by Mary Gordon
Physically, Beverly is almost comically opposite to Miranda. She is dark eyed; Miranda’s eyes are grayish green; Beverly’s hair is black and thick and always in a tangle; she pins it to the top of her head, but it is always falling down, and it’s almost a tic with her (he finds this charming) to be continually pinning it up. Sometimes, she sticks pencils in the bun she makes of her hair as if she were a Chinese woman using hair sticks. Her legs are long and almost worryingly slender; she is vain about them and wears the shortest skirts she can. He loves Miranda’s thick straight legs, to him like the trunks of beautiful trees, but he knows she is distressed by them and covers them in jeans or long peasant skirts. Miranda’s breasts are small; they sit neatly on her rib cage: innocent, tender. He will not allow himself to think of Beverly’s breasts, even when he knows she is purposely brushing against him so that he’ll have to. But though he’s tried to banish the thought, he knows Beverly’s bosom is fuller than Miranda’s, particularly in relation to her birdlike frame.
• • •
Adam believes that if only Beverly could spend time with his mother she’d be much better. Rose would feed her and give her advice, and that would lead to her greater happiness. But then Beverly might say: What’s happiness? I don’t believe in happiness. He doesn’t know if she would say it in her bitter voice, or her wounded one: he can never predict which Beverly he is going to encounter: the hissing snake, the trembling rabbit, the soaring bird of brilliant song. Adam understands that his mother is incapable of offering comfort without offering food, and that if Rose offered Beverly food she might not eat it. Beverly has a long list of foods that are “too, too sick making.” So of course he wouldn’t try to introduce them, particularly since he knows how much Miranda would dislike Beverly, and it would be wrong to try to place her under Rose’s wing, where Miranda has pride of place.
Miranda sees that the kind of conversation she and Adam always had is stalled now, as if some dam, whose construction she had failed to notice, has cut off the stream of their shared life. But she doesn’t want to think about it because then she would have to understand her part in it, the depths of her own boredom. She agrees to go for a drink with Jeremy Sussman, a medical student who is organizing a storefront clinic, and allows him to kiss her, but she runs away (he laughs nastily at her escape down the street), and she is ashamed that she allowed herself to get this close once again to the danger of betrayal. This time, though, she goes right back to Adam, and her silence, her evasion—“Where were you?” “Oh, just having a drink with Valerie”—is the first time she has directly lied to him, as opposed to keeping something back, and so the stream is befouled now, clogged yet more.
And when Fatima’s telegram arrives, “We need you here,” both Adam and Miranda understand that it is right for her to go. She will be away for his recital, and she expresses her regret, but both of them understand that they are secretly relieved. She will, she assures him, be back home for his solo recital: the last three Beethoven sonatas. She is particularly fond, she tells him, of Opus 110; Think of me when you’re practicing it, she tells him.
“As if I don’t always think of you,” he says, wondering, just a bit, if that’s still true.
Realizing that he can’t make Beverly’s life better through contact with his mother, he makes what he thinks is the second-best choice. He’s listened to Miranda for years when she says how important it is to have girl- (now women) friends. So he convinces Valerie it would be an act of kindness to spend time with Beverly, and to his surprise Valerie, too, becomes fond of her. He knows what Miranda would say, That doesn’t mean anything, Valerie likes everybody. Beverly invites Valerie to go on what she calls “a thrift shop crawl.” They come back with bags of clothing that could have been costumes from thirties screwball comedies, or later Betty Grable films: a big-shouldered beaver coat, a beaded handbag, a cinch-waist polka-dot dress with a white patent-leather belt.
