The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [42]
Miranda, on the other hand, has been accused of a failure of patience. But only with human beings; with objects, plants, and animals, she seems to be uncannily patient. She has been praised consistently for her enthusiasm. Her energy. A reservoir, seemingly inexhaustible, of plans and hope.
Adam has never had a real friend. For too many years his life has been too different from that of other boys his age. Oh, there are other boys whose lives are more like his, students of Henry Levi’s, but they live in Manhattan and their parents seem to have more to do with Henry Levi and the music they all love than Adam’s parents do, and so he feels abashed, unworthy. When Sylvia Levi suggests that the boys get together for a Coke, they do (they all revere her), but they don’t know how to talk to one another, and they frequently look at their watches, eager to get back home. To practice. To be with their families, with whom they need not enter into extended conversations or talk at all.
Miranda’s life is centered around her group of friends, the smart girls, who dream of not being as law abiding as they are, and who do not have boyfriends.
For weeks and weeks, Miranda and her four friends have dedicated themselves to the question: what should Miranda choose for her audition piece.
The conditions are many.
They are extensively discussed.
There is the matter of personalities: the judges of the competition.
The judges will be: Miss McKeever, who will get teary over almost everything, and, most important, Mr. Jameson, the junior music teacher, director of the Glee Club, called Jamie by the girls who swoon over him in small semiprivate groups. They love his black-rimmed glasses, his sand-colored hair, long enough to fall into his eyes and be pushed impatiently back by graceful hands that always seem to be quite tan, whatever the season. He was the first to appear in school in a madras jacket worn over a yellow shirt, something the girls had not seen in life but only in the pages of Seventeen magazine. It would not occur to them that Charles Jameson has a lover, with whom he lives in Greenwich Village, whose name is not Harriet but Harry. Such a category has not entered the group mind, and certainly not the group discussion. Therefore all the girls in the Thomas Arnold Glee Club can still put themselves to sleep with dreams of their June wedding (the week after college graduation) to Charles Jameson. They speculate endlessly on the details of his current (temporary) bachelorhood. They decide he is involved with a Martha Graham dancer. Or perhaps someone who works in advertising or publishing. Or perhaps someone European. Spanish, they decide, or Portuguese.
The girls worry: Charles Jameson’s tastes are unpredictable. Last spring he announced that the Glee Club would be singing selections from Brigadoon. Along with this, they will be singing selections from the Messiah and some Negro spirituals.
Then there is the painful reality that juniors are almost never given solos and the even more crushing fact of the dreaded enemy Suzanne Lazzard, who signs her notes (written to Mr. Jameson and to senior boys, never to girls) SUZZI, with two z’s. Her mother is rumored to buy Suzzi’s clothes in Paris. Her father provides Suzzi with voice lessons from Miss Patti Richards, who was in the chorus of Damn Yankees and who has told everyone that she and Gwen Verdon are “very very close.” Like sisters, Miss Patti Richards says. Twining her middle fingers. “Like this.”
A third problem: the girls don’t know whether to honor or to discourage Miranda’s obsession with Joan Baez.
A trip to the city is required. To select sheet music, so that they’re sure they haven’t wasted their time on something that could not be presented to Charles Jameson, who can sight-read anything.
They take the same