by Mary Gordon
It is the first thing he has been reluctant to talk about to Miranda.
As she is reluctant to tell him, or to remind him, that this summer she will go with her friend Fatima to Pakistan to work in her father’s clinic.
When she shows him her airline ticket, she can see that he is struggling: of course she must go, of course they had agreed on it more than a year ago, but she sees a flare of panic in his eyes, as if someone had lit a match inside his skull. He is afraid to be without her.
She is afraid of his being without her, but she knows it would be wrong to say that she is afraid of being without him.
But when she gets to Pakistan she is afraid, often afraid, at the sight of blood and hunger and too early death. She isn’t good at dealing with the sick, the dying; and Fatima’s father, a kind man, suggests that perhaps she’d prefer going into villages, teaching women about nutrition, which she does succeed at moderately. Back at the clinic, she listens to the staff’s complaints about disorganization, and there she succeeds, not just moderately, but brilliantly, at organizing the records, the rotas, at creating systems for ordering medicines and apportioning tasks. But she can’t love herself for this; she would love herself more if she were better at dealing with the sick and the dying. She determines that she will work on her nature; she will make herself better; this is the important work in the world and she must make herself take part in it.
She returns to Wellesley knowing that she is happier in the lab than at the bedsides of the dying, but she will not allow herself to make decisions based on accidents of happiness. All that fall, and into the winter, Adam can’t shake a cold, and finally, after they come back from Christmas vacation, he goes to the health service and is diagnosed with mono. He is sent to the infirmary, and then sent home.
At first, all during March and the beginning of April, she goes back to Hastings on the weekends, to help with nursing him, to keep him company. And then the world is different: Nixon invades Cambodia. She phones and speaks to Adam, who is so sleepy, he says, just so sleepy, but she also talks to Rose, who says she must stay in Boston, she must be involved in the demonstrations: Adam will be fine; he has plenty of people here to look after him. She is having to learn words like Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge and who Sianouk is and who is the hero and who is the villain and who is to blame and what is the role of the North Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Russians. And how to absorb, how to understand the shock of Kent State: the National Guard is shooting students, students like herself; the world has gone mad, and in order not to go mad she must be with people like herself, devoted to acknowledging the madness. But Adam is, literally, sleeping through it, sleeping eighteen hours a day, sleeping under the blankets of his boyhood with the blinds half drawn. Rose has gone back to school; she is taking courses at the community college and is busy, and somehow it is Miranda’s mother, Harriet, who seems willing to check in on Adam several times a day, to bring him soup and custard, grapefruit and orange juice. And to play cards with Adam and Jo when she comes home from school.
Adam tells Miranda that the three of them are very happy playing cards in the time when he can keep awake, but it makes her impatient to hear about it; her days are spent at meetings, mimeographing leaflets, making demands on the university, mourning the dead. And listening to a new conversation: the women who say they’re not going to mimeograph, not going to make coffee; they have their own issues, they want a voice. They do not want to be the servants of men. And so when she is called to come home, it feels like she’s being called to be a servant, and she understands now she has no wish to be a servant. She can hardly bring herself to go home for even one weekend. Rose senses her impatience, sees how Miranda tends her son and says, “You might want to rethink being a doctor. I’m not sure you like being around sick people very much.”
In his bed at home, Adam, exhausted, frightened, missing her, is terrified because he is playing the piano less than he has since he was seven years old. He can, for minutes at a time, study the scores of the Schubert sonatas, perform Madame Rostavska’s stretching exercises, but to sit at the piano for any time at all: he simply doesn’t have the strength. And the piano, he knows, is a jealous lover. He may very well be punished by the loss of a technique he will never be able to recoup. Because although he is a boy who enjoys life, and he is kind and infinitely sympathetic, he is also the terrified lover of a dominating beloved, who can give or withhold, whom he has no choice but to serve. And when Miranda comes to lie beside him in the half-dark room, the smell of his insufficiently washed body, the indolence that lodges in his beard, make her feel clammy and suffocated, and for the first time his body is not a delight to her; for the first time, being next to it is not where she wants to be. She wants to get away, outside, into the cold, into the icy spring wind, back to school, back to the fire of this moment.
And one night, high with fatigue and the sense of purpose, she somehow allows Toby Winthrop to convince her that not to have sex with him is to give in to an oppressive hierarchy of monogamy. She thinks of Adam lying heavy and sweaty underneath his childhood blankets, and Toby’s body—wire lean and bristling with rage and contempt—seems to her newly desirable.
Afterward, trying to sleep beside Toby, she is struck cold with the wrongness of what she’s done; she gets up in the middle of the night, runs back to her dorm, and weeps in Valerie’s arms: “What have I done. I’m awful. I’m despicable. I don’t deserve him.” And Valerie says, “Look, it’s crazy times, everyone’s a little crazy … just don’t ever tell Adam. For God’s sake, it won’t hurt him if he never knows. The cruel thing would be to tell him. What you did was stupid. But don’t be cruel.”
