“You won’t remember me,” he said. “We barely spoke.”
The voice on the other end of the phone was correct. Gwen Wells did not know who Hal Legend was. Apparently they had been at the same community dinner the evening before. He had gotten her phone number and was now calling to ask her to dinner.
He was asking her on a date.
Gwen had been on dates before, but the last one had been with a young midshipman who had subsequently made her a wife, mother, and now a widow. Surely the rules that had applied to dating in those days no longer applied.
But Gwen had a thirty-year-old daughter, Holly, who was a single lawyer in New York City, and Gwen knew enough about Holly’s life to know how one went about dating a stranger.
Yes, she would love to get together with Hal Legend. (Holly always accepted first dates.) But it needed to be lunch. (Keep it short was Holly’s rule.) No, no, he didn’t need directions to her house. She would drive herself, she would meet him there. (Have your own escape route.)
“You’re making this too easy for me,” he said. “I was prepared to go to a great deal of trouble to see you.”
And there was something in the way he said “you,” something quiet and deep, that Gwen had not heard from a man in a very long time.
Three days later Gwen admitted to herself that she was nervous about this date. She, usually well-focused, clear-sighted, and self-directed, was nervous.
She couldn’t believe it. She was never nervous. She worried about her kids, of course, but who didn’t? That wasn’t the same as being nervous. Why was she even going? She was fifty-eight years old, for heaven’s sake. All those rules about dating that she had picked up from Holly—it wasn’t as if Holly had sat down and taught them to her. It had never occurred to either one of them that she would need them.
So why was she going? I’m old enough to be a grandmother. Grandmothers do not go out on dates.
In point of fact, she was not a grandmother, something which she forced herself to remember. But that’s only because neither Holly nor Jack are married. I’m old enough and that’s what counts.
She looked at her neat gold-banded watch. She was ready, and there were twenty minutes before she needed to leave. What should she do in those twenty minutes?
This was not like her. She did not fluster easily. She was Mrs. Poised and Reliable, Mrs. Organized and Predictable, the lady with the tidy closets and neat drawers. The Queen of the Unchipped Manicures. The commanding officer’s wife, the one responsible for all the other wives when the boat was out at sea. Can’t understand the notice from the bank? Don’t know if you should get the car repaired? Too many wine bottles in your friend’s weekly trash? You called Mrs. Wells. She could be counted on to sort out everything.
In those days an officer’s fitness report always included an evaluation of his wife because the wives had had responsibilities too. Being an officer’s wife was a job, and Gwen had been good at hers. Very good. Her husband would have never become admiral if she hadn’t been.
But that was over now. Her manicures were still unchipped, her closets were still neat, she was still trim and blonde, but she wasn’t Mrs. C.O. anymore. Mrs. Admiral Wells was Gwen, out on her own, actually going on a date. She wished Holly or Jack were here. This would all be easier if one of her kids were coming with her. They were great. Everyone always liked them.
She stopped herself. She was not dependent on her children. She was not going to hide behind them. In fact, she was going to make a rule for herself. If she actually made it to this date, she was not going to talk about her children, and if she got a set of grandchildren between now and then, she wouldn’t talk about them either.
She forced herself to wait another ten of the remaining twenty minutes and then drove to the restaurant. It was in the suburbs, across from Tysons Corner, one of the biggest malls in the Washington, D.C., area. Parking was easy. Too easy. Now she was twelve minutes early.
Some people were always falling further and further behind in life. She was getting further and further ahead. It would be nice if that were a cosmic metaphor, but it probably wasn’t. She was just twelve minutes early for her first date in more than three decades.
This was stupid; this fretting was not like her. She pulled her keys out of the ignition and swept up her purse. She was going inside. So what if she was early?
The winter sunlight was thin, but it glittered off the low mounds of ice-crusted snow at the edges of the parking lot. Gwen pulled the restaurant door open. It was dark inside, and for a moment she could see only shapes. A man was rising, moving toward her. Apparently he—if this was indeed the correct ‘he’—had arrived even earlier. She pulled off her gloves and slipped them into her purse. Her eyes were adjusting to the light. She could see colors, now details.
He was a tall man with a full head of silvering hair and alert grayish eyes. The bones of his face were good, the slight squareness of his jaw balanced by the high cheekbones. He was a handsome man, but there was nothing overly arranged about his hair or dress. She liked that. She didn’t like vain men.
She put out her hand. “You should have told me that you were the one who knew all the songs.”
She had noticed him the other evening. How could she not have?
The dinner had been held at a historic mill, a high, round wooden building with exposed joists and stone floors. Someone had brought song sheets, and a small group—a nice mix of all ages—had enjoyed singing. But there were only four songs on the sheet, and they wanted to sing more. Someone suggested “Clementine” and “On Top of Old Smoky” after that. Then there was a pause; no one could think of another song. People started to stir as if they were going to leave the circle. Gwen was disappointed. She would have liked to sing more.
Then a man—this man—spoke. “Why don’t we see if we can make it through ‘Shine on, Harvest Moon’?”
Gwen knew only the chorus, or at least that’s what she thought, but with this man prompting, she remembered more of the verses than she thought she did.
Each time the group finished a song, they looked at him, and he always had a suggestion for another: cowboy songs, Broadway tunes, Scout camp songs, good songs, songs that were fun to sing. And whenever the group started to flounder, everyone singing lines from different verses, he got them back on track; he knew the right words.
“It really made the evening wonderful,” she said to him now. “Singing can be such fun even if you aren’t very good at it.”
“We had time to sing only because you got the buffet line moving.”
It took her a moment to remember. Oh, that business with the extension cord.
The dinner at the mill had been a buffet, and the line had quickly grown quite long. It was easy to see why. The buffet tables had been pushed against the wall so that people could serve themselves only from one side. If they were moved out, the line could split in two.
