by Mary Gordon
And then there is Rob, her brother, who has left home, who has mortified his father, terrified his mother. He is now in Canada, in some town they have never heard of, somewhere in Manitoba. And he cannot come home.
Her brother resisting, evading, or, in her father’s words, dodging the draft.
Her brother, running for his life.
Her father shouting. Her father, insulting, accusing. “We risked our lives to make the world safe for little punks like you who think your lives are too good to risk for the idea of freedom.”
And her mother wringing her hands. “Oh stop Bill oh don’t.”
And her brother, his hair golden in the sun that pours through the windows that June day, despite her mother’s trying to keep the damaging light out. Not answering, his jaw clenched, saying, “I know you’ll never understand.”
But Miranda understands; she fights her father; she tells her father her brother is a hero; it is more courageous to say no to evil than to go along with it. What about Nuremberg? We are more like the Nazis than we are like the English and Americans in your war. She calls it “your war,” as if he’d started it. And he says, “Little girl, you don’t know a goddamn thing.”
Her brother, five years older, looked at adoringly, although they do not inhabit the same world. Her brother who rode her on the handlebars of his bicycle and gave her piggyback rides and took her camping, just the two of them, cooking their meals on the Primus stove. Her brother, quiet, practical, his father’s son, the two of them in the garage, sawing, painting, hammering, her brother, engineering student at Cornell, her brother with the lovely girls and their stiff hair and their swishing skirts and their high sharp scents driving away in the convertible he saved and saved for … now her brother has left home, can’t return, and her father says, “And don’t think of coming back to this house, you’ve burned your bridges.” Her mother says nothing, but her lips thin into an invisible line of paralyzed grief. And Miranda cannot give her mother sympathy because she won’t stand up to her husband on her son’s behalf. But Miranda will stand up to her father, so every dinner is a fight, every night’s peace is destroyed, and Rob is somewhere in Manitoba, homesteading, he says, and she will visit him in the summer if she can save the money, and of course she will. She will go with Adam; she will be sure she does.
By 1967 the weather has changed; it is no longer early spring; it is high noon; the sun falls like a blade on everything, shedding its overclear light. Everything is as clear as it can be. Or it is entirely invisible, entirely incomprehensible to sight and understanding. So if it is not high noon it is black midnight; it is the land of death and darkness or it is the land of unprecedented hope and transformation. But it is not the land of their birth.
Now Miranda’s brother has left home, as it turns out never to return from a place they all had only thought of as prairie, featureless on a map whose details they had always believed were of no importance to them. So with all this happening to her family, to the world, how can she think anything is as important as the war, the source of unnameable horrors and one grief she can all too familiarly name. How can she believe it matters if she studies French or Russian. She would like to take a course on seventeenth-century poetry, but she will not allow herself. She will study economics, history, biology. She will be premed; she will become a doctor and serve the poor: in rural Appalachia, in Harlem, or in Africa or India, she’s not yet sure.
But what is important to Adam in September of 1967? He understands that Miranda is right; nothing is more important than stopping the machine of death. On the other hand, or at the same time, his allegiance is to the great music of the past, and he must honor that allegiance by attending to the demands of the music, which requires many many hours a day of practice. Playing and replaying the same notes, the same phrases, trying to master the Hammerklavier, agonizing over fingering as Miranda is agonizing over napalmed children and the destruction of the land and culture of Vietnam. He believes Henry Levi (shouldn’t he know best, given his history?). When Adam talked to him about his guilt for not being more involved in Miranda’s antiwar activities, he had said:
“Wars have always happened and human beings have always done hideous things to one another, more hideous than you can imagine. And above all, or underneath it all, this music goes on, must go on. The question must be not only why do we live but what do we live for? And one of the most important answers, Adam, you must believe me about this, is for beauty. For beauty whose greatness goes on and on.
