by Mary Gordon
And she has never been asked on a date before, so the whole notion of “date” shimmers in the distance, desirable, unattainable, the Islands of the Blest, Mount Rushmore, Shangri-la.
So a few weeks later she pretends to just happen to be on the same New York–bound train as Adam. She knows which train he takes into the city every week because she engages in an activity that would now be known as stalking. She sees that, although formerly he took the 3:47 train on Fridays, now he takes the 11:30 on Saturdays; she assumes he is going to the city for his lesson.
For three weeks they have been in the same room three afternoons a week, rehearsing with the Glee Club. They have never been in the company of fewer than thirty others. They have yet to exchange a word.
Not only does she find him beautiful, she also finds him the embodiment of a life that is far from everything her father stands for. Her father: efficient, always certain, ready at a moment’s notice to dismiss the tentative, the circumspect.
Sometimes she gets to the music room early hoping to be alone with him, but she always hears him playing the piano and when she peeks in the door his look is so intent she would be ashamed to interrupt him. And she is excited by his intensity; it creates in her a hunger as avid, and she would like to be as public in her avidity for him as he is toward his music. But that is impossible. She must pretend to be in the same place as he is by accident. She must pretend to accidentally drop books so that he will pick them up.
And when Adam sees her on the train he finds himself strangled with anxiety. Because he has found her beautiful, her hair like a cool stream down her back; he would like to bury his hot face in it, and her careful, sensible but supple hands, and her voice singing “the joys of love” with a clarity he yearns for when he plays, for example, the mazurkas of Chopin. But she need not strive for it; this clarity is who she is.
So when she says, “Hi, oh, we’re on the same train,” he can’t think of anything to reply.
It is, he thinks, easy for her to find things to say.
“I’m going to the Museum of Modern Art,” she says, casually. “I’m really interested in Monet. My mother has this book about him and I thought maybe I’d ask Mrs. Lucas if I could do a term paper on the French Impressionists for history. I know that’s a little weird, but she’s kind of, you know, easygoing.”
She made that up a second before: that she will go to the Museum of Modern Art. She has never been there; she has been to the Metropolitan with her mother. But they don’t visit the Impressionists there; her mother prefers the cool vaultings of the Metropolitan; she loves the Gainsborough ladies, the Goya ladies, the ladies of Ingres and David, and she once said she found the Impressionists “a bit rushed for my tastes.”
Adam is in a panic because he doesn’t know where the Museum of Modern Art is. He never does anything in the city but go to his lessons and then get back on the train. Unless he stops for a grilled-cheese sandwich and a Coke at the luncheonette on Broadway and Eighty-fourth Street.
“That’s great,” he says.
She spends the entire day in Grand Central Terminal, her eye on every Westchester train, so that she can pretend just to happen to be on the same one. He gets on a train three hours later.
“How was the museum?”
Now it is her turn to panic. She hadn’t thought that she would have to tell this lie, and she thinks she’s been very stupid.
“Nice,” she says. “Really nice. How was your lesson?”
“Oh, good. I have a really great teacher.”
“Oh,” she says. “What’s his name?”
And somehow, this simple question, answered simply with the name “Henry Levi,” frees Adam to begin speaking. About Henry Levi, his apartment, his family in Germany that perished. And then Miranda speaks about Anne Frank, and they discuss the fact that both their fathers fought in the war in Europe and never speak of it.
“So I’ll see you in school,” he says as they part to walk home in separate directions from the train station.
“Yes,” she says, drenched in her failure like a hungry animal caught in a rainstorm.
But they have talked to each other, and the next weekend she gets on the train and says, “I’m going back to the museum,” and he says, “Oh maybe I could meet you there after my lesson,” and she says, “Oh great,” and they are both frightened because neither of them knows where the museum is. But they find it, they look at Monet’s water lilies and Matisse’s swimming pool and Picasso’s Guernica, and his goat. She chatters and feels a fool, he is nearly mute and feels a fool, and they go back on the train and say again, “See you in school.”