“All for five dollars, it’s unbelievable fun,” Valerie says, and soon she has included some of Miranda’s other friends on her expeditions with Beverly. Only the more law abiding, less adventurous of the friends had stayed on in Boston after graduation; Renee is in Morocco with a Moroccan boyfriend, Lydia has gone out to San Francisco to an art scene she found more “open.” So those who are left are serious, purposeful, concerned with doing good, still with the residue of pleasing their teachers clinging to them, although they are officially, now, not students. They feel in Beverly’s company steered into a more adventurous and less safe world. A world that simultaneously harks back to their mothers’ youths (the choice of Manhattans over hashish, stiletto heels over cowboy boots, velvet capes over Aztec ponchos) and skates close to a world of danger their mothers wouldn’t even have the name for. Do they believe that Adam and Miranda are inviolable, as safe as Fort Knox, so there’s no need to be concerned about his spending time with Beverly? Is that why they don’t mention her in their letters to Miranda? Or are they keeping something from her, something that might disturb her in her new difficult life? Or have they secretly come under Beverly’s sway, because they’re tired of Miranda’s certainty, her calm, silent judgments?
And Adam feels in having introduced Beverly into this female society that he takes a new place among them. No longer is he the pampered, gifted boy whom they must instruct about the world while protecting him from it. In knowing Beverly, he showed himself, in a larger sense, more knowing. On Beverly’s advice, he grows a beard. Beverly’s voice, the cigaretty undertone, her diction, at once sharp-edged and louche, challenge him in a new way. She talks passionately about artistic growth. She says he must break out of the comfortable cocoon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where he feels so easily at rest and listen to the music of John Cage and Varèse and Schoenberg. Particularly of Messiaen, whose synesthesia fascinates her. She talks about Messiaen’s idea that each chord represents a specific color. She says that unless he lets the dark bitter tones enter in he will remain a competent pianist, but one among many, and if he wants to break out of that circle and enter the circle of the great, “I don’t believe in words like ‘great,’ not for myself anyway,” he says and she replies with impatience, flicking the ash of her cigarette on the floor, “Oh, nonsense, Adam, you must dream big and your dreams must include chaos and darkness.”
And in her filthy room, listening to music he has only just learned to like, he feels the lure of her challenge. He does want to grow as an artist; he doesn’t want to rest in safety. Miranda is safety; she is certainty, and rest and perhaps … he will not finish that sentence. He takes another drink of gin and Campari, which he actually doesn’t like, but knows to be the right thing to be drinking when listening to John Cage and taking Beverly up on her offer to run his fingers up and down the multiple scars on her arm, marking her suicide attempts. She takes the twenty bottles of pills from her medicine chest and puts them on her coffee table, burned by cigarettes, and says, “I’m a mess, Adam, don’t you think I’m a mess?” He thinks of her passionate, inspired playing of the Messiaen. And he says, “No, Beverly, I think you’re a kind of genius.”
And she says, “Adam, you are my fortunate island. You are my island of the blest. So often I feel that I am a small, unseaworthy boat, rocked back and forth by tumultuous waves, and then the glimpse of you, reachable, makes me know that I’m all right. That I will be all right.”
The words she uses, “a small seaworthy boat, rocked back and forth by tumultuous waves,” strike him as false. He suspects that she’s said this before, to other people. But then, suppose she never has, suppose he really is the only person who makes her feel safe? Is it that he’s had too much to drink, is it that he fears Miranda no longer loves him in the way he loves her, unquestioningly, uncritically, that she no longer believes he’s enough for her, that he fears she’s not enough for him, that she has not written in three weeks, and what she writes is dry, perfunctory, as if she can’t take her mind away from the compelling horrors to bring it back to him. The
man she says she loves.
Beverly is weeping. She has drunk too much. She’s talking about her “bitch mother, the refrigerator.” And her father, “the drunken bully holding the purse strings like a whip.” And her brother, banished from the house for being homosexual (she thinks he’s in France somewhere, no one knows exactly where he is, they haven’t heard from him for five years). This pileup of loss and deprivation (he thinks of his mother, his grandparents) breaks his heart, and there she is, her frame so frail, her legs looking as though they can barely support her, and she is saying, “Hold me, Adam, I just need you to hold me. It’s hard for me to ask for things so simply, but I must.” He can’t refuse; he is holding her; her dark hair comes loose from its pins, smoky, hypnotic, her full breasts, unhampered by a bra, press up against his chest, and how does it happen, they are kissing, then they are lovers, and he is a betrayer, and in the morning he only wants to be away from her and she knows it and weeps again and says, “I knew it. I knew you’d be just like everyone else. Everyone who comes near me finds me loathsome in the end.” And he says, “You’re not loathsome, you’re beautiful, but this is a mistake. I shouldn’t have done this. Miranda and I … well, we belong to each other.”
