from Chapter II
“How did you ever find this place, Julia? A meadow on top of a mountain? The air up here is like champagne. Why didn't we know about this spot when we were growing up?”
“It's called Pinnacle Old Bald by the locals, but it still goes by its unpronounceable Indian name on the maps. So when people come asking for it, of course, the locals can't—or won't—tell them where it is. And you know as well as I do that there are a whole lot of things we didn't know about when we were growing up.”
“You said a mouthful there, honey.” Clare clapped her friend jovially on the arm as the two of them, Julia in front, hiked up a wide path in noon sunshine towards a dome-shaped golden meadow sticking right up into the blue sky. Clare was lighter of heart since Julia had driven her away from Quick's Hill this morning. The frown lines between her brows had disappeared and her shoulders had sprung back, as if released from an invisible load. She grew more confident and relaxed with every breath she took of the invigorating air.
“The spirits are pretty friendly up here,” Julia said, “if you come with the right attitude. It's supposed to have been an Indian burial ground once. A retired Navy officer owns it now. But he allows hikers and picnickers, as long as they clean up after themselves and don't bring guns. Anyway, he's not here very much. I think it's just an ‘investment’ for him. That's a Christmas tree farm, all those little spruces in rows on that sunny slope. The caretaker was one of my students, that's how I know about it.”
“Well, I love it. There's something…sacred about it. I wouldn't mind being buried up here.”
“I think you'll enjoy it much more being alive, dear.” But Julia was pleased with Clare's enthusiasm. She liked to show her new places, places in these mountains they had never dreamed existed when they were growing up. It had become a self-imposed commission for Julia to be able to produce a different hiking and picnic spot every year when Clare visited. It was Julia's way of reminding her old friend that there were rewards for those who returned to live in the place where they were born. Perhaps it was also, Julia thought, a way of reassuring herself that the old and familiar harbored special revelations for those who hung around faithfully and stayed alert. “I was going to take you up to Mount Mitchell, but George and I drove up there in August for a hike, and when we got there and saw what had happened to it, we just turned the car around and went somewhere else.”
“God! Its terrible. I saw a picture of it; it made the front page of the Times. All those noble red spruce woods where we used to camp out as Girl Scouts look like some blasted peak in Hell. Acid rain. All the way from Ohio, the article said. From smokestacks of coal-burning furnaces. I got very depressed when I read it. One more old landmark gone. Just like the old St. Clothilde's getting torn down board by board when I was away in England. But Mount Mitchell, you would have thought, was inviolable. Do you remember that year, when we were camping out and everybody started blowing on the fire, only the air was so thin we couldn't get our breaths properly and Freddy Stratton just sank in a heap all of a sudden and that good-looking forest ranger had to pick her up in his arms and carry her to the station wagon so they could get her back down to the camp infirmary?”
Julia laughed. “I'll bet she wasn't so far gone that she couldn't enjoy it.”
“You know, I've about got up my courage to phone Freddy. I've been working up to it for years. I want to test whether I'm over that terrible sense of inferiority she could make me feel just by looking at me. It's been over twenty years since I last saw her.”
“I wish you would call her. It's time you realized she's not the archrival you always made her into. I saw her a couple of weeks ago, out at that new crafts center they've made out of the old railway depot. At first I didn't recognize her; I thought it was just one more tense society matron in her Talbots catalogue clothes. She nursed her mother at home through the last stages of lung cancer, you know. Yet, the whole time we talked, Freddy was chain-smoking.”
“What did you talk about?” Clare's voice, suddenly regressing to its anxious adolescent pitch, reminded Julia how jealous Clare had been of Freddy Stratton's sudden courting of Julia when they had reached the age when it was time to meet the right kind of boys and there was Julia's family conveniently living on the Belvedere School grounds.
“Well, her mother, of course. I said, ‘It must have been awful for you,’ and she said, ‘No, I was really glad to be able to do it.’ And she asked about you. I told her you'd be coming down to visit your family.”
“What did she say about me?”
“Well, she asked how I felt about your using my family in your novel.”
“What did you say?”
“I said that I had known you were doing it, that we had even corresponded about it, but that, really, it wasn't my family when you got through with us. I explained to her that was the way writers work. You made up your own Richardson family and called them the Taylors. You idealized us into a sort of generic genteel Southern family.”
“Oh, do you think so?” Clare sounded annoyed.
“More or less. But what does it matter? It's a fine book. And It's given my father's ego a boost. Not that my father's ego exactly needs a boost, but—”
“So how is George?” Clare changed the subject abruptly. “Is that still on, then?”
“I'm not sure ‘on’ is the word for it—I mean, we were never on fire, or anything—but we're not altogether off, so I guess it'll do. We both like to walk, and eat good food, and complain about how they overwork us at North State. We make love once a week, on Friday nights, when I stay over at his house. He's very…punctilious. And on Saturday morning we have a big celebratory breakfast because we've acquitted ourselves like a normal couple, and then he starts looking wistfully towards his study—he's doing a book on medieval French monasteries—and I rinse the dishes and put them in his dishwasher and go home and do my own laundry. Actually we suit each other very well. He would have made a perfect Jesuit if God hadn't been so inconsiderate as to cause him to be born into a Protestant family, and I…well, I've had the feeling lately that I'm just marking time until I reach the age when I can dispense with the social necessity of having a boyfriend.”
“Julia, do you really feel that way?”
“I'm exaggerating a little, but I can imagine how it would be. It wouldn't be so different from our early adolescence, when we were just…ourselves. Before we got infected with the notion that we'd better go hide in our closets if we didn't have a man to go out with on Saturday night. You know, I counted it up the other night: it's been fifteen years since I was a married person, and I was married only four years. Even counting live-in lovers, by far the greatest portion of my adult life has been spent alone. It may well be that solitude is my most natural state.”
“I used to think that, before I met Felix. Now I don't know. I think my talent for living alone may have atrophied. Funny, isn't it, you're the one who's been married and you're talking like a spinster; whereas I'm the real spinster, I'll probably never marry, but I can't imagine life without Felix.”