Russ struggled to think of something wise to say, something to compete with Ambrose’s special insight into young people.
“Coming home and finding Larry high,” she said, “was a real eye-opener. I came down with a wretched cold, and when I finally got over it I felt like I’d turned a corner. Like I needed to get my life on a different kind of track—be more involved with my kids, stop chasing the fantasy second husband. I want to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. I want to get more involved with you and Kitty and your work, and I asked Rick if there’s a way for me to get involved in Crossroads, too. Part of it is feeling I have to be a kind of father for Larry and Amy, not just a mother. But part of it is just—do you ever feel like you were born too early?”
“You mean, do I wish I were younger?”
“Yeah, I guess we all end up wishing that. But I’m talking about what’s happening now. I mean, the simple fact that girls can wear the same clothes as boys now—I missed all that. I missed the Beatles. I missed living with a guy before I decided if I should marry him, which wouldn’t have been a bad idea in my case. I feel like I was born fifteen years too early.”
“But what you’re describing,” Russ said, “was already happening in the early fifties. The spirit in New York, in Greenwich Village, when I was there, was everything you’re describing, except, in a way, it was purer.”
“In New York, maybe. It sure wasn’t happening in New Prospect.”
“Well, personally, I’m not sure I wish I’d been born any later.” He warned himself not to oversell Greenwich Village, since he and Marion had lived there for only two months, following two years in seminary housing on East Forty-ninth Street. “What galls me about so-called youth culture now is that people seem to think it came out of nowhere. The kids today think they invented radical politics, invented premarital sex, invented civil rights and women’s rights. Most of them have never even heard of Eugene Debs, John Dewey. Margaret Sanger, Richard Wright. When I was in Birmingham in 1963, a lot of the protesters were my age or older. The only real difference now is the fashions—different music, different hair. And that’s just superficial.”
“You really think that’s the only difference? If there’d been a group like Crossroads when I was in high school, I would have joined it in a heartbeat. If I’d read Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem when I was twenty, my whole life might have gone differently.”
Russ frowned. He’d known that Ambrose was a menace, but the gravity of the threat from Kitty Reynolds was unanticipated.
“I’m only saying,” he said, “that civil rights and the antiwar movement and, yes, feminism are the fruit of seeds that were planted a long time ago.”
“Okay, noted. But can I tell you one other terrible thing?”
She repositioned herself again, putting her back against the passenger door and one of her feet against his seat belt. He felt a tug in the belt, across his groin.
“I still have Larry’s bag of pot,” she said. “Can you believe it? I went to flush it down the toilet, so he could hear me doing it, but somehow I didn’t do it. I hid it in my bedroom.”
Everything Russ had just said about his youth was hogwash. The age he wanted to be was exactly the age of Frances.
“I’m waiting, Reverend Hildebrandt. Are you going to tell me I did a bad thing?”
“Legally, I suppose there is some hazard.”
“Oh, come on. No one’s going to kick my door down.”
“Still. What are you planning to do with it?”
“Well, um—what do you think I’m going to do with it?”
He nodded. He felt some pastoral responsibility to steer her from the path of iniquity, but he didn’t want to seem like a square. “In that case,” he said, “I suppose my concern would be that it complicates your message to Larry. If you’re telling him that drugs are bad for him—”
“That’s why I asked you how young is too young. Because I’m not too young. I’m trying to start my life all over at thirty-seven. I’m curious to try new things, and I had this image … I was thinking, you know, maybe I could invite Kitty, and you could invite your wife. The four of us could do a little experiment together, to see what all the fuss is about. If we’re forbidding our kids to do something, shouldn’t we know what we’re forbidding?”
“I don’t need to jump off a cliff to know that children shouldn’t be jumping off a cliff.”