The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (28 page)

“Oh, no offense,” she said with exaggerated contrition. “I almost forgot what it was like to be a kid.”

“Does Harry know what a bitch you are?” I asked, marveling at my own brashness.

“What did you say to me?”

“Oh, no offense,” I said.

The truth is that’s what I wanted to say, if only I had been brave enough to say it. What I actually said was nothing at all. I never said a word, just stared down at the table and felt my legs grow shorter with each passing moment in her company.

“H
ARRY DOESN’T BELIEVE IN
hunting,” I said to my mother as we drove along the winding ocean-view road toward home, brilliant sun illuminating a familiar journey. “He thinks it’s cruel.”

“Well, it is when you get right down to it. I would be hard pressed to make an argument otherwise.”

“Don’t look so amazed,” she said, briefly averting her eyes from the road to confront my astonished expression. “Must you wear every emotion you feel on your face? No one likes a gaper, Riddle.”

“If you think hunting is wrong, then why do you hunt?”

Greer let out a deep sigh. “Oh, God,” she said full of exasperation. “There is only so much is-it-right or is-it-wrong that I can pack into a day. Think of the suffering that went into your riding boots. Are you going to stop riding? For that matter, look at the way horses are abused in the name of competition. Do you intend to stop competing? Think about how your father tortures himself—and others, too, by the way—by constantly invoking his principles.”

I wasn’t impressed.

“Why do I bother? You’re just like your father with his constant moral hectoring.”

“Do you ever wonder why Camp is the way he is?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think he killed anyone in the war?”

“I have no idea. You would have to ask him that question.”

“Yes, but what do you think? Do you think he killed someone?”

She considered for a moment before answering, as if she were mediating an internal debate.

“Yes, I would imagine that he did.”

“It must be awful.”

“Oh, come now. I think everyone deserves to be killed at some point.”

Greer looked into the rearview mirror and adjusted her makeup. She always seemed poised to hear a director yell “Cut!”

“He talks a lot about the war, but he never talks about that.”

“Riddle, here’s a little grown-up tip for you. When it comes to telling stories, it’s not what you tell that matters, it’s what you leave out that’s important.”

No kidding. I couldn’t argue with her about that.

I stared out the window, as was my habit. Greer wasn’t exactly offering me much in the way of moral counsel. She was generally annoyed by any discussion that involved ethics.

She leaned forward, grinding her cigarette into the ashtray. I waited as she lit up another one.

We drove along in silence, my mother releasing her ponytail, blonde hair flowing freely to her shoulders, hair shining, hair always shining.

“Riddle,” she said finally, glancing in my direction. “Semel insanivimus omnes.”

“Speak English, please. Is that a line of dialogue from one of your films?”

We’ve all been mad at least once.

M
Y MOTHER AND I
were sitting down to supper when we heard the jiggle of a key in the front door, the dogs’ tails thumping in unison against the floor giving away the intruder’s identity.

“Camp! What are you doing home?” I asked, jumping to my feet, my mother looking on quizzically from her spot at the dining room table.

“My flight got delayed. Then there was some confusion around scheduling in Washington. I decided someone was trying to tell me something, so I came home. To hell with it. I’ll go tomorrow.”

“How did you get home?” Greer asked. “Did you hire a car?”

“Gula drove me, believe it or not. I ran into him at the airport picking up guests arriving for Gin’s annual massacre of the innocents.”

The August hunt tended to attract riders from neighboring states who were serious about fox hunting. The auction, still a couple of weeks away, drew a more international crowd interested in buying and selling top-of-the-line competition horses. Gin also held a deer hunt that weekend attended by friends of his and Greer’s, social acquaintances, prominent people in the arts, politics and society, some of whom hunted, some of whom were interested in buying horses, all of whom wanted to be seen as important enough to warrant an invitation.

“We know how you feel about hunting, Camp,” my mother said. “Have you ever considered keeping your thoughts to yourself, or must you be heard on every topic?”

“You might be surprised at the things I keep to myself,” Camp said, a trace of bitterness creeping into his voice.

“You seem a little weary,” my mother said. “Are you not feeling well?”

“I am tired,” Camp said, a rare concession for him. “Think I’ll have a shower and relax.”

I don’t think I had ever heard my father use the word “relax” in a sentence before that moment. My mother was equally taken aback. “Should I arrange to have you buried, or would you prefer cremation?”

“Just throw me out with the garbage,” Camp said, undoing the top button of his shirt and loosening the knot of his tie as he headed out of the dining room and up the stairs.

