by Mary Gordon
The war escalates; the numbers of the dead pile up and up, the cities burn up, and Miranda has to work harder, pull her mind away from what she is really thinking about to concentrate on his question: should I prepare the Schumann sonata or the Beethoven bagatelles? He says he doesn’t want her opinion as a trained musician; he just wants her as a sounding board. For the first time, she feels, by this task, rendered inanimate; for the first time, she isn’t sure she likes it. Being a sounding board. It occurs to her that a sounding board is not a person but a thing. Unliving. Unalive.
Just as Adam has chosen the Schumann over the Beethoven, Martin Luther King Jr. is shot. Dr. King, whom Miranda continued to revere although some of her friends grew contemptuous of him and his insistence on nonviolence. As Rob has become contemptuous. Contempt is in the air. It is a space at the front of the shelf now, easily reached for, easily available. And then Robert Kennedy is shot, shot in a hotel kitchen by someone with a name and an origin that seem bizarre. How can it be: another violent death, another Kennedy cut down by violence? How ridiculous they now seem: the endless heated arguments: Do you support McCarthy or Kennedy? When anyone can be so easily, so absurdly, cut down. She runs to Rose, and they weep in the kitchen because they saw him, they saw him up close, and they did not see Dr. King, and Bobby is the second brother to be killed, but they worry: is that saying something wrong, something bad about them? Rose still believes one must vote for Hubert Humphrey, she is working for him at Democratic campaign headquarters; Miranda says, No, I won’t support him until he disavows the war. The war is the most important thing. And Rose says, I don’t believe anything is the most important thing. There are many important things which Nixon will prevent. And Humphrey is a good man. Nixon is not.
Rose and Miranda don’t like to argue with each other. Does Rose understand that Miranda is moving away from her son? It is possible that even Miranda doesn’t understand it.
All spring, Adam prepares Brahms’s Seven Fantasies; in May, he will enter a competition. His principal teacher, Madame Rostavska, and Henry Levi, in consultation, decide that this is a good choice for him. It avoids the expected competition choice: it is not a virtuotistic piece, but it will show off Adam’s talents, his ability to range among moods and tones, his gift for subtle, deep interpretation. If he is selected, he will study in Rome with Stuarto Roncalli. He is putting in more hours in the practice room than he has ever done. He listens to Henry Levi, to Madame Rostavska: he listens to everyone, everyone is telling him different things. Henry Levi says: You must concentrate on the transition between note and note. Every transition must be clean, crisp. You must honor the emptiness, the silences. He concentrates on no. 3: the Sturm und Drang Capriccio in G minor. He urges Adam to emphasize the stately processional aspect of the central section. Madame Rostavska is most concerned with no. 4: an intermezzo in E major. She reminds Adam that Brahms originally called this a nocturne; she urges him to imagine moonlit descending figures, the calm transformation that results in a serene end. He dreams the notes; he hears in his nightmares his teachers’ conflicting advice. Miranda brings him sandwiches and tea with lemon and honey; these are their suppers every night for the month of May.
When he plays for the judges, he feels he is outside his body. Miranda greets him backstage, and she sees that he is drenched with sweat. He tells her he thinks he’s never played worse: how could he have imagined he had a chance? How could he have imagined he had the right to play this piece by Brahms, so full of great themes, great feelings, when he is nothing but mediocre, no, less than mediocre. A total failure. An utter fraud.
But then it is announced: Adam is the winner. And Miranda insists that all her friends take time off from demonstrations and teach-ins and strategic arguments, and they take over a pizza parlor on the North Side and toast Adam with endless glasses of Peroni beer.
Through a Wellesley alumna, Miranda secures a job in Rome that will pay her almost nothing, with the Food and Agricultural Organization, which everyone calls FAO, pronounced “FOW.” She hopes to work on projects connected with the distribution of food in what is then being called the Third World. She lies to her parents, tells them she is living in a woman’s hostel. She suspects that her mother knows she’ll be living with Adam, and she encourages Miranda’s elaborate lies at the dinner table. In the hostel for girls only, she tells them, she will be watched over by nuns.
