NINETEEN
YOU’LL DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS. You always have. I couldn’t have tolerated you this long if you hadn’t. From the day I met you I knew you had the capacity for something more than your family could give you and I was right.
You must understand, Jude, what I had with Gideon was more than it wasn’t. On some level I was aware of the chasm that separated us and still I was far enough gone to waylay if not discharge my sense of decorum entirely and behave as though we two were the only ones left in the world. This is the only explanation I can offer for the fact that I allowed myself long private conversations with a stranger not once but repeatedly and in 1951 when I knew women who needed their father’s permission to marry. Being closer to the wild meant being further removed from