“Don’t think, Adam, that I don’t question all this. That I don’t sometimes think I’m misusing or wasting my life. But when I begin to feel this way, I think of the curators in the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad. They were starving, hiding themselves in the museum while unimaginable horrors were going on outside. People selling human flesh in the black markets—you can’t even imagine. But the curators stayed on in the museum. The great paintings had been taken away, hidden. But they took each other on imaginary tours, pointing to the empty spaces on the walls where their beloved paintings had been. They described them in detail to one another, knowing that some of them might not survive, that the paintings might not survive, and that at least the memory of them should be preserved, somehow. To me, these people were heroes. The kind of heroes that help me live my life.”
And walking down Riverside Drive, waiting to meet Miranda for their last time in the park before they go back to school that September of 1967, Adam feels at peace. He will serve the world through his music; Miranda will serve it through protesting the horrible unjust war.
Then in September Miranda asks him to come with her to the demonstration at the Pentagon. It will be a great event, she says; it is necessary that everyone participate; it is their moment in history. Not to go would be like not standing up to Hitler. Adam thinks of Henry Levi, who left Germany because of Hitler. Henry Levi left and his parents did not. Henry Levi lived and his parents did not. But Henry Levi tells him he must not participate in demonstrations because if he were beaten, if something happened to his hands, if they were injured, there would be no hope for a career. He suggests that Adam try to organize other music students to present concerts in protest against the war. But he must not go to demonstrations himself. He must not put himself in danger.
Adam sews (he will not ask Miranda to sew for him) a black armband onto the sleeves of all his jackets so that wherever he goes and particularly if he is performing in public he can be seen to be opposing the war.
He knows this isn’t enough for Miranda; she praises him, but he can hear the reservation in her praise. And she can hear that her political friends disturb him; he doesn’t trust them, he thinks they love violence because they are confusing it with something else, some other romantic category: courage or sex. The boys with their uncombed hair and dirty jeans talk about stockpiling guns in basements, about blowing up banks or laboratories. And Miranda’s friends look up at them adoringly, and then invite the boys with their uncombed hair into their beds.
He doesn’t tell Henry Levi that refusing to accompany Miranda on the march will put him in another kind of danger. The danger of losing her. Whom he is not afraid to think of, to speak of, even, as the love of his life.
They are slipping away from each other as if they were standing on a muddy bank holding on to each other, trying to be completely still although they feel their footing giving way.
Only a year earlier when they were both leaving home for college, it seemed everything would be quite easy.
From the day that she moves into the dorm, Miranda knows that she is lucky in her roommate, Valerie, from a small town outside Omaha, bouncy and pleasant and pleased with everything. She wants to major in art history. Miranda’s arriving at college with a boyfriend, a musician, gives her, for Valerie, a great cachet. There are what are called parietal hours, two hours on Sunday when boys are allowed in dormitory rooms. Quite early on, Miranda confided her sexual status to Valerie, who was honored to leave the room
on Sundays. And so for the first time Adam and Miranda are free from the fear of intrusion and surveillance. For the first time, they are safe in her bed.
Miranda makes a new friend every week. Her closest friends live on the same dormitory floor: Lydia, from Needles, California, who likes geology, and tall Renee from Philadelphia who urges Miranda to take Russian, and Marian from Chicago who is one of the first to major in African studies. They think Adam is wonderful; his distance from contemporary culture makes him seem precious, a museum piece, a fragile porcelain. They tease him about his ignorance of rock and roll. When he says, “Some of it’s very good, the Beatles, for example, some of their harmonies are quite complex. They’re very interesting,” “Oh, for God’s sake, Adam,” Renee says, and laughs that laugh that makes everyone want to be standing next to her. “Saying the Beatles are interesting is like saying ice cream is interesting. Maybe it is, yeah, and you could analyze it: there’s cream, there’s sugar, there’s the ice and the machines that make it. But in the end it’s just fucking fabulous and you’re really glad it’s in the world.”
