by Mary Gordon
“And so you think he just allowed himself to die because he didn’t want to live without her. They had, I think, a great love.”
“Yes, I think so, yes, a real, great love.”
She doesn’t want to go on talking in this way. “My mother felt she had to keep the summer light and heat out of the house. She confused light and damage. How I disliked it: the curtains drawn, the doors kept shut all summer.”
“Do you remember that dread on Sunday nights? Sheer dread. I didn’t even dislike school; why did I so dread the beginning of a new week?”
“Perhaps we wanted to sleep more than we were allowed. Perhaps we dreaded waking up and being tired. I do remember being tired on school mornings.”
“I liked it when I lay in bed and heard the rain,” he says.
“Thunderstorms, I loved. Lightning like a crack in something that needed it.”
“Blue light on the snow. I loved it then. Sometimes, now, I fear the approach of winter.”
“I live in a place where winter is unreal.”
“Do you still love swimming? You were always so excited when you went into the water for the first time in the summer.”
“I do love swimming, yes. I think I’m happier in water than anywhere else. We have a house on a small lake in Oregon. Each morning, even if it’s quite cold, I dive into the water. It’s a wonderful deep blue-green. There I feel exhilaration. I’m full of gratitude. I hear myself saying, in a voice I know is mine but that I can’t quite recognize, ‘I love everything, I love everything.’ ”
“Weren’t the springs earlier and longer?”
“I don’t know about your springs. We live, Adam, a continent apart.”
“California. Land of the unreal.”
“The new world. Possibilities.”
“You don’t have real autumns.”
“No, I miss that light: that bright light on the yellow leaves.”
“Here in Rome there are only varieties of green. In autumn the greens become bronzed, like old metal. Even now, though it’s October, everything is green; the yellow just becomes part of a darker green. Absorbed in it.”
“America invented brilliant autumns,” she says.
“Do you remember when we left home for college?”
“You got there a week before me.”
“I had to audition, I had to keep auditioning … God, I was so afraid of failing.”
“I thought, Now I must begin my life.”
“We sat under a tree,” Adam says. “I think you said it was a larch. The leaves were narrow, they made a canopy over our heads. I wanted to say, ‘We sit beneath a canopy of brilliant gold.’ But I was afraid to say something like that in front of your new friends.”
“I wasn’t afraid of anything then. If only I could be like that again.”
“And what are you afraid of now?”
“Now I’ve learned to be afraid of more things than I could even have imagined thinking of as frightening,” she says.
“I sometimes wonder if I am any longer capable of exhilaration. Of that sense of taking flight. Of being taken up. I am very attached to the earth.”
“Maybe it’s because we’re more than halfway through our lives on earth and so perhaps more reluctant than we once were to take flight from it.”
“Or perhaps our blood has slowed and thickened,” Adam says.
She thinks: He’s had a heart attack. He could have died. I’m sure he’s on medicine to thin his blood. Perhaps he feels the cold.
“You look cold,” she says in case he is.
“I am, a bit.”
Alarmed, he turns his wrist, looks at his watch.
“I should be waking Lucy now.”
She sees he is no longer with her.
“I’ll stay here and walk for a while,” she says. She wants to be looking at the trees in a way that she knows wouldn’t interest him. Because of what they have been saying, she wants to be thinking of her father. She feels free to, as she hasn’t felt for what she thinks is much too long a time.
September 1964
Labor Day has come and gone; it is officially not summer, but the air is close and damp, the temperature in the high eighties. No one knows how to dress. Or rather, girls and women don’t; boys and men believe they have no choice. For most activities of any kind of public nature, a jacket is required; they are prepared, men and boys who aspire to the category of “the respectable,” to be too hot. But girls and women, having put aside their pastel dresses, are baffled, vexed. As long as they refuse white shoes, belts, and pocketbooks, they are perfectly within their rights to wear a skirt and long-sleeved blouse of a breathable material: cotton always the most desirable, but sometimes rejected on the basis of convenience in favor of nylon or Dacron: drip-dry. Whatever they choose, they too will be uncomfortable. Stockings are compulsory, and for all but the most brave, a girdle to hold in the stomach, whether or not the stomach requires being held in. Also to keep the stockings up.
But even if they are not too warm, the women and the girls will not be happy. They have spent many days in August sweating in try-on rooms, making important autumn purchases: wool skirts (straight, A-line, pleated), sweaters to match the colors of the falling leaves. Purchases to suggest security, dependability, a preparedness against the coming winter.
Miranda, for example, is secretly disappointed because she spent a summer’s worth of babysitting money on a jacket made to look like a lumberjack’s red-and-black plaid, designed by Pendleton. It would be absurd to wear it on a day like this; she would sweat and worry at the odor of her own young body, still unfamiliar to her, producing new, unacceptable substances at a daily or alarming rate.
She does not think of it as September 7, 1964. She thinks of it as the first day of junior year.
Four years later, September 7, 1968, she won’t consider wearing something uncomfortable. In 1968, she will wear what is easy or amusing; no one she speaks to at that time will be able to consider once again wearing stockings and a girdle, which will, by that time, have become as unthinkable as a whalebone corset, a bustle, a parasol. Miranda and her friends will be proud of wearing garments others have worn before them. They will hide any designer label, anything with a recognizable name.
