The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [76]
On the Greyhound bus on the way home from Manitoba their skin turns livid in the bad false light. Adam is ashamed when his eyes fall on his pale hands, remembering the look of them beside Rob’s: callused, bandaged, chapped. Capable hands. The capable, he knows, are always contemptuous of those whom they consider the merely accomplished. Rob didn’t used to be contemptuous of him. But Adam knows that he is now.
“My brother’s changed,” Miranda says. “He’s become a bitter person.”
Adam knows that Miranda is right. Her brother is bitter about his country and his family. Bitterness is eating him away. There is a core that is there, steely, undiminished. It has not been reduced; rather it has hardened. He is himself, but harder. Adam allows Miranda to weep in his arms. His heart is broken for her; she has suffered a loss that has something to do with blood. He had always admired Rob and somehow feeling that Rob liked him, approved of him for his sister, made him feel more valuable; it was good to be valued in the world of men like Rob.
Normal men.
He is glad to be comforting Miranda. It’s so rare nowadays that she needs anything from him. His need of her is so obvious, so constant, everyone acknowledges it: that he needs Miranda and he always will need her because people with musical gifts like his need other people in the world to get them through. Because what they do is so difficult, so impossible. Requires so many hours of practice: hours behind closed doors, the hands, the back, put in unnatural positions, positions which must be held, repeated, held. Such heroic concentration. All of it taking its toll on physical and mental health: these breakdowns must be warded off, kept back by a vigilance that cannot come from the musician himself: he hasn’t the time for it, the mental space. But without it: the music will be lost to the world, or its quality diminished beyond recognition, even beyond worth.
The war escalates; the numbers of the dead pile up and up, the cities burn up, and Miranda has to work harder, pull her mind away from what she is really thinking about to concentrate on his question: should I prepare the Schumann sonata or the Beethoven bagatelles? He says he doesn’t want her opinion as a trained musician; he just wants her as a sounding board. For the first time, she feels, by this task, rendered inanimate; for the first time, she isn’t sure she likes it. Being a sounding board. It occurs to her that a sounding board is not a person but a thing. Unliving. Unalive.
Just as Adam has chosen the Schumann over the Beethoven, Martin Luther King Jr. is shot. Dr. King, whom Miranda continued to revere although some of her friends grew contemptuous of him and his insistence on nonviolence. As Rob has become contemptuous. Contempt is in the air. It is a space at the front of the shelf now, easily reached for, easily available. And then Robert Kennedy is shot, shot in a hotel kitchen by someone with a name and an origin that seem bizarre. How can it be: another violent death, another Kennedy cut down by violence? How ridiculous they now seem: the endless heated arguments: Do you support McCarthy or Kennedy? When anyone can be so easily, so absurdly, cut down. She runs to Rose, and they weep in the kitchen because they saw him, they saw him up close, and they did not see Dr. King, and Bobby is the second brother to be killed, but they worry: is that saying something wrong, something bad about them? Rose still believes one must vote for Hubert Humphrey, she is working for him at Democratic campaign headquarters; Miranda says, No, I won