Chapter Twenty-Six

I
F YOU’VE NEVER HUNTED ON HORSEBACK, YOU PROBABLY HAVE
a mistakenly refined notion of what it means. Imagine it as a piece of music where the bottom notes repeat in jarring, thunderous sequence until all you can hear is a throbbing bass line. There are no real high notes in hunting. There’s the odd soaring relief when it’s lift-up and over a hurdle you sail, but most of the time it’s pounding, relentless, digging up the earth as you go, and all the while there’s that meditative tremor of hoof to ground like fist to drum.

A hunt starts in silence. Hounds are sent in to rout the fox. The field is quiet and well back. When the pack finds they immediately give tongue and then there’s a period of intense listening, of holding still, to hear the direction of the chase, to decide the course, to evaluate the freshness of the line. Dry ground and dry air do not hold scent well, wind and temperature have their own roles to play.

If hounds run with heads held high, the scent is off the ground, so strong it owns the air. Sometimes the scent lies still and flat against the earth; other times it moves like an invisible cord. When the pack hits it they take possession of it; occasionally they get beyond it or behind it or run riot when they encounter the distracting scent of deer or rabbit or coyote.

You want hounds with head to ground, otherwise they may lose interest. When you hunt on horseback, you’re in pursuit of the invisible. You’re being guided by instinct, following the lead of a quarry seldom seen. There’s no greater thrill than when you catch sudden sight of a flash of red, simultaneously appearing and disappearing, existing only in the moment, coming into view in a way so ephemeral that it makes you question whether you’re in pursuit of anything at all.

Some hunters determine to kill what they chase, stop the fox in its tracks, have it all end where it ends. Others, like me, enjoy nothing better than being led around in circles, as the object of all that desire gets far away, until a vibrant slash of color, a startling crease of memory is all that remains.

The fox broke cover that day. He led us over many miles—running, evading, circling, appearing and disappearing, reversing himself and taking us back almost to where it all began near the big kettle pond on Gin’s property. That’s where we lost him. Struggling to find his scent, the dogs cast about until all but one of them gave up. Bruce, the lead hound, never would say die but kept his head to the ground until he recovered the line or had to be leashed and dragged back to the kennel, his defeat imposed by others.

The other riders decided to head back to the stable—all but me. I watched Bruce and looked around, examining the countryside for a clue, for something to guide my way. Cantering off after him, the two of us were trying to recover the scent. He led me deeper into the woods to an old stone fence.

The fox had broken the line of scent by jumping up and running along the length of the fence and into the dense coppice wood beyond. Bruce ran alongside Mary as we followed the fence to its end, to where it crumbled and fell away and we were able to enter into the thickets of hazel, so dense at points I could barely make my way. Bruce was ahead of me when I heard him. I followed the sound of his cry and was about to call him back when a pair of deer ran from the bush, startling Mary, who shied so dramatically she almost unseated me.

Pressing Mary onward, my heart banged in my chest. There was no trail left to follow, and in the near distance I caught a brief last sight of the fox as he went to earth.

I called for Bruce to come away and as we struggled through the dense undergrowth, the old dock and canoe visible ahead in the clearing, the canoe latched to the dock, my eyes settled on something jarring, its effects disturbing.

Alarmed, I hesitated, then urged Mary forward. What was I looking at? A decaying animal. Is that what it was? My eyes focused on a hank of hair caught at the base of a sycamore tree, visible among a crucible of coppice stools. Squinting, I drew nearer and with each closing step I realized with a sense of mounting horror that along with the school bag and the topsiders and the artfully arranged miraculous medal and the tarnished silver chain, I had found Charlie Devlin.

T
HE POLICE GUESSED THAT
Charlie had died the same weekend that he disappeared. The timeline seemed right. Determining the cause of death was a problem, they said, because there was so little of him left—his skull and bones, stripped bare, were scattered erratically across the forest floor by purposeful scavengers and by the random forces of nature. Adding to their initial confusion, his bones were charred. Easily enough explained when Gin told them that he had done some controlled burning in that area to protect against the incursion of nonnative plants.

Privately, they speculated that Charlie had gotten drunk or high or both and had decided to go to the pond at Gin’s where he and Harry had gone so many times before. That would explain why his jacket was found on our property. He had obviously dropped it or discarded it along the way.

Charlie Devlin lost his life as a result of misadventure, just another one of those sad but inevitable casualties of youth.

Determining the cause of death may have been a problem for the police, but it wasn’t a problem for me. I sat down far from his remains, sun shining through the leaves of the overhanging trees, Mary peacefully grazing on lush clumps of tall grass, wind whistling through, and I thought about all of it, the running, the scuffling, the violent banging, the shattering glass and the plaintive cry. Why?

T
HE REALITY OF THOSE BONES
, stark and stripped bare, quiet and unremarkable—they could have been the remains of a lamb or a fox or a rabbit—possessed, for all their plainness and their simplicity, the power to elicit from me a brutal admission about the cost of my silence. Gula had killed Charlie Devlin in the yellow barn that Sunday in June, and I hadn’t lifted a finger to help him.

