant.”

“Well, which would you have meant?”

“Neither,” she sniffed. “I’ve read Mansfield Park. Besides, we didn’t grow up with each other. I don’t see anything wrong with it.”


Philip sat upright. “Yvette!” he exclaimed. He was still joking, but I heard a note of surprise in his voice. “That’s practically a proposition!”

“Don’t be stupid, Philip,” she said. She glided away, and I retired to my own bedroom. It had been a typical conversation between cousins, a tossing sea on which I strove to keep afloat. I had no idea what they were talking about, and probably they didn’t either. All of them enjoyed throwing the ball of innuendo around their circle, keeping it aloft for as long as possible. I stood outside the group, watching and listening. The first thing I did in my room was look up “proposition.” The dictionary defined it as “a suggestion or proposal,” which didn’t help at all.

The idea of a web of attractions between relatives was less shocking than it might have been to my Hatfield cousins because,