But there was an extension cord, the caterers said. If the tables were pulled away from the wall, people might trip on the extension cord. “I’ll stand on it,” Gwen had proposed. This was the sort of problem admirals’ wives were expected to solve. “That will keep people from getting themselves tangled up.”
So Gwen had spent the first part of the evening planted on a heavy safety-orange extension cord. No wonder Hal Legend had noticed her. She had been a human traffic cone.
“It was so silly,” she said to him now, “to have anything on a buffet table that needed electricity. Or at least they should have brought have a roll of duct tape to tape down the cord.”
Her son, Jack, would have had a roll of duct tape in his truck. Jack never went anywhere without duct tape. But she was, she reminded herself, not going to talk about her children.
Hal nodded, agreeing with her either about the duct tape or the electricity or both, but he didn’t say which. Clearly he had the sense to know that there was nothing more to be said on this topic. “They have a coat check. May I take yours?”
He was raising his hands, obviously planning on helping her with her coat. So she turned slightly and let him lift it off her shoulders.
He was tall. She wasn’t used to tall men. Her husband, John, had been five-foot-nine, and many of his fellow submariners barely met the military’s minimum-height requirements. A tall man spent too much of his tour on a sub ducking his head and twisting his shoulders. As a submariner’s wife, Gwen had grown to admire short men. Many of them, teased through their childhoods, had grown up with steady courage and a fierce sense of service. They seemed denser, tighter, tougher than less efficiently built men.
But Hal Legend was tall. She knew nothing about tall men.
He checked her coat, and a minute later they were seated, the business of taking menus and refusing drinks occupying them for a few moments. Gwen had already decided she would get a Caesar salad. She glanced at the menu, making sure that one was listed. Then she set it aside and leaned forward.
“I didn’t let myself call Barbara Hutchens”—the Hutchenses had been the ones, he had told her, who had brought him to the dinner—“to find out about you. So I am ignorant. Does knowing a lot of songs sum you up completely, or is there more?”
“No, the songs pretty much cover it. I am a music professor, and I specialize in folk songs of all different cultures.”
A professor? She was a navy wife. What different worlds. “So you could have had us singing in Sanskrit?”
“Perhaps not Sanskrit, but certainly Serbo-Croatian.”
She asked him about his work. Why folk songs?
“I like the energy of popular culture,” he said. “I like learning about a society through the words its people sing.”
That sounded good, but Gwen wasn’t sure she really understood. “For example?”
He gave several. Political assumptions, religious practices, economic principles, everything about a society he was able to connect with the songs. She mentioned some of the songs she herself loved, and he had something to say about each of them, things so interesting that she knew that she would never again hear or sing the song without thinking those thoughts.
Her unease, her nervousness, was gone. She enjoyed listening to him talk. It was interesting. No, it was more than interesting. She could feel herself leaning forward, ignoring her salad. It was exhilarating. He had such insight into large issues. It was as if he were an eagle, soaring over the earth, seeing all, the trees, the lakes, the mountains, and understanding all.
A submarine speeds through dark waters, beneath everything, seeing nothing.
There was a lightness about Hal that her husband had not had. John had been an intense man, keenly focused, hungry to act. His admiral’s stars had forced him to become wise, had forced him out of single-mindedness and into reflection, but the discipline had not come naturally or easily to him. Hal was different. He wore his wisdom lightly, the rightful crown to his years.
And suddenly all of this seemed right, this meeting a man when you were fifty-eight. At fifty-eight you no longer met the midshipmen and the graduate students; you met the admirals, the professors, the men who had become the Arthurs and the Merlins and the Solomons. Those men, the ones who were truly confident and kingly, they were no more interested in pretty lassies than you were in bright-faced lads.
Gwen let the conversation drift toward more personal matters. Hal was a widower. He lived in Iowa, teaching at a small college there, but he was spending the spring semester in Washington teaching at Georgetown University. “I needed to get away for a while. I was living exactly as I had when Eleanor was alive. I had changed nothing. I couldn’t think what to change. Everything seemed right, but empty.”
His wife had died suddenly from a drug-resistant infection, a sore throat that had become pneumonia. “It was very surprising for us all,” he said.
Gwen knew about that kind of “surprise.” Her husband had also died suddenly. He had been driving home and had stopped to help a young mother with a flat tire. A drunk driver had careened off the road, killing John but not the woman or her two small children.
Hal winced at the story.
It had been four years. Gwen had done her mourning. She was as at peace as a person could be. “John was in the service. He had always expected that he might have to die for others…although admirals sitting behind desks usually aren’t the ones who have to do it.”
“I don’t imagine they are,” Hal agreed.
It would be easy, Gwen suspected, for the conversation to drift back to the general; they could talk about the military, about ideals of service, and so on. “Do you have children?” she asked.
He had three. His older daughter was a lawyer. She ran a legal-aid clinic. His son was a linguistic professor in California, specializing in dying Indian languages. “Some of these languages are down to their last two or three speakers, and those people are pretty old. Ian and his students are frantically trying to learn what they can.”
Both his son and daughter were married with children. Phoebe, the daughter, had four children, and Ian, the son, had three.
“You said you had three children,” Gwen said. “Your other daughter—is she married?”
“Amy? No, she’s not.”
Something pricked at Gwen. “Amy? Is that her name? Amy Legend? That’s funny. She must have the same name as that figure skater then.”
“Actually, she is that figure skater.”
Gwen had been lifting her fork. She stopped, staring at him. Then she laid her fork back down.
Amy Legend? His daughter was Amy Legend?
Amy Legend had won an Olympic gold medal. She had been on the cover of People magazine. America loved her. She was a star, a celebrity. “Amy Legend is your daughter?”