“She never shed a tear,” one of the hunters that found me marveled when discussing me with the police. “Most girls her age would have been hysterical, but she was so calm and composed. She said she was afraid to go for help. She thought she might not be able to find her way back to where he was. Most girls wouldn’t have cared. They would have just gotten the hell out of there and as far away from the body as they could.”

I had spent the summer crying for Charlie Devlin—at least, I thought it was for Charlie. Finding him strewn among the grass and the leaves, wan and dispersed and rendered anonymous, I felt such shame, such guilt, even as I was ashamed to feel shame, disgusted by my feelings of guilt.

My failure to act disentitled me. Feeling nothing is the worst feeling of all. Since finding his remains that day in the woods, I’ve never shed another tear for him. How could I? By what right? However would I dare?

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“‘P
OLICE’ AND ‘THINK’ ARE TWO WORDS THAT ARE NEVER TO
be used in the same sentence,” my mother said, no occasion too somber to warrant a moratorium on the expression of her opinions. “Gin told me they used divers to search the pond this morning but found nothing illuminating. Apparently, Charlie and Harry used to occasionally visit the pond unbeknownst to anyone, so it was familiar to him.”

“Sad state of affairs all around,” Camp said. “Quite a blow for Harry, though I suppose at least now he knows what happened. No more agonizing about whether his brother’s dead or alive.”

“A terrible thing for Michael, losing a son,” my mother reminded him.

“Yes, that too.” Camp cleared his throat and ran his finger around the rim of his glass. “How is Gin reacting to the tragic discovery?”

“Oh,” Greer said. “That’s the other thing. I think he’s terrified that the police suspect him of being involved in the disappearance. So bizarre. Honestly, it’s enough to make me wonder.”

“Gin’s total ineffectiveness as a human being is his best asset in this case,” Camp said. “Unfortunately, it sounds as if Charlie Devlin got himself into a jam. Lots of kids do these things. Inevitably, some of them pay the ultimate price. It’s a good lesson for you.” He pointed at me, as I stared back at him without speaking. “Though I’m sorry you had to learn it in such a difficult way.”

My mother sought to inject a little vitality into the numbness I was emanating from my corner in the room.

“What about you?” she said, pressing him for information about his trip to Washington. He’d cut it short when he heard the news about Charlie.

“Went well, despite the standard nonsense. Very well. Stupendously, in fact. I think I can safely report that the party is amenable to my ambitions.”

I marveled at my parents’ ability to carry on as if nothing had happened.

“Really?” my mother said, eyebrows raised. “Will I be expected to refer to you as Your Grace?”

“Only on Saturday nights,” Camp said, as they laughed and I looked on.

K
ISSING MY MOTHER ON
the cheek—the discovery of Charlie Devlin’s remains seemed to have had a restorative effect on their relationship—Camp announced he was going to get changed. Greer walked on ahead of him. Pausing at the doorway, Camp called my name.

“So you’re fine.” It was less a question than a pronouncement. No inquiries from Camp as to my emotional response to finding Charlie Devlin’s remains.

“Shipshape,” I said.

“You cooperated fully with the police? Told them everything.”

I nodded.

“Good. I’m proud of you.”

Oh God. Proud of me?

Camp seemed relieved. It was the most relaxed I had seen him in ages. His relief was evident in the way he walked, the animated spontaneous way he talked.

“You don’t seem tense anymore, Camp,” I said.

“You might be a little tense, too, if you were being accused of murdering a fifteen-year-old boy,” he said. “Now we can finally put this thing behind us.”

Charlie had been found, the tragedy satisfactorily defined. Any connection to our family had ceased to be of interest or concern to anyone. Anyone but me, that is.

Sometimes it seemed to me that my parents never met a catastrophe they didn’t like. The day-to-day stuff—cooking, laundry, simple parenting—undid them, but give them a war or a murder, set the whole world on fire, and they were like a vaudeville team that you couldn’t extract from the stage without a grappling hook. Camp, especially, rose to the occasion. Lou once told me that she had talked to some of the men he served with and they all said that even in the worst situations, Camp used to tell jokes and make funny remarks. “He was always able to make us laugh,” they said.

No question about it, Camp was the sun; the rest of us were orbiting lesser planets. He was exciting to be around. Incapable of a lukewarm response, he made things happen. A creator of worlds, he possessed a deep need to monitor and control the people he loved. A few minor personal adjustments, the occasional pruning of free will, a chop to point of view here, a trim to independent thought there—it seemed a reasonable trade-off to me. Besides, he was a merciful god and he dispensed favors in a dizzying flurry. The air was dense with his blessings; like a cloud of cherry blossoms propelled on a gentle wind, they soared then settled. I was forever knee-deep in petals and perfume. If ever he administered discipline, it was swift and straightforward and readily comprehended.