And then there is the dance, his first, which he goes to only so that he can dance with her. And he smells her hair, so clean and promising, so exciting and reassuring, and two weeks later, the unthinkable: he asks her to the movies.
Zorba the Greek.
It is, for both of them, incredibly, their first date. She has never been asked out on dates because the boys in her class are afraid of her. They think she is contemptuous of them, but she isn’t; it’s just that she can’t place them in a category she can understand. They seem to her not quite real. They aren’t the little boys she’d played with easily, but they so obviously aren’t men, if by men she was meant to understand someone who could be the object of desire. Her ideas about desirable men come from movies and books: Rick in Casablanca, Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, Professor Bhaer in Little Women, Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. The boys she sees in school seem far too solid; there is no space in them for the depth that would call out to her. They’re right that she isn’t interested in them, but it isn’t for the reasons they think.
She is not alone among her friends in this failure to connect. Among the four of them there is a total of two and a half dates. The popular girls, athletic or fashionable or daring, have dates every weekend, but Miranda and her friends, members of the Glee Club, the Debate Club, the school newspaper, the literary magazine … they don’t know why … they feel their failure. But it hasn’t happened.
Her first date with Adam is as extensively discussed as the arrival of the Beatles. They think it’s wonderful that he suggested Zorba the Greek. It proves he’s got imagination; she’s lucky he’s an artistic type.
She loves the movie; she’s almost drunk on it, and after it (all during it, he is in a literal sweat with the desire to hold her hand and the impossibility of doing it, not least because his palms are clammy with anxiety and she might, he fears, find that unappetizing) she takes his hand and says: That’s what I want from my life, real life, strong life, life and death, and to lose yourself in that kind of dancing. I mean, his little son dies and instead of weeping he dances. God, that’s what I want. I can’t wait to get to Europe where people really live instead of this damn Westchester keeping up with the Joneses. Look, it’s snowing, she says, and she puts her head back and opens her mouth, sticks out her tongue and starts swaying to the Zorba music she’s humming. He’s embarrassed, at first, on the street, but then they turn a corner, no one’s on the street, no one can see them, and he lets her dance him down the street, his heart is full, she is the most wonderful person he has ever known, he would like to kiss her but he’s afraid, but he does squeeze her hand, and they go on dancing. The snow falls on her hair and he would like to brush it off, but thinks he mustn’t, and then does and says, “Maybe before vacation we could see another movie.”
And then another movie and another, and the slow anguishing prospect of hand holding and first kisses (neither has kissed anyone before) and then meeting after school, the shock of Christmas vacation, unable to say they will miss each other, and more movies … it’s the only place they can go that they can kiss. Hours of kissing, blissful kissing, imagining nothing more is possible for them. The pride of sore, dry lips. They kiss through the entire three and a half hours of Dr. Zhivago and are terrified that their parents (by which they mean her father) will ask them what the movie is about.
He is afr
aid of her father. Her brother makes him feel unmanly. Her mother’s anxiety creates in him a terrible tenderness. It is much easier for her in his house.
And then he feels he must tell Henry Levi, and Henry is immediately practical and clinical. He speaks of “prophylactics,” and Adam is abashed, and Henry sees his mistake and says, “Bring the young lady with you to a lesson sometime.”
He says to his wife: It is important that he not be lost in the whirlwind of adolescent sex. It’s good for him to have a girl, but it can’t interfere with his music.
And so Sylvia is given the task: that Miranda must understand she, too, is involved in something greater, older, far more important than herself. But after talking to Miranda she says to her husband: It’s all right, Henry, she’s a serious girl.
She takes Miranda to Bergdorf and buys her a gray cashmere cardigan, which thrills Miranda because it is, she thinks, her first serious garment, the first garment that acknowledges her seriousness; it is her passport into the adult world.
