The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [40]
For a long time, Henry Levi didn’t speak to Adam of these things. Until the spring of 1963, when Adam tells him he can’t come for a lesson the next week because it’s Good Friday. Mr. Levi, so formal, so reserved, brings down his fist, the fist made of the valuable fingers of the valuable hand, down on the valuable wood of the piano, and the metronome jumps, the head of Beethoven jumps, and he speaks of roving gangs assaulting Jews in the name of the Crucified Christ whom the Jews are responsible for killing. You think this is only in Europe, but I tell you it is here as well. So how can he feel safe ever, he asks, on this day when he knows very well that he and others of his kind are never safe on this day, this Friday, which the people among whom he lives insist on calling good.
Mrs. Levi, whom Adam will one day (but not for many years) call Sylvia, appears from nowhere with a glass of water and a linen napkin. Be calm, Henry, she says, then something in German, and Adam is sent home.
The next week Henry Levi apologizes, says he must explain, and every week, when the lesson is over and he can be sure he is not misusing the time for which he has been paid, he tells Adam a bit more, doling out history like a rich but poisoned candy Adam must learn to digest or grow immune to.
And so, instead of reading the New York Times, Adam reads histories of the war. Details of concentration camps. His nightmares are not of bombed streets in flame but of piles of bodies, shoes, bones. He dreams himself a starving child in a freezing woods, barefoot; he has stolen bread which he must share with another child; he doesn’t want to share it. In one book he has read, he learns of a survivor child who escaped into the woods after having stolen a chocolate coin. Each night he and his brother lick their index fingers and rub them over the slowly diminishing coin, making it last a month. In his nightmare, while his little sister sleeps, he palms the coin and swallows it all.
Who has taught him to fear his appetites, which at sixteen seem to him monstrous?
Miranda thinks of her appetites as the stuff of songs. Over and over she plays Peter, Paul and Mary (but only Mary sings), “The first time ever I saw your face.” Whole hours lost, dreaming of something she doesn’t even know the word for. “Boyfriend” is too trivial, too unserious, and she could not begin to form, in relation to herself, the word “lover.” When she sings the words from that same song, “the first time ever I kissed your mouth”—kissed your mouth rather than your lips—she is excited and proud of her excitement. And she knows she wants to be doing something only wives are meant to be doing, but she doesn’t want to be a wife, she wants to be someone’s great love. She is afraid that this will not happen before the world is annihilated.
And so these children on the verge of no longer being children hear in their sleep the words “annihilation,” “monstrosity.”
And yet in the history of the world it is, perhaps more completely than any other, a time of safety. A time of hope. Despite the death of the young president, a time of hope.
On September 7, 1964, Adam and Miranda have not yet spoken a word to each other, although they are students in the same school, in the same year. The Thomas Arnold School: a high-minded, old-fashioned private school in Hastings, enclave of the children of the privileged, the intellectually