But I left that summer with wings in my heart, sure that my life was about to change.
I was right about that.
At the end of my first week as fireside counselor I decided to end the evening early. I was still feeling my way through the world of story, and I had given them too much to digest. I started out with “Theseus and the Minotaur,” progressed to “The Trojan Horse,” and finished up with “Leda and the Swan.” Hands sprang up like wildfire when I finished that one.
“But what did the swan do to that lady?” was the first question, and I could not answer it. Somehow it never had occurred to me to ask my father. I loved the myth for its grace and yearning and beauty, the lovely young nymph, the air full of fluttering pure white wings. What was truly going on had never entered my mind.
I was silent for a moment. What had I let myself in for? From across the fire, in the darkness beyond its leaping red heart, came a deep masculine voice with laughter in it.
“The swan was Zeus in disguise, and he diddled old Leda right and proper,” it said. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you that Zeus was a serial rapist?”
All the young campers gasped. I knew that the question was directed at me. I stared stonily in the direction of the voice, hoping my stare was as effective as my mother’s. In truth I had no idea that Zeus as the swan had raped Leda. I barely knew what rape was.
The other male counselors from Silverlake, who had come over to sit in on the last of the campfire as they often did, laughed uproariously. I swept them with the Look. Tonight was the first night they had come, but I recognized most of them from previous years. I felt my face and neck flame.
“Tell her about it, Abrams!” one of them called, and another shouted, “You girls better look out for them swans. You see a single feather, you run tell your counselor. Maybe she’ll have it figured out by then!”
“Bedtime,” I said crisply. “Lights-out in twenty minutes. Everybody back to the cabins.”
They muttered mutinously, as they always did, but they got up and headed for their cabins. I stayed behind to put out the fire, my face still burning. I had emptied the pails of water kept there for fire extinguishing and was about to stamp on the embers when a voice directly behind me said, “I’m sorry. That was a cheap shot. If any of them tell the directors, I’ll probably get canned. Unless you’re going to tell them?”
It was the deep voice from the other side of the campfire. I did not turn around. I did not want its owner to know that I was still blushing.
“You’d be right to do it,” the voice went on, and I did turn around then.
He was all-over brown. In the dying firelight he looked a molten copper brown, from the tangled hair that flopped over his forehead, to his deep-shadowed eyes under strong brows, to his bare feet on the grass. His straight nose was peeling in strips, exposing patches of tender pink underneath, and when he smiled I could see that there was a chip out of one of his front teeth. It looked like a recent accident; somehow I could not imagine that a Silverlake counselor’s parents would let him go around with a chipped tooth. He wore a white tee shirt with the Silverlake emblem on it, and he had broad, bony shoulders and big feet and a sprinkling of freckles across his cheekbones. In the dying firelight he looked half-Indian, a Plains Indian perhaps, with the slanted eyes and the all-over brown, but his accent was purely and thickly southern as sorghum syrup.
“I’m Nick Abrams,” he said. “I guess you can tell I’m from Silverlake by the cool threads. Who are you?”
“I’m Thayer Wentworth,” I said, feeling the heat spread up my face again. “Are you always that brown?”
“Almost always,” he said. “I live on the Georgia coast. Lots of sun on the coast. Are you always that red?”
I felt the anguished shyness rise in my throat for a moment and then surprised myself by laughing.
“Almost always,” I said.
We stood silent for a moment, he studying my face, I looking everywhere but at his.
Then he said, “If you’re going back up to the cabins, I’ll walk you.”
“Thank you,” I said, still not moving.
He took my hand and tugged it lightly, and I followed him out of the smoking fire pit and up the pine needle-slicked hill toward the log cabins, where the din of young girls going to bed was rising. We did not speak again until we reached the silver-weathered front door, and then he said, “See you tomorrow,” and I said, “Yeah, see you.”
Only then did he drop my hand.