But of course she does not know this. It is September 7, 1964, the day she must audition for the Glee Club. It’s not an ordinary audition for the Glee Club; she’s already in the Glee Club, anyone can be, almost anyone who can sing in tune. But it’s different today. Today she’s auditioning for solos, and everyone wants a solo, and she’s only a junior, and juniors never get solos, but she knows she’s right to try for this because she knows she’s right to say to herself, I have a good voice.
How does she know? Because her friends tell her, and so does Miss McKeever, the music teacher, whom she doesn’t trust because Miss McKeever is too eager, too enthusiastic, too needy of Miranda’s friendship. And Miranda is ashamed for her that she, an adult, should visibly need so much from someone like Miranda, who is still used to thinking of herself as a child.
Nevertheless, she knows her voice is good.
What she doesn’t know is: what is meant by “good”?
To whom should she compare herself? Most important: Joan Baez. She knows her voice is not as beautiful as Joan Baez’s. She wonders if, one day, with study, with discipline, it could be, but this is something she tells no one.
Miss McKeever tells her that this year the Glee Club’s solos will be taken from Brigadoon. So with the part of her babysitting money left over after she bought the Pendleton jacket, she buys the original Broadway cast album of the show. She chooses the original Broadway cast, with people she’s never heard of—David Brook and Marion Bell—instead of the record accompanying the film, with people she has heard of and likes very much: Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. Because she knows that Broadway is more important than Hollywood and the original cast is always the best. How does she know this? It is one of the things she and her friends seem to know, whi
ch allows them to mark themselves as superior to others of their cohort who are considered superior—cheerleaders, athletes—but who do not know this kind of thing.
In her room, with the doors closed, when she is sure her father is at work and her mother is out shopping and her brother is practicing with one of his many teams, she sings the words to the songs.
“The heather on the hill.”
“Come to me, bend to me.”
She is embarrassed at her own yearning to sing these words to a living person. “Come to me, bend to me, kiss me good day! Give me your lips and don’t take them away.”
She has not yet been kissed.
At night in her bed she dreams of it. Her arms around a boy’s strong body, his arms around her. Leaning against strength that will allow her to feel what she has never felt but imagines, through reading and the movies, is delicious: the luxury of weakness.
To be allowed to allow whatever will be bound to happen.
The music of Brigadoon is not the kind of music she believes in. She believes in folk music. She wishes the solo were going to be “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Or a song that evokes the great emotions of simple people—“Long Black Veil” or “Silver Dagger.”
But when she wakes from sleep, the words on the screen between her sleeping and her wakefulness are “Give me your lips and don’t take them away.”
Adam takes a second shower after breakfast. His white long-sleeved shirt is already soaking wet. He is nervous; he is mortified. This year he will be the piano accompanist for the Glee Club. He is a scholarship boy in the Thomas Arnold School; he can’t refuse the job, although he despises himself for not insisting that he can’t do it. He is a real musician and the music that they sing is trash.
His teacher, Mr. Levi, trained by Schnabel himself, has told Adam that this kind of music is trash, dangerous trash; he must fend off its corruption like the threat of an infection.
Mr. Levi says he thinks Adam should suggest that the Glee Club sing some madrigals.
He doesn’t understand that it is impossible that Adam would suggest anything like this. For his suggesting at all would imply that he possesses an entity that he suspects is not really his. That word Mr. Levi says so casually, as if it were something permitted in the world: to speak of it, to speak the word: talent. Your real talent. Your genuine talent. And he doesn’t understand that Adam would never suggest anything that would possibly hurt anyone, but especially Miss McKeever. Poor Miss McKeever—plain, unloved, even by the students on whom she lavishes so much love.
He would like to tell Miss McKeever: If you were colder, they would love you.
An economy of temperature he believes in but does not understand.
Miss McKeever looks on him like a young prince, a young god. She, too, uses the words that are not permitted, “your talent.” Sometimes she says, “your gift.”
In secret he occasionally allows himself to believe that he is gifted, talented. But it must not be said aloud. Not by Mr. Levi. And especially not by Miss McKeever, who wants nothing more than to bask in the light of his giftedness, his talent.
Which, to be safeguarded, must not be spoken of, he knows, aloud.
Every Friday when he takes the commuter train from Hastings to Manhattan he is grateful, abashed, incredulous. That he should be doing this. He, Adam, son of his parents, Salvatore and Rose, whose parents came in their turn, nearly children, traveling by ship from Italy in conditions of unspeakable filth and terror. They do not speak of it; his grandparents are nearly silent people, as if in front of their son who works in the furniture store in White Plains, and their daughter-in-law who is kind and good and cooks the food they love, but who has named her children Adam (after a man she worked for, a lawyer who went to jail because of standing up for something about colored people) and Jo (named after no one in the family, named for someone in a book she read). Their daughter-in-law who asks them to babysit (what kind of word is that, they ask each other, the grandparents) so she and their son can go to a Chinese restaurant. A Chinese restaurant? To eat what kind of food? In front of such people as their son and daughter-in-law, they believe it would be wrong to speak of where they came from, what they are. They believe they have no right.
