The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [29]
“I cook a little, but I don’t enjoy it. It always seems to take so much time and then everyone eats it so quickly.”
She doesn’t say, Does your wife cook? Is she a good cook? She knows her own competitiveness and she doesn’t want to create any areas of competition. She prefers thinking of, talking about, his mother.
“What I felt in your mother’s house, what I wanted for my children, was a place of safety and expansiveness. I think my mother would have been better off if she’d just set the house on fire and run off with only what she could hold in her hands or in her pockets. She seemed so trapped, so frightened. I didn’t want an entrapping, fearful house. I wanted a house where everyone was free and happy.”
“Did you do it?”
“Who’s happy? Who’s free?”
“Freer and happier, then?”
“Freer and happier than I was in the house when I was growing up? Freer and happier than my mother was? I think so, yes.”
She doesn’t ask him about how he lives in his house. She doesn’t believe it’s important to him. And she knows that in at least one of the houses of his life, tragedy happened. Horror. Does he still live in the same house? She doesn’t want to speak about that yet. Not here, in the Campo dei Fiori. Instead she says, “Let’s buy some of these grapes.” She buys what seems to him an excessively large bunch: dark purple, nearly black. She holds them to the light.
Friday, October 12
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“I Suppose You Find That Music Sentimental”
They are sitting by the puppet theater, a rough, unpainted bungalow that looks provisional and out of place among the serious official buildings that are also a part of the park, that remind you that it was once the estate of wealthy and powerful men who moved the world with their little fingers. A sign says that the show will begin in an hour and a half. Some instrument—it sounds like a player piano—is producing music that could be the accompaniment to a silent film. Miranda can’t identify the melody, but she knows it’s from a time when songs were required to be innocent: girls on bicycles built for two, or kissing boys in a rowboat. The music, which she has no wish to judge, pleases her, and she’s about to lean back into it, like an accommodating but perhaps untasteful chair. Then she remembers whom she’s with. She is with Adam.
“I suppose you find that music sentimental,” she says.
Adam puts both hands in his pockets, as if he’s hiding something from her. “Does it matter whether I do or not?” he says. “What would it mean to you if I said yes, I think it’s sentimental.”
“Now it doesn’t matter. But once it would have made me very angry. And I would have been scared, and then insulted and then angry, yes, scared, insulted, angry, all at the same time that I might be accused of being sentimental. Now I think: Yes, I am, in some things, sentimental, and so what?”
“What do you mean by ‘sentimental’?”
“It implies, I’d think, excess,” she says.
“Excess of what?”
“Sentiment.”
“By which is meant?”
“Emotion. Feeling.”
“But what would ‘excess’ mean? Is there a fixed, a proper, amount of it that mustn’t be overspent?”
“I do know there is such a thing as sentimentality,” she says, “and it makes you physically sick with that sickness that tells you something’s wrong. Hallmark cards. Hummel statues.”
“But my mother loved her Hummel statues and I loved my mother.”
“And I loved your mother. And I loved how she loved her statue of the little girl feeding the sparrows, the one of the little boy playing the violin.”
“I would never have begrudged her that pleasure.”
“But me you did begrudge.