The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [38]
His teacher, Mr. Levi, trained by Schnabel himself, has told Adam that this kind of music is trash, dangerous trash; he must fend off its corruption like the threat of an infection.
Mr. Levi says he thinks Adam should suggest that the Glee Club sing some madrigals.
He doesn’t understand that it is impossible that Adam would suggest anything like this. For his suggesting at all would imply that he possesses an entity that he suspects is not really his. That word Mr. Levi says so casually, as if it were something permitted in the world: to speak of it, to speak the word: talent. Your real talent. Your genuine talent. And he doesn’t understand that Adam would never suggest anything that would possibly hurt anyone, but especially Miss McKeever. Poor Miss McKeever—plain, unloved, even by the students on whom she lavishes so much love.
He would like to tell Miss McKeever: If you were colder, they would love you.
An economy of temperature he believes in but does not understand.
Miss McKeever looks on him like a young prince, a young god. She, too, uses the words that are not permitted, “your talent.” Sometimes she says, “your gift.”
In secret he occasionally allows himself to believe that he is gifted, talented. But it must not be said aloud. Not by Mr. Levi. And especially not by Miss McKeever, who wants nothing more than to bask in the light of his giftedness, his talent.
Which, to be safeguarded, must not be spoken of, he knows, aloud.
Every Friday when he takes the commuter train from Hastings to Manhattan he is grateful, abashed, incredulous. That he should be doing this. He, Adam, son of his parents, Salvatore and Rose, whose parents came in their turn, nearly children, traveling by ship from Italy in conditions of unspeakable filth and terror. They do not speak of it; his grandparents are nearly silent people, as if in front of their son who works in the furniture store in White Plains, and their daughter-in-law who is kind and good and cooks the food they love, but who has named her children Adam (after a man she worked for, a lawyer who went to jail because of standing up for something about colored people) and Jo (named after no one in the family, named for someone in a book she read). Their daughter-in-law who asks them to babysit (what kind of word is that, they ask each other, the grandparents) so she and their son can go to a Chinese restaurant. A Chinese restaurant? To eat what kind of food? In front of such people as their son and daughter-in-law, they believe it would be wrong to speak of where they came from, what they are. They believe they have no right.
Adam believes he has no right as he presses the buzzer at Henry Levi’s apartment on Riverside Drive. No right. No rights. Those who tell him he has many rights, on account of his gift—well, he knows they must be wrong. You are my genius boy, his mother says, pretending it’s a joke, kissing him over and over on the top of his head after she’s heard him play anything: a Chopin nocturne, “Moonlight Sonata,” perhaps not even playing them well. But she believes he has a gift, and that his gift means he doesn’t have to clean the house on weekends and certainly not get a summer job. And so he tries to understand what this thing is, this music, who he is in relation to this music, and what it is to him and what are its demands; a whole world of arduous exigencies, permissions given and withheld, is his.
And the money. Money for his lessons. Somehow money is involved and is provided; he eats up family money; he sees himself at the dinner table, guzzling while they eat modestly, denying themselves the choicer morsels they might secretly crave. Or maybe it is his music that is guzzling it all. But somehow allowances are made for this as well.
They are very young, Adam and Miranda; she is sixteen;