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.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]