The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [111]
Beverly regularly becomes hysterical, moving from tears to howls of laughter that seem inhuman. You’re laughing like a hyena, he wants to say to her, you’ve become a beast. Then scalding, torrential tears. I want to kill myself, I’ll kill myself and take the baby with me.
He thinks of the word “baby” and then “mine.” He must think of himself now using the word “father,” which he believed he would not be doing for a very long time, until much more of his life had been lived. Until words like “career,” “future,” “livelihood” would be things he had a clear sense of, things possibly under his control.
“I’ll take care of everything,” he says, and she looks at him with that murderous sharp bitterness that will never leave her eyes again when she looks at him. Never, even when she is looking at her child, will her eyes be drained of bitterness, and certainly never when she looks at him. Only sometimes she is entirely desperate, and then her eyes are drained of everything: eyes empty as the blank eyes of a ruined statue: an empty blankness that nothing could ever fill.
He doesn’t know what to do. He does something he’s ashamed of doing, even as he does it, but it’s the only thing he can think of. He goes home to his parents. Runs home to his parents: what could be a more humiliating cliché. For someone’s father. A man.
Rose asks practical questions: how far along.
Five months.
Her beautiful generous lips disappear into an unfamiliar line.
“I see, then, it’s too late.”
Too late for her son to have a happy life.
Too late for her to have Miranda for her daughter.
“She could go away somewhere to have it, then put it up for adoption.”
And even as she says it, some old instinct of blood forbids, for all of them, the prospect of a child brought up by strangers. A child with their features living in the world unknown to them, unreared by its own.
“I’ll have to marry her.”
“Yes,” his mother says. “You will.”
His father says, “A child is always a blessing.”
His mother says, “Unfortunately that’s not true.”
And his father, sterner than Adam has ever heard him, says, “Rose, you must not say that. You must not say that ever again.”
Adam breaks down. “How will I tell Miranda?”
“There is no good way,” his mother says.
“It must be done, though, son, and soon,” says Sal.
He hates himself for thinking, when Beverly threatens to kill herself, that he sometimes wishes that she would. She says she’s thought of adoption, of course, but she wants “the kid,” and if he doesn’t want to be “in on it,” she’ll do it by herself. She’ll go on welfare. “Possibly I have hidden depths. Hidden resources.” Then she laughs her hyena laugh.
At least she was never a woman he thought he loved.
• • •
The hour of dread. The moment that must be lived. The leaden day. Heavy as lead, as lightless.
“Miranda, there is something I must tell you. It’s a terrible thing.”
And says the words.
“Yes, well, I see you have no choice,” she says.
She doesn’t know who is saying those words, or where they are coming from. Some mouth not hers. Someone with a body; she is outside her body. She is watching herself, her bloodless face, her freezing hands, but she is seeing these things from a distance, a cold height, unsheltered, incalculably far away. She is not standing on this place, this promontory, but hovering above it, weightless. Gravity, the law of cause, have been taken from her. This is a thing that cannot have happened. She does know whom it has happened to. Herself, but someone she has never known. She will know this person now; from now on, when she says “myself,” it will be the person to whom this thing has happened. She thinks she is going to be sick, and she doesn’t want him to see or know that. Above all, she doesn’t want to be in the place he is.
She goes into the bathroom where he can hear that she has washed her face. He cannot see that she is sitting