He nodded. “We’re very proud of her.”
“Amy Legend? The Olympic champion Amy Legend?”
“Yes.”
She was having lunch with Amy Legend’s father? “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
“It seemed pretty clear that you didn’t want us to talk about our children.”
He was perceptive. Completely wrong—who wouldn’t want to talk about Amy Legend?—but perceptive. “That was before I knew that she was one of yours.”
Amy Legend had been a lovely child, a golden-haired little sprite so pretty that she almost didn’t seem real. When she was with her family at a restaurant or in line with her mother at the post office, people turned and watched her. Her features were delicate, her eyes darkly lashed.
Of course, at age four she had no idea that she was a little package of winsome grace. She cared only about her hair. She had short hair, and she wanted long hair. Oh, how she wanted long hair. She hungered for it, she craved it, she pretended she had it. She would loop a petticoat around her head and imagine that the white nylon was hair swishing and billowing. She would clamp a towel to her scalp and toss her head so the terry cloth would flick over her shoulders and cascade down her back. She cut pictures out of magazines with her little plastic scissors, pictures of hair, flowing tresses that curled and gleamed.
“Long hair is too hard to take care of,” her mother told her, “and trust me, love, you look better in short hair.”
Amy Legend was twenty-six now. She was wealthy, she was famous, and her mother was dead. She could have worn her hair however she wanted. But her mother turned out to be right after all—she did look better in short hair. “You wouldn’t look bad if you let your hair grow,” various stylists had told her, “but you certainly look better with it this length.”
So hers was still short. It was beautifully cut in a soft, feathery style. Now honey blonde, it glowed with carefully placed golden highlights. It was great hair…but it wasn’t long.
“What was it like?” Gwen asked. “Raising such a gifted child? You read all about how much is involved, the driving and the traveling and the money. It’s such a commitment.” She had always been glad that her two children had been all-around types, good at a lot of things, not overwhelmingly talented at any one.
“Financially it was extraordinary, just unbelievably expensive,” Hal admitted. “But Eleanor had some family money, so we never had to make any difficult choices, and once she turned professional, she paid us back completely even though we had not expected it.”
“What about the rest of it, the logistics and all? Did it take over your lives?”
“No. She’s a lot younger than Phoebe and Ian, and I am afraid we focused more on them. We had a little-kid household when they were little kids; we were about teenagers when the two of them were teenagers. Amy just had to go along. Plus, Phoebe and Ian—especially Ian—were very bright in the ways that a college community recognizes, and Amy’s abilities were foreign to us. Then suddenly one day there were reporters in the driveway, wanting to talk about her.”
The Legend family loved to read. Their high-ceilinged, turn-of-the-century brick house in Iowa was full of books. There were books piled on nightstands, on the breakfront in the dining room, on the top of the piano in the front hall. There were books at the foot of the stairs waiting to be carried upstairs, books at the top of the stairs waiting to be carried downstairs.
Eleanor—the family’s mother—always had a book with her. She read while waiting to pick the kids up at piano lessons, she read while eating her lunch, while waiting for a pot of soup to come to a simmer. Amy’s older sister and brother, Phoebe and Ian, were readers too. They took books to the grocery store and leaned against the base of the coin-operated riding horse, reading while their mother pushed a cart through the aisles.
But Amy, lovely little Amy, was different. She did not like to read. When she was at the grocery store, she went to the cosmetic aisle and looked at the nail polish and lipstick. In good weather she played outside, turning cartwheels, dancing with her shadow, flipping herself down from the limbs of trees. In bad weather she roamed the house, restless, wanting to be entertained. Her brother and sister didn’t need to be entertained. They could take a book and disappear for hours. They could play Monopoly for most of a day. Not Amy. She was a little hummingbird, always in motion.
The year she was seven winter came hard. Day followed day of freezing, sleeting rain. The skies were low and gray, the sidewalks were icy. The rest of the family loved it. They built fires in all the fireplaces, made popcorn balls, piled chamber music on the turntable, and reread their favorite books.
Amy could watch the firelight for ten minutes. Then she was out of her chair, rummaging through her mother’s closet, trying on all her shoes and scarves, but Eleanor had little interest in clothes; her closet had few glittering treasures. Amy sneaked into her older sister’s room and played with her makeup, streaking harsh lines of blue across her eyelids. But Phoebe didn’t have much makeup. In desperation Eleanor flipped on the television. “Here, Amy, I think you might like this.”
It was the Olympics, a preview of the ladies figure skating competition.
Amy didn’t like television. She didn’t like to sit, doing nothing, but within moments she was mesmerized—the spins, the jumps, the flashing blades, and the costumes, oh, the gorgeous costumes, the glittering sequins, the chiffon skirts that floated and swirled, the soft feathers. She was breathless. Longing swelled inside her, a balloon stretching and growing until it was tight and hard.
“I have to do that. Oh, Mother, Daddy, please, I just have to.”
Eleanor had no sympathy for her youngest child’s obsession with glamour and affectation. She was English, a brisk, practical, self-assured woman. She liked the ballet, but figure skating? It was so…so middlebrow.
But anything that would keep Amy occupied during bad weather was worth doing. She called the college’s hockey rink about skating lessons.
Oh, yes, an assistant coach’s wife had been a figure skater. She’d be happy to give Amy a few lessons.
Amy went to her first lesson. The next day she took her skates to school. Eleanor assumed that she was taking them for show and tell, and Amy did indeed show them to everyone. After school, instead of going home, she bent her head into the biting wind and trudged to the rink. She put on her skates and went out on the ice, skating straight into the middle of a hockey practice.