I
WALKED SLOWLY TOWARD THE
car, my father and mother uncharacteristically silent, preoccupied with their own thoughts, following a few feet behind me. I climbed into the backseat and looked down at my hands folded in my lap. Camp slid behind the wheel and stared straight ahead. My mother looked out the passenger window and never once spoke the whole way to the church.

Charlie Devlin’s funeral mass was held at Our Lady of Lourdes in Wellfleet, the church he had attended as a boy. It was simple and private, unadorned, no eulogy—his father’s decision, and one that earned grudging respect from Camp, who considered speech making to be an unacceptably Protestant manifestation of grief.

I remember some things from that day, forget other things. My father’s businesslike demeanor. He shook hands with Michael and their brief exchange was brusquely formal, sterile as a military salute. Despite their differences, my father wouldn’t have considered for a moment not attending Charlie’s funeral. I remember how handsome Harry looked in his dark suit.

I remember searching for my mother. Going from room to room and not finding her. Seeing her finally, outside, with Michael, the two of them alone in the rear of the churchyard, standing under a large tree. I came on them from behind, Michael’s face buried in his hands, his shoulders shaking, silently sobbing, my mother’s arm around his shoulder, her hair a yellow shroud.

They never knew I was there. I never knew you could be too sad to cry.

Wandering down into the basement, I sat by myself in the kitchen for a while. Then I went upstairs and into the church where Harry stood next to the parish priest, the bishop and a church cardinal, their presence a tribute to Michael Devlin’s stature, Harry smiling and shaking hands, thanking each person for coming.

He greeted my father politely. Later, I stood in the vestibule watching as Harry and Camp helped Gin to his car. His grief seemed vulgar and out of place, self-indulgent and insincere, as if someone had shown up to the funeral drunk and disorderly and demanding a beer.

“Why did this terrible thing happen? At the farm of all places!” he cried as he leaned into Harry while they walked down the church steps. Gula, playing the role of chauffeur, stepped out from behind the wheel of the driver’s seat as they approached. He opened up the passenger door, spoke to my father and then extended his hand to Harry and told him how sorry he was. As Harry and my father turned their backs to him and walked back toward the church, Gula smiled up at me and waved.

Something in a hood. Something in a cape. I looked at him and all I could see was soot and grime and charred bone, a piece of skull, russet hair with crimson tips. I saw him as if for the first time and he was awful to behold. What did he do? Why did he do it? What had I made possible?

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped. It was Harry.

Shaking my head, I managed to eke out a stilted expression of sympathy.

“How did you find him when I couldn’t?” Harry said, his face white and stricken. I looked down at the ground. I knew what I had to do.

“Harry . . .” Just as I found my voice, his attention was diverted when Jemima emerged from the crowd and took his hand and whispered in his ear and led him away.

Would I have told him if she hadn’t interrupted? I don’t know. I’d like to think so.

Standing at the open doorway of the church, I glanced down at the book of condolences, multiple expressions of sympathy on every page. Camp had written something. I picked up the pen and thought about what I wanted to say. Gula came up behind me, waiting his turn. I fled without signing.

You get the epitaph you deserve. That day at the funeral I earned mine.

She fled without signing.

C
AMP DROVE US HOME
from the funeral, my mother in the passenger seat, me behind her in the back, the only sounds the tires rolling along the road and the wind whistling in through the open crack of my window. It was a beautiful summer day, a pretty day to be alive. The birds sang and the sun shone. The ocean glittered in alternating shades of blue: sapphire, cobalt, indigo.

“Camp,” I said, breaking the silence, “what did you mean when you wrote to Michael in the book of condolences, ‘I will see you in the morning?’ ”

“Never mind, Riddle,” Camp said.

More secrets. I started to protest when he cut me off.

“It’s private. Do you understand? It’s none of your business. It’s between Michael and me.”

Once inside the house, my mother removed her hat, a gesture that felt somehow ceremonial, and set it on the table in the entryway and left it there, a solemn memorial of where we had been. She pulled off her gloves, tucked them into her bag and ran her fingers through her hair, glancing at herself in the hallway mirror, then went into the kitchen to make coffee.

My father sidled up to the piano and casually tapped out a tune. Walking over to the tall windows overlooking the dunes and the beach, the ocean, he paused to look, take it all in, then he reached for the crank at the bottom of the sill and opened wide the windows on either side, sunlight and breeze pouring in, flooding the house with brilliant light and a rush of fresh air.

“Greer, I’ve been thinking, we should have a party,” he said, turning to face her as she stood in the doorway of the living room, a sudden gust of wind blowing her hair back off her shoulders.