So Shelly (4 page)

Gordon failed to appreciate the levity. He rose to his feet and said, “I thought you’d understand. I guess I was wrong.”

“Gordon, wait,” Shelly said, grabbing his hand and pulling him back to the wooden boards, still warm with residual heat from the day. “I’m sorry. Is she the girl who stayed with you guys? I saw her a few times coming and going. She’s pretty. I thought she was a friend of Augusta’s or something. I didn’t know. Where is she now?”

“She went home to Virginia.
Not
West Virginia,” he said in order to ward off any more smart-ass comments. “We text and call once in a while. I’ve even offered to move back East, but she insists that I stay in Ohio. I’m pretty sure she’s blowing me off.”

“It’s probably for the best, Gordon,” she said, trying not to sound too self-serving. “I mean, she
is
your cousin.”

“I know, but I can’t help that. She’s the one. I love her.”

There was a pause. Shelly could sense him sharpening the knife before he laid it bluntly before her. “We did it.”

Shelly attempted to organize the ramifications of this unwanted information: (1) she wouldn’t be his first, (2) Annesley was a whore, (3) he probably had an STD, (4) he’d have two-headed babies, and (5) Annesley was really a whore.

“We had sex,” he added when she failed to respond, as if “We did it” hadn’t been obvious enough.

All she could think to say was “I hope you used a condom.”

“Condom
s,
” he added.

The plurality made it worse for Shelly, but for Gordon the memories seemed to lift his spirits and to break the spell under which he had languished. He laughed, and the gloom dissipated immediately. He smiled. His confidence returned. He stood up, pulled his T-shirt over his head, dropped his shorts, and dove headfirst into the bay.

“Come on in,” he called to her as he rolled over and made several backstrokes with his periscope intermittently breaking the surface.

Shelly knew that she shouldn’t. That she mustn’t. That there was a snake in the water (five to ten deaths by snakebite in the United States per year). But she never said no to Gordon. No one ever said no to Gordon. In the moonlight that burst through the thinning wisps of clouds, Shelly shimmied out of her shorts and top and stood naked in the spotlight moon, hoping that he would stop and be wowed by her womanly figure, which, in her mind, was every bit as beautiful and deserving of his body as Annesley Chaworth’s.

But Gordon was already torpedoing away from her.

Shelly watched as his muscled arms, in a sinuous stroke, carved a path over the surface, and as the rhythmic, gyrating torque of his body intermittently exposed his perfect ass to the moon as he propelled himself away from her until he disappeared in the darkness.

“I love you,” she said in a voice that soon tired, plummeted, and drowned like Icarus beneath the waters, long before reaching his ears.

Then she was in the water, a child again, swimming in his wake.

*    *    *

The second event that summer, which more or less divided the threesome forever, occurred on a steamy mid-August night, when Catherine, unable to sleep, and seeking the soothing, somnolent night air, stepped onto the back balcony of the master bedroom, where she heard Gordon’s sounding calls of “Marco” being answered by girlish giggles and teasing “Polo.” Catherine’s storming of the beach revealed the trio, naked in waist-deep water, with Gordon’s hands blindly groping for and often finding the welcoming bodies of his glistening sister and “that neighbor girl,” as Catherine disdainfully referred to Shelly.

In the aftermath of Catherine’s phone call to Mr. Shelley the next day, by his edict his daughter was no longer allowed contact with the Byron children. For her part, Catherine determined that an immediate and long-term separation was needed for Gordon and Augusta. God only knows to what planet Gordon would’ve been banished had his mother known of his couplings with Annesley.

In early September, she terminated her children’s homeschooling and registered Gordon for his freshman year as a boarder at an all-boys prep school, the Brothers of the Holy Rood Academy in Sheffield on Cleveland’s west side, while Augusta matriculated as a third-year upper-school student at the Brook School—Catherine’s own alma mater—on its sylvan campus in the extreme southeastern suburbs. The Brook School was a secular institution that had been founded nearly one hundred years before by the nouveaux riches
barons of Cleveland’s industrial renaissance, who’d possessed the progressive vision that the proper education of a young lady should transcend the niceties of Victorian etiquette and social grace. So they’d financed an all-girls boarding and day school for the academic furtherance and social maturation of their urban princesses.