The coach instantly blew his whistle. This fragile-looking child in her loosely tied skates was in genuine peril. But he knew nothing about little girls; it never occurred to him to ask why she was there. He told her that the team would be off the ice in fifteen minutes, and as they were leaving, he motioned to one of his huge, shin-guarded, shoulder-padded players to go tie her little white skates for her.
She had been mesmerized by the players’ speed. That’s what she wanted to do, to go that fast, to fly like that. She stepped out onto the rough ice and started to skate. The coach forgot about her, and after the team had cleared out of the locker room, he flipped off the lights with only the briefest glance over his shoulder. Amy went on skating in the dusky half-light. She wasn’t even thinking about costumes anymore. She wanted to skate.
An hour later the Zamboni man came to resurface the ice for the evening open session. And of course he was very surprised to see her. Do your parents know you are here? Do you have permission to do this? Any of those questions Amy would have answered honestly.
But he worded his question unthinkingly. “Are you supposed to be here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Amy answered, and she was telling the truth. “I am supposed to be here.”
“What was she like as a child?” Gwen asked. “I’ve seen pictures of her. She was lovely.”
“Yes, she was,” Hal nodded. “She was also obedient, very obedient. Until she started skating, she was dragged along everywhere, to Phoebe’s and Ian’s piano recitals and science fairs, and she always behaved well, probably better than a little kid should have. But most good skaters do have very obedient personalities. For years and years they have to do exactly what they are told, when they are told, and a lot of it is pretty tedious. They have to want to obey their coaches. It always surprises me that so much creativity can come out of these very well-behaved people, and I’m still not sure that I know what makes Amy tick. When she’s around the family, she always seems quiet and cooperative, just like when she was little.”
“You don’t accomplish what she was by being quiet and cooperative.”
“No, you don’t,” Hal agreed. “There’s clearly this big chunk of her that I don’t know at all.”
Amy could not wait a whole week for her next lesson. Please please please, could she have another one now? She would do anything, anything.
Her parents sat down and talked to her. As long as she worked hard, they said, she could skate all she wanted.
Worked hard? What were they talking about? Book reports, math problems, that was work. This was skating.
She could walk to the rink, so she went every day after school. She watched the hockey practices, she watched the Zamboni man, and she skated. She skated endlessly, forever. She never got tired of it.
She had no idea if she was any good. She didn’t care, she just loved it so much. She even read a book that spring—a pictoral biography of Peggy Fleming.
Then one afternoon during the last week of school she came home from the rink to find her duffel bag laid out on her bed. She stared at it. It was heavy green canvas with a zipper and a single handle.
Duffel bags. That meant Minnesota, packing to go to Minnesota. Her family had a cabin on a lake in the northern part of the state, and that’s where they spent the summer, the whole summer. Their cabin was in the middle of a forest, miles and miles from any town, and even that town was too small to have a rink. She would have to go the whole summer without skating. She couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t.
But she had to. No one gave her a choice.
“This is going to make me sound like a horrible snob,” Hal was saying, “but we didn’t have a lot in common with the other skating families. It wasn’t merely that they were obsessed with their children’s lives to an extent that seemed very unhealthy to us, but their notions of success were so limited. All they could think about was winning competitions and making money.”
Gwen could easily understand how a person’s vision could get “limited” to that, especially if you didn’t have the family money Hal said his wife had had. “What were your definitions of success?”
“Creating beauty. Expressing the music. I think if we helped Amy at all, it was managing to instill that in her. If she did something lovely, if she made the audience feel something, then she had succeeded regardless of what scores she got.”
Amy’s ethereal childhood beauty stayed with her. Her mother came from an aristocratic background—three hundred years of privileged men marrying the prettiest girls they could find. That heritage showed in Amy. She remained lovely. Her arms, legs, and neck were willowy and graceful; her strength came in long, clean lines rather than in bunchy knots of muscle. Her torso was lean and compact, and her back was the most flexible her pediatrician had ever seen.
“She needs to be with someone better than me,” her coach said. “There’s nothing in Iowa for her.” The coach recommended a training facility in Delaware. A number of families who lived close to the training center took in boarders to help meet their own children’s expenses. The local schools were used to giving the young skaters plenty of release time, or tutors could easily be found for those who wanted to be taught at home.
Eleanor had gone to boarding school; sending a child from home was not strange to her. Amy herself loved the idea. This was her dream, to skate all the time, to train with the best.
The rink was one place where she was always special. She would be bent over her skates, lacing them up, and she would hear the coaches, the other parents, whispering her name in the way that teachers had always whispered Phoebe’s and Ian’s names. She liked that. At home she felt like an afterthought, Amy the Afterthought. On the ice she was someone else. She was the one people thought about first.
Not in Delaware. Not at the training center there. She wasn’t the best anymore. At first she didn’t even seem very good.
Her talent was footwork. She could skip across the ice, her feet dancing in dazzling patterns, her blades slicing and crossing as lightly as if she were in ballet shoes. She could do sequences that even the senior girls couldn’t. But she couldn’t jump.
That’s what mattered, the jumps. That’s what everyone talked about, that’s how the girls sorted themselves out, by who could do which jumps. Girls there younger than Amy had double axels, one even had a triple salchow. Amy’s footwork didn’t matter. You had to be able to jump.
The year she was thirteen, she qualified for the national junior tournaments. She placed twelfth. The next year she came in seventeenth.
Seventeenth. Worse than the year before. And she had skated a good, clean program. There was no way she could have skated any better. This was worse than if she had skated badly, much worse. What do you do when your best isn’t good enough?
Almost unable to speak, she called her parents as soon as the results were posted. “This doesn’t make sense anymore.” She was in tears. “You’re spending all this money, and nothing’s happening. I’m not getting any better. I think I should come home.”
Sometimes girls had to quit because of money; their parents couldn’t afford their training anymore. They would simply disappear, and everyone would have to guess where they were, why they had gone.
