Summer's End (2 page)

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 hun
dred 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.