Adam believes he has no right as he presses the buzzer at Henry Levi’s apartment on Riverside Drive. No right. No rights. Those who tell him he has many rights, on account of his gift—well, he knows they must be wrong. You are my genius boy, his mother says, pretending it’s a joke, kissing him over and over on the top of his head after she’s heard him play anything: a Chopin nocturne, “Moonlight Sonata,” perhaps not even playing them well. But she believes he has a gift, and that his gift means he doesn’t have to clean the house on weekends and certainly not get a summer job. And so he tries to understand what this thing is, this music, who he is in relation to this music, and what it is to him and what are its demands; a whole world of arduous exigencies, permissions given and withheld, is his.
And the money. Money for his lessons. Somehow money is involved and is provided; he eats up family money; he sees himself at the dinner table, guzzling while they eat modestly, denying themselves the choicer morsels they might secretly crave. Or maybe it is his music that is guzzling it all. But somehow allowances are made for this as well.
They are very young, Adam and Miranda; she is sixteen; he will be sixteen in two months. They never say to themselves: we are very young, most of our lives have yet to be lived. They fear, they hope and they believe. They think: I will travel to many places/I will never go anywhere/I will have many great loves/No one will ever choose me/The world will be better for my having lived in it/Nothing I do will come to anything/I will make music of unthought-of purity/I am a fraud and will soon be exposed for the fraud I am/I will be renowned, applauded on the world’s great stages/I will end up selling furniture in White Plains like my father, whom I honor/I will be the wife of a great man, will be the mother of many children who surround me with incalculable love/I will marry a man, as my mother did, who forgets that he once loved me.
Of the things they do not fear, or do not think of fearing (fortunate children, spared what others alive when they are alive have not been spared, what most of the human race has not): physical illness, plague, bodily weakness. No, these are not their fears. Their fears are of the earth’s annihilation by the atom bomb, the mushroom cloud, the threat of which inspires their teachers to send them under their desks for weekly air-raid drills. THEENDOFTHEWORLDTHEENDOFTHEWORLD is a phrase that often spins in their minds, and they are terrified even when they forget that they are terrified. They know quite well what it will mean: the complete disintegration of their flesh and bones. The turning to ash in an instant of everything they love.
And close at hand, like an aunt or uncle living in the next town: the memories of the war. The concentration camps. The words, still whispered to themselves at night when sleep refuses: gas chamber, SS, Hitler, death to the Jews.
So these two children, or only recently no longer children, Adam and Miranda, born in 1948, and so in 1964 sixteen or about to be sixteen. She will not allow her mother to give her a sweet sixteen party; her mother, she knows, is disappointed, but will not (she never does) press her wish.
• • •
Prosperous children, or relatively so in Adam’s case. Miranda is more prosperous than she knows; her mother the beneficiary of one of those unnamed industrial enterprises common to the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father, a chemical engineer, graduate of Williams College, her mother, Smith 1941, who once worked, briefly, before her marriage, in a gallery and dreamed of cataloging English watercolors of the nineteenth century. Despite their real, or relative, prosperity, these young people have their nightmares. The flavor, the weather of their nightmares differ.
Miranda’s are of explosions. Something heavy dropping from a plane. In her frightening dreams, she does not make a picture of the thing dropping from the plane; she mak
es a picture of the pilot: a Russian in a brown wool uniform with Mongol slits for eyes, a pig snout of a nose, enormous teeth, yellow, wolfish, that tear each night into huge hunks of meat and could tear with equal ease a girl child’s flesh. The dream streets are lines of shooting flame, and people run, their skin crackling, their faces melting to monstrosity. Sirens sound, but they are useless; no one is in charge; the population hurtles toward nothing, anything, searching for anything they love, all lost, fallen into the pits the streets have become or burned to cinders. She is trying to get home to her room, her books, her mother who must be safe, her father who must know what to do, but her brother will not be home because he will be in the streets, trying to protect something, but there is no protection, no one can be safe.
Adam’s nightmares unroll in a different landscape. He rarely reads the newspapers, and when his parents are watching Walter Cronkite he is practicing. But he listens, he listens to his teacher Henry Levi. Henry (Heinrich) Levi, sent alone to New York in 1936 to live with uncles and cousins. In Berlin, his family was musical; his father a violinist for the State Opera, his mother a coach for some of the most famous sopranos of the day. They lost their jobs, but they wouldn’t leave, because their parents wouldn’t leave and they would not abandon their parents. They gambled on their own lives, and lost, but they did not gamble on the life of their son. In New York he lived with merchants, kindhearted sellers of women’s lingerie. They understood that Henry’s musical training must continue. His uncle, the merchant, thought it a privilege to pay for Henry’s lessons with the best teacher, and so Henry had to hide his terror and his shame. It was 1938, then 1939, then 1940, and America was still not at war. He knew that he would never see his parents, that they would be killed while he was safe, saved for his music.