But no one would have to guess about why Amy left. They would all know. She wasn’t good enough. She had failed.
She knew what her parents would say. She should finish the year, the money didn’t matter, the important thing was not to be a quitter. I’m not a quitter, her heart shrieked. No one works harder than me. I’m just not good enough. I’ll never get these stupid jumps.
She couldn’t go back to Delaware, not as seventeenth place, not as Amy the Afterthought. “Your flight is this afternoon, isn’t it?” her father asked. “Do you want us to meet you in Delaware?”
“It won’t do any good.” She was still crying. “Nothing will help.”
“It may not help you,” he said firmly, “but it will help us, make us feel that we are doing something. I have an eight A.M. class tomorrow morning. I can’t cancel it, but the minute it’s over, I’ll be on my way.”
Her parents hadn’t seen her skate in more than a year. They rarely came to tournaments, and Amy didn’t really expect them to. They were so different from all the other skating families. Nonetheless, by the time she got back to Delaware after the tournament, she heard that her father had called the front office. Her coaches were rearranging ice time, and the next morning he was there, a tall, lean man with thick, dark hair. She supposed he had flown to Philadelphia and rented a car there.
“Amy’s a very nice little skater,” she heard her coach say to him. “She has such wonderfully long arms and legs, her line is so lovely, and she carries herself so well. We have developed a very aristocratic look for her.”
Amy didn’t want to be a “very nice little skater.” She wanted to be the best. She wanted to win.
“Let me watch her skate,” her father said.
He stood at the boards, resting lightly on his elbows, his hands linked. He was wearing a tweed jacket, a pale blue shirt, and a navy blue knitted tie. It was strange to see a father at practice. Figure skating was a world of mothers. Even in the family she lived with, none of them saw the father very much. He worked two jobs to pay for his daughter’s training.
The air in the rink was thin, the light pale and artificial with a meat locker chill. Amy skated her short program for her father, then her long program. When she came back to the boards, his expression was gentle, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
He touched her face. “You are so very lovely.”
People said that to her all the time, how lucky she was to be pretty. “That’s not enough, Dad.”
“I know. Now tell me, who chose your music?” he asked.
“The coaches.”
“What about this ‘aristocratic’ look that you are supposed to have?”
“I think it has to do with my not being any good at the jumps.”
He smiled. “Is that what ‘aristocratic’ means? Not being able to jump?”
“They talk about elegance, coolness, serenity, things like that.”
“Well, sweetheart, I’m willing to bet that these people here don’t know any aristocrats, which gives you and me a leg up because we do.”
“We do?” She was confused for a moment. “Oh, you mean Mother?”
Mother’s grandfather had been an earl, and when she wrote letters to her own mother, she addressed the envelopes to “Lady Phoebe Cooke.” Amy didn’t really know what that meant—Mother never seemed to think it important—but it did sound aristocratic.
“Now, do you really think you should try to skate like your mother?” her father asked.
Amy’s laugh was a little thin and watery, but it was a laugh. “No.” All the other skating mothers drove gleamingly clean cars and dressed carefully; even when they came to watch the earliest morning practice, they wore makeup and their blouses were neatly ironed. Her own mother drove a battered station wagon. Her jewelry was all inherited—strange Art Deco pieces which she wore without much thought of how they looked with her clothes. Amy couldn’t imagine trying to skate like her.
“So let’s lose this ‘aristocratic look,’” Amy’s father said. “Your mother may be an aristocrat, but you are a red-blooded, bouncy American kid. Now, let me watch some of these other girls so I know what I am looking at.”
Amy slipped her skate guards on and came around to sit with him in the bleachers. For the next hour they watched her friends. She knew some of their programs almost as well as she knew her own. She told her father what to watch for.
“Now, watch the height she gets on her jumps…see how tight she is in her rotations…how clean her landing is.”
“Amy, please,” he said, “stop talking about the jumps. I’m tired of hearing about jumps.”
“But the jumps are everything, Dad. They’re what counts.”
He motioned her to be quiet.
She couldn’t remember when they had ever sat like this, just the two of them. The family often watched slides on Sunday evening, and if Phoebe or Ian wanted to work the projector, then Dad would pull her into his lap because she was the littlest, the only one who was still cuddly. But if Phoebe or Ian needed help with the projector, he would have to move her off his lap and go help the older one.
He wasn’t liking what he was seeing on the ice. Amy could tell that. His lips were tight, and his head was pulled back, his neck angling sharply away from his shoulders and spine. She had seen him like that before—when she was little and would be struggling with her spelling words or trying to read something aloud. He would glance at Mother, and Mother would lift her hand—this is Amy, the hand would seem to be saying, there’s nothing we can do about it. She’s not like the others.
At the end of the session, he sat quietly for a moment, looking down at his hands, his lips tight. Then he spoke. “Why do you want to quit?”
This was a test. Amy knew that instantly. There was a right answer.
And she had no idea what it was. “Because I’m not good enough?”
He shook his head. “No. We have no idea how good you are. Every one of these girls is exactly alike. They are little robots. Your coach is very controlling. Do you know what I mean by that?”
Sort of. “But, Dad, she’s the coach. We have to do what she says.”
“No, you don’t. You have to listen to what she says. You have to try it, give it your best shot, but if it doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to do it.” He lifted his arm around her shoulders. “You know that your mother doesn’t really enjoy watching you skate. Do you know why?”
Amy looked down at her hands. Of course she knew why. She wasn’t Phoebe or Ian, she wasn’t smart like Phoebe and Ian. That’s what counted to her parents, being smart, not being able to skate. But Dad wouldn’t say that. It was true, but no one would say it. “She’d rather be watching ballet.” That seemed like a safe answer.
