The Love of My Youth (13 page)

Everyone seems to think of Miranda as Adam’s wife, though they are only sixteen, seventeen. They don’t know of their secret life, the real life of husband and wife, stolen treasures (half hours in Miranda’s bedroom, in darkness on a beach, once, daring, on the Levis’ couch when they are in Paris for two weeks and Adam and Miranda are assigned to water the plants, feed the cat). Do the Levis understand that they are providing an opportunity for illicit love between teenagers? Most likely they do.

Each time they make love, Adam and Miranda are convinced that they are doing something entirely unlike what has been done by those before them who would say they are doing the same thing. They are utterly ignorant of all but the most rudimentary sexual technique; but it doesn’t matter, simply having sex is a source of ecstatic astonishment. The idea of enjoying it
more
, this is nothing they can comprehend.

It is he who pays the price of public shame, the semicriminal forays into the drugstore, purchase of that item for which there so many names, all of them unappealing: condoms, Trojans, rubbers, Baggies, bags.

Together they make their college plans; she will go to Wellesley and he to Boston University because Henry believes in a larger education than a conservatory provides: history, the sciences, the plastic arts. And his old landsman, Rudolph Stern, teaches there and yearns for a gifted pupil who will make his name. So Henry says this is just the right place for Adam; he will get special attention rather than having to fight for it as one among many. He will be introduced to a larger world, but will be protected, sheltered. It is required that the artist be protected; in his turn he must be vigilant to protect his own gift. And Miranda will be there to see it all, but not so close that her lovely body will distract him too much from the demands of his music.

They leave Hastings only three days apart; Adam needs to be in school early for auditions. Rose invites Miranda and her parents for a farewell supper, excruciating for Miranda. She has her place in Rose’s house beside Rose in the kitchen, always within sight of Adam, perched in Jo’s adoring regard, somewhere to the left of Sal’s sight, where most of the world seems to go on for him. In her own home everything has changed. She is no longer Daddy’s brilliant little girl; they can hardly speak to each other without arguing about politics: civil rights, Medicare, what her father calls creeping socialism. Her affection for her mother’s light tenderness has turned to irritation.

As intelligent as anyone Miranda had ever known, Rose nevertheless cultivated large tracts of the primitive. Family was family. Everything having to do with family could be repaired by food or tears followed by loud, enveloping, even smothering embraces. The steel-cold silent daggers drawn and bristling everywhere around Miranda’s house: there was no place for these in Rose’s kitchen. And Miranda saw how her mother yearned to be closer to Rose, to what Rose represented, as if she were an orphan with chilblained hands afraid to approach the stove because she’d heard what happened to chilblained hands when they got too close to warmth. They bled. They scarred forever. Shyly, Harriet tiptoed into the kitchen, wanting to be of help to Rose, but it was clear that Miranda knew her way around that kitchen as her mother did not. And trying to pretend she didn’t understand that made Harriet vague, confused, incompetent in a way that shamed her daughter and was untrue to her actual domestic competence, different in tone from Rose’s, but well established over years. She wanted to say,
I’m a very good baker, you know. My piecrusts are first rate
. But of course she would never say anything like that.

At the dinner table, the men speak of cars, and then go silent. Sal feels unworthy to ask Bill questions about his work; Bill is a chemist; he works for a company that manufactures paints. Finally Sal asks, “Do you import any of the pigments that you use?” And Bill says, “Believe me, that’s yesterday’s news.” And Harriet, flustered, tries to talk about the fact that some of the pigments that made possible the memorable colors of Italian Renaissance paintings are no longer available. “Yeah, it’s hard to get ahold of a regular supply of donkey dung,” Bill says, and everyone pretends to laugh, except for Harriet, who blushes and, too quickly, Sal says his experience of seeing the Sistine Chapel was one of the great moments of his life.

Adam and Miranda feel they mustn’t touch each other, even stand near each other, or sit too close, as if the vector emanating from their bodies would provide too much information, particularly to Miranda’s father.

Rose tells a story about Adam as a little boy. “I think he was five,” she says. “I took him to see the movie
Pinocchio
. He was so upset when the whale swallowed Pinocchio that he jumped off my lap, ran to the front of the theater, and tried to attack the whale on the screen. ‘I have to save Pinocchio,’ he kept saying. I had to drag him out of the theater, screaming. He wouldn’t go to the movies for two years.”

Bill tells the story of Miranda’s falling off her bicycle, cutting her head so that she needed five stitches, and getting right back on the bike the minute she got home from the doctor’s.

Adam understands that this is Bill’s way of reminding him that he isn’t good enough for Bill’s daughter.

It is a relief to everyone when the meal comes to an end, and Miranda’s father gives a gracious toast.

“Our wandering scholars, may you go far, but never forget where you came from.”

And so they leave their family houses, Adam and Miranda, never to return. No one knows that Harriet, in the large cool rooms over which she is said to preside, dim, even on the days of brightest summer, weeps because her youngest child, her treasured one, has left, and the house’s spaciousness, which once seemed delightful, now seems nothing but a threat. Rose assumes that Adam will come back; she does not think of having lost him. And she is going back to school; her first classes at Westchester Community College will coincide with Adam’s and Miranda’s, two hundred miles to the north.

