The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [56]
“In the eye of others.”
“And then what?”
“There’s no ‘then.’ Simply to know. Always to feel worthy.”
“I think that might be impossible,” she says.
“Even for the beautiful? The truly, the unquestionably, beautiful? I think they’re a different order from us. We’ll never know.”
“Isn’t it odd, though, that beauty, real beauty, whatever form it takes, stimulates, somehow, an impulse to praise? Where does it come from?”
It excites her to be speaking in this way, a way she no longer speaks. Did she ever speak in this way? Or is it a kind of unreal talk, dream talk … as their time together is unreal, a kind of dream. She is carried by the wave of their talk; she doesn’t want to be let down onto the shore of ordinary speech.
“Praise, yes, a verb, intransitive, objectless. Leading somewhere. Nowhere.”
He is raking his fingers through his hair; she recognizes the gesture. It’s something he did when he was troubled. So whereas their talk is enlivening to her, she sees it is disturbing to him. And that his hair is much much thinner than it was in the time they were together. His hands, though, haven’t changed. The fine dark hair on them has not coarsened or lost color.
She doesn’t want him to be troubled. She wants him to be with her, enjoying the freedom of this talk, so different from the conversations of what she can only call their real lives.
“I prefer something graspable, like that ball flying through the air,” she says, pointing.
“Until the game ends, and the darkness falls.”
“Adam, it’s eleven in the morning!”
Wednesday, October 17
THE VIA ARENULA
“Were We Wrong to Be So Hopeful?”
She has asked him for some help with shopping. Not the kind of shopping most people do in Rome; she is not buying shoes or handbags or jewelry, or even olive oil or pasta or wine. She is shopping for her mother-in-law, who has just had a stroke. Her mother-in-law is adamant about having only cotton, linen, wool, or silk next to her body, and she disliked the cotton nightgowns that Miranda had been able to find in Berkeley; she was too old, she said, to look like Little Bo Peep. Miranda keeps passing a store with many nightgowns and bathrobes; they appear to be pure cotton, but she depends on Adam, with his mastery of the language, to ascertain that the cotton is quite pure.
“I like my mother-in-law. I’ve always liked her, even when I thought she didn’t like me. Or for a long time she wouldn’t even think in terms of liking or not liking me; she just didn’t approve of me. I wasn’t Jewish. I had a career. I sometimes think all mothers just want their sons to marry someone who will make their lives easier. Sometimes even I feel that way. When I see one of the boys with an interesting, complicated girl, I want to say, Oh no, don’t do it.”
“But like everyone else, Miranda, I’m sure your mother-in-law came around to you.”
Miranda isn’t pleased that the compliment pleases her. She feels it’s something she should be finished with, at her age: taking pleasure in being liked, especially by Adam. But yes, she had won Hannah over, difficult Hannah, demanding Hannah, critical Hannah, who lived half the year in Tel Aviv and half the year in Berkeley: her greatest luxury, being near her son, her grandsons. Yonatan’s father had done well in the electronics business; in retirement, living two places was something they could afford. And finally, when she realized that it was only Miranda who would make the boys’ bar mitzvah possible (Yonatan had no interest in it; he said all that religious stuff was only superstition) she and her mother-in-law were allies forever. Miranda stood up to Yonatan and said, No, there are threads that must not be broken. There are threads I will not break.
And now alone, a widow, her fierceness collapsed on itself because of a blood vessel gone awry, Hannah will be a difficulty in Miranda’s life. One she is glad to be away from for three weeks. Glad, and grateful, to be leaving her, for the time, to Yonatan.
“She’s a wonderful grandmother. I’m glad the boys have at least one grandparent.