CHAPTER 6
Abrams, you said?” my mother asked delicately, tapping her napkin to her lips.
“It’s a fine old St. Simons Island family, Crystal,” my grandmother Caroline said, smiling across the wooden picnic table at my mother. It was her cool-amused smile.
“What’s on St. Simons?” my mother said, studying the pallid iced tea in her sweating glass. “I’ve never seen anything but tourists and that silly pink hotel on St. Simons. We don’t pass it on the way to Sea Island, I don’t think…. Is the family in the tourist business?”
“Department stores,” my grandmother said, still smiling. “Several of them along the coast. Quite substantial. This young man’s grandfather was in the Driving Club with Big Finch and me.”
“Abrams? The Driving Club?”
“They manage it a bit better than you do, my dear.”
I watched the exchange in puzzlement.
“What’s the matter with Abrams?” I asked.
“Oh, Thayer, really! You can be so abysmally dim sometimes. Abrams is a Jewish name. I was only surprised because I didn’t think… people of his religion came to Sherwood Forest.”
“Why not?” I persisted. “Why wouldn’t they come?”
I was honestly puzzled. There had never been much prejudicial talk about Jews in Lytton, that I had heard, anyway. It was all against the blacks. I see now that it was simply that we had so many more blacks than we ever had Jews. In my childhood, Jews did far better in the cities. Not always good, God knows, but better. I don’t think Lytton had any Jews in those torpid years, and I wouldn’t have known them as such if it had.
“You didn’t even know he was a Jew, did you?” my mother said in exasperation.
I did not reply. I had not known. The question of Nick’s ethnicity had never come up. I knew about his family and his house and the island and his friends and what they did and what they dreamed of doing, even his multiple dogs. But he had never mentioned religion or church, and neither had I. By the time it might have come up we were so closely bound and nearly alike that I simply assumed we shared the matter of church, as we did almost everything else.
“You have only to look at him,” Mother went on, reaching for a sugar cookie and then putting it back. “Dark all over. Those eyes and cheekbones…”
“You sure could have fooled me,” my grandmother said, stretching her tan legs out to the July sun. I stared at her. To my knowledge, nobody had ever fooled my grandmother.
“I would have said Native American, maybe, if I didn’t know his family. An Iroquois, maybe, or a Cherokee…”
“Well, he seems a nice, polite boy, for all that,” my mother said, her tone ending the matter, and stood up. “It’s time we started home, Mother Caroline,” she said. “It’ll be well after dark when we get back, and I don’t like driving at night….”
“Detritus does quite well at that,” my grandmother said, but she, too, rose, leaning heavily on her cane. “He is a nice boy, Thayer. Bring him to see us when camp is over.”
My mother looked sharply at her, and Grand said, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, he can sleep in the garage with Detritus if it upsets you to have him in your house. He’d probably be more comfortable there, anyway.”
By this time Detritus had pulled the Mercedes down to the picnic table and was handing the two women in. My mother hugged me, and Grand did, too.
“It seems a long time that you’ve been away,” she said. “It will be good to have you home. Unless you’ll be visitin
g your Nick at St. Simons?”
“No,” I said, not looking at my mother, ensconced in the backseat fanning herself. It was mid-July and steaming… even in our green bowl of valley. “Nick and his father are going to Europe after camp. Nick’s going to be an architect, and his father thinks he should see some of the buildings over there before he starts college. They’ll be gone over a month.”
“They’re not taking his mother?” my mother asked. She said it incredulously, as if some great familial taboo was to be violated, and I knew we were not through with the subject of Nick Abrams yet. Not by a long shot.
“His mother’s dead,” I said briefly. “She died when he was ten. She had cancer. He lives with his father.”
“My goodness, that’s too bad,” Mother said. She was studying her still-beautiful face in her compact mirror. “Doesn’t he have any other family?”
“Two sisters,” I replied. “They’re both married.”
