Early Warning

But they were still angry at one another; when they went back to watching TV, Frank had to sit them on cushions a couple of feet apart so they wouldn’t continue the argument. By the time Janny walked in, and then Andy, they were quiet enough. Andy said, “Whew! It’s nice and shady in here. We could have stayed home, it’s so hot. You guys have a nice afternoon?”

“We did,” said Frank. The boys nodded; undoubtedly, “nice” was not the word to describe the particular pleasures of their time together. But “nice” was not for boys, Frank thought. “Educational,” “stimulating,” “active.” Right out of Dr. Spock, Frank was sure.

1956

GRANNY ELIZABETH WAS BOUND and determined to go visit Henry in California (and Eloise, too — ever since Eloise had lived with Rosanna and Walter back in the old days, helping with Frank and Joe, Granny Elizabeth had had a special fondness for her), and so Claire found herself on New Year’s Day, her seventeenth birthday, helping Granny down the steps at the station in Oakland or Berkeley or somewhere damp, dark, and chilly. Granny had on her furs — a set of four minks with heads and tails, biting each other around her neck. The thing was ten years out of style, but she was enormously proud of it—“It’s the dog she never got to have,” said Joe. Claire, carrying both the suitcases, had to hurry to keep up with her grandmother as she clicked down the platform toward the waiting room. “California!” she exclaimed. “You know, Claire, in a day or two, I will stand on these eighty-year-old feet and stare out over the Pacific Ocean, and that is a thing no Chick or Cheek has ever seen before! Stuck in the mud as always, just like hornbeams on the riverbank, looking at the lucky creatures drifting by! There he is!”

The Chicks and the Cheeks were Granny’s ancestors back in England. Secretly, Claire always thought maybe the names were a joke, that they were really “Smiths” and “Johnsons.”

Henry was laughing as he took the bags from Claire. Then Eloise was hugging her, and Rosa kissing her, and Henry was saying, “How was your trip, Granny?”

“Not long enough by half,” she said, “but I hear this is as far as you can go.”

The next morning, Henry showed up at Eloise’s. As soon as they finished their coffee, they piled into Eloise’s car, and Henry exclaimed, “Westward ho!” Two hours later, they were standing in the brilliant sunshine, at a place called Drakes Bay. The weather was not hot but, compared with Oakland, almost heavenly.

Claire kept her eye on Rosa, who slipped off her shoes and socks and set them beside an oddly shaped rock — they would pass it going back to the car. They were the only people on the beach. Rosa was five months younger than Henry, almost twenty-three, but years more mature. “Ah, the beach!” exclaimed Granny, with joy. But to Claire it was a stark, strange thing: flat, cool sand running under flat, cold water, the brilliance of the clouds and the sea and the sun almost too much to look at. Granny Elizabeth stood up straight, her arms thrown in the air. Henry touched something in the sand with his toe and bent down. It was a shell — concave, pearly on the inside, and rough gray on the outside. Claire said, “What’s that?”

“Only an oyster shell. But you know how they know that Francis Drake stopped here? Shards of broken porcelain from vessels he would have been carrying on the ship. By the time he got here, he had one ship, the Golden Hind. He started out with five. These cliffs here”—he swept his arm around, and Claire noticed the tall, pale cliffs looming over the grayish-yellow sand—“reminded him of Dover, England, where there are also cliffs, so he called this ‘Nova Albion,’ which basically means ‘New England,’ and claimed all this coast for Queen Elizabeth.”

“Was that before the Pilgrims?” said Claire.

“Forty-one years before.” Henry scraped his toe through the sand again.

Since moving into Henry’s old room at home, Claire had looked through some of his books. She couldn’t believe how boring they were. She thought it was really too bad that Henry should be so good-looking — he was twenty-three and looked like a blond James Dean, except he didn’t — James Dean walked around like he had a plan, and Henry walked around like he was going to the library, which he was.

He did everything Rosa said. Rosa had her nose in the air, Claire thought, and when she smiled, it was only to laugh at you, or even less than that — she smiled to herself because it wasn’t worth it to notice you. Right now, she was walking ahead of all of them, her hands in her pockets, sometimes shaking her head to make her hair blow, and then gazing out to sea as if she saw something that she was going to go write a poem about. Aunt Eloise might look a mess, but she was nice. How did her daughter turn out not to be? Claire wondered.