by Mary Gordon
Adam’s family had very much less money than Miranda’s but always made him feel that he need do nothing to make money, nothing that would interfere with his music. He could never be entirely without guilt for that, a guilt that changed its tone as he aged, as he began to understand his father’s thoughtful kindness at keeping from him the details of what he had to do to make the money. And sitting on the bench beside her, he doesn’t say, But you see your having more money means you can live in the Via Margutta while I live in the Via della Reginella, because he knows she would actually prefer living where he lives. And he knows she has more money than her husband because Valerie has told him. But what he doesn’t know is if she understands that her money comes not from her father, but from her mother, that gentle woman who would not have known how to say the first word about it. So he decides to speak of money in a different way.
“Even the young now believe money is important. They think about it in a way we never did.”
“I know that it’s important to them, but I don’t know in what way. And perhaps I don’t think about it as much as I should. I know that we have enough money. A house we like very much. A small cabin on a lake. Our sons have gone through college. If they want more education, it can be made to happen. And yet, for the first time: I would like more money. But I don’t know what for. More clothes than I can wear, more houses than I can live in, more food than I can eat?”
“More time, perhaps. Fewer hours working.”
“Time is money, right. I don’t like saying that, but it’s the truth. Then I ask myself: Time for what?”
“To be still. To go where you want when you want. Not to have to be fatigued.”
“Are you tired of your work, Adam?”
“Yes, I suppose, and yet I think it’s quite important, and I think I’m good at it. It frightens me that, in a generation, the music that I love, that I have lived so much of my life for, will almost disappear. It was considered a necessary acquisition: people, ordinary people, had pianos in their living rooms. Everyone took music lessons, even if they were doing it only to be perceived as doing it, to be thought of as cultured, worthy to be taken into the middle class. Now almost no one thinks it matters one way or the other whether you take lessons. Most of the young. Most of the world. It’s important to me that I can influence some of them so that they will be moved, consoled, set on fire. Of course, it’s nothing like the importance of what you do. You save people’s lives.”
“Only at several removes, and I don’t know what the long-term effects will be. I told you, I gave up that kind of ambition because I wanted an ordinary life. A life for my children with the things money can buy. Health and safety.”
“Is that what money buys? Health and safety?”
“And quiet. And privacy.”
“And beauty. Tomorrow I’ll take you to a beautiful café.”
“No, Adam, tomorrow I will take you to a place I’ve wanted to go. It is, I think, quite beautiful. The kind of place we would never have dreamed of entering when we were young. It’s expensive. But I can afford it. It’s the kind of thing you can almost never say: I have enough money. People will talk about almost anything else, the most intimate, the most mortifying things, before they’ll mention money. We don’t want to be poor, but we don’t want to admit we’re not.”
“And if we had lived poor, as we said we would when we were young, going to this kind of restaurant is the sort of thing we would never have hope of doing. Would we be more or less happy? More or less unhappy? I know people, my God the money some of my students come from, people who think about money all the time. They have too much money, and they aren’t happy. I know that’s the wrong thing.”
“And the right thing?”
“Ah, that I can never seem to settle on.” His face seems to her to have darkened; but perhaps it’s only that he’s moved into the shadow of the overhanging leaves.
Sunday, October 21
THE RESTAURANT, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
“I Am Not Ready to Be Seen As No Longer Young”
The restaurant is actually part of the Museum of Modern Art. They walk up the elaborate marble staircase, through the doors flanked by Corinthian columns, not even stopping to buy a ticket. He’s told her the collection is undistinguished, not worth the steep admission price. “You don’t come to Rome for museums,” he tells her. “There are only one or two that are really world class.”
They’re more dressed up than they’ve been since their first night at Valerie’s. She’s wearing a black silk pantsuit; underneath the jacket, a silky jade-colored shirt. He wonders if the shirt is sleeveless. He thinks of his memories of her arms: freckled, lightly muscled.
In all the time they’ve been together, all these days in Rome, he hasn’t seen her legs. She wears long skirts or pants. Her legs were always a vexation to her; he had found them beautiful, arousing. Worried that he knows she’s thinking in this way, he doesn’t compliment her on her outfit, as he’d thought of doing, before his imagination took off in a direction that causes him unease.
She’s reserved a table outdoors, on the veranda. They look out over the park, the park that she’s come to know well because of their daily walks.
“The sky is white today,” she says. “The flat pines are beautiful against it. The pines of Rome.”
“I like the pines, and I always wanted to like the music, the Respighi, but I can’t.”
“Umbrella pines. I love the shape they make against this white sky. I think what I love most in Rome are things seen against the sky. And things that are what they are because of water. Bridges. Fountains. The sound of fountains. The reflections of the bridges, of the arches of the bridges, repeating themselves in the river. Particularly at dusk. At twilight. What’s the difference between twilight and dusk?”