“A shame to be alone in a big house like that,” Mother said, as if she and I were not living the same way, or almost. “I suppose it is a big house?”
I remembered the photograph he had shown me, of a rambling two-story shingle house atop a dune line, staring out at an ocean.
“Yeah. But they have a lot of people around. Servants, I guess.”
I did not know if you called hired people in other houses servants. We never had. The word had an old-fashioned taste on my lips, somehow Victorian.
“I imagine they must,” Mother said creamily, and from the front seat Grandmother Caroline winked at me, and Detritus swung the big car up the gravel road and out of sight among the trees lining it to the camp gates.
They had come up to camp for Parents’ Day, and Nick had gotten special permission to join us for lunch, since we were both counselors and his father could not come. He had kayaked back across the lake over an hour ago. Now everything was still and quiet, punctuated only by lazy birdsong and the slap of the lake against the pier pilings nearby. Only large wastebaskets full of colorful paper plates and crumpled napkins and road dust lying in still strata in the freshening late-afternoon air spoke of people in this place. I shivered, though it was still very hot. Emptiness lapped in my heart. I wished that my mother had not come. I wanted Nick. I had known somewhere deep inside that she was not going to like him, but I had had high hopes for the day anyway. How could anyone not like him?
I started up the hill toward the cabins, to assemble the girls for supper.
“Nick,” I whispered, wishing him back.
From the very beginning he had struck me like a lightning bolt. It was hard not to look at him. His physical presence seemed painted on the air in luminous strokes; I would as soon have looked away from a wild animal, or living fire at my feet. No one else had ever struck me this way. Not even my mother and sister, who were widely known to be eye-stoppingly beautiful. Not even my father, who was not beautiful but, in my eyes, lit by love. I don’t believe Nick Abrams appeared so indelible to anyone else, or he would have been trailed by a pack of giddy followers; it would have been a sort of human Stendhal effect. But he was not. That summer he was mostly with me.
I knew that the attraction was mutual, but I could not imagine why this brown demigod of earth and woods was interested in me. I was certain that no other boy ever had been. Toward the end of the summer I asked him why.
“Are you kidding? Don’t you have a mirror? You’re a knockout,” he said, raising himself on one elbow. We were lying on the float at the end of the dock in the lake. We swam together almost every day, in mid-afternoon when the campers were napping or resting. He swam like a dolphin. “Like an island kid,” he said. I was not a good swimmer. Horses had been my love in this place for the past five years. That I would give them up for Nick and the lake spoke volumes.
“It’s my mother who’s the knockout,” I said, laying my arm across my face, both to shield it from the sun and so that he could not see that I was blushing. “And my sister. Everybody thinks so. Everybody at home calls them the Wentworth girls, like they were twins. They’ve even had their pictures in the Atlanta paper. They looked like two movie stars.”
“The hell with that,” he said. “Anybody can be a blonde. All you need is a bottle. Almost nobody has hair like yours, or eyes like topaz aggies….”
“My grandmother does,” I said.
“Yeah, and she’s a knockout, too. Puts your mother in the shade, if you don’t mind me saying so. You look a lot like her. Longer and more streamlined maybe, and I don’t know about her boobs because she had on that loose shirt thing the time I met her. But if hers are as good as yours…”
He let the sentence trail off and ran his fingers where my breasts spilled slightly sideways from my bathing suit top. My face felt as if it had been scalded. He knew my breasts by that time. He knew almost every square inch of me. Sometimes, when I thought about the things we had done together, I simply could not believe them. I could not believe it had been so very easy to cross that gulf between childhood and adulthood, if that was where I was now. What else do you call it? Adults had sex. Children didn’t.
“What’s an aggie?” I said, not caring in the least. I just liked to watch his mouth when it formed words.
“A marble. You use it to shoot with. Didn’t you ever play marbles?”
“No,” I said. “Did you learn at home?”
“No. I learned at my first year at Edgewood….”