They are both serious, Adam and Miranda, but in different ways, about different things. He is serious about music. She is serious about changing the world. Ever since she heard of the black girls killed in the Birmingham church she has determined she will devote herself to the eradication of the evils of the world, particularly evil caused by prejudice. They believe that it is possible that their seriousness will bear fruit.
And so for Adam and Miranda these are years of happiness. Perhaps a dream of happiness. A dream of life. Of loving and being beloved. Of desiring and being desired. Of knowing and being known. The world they see now, loving each other, is larger than they thought, but it has a place for them. Nothing terrible happens to them individually in the years 1964, ’65, and ’66; the sorrows of the world are public, far from them, part of the lives of others. Much of what they have been told to believe about what is called morality, they come to understand, does not, because of their love for each other, apply to them.
Later when she thinks of that time (two decades will go by during which she refuses to think of it), it seems to her that it was always early spring, the air moist, still with traces of the end of winter, but a sun insistent, white in a light sky. Breaking through.
Love, love, love. My love loves me. The love of two young bodies. Hours lying in grassy spaces, cold seeping through their clothes, the cold ignored. Half hours stolen in her bedroom when her mother is at the dentist. Kisses in the movies or on the New York subway where they believe they are invisible. And the discussions formed around an ethical problem, a question of honor, which is called respect. Where can you touch my body, at what point will it properly be called a violation? Where can I touch yours?
They don’t believe there is anyone they can ask for help or advice about these things. None of Miranda’s friends has a love like hers and Adam’s. They might date, they might even go steady, but Adam and Miranda know they will be together all their lives, and because of his music and because she is determined to bring greater justice to an unjust world, they stand for something greater than themselves. And their families are part of the understanding, the understanding of that thing known as ADAMANDMIRANDA MIRANDAANDADAM. So where they can touch each other’s bodies becomes part of a larger question: it involves the houses they were born in and the music of three centuries.
Months and months of talking, and finally the words are hers. “We love each other. Setting these limits is false to our love.”
In this decision they know they have crossed a barrier; they are on the other side of something, alone in a country of their own invention. A crossing unimpeded by regret.
In the summer of 1965 she takes the train to Harlem every day to tutor ten-year-olds, who do not love her, or who extravagantly adore her, while he increases his lessons with Henry Levi. (Three times a week in summer … where does the money come from? He is afraid to ask.) On the summer evenings, they meet in Central Park and lie in the grass in each other’s arms and share the sandwiches that his mother has packed for both of them. Sometimes they watch Shakespeare or listen to a symphony.
It isn’t true that the weather was always one way; it didn’t need to be; they loved all kinds of weather. And, no, it can’t be right that they were always happy. Certainly there were problems with her family. Her father, playing the jilted lover (Why don’t we ever see you? Am I wrong or are they paying your bills now?). And her mother, regretful, supplicating: “I was hoping we could see a movie or perhaps one day I could meet you in New York.” They are right, these parents; they have lost their daughter. Most particularly to Adam’s mother. Though they do not know that the daughter and the boy are lovers. Or they do not admit, even to themselves, that they know. It is, after all, 1964, ’65, ’66.
What they don’t understand is that they have lost their daughter, not just to a boy, and not even just to his family, but to music, which is to say to the whole idea of the past, a past beyond immediate ancestors, beyond America.
When this time is long behind them, and, no longer young, they try to understand their past, they find it hard to remember how they spent their days. What did they do in all the time they were together? They can say, Well, there was sex … but how many hours did that take up? They did, somehow, put in their days. They both look back on them as days when they believed that they were happy—and Adam, having had more unhappiness than Miranda, will do this far more often.
