The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [51]
As intelligent as anyone Miranda had ever known, Rose nevertheless cultivated large tracts of the primitive. Family was family. Everything having to do with family could be repaired by food or tears followed by loud, enveloping, even smothering embraces. The steel-cold silent daggers drawn and bristling everywhere around Miranda’s house: there was no place for these in Rose’s kitchen. And Miranda saw how her mother yearned to be closer to Rose, to what Rose represented, as if she were an orphan with chilblained hands afraid to approach the stove because she’d heard what happened to chilblained hands when they got too close to warmth. They bled. They scarred forever. Shyly, Harriet tiptoed into the kitchen, wanting to be of help to Rose, but it was clear that Miranda knew her way around that kitchen as her mother did not. And trying to pretend she didn’t understand that made Harriet vague, confused, incompetent in a way that shamed her daughter and was untrue to her actual domestic competence, different in tone from Rose’s, but well established over years. She wanted to say, I’m a very good baker, you know. My piecrusts are first rate. But of course she would never say anything like that.
At the dinner table, the men speak of cars, and then go silent. Sal feels unworthy to ask Bill questions about his work; Bill is a chemist; he works for a company that manufactures paints. Finally Sal asks, “Do you import any of the pigments that you use?” And Bill says, “Believe me, that’s yesterday’s news.” And Harriet, flustered, tries to talk about the fact that some of the pigments that made possible the memorable colors of Italian Renaissance paintings are no longer available. “Yeah, it’s hard to get ahold of a regular supply of donkey dung,” Bill says, and everyone pretends to laugh, except for Harriet, who blushes and, too quickly, Sal says his experience of seeing the Sistine Chapel was one of the great moments of his life.
Adam and Miranda feel they mustn’t touch each other, even stand near each other, or sit too close, as if the vector emanating from their bodies would provide too much information, particularly to Miranda’s father.
Rose tells a story about Adam as a little boy. “I think he was five,” she says. “I took him to see the movie Pinocchio. He was so upset when the whale swallowed Pinocchio that he jumped off my lap, ran to the front of the theater, and tried to attack the whale on the screen. ‘I have to save Pinocchio,’ he kept saying. I had to drag him out of the theater, screaming. He wouldn’t go to the movies for two years.”
Bill tells the story of Miranda’s falling off her bicycle, cutting her head so that she needed five stitches, and getting right back on the bike the minute she got home from the doctor’s.
Adam understands that this is Bill’s way of reminding him that he isn’t good enough for Bill’s daughter.
It is a relief to everyone when the meal comes to an end, and Miranda’s father gives a gracious toast.
“Our wandering scholars, may you go far, but never forget where you came from.”
And so they leave their family houses, Adam and Miranda, never to return. No one knows that Harriet, in the large cool rooms over which she is said to preside, dim, even on the days of brightest summer, weeps because her youngest child, her treasured one, has left, and the house’s spaciousness, which once seemed delightful, now seems nothing but a threat. Rose assumes that Adam will come back; she does not think of having lost him. And she is going back to school; her first classes at Westchester Community College will coincide with Adam’s and Miranda’s, two hundred miles to the north.
And the fathers? The fathers do not permit themselves to mourn the loss of their young to the world. The fathers pack boxes into trunks