“There’s some element of truth in that,” he admitted, “but the important thing is that she doesn’t feel like she’s watching you.” His voice was gentle. “It seems as if it’s someone else out there. And I think, as usual, she’s right. I don’t know as much about figure skating as perhaps I should, but I do know a thing or two about performance.”
Amy looked at him blankly. Oh, he was a music professor. That’s what he was talking about, musical performances.
“The one thing that separates the great musicians from the very good ones is not technique; they all have that. The great musicians love every note that they play, they become the piece of music. That’s not happening when you skate. It’s closest to happening with the girl in the blue. I almost have a sense of her personality, of who she is when she skates.”
The girl in the blue was the two-time Junior National champion. “Did you see how many triples she has in her program?”
A look of impatience flashed across her father’s face. “No, I didn’t. Amy, you’re obsessed with these jumps. It’s all you can think about. All that matters to you is the thing that you’re worst at. Let’s concentrate on what you’re good at. Now, what is your favorite piece of music?”
Another test. Her favorite piece of music. She wasn’t prepared. She knew that she ought to name something from the classics, Liszt or Brahms or someone like that. He would approve of that, but for the life of her, she couldn’t think of anything.
She blurted out the name of a song currently playing on the radio. Then hated herself. Why had she said something so dopey? Now he was going to think that she was stupid.
Although of course he already knew that.
But his expression didn’t change. His voice was even. “Fine. Let’s get a tape of it.”
“For a program? But it has lyrics. We can’t use things with lyrics.”
“Then we will rerecord it.”
He stayed for three days, and for the first time in the two and a half years Amy had been there, she felt like she had the full attention of her coach and the choreographer.
He borrowed a pair of skates and came out on the ice.
“I didn’t know you could skate, Dad.”
“By the standards of everyone around here, I’m sure I can’t,” he answered. “But I played hockey constantly as a kid. As soon as the farm ponds froze, that’s what we did.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You didn’t?” He shook his head. “That’s what got me the Rhodes scholarship, being able to play hockey—you had to be athletic as well as smart. If I hadn’t skated, I wouldn’t have gone to Oxford and I wouldn’t have met your mother and then where would you be?”
Amy shrugged. This was weird, her not knowing that he could skate when skating was her whole life.
But ice hockey was nothing like competitive figure skating, and she resisted his ideas at first. He didn’t understand how important the jumps were. “But, Dad,” she kept saying, “the judges look for those jumps.”
All the other families knew about the jumps. It was starting to make her mad. The other families came to watch competitions; some mothers were at every practice, every single one. She understood that her family wasn’t like that, that they were different, but Dad had no business acting like he knew what he was talking about. He didn’t.
He must have sensed her mood. He stopped and gathered up her hands in his, pulling her close. “I know you don’t agree with me, but could you humor me for a bit? The minute I’m gone, you can go back to doing it the old way.”
She could feel the tweed of his jacket along her forearms. The tweed was made of twists of blue and green, and the suede patches at the elbow were a soft brown. His hands were slender for a man’s, but they were warm.
He and Ian had learned calculus together. It had been during her last year at home. Ian, who seemed to be able to learn languages faster than Amy could read English, was actually having trouble in a subject. “Well, it won’t hurt me,” their father had laughed, and night after night they sat in the book-filled living room, moaning and making faces. But Ian had gotten an A.
Now her father—her father who had skated during his own childhood—was here, helping her.
She wanted to believe him, she really did. She didn’t want to be mad, not when he had gone to so much trouble to get here, but what did he know about the sport? She looked over her shoulder at her coach.
That was a mistake. She knew it the instant that she did it. She was saying to him that her coach’s opinion mattered more to her than his did.
Well, maybe it did.
Surprisingly the coach supported him. “Pretend that you’re a professional, in an ice show,” she suggested. “In an ice show you don’t have to worry about judges.”
No one had ever talked to Amy about a professional career. The best girls were already getting flowers from the ice shows and the management agencies, but not Amy.
“Can you think like that?” Her father’s voice was gentle.
“Yes.”
She was the most important element of the program, he said. Not the music, not the costume, not even the jumps, but she herself. He preached sincerity, absolute sincerity. “Do you love that move? You can’t do it if you don’t love it. No one will believe in you unless you believe in yourself.” He talked about emotion and getting the audience to feel what she was feeling. “Reach out to them.”
And above all, she had to be herself. “Maybe it would be easier, even better, if you were a jumper, but you aren’t. Pretending to be won’t work.”
He helped her understand that she liked the Top 40 tune because it was so cheerful, so full of bouncy anticipation. The first evening he found a piano and started playing a rough medley of three medieval German folk songs. Amy instantly fell in love with the songs. Hal played and replayed them, trying all sorts of different arrangements. Amy listened and listened.
After an hour he stopped playing. “You have a marvelous ear,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before. I thought Ian was the only one of you who had it.”
All her life she had heard that Ian was so good at languages because he had a nearly genius-level ability to remember and recreate a sound. It was strange, it was incomprehensible, to hear her ear compared to his.
They made a tape of the German songs, and the next morning they took everything they had worked on the day before and put it to the new music. Then he rearranged the music so the jumps made sense. She came to understand what she had hated about jumps was that they never seemed to have anything to do with the music. But now her music seemed to be lifting her and turning her on its own.
“What makes a jump work?” her father asked. “What makes you go around? What are the physics involved?”
Physics? Amy knew nothing about physics. Ian was the one who understood physics, not her.
Dad talked to the coaches. They gave him articles to read. “The latest research on jumps,” he said to Amy afterward, “argues for importance of upper body strength, and that can be improved.”
So Amy started lifting weights.
She hated it. How she hated it. Skating was about speed and beauty and emotion, about lifting an arm and extending a leg and knowing, feeling, the beauty of the line. Lifting weights was drudgery, a job, and she hated it.