And then he stopped. He had gone to Camp Edgewood on Burnt Mountain from the time he was eight until now. He was at Silverlake this summer because his friend from St. Simons, who had always come to Silverlake, had a chance to spend a summer on his uncle’s dude ranch and Nick took his counselor’s position here for him. Nick loved Edgewood, I knew. But he stopped talking about it when I told him about my father’s death on Burnt Mountain, coming home from the camp.
“You can talk about it,” I said. “I’m not going to be silly about it anymore. It must be a great place, if you like it so. My father loved it, too….” I halted, then went on. “He went there when he was a kid. Maybe you’ll take me to see it, when you get back from Europe. There’ll be time before school….”
“Maybe I will. We’ve got lots of stuff to do when I get back.”
“What will we do?” I asked very faintly. The sun had lowered behind the mountain to the west of the camp so that part of the lake and the float lay in shadow. In the gloom he was all a piece of the dimness except when his white teeth flashed, the broken front one looking like a chip in a pearl. I wanted him to continue talking. I loved the flash of his smile and basked in the warmth that his skin gave off. His deep voice echoed in my very blood. I would, I thought, know his voice anywhere on earth.
“Well, you know. We’ve talked about it. You’ll go to Agnes Scott and I’ll switch from Yale to Georgia Tech. They have just as good an architecture department. We’ll see each other practically every night. When we get out I’ll practice in Atlanta and you can write your songs and stories, or teach them, or whatever you want to do. We’ll have a house right on the Chattahoochee River; I’ll design it.”
“Children?” I asked dreamily, lost in the shining world that he was spinning with his lips.
“Oh yeah. Several. Lots. And, and they’ll all come here to Sherwood Forest or Silverlake if that’s what you want.”
“They can go to Edgewood, if you want them to. Just so I don’t have to. There’s a lot else up there that’s really beautiful, I know.”
There was. There was Burnt Mountain itself, named for a long-forgotten lightning-spawned wildfire that had charred but could not kill that last towering knob of the Appalachian chain. Burnt Mountain. It had always seemed a mystical place to me, the tall green house of a hidden god.
“We’ll see.”
Nick leaned over me and brushed his lips lightly and softly over mine. I shuddered, partly with pleasure and partly with apprehension. If anyone saw us there would be no more meeting in the afternoons and evenings. Everyone
at Sherwood Forest and Silverlake alike smiled indulgently at us, two young people so obviously in love. But they would not smile if they saw us kissing in full view of the camp, much less knew what we did at night on the top bunk of the empty log cabin closest to the water’s edge.
“If anybody sees you doing that they’ll kick us both out,” I said. “What would you do then?”
“Marry you right off, I guess. I was planning to wait a few years, but I’d just as soon do it now. Nobody could say a word about what we do then.”
“As long as we don’t do it in plain view and scare the horses,” I said, my chest filling with insane laughter.
He lifted my head to his face and kissed me long and hard, and the laughter bubbled into his mouth and danced on our joined breaths.
After he had paddled out of sight toward Silverlake on the opposite shore, I sat with my knees drawn up to my chest and my face up to the last of the sun, thinking about us, Nick and me. Utterly confounded, all of a sudden, that there could be us. How had this happened? I was never meant to be part of an “us”; I had always known that. I was the troublesome one, the reader, the stargazer, always scanning odd skies for even odder materializations, asker of innumerable and unanswerable questions, openly loving only my father and the house I grew up in. A cipher. A changeling. And always, essentially alone. I watched as my older sister grew up, began to flirt, to talk long and teasingly on telephones, to date first one young man and then another, then to cast her whole fervent soul into the being of a particular young man, only to withdraw it carelessly and move on to another. I had no doubt that she would always live, move, and have her being, as we said at church, in the light cast from a man. Her studies were so-so; I believe it was Grandmother Caroline’s auspices that got her accepted at Agnes Scott. Men. For Lily, just men.
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