The Love of My Youth (3 page)

She has no idea whom she’ll be meeting now the door opens and it has become too late.

She hears his voice as he walks down the hall with Valerie. The voices of the dead. She thinks of what happened when her friend Richard died and she called his number by mistake and heard his voice on his answering machine. She was first horrified. Then comforted. She hung up and called again and then again. As if she could, by doing this, keep him with her.

But Adam hadn’t died. And yes, it is a voice she knew, a voice she remembers, and the sound of it stirs her, lights a match between her ribs, the two of them located below her breast bone, to the right of what she knows to be her heart. Something has kindled. A sharp-edged spot of heat, painful but not unbearable.

She would not have known him.

They are trying to compose their faces so that they are blanks. Giancarlo half rises from his chair; Adam comes toward him, and shakes his hand.

“So, here we all are,” Valerie says.

“Valerie, that is a stupid thing to say,” Giancarlo’s mother hisses. “As if we were not here. Or could not be here if we are here.”

Miranda knew that what Valerie said was stupid, but the old woman’s saying it is hateful, and it makes her feel hateful for sharing the thought. For it isn’t true, what the old lady said, at least not completely. They are here. But they could quite easily not be.

“You’re blonde,” he says, holding his hand out to her.

“Among other things,” she says. So her first words to him are harsh. Is it that she wants to strike a blow? It’s not a good beginning. But no beginning would have been good.

Adam blushes. She remembers now how easily he colored. It was meant to be genetic, she had learned. There was no helping it; it was like perfect pitch, which he had also been born with. He hated it, that because he blushed so easily his inner life was readily visible. She had suffered with him for it. She had loved him for it, too.

He sees that she has kept her freshness. She has not diminished. She is lovely still. He wonders if she thinks him old. If she’s surprised that he’s no longer thin. What I said was stupid, he thinks, and he hates the loop of time that will not allow him to unsay.

Valerie hands him
prosecco
.

The old lady crosses her birdy legs.

•   •   •

“We are only the five of us,” she says, “and only I am a stranger to you two. Please understand that I have been apprised of everything in your past. Also understand that I was educated in America. Rosemary Hall. Vassar. You read a novel called
The Group
by Mary McCarthy? I was there then. A stupid novel, still it got the flavor of the times. I mean to say that I believe, above all, in plain speech. It is a waste of time pretending this is an ordinary evening. You should learn about one another’s lives, what has happened to you. I mean, of course, Adam and Miranda. Because to Valerie and Giancarlo nothing of importance has happened, or will happen. Then you will see if you have interest in knowing each other once again.”

Her distressingly thin legs, her feet, fish flat in canvas shoes, her hands with their resplendent rings, her eyes, invisible behind dark glasses, further hidden by a sun shade—something Miranda had seen women wearing in America when they play tennis—render this woman if not un-, then extra-human. Oracular. Imperious. Someone to be obeyed.

“To break the ice, as you Americans say, I will tell you about my life. It has been very interesting to anyone intelligent enough to be interested in what really happened to the world in the twentieth century. You understand that I am ninety-five years old, but my mind is perfect. I prefer that my body disintegrate before my mind, and this is happening, but I am ready for that, it is all right.

“I was born just before the First World War, at the end of the Old World. You are Americans, and so history is to you an abstraction.”

“Mama, that’s a bit of a generalization, wouldn’t you say,” Giancarlo says, barely audibly. Miranda realizes it’s the first word she’s heard him say in fifteen years. Giancarlo is very quiet. Reticent son of a voluble mother. Perhaps that’s why he married Valerie. For her chatter. For some reason she knows the Italian word for chatter.
Chiacchiere
. A good onomatopoeia. Valerie’s chattering, the mother’s chattering, are like a thorny maze she must walk through, abrading her skin, catching the edges of her clothing. But where must she get through to? To an understanding of what she is to do. With Adam.

He is still beautiful, she thinks. He is the first man of whom I used the word “beautiful.” Still apt.