And Miranda allows herself to believe this is the best course. She doesn’t speak to Toby Winthrop again; she does not work again with his organization, but joins another group, less militant, with more women in charge. When she sees him somewhere—at a demonstration, or on the street—he always smiles and makes a gun shape of his hand and pretends to shoot her, and the contemptuous look in his eye is simultaneously humiliating and arousing to her.
Her last weeks of college are sluiced by her shame. Her graduation is overshadowed by Cambodia and Kent State; her last classes were anticlimactic, and she has missed so many she does not graduate summa, magna, or cum laude as she had always expected, as everyone had thought she would.
Adam must make up the course work he has missed, so he takes some summer courses. He wants to do more theory; he will also study voice and conducting; Henry Levi criticizes contemporary pianists because they don’t sing their music, they concentrate only on their fingers and don’t allow their bodies to follow the line. Miranda likes this plan; she doesn’t want to go home to Westchester and fight with her father about his support of the war machine and, newly versed in the language of women’s liberation, to be complicit in her mother’s oppression. She gets a job in the office of Planned Parenthood in Somerville; she and Adam move into the top floor of a white clapboard house. At work, she begins a program of sex education for teenagers who, healthy, though defiant, even deluded, she likes better than she likes the sick.
He wants to talk to her about chromatic scales and contrapuntal structures; his theory classes and composition classes are teaching him a language to which she has no access and in which she has no interest. She is a worker now; she must get to a desk at nine and not leave it till five; she leaves their apartment in Somerville at eight and gets home at six, if there’s not a meeting, and Adam, proud of her and her work in the world, is also excited by the music coming to him in new ways through his learning about singing and conducting, and Miranda says, Yes, it’s wonderful honey, wonderful sweetie, but he can tell she isn’t listening as she used to, and he is frightened by her distance, by her new energy as a woman of the world.
Most of the time, except on the weekends, they are apart. She’s at work; he is in the practice room, the one next to Beverly, who has returned to school after her time off (“Both of us, Adam, lyin
g in half-dark rooms; you in your mother’s house, me in the bin, much fancier, much more costly”), and she does listen to his excitement about voice and conducting, and the relationship among the last Schubert sonatas. And she signs up for those classes with him. Madame Rostavska, a Russian, and a sentimentalist, calls him into her office one day and asks him to do “a mitzvah, Adam, do you know what a mitzvah is? In Jewish tradition: a kind act, a good work. Beverly would like you to work with her on the Messiaen ‘Amen.’ She’s a fragile girl, very gifted, she’s suffered a great deal. I think, as musicians you could learn from each other. She’s a passionate pianist, but lacks your discipline. You could benefit from a touch of her wildness.”
Adam blushes; he says he’d like to think about it. He does not speak about it to Miranda. He doesn’t speak of it to anyone, but he is drawn to the challenge of expanding his range as a musician. Messiaen is not someone he had ever thought of much, but the technical demands of his keyboard music, he knows, are enormous. Certainly it will be good for him to stretch himself like this. The question: will the stretch be painful, like Henry Levi’s stretches, or mysterious in their effects, like Madame Rostavska’s? He tells Madame Rostavska he will be glad to do the two-piano piece. Beverly throws her arms around him. When she lifts her arms, he smells the rank uncleanness of her sweat mixed with the harsh sweetness of a perfume he will later know is called Ma Griffe. He is disturbed that it excites him. He will learn that ma griffe is French for “my claw,” and he will wonder if it was for the suggestion of animal aggression that Beverly chose it.
And in November, Fatima, back in Pakistan, gets in touch with Miranda after the Bhola cyclone: the worst natural disaster in the subcontinent in the century. A telegram: old-fashioned in its brief imperative. “Come now. All is chaos. We need you here.”
Monday, October 22
THE CLOISTER OF THE QUATTRO CORONATI
“Some People I Have Just Let Go”
“I want to take you to one of my favorite places, a restful place in this city that seems to have no interest in rest.”
Looking out the bus window, she sees the Piramide, and then the headquarters of FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, where she worked during the summer of 1969. She can hardly remember the details of her work, that work that was so crucial to her at the time. She can hardly remember her office or rather her cubicle. She seems to recall that all the American women she worked with were named Lois. She can remember, as if trying to discern them in a dream, or in a fog, some details of some faces, sometimes a dress—navy blue with white polka dots—or a pair of shoes, red high heels, open toed.
They pass the Colosseum, which, without saying anything, they both understand they will only glance at. They leave the bus and pass the church of San Clemente.
“San Clemente is famous for embodying the layering of Rome. At the bottom is a Mithraic temple, where bulls were slaughtered, above that an early Christian basilica, and on top a seventeenth-century church that includes Byzantine mosaics and Renaissance frescoes. But let’s not go there. You have to give me credit, Miranda: I’ve kept my word. Only one beautiful thing a day.”
She laughs. “I appreciate your restraint,” she says.
They climb up a hill to a much older brick structure, walk through a courtyard whose simple grand proportions, its emptiness, its openness, seem a desirable sign of something large and fine. They enter the dark church. Adam walks toward a far wall and presses a bell that for a time Miranda cannot see. As her eyes grow used to the dimness, a nun opens a door, and Adam says, so low Miranda can only just hear him, “Grazie, suora.” She wonders how he knows what to call nuns in Rome.
