Burnt Mountain (11 page)

A
brams, 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 visiting 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.

I thought it unnatural, insane, almost revolting. But to my mother it was obviously the accepted norm for a maiden daughter.
She inundated Lily with attention, questions, advice, unguents, powders, dresses; even when she was scolding Lily for some
infraction or another… staying out too late, necking in the car in the driveway, hanging up rudely on an unlucky swain… my
mother’s interest was obvious and all-consuming. It was territory that she knew, and she relished guiding her fledgling through
it. I was thankful to the swaggering, neckless Goose that he waited almost until time for me to leave for Sherwood Forest
this summer to snatch Lily up and whirl her away into eternal Goosehood. It spared me, I know, the eyes of dissatisfied motherhood
turned on me in the useless determination to groom me as bride material. Once I overheard my mother say to my grandmother,
“I could just kill Lily for throwing it all away on that… Cro-Magnon. Now I’ve got to start all over again with Thayer, and
I might as well be trying to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.”