Adam looks at her, ascertaining the shape of her strong legs beneath the silk of her long skirt. I always thought she was stronger than I, he thinks, but that last day when she wept and wept without making a sound, I thought I’d broken her heart. I could do nothing else. No other path was open to me. I believed that at the time. What good can it do to question it now? I should not have come. But of the mistakes I’ve made, agreeing to see her again is not a great one. Nothing will come of it, nothing will lead from it. Except, perhaps, the satisfaction of a curiosity. And the reassurance: she was not destroyed. I did not destroy her. Life went on. The harm I did was not so great, was covered over by events. Time. Good fortune. Her own gifts. Her strength.

“Only a small mind is afraid of generalization, my son,” says Giancarlo’s mother, Signora Rinaldi. Miranda realizes she doesn’t know her first name. “It’s like being afraid to build a house with more than one story. What would Rome be if people had been afraid of gestures that might seen too large, that took in what might at first appear too much.”

No one has the courage, the will, the impulse, the energy, to contradict her. For one thing, she is just too old.

At the same moment, Adam and Miranda grasp the tone of Valerie’s life. Between them stretches out a cord of simultaneous understanding. They are attached by a shared sympathy. For Valerie, the victim of a woman who never once considered that her gestures might be overlarge, who sees destruction as inevitable, unworthy of comment, certainly of surprise.

“And so, as I was saying, before I was interrupted by my son making a point beside the point, after the war, the first war, I mean, with Italy in disarray, my father, who was a physician, he treated many of Rome’s first families, he was a very great ophthalmologist, my father decided I should go to America for my education. I came back home in 1932. Mussolini had come to power. I was twenty years old. Still something of a flapper. Famous for my legs.”

She crosses and uncrosses her legs, thinking them, perhaps, still fetching. But Miranda can only be worried by them; to her they suggest nothing but potential fractures.

“I married Giancarlo’s father the next year. He was a press attaché for Mussolini. Very idealistic. He’d been a poor boy, and he saw how Mussolini had made his life better. People like to forget how bad most people’s lives were before Fascism, how badly things were run, and how much better it was for Italy to have a strong leader. You know, Mussolini came to power as a socialist.”

Miranda feels a half-dollar-sized pain in the back of her skull. She knows that it is rage. She believes in the concept of evil, though not being metaphysically inclined in the least, she does not know or feel the impulse to name its source. But the old woman, with her hooded eyes, her flat feet in their canvas shoes, her blade-thin crossed ankles, seems to her, if not evil, at least to be speaking evil words.

Valerie is passing crackers with a thin layer of pâté on each, and what Adam thinks must be capers, although they are the size of large pearls, bigger than any capers he has ever seen. Their bitterness is pleasing, and cuts satisfyingly through the meaty richness of the pâté, the dryness of the crackers. He wonders if, after all these years, Miranda will have changed enough to be able to keep silence in the face of the old lady’s words. If not, she will soon be saying something that will make a disaster of the evening, that will turn the room into a wreck.

Miranda is biting slowly at her cracker. She is saying nothing.

But the old woman wants something, Adam knows. She taps her cane. Valerie brings her a glass of water. Adam knows this is not what she wants; she wants something else. Discord: her thirst for it is much much stronger than her desire for the water that she demands, as if she were signaling a servant, wordlessly. Her spiteful mouth, blind seeming too because of the hooded eyes, is hungry; the dry lips are licked with relish for what she thinks she can make happen soon.

“When the Americans came, my husband was imprisoned. Twice. Once for three months, right here in Regina Coeli prison. Six months here, then nearly a year in the South. It was dreadfully unfair. My husband was punished for doing what he believed to help his country. I moved heaven and earth to have him released. I wrote to the pope. Finally, because of me, or because of my father, who had made the pope’s eyeglasses personally, my husband was released.”

“And afterward?” Miranda asks, engaged, despite her determination not to be.

“He became a lawyer. He was through with politics.”

