The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [41]
The smiling face of Anne Frank.
The black children of Little Rock.
John Kennedy and his wife in a formal portrait.
Jacqueline Kennedy veiled, widowed, her husband among the perfect dead, the little boy saluting as his father’s coffin rolls past him in the funeral cortege.
And alongside, or perhaps pressed on top of these, like an outline stenciled above a painted landscape, Adam has other images which Miranda does not have.
The face of Henry (Heinrich) Levi, a young boy in Germany.
And the other Germans. Bach. Beethoven.
The face of the victorious Van Cliburn, with a mouth set like Beethoven’s (not the calm mouth of Bach) and his furious, impossibly tight curled hair.
And when Miranda is reading nineteenth-century novels or learning new dances with her friends, Adam is practicing the piano four, six, sometimes seven, even eight hours a day. They have no way of knowing how the other spends his or her day: he, listening over and over to records on the phonograph his parents allow him to keep in his room so that he can better understand a certain phrasing, while she is listening over and over to Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. Adam and Miranda are from different tribes. They are both sixteen, but he is much much older. Yet in some ways, more thoroughly a child.
It is because of music that they meet and speak.
September 7, 1964. They both walk from their separate homes to the Thomas Arnold School. She is wearing a cotton shirtwaist dress, blue and green flowers against a background of pinkish beige, her skirt modestly below her knees. She wears stockings held up by a garter belt, refusing her mother’s semi-abashed suggestion of a girdle. Her shoes: Bass Weejun loafers with pennies in the slits made for the purpose. She is uncomfortably hot, and blames it on her stockings, which she thinks of jettisoning by the side of the road but not today, no not today. Today is too important.
Adam is too hot because the only jacket that still fits him (he is four inches taller than he was in June) is a brown herringbone wool, recently bought, looking forward to cooler weather. The sleeves of his blue-and-white plaid summer jacket now only reach a bit below his elbows, the fabric pulling shamingly and uncomfortably across his shoulder blades.
“We’re going to have to put a brick on your head,” his mother says, “or just stop feeding you.” She says this as she ladles thick vegetable soup, pasta with meat sauce, and cuts into a cheesecake she made this morning, with a knife she ran under warm water to facilitate the removal of each slice. He sees her smile of calm fulfillment when he eats. And he is always hungry so she seems always happy. He is a boy who loves his mother, loves his sister, loves, though more shyly and quite silently, his nearly silent father. He even loves his grandparents, for whom there is no silence in the expression of their love for this grandson who makes music.
He lives with the sorrow and the shame that he does not entirely belong to his family. He belongs as well to Henry Levi; he belongs to music. Music is the beam of light his eye is always focused on. He lives for music, yet he loves his family who do not live for music, not at all, could live perfectly well without it. They don’t, he knows, exactly understand why he must play the same bars of a Bach invention, a Chopin polonaise, again and again. Does it drive them to distraction? They never suggest it, never say anything but the most loving words of praise about his music. He understands, he thinks he understands, that he was born for something larger, older than his family, this music that was there (but where is there, where was it?) long before he was born and will go on long after he is