The Love of My Youth by Mary Gordon Page B

into the smell of food, into safety, but at that moment it wasn’t safety you wanted, it was danger, the risk of cold, to be there for that sudden drop of bluish black. Part of you longed to be locked out. As if being indoors at all were a kind of suffocation, an imprisonment. You’d never be let out again; you’d never get the air, the light.”
    “I used to be frightened by high winds, but of course I couldn’t say it. I was a boy … what kind of boy would be frightened by high winds? But my house always seemed insubstantial to me. Your house always seemed safer than mine. Perhaps because your father seemed more in charge than mine.”
    “But your father was so much kinder.”
    “I can’t call back the sound of his voice. But his presence, yes his presence was always kind.”
    “I didn’t feel safe in my house.”
    “It was so solid, though. Wasn’t it built in the eighteenth century? A stone house in a town where nearly all the houses were wooden. Oh, I guess there were some brick houses. But yours was stone. I thought that was so wonderful. And the fact that your father had built himself a greenhouse. I was in awe of that, and it seemed like a kind of holy place, I wanted to take my shoes off or cover my head. It seemed extraordinary to me, your father seemed the absolute perfection of the American man: a war hero, an engineer, so handsome and tall, and then he grew these beautiful delicate orchids.”
    “Ah yes, my father and his orchids,” she says with a bitterness he doesn’t recognize in her. But he hears there is something else in the tone, something else besides bitterness, only he can’t identify it.
    She feels the effort at keeping back the pleasant memories of herself and her father in the greenhouse, the unclear light, the overheated air, and in the unclarity the brilliant flowers, so that it was an atmosphere of mistiness and certainty, a dream of peace. But she doesn’t want to complicate her bitterness; she has determined she will shut her heart to her father’s virtues; to allow them in would be to betray her brother, which she will not do.
    “When I was in that greenhouse, I always thought there was no need to worry about certain things,” he says.
    “When you say ‘certain things,’ what you mean is money.”
    “Well, maybe that was part of it. I think it was more a certain kind of display that I worried might be excessive. Too much loud laughing. Too much food. Too much gratitude. Too many angry words and then too many apologies.”
    “My mother was both too grateful and too apologetic,” Miranda says. “My father: neither. Not at all.”
    “And my mother was not apologetic. Nor was my father. I think it was the grandparents. Every Sunday. Grateful and apologetic. And my father, somehow ashamed in front of them, as if he’d had too much good fortune. Not ever taking credit for how hard he’d worked for whatever he’d got. Which made me grateful and apologetic: I was always aware of how hard he had to work to pay for my lessons. And so that I wouldn’t have to work so hard. I think he was always afraid that the good fortune of my mother in his life would be somehow snatched away. Which in the end it was.”
    “And so you think he just allowed himself to die because he didn’t want to live without her. They had, I think, a great love.”
    “Yes, I think so, yes, a real, great love.”
    She doesn’t want to go on talking in this way. “My mother felt she had to keep the summer light and heat out of the house. She confused light and damage. How I disliked it: the curtains drawn, the doors kept shut all summer.”
    “Do you remember that dread on Sunday nights? Sheer dread. I didn’t even dislike school; why did I so dread the beginning of a new week?”
    “Perhaps we wanted to sleep more than we were allowed. Perhaps we dreaded waking up and being tired. I do remember being tired on school mornings.”
    “I liked it when I lay in bed and heard the rain,” he