The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [72]
Her brother, five years older, looked at adoringly, although they do not inhabit the same world. Her brother who rode her on the handlebars of his bicycle and gave her piggyback rides and took her camping, just the two of them, cooking their meals on the Primus stove. Her brother, quiet, practical, his father’s son, the two of them in the garage, sawing, painting, hammering, her brother, engineering student at Cornell, her brother with the lovely girls and their stiff hair and their swishing skirts and their high sharp scents driving away in the convertible he saved and saved for … now her brother has left home, can’t return, and her father says, “And don’t think of coming back to this house, you’ve burned your bridges.” Her mother says nothing, but her lips thin into an invisible line of paralyzed grief. And Miranda cannot give her mother sympathy because she won’t stand up to her husband on her son’s behalf. But Miranda will stand up to her father, so every dinner is a fight, every night’s peace is destroyed, and Rob is somewhere in Manitoba, homesteading, he says, and she will visit him in the summer if she can save the money, and of course she will. She will go with Adam; she will be sure she does.
By 1967 the weather has changed; it is no longer early spring; it is high noon; the sun falls like a blade on everything, shedding its overclear light. Everything is as clear as it can be. Or it is entirely invisible, entirely incomprehensible to sight and understanding. So if it is not high noon it is black midnight; it is the land of death and darkness or it is the land of unprecedented hope and transformation. But it is not the land of their birth.
Now Miranda’s brother has left home, as it turns out never to return from a place they all had only thought of as prairie, featureless on a map whose details they had always believed were of no importance to them. So with all this happening to her family, to the world, how can she think anything is as important as the war, the source of unnameable horrors and one grief she can all too familiarly name. How can she believe it matters if she studies French or Russian. She would like to take a course on seventeenth-century poetry, but she will not allow herself. She will study economics, history, biology. She will be premed; she will become a doctor and serve the poor: in rural Appalachia, in Harlem, or in Africa or India, she’s not yet sure.
But what is important to Adam in September of 1967? He understands that Miranda is right; nothing is more important than stopping the machine of death. On the other hand, or at the same time, his allegiance is to the great music of the past, and he must honor that allegiance by attending to the demands of the music, which requires many many hours a day of practice. Playing and replaying the same notes, the same phrases, trying to master the Hammerklavier, agonizing over fingering as Miranda is agonizing over napalmed children and the destruction of the land and culture of Vietnam. He believes Henry Levi (shouldn’t he know best, given his history?). When Adam talked to him about his guilt for not being more involved in Miranda’s antiwar activities, he had said:
“Wars have always happened and human beings have always done hideous things to one another, more hideous than you can imagine. And above all, or underneath it all, this music goes on, must go on. The question must be not only why do we live but what do we live for? And one of the most important answers, Adam, you must believe me about this, is for beauty. For beauty whose greatness goes on and on.
“Don’t think, Adam, that I don’t question all this. That I don’t sometimes think I’m misusing or wasting my life. But when I begin