On the plane (it is her first time in Europe, but Adam has been with his mother twice; no one is left in Rome, but she still has family in Orvieto; all of Sal’s family is in America now), they are once more only Adam and Miranda, only Adam and Miranda to each other. “This is good, I think we needed this to get away,” they both say, and she is delighted by everything her eyes fall on. They play a game with the color of the walls: find your favorite wall today and pretend we work for my father’s paint company and we have to make names for paints. First-dawn blue, they say, sun-drenched sand. The trees seem older to her; she sets herself the task of learning their names.
Life is easy for them in the apartment owned by friends of the Levis, where she is for the first time a housewife. Although they never eat at home, except for breakfast; two doors from where they live in the Nomentana is a trattoria. The owner, who finds them charming, serves them meals for a dollar apiece. Why would she cook? She doesn’t know how. Adam wouldn’t dream of asking her.
The arrangement for the apartment is part of Henry and Sylvia Levi’s plan, the plan to ensure that Adam is taken care of by Miranda. Later she will resent this, feel they were implicated in her entrapment, but for now she revels in the high ornamented ceilings, the dark wood of the furniture, the maid, very young with the single long braid, who comes three times a week and calls her signora and leaves behind her the smell of beeswax and lavender.
In Rome that summer, there is none of the dark buzz, the dangerous downed wires that seemed everywhere on every road Adam and Miranda walked on in the America of 1968. She needn’t argue with Renee and Marian (she is speaking to them again) about the Black Panthers. She needn’t worry that Lydia seems to be taking too many and more frightening drugs. She needn’t keep it from Adam that she is smoking pot with her friends; she wouldn’t dream of smoking marijuana here; she wouldn’t know how to go about finding it even if she wanted to, which she does not. She needn’t argue with Toby Winthrop, the Harvard junior, her fellow draft counselor, about the fascist implications of monogamy; she needn’t listen to him taunting her as “the suburban radical, the Westchester liberal.” She is tired of arguing with so many people and of trying to understand so many things. Here, it is impossible to think clearly about politics. Italian politics are so complicated that she thinks that in the course of a summer she could never come to understand them; they inhabit terrains ranging, from what she can gather, from Byzantine historical complexities, old grudges and old loyalties, to a dangerous love of violence. It isn’t her responsibility, and she feels she can “lay her burden down.” Just for a few weeks; she’ll take it up again when she goes home.
But here they are happy. Happy having their coffee and cornetto in the morning, served by an elderly man, who tells them they must not call him signore but Giuseppe, who adores Miranda, tries to explain to her who Padre Pio is, tries to explain the stigmata, and Adam is embarrassed because his grandmother also has a picture of Padre Pio, in her bedroom. Adam tries to explain to Protestant Miranda that this picture of the smiling, bearded monk, below which they drink their cappuccini and eat their cornetti, is the image of a man who was meant to bleed from wounds, like Jesus, in the place of Jesus, every Friday and most days of Lent. And that both Giuseppe and his grandmother believe this man could fly. She listens to his explanations as if he were speaking of initiation rites in Papua, New Guinea: she finds the story charming, not entirely understanding that these are the stories Giuseppe and Adam’s grandmother live by.
They are happy shopping, buying their peaches, their cheese, their tomatoes, their bread. Though she won’t c
ook, she loves buying picnic food and planning the location of their outings. Calm and pleased, she walks the aisles of the ancient covered market in Nomentana: rows on rows of fruits and cheeses and salamis, fish she doesn’t know the name of and wouldn’t know what to do with but enjoys looking at. She allows herself to be distracted. She follows Adam’s lead: this is his other home, these are his people. Certainly, it must be in his blood, this way he has of picking up a peach and turning it over, smelling it, putting it to her nose, telling her to bite it, taste the juice, no wait, he’ll take the first bite so she won’t have the trouble of the fuzzy skin, and he brushes the hair from her cheek with the edge of his palm. And surely he must have been born to it, to talk this way about food, to speak without embarrassment about the richness of the tomatoes, the sharpness of the basil, the smooth texture of the cheese. He praises the olive oil; he says its taste is the taste of comfort and hope.
