The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [71]
“I need to let my eye fall on you sometimes when I’m playing and not be worrying that you’re judging every nuance, every pressure of the pedal, every tempo of every phrase. I live with being judged, all the time, I’m judged and judged and judged. I need you to be in a place away from it all.”
She is ennobled by his words; he’s asking something of her, something womanly, saintly, asking her to give something up (a kind of knowledge), to be willing to empty herself of something she doesn’t even yet possess: to enhance her own emptiness. (She thinks of the word “womb,” which she prefers to “uterus”; her womb is empty, but only temporarily, waiting for his child.) Her emptiness will help him give birth to his own greatness. He wants her to be not music. He wants the blankness, a blank slate, no, a blank shoreline, dry firm sand where he can set his foot and feel safe.
She takes her model from Sylvia Levi, who enjoyed her work as phlebotomist, enjoyed, as she said, colleagues who didn’t know Bach from boogie-woogie, and yes she missed her job when they agreed that Henry was earning enough money and didn’t need her salary, what he needed was her attention, that she should be able to listen to him. Like that dog, she said, cocking her head in imitation of the RCA Victor dog in front of the gramophone. What he wants is for me to listen and respond, without musical training, without criticism, just listen, and make a place where he can eat and sleep and entertain his friends in comfort and of course after all these years of listening I have learned enough so that I know something about what he does but not so much so that he has to be afraid. They are so afraid these men who have given themselves to music. What they do is so demanding, in a way so dangerous, that it is our place, as their women, to make a safe harbor. To make the harbor safe. Miranda believes it is an honorable role and the one to which she has especially been called: the woman behind, beside, the great man. Enabling, rather than possessing, greatness.
Miranda never asked Sylvia Is this why you never had children? because she would then have to say, I will give up a great deal, but that I will not give up. She and Adam talk about their children; he will teach them music; she will teach them to swim, and to know the names of trees and the varieties of birds. Which she was taught by her father. Who taught her brother as well. Her brother to whom her father now vows he will never again speak. The three of them sharing binoculars. Her father whispering: Listen. Or pointing: Just there.
It is in some ways a mistake, his keeping her away from the world of his music. Because it takes up most of his time, and all the people he knows use their time in the same way, but she is using her time differently, meeting people very different from anyone he knows or has known. Almost immediately, she is taken up by people she likes on campus who tell her that to resist the war is the most important thing, and she knows they’re right, because it’s life and death they are talking about, real lives, real death. What is at stake is more important than anything that has come into her sights before.
And then there is Rob, her brother, who has left home, who has mortified his father, terrified his mother. He is now in Canada, in some town they have never heard of, somewhere in Manitoba. And he cannot come home.
Her brother resisting, evading, or, in her father’s words, dodging the draft.
Her brother, running for his life.
Her father shouting. Her father, insulting, accusing. “We risked our lives to make the world safe for little punks like you who think your lives are too good to risk for the idea of freedom.”
And her mother wringing her hands. “Oh stop Bill oh don’t.”
And her brother, his hair golden in the sun that pours through the windows that June day, despite her mother’s trying to keep the damaging light out. Not answering, his jaw clenched, saying, “I know you’ll never understand.”
But Miranda