“Nobody belongs to anyone,” she says, and for the first time she looks ugly to him. “That’s a disgusting way to talk. My bicycle belongs to me. My jade ring. People are free, and if they aren’t, well, that’s less than human. Or they’re just slaves.”
He kisses her good-bye, miserable. She has used the word “loathsome” about herself, but he knows it rightly applies only to him, and he can’t wait to shower in his own bathroom, but it isn’t only his. Miranda’s shampoo, Breck, is in the shower, and he opens it, smells it, uses it to wash his own hair, as if then he could be with her, could become her, pure as she is pure, and the water falls on the flesh that he can only loathe and the smell of her shampoo pierces his heart. The words he uses for himself he never imagined he would have to use. “Profligate.” “Betrayer.” He is unworthy of Miranda, unworthy of her love.
Miranda, in Pakistan, is exhausted, overwhelmed, in despair, thinking there is nothing she can understand. She can hold back for an hour, a day, the tidal wave of horror, the psychological correlate to the tidal wave, the typhoon that is the natural disaster that is the reason for her being where she is. If she is not absolutely engaged in an activity, the images return: the bloated bodies floating like black dolls, the swollen cattle, drowned, the wandering children, their mouths open, silently abashed. And even when she feels that something is being done to feed and clothe the victims and provide medicine, she has to come to terms with the corruption and cruelty of people to their own people. Her romance of poverty, the solidarity of the poor, is blasted through, as if a cannonball had breached the solid ramparts of her understanding. She sees a young man stealing a blanket from a shivering old woman. Then she observes some small act, some gesture—two boys share a piece of bread, a woman tears her shawl in half and gives half to another mother—and she thinks: people are good, they can love each other.
Too tired at night to write more than a few lines, and unwilling to worry Adam or her parents, she provides only telegraphic news assuring them she is all right. She is working with Fatima and her father, on a team set up by the WHO. Fatima’s father asked her to contact Miranda because he remembers that what she is good at is organization, and he sets her the task of keeping track of people and supplies, and she understands that, although she isn’t relieving suffering directly, she is making marks on paper, creating files, telling people to go here or go there, making something a little better, doing something to cut into the chaos of this world of death. Half a million dead, mostly women and children, a world into which she wakes each morning and from which she retreats gratefully into sleep.
At night as she lies on her cot she questions for the first time in her life the goodness of life, the desirability of living. For the first time she thinks it would not be the worst thing to be dead. She begins to understand that she is getting sick. She knows she is really sick when, trying and failing to straighten a stack of files, her eyes fall on her own hands, and they become her father’s hands, and miraculously (she was her father so she did not succumb) she gets herself to her desk and sits shaking, realizing she is really ill. She slips into a delirium in which she is herself, her father, her father’s hands, Adam’s hands, of which they had to be so careful touching the white keys, but the music she produces is dangerous, unsoothing, and she says to someone (but she is alone in the office, there is no one there), If I die please let me die as myself.
In her fevers, she dreams of the safe, clean, sweet-smelling solid world. Her place beside Adam’s body in the bed whose sheets she’d chosen, washed, made up for the comfort of their sleeping. At night hearing the sounds of weeping and screaming and trucks backing up and misfiring sounding more like guns than she can bear, she hears him playing a Bach partita, one of the preludes of Debussy, and she realizes that she had moved herself away from his music, thinking it irrelevant to the suffering of the world. Now and newly she sees it as essential, an alternative to chaos, a sign of the goodness that is the counterpoint of the dread conditions she is living in.
And when she is diagnosed with hepatitis and sent home, she is, to her shame, not entirely sorry.