Everyone suddenly seems to be saying “fuck,” using the adjective “fucking” in the easy, habitual way they used to say “groovy.” Renee denies it, but Valerie and Lydia admit to being jealous of Miranda’s wifely status. They all feel free to say how good-looking he is: his beautiful hair, his beautiful eyes, how easily he blushes. Lonely and inadequate in their single beds, they dream of what she has. Adam’s shyness, his seriousness, touch the maternal in them. If Miranda isn’t in when he calls, they speak to him as if her absence were a deprivation he must be protected from. As if not hearing her voice, he will feel starved and they must feed him.
They are very young, Adam and Miranda. Their bodies are continually miraculous to each other. They have never seen other bodies, and so for them both, the body of the other is all bodies, or the first body: they are Eve and Adam in the Garden, and the apple has not yet been thought of, tasted, known. Their skins are fresh, unblemished; not having touched other skins, they do not fully understand this; their joy in each other is absolute; there is nothing to which it can be compared. Each touch is arousing; they can hardly wait to be in each other’s arms. Having come together first as almost children, they had not had time for the malice that corrupts desire, that mixes it with punishment and blame. Making love soon became quite customary; it was as if it were something they had never not done. Customary, and yet still miraculous. Often they say to each other, lying in each other’s arms, “I am happy. I am very happy.”
How did it darken? Was it that the world was getting darker in those days, a daily darkening, a cloudy thickening? Miranda volunteers for draft counseling; the sister of Rob, how can she not, and Rose at home is counseling neighbor boys to resist the draft: assuring them that they’re behaving justly; helping them relocate to Canada, directing them to psychiatrists who will swear that they are psychologically unfit for battle, that they would bring danger to their fellow soldiers; that this risk should, in the interest of the war effort, be avoided at all costs.
For a time, Miranda moves in a well-meaning pastel-colored clutch of colleagues and companions: Quakers, Unitarians, left-wing Catholics and Jews, people whose parents had voted for Adlai Stevenson. She sings in the dormitory lounge the songs of Peter, Paul and Mary. The edgiest lyrics that come out of her mouth are “Accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone … For the times they are a-changin’.”
Was it because the music changed? That Dylan became ironic, angry, that the Beatles moved from vaudeville to LSD? And then there are no more parietal hours; the young women of Wellesley will no longer accept that they should be told when men are or are not allowed into their rooms. And so now they are allowed in more and more, and suddenly there are male voices in the hall, male presences in the dining room.
Tall Renee experiments with drugs because of her new boyfriend, Arnold, who is from Florida and insists that only through pharmaceuticals can enlightenment be found. Two weekends into the second semester of sophomore year, Marian decides that she no longer wants to be friends with Miranda and Lydia and Renee and Valerie; she doesn’t even want to live on the same hall with them, although they’d gone to great trouble the year before to assure that they’d all be together. She is put off because they are so uncomfortable with her boyfriend, Roger, who has hair unlike any hair they have ever known (it’s called an Afro, Marian tells them), who is silent and sullen and makes no attempt to engage the girls in conversation, who disappears for long periods and then is suddenly there, who is not a student; they don’t know exactly what he does. They fear that their anxiety is racially motivated, and they try to conceal it; but even with Renee, who is the most relaxed, the tension is clearly there. Some of the groups with which Miranda is involved have given up an unequivocal commitment to nonviolence.
Adam does, in the end, go with Miranda to the march on the Pentagon. He sits with her on the bus, but what he does at the march isn’t enough for her and they both know it. He’s uncomfortable; she knows he’s worried about his hands. He is too shy to shout out slogans and can’t bring himself to walk in silence with his two middle fingers formed into a V. He knows that she’s grateful to him for going. He knows, too, that for the first time she considers the possibility that she might wish he were other than he is.
• • •
During spring break 1968, Adam and Miranda visit Rob on the farm in Manitoba. The bus trip takes them two days; they are filthy and tired when they arrive in Winnipeg, picked up by Rob in a battered truck, and filthy as they are. He lives on a commune; they are shocked at how ramshackle everything is, how hard everyone works, how humorless the people are. No sign of spring has come; the snow melts halfheartedly in puddles that half reflect the empty trees. The people with whom Rob lives, many of them draft evaders, are too exhausted to care about music or poetry; they seem too worn out even for ideas. Rob is affectionate, but he speaks to Adam and Miranda as if he were speaking to slow, though good-hearted, children. She sees that he thinks, like her father, that he knows more than she will ever know. She feels around the edges of his love a flickering of contempt, which he tries to stifle, but she senses that what has always been between them is now like a page saved from the fire, but nonetheless singed.
