The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [48]
When this time is long behind them, and, no longer young, they try to understand their past, they find it hard to remember how they spent their days. What did they do in all the time they were together? They can say, Well, there was sex … but how many hours did that take up? They did, somehow, put in their days. They both look back on them as days when they believed that they were happy—and Adam, having had more unhappiness than Miranda, will do this far more often.
The way Adam’s days were spent was shaped by the fact that he was trying to become a serious musician, and that happened by accident. The only boy child in a clutch of nine girl cousins, he was bored at the large family gatherings in the house of his grandparents in the Bronx and so he disappeared with his grandfather, bored also, into the back room, where Sal Sr., born in Calabria, listened to the Texaco opera hour. To the operas of Verdi, Rossini, most particularly Puccini, which were to him as accessible as the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein were to his children and their wives. He saw that his grandson loved music as he did, closed his eyes as he did, tapped his little feet in the Buster Brown shoes (inside them, the image of the blond boy and his dog), then walked to the piano and somehow (Miracolo, the child is not yet five) and picked out the tune, Là ci darem la mano.
“He plays by ear,” the grandfather said, with a pride he had never before had occasion to call up. Adam would make his way to the piano, which he loved better than his aunts, his cousins, his too expressive grandmother, but not his grandfather, with whom he shared the music. The large unaccommodating black piano was not a fine instrument; rather it was a sign, a necessary sign in a certain kind of upwardly striving house. It was opened rarely; mostly it is something to put the pictures of the children on (graduation, wedding), then the grandchildren (christening, first communion). But for five-year-old Adam the looming black complexity was the fresh green bosom of the brave new world.
“Play this, Adam, play that.” They sang snatches of songs for him; he was their trick dog, their magician. “Body and Soul,” “America the Beautiful.” He played whatever they sang. And they didn’t have to say anything to his mother, she already knew. His mother, besotted, drenched in love for her son, saw that he needed piano lessons. At seven he was taken (this is luck, but there is always a place for luck) to a woman Rose knew from church. Lorraine Capalbo, who gave piano lessons. Who was, though frustrated, a real musician. She demanded a great deal from Adam, in whom she saw a gift, the fulfillment of a dream she had given up for herself. Conservatory trained, she married after the war, moved to White Plains, had three children, boys, none of whom had an ear for music, all of whom lived for sport. She taught Adam for five years; he was the jewel in the crown of the yearly recitals she presented in her living room. When he turned twelve, she passed him on (this rite of passage coinciding, though of course she didn’t know it, with his first wet dream) to Henry Levi, whom she knew when she was young and serious and with whom she was still hopelessly in love.
And so at twelve, Adam entered the world of serious music, and anyone who was part of his life must be part of that world as well. His mother, shyly ignorant, but eager, tried to learn. His father came to his performances, paralyzingly ill at ease. His sister worshipped him and at night thanked God that she was the sister of a brother who did this thing she could not do and thanked God that she didn’t have to do it. Music.
So Miranda, loving Adam, must be brought into this world.
It is not her world. Her world is based on dreams of justice. But there is time for both, because of all the hours Adam must be away from her, studying, practicing, and Sylvia Levi has told her it is important “to keep up her own interests but be ready when called upon to put them down.” Sylvia Levi is a phlebotomist. She