by Mary Gordon
For a long time, Henry Levi didn’t speak to Adam of these things. Until the spring of 1963, when Adam tells him he can’t come for a lesson the next week because it’s Good Friday. Mr. Levi, so formal, so reserved, brings down his fist, the fist made of the valuable fingers of the valuable hand, down on the valuable wood of the piano, and the metronome jumps, the head of Beethoven jumps, and he speaks of roving gangs assaulting Jews in the name of the Crucified Christ whom the Jews are responsible for killing. You think this is only in Europe, but I tell you it is here as well. So how can he feel safe ever, he asks, on this day when he knows very well that he and others of his kind are never safe on this day, this Friday, which the people among whom he lives insist on calling good.
Mrs. Levi, whom Adam will one day (but not for many years) call Sylvia, appears from nowhere with a glass of water and a linen napkin. Be calm, Henry, she says, then something in German, and Adam is sent home.
The next week Henry Levi apologizes, says he must explain, and every week, when the lesson is over and he can be sure he is not misusing the time for which he has been paid, he tells Adam a bit more, doling out history like a rich but poisoned candy Adam must learn to digest or grow immune to.
And so, instead of reading the New York Times, Adam reads histories of the war. Details of concentration camps. His nightmares are not of bombed streets in flame but of piles of bodies, shoes, bones. He dreams himself a starving child in a freezing woods, barefoot; he has stolen bread which he must share with another child; he doesn’t want to share it. In one book he has read, he learns of a survivor child who escaped into the woods after having stolen a chocolate coin. Each night he and his brother lick their index fingers and rub them over the slowly diminishing coin, making it last a month. In his nightmare, while his little sister sleeps, he palms the coin and swallows it all.
Who has taught him to fear his appetites, which at sixteen seem to him monstrous?
Miranda thinks of her appetites as the stuff of songs. Over and over she plays Peter, Paul and Mary (but only Mary sings), “The first time ever I saw your face.” Whole hours lost, dreaming of something she doesn’t even know the word for. “Boyfriend” is too trivial, too unserious, and she could not begin to form, in relation to herself, the word “lover.” When she sings the words from that same song, “the first time ever I kissed your mouth”—kissed your mouth rather than your lips—she is excited and proud of her excitement. And she knows she wants to be doing something only wives are meant to be doing, but she doesn’t want to be a wife, she wants to be someone’s great love. She is afraid that this will not happen before the world is annihilated.
And so these children on the verge of no longer being children hear in their sleep the words “annihilation,” “monstrosity.”
And yet in the history of the world it is, perhaps more completely than any other, a time of safety. A time of hope. Despite the death of the young president, a time of hope.
On September 7, 1964, Adam and Miranda have not yet spoken a word to each other, although they are students in the same school, in the same year. The Thomas Arnold School: a high-minded, old-fashioned private school in Hastings, enclave of the children of the privileged, the intellectually ambitious, the fearful, the insecure. Adam and Miranda know each other’s names and faces. They have not spoken a word, yet by virtue of having been born in the same year, 1948, they share images stamped into the soft wax at the base of their spine. For both of them, the seal is set. Set in the spine, from which the fragile and responsive nerves radiate out.
The smiling face of Anne Frank.
The black children of Little Rock.
John Kennedy and his wife in a formal portrait.
Jacqueline Kennedy veiled, widowed, her husband among the perfect dead, the little boy saluting as his father’s coffin rolls past him in the funeral cortege.
And alongside, or perhaps pressed on top of these, like an outline stenciled above a painted landscape, Adam has other images which Miranda does not have.
The face of Henry (Heinrich) Levi, a young boy in Germany.
And the other Germans. Bach. Beethoven.
The face of the victorious Van Cliburn, with a mouth set like Beethoven’s (not the calm mouth of Bach) and his furious, impossibly tight curled hair.
And when Miranda is reading nineteenth-century novels or learning new dances with her friends, Adam is practicing the piano four, six, sometimes seven, even eight hours a day. They have no way of knowing how the other spends his or her day: he, listening over and over to records on the phonograph his parents allow him to keep in his room so that he can better understand a certain phrasing, while she is listening over and over to Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. Adam and Miranda are from different tribes. They are both sixteen, but he is much much older. Yet in some ways, more thoroughly a child.
It is because of music that they meet and speak.
September 7, 1964. They both walk from their separate homes to the Thomas Arnold School. She is wearing a cotton shirtwaist dress, blue and green flowers against a background of pinkish beige, her skirt modestly below her knees. She wears stockings held up by a garter belt, refusing her mother’s semi-abashed suggestion of a girdle. Her shoes: Bass Weejun loafers with pennies in the slits made for the purpose. She is uncomfortably hot, and blames it on her stockings, which she thinks of jettisoning by the side of the road but not today, no not today. Today is too important.
Adam is too hot because the only jacket that still fits him (he is four inches taller than he was in June) is a brown herringbone wool, recently bought, looking forward to cooler weather. The sleeves of his blue-and-white plaid summer jacket now only reach a bit below his elbows, the fabric pulling shamingly and uncomfortably across his shoulder blades.