There were no short cuts; there was little satisfaction. She couldn’t let her muscles become bulky, so she didn’t have the challenge of seeing how much she could lift. She instead faced endless repetitions. It didn’t matter which tapes she listened to or who else was in the room to talk to; lifting weights was always hateful, and she had never hated anything about practice before.
But she did it.
Her jumps were never as strong as some of the other girls’—they never would be—but they grew better, and she worked on her landings until they became feather-soft. If the jumps themselves were slow and low, that grew to seem right because she was like a feather, floating easily, effortlessly.
It turned out that the more her father talked to her coaches and the other staff at the training center, the less he thought of them. He asked her which two junior skaters she enjoyed watching the most. “I don’t care about who is winning, not at this level. Simply tell me who you can’t take your eyes off of.”
She thought for a while. It was hard. At competitions you just thought about who was going to win. “There are these two guys—Henry Carroll and Tommy Sargent—I do love to watch them. Henry blazes across the ice, he has such power, and Tommy, he’s little and he always seems so funny. He makes me laugh even when he’s skating.”
Her father seemed to like the sound of that. “Then let’s look into who they train with.”
“But, Dad, they never win.”
“And I think that’s in their favor. It’s the little robots that are winning the Juniors.”
Henry and Tommy were in Colorado, not at the big facility in Colorado Springs, but at a smaller rink in Denver, where they trained with a man named Oliver Young. Family finances had forced Oliver out of amateur competition before he had made a name for himself; he had skated in ice shows for several years and was now starting to coach. He was interested primarily in boy skaters; Amy would be the only girl at the Junior Olympic level.
“Will that bother you?” her father asked her.
“No.” She had never gotten very close to the other girls in Delaware, even the ones she lived with; their rink was too competitive for friendships.
She moved to Colorado in the fall. Oliver agreed with her father. His philosophy was yes, you had to get all the basics, and yes, you had to lift weights, but in the end you had to learn to skate like yourself, and the next winter, the year Amy was fifteen, with a program full of dazzling footwork she won the Junior tournament. From seventeenth place to first in one year.
The girls in her old skating club tingled with frustration. They had thought Amy had left Delaware because she wasn’t good enough. So why had she won? They were better skaters, they kept saying to themselves over and over, and it was true. But they were not better performers, and there was nothing that they could do about it. Amy’s musicality—that she seemed to hear more in a piece of music than anyone else—and her capacity to project herself, to make people feel what she was feeling, both of those were simply God-given talents, which Oliver Young recognized and fostered.
She went on lifting weights. Day after day, and she never liked it any better, never found it any more satisfying. Her family still made her come to Minnesota for a few weeks every summer, and she took empty sacks with her, filling them with sand for the numbing routine.
She came in ninth her first year in the Senior Tournament. Officials at the United States Figure Skating Association noticed her and arranged for her to enter a small international competition in Vienna. Such invitations were usually limited to the top seven or eight skaters, and the mothers of girls who had finished ahead of Amy at the Nationals were incensed. Why was Miss Amy Legend suddenly the USFSA’s little pet? Their daughters deserved the organization’s support, not Amy.
But those girls were the little robots, and at this level technique was no longer enough.
Amy’s confidence increased. The next year she came in sixth, then third. Now the ice shows, the agents, and the management companies were sending her flowers, and the USFSA was determined to give her more international experience. She sparkled on the ice, skating with glowing warmth, and the year she was nineteen, she became National Champion. It was an Olympic year, and the USFSA named her to the Olympic team.
Nineteen was a good age. Ladies’ figure skating had not yet gone the way of gymnastics, a sport dominated by tiny school girls whose rigorous training schedules had delayed their physical development. They were superb athletes, but they had little celebrity value. Only other schoolgirls were interested in them.
But the general public could identify with a young woman almost in her twenties. People loved reading about Amy during the weeks before the Olympics. She was so pretty, she dressed so delightfully. She was a little shy, looking up and out at the world from beneath her bangs as the Princess of Wales had once done. The media made much of her music professor father and how the music majors at Lipton College in Lipton, Iowa, performed and recorded all her music for her. They took pictures of her mother’s grand ancestral homes in England and Ireland even though in some cases her mother had never laid eyes on the place.
Yet there were those who wanted to find fault. People who paid no attention to figure skating at any other time were suddenly experts, announcing that footwork could never win the Olympics. “She may be the most watchable skater of the circuit,” proclaimed the network’s skating pundit, “but her jumps aren’t up to international standards.”
“I think the American public is going to be in for a big disappointment,” announced a male former pairs champion. “Amy Legend is not going to win the Olympics. She can’t.”
He was wrong.
The top women skaters usually don’t go to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Theirs is one of the last competitions, so any skater who comes to the opening has an extra week of sitting around in a cramped dorm, eating institutional food and waiting for inadequate ice time.
But Amy had been watching the opening ceremonies since she turned seven. There was no way she was going to miss this one, no matter what it did to her training schedule.
“Let her go,” her new advisers at the sports management agency told her coaches. “She’ll get some great camera time.”
Both Amy’s parents had been involved in the selection of her management team. “No one on earth,” her father had said, “can see through smooth talk faster than your mother. She’ll have no patience for any of these people. If we find someone she can tolerate for twenty minutes, you’ll have a person you can trust with your life.”
These new advisers were telling her that medals weren’t enough. “The American public has to love you,” they said.
“And exactly how do I go about getting them to do that?” she laughed.
“By being yourself.”
Be yourself. She was the only girl hearing that. The other top amateur girls were being “packaged”—that was the word they kept hearing, “packaging.” Andrea was to be feisty; JillAnn was to be sweet. It put too much pressure on them, knowing that they were supposed to be sweet or feisty all the time.
