The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [107]
And when she is diagnosed with hepatitis and sent home, she is, to her shame, not entirely sorry.
Her mother wants her home in Hastings, but she doesn’t want to be in the house with her father, who had warned her of precisely what has been the case: disease, disorder, a horror nothing in her life has prepared her for. Ever since she began arguing with her father, since Rob left for Canada, she had a secret fear that all along he was right: that violence was endemic to human nature, that inequality of wealth was also part of the human condition and to deny basic inequalities was to deny nature, that men and women were made different and to deny that, to insist that they could inhabit the same realms, do the same work, was another denial of nature. His certainty, his hard conviction that the old ways were right, was a stone wall she had to butt her head against. Everything she saw about the injustice of privilege, the disproportionate grabbing of wealth by the West, everything that had made Bhola inevitable, made her know that he was wrong. But then he stood like a fort, impervious to wind or storm, willing himself to imperviousness, to the loss of his son’s love. And that very steadfastness, while it turned her heart to stone, was capable at the same time of making her doubt herself. Sometimes in her fever he became the calm place in her imaginings. She thought of how cool he was in emergencies: when she had fallen off her bike and her head was bleeding, when Rob broke his leg in football, when her mother lay on the floor hemorrhaging (later she would understand it was a miscarriage) and five-year-old Miranda ran screaming to the garage where her father was working on the car. She hoped she did not cry out what in her dreams she cried: Daddy, you’re the one who should be here, not me. Everything you are is what they need. What I am is at this moment of much less value.
She wants her mother. In her fever dreams, she yearns for her mother’s cool hands on the pillow, on the white sheets of her childhood bed, the pink room, the wallpaper pink flowers, the lampshades pink, the pink of her mother’s nail polish, and she hopes that she didn’t cry out for her mother.
But she will not go home to her father’s house; she makes her mother come to her. She wants to be with Adam. To the spare clean rooms she has paid for with the salary she has earned for work her father would not approve of, thinking of it as another fool’s errand, the money she has earned fool’s gold.
Her mother agrees to come to the Somerville apartment to care for her. Her father will not, as he says, “cross the threshold” of the apartment where his daughter lives with a man she isn’t married to, and Harriet says, “Oh Bill, they’re as good as married,” and her husband says, “There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip,” and for the first time since he banished their son, Harriet tastes hatred for her husband. She will not allow it to settle in her mouth. She will spit out the bitter taste of hatred as quickly as she tastes it, slake it with the sweet taste of gratitude for a life made safe by this man and everything he stands for. But having tasted hatred, and for the second time, so she knows it could arrive again, she is newly frightened, of herself and of the world, a world her daughter has entered in a way she never could.
Harriet admits only to herself that she is happy taking care of her daughter. And Miranda allows herself to be cared for. But Harriet sees: Adam’s attention is not entirely with her daughter. Not as it was. He loves her now as a weak thing, but he doesn’t love her as a tree loves the sun, which is