Adam sees fear flicker in Valerie’s eyes. He remembers that the apartment belongs to her mother-in-law. That Giancarlo doesn’t have a job. Valerie confessed, just yesterday, that he’d been hospitalized for depression. That she is frightened, because she is in a country where family matters, and her family isn’t here. Her eyes are asking him to rescue the situation. But the situation is her fault. Why did she think Miranda and Signora Rinaldi could be in a room together without a good chance of disaster? But it would never have occurred to Valerie that there were people who should not be in the same room.

He knows she is looking to him for rescue, but he can’t think of a thing that he might do. What should he talk about? The weather? The new influx of Russian tourists? The weak dollar? The progress of the repairs on the Piazza Navona? His daughter’s progress with the violin?

“You are shocked because I don’t express shame when speaking of my husband’s Fascist past. But I have no shame; I have pride. I have pride because I have understanding. My husband was punished for doing what everyone of his generation did. Now what do you think of all this, Miss Miranda? You see, I know about you and your politics and your past. That you, like so many of the naïfs of your generation, thought you would change the world, poof, like that. And then were shocked that you did not. I know from Valerie that you were political, and the young Adam was going to be a great pianist, and everyone thought you would be together forever and ever but that somehow the differences between art and politics were too great, and here you are now, forty years later, wondering what to say to each other. There is probably more to it, the kind of thing Valerie enjoys keeping from me, I would guess another woman, but we won’t go into that. But you see I know about you and your political past, so I can only imagine what you think.”

“I don’t have an opinion,” Miranda says.

“From what I know of you, this is a falsehood. Don’t condescend to me because I’m old. I can take your ideas. I’m not afraid of what you have to say.”

“I didn’t think you were afraid for a minute,” Miranda says.

“What did you think, then?”

“That you believe that I don’t know enough to have an opinion that’s worth anything to you.”

“I can just imagine what you’re really thinking, what you’re afraid to say for fear of making a scene. You think that everyone who was not your idea of a hero should be punished as a criminal. This is an American arrogance spoken by a people who have never had to resort to difficult choices.”

There is a sound of breakage, a sound that almost comically expresses what everyone feels. Only gradually, Miranda understands that she has broken her glass by grasping it in the effort not to say what she really means.

“What has happened?” the old lady asks.

Adam is sure she knows, but wants to hear the words. Her lips have disappeared with a spite or pleasure she feels no need to hide.

“Miranda has cut herself,” Valerie says, her hands fluttering, as if she’d never seen anything like this before.

“Valerie, Valerie,
che succede
,” Giancarlo shouts, running out of the room.
“Non po sopporla.”

“Niente, caro,”
Valerie says, running after him to some room whose entrance is invisible.

Adam sees that no one intends to do anything about what has happened to Miranda. He takes his handkerchief and wraps Miranda’s fingers. Her fingertips are bleeding, but he sees she isn’t severely hurt.

“Take her to the bathroom, she mustn’t stain the furniture,” the old lady says.

He can hear Giancarlo weeping in the kitchen.
“Non ti preoccupare,”
he hears Valerie saying.

“Valerie, are there Band-Aids in the bathroom?” Adam asks, sticking his head into the room into which she and Giancarlo have disappeared.

She nods and points, holding her husband halfway on her lap.

Adam takes Miranda’s hand and leads her into the bathroom. He opens the medicine cabinet, takes out a tube of antiseptic ointment, puts her hand under the water, spreads the ointment, and bandages each of her wounded fingers. He sees that she is crying, and he knows that she hates that she is crying and hates that he sees.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says.

She nods.

“I’ll see Miranda home,” he says to Valerie, who nods, still absorbed in her weeping, trembling husband.

“I’m taking Miranda back to her apartment,” he says to the old woman, who is holding in her hand a half-eaten cracker.

“Such a shame,” she says. “I was looking forward to the evening.”

Miranda and Adam don’t speak or look at each other in the brass cage of the elevator. Silently, they walk to the massive door leading to the street. It slams behind them like a door in a room constructed for the Inquisition. They press on the outer door. It doesn’t open. They press again. Nothing.

Miranda begins to laugh.

“I remember what Valerie said now. In order to open this outer door you first have to press a button outside the inner one.”