He is passionate about Roman water. He shows her how to cover the hole in the spigot with her middle finger so she can drink more easily, so the delicious water can go directly into her mouth. He fills bottles with water from the different fountains and insists that she discriminate and choose her favorite. He talks about the way the color of the stone changes as the day progresses and the shadows lengthen. She allows herself to believe that it’s all right to enjoy the world, to pay attention to the kinds of things he is paying attention to. It’s a kind of slowness, a kind of attentiveness that would mortify and perhaps even frighten the people she was raised among. She can just imagine what her father would say if he heard Adam going on and on about a peach. He would call it, she knows, unmanly. But it is the opposite to her; never has she desired Adam more; never has he seemed more the man with whom she delights in sharing her bed. Their bed.
Except when they are in bed, to sleep or to make love, they are hardly ever indoors. All summer she reads almost nothing. They walk the streets from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. She asks him: Do you ever want to go to church. And he says no and blushes. So they do not enter a single church. Except to hear music: Palestrina, Monteverdi, sung in the places they were meant to be sung, part of something they were meant to be part of, not cut off, no longer museum pieces, but connected to something still alive. But he will not kneel and stand when the others kneel and stand, and he refuses to take communion.
Adam says he knows that his not going to communion would make his father sad. He tells her that it is Sal who has the religious life, Sal who is saddened that Adam seems uninterested. Rose knows why: Adam will not take communion because he knows that he is understood to be in a state of mortal sin on account of being Miranda’s lover. Since the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Catholic church’s stance against birth control, Rose herself has not entered a Catholic church. Sal is an usher at Mass on Sundays and often a communicant at Mass during the week. Each year he makes a retreat for five days with the Redemptorist Fathers, someplace upstate; no one ever questions him, and he says nothing to anyone about his religious life. Which Adam knows is serious, extensive, because of the books that line his shelves. John of the Cross. Meister Eckehart. Julian of Norwich. It seems not to come between his parents, Rose’s rage at the church, Sal’s devotion to it. Adam doesn’t understand why it doesn’t come between them, but the fact that it does not raises in him an enormous pride, as if his parents were great players in a long, demanding, but intensely private game.
Miranda knows that she and Adam are only playing house, but why not, she thinks, why not enjoy it? When they meet for dinner, tired after work, tired for the first time as adults are tired, she allows herself to be distracted as well by this new kind of adult exhaustion. And distracted by her job, a job involving the analysis of data, a task that, to her surprise, in its cool comfort, she enjoys. At her job she meets people from all over the world; she is the youngest, they indulge her, they are amused by her, but, at the same time, admiring her facility, they take her seriously. A competence with numbers, with what is called data, is something she didn’t know she had. She believes she is learning about the world. She likes her job; she likes the color of the stones and the sounds of the fountains; she likes their endless walks, though she never remembers for long what it is they saw. Only the color of the stones, the sounds of the fountains.
Adam feels himself being stretched, and yet relaxed, closer to becoming the kind of musician it is his life’s work to be. He does not spend the time in the practice rooms that he did in America. But none of his Italian friends do. They do not seem distorted, misshapen, his new Italian musical friends. They may be mad, he tells Miranda, but they’re not neurotic. I think it’s because serious music isn’t an oddity here, something people only pretend to think is important. It’s more ordinary, and it makes them much more normal.
They have families they live with, these new friends, and they invite Adam and Miranda for Sunday dinners that go on for hours and that have a cast of characters it is impossible to remember, sometimes, even, to count. And they are invited to Rose’s family in Orvieto, who do not ask the details of Adam’s and Miranda’s living arrangements; they are shopkeepers, the family; they sell cheese and bread and olive oil. Afterward Adam and Miranda get on the train back to Rome dizzy from the funicular and stuffed from a day of endless, interlocking meals, carrying bags and bags of food as if they were returning to the Arctic rather than the great city of Rome.
