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Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
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Berkeley and will go with her through her graduate work in the rehabilitation of other visually impaired people at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo.
Joe teased her about Kalamazoo when she told us her plans for grad school.
“Kalamazoo? Why do you want to go to school in Kalamazoo? It sounds like a bad Borscht Belt routine.”
I knew he had hoped she would come back to the Mountain and Trinity for grad school, though of course he would not say so to her. But he was proud, too, that she wanted to spend her life working with other blind people. Trinity could not help her there.
“Well, so what?” She grinned. “What do we care, Joe and I? I can’t see Kalamazoo and he can’t spell it.”
Joe had stayed with us in the house on the Steep when Lacey went to Europe, and though he was polite and well-mannered and accommodating to Joe and me, I knew his heart was traveling with Lacey. His big head turned often toward the door she had vanished through when she left him, and when he heard, long before I did, the tap of her cane as she made her way up the front walk with Joe after he met her at the Atlanta airport, he gave a great bark as full of joy as any sound I have ever heard. He had never barked before, not for us.
Yes, it was the right thing I did all those years ago. Lacey was all but out in the world, and it was the world of her choosing, and Joe and I were in the house of our dreams in the world of our choosing, he the department head he wanted to be, with a deanship and who knew what waiting beyond that, I with all I had ever wanted already within my grasp and the world off the Mountain, if I chose, at my fingertips.
I reached up and touched the nose of the woman in the mirror.
HILL TOWNS / 57
“Nothing is different, not really,” I said to her. She did not look entirely convinced. Her eyes were shadowy with doubt.
“No, really,” I said to her. “It’s the same world, yours and Joe’s. Absolutely the same one it always has been. Maybe it just doesn’t shine quite so much now; maybe the world off the Mountain has tarnished it a little. But it’s the same. So are you. So is he.”
And I bit my lips to redden them, a trick I had learned reading Gone With the Wind when I was eleven, and went back to my party.
Colin Gerard was Joe’s protégé. He had been Joe’s favorite student through all four years as an undergraduate, the star of Joe’s small seminars and survey courses, the chosen one, the heir apparent. Most professors at Trinity have them.
Colin was from an old Richmond family, its lineage thick with bishops and generals and academicians, at least three of whom had been at Trinity before him. He slipped as easily into the world on the Mountain as if he had been born there.
His specialty was the Fugitives, and Joe still talked about his thesis on Allen Tate now, long after Colin had finished grad school and become Joe’s graduate assistant.
I knew Colin planned to stay at Trinity forever, barring some unimaginable unforeseen calamity. He was the sort of young man who, to me, seemed genetically programmed for the Mountain: handsome in a mussed, fine-boned way, graceful with the kind of shambling indolence that goes well with dusty black academic gowns, funny in the mordant self-deprecating way that is so admired up here, a varsity track man, president of his fraternity and coxswain of his crew, an accomplished
58 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
drinker of bourbon, bright to near brilliance. He held almost every office for which he ran, and almost every honor Trinity had to offer, and I think there is a lot of money in his family.
Old money. When I think of the words “Golden Boy,” I think of Colin Gerard. How on earth he had come to be so besot-ted with Maria Facaros Condon from Newark, New Jersey, was a source of much speculation and enjoyable gossip at Trinity. Colin, the consensus has it, could do better.
Maria came to Trinity on a full scholarship to study political science and
Joe teased her about Kalamazoo when she told us her plans for grad school.
“Kalamazoo? Why do you want to go to school in Kalamazoo? It sounds like a bad Borscht Belt routine.”
I knew he had hoped she would come back to the Mountain and Trinity for grad school, though of course he would not say so to her. But he was proud, too, that she wanted to spend her life working with other blind people. Trinity could not help her there.
“Well, so what?” She grinned. “What do we care, Joe and I? I can’t see Kalamazoo and he can’t spell it.”
Joe had stayed with us in the house on the Steep when Lacey went to Europe, and though he was polite and well-mannered and accommodating to Joe and me, I knew his heart was traveling with Lacey. His big head turned often toward the door she had vanished through when she left him, and when he heard, long before I did, the tap of her cane as she made her way up the front walk with Joe after he met her at the Atlanta airport, he gave a great bark as full of joy as any sound I have ever heard. He had never barked before, not for us.
Yes, it was the right thing I did all those years ago. Lacey was all but out in the world, and it was the world of her choosing, and Joe and I were in the house of our dreams in the world of our choosing, he the department head he wanted to be, with a deanship and who knew what waiting beyond that, I with all I had ever wanted already within my grasp and the world off the Mountain, if I chose, at my fingertips.
I reached up and touched the nose of the woman in the mirror.
HILL TOWNS / 57
“Nothing is different, not really,” I said to her. She did not look entirely convinced. Her eyes were shadowy with doubt.
“No, really,” I said to her. “It’s the same world, yours and Joe’s. Absolutely the same one it always has been. Maybe it just doesn’t shine quite so much now; maybe the world off the Mountain has tarnished it a little. But it’s the same. So are you. So is he.”
And I bit my lips to redden them, a trick I had learned reading Gone With the Wind when I was eleven, and went back to my party.
Colin Gerard was Joe’s protégé. He had been Joe’s favorite student through all four years as an undergraduate, the star of Joe’s small seminars and survey courses, the chosen one, the heir apparent. Most professors at Trinity have them.
Colin was from an old Richmond family, its lineage thick with bishops and generals and academicians, at least three of whom had been at Trinity before him. He slipped as easily into the world on the Mountain as if he had been born there.
His specialty was the Fugitives, and Joe still talked about his thesis on Allen Tate now, long after Colin had finished grad school and become Joe’s graduate assistant.
I knew Colin planned to stay at Trinity forever, barring some unimaginable unforeseen calamity. He was the sort of young man who, to me, seemed genetically programmed for the Mountain: handsome in a mussed, fine-boned way, graceful with the kind of shambling indolence that goes well with dusty black academic gowns, funny in the mordant self-deprecating way that is so admired up here, a varsity track man, president of his fraternity and coxswain of his crew, an accomplished
58 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
drinker of bourbon, bright to near brilliance. He held almost every office for which he ran, and almost every honor Trinity had to offer, and I think there is a lot of money in his family.
Old money. When I think of the words “Golden Boy,” I think of Colin Gerard. How on earth he had come to be so besot-ted with Maria Facaros Condon from Newark, New Jersey, was a source of much speculation and enjoyable gossip at Trinity. Colin, the consensus has it, could do better.
Maria came to Trinity on a full scholarship to study political science and
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