The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [0]
Fiction
The Stories of Mary Gordon
Pearl
Final Payments
The Company of Women
Men and Angels
Temporary Shelter
The Other Side
The Rest of Life
Spending
Nonfiction
Reading Jesus
Circling My Mother
Good Boys and Dead Girls
The Shadow Man
Seeing Through Places
Joan of Arc
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Mary Gordon
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt from the “Second Duino Elegy” by Rainer Maria Rilke, from A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, copyright © 2009 by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gordon, Mary, [date]
The love of my youth / Mary Gordon.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37977-1
1. First loves—Fiction. 2. Middle-aged persons—Fiction.
3. Rome (Italy)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.0669L68 2011 813′.54—dc22 2010032988
www.pantheonbooks.com
Jacket image: The Ponte Giuseppe Mazzini in Rome by Rob Koenen/Flickr/Getty Images
Jacket design by Carole Devine Carson
v3.1
For Penny Ferrer
We have come this far
This is given to us, to touch
each other in this way.
—Rainer Maria Rilke,
from the Second Duino Elegy
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Gail Archer and Richard Goode for advising me on matters musical. Also I would like to thank everyone who has opened to me the joys of Rome.
My time in Rome was made possible by research funds provided by the Millicent C. McIntosh Chair in English at Barnard College.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Map
October 7, 2007
Monday, October 8
Tuesday, October 9
Wednesday, October 10
Thursday, October 11
Friday, October 12
Saturday, October 13
Sunday, October 14
September 1964
Monday, October 15
Tuesday, October 16
Wednesday, October 17
Thursday, October 18
Friday, October 19
Saturday, October 20
Sunday, October 21
September 1967
Monday, October 22
Tuesday, October 23
Wednesday, October 24
Thursday, October 25
Friday, October 26
Saturday, October 27
Sunday, October 28
September 1970
Monday, October 29
Tuesday, October 30
Wednesday, October 31
A Reader’s Guide
About the Author
October 7, 2007
“I hope it won’t be strange or awkward. I mean, what seemed strange to me, or would seem strange, is not to do it. Because in a way it is strange, isn’t it, really, the two of you in Rome at the same time, the both of you phoning me the same day?”
Irritation bubbles up in Miranda. Had Valerie always been so garrulous? So vague? Had she, Miranda, always found her so annoying—the qualifications, the emendations, laid down, thrown out like straw on a road to muffle the noise of passing carriages when there’d been a death in the house? Where did that come from? Some novel of the nineteenth century. The early twentieth. And now it is the twenty-first, the first decade nearly done for. There’s no point in thinking this way, focusing on Valerie’s habits of speech and diction. As if that were the point. The point is simply: she must decide whether or not to go.
It has been nearly forty years since she has seen him. Or to be exact—and it is one of the things she values in herself, her ability to be exact—thirty-six years and four months. She saw him last on June 23, 1971. The day had changed her.
Adam tries to remember if he had ever been genuinely fond of Valerie. What he can recall is that, of Miranda’s many friends,