No one ever spoke to Amy about a “package,” and at first she assumed it was because she was hopeless, such a gooey blob of nothingness that she couldn’t be scooped up into a container.
But her training partner, Tommy, tiny, wise, and witty, knew better. No one was talking to him about packaging either. “We’re the real thing, Amy, you and me. Even Henry”—technically Henry was a better skater than either of them, but then he was a better skater than anyone on earth—“doesn’t have it. We do.”
Henry and Tommy had signed with the same agency. Henry was favored to win the men’s gold while Tommy knew that he would be lucky to come in third. “You’ll come into your own as a professional,” the agents and managers kept telling him. “Don’t worry.”
All three of them went to the opening of the Olympics, and Amy had a wonderful time during that first week when they weren’t competing. She had never played any team sport, and she suddenly found that she liked being on a team. She went to as many skating events as she could. Looking wide-eyed and pretty in her red, white, and blue team sweats, she cheered for all the other American skaters. She got a mad crush on one of the American hockey players, but fortunately for his concentration she never had the nerve to tell him about it.
She was third after the short program. She and Oliver had hoped to be in second place at that point, but with jumps like hers it was no surprise that she was not.
Then in that day between the short and long programs the Olympics stopped being fun. Tommy and Henry were skating in the men’s final that evening, but all Amy could think of was her own fate—how large the gap was between her and the other two girls and how solid their jumps were. And then a worse thought took over—how very few tenths of a point separated her from the fourth-place finisher. The skating community might not expect her to get a medal, but the American public did. They believed in fairy stories. She was pretty, therefore she would win the gold.
It doesn’t work that way. There’s no magic, no guarantees. It’s just me and my skates.
Henry won. Now all the people who were saying that Amy couldn’t win were talking of 1976, when Dorothy Hamill and John Curry, two skaters trained by the same coach, had won the women’s and men’s golds. Amy and Henry could repeat that. Oliver would become the Carlo Fassi of his generation.
It was too much.
So she fell. On the easiest of the triples, the plain old toe loop. A little overrotation. Tilting in the air. Fighting for the landing. Not being able to hold it, and she was on the ice. Her chance for the gold was gone.
So it was over. All those years of lifting weights—they had been a waste. Now it was all pointless.
She scrambled to her feet and caught up with the music. She wasn’t going to think about the weights. Just as she had been watching the opening ceremonies for twelve years, so she had been watching people compete for twelve years, and long ago she had made a pledge to herself. If I fall on a big night, I will not mind. I may have to stop competing, but then I can start performing. The judges may hate me, but I can make the audience love me. I will skate for them.
She opened her arms in a swirling, embracing, almost triumphant motion, gathering in the audience. I’m here for you now. It’s too late for those people sitting at rink-side with their little computerized scoring machines. They’ve given up on me. But you haven’t. You will love me…love me…love me.
And they did.
The young Chinese woman in second place gasped in weary relief when she saw Amy fall. She turned her back to the monitors, knowing that she didn’t have to worry about Amy anymore. She was to skate next, and so she was at the boards, taking her skate guards off when Amy’s scores flashed up. She had not seen Amy’s performance, and she was staggered by the numbers. Amy had fallen; how could she be getting these scores?
So that skater, rattled and tense, fell too. Only she went on trying to compete. She could compete, but she could not perform. Amy was now in second place.
The German skater who had begun the evening in first place skated last, and she knew exactly what she needed to do—skate cleanly. She did not have to add any extra jumps, she did not have to take any risks. All she had to do was not fall down.
And that’s how she skated, like someone who was determined not to fall down. And she didn’t fall. But her skating was leaden and lifeless. Her artistic-impression scores were weak.
The judges try to be fair, but they also have to think about what is good for the sport. And there was no doubt after this evening’s gutsy performance that the delicious little Amy Legend, even if she couldn’t jump, was very good for the sport.
Amy had won because she had made a mistake, because she had forgiven herself for making a mistake.
After they hung the gold medal around her neck and played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” she did all the fun things that Olympic medalists get to do. She carried the flag at the closing ceremony. She sat beside Mickey Mouse on a float at the Disneyland parade. A warmly smiling grandfatherly butler opened the door to the White House, and when the Olympians gathered for their picture in the East Room, a press aide made sure that she was the one standing next to the president.
She taped some commercials, toured with the other Olympic skaters, posed for a poster, made a television special, toured some more. Designers started lending her clothes. And everyone seemed to love her.
But she still had to lift weights.
Gwen and Hal stayed at the restaurant until four o’clock. That night she wrote him a proper note, thanking him for lunch, inviting him to her house for dinner. He called within five minutes of getting the note. He’d love to see her again. He couldn’t wait. They shared that dinner, then an evening at the theater, followed by an afternoon drive through the wintry countryside and phone calls every evening.
Neither one of them could believe what was happening. They had never expected anything like this.
Hal was a scholar. He gathered information; he collected every variant verse of a song. But for the first time in his life, he seemed to have enough information immediately. From the moment he had seen this quiet, elegant woman alerting people not to trip on the extension cord, he had known enough.
They had grown up in surprisingly similar homes, Gwen in Maryland, Hal in Wisconsin. Their parents were educated with values and incomes that were comfortably middle-class. They readily admitted that had they met as teenagers, they would not have been drawn to each other. Early in their lives both of them had wanted adventure; they had wanted to be married to someone different from themselves. Gwen had chosen John and the itinerant life of the military while Hal had married Eleanor, aristocratic, earthy, unconventional. But with those long, satisfying marriages behind them, they were now ready for similarity, for ease and comfort.
Gwen knew that while Hal was not the man she would have chosen to begin her life with, he could well be the man with whom she would choose to conclude it.