The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [67]
She doesn’t say what they both know: money is something she has never worried about. He doesn’t realize, though, the extent of her financial comfort. That her father—resented, feared, admired grudgingly—had made excellent investments, and at her parents’ death, she was left enough money so that all sorts of possibilities were open to her and her children. A house in the Berkeley Hills. Private schools. Never having to question: Shall I sit at a table or drink on a bench from a plastic cup.
“When we were young together,” she says, “money meant nothing to us. We couldn’t imagine that it would ever be of any importance. That it would make any difference.”
Now there’s something he doesn’t say in return, Yes, it wasn’t important, but the way it was unimportant was different to each of us. It wasn’t important to you because you were never greedy, but also because you never had to think about it. Because your mother had been left quite a lot of money. He remembers a time when Miranda’s father—perhaps he’d had too much to drink—took him aside and said, “You’ll never have to worry about my girl going hungry. My wife, well, my wife’s family was quite well off and I’m proud to say I’ve done well with what she’s been left.” Adam didn’t want to hear it because, Miranda was right, money wasn’t important to him, didn’t interest him, but also because he had a feeling it suggested what her father really thought about him. That Adam couldn’t, on his own, provide for his daughter. That he was a better man than Adam: more a real man.
Adam’s family had very much less money than Miranda’s but always made him feel that he need do nothing to make money, nothing that would interfere with his music. He could never be entirely without guilt for that, a guilt that changed its tone as he aged, as he began to understand his father’s thoughtful kindness at keeping from him the details of what he had to do to make the money. And sitting on the bench beside her, he doesn’t say, But you see your having more money means you can live in the Via Margutta while I live in the Via della Reginella, because he knows she would actually prefer living where he lives. And he knows she has more money than her husband because Valerie has told him. But what he doesn’t know is if she understands that her money comes not from her father, but from her mother, that gentle woman who would not have known how to say the first word about it. So he decides to speak of money in a different way.
“Even the young now believe money is important. They think about it in a way we never did.”
“I know that it’s important to them, but I don’t know in what way. And perhaps I don’t think about it as much as I should. I know that we have enough money. A house we like very much. A small cabin on a lake. Our sons have gone through college. If they want more education, it can be made to happen. And yet, for the first time: I would like more money. But I don’t know what for. More clothes than I can wear, more houses than I can live in, more food than I can eat?”
“More time, perhaps. Fewer hours working.”
“Time is money, right. I don’t like saying that, but it’s the truth. Then I ask myself: Time for what?”
“To be still. To go where you want when you want. Not to have to be fatigued.”
“Are you tired of your work, Adam?”
“Yes, I suppose, and yet I think it’s quite important, and I think I’m good at it. It frightens me that, in a generation, the music that I love, that I have lived so much of my life for, will almost disappear. It was considered a necessary acquisition: people, ordinary people, had pianos in their living rooms. Everyone took music lessons, even if they were doing it only to be perceived as doing it, to be thought of as cultured, worthy to be taken into the middle class. Now almost no one thinks it