And the fathers? The fathers do not permit themselves to mourn the loss of their young to the world. The fathers pack boxes into trunks of sedans, into the backs of station wagons; they tell themselves their griefs must be unmanly. But in bed, that night, exhausted from the drive, and enervated by the highway food, Sal says to Rose, “It will never be the same,” and she says, “No, it never will.” Bill will not allow himself even that observation. But when they arrive at Miranda’s dorm, he sends the others out to lunch while he and Miranda arrange the collapsible shelves he has built for her; she can fold them up and store them in the closet; then unfold them in case the shelves provided by the college prove inadequate. You never know, he says. You never know.

Adam and Miranda leave their families to take their places in the world. Joined, they believe, hand in hand, forever, on a path that will stretch out the whole length of their lives. If you told them that the chances of this were quite small, that there were boulders and thickets and ravening animals they would encounter on their way, they would look at you blinking, puzzled, befuddled. Adam would go silent, but Miranda would stand straighter, look at you, her gray eyes going dark with disbelief at this display of folly, and she would say, staring you down till you agreed with her or at least pretended to, “You ask if we know where we’re going? Of course we know where we’re going. Why do you even ask?”

Monday, October 15
SANTA CECILIA
“What Are We Getting but Glimpses”

It is raining, and they both agree that it is odd and somehow wrong for it to be raining in Rome.

“In Paris, rain would be perfectly acceptable,” she says. “In London, it would be expected. But here it seems like a cheat, a kind of mean carelessness, maybe even a dirty trick.”

“I’d like to show you a place that’s lovely even in the Roman rain,” he says.

There’s no reason not to. The rainy afternoon is open; what she might do if she were not with him is sleep. And surely that would be a waste.

They agree to meet at the Largo Argentina, which seems to her like a child’s version of an archaeological dig, false, a wrongheaded offering to the tourists, a half-baked distraction to make them feel they’re doing something important. She watches the people waiting to change buses; she thinks there must be fifty that stop here. She thinks of the word “hub,” such an ugly word, so un-Italian, the grudging vowel barely wedged in between the
h
and
b
.

They cross the river into Trastevere, thinking guiltily of Valerie, though neither of them wants to mention her.

Miranda has no idea where she’s going. Adam keeps turning up smaller and smaller streets; and they are passing Roman houses, medieval houses, Renaissance palazzi insulted by graffiti, a shop selling cakes as large and beautiful as hats, an English bookstore, a cobbler, the predictable pileup of tourist schlock: bags saying
I LOVE ROME
, sunglasses, soccer shirts.

They enter the courtyard of a building: rose-pink, even in the rain. The rain seems to have freshened, rather than diluted, its light stone. Through the complicated arch they see an urn: classic, restrained, unornamented, the source of the fountain’s water, rising up out of an oblong of alternating black and white. Rosebushes surround the fountain, and (how can this be, Miranda wonders, this late in October) one with three salmon-colored roses, and three others, each with a single flower, buttery in the half-light.

Dim, Miranda thinks as they walk into the church. The light is dim, and the dimness is pleasurable, it has a luxurious thickness, as if it weren’t really light, shouldn’t properly be called light, but some other thing she can’t find a name for.

“I come here because Saint Cecilia is the patron of music,” he says. “Perhaps because of Handel: I love his
Ode to Saint Cecilia’s Day
. Lucy’s conservatory is Santa Cecilia, and so she wanted to come here for good luck. And then she was upset. She hadn’t, somehow, known the story. She hadn’t thought of it before: the cult of martyrs. As it turns out, when she was martyred, Cecilia was very young. I hadn’t realized that she was close to Lucy’s age, brutally murdered for refusing to marry the suitor her father had chosen, giving up her life because of a religious conviction. Apparently, they tried to kill her three times and it didn’t work; they tried to strangle her, then behead her. Whatever they did, she wouldn’t stop singing. Finally she was suffocated in a kind of steam-room prison. It was all so far from anything that had come Lucy’s way. It didn’t occur to me that she’d find the story disturbing. But she ran out of the place crying and I had to chase her down the street. I was terrified. She isn’t very self-sufficient. The way she’s lived, the way we’ve made it possible for her to live, she hasn’t had to cope with very much of the larger world.”

“Is that a good thing for a girl, the way we all have to live now?”

“It’s the way it has to be if she wants the kind of musical life she says she does. There are things she has to be protected from so that she can devote herself. It’s simply the way it is.”

“Devote herself.” Don’t you mean sacrifice
, she wants to say. She sees by the line of his mouth that nothing she could say would make the slightest impression. And she knows it’s a mistake to advise him about his daughter. Whom she has never met. Whom she has no wish to meet.

The church is empty. They approach the figure of Cecilia, white marble behind glass: the simulacrum of a coffin. Her face is invisible; it is turned toward the wall of black marble, as if this slender girl were merely sleeping in an uncomfortable way. Her head is covered by a veil. Barely visible: the cut across her throat that signals her beheading. The white marble rests itself against a background of sheer black.