Her mother wants her home in Hastings, but she doesn’t want to be in the house with her father, who had warned her of precisely what has been the case: disease, disorder, a horror nothing in her life has prepared her for. Ever since she began arguing with her father, since Rob left for Canada, she had a secret fear that all along he was right: that violence was endemic to human nature, that inequality of wealth was also part of the human condition and to deny basic inequalities was to deny nature, that men and women were made different and to deny that, to insist that they could inhabit the same realms, do the same work, was another denial of nature. His certainty, his hard conviction that the old ways were right, was a stone wall she had to butt her head against. Everything she saw about the injustice of privilege, the disproportionate grabbing of wealth by the West, everything that had made Bhola inevitable, made her know that he was wrong. But then he stood like a fort, impervious to wind or storm, willing himself to imperviousness, to the loss of his son’s love. And that very steadfastness, while it turned her heart to stone, was capable at the same time of making her doubt herself. Sometimes in her fever he became the calm place in her imaginings. She thought of how cool he was in emergencies: when she had fallen off her bike and her head was bleeding, when Rob broke his leg in football, when her mother lay on the floor hemorrhaging (later she would understand it was a miscarriage) and five-year-old Miranda ran screaming to the garage where her father was working on the car. She hoped she did not cry out what in her dreams she cried: Daddy, you’re the one who should be here, not me. Everything you are is what they need. What I am is at this moment of much less value.
She wants her mother. In her fever dreams, she yearns for her mother’s cool hands on the pillow, on the white sheets of her childhood bed, the pink room, the wallpaper pink flowers, the lampshades pink, the pink of her mother’s nail polish, and she hopes that she didn’t cry out for her mother.
But she will not go home to her father’s house; she makes her mother come to her. She wants to be with Adam. To the spare clean rooms she has paid for with the salary she has earned for work her father would not approve of, thinking of it as another fool’s errand, the money she has earned fool’s gold.
Her mother agrees to come to the Somerville apartment to care for her. Her father will not, as he says, “cross the threshold” of the apartment where his daughter lives with a man she isn’t married to, and Harriet says, “Oh Bill, they’re as good as married,” and her husband says, “There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip,” and for the first time since he banished their son, Harriet tastes hatred for her husband. She will not allow it to settle in her mouth. She will spit out the bitter taste
of hatred as quickly as she tastes it, slake it with the sweet taste of gratitude for a life made safe by this man and everything he stands for. But having tasted hatred, and for the second time, so she knows it could arrive again, she is newly frightened, of herself and of the world, a world her daughter has entered in a way she never could.
Harriet admits only to herself that she is happy taking care of her daughter. And Miranda allows herself to be cared for. But Harriet sees: Adam’s attention is not entirely with her daughter. Not as it was. He loves her now as a weak thing, but he doesn’t love her as a tree loves the sun, which is how he loved her when they sat in her living room holding hands watching Leonard Bernstein on the television, or when they sat in the back of the car holding hands. She knew they were doing other things besides holding hands, she knew everything they did … did they really think she didn’t know what happened in Miranda’s pink room when she wasn’t there? She knew even before she opened the door that time … was it to let them know she knew that she made that mistake … she will never admit that to herself, will never speak of the incident to anyone.
Miranda has taken her last step out of childhood. Her skin is no longer a girl’s, no longer untouched. Her residency in the country of the sick has guaranteed that she will never be the child she was. Harriet’s child, untouched. No longer what Harriet understands as an American girl.
She is ashamed at how happy she is that, sick, her daughter is more beautiful to her than ever, more lovable than she has been in all the years since she has ceased, literally, being a child. She is thinner, and so the bones in her face are sharper, the lines clearer. She has always looked charming, Harriet thought. Now she is heartbreakingly beautiful. She has gone from being Vermeer’s sensible housewife to a Filippo Lippi Madonna. The darkness of the world has wiped its brush across her face, and the effect, Harriet thinks, ashamed, is beautiful. How can it be good that her daughter has suffered. It has made her kinder, Harriet could see; it has also made her lovelier.
