The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [75]
Adam does, in the end, go with Miranda to the march on the Pentagon. He sits with her on the bus, but what he does at the march isn’t enough for her and they both know it. He’s uncomfortable; she knows he’s worried about his hands. He is too shy to shout out slogans and can’t bring himself to walk in silence with his two middle fingers formed into a V. He knows that she’s grateful to him for going. He knows, too, that for the first time she considers the possibility that she might wish he were other than he is.
• • •
During spring break 1968, Adam and Miranda visit Rob on the farm in Manitoba. The bus trip takes them two days; they are filthy and tired when they arrive in Winnipeg, picked up by Rob in a battered truck, and filthy as they are. He lives on a commune; they are shocked at how ramshackle everything is, how hard everyone works, how humorless the people are. No sign of spring has come; the snow melts halfheartedly in puddles that half reflect the empty trees. The people with whom Rob lives, many of them draft evaders, are too exhausted to care about music or poetry; they seem too worn out even for ideas. Rob is affectionate, but he speaks to Adam and Miranda as if he were speaking to slow, though good-hearted, children. She sees that he thinks, like her father, that he knows more than she will ever know. She feels around the edges of his love a flickering of contempt, which he tries to stifle, but she senses that what has always been between them is now like a page saved from the fire, but nonetheless singed.
On the bus ride home, she weeps in Adam’s arms, and he consoles her, saying, Rob is tired, he’s overworked, he’s still in shock, he’ll come around, he loves you. Thinking of his feelings for his sister, Jo. Unconditional love. The older for the younger. The stronger for the weaker. My sister. My brother. Nothing, he believes, can change that. Inherited from Rose the primitive conviction: blood is thicker than water.
This belief makes him different, he knows, from his fellow serious musicians. His place in the family headed by Rose and Sal. His love for his family. His easy breathing of the family air. Who don’t know exactly what he does all day, but believe his grandfather when he says, “It’s in the blood.” What blood? Adam wonders. Can what I feel for this music have to do with blood? And yet, of course, he knows it does; his blood makes his fingers move, makes his head swoon and his heart sing. Yes, of course, it is a thing of blood. As is his love for Miranda, which he cannot talk of to his friends, who seem never to have breathed ordinary human air, only some other element, not oxygen enriched, or perhaps superenriched: the air of music. They don’t understand the ordinary world, the give-and-take of ties that are called familial affection. Nor do they understand what he has for Miranda, this love, necessary, automatic as breathing, natural as swimming in the sea.
They don’t have girlfriends, or they have too many girlfriends because girls like throwing themselves at musicians, thinking they are making themselves a place in the world of high culture. Or they have difficult girlfriends, or they discover that it is men they love, and the musicians who are girls weep and are exhausted because the boys don’t understand them and they are exhausted from their incomprehension, and then the boys become more fractious, trying to handle their own