“She seems so vulnerable,” Miranda says. “So girlish. Elegant. Delicate. Refined. I wonder if those concepts are of use to women now? Or if they’re simply a danger.”

“You want her to have spat in her executioner’s face before he cut her throat? What good would it have done? What difference would it have made?”

“There’s no romance for me in passive female suffering. What would your mother have said?”

“I like to think she would have found it beautiful. I like to think you do.”

“I do, despite everything I know. Rome is difficult for me in just this way. It makes a mockery of everything I know is right and true. I know that it’s right and true that lovely young women should not be brutally killed. And yet, being here in this unclear light, I’m touched by the poignance of her posture, of her graceful giving up. All those words, ‘graceful,’ ‘elegant,’ they required so much renunciation, and I wasn’t going to stand for that. Not if I wanted to be the kind of person I wanted to be. Not if I wanted the world to be the kind of place I wanted it to be. Even this light: I feel like I can’t quite see properly. But I like it, and then I think: how can you like a lack of clarity? In America, we’re devoted to clarity. My house has fifty windows. Sometimes I have to shade my eyes from the sun when I walk across the living room. But I like it here and I’m not sure I should. I’m not sure I like it that I like it.”

“That, I think, must be good for you.”

“I’m trying to live an ethical life.”

“Here, for this moment, there is nothing you can do that is right or wrong. Nothing you can do but be here with this beautiful thing.”

“But if I didn’t find it beautiful, if I weren’t moved by it, you would use the word ‘wrong.’ If I came in here with a gaggle of shouting Floridians off a tour bus, eating ice-cream cones or throwing McDonald’s wrappers on the floor: you would say that was ‘wrong.’ ”

“A different kind of wrongness.”

“But wrongness, nevertheless. Which is why, Adam, it’s untrue to say that right and wrong are impossible here.”

“And what does it mean to you if I say you’re right?”

“It means I’m right.”

“That’s always been so important to you.”

“Of course, to whom would it not be important?”

“To me. Because to me, ‘It is all a darkness.’ ”

“Who said that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Someone, maybe in the seventeenth century. Or maybe I made it up. I’m very drawn to the darkness. You see how the whiteness of Cecilia gets its power from the darkness. She’s ready to enter the darkness at any moment. To be swallowed up. By a blankness that has nothing in it of ordinary liveliness. And yet, it’s very beautiful. And that’s why this thing of right and wrong, this whole business of understanding, what is it, what are we getting but glimpses in or from the darkness?”

“And the darkness, what is that?”

“Everything we don’t know or can’t know or understand.”

“Yes, but we’re not being swallowed up yet. We haven’t been absorbed yet. And so now we fight the darkness. We do everything we can to understand.”

“I don’t want to fight the darkness. I want to understand its place in our lives. I understand that there are things I can’t understand. And I think to pretend otherwise is a kind of dishonesty. Because in the end we’ll be going into a darkness. And I think that’s all right.”

“Doesn’t it scare you, Adam? Where will Lucy be, when you disappear, when you’re absorbed into the darkness?”

“That’s where my courage fails, so I don’t think about it. Not what’s outside the darkness, not what I leave behind.”

“So you’re not afraid?”

“Oh, often, and of many things. But of that darkness? No.”

They sit again on the marble bench surrounding the urn, the bushes each with a single rose. Neighborhood children are running up and down the courtyard. They run up a set of shallow steps leading to a small wooden door. At the top of the steps: a wounded bird, flapping, taking some comic and pathetic steps, trying to fly, failing, flapping. The children are taunting the bird. Miranda wants to stop them, and then she sees from the sky, like fighter planes, six gulls swooping down, nearly grazing the children’s heads. The children are frightened, delighted.

Sitting near the fountain is a slim African woman and her baby son. Miranda calculates he must be nearly two. He is about to fall asleep. The gulls continue swooping, diving, their cries, coarse and threatening, pierce the light calmness of the place. The mother speaks to her son in French but, hearing Adam and Miranda, switches to English.

“Those birds frighten me,” she says.

“No, no,” Miranda says. “They’re nothing to be frightened of. Or we have nothing to be frightened of. They’re just trying to keep the children away from the wounded one. They’re just protecting one of their own.”

“Still,” says the woman, “I am frightened by the noise. And that they seem so close.”

“Nothing to be afraid of, really. It’s those children who should be afraid. But they of course are not.”

A nun appears from inside the wooden door, claps her hands, shouts at the children, and they run, screaming, through the archway.

“It’s quiet again,” says the woman, putting her sleeping baby in his stroller. “Nice. I like the quiet.”

“Yes, we’re lucky to be here in the quiet.”

“Yes,” says the woman. “Lucky. Yes.”

Miranda would like to ask her where she comes from, hoping that might help her to understand what the word “luck” might mean to her. But then she thinks: Perhaps Adam is right. This task of understanding, which she feels so often burdened by, is perhaps better let go, for now. Here in the quiet. In the dove-colored light falling on the rose-colored stone.