Catherine was completely indifferent to the founding philosophy or the mission of either school. She simply desired to purchase as much separation and containment for the incestuous siblings as her shrinking means could afford.

The air-conditioning unit was busting its servile ass to lower the interior temperature of Gordon’s new car, a Merino-leathered air-locked, soundproofed black M3 BMW sedan. He calmly commandeered this early graduation gift to himself through the vehicle and pedestrian traffic in the gymnasium parking lot. Shelly rested snugly between my thighs inside the urn. Curious, I removed the lid and examined the contents. I turned momentarily to look through the tinted back window, fully expecting to see Mr. Shelley, with his square jaw set and fists clenched, storming after us through the gymnasium’s glass double doors in pursuit of what was left—but being spirited away—of his daughter. But it seemed that Gordon’s sleight of hand had yet to be discovered.

As I was still glancing back, without warning I was violently propelled forward. The shoulder belt bit into my neck as my momentum stretched the strap to its protective limits. As if in outer space, Shelly, inside her capsule, took flight.
Miraculously, Gordon’s right hand appeared and blocked its path, allowing me to get my own hands beneath the urn before it turned over, plummeted to the floor, and spilled all over the carpet. Just a small puff of Shelly plumed from the urn, only to be immediately scattered by the jet stream of air-conditioning before I replaced the stopper.

The cause of the sudden stop, Claire Clairmont, Shelly’s stepsister from her father’s remarriage, stood stock-still, with her infant daughter nestled in her arms, less than two feet from the car’s front fender. Barely in a little black dress (she was clearly pleased with her decision to nurse her child), Claire was more appropriately attired for clubbing than attending the wake of her stepsister. Another girl, dressed in a waitress’s uniform, arrived simultaneously with Claire and stood at Claire’s black stiletto heels, casting the evil eye of a gypsy witch at Gordon.

Gordon punched the steering wheel with an open right palm. “Fuck!”

Claire is the daughter of Shelly’s father’s second wife. His first, Shelly’s mother, drowned herself in the midst of postpartum madness mere weeks after Shelly’s birth. (About one in a thousand new mothers experience postpartum psychosis, which sometimes causes them to harm, or even kill, themselves or their babies.) During the winter of Shelly’s junior year, her father abruptly married Mary Jane Clairmont. Shelly hated her stepmother (to make things worse, Mary had been Shelly’s mother’s name as well), as she would have hated any woman who wasn’t her own sainted one; although,
she had no memories of her mother, just photos and imaginings.

For her entire life, Shelly was the ignored princess of the castle, left to her own devices by a distant father who, on some irrational level, blamed the child for his wife’s death. He left any and all discipline to a series of nannies, none of whom, for any extended duration, could tolerate Shelly’s free spirit or her indifferent father’s lack of support for or reinforcement of the disciplinary measures they attempted to administer. It’s unsurprising, then, that Shelly didn’t take too kindly to her stepmother’s usurpation. And with Mary Jane’s teenage daughters, Claire and Frances, in tow, Shelly’s home was, overnight, transformed into a sorority house.

Shelly tolerated Claire because Shelly had no friends other than Gordon and me. She was pleased to have acquired one who, having no prior knowledge or experience with Shelly’s “uniqueness,” had few grounds on which to prejudge her.

Frances, on the other hand, was just strange—even by Shelly’s liberal standards—a hard-core Goth and, Shelly was fairly certain, a cutter. Whereas Claire had been enrolled at Trinity in the same grade as Shelly and Gordon, Frances had apparently dropped out of school. She stayed out all night, slept all day, and was typically gone from the house by the time anyone returned from work or school.

It was through Shelly that Claire barged into Gordon’s life with the misguided assumption that any friend of her new stepsister was a friend of hers. When it turned out that Gordon wasn’t going to be Claire’s friend, she stalked him. At school in the halls, at lunch, at his locker, at swim practice
and meets, she was always there. Texting and emailing messages and pictures she’d taken of him, of her, of him and her; she even sent a picture of her flashing her breasts in a mirror.

Now there she was, too clueless to realize that she was mere inches from being made roadkill.