“We’re going to have to put a brick on your head,” his mother says, “or just stop feeding you.” She says this as she ladles thick vegetable soup, pasta with meat sauce, and cuts into a cheesecake she made this morning, with a knife she ran under warm water to facilitate the removal of each slice. He sees her smile of calm fulfillment when he eats. And he is always hungry so she seems always happy. He is a boy who loves his mother, loves his sister, loves, though more shyly and quite silently, his nearly silent father. He even loves his grandparents, for whom there is no silence in the expression of their love for this grandson who makes music.
He lives with the sorrow and the shame that he does not entirely belong to his family. He belongs as well to Henry Levi; he belongs to music. Music is the beam of light his eye is always focused on. He lives for music, yet he loves his family who do not live for music, not at all, could live perfectly well without it. They don’t, he knows, exactly understand why he must play the same bars of a Bach invention, a Chopin polonaise, again and again. Does it drive them to distraction? They never suggest it, never say anything but the most loving words of praise about his music. He understands, he thinks he understands, that he was born for something larger, older than his family, this music that was there (but where is there, where was it?) long before he was born and will go on long after he is dead. And so it is not difficult for him to practice hour after hour, repeating the same phrase until the touch, the emphasis, is as right as it can be. His gaze does not stray from the beam of light whose source is somewhere higher than his sight can comprehend.
Miranda, on the other hand, has been accused of a failure of patience. But only with human beings; with objects, plants, and animals, she seems to be uncannily patient. She has been praised consistently for her enthusiasm. Her energy. A reservoir, seemingly inexhaustible, of plans and hope.
Adam has never had a real friend. For too many years his life has been too different from that of other boys his age. Oh, there are other boys whose lives are more like his, students of Henry Levi’s, but they live in Manhattan and their parents seem to have more to do with Henry Levi and the music they all love than Adam’s parents do, and so he feels abashed, unworthy. When Sylvia Levi suggests that the b
oys get together for a Coke, they do (they all revere her), but they don’t know how to talk to one another, and they frequently look at their watches, eager to get back home. To practice. To be with their families, with whom they need not enter into extended conversations or talk at all.
Miranda’s life is centered around her group of friends, the smart girls, who dream of not being as law abiding as they are, and who do not have boyfriends.
For weeks and weeks, Miranda and her four friends have dedicated themselves to the question: what should Miranda choose for her audition piece.
The conditions are many.
They are extensively discussed.
There is the matter of personalities: the judges of the competition.
The judges will be: Miss McKeever, who will get teary over almost everything, and, most important, Mr. Jameson, the junior music teacher, director of the Glee Club, called Jamie by the girls who swoon over him in small semiprivate groups. They love his black-rimmed glasses, his sand-colored hair, long enough to fall into his eyes and be pushed impatiently back by graceful hands that always seem to be quite tan, whatever the season. He was the first to appear in school in a madras jacket worn over a yellow shirt, something the girls had not seen in life but only in the pages of Seventeen magazine. It would not occur to them that Charles Jameson has a lover, with whom he lives in Greenwich Village, whose name is not Harriet but Harry. Such a category has not entered the group mind, and certainly not the group discussion. Therefore all the girls in the Thomas Arnold Glee Club can still put themselves to sleep with dreams of their June wedding (the week after college graduation) to Charles Jameson. They speculate endlessly on the details of his current (temporary) bachelorhood. They decide he is involved with a Martha Graham dancer. Or perhaps someone who works in advertising or publishing. Or perhaps someone European. Spanish, they decide, or Portuguese.
The girls worry: Charles Jameson’s tastes are unpredictable. Last spring he announced that the Glee Club would be singing selections from Brigadoon. Along with this, they will be singing selections from the Messiah and some Negro spirituals.
Then there is the painful reality that juniors are almost never given solos and the even more crushing fact of the dreaded enemy Suzanne Lazzard, who signs her notes (written to Mr. Jameson and to senior boys, never to girls) SUZZI, with two z’s. Her mother is rumored to buy Suzzi’s clothes in Paris. Her father provides Suzzi with voice lessons from Miss Patti Richards, who was in the chorus of Damn Yankees and who has told everyone that she and Gwen Verdon are “very very close.” Like sisters, Miss Patti Richards says. Twining her middle fingers. “Like this.”
A third problem: the girls don’t know whether to honor or to discourage Miranda’s obsession with Joan Baez.
A trip to the city is required. To select sheet music, so that they’re sure they haven’t wasted their time on something that could not be presented to Charles Jameson, who can sight-read anything.
They take the same train to the city as Adam, and they greet him politely, but he blushes when he sees them and ducks his head as if their greeting were a heavy rain he must escape. He enters another car.
“Do you think he’s cute?”
“Who?”
“Adam.”
“He’s really shy. I think he’s kind of a snob. He takes these special piano lessons in the city. He’s a big pianist, or something. He’s going to accompany the Glee Club this year.”
“Well, then, I guess we’ll get to know him.”
“Probably, yeah.”
They don’t think of him for the rest of the thirty-five-minute train ride.