“That’s the kind of thing you know, that you wonder about, that I never would. And I meant to ask you, what’s the name of those trees with the small leaves. In all my years in Rome, I’ve never known. And it seemed like the sort of thing I should have known, so I was always embarrassed to ask anyone. It always seemed too late to be asking.”
“Ilex,” she says. “I’m glad you’re not embarrassed to ask me.”
“Because you know it’s the sort of thing I’ve never known.”
“It is, Adam, the sort of thing you could learn.”
“But you learned very young, from your father.”
“Yes, those were times I know that we were happy, walking in the woods.”
Her father, she knows, wouldn’t approve of spending so much money on a meal.
“Every time I’ve passed this place, I wanted to have lunch here,” Miranda says. “The view is wonderful, but there are some places you don’t want to eat alone. Or with someone who’d fuss about the price. It might be different for a man. Although things have changed. When I was younger, it was rare to see a woman in a good restaurant eating on her own. Traveling in India, it’s almost impossible. If you’re eating on your own reading a book, a young woman of the restaurant family will come and take your hand and tell you it’s terrible for a woman to be eating alone with a book, and you’re just swept up, into a family life that I am simultaneously delighted by and appalled by—I mean, I’m appalled by the theft of my privacy.”
“There’s no Italian word for privacy.”
“How can that be?”
“There’s a word for solitude, but that’s different, almost religious. The right to privacy: that’s very northern.”
“You only have to travel a bit south or east to be shocked at how northern you really are. How important things like people arriving on time become. When you have to understand that when you say two o’clock you mean two o’clock, and the people you are with mean ‘sometime between two and seven.’ ”
“You’re no longer habitually late.”
“No: Yonatan cured me of that.” She doesn’t want to be talking about her husband now. “Let’s order something luxurious. The sort of
thing that would shock my father. Have the most expensive thing on the menu.”
“But suppose the most expensive thing on the menu isn’t the thing I want?”
“Yes, that would be a problem. Then let’s say: have whatever you want and don’t think, for a moment, about money.”
This is impossible for him. And he is not entirely at ease with a woman saying those words to him, implying that the check will be paid by her. Still not entirely at ease that his wife earns more than he. But he knows that is a foolishness, one he can just let go. And this is Miranda, and he is Adam, and it is much too late for that; he knows it is beneath him.
“Lobster risotto,” he says, “to start.”
“Yes, and then?”
“Cinghiale,” he says. “Boar.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been told it’s the season. How frightening boars are: those tusks. Digging for truffles. What a strange animal. Threatening, but discriminating. Bloodthirsty, yet a friend of the table.”
“Look around: most of the men are gray haired, like me. It’s because it costs a lot to eat here.”
“But the women are not gray haired. Not one. Even I’m not; though without chemical help, I would be.”
“I think you’re more worried about getting older than I am.”
“It’s harder for a woman. A finality occurs. One day you’re fecund and the next day barren. Bang. No more children for you. Do you know how lucky you are? I won’t have the chance again. You must have been in your forties when Lucy was born. And there wasn’t the slightest worry attached to that. You could have another twenty-five children if you wanted.”
“But I don’t, of course, want.”
“I may have had too much to drink, or they’re taking too long bringing the food, but I want to tell you something. It happened last night. Someone who gave a paper at the conference was staying at a very fancy hotel. Not the Hassler, but something up there like that. He invited us all for drinks. It was one of those very modern places where the bathrooms make you think you wandered into a conceptual art installation by mistake. You think maybe some German did the sinks, some postmodernist you’re not hip enough to know the name of, and you can never find the water faucets. There were only two toilets. I went into one, and before I sat down I saw there were spots of blood all over the seat. So I went into the other toilet.
“After I washed my hands I noticed the Asian woman who was handing out the towels. At first I was horrified that she’d think the blood was mine, and think of me as unclean. But then I hoped she thought it was mine, so she would think of me as still young. Young enough to menstruate. Still vital. I gave her an enormous tip, because I wanted her to think both things at once: that the blood was mine, and wasn’t mine, that I was not unclean but not infertile. I suppose I am not ready to be seen as no longer young.”
The waiter brings the food; it’s not very good. Neither of them wants to remark on this.
“We’re more than halfway through,” Miranda says.
“Through what?”
“Our life.”
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” Adam says, making a face so she won’t think him pretentious.
“Past the median.”
“Postmeridian.”
“Postmeridian. It just means after noon.”
“Dolce?” the waiter asks. He hands the menu to Miranda, and translates for her, “Sweet?”
September 1967
She knows he doesn’t want to go, and that it’s difficult for him to tell her.
The march on the Pentagon. The biggest antiwar demonstration ever planned. The government will have to understand that they are wrong to be in Vietnam. The war will have to end.