And so they spent that summer walking the streets, avoiding the American students on the Spanish Steps (We’re not like them, Adam, tell me we’re not like them), a month of streets marked by fountains and public sculpture and concerts which seem to be everywhere, every night, and free, and the scent of flowering trees and frying food and laundry flapping in the heartlessly blue sky, the sound of whirring sewing machines and snatches of songs flung out onto the Via Nomentana way past midnight.
She had meant, originally, to go to Pakistan that summer to work in Lahore with her friend Fatima in the clinic of her father who is a doctor there. She has told Adam she must do it the next summer, and he says, yes, of course, but this is a once in a lifetime chance, and afterward she knows that he was right; she wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Even for the responsibility of saving the afflicted poor.
The things that vexed and separated them seem far away. Miranda reads the International Herald Tribune occasionally, but there is no television in the apartment so he doesn’t have to hear her every night railing as Walter Cronkite describes napalmed bodies as he would back home. She leaves the railing to the Italian radicals, whose slogans she can’t begin to understand. She takes the bus each day, a forty-minute ride beside ordinary Italians who seem absorbed in ordinary lives, and that seems right; it’s all right for her to be absorbed in what seems ordinary Roman life: colors and smells and textures. After all, she is working hard on something important, reports on sorghum and terracing and irrigation. Adam and Miranda can hardly remember what seemed so troubling between them; whatever it was has disappeared, dissolved like the miles that turned to nothing as the plane rose up over New York and crossed the fretful cold gray-green Atlantic. It seems that they have all the time in the world. Each day they tell themselves that they are lucky.
Then they go home; the days shorten; the October sky turns blue-black at five o’clock; there are no longer enough hours in the day. Is this the same sky, they ask each other, as the Roman sky? Is the sun the same sun? Why is the light so different? It is only with Adam that Miranda can have this kind of conversation: tender, speculative, playful. This habit of mind has no place in the diction of her serious friends, who know it’s their job to change the world.
She is spending more time in the biology lab; her real love is botany, but after her summer at FAO she has decided on a double major in biology and economics, which pleases the premed adviser: she thinks Miranda’s prospects are excellent. Miranda is still counseling draft resisters. She is back to smoking pot.
And Adam is doing as he ha
s always done: practicing, practicing. He is absorbed in the relationships among the last Schubert sonatas: when he tries to speak about this to Miranda she says, “Um-hm, interesting,” but he knows she isn’t interested. Madame Rostavska, a Russian, continues to believe that the technical training he received from Henry Levi is all wrong. Henry Levi insisted on his doing stretching exercises that were painful; he believed that without a certain amount of pain the proper stretching could not be accomplished. Madame Rostavska says that that’s “typical German sadism,” and gives him a new set of exercises, which do not hurt but are more time-consuming than Henry Levi’s.
He eats most of his meals with people who make jokes about musical figures. “What’s half a bottle of Four Roses? A diminished fifth.” Some of them ask and then forget and ask again, “Why are you wearing that black armband on your jacket? Did someone die?” And he thinks this continued questioning must be aggressive; if it weren’t, they would be afraid to ask him in case someone in his family had really died. He knows this subtle aggression reflects an appetite for perversity in his semifriend Ronald, who is in love with Shostakovich.
On January 10 of 1969, Beverly Marshall, a piano student a year behind him, makes a suicide attempt in the practice room beside his. Adam barely knows her; he has noticed that she waits for him often outside his practice room, seems to want his attention in a way that makes him uncomfortable. He’s surprised that although they barely know each other she always wants to speak to him of her abiding sadness. When he hears what sounds like a fall, he knocks on her door, turns the handle, finds it locked, becomes alarmed, and persuades the janitor to open the door with one of the hundred keys that hang from a ring he carries on a chain attached to his thick webbed-leather belt.
