The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [36]
“Weren’t the springs earlier and longer?”
“I don’t know about your springs. We live, Adam, a continent apart.”
“California. Land of the unreal.”
“The new world. Possibilities.”
“You don’t have real autumns.”
“No, I miss that light: that bright light on the yellow leaves.”
“Here in Rome there are only varieties of green. In autumn the greens become bronzed, like old metal. Even now, though it’s October, everything is green; the yellow just becomes part of a darker green. Absorbed in it.”
“America invented brilliant autumns,” she says.
“Do you remember when we left home for college?”
“You got there a week before me.”
“I had to audition, I had to keep auditioning … God, I was so afraid of failing.”
“I thought, Now I must begin my life.”
“We sat under a tree,” Adam says. “I think you said it was a larch. The leaves were narrow, they made a canopy over our heads. I wanted to say, ‘We sit beneath a canopy of brilliant gold.’ But I was afraid to say something like that in front of your new friends.”
“I wasn’t afraid of anything then. If only I could be like that again.”
“And what are you afraid of now?”
“Now I’ve learned to be afraid of more things than I could even have imagined thinking of as frightening,” she says.
“I sometimes wonder if I am any longer capable of exhilaration. Of that sense of taking flight. Of being taken up. I am very attached to the earth.”
“Maybe it’s because we’re more than halfway through our lives on earth and so perhaps more reluctant than we once were to take flight from it.”
“Or perhaps our blood has slowed and thickened,” Adam says.
She thinks: He’s had a heart attack. He could have died. I’m sure he’s on medicine to thin his blood. Perhaps he feels the cold.
“You look cold,” she says in case he is.
“I am, a bit.”
Alarmed, he turns his wrist, looks at his watch.
“I should be waking Lucy now.”
She sees he is no longer with her.
“I’ll stay here and walk for a while,” she says. She wants to be looking at the trees in a way that she knows wouldn’t interest him. Because of what they have been saying, she wants to be thinking of her father. She feels free to, as she hasn’t felt for what she thinks is much too long a time.
September 1964
Labor Day has come and gone; it is officially not summer, but the air is close and damp, the temperature in the high eighties. No one knows how to dress. Or rather, girls and women don’t; boys and men believe they have no choice. For most activities of any kind of public nature, a jacket is required; they are prepared, men and boys who aspire to the category of “the respectable,” to be too hot. But girls and women, having put aside their pastel dresses, are baffled, vexed. As long as they refuse white shoes, belts, and pocketbooks, they are perfectly within their rights to wear a skirt and long-sleeved blouse of a breathable material: cotton always the most desirable, but sometimes rejected on the basis of convenience in favor of nylon or Dacron: drip-dry. Whatever they choose, they too will be uncomfortable. Stockings are compulsory, and for all but the most brave, a girdle to hold in the stomach, whether or not the stomach requires being held in. Also to keep the stockings up.
But even if they are not too warm, the women and the girls will not be happy. They have spent many days in August sweating in try-on rooms, making important autumn purchases: wool skirts (straight, A-line, pleated), sweaters to match the colors of the falling leaves. Purchases to suggest security, dependability, a preparedness against the coming winter.
Miranda, for example, is secretly disappointed because she spent a summer’s worth of babysitting money on a jacket made to look like a lumberjack’s red-and-black plaid, designed by Pendleton. It would be absurd to wear it on a day