They are not thinking of him, but he is thinking of them, because although he is a kind boy, a gentle boy, who loves his mother and his sister and the great music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although he is what everyone who knows him even slightly (the train conductor) or quite well (his mother, his sister) would consider a good boy, he is tormented by the wild and to him incomprehensible and unimaginable urgings of his body. He does not focus on Miranda any more than on any of her friends. He will not allow details to connect his random and generalized desire for any female at all to someone he might know, with the face of a girl or girls who exist in the same world as he, so defiling does he consider his desires. And he would never dream of buying pornography or anything approaching it. The source of his imaginings: women in bikinis seen on postcards tacked up on the wall of the garage where his father gets his car repaired. A calendar found in the same location. He thinks that he must be mad or loathsome to call up these images so often; he can’t understand that the same body that dwells on these images is capable of reproducing the great pure invaluable music of Schubert and Fauré.
Miranda and her friends go to Colony Records on Broadway and Fiftieth. They find something called the Joan Baez Songbook, which has on its cover a picture of the singer on a beach in California called Big Sur. They plan to travel there after high school graduation. They are hoping one of their parents will lend them a car.
They pore over the book, relieved beyond all telling that it provides, not only guitar chords, but also the possibility for piano accompaniment. Now the problem is: to find a song that will not lose by being accompanied by piano rather than guitar.
They buy the book. They look over it on the train. They look over it in Miranda’s bedroom. They settle on “Plaisir d’Amour,” sung first in French. Miranda has studied French for eleven months, her accent is considered “excellent.” But suppose Suzanne (Suzzi) chooses a French song. This is considered, then rejected. They know their enemy. They know that her imagination is set not on Paris (where her mother might be buying her clothes) but on London, where the Beatles live. She has had her hair cut in the short geometric style invented by Vidal Sassoon, and she paints her eyelids with a single thick black stroke.
They’re right: Suzzi doesn’t choose a French song, she chooses a song by an English singer, Dusty Springfield. “You don’t have to say you love me just be close at hand.” They don’t know that she means it as a message to Mr. Jameson: that she has no desire, in her desire for him, to curtail his freedom.
Has Charles Jameson, though, understood this secret message? And perhaps wished to remove himself from this desire, the desire of a girl whose new haircut, new makeup, have removed her from the territory of the girlish, transporting her over the line into the territory of the womanly, a territory he finds much more dangerous, much less comfortable? What he treasures in the female, particularly as he sees it is now in the process of becoming obsolete, its form melting away like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea: innocent girlishness. Girlish ardor.
So Suzanne (Suzzi) has miscalculated. Singing her modern song with her modern haircut and short modern skirt, she represents for Charles Jameson all that he would like, in the female, kept back.
Miranda, her light brown hair unstyled, reaching below her shoulders, her flower-print shirtwaist dress, her simple song of heartfelt love and its potential sorrows, has touched, in Charles Jameson, exactly the right note. He sees that she is virtuous, and thinks of the Old English word “virtu.” She is like a sturdy, unperfumed flower, a hollyhock, white, lightish pink. Her hands with their short, unvarnished, rounded nails, seem both cool and warm, as if, touching them, you might be comforted but never urged.
Miranda’s eyes fall on the boy seated at the piano, on Adam, whom she looks at briefly and then looks away from. She thinks: He is beautiful. She has never in life (though she’s read of it in books) seen hair like his, so black it seems shot through with blue, and she thinks “Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair,” which Joan Baez has sung night after night in the darkness of Miranda’s bedroom. She wants to refuse the word “beautiful” because “beautiful” is not a word used for boys in those years. Yet it returns like a wave over a slick shoreline. Beautiful, she thinks, he is beautiful, and she thinks of this boy whose name, Adam, is the only thing she knows about him, except for the fact that he’
s a serious musician. Their eyes meet, and they both blush. She looks not at his face but at his beautiful hands, the traces of dark hair that make him so excitingly ungirlish.
So it begins with music, with a singing girl, and a boy, playing the piano to accompany her song.
Plaisir d’amour
Endure qu’un moment
Chagrin d’amour endure
La vie.
The joys of love
Are but a moment long
The pain of love endures
Your whole life long.
Adam and Miranda, one just sixteen, one nearly, neither of them knowing the joys of love or its attendant, some would say, inevitable sorrow.
So it begins, the rest of the story. A love story like any other, conforming to certain patterns (rhythmic), revealing certain strains and inflections (class; gender, though the word is not yet in vogue) but most particularly shaped by its time, its moment in history: the mid-1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. Though many people would say that in 1964 the ’60s have not yet begun: they will begin a year later, in 1965. But certainly we are not in the ’50s. Rebellion is in the air, but it is not, for now, called revolution. Rather: “nonconformity.” There are signs of change; money is not important; respectability, security, are nothing. The worst thing you can be called in those years: phony.
There is no falseness in either of them, Adam and Miranda, and what they will soon regularly call “our love.”
There is one small falsity, however, a necessary one, committed by Miranda to set things in motion. Because, although she thinks of herself as a modern girl, free of the constraints that she believes have hobbled her mother and her mother’s generation, she would find it unthinkable to ask a boy out on a date.