The way Adam’s days were spent was shaped by the fact that he was trying to become a serious musician, and that happened by accident. The only boy child in a clutch of nine girl cousins, he was bored at the large family gatherings in the house of his grandparents in the Bronx and so he disappeared with his grandfather, bored also, into the back room, where Sal Sr., born in Calabria, listened to the Texaco opera hour. To the operas of Verdi, Rossini, most particularly Puccini, which were to him as accessible as the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein were to his children and their wives. He saw that his grandson loved music as he did, closed his eyes as he did, tapped his little feet in the Buster Brown shoes (inside them, the image of the blond boy and his dog), then walked to the piano and somehow (Miracolo, the child is not yet five) and picked out the tune, Là ci darem la mano.
“He plays by ear,” the grandfather said, with a pride he had never before had occasion to call up. Adam would make his way to the piano, which he loved better than his aunts, his cousins, his too expressive grandmother, but not his grandfather, with whom he shared the music. The large unaccommodating black piano was not a fine instrument; rather it was a sign, a necessary sign in a certain kind of upwardly striving house. It was opened rarely; mostly it is something to put the pictures of the children on (graduation, wedding), then the grandchildren (christening, first communion). But for five-year-old Adam the looming black complexity was the fresh green bosom of the brave new world.
“Play this, Adam, play that.” They sang snatches of songs for him; he was their trick dog, their magician. “Body and Soul,” “America the Beautiful.” He played whatever they sang. And they didn’t have to say anything to his mother, she already knew. His mother, besotted, drenched in love for her son, saw that he needed piano lessons. At seven he was taken (this is luck, but there is always a place for luck) to a woman Rose knew from church. Lorraine Capalbo, who gave piano lessons. Who was, though frustrated, a real musician. She demanded a great deal from Adam, in whom she saw a gift, the fulfillment of a dream she had given up for herself. Conservatory trained, she married after the war, moved to White Plains, had three children, boys, none of whom had an ear for music, all of whom lived for sport. She taught Adam for five years; he was the jewel in the crown of the yearly recitals she presented in her living room. When he turned twelve, she passed him on (this rite of passage coinciding, though of course she didn’t know it, with his first wet dream) to Henry Levi, whom she knew when she was young and serious and with whom she was still hopelessly in love.
And so at twelve, Adam entered the world of seriou
s music, and anyone who was part of his life must be part of that world as well. His mother, shyly ignorant, but eager, tried to learn. His father came to his performances, paralyzingly ill at ease. His sister worshipped him and at night thanked God that she was the sister of a brother who did this thing she could not do and thanked God that she didn’t have to do it. Music.
So Miranda, loving Adam, must be brought into this world.
It is not her world. Her world is based on dreams of justice. But there is time for both, because of all the hours Adam must be away from her, studying, practicing, and Sylvia Levi has told her it is important “to keep up her own interests but be ready when called upon to put them down.” Sylvia Levi is a phlebotomist. She draws blood at the laboratory of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Committed to the belief that Henry’s music was more important than anything she could accomplish, she found for herself a profession that would always be in demand but that would not be so demanding that she couldn’t drop it at a moment’s notice. Sylvia is not only skilled but charming, and so she is allowed to accompany her husband when he travels for performance dates. She suggests that Miranda keep her eye open for a similar career, but Miranda, though admiring of Sylvia, does not wish to follow her lead.
It helps that Adam’s mother shares Miranda’s dreams of justice. It turns out that they had a connection anterior to the one created by Adam; they both worked at the local headquarters of Bobby Kennedy’s senatorial campaign. They must, they reckon afterward, have been standing quite near each other holding signs when Mr. Kennedy drove by, waving. So there is a place for Miranda in Adam’s house not only as his girlfriend, but also as Rose’s political comrade, long desired. Rose’s friend.
Miranda’s mother would like to be her daughter’s comrade, companion, friend. She would like to sit at Rose’s kitchen table, peeling, slicing, talking about the world. She sees the desirability of what her daughter is moving away from her to approach; she understands the lure of the smells, the laughter, above all the music Adam plays. Adam understands that Miranda’s mother responds to his music in a deeper way than anyone in his family, who love him and love the music not for itself but because it was made by him.