The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [104]
Miranda sees that the kind of conversation she and Adam always had is stalled now, as if some dam, whose construction she had failed to notice, has cut off the stream of their shared life. But she doesn’t want to think about it because then she would have to understand her part in it, the depths of her own boredom. She agrees to go for a drink with Jeremy Sussman, a medical student who is organizing a storefront clinic, and allows him to kiss her, but she runs away (he laughs nastily at her escape down the street), and she is ashamed that she allowed herself to get this close once again to the danger of betrayal. This time, though, she goes right back to Adam, and her silence, her evasion—“Where were you?” “Oh, just having a drink with Valerie”—is the first time she has directly lied to him, as opposed to keeping something back, and so the stream is befouled now, clogged yet more.
And when Fatima’s telegram arrives, “We need you here,” both Adam and Miranda understand that it is right for her to go. She will be away for his recital, and she expresses her regret, but both of them understand that they are secretly relieved. She will, she assures him, be back home for his solo recital: the last three Beethoven sonatas. She is particularly fond, she tells him, of Opus 110; Think of me when you’re practicing it, she tells him.
“As if I don’t always think of you,” he says, wondering, just a bit, if that’s still true.
Realizing that he can’t make Beverly’s life better through contact with his mother, he makes what he thinks is the second-best choice. He’s listened to Miranda for years when she says how important it is to have girl- (now women) friends. So he convinces Valerie it would be an act of kindness to spend time with Beverly, and to his surprise Valerie, too, becomes fond of her. He knows what Miranda would say, That doesn’t mean anything, Valerie likes everybody. Beverly invites Valerie to go on what she calls “a thrift shop crawl.” They come back with bags of clothing that could have been costumes from thirties screwball comedies, or later Betty Grable films: a big-shouldered beaver coat, a beaded handbag, a cinch-waist polka-dot dress with a white patent-leather belt.
“All for five dollars, it’s unbelievable fun,” Valerie says, and soon she has included some of Miranda’s other friends on her expeditions with Beverly. Only the more law abiding, less adventurous of the friends had stayed on in Boston after graduation; Renee is in Morocco with a Moroccan boyfriend, Lydia has gone out to San Francisco to an art scene she found more “open.” So those who are left are serious, purposeful, concerned with doing good, still with the residue of pleasing their teachers clinging to them, although they are officially, now, not students. They feel in Beverly’s company steered into a more adventurous and less safe world. A world that simultaneously harks back to their mothers’ youths (the choice of Manhattans over hashish, stiletto heels over cowboy boots, velvet capes over Aztec ponchos) and skates close to a world of danger their mothers wouldn’t even have the name for. Do they believe that Adam and Miranda are inviolable, as safe as Fort Knox, so there’s no need to be concerned about his spending time with Beverly? Is that why they don’t mention her in their letters to Miranda? Or are they keeping something from her, something that might disturb her in her new difficult life? Or have they secretly come under Beverly’s sway, because they’re tired of Miranda’s certainty, her calm, silent judgments?
And Adam feels in having introduced Beverly into this female society that