Miranda and her friends have been planning for it, negotiating with bus companies, attending training sessions: what to do if you’re teargassed, if the cops approach you intending to beat you up. Miranda’s father doesn’t believe that any policeman would dream of harming his daughter. He would not, however, have dreamed that his daughter, in blue jeans and a work shirt, a bandanna around her neck, would be carrying in a knapsack bottles of water and tubes of Vaseline (smear the Vaseline on your face, then douse the bandanna and cover your face in case of teargas). Small bottles of iodine to treat potential wounds. He would never have dreamed that his daughter would be a “demonstrator,” that she could imagine she had anything to fear from the police, that she would be shouting (so unladylike! he had raised her to be a lady like his mother, like her mother) phrases that were ridiculous to him, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
There is not, she believes, anything more important than stopping the war. When she arrived at Wellesley, in September 1966, a little more than a year before, she did not know she would be thinking this. She thought the most important thing was choosing the right classes for her first semester. Would she study Russian or continue with French? Should she do her science requirement in her freshman year? What would her roommate think of her new blanket, a Hudson Bay (cream, trisected by three bands: turquoise, orange, gold), which she and her mother had shopped for and which she loved, the first domestic item owned only by her, not by her mother, her father, though paid for, of course, by them.
Two days before he will leave for Boston, she spreads the new blanket out on the floor of her bedroom. Her mother is shopping in the city; she has read about a special kind of cloth bag that will prevent clothes from being wrinkled when they’re folded in a suitcase. She is determined that Miranda will have several.
Adam and Miranda lie on the blanket; he is running his palms against the soft wool. She tells Adam she’s signed up for a course in music theory. He is rarely angry, but he looks angry now; a beautiful russet creeps up toward his brows and he says, “I don’t want you to do that,” and that, too, is odd; he never asks her for anything, but she can ask him why because they love each other, nothing can hurt their love or weaken this bond, which she knows will go on unto death. So without fear she asks, “Why?” and he says, “I want you, when you listen, to listen to me playing. To listen to me, not the music. I need to know you love me as a man, not as a musician.”
She is thrilled to hear him speak this way. To refer to himself as a man. He is, after all, only eighteen and perhaps has never before used the word to describe himself. And because his using it in her hearing frightens them both at first (as if they were inhabiting a room they’d been told they had no right to enter), and then seems entirely right—they have moved not only into another room but to another country: they are citizens of the grown-up world.
“I need to let my eye fall on you sometimes when I’m playing and not be worrying that you’re judging every nuance, every pressure of the pedal, every tempo of every phrase. I live with being judged, all the time, I’m judged and judged and judged. I need you to be in a place away from it all.”
She is ennobled by his words; he’s asking something of her, something womanly, saintly, asking her to give something up (a kind of knowledge), to be willing to empty herself of something she doesn’t even yet possess: to enhance her own emptiness. (She thinks of the word “womb,” which she prefers to “uterus”; her womb is empty, but only temporarily, waiting for his child.) Her emptiness will help him give birth to his own greatness. He wants her to be not music. He wants the blankness, a blank slate, no, a blank shoreline, dry firm sand where he can set his foot and feel safe.
She takes her model from Sylvia Levi, who enjoyed her work as phlebotomist, enjoyed, as she said, colleagues who didn’t know Bach from boogie-woogie, and yes she missed her job when they agreed that Henry was earning enough money and didn’t need her salary, what he needed was her attention, that she should be able to listen to him. Like that dog, she said, cocking her head in imitation of the RCA Victor dog in front of the gramophone. What he wants is for me to listen and respond, without musical training, without criticism, just listen, and make a place where he can eat and sleep and entertain his friends in comfort and of course after all these ye
ars of listening I have learned enough so that I know something about what he does but not so much so that he has to be afraid. They are so afraid these men who have given themselves to music. What they do is so demanding, in a way so dangerous, that it is our place, as their women, to make a safe harbor. To make the harbor safe. Miranda believes it is an honorable role and the one to which she has especially been called: the woman behind, beside, the great man. Enabling, rather than possessing, greatness.
Miranda never asked Sylvia Is this why you never had children? because she would then have to say, I will give up a great deal, but that I will not give up. She and Adam talk about their children; he will teach them music; she will teach them to swim, and to know the names of trees and the varieties of birds. Which she was taught by her father. Who taught her brother as well. Her brother to whom her father now vows he will never again speak. The three of them sharing binoculars. Her father whispering: Listen. Or pointing: Just there.
It is in some ways a mistake, his keeping her away from the world of his music. Because it takes up most of his time, and all the people he knows use their time in the same way, but she is using her time differently, meeting people very different from anyone he knows or has known. Almost immediately, she is taken up by people she likes on campus who tell her that to resist the war is the most important thing, and she knows they’re right, because it’s life and death they are talking about, real lives, real death. What is at stake is more important than anything that has come into her sights before.