“It’s not my kid,” Gordon yelled from inside the air-conditioned BMW. Begrudgingly, he lowered his power window, letting the cool air out and Claire’s voice in.

As Claire tottered on her heels toward the driver’s-side window, I noticed that the angry gypsy girl’s name tag read “Caroline.” Shelly had warned me about the infamous Caroline Lamb, but I had never met the girl. Completely bereft of any lamblike qualities, she finally released Gordon from the track of her death stare and made her way toward the gymnasium.

I watched Claire mouth, “Her name is,” but I only actually heard “Allegra” as the window completed its descent.

The baby had been born the previous December. Per Trinity’s policy, and to Gordon’s great relief, Claire hadn’t been allowed to attend classes for as long as she was showing, so she had completed her fall semester at home through independent study, before returning during the second half of her senior year and recommencing the torment of her unconfessed baby daddy.

“I don’t care what her name is,” Gordon said. “She isn’t mine.”

I don’t think even Gordon believed his lie anymore, but he kept insisting upon it, less out of a desire to avoid
responsibility for the child than to escape an unimaginable lifelong linkage to Claire and Mr. Shelley.

Leaning nearly into the driver’s-side window, she spoke to Allegra in that singsong voice adults use with children and pets, and she waved the baby’s disinterested hand at Gordon, saying, “Say hello to daddy, sweetheart.”

“It isn’t mine,” he insisted once more. Then he stomped on the gas pedal, catapulted the BMW into a timely gap in the constant two-way traffic of Madison Street, and, at least temporarily, left three females of his yet-to-be-reckoned-with past in the lurch.

I let a few moments pass in silence before I asked, “Why not just take a paternity test?”

He looked at me like I was the biggest idiot on earth.

According to Shelly’s intermittent telling of Gordon’s biography—any conversation with Shelly eventually wound itself back to Gordon—by the time he was banished to boarding school, he had outgrown his insular box on the Strand anyway, and he took immediately to prep school life. His widely recognized family name and assumed fortune (in fact, Catherine had to secure a second mortgage on the Acedia property in order to finance the children’s education) won a warm reception from the faculty and administration, and Gordon immediately asserted himself as a mediocre student, superb athlete, and master prankster, the perfect recipe to expedite ingratiation with the boys of “the Rood.”

Gordon won the hearts of the Brothers with his outsider’s fascination with all things Catholic. Having been raised in a secular home, he loved the theatricality and sensuality of Catholic rituals, if not so much the “one true God” thing; his basic agnosticism remained sacrosanct. At the Rood, Vatican
II was treated as a malicious rumor; the Brothers remained frozen in 1960. Daily mandatory Mass was still recited in Latin, communicants still knelt at a Communion rail, and no lay hands touched a host. Gordon loved it. Within the first month, he had the Brothers convinced that he was committed to the conversion process. He even teased Brother Lombardy, the vocations director, with the prospect of his seeking a place in the order, despite its mandatory vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. There could not be three vows more antithetical to the nature and needs of Gordon Byron.

Within days of his enrollment, Gordon sauntered across campus as if he were already the shit, wearing his navy-blue blazer bearing the gold-braided crest of the Rood on the left breast—a rustic cross over whose horizontal beam a muslin cloth was draped, bearing the words “
Sacrifucium
,
Sanctimonia
, and
Scientia
”—over a white dress shirt, with blue and gold stripes slanting down the length of the school-issue polyester tie. His first night in the four-story dormitory saw him march onto the first-year students’ basement floor, evict one of the boys from the room nearest the communal bathroom and showers, and relocate the poor kid to Gordon’s own assigned room at the hallway’s end.

The hand-lettered sign outside the desired room bore the names Wildman and Harness.

“Hey, Wild Man, pack up. You’re moving,” Gordon commanded. He’d eyeballed the single person inside the room and had correctly identified the one to whom the name Wildman belonged.

“Fuck you” was the response of the soon-to-be-expatriated
boy, who remained crouched with his back to Gordon while he fidgeted with computer cables.

“Don’t flatter yourself, stud,” Gordon answered in an exaggerated lisp.

When Wildman rose, he stood two inches taller than Gordon and at least twenty-five pounds heavier. He was a middle linebacker who’d already been promoted to the varsity football team.