The nun, tall, pale, and smiling, closes the door behind them. They are directed to a cloister, a place that seems entirely apart from Rome, from everything she has known or ever thought of as Rome. The quiet falls, at first quite heavily, on her shoulders, then she feels it on her eyes, like a poultice, as if, without knowing it, she had been running a low-grade fever. Sitting on a stone bench, she gives to the stone all the accumulated tiredness of the unfrivolous traveler. She closes her eyes. Four sounds come to her: the sound of what she understands as seagulls, raucous, querulous, reminding her that Rome is near the sea, something she has not had the slightest sense of. Then there are the cheepings of better-tempered birds. Are there sparrows in Rome? she wonders. They somehow seem so Anglo-Saxon, not a bit Italian. Then a siren, then the sound of children’s heels on stone, and then their challenges, given, thrown back, and against it all the mother’s voice: Sta’zitta. Quiet down.
• • •
On the inside of the arches that surround the cloister is a pattern, bright red against ocher, of what appear to be teardrops. In the center of the cloister, the grass surrounding the well seems wild. Uncared for. And yet the wildness seems deliberate, an allowance rather than a neglect, and once more she is amazed that late in October there are roses, white, blooming only on one bush, the farthest from the door. She remembers that of the qualities she liked most about Adam, among the most important was his ability to be with her in silence. A silence that seemed like a very special kind of accompaniment. She allows herself to bask in silence now; she lowers herself as into a warm pool, or no, she thinks, a lake with just enough coolness in it to make you feel movement is possible, any movement you might like.
It is difficult to leave, to go back to the outside world. He feels this strongly and, as if to take the difficulty in his teeth, he brings up a difficult subject.
“What shall we do about Valerie?”
“Oh, Lord, Adam, you would think of that. You were always so responsible about that sort of thing.”
“Well, yes, OK, I’ve thought of it, but I haven’t the slightest idea of what to do about it. You were always better at that than I. Figuring out what to do. Then doing it.”
“That’s because then I believed there was a right thing to do, and if I just put my mind to it I’d discover it. That’s another one of the things I’ve given up.”
“We could send her a note. Thanking her.”
“For what? For a disastrous encounter? For the dinner we never got to eat?”
“For the drinks. For arranging for us to meet.”
She refuses to take up this last statement. “And what would the note say, ‘Thanks for the drinks. And by the way, Adam and I are meeting daily, and we haven’t invited you once, and we have no intention to do so.’ ”
“Couldn’t we just say, ‘Thank you for having us for drinks, your apartment is lovely and thank you for making our holiday more enjoyable.’ ”
She feels annoyance rising, an oblong at the back of her neck, heating the cool place that was left there by the cloister’s silence. “First of all, Adam, we can’t say ‘we.’ And this isn’t a holiday for me; I’ve been working.”
Ah, he thinks, she hasn’t lost her anxiety that she isn’t working hard enough. That she hasn’t done enough. What were her words? That she’s “let herself off the hook.” As if any kind of pleasure were an unearned release. From what? He never knew what it meant to her to be “on the hook.” It seemed somehow desirable to her, in a way he never understood.
“It would be good to write some kind of note, though,” Adam says.
“Of course you’re right. And you probably will write a note and I probably won’t. I’ll get paralyzed. I’ll go silent because of the impossibility of finding the right thing to say. Something that’s truthful and not wounding. But in my own defense, it’s not just this situation: I’m terrible at writing thank-you notes. My husband writes the thank-you notes, if any get written.
“So you see we’re different now,” Miranda goes on. “It’s you who thinks of the right thing and does it, and I who somehow can’t. I who don’t know what to say or how to say it. It’s because of just this sort of thing that there are some people I have just let go.”
“I was always astonished at the number of people in your life. Wherever we went, it always took much longer
to get there than I thought it would because of all the people who wanted to greet you. And whom, therefore, I had to greet.”
“Well, yes, I came to see it was too much. I came to the point where I didn’t want to have any new friends. I wanted to have a card printed up that said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t get to know you because there are already too many people in my life.’ ”
“But of course you would never do that, because you really hate hurting people’s feelings. Although you like being witty, being thought amusing and sharp. I never knew you to hurt anyone out of malice. You hurt people when you weren’t paying attention. When you were distracted.”
“That kind of carelessness, I’ve come to see, is a kind of malice.”
“No, Miranda, no, it’s not. I’ve known people who take pleasure in hurting. Who enjoy humiliation. That was never you.”
“Nevertheless, I have hurt people. And then, in my guilt about that, my inability to face the harm I’ve done, I turn away from them. We can forgive those who trespass against us. We can’t forgive the ones we’ve trespassed against.”
“I have very few friends.” He sighs. She can’t bear to see the sadness that is shadowing his face. It’s not right; he should have more friends. She doesn’t want him to suffer an additional burden: the conviction that it’s because of something wrong in him.