On the bus ride home, she weeps in Adam’s arms, and he consoles her, saying, Rob is tired, he’s overworked, he’s still in shock, he’ll come around, he loves you. Thinking of his feelings for his sister, Jo. Unconditional love. The older for the younger. The stronger for the weaker. My sister. My brother. Nothing, he believes, can change that. Inherited from Rose the primitive conviction: blood is thicker than water.
This belief makes him different, he knows, from his fellow serious musicians. His place in the family headed by Rose and Sal. His love for his family. His easy breathing of the family air. Who don’t know exactly what he does all day, but believe his grandfather when he says, “It’s in the blood.” What blood? Adam wonders. Can what I feel for this music have to do with blood? And yet, of course, he knows it does; his blood makes his fingers move, makes his head swoon and his heart sing. Yes, of course, it is a thing of blood. As is his love for Miranda, which he cannot talk of to his friends, who seem never to have breathed ordinary human air, only some other element, not oxygen enriched, or perhaps superenriched: the air of music. They don’t understand the ordinary world, the give-and-take of ties that are called familial affection. Nor do they understand what he has for Miranda, this love, necessary, automatic as breathing, natural as swimming in the sea.
They don’t have girlfriends, or they have too many girlfriends because girls like throwing themselves at musicians, thinking they are making themselves a place in the world of high culture. Or they have difficult girlfriends, or they discover that it is men they love, and the musicians who are girls weep and are exhausted because the boys don’t understand them and they are exhausted from their incomprehension, and then the boys become more fractious, try
ing to handle their own exhaustion, and the exhaustion of the girls, and the mutual incomprehension. So Adam goes to Miranda often in the evenings and every Sunday (you are my Sabbath, he says to her) for refreshment, renewal, rest. The release and replenishment of his desire, which is, he says, like Moses’s burning bush (Boy, they got you with that religious imagery, Miranda says, temperamentally uninterested in religion). Well, perhaps; nevertheless my love for you burns and burns and is never consumed.
On the Greyhound bus on the way home from Manitoba their skin turns livid in the bad false light. Adam is ashamed when his eyes fall on his pale hands, remembering the look of them beside Rob’s: callused, bandaged, chapped. Capable hands. The capable, he knows, are always contemptuous of those whom they consider the merely accomplished. Rob didn’t used to be contemptuous of him. But Adam knows that he is now.
“My brother’s changed,” Miranda says. “He’s become a bitter person.”
Adam knows that Miranda is right. Her brother is bitter about his country and his family. Bitterness is eating him away. There is a core that is there, steely, undiminished. It has not been reduced; rather it has hardened. He is himself, but harder. Adam allows Miranda to weep in his arms. His heart is broken for her; she has suffered a loss that has something to do with blood. He had always admired Rob and somehow feeling that Rob liked him, approved of him for his sister, made him feel more valuable; it was good to be valued in the world of men like Rob.
Normal men.
He is glad to be comforting Miranda. It’s so rare nowadays that she needs anything from him. His need of her is so obvious, so constant, everyone acknowledges it: that he needs Miranda and he always will need her because people with musical gifts like his need other people in the world to get them through. Because what they do is so difficult, so impossible. Requires so many hours of practice: hours behind closed doors, the hands, the back, put in unnatural positions, positions which must be held, repeated, held. Such heroic concentration. All of it taking its toll on physical and mental health: these breakdowns must be warded off, kept back by a vigilance that cannot come from the musician himself: he hasn’t the time for it, the mental space. But without it: the music will be lost to the world, or its quality diminished beyond recognition, even beyond worth.