The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [77]
Rose and Miranda don’t like to argue with each other. Does Rose understand that Miranda is moving away from her son? It is possible that even Miranda doesn’t understand it.
All spring, Adam prepares Brahms’s Seven Fantasies; in May, he will enter a competition. His principal teacher, Madame Rostavska, and Henry Levi, in consultation, decide that this is a good choice for him. It avoids the expected competition choice: it is not a virtuotistic piece, but it will show off Adam’s talents, his ability to range among moods and tones, his gift for subtle, deep interpretation. If he is selected, he will study in Rome with Stuarto Roncalli. He is putting in more hours in the practice room than he has ever done. He listens to Henry Levi, to Madame Rostavska: he listens to everyone, everyone is telling him different things. Henry Levi says: You must concentrate on the transition between note and note. Every transition must be clean, crisp. You must honor the emptiness, the silences. He concentrates on no. 3: the Sturm und Drang Capriccio in G minor. He urges Adam to emphasize the stately processional aspect of the central section. Madame Rostavska is most concerned with no. 4: an intermezzo in E major. She reminds Adam that Brahms originally called this a nocturne; she urges him to imagine moonlit descending figures, the calm transformation that results in a serene end. He dreams the notes; he hears in his nightmares his teachers’ conflicting advice. Miranda brings him sandwiches and tea with lemon and honey; these are their suppers every night for the month of May.
When he plays for the judges, he feels he is outside his body. Miranda greets him backstage, and she sees that he is drenched with sweat. He tells her he thinks he’s never played worse: how could he have imagined he had a chance? How could he have imagined he had the right to play this piece by Brahms, so full of great themes, great feelings, when he is nothing but mediocre, no, less than mediocre. A total failure. An utter fraud.
But then it is announced: Adam is the winner. And Miranda insists that all her friends take time off from demonstrations and teach-ins and strategic arguments, and they take over a pizza parlor on the North Side and toast Adam with endless glasses of Peroni beer.
Through a Wellesley alumna, Miranda secures a job in Rome that will pay her almost nothing, with the Food and Agricultural Organization, which everyone calls FAO, pronounced “FOW.” She hopes to work on projects connected with the distribution of food in what is then being called the Third World. She lies to her parents, tells them she is living in a woman’s hostel. She suspects that her mother knows she’ll be living with Adam, and she encourages Miranda’s elaborate lies at the dinner table. In the hostel for girls only, she tells them, she will be watched over by nuns.
On the plane (it is her first time in Europe, but Adam has been with his mother twice; no one is left in Rome, but she still has family in Orvieto; all of Sal’s family is in America now), they are once more only Adam and Miranda, only Adam and Miranda to each other. “This is good, I think we needed this to get away,” they both say, and she is delighted by everything her eyes fall on. They play a game with the color of the walls: find your favorite wall today and pretend we work for my father’s paint company and we have to make names for paints. First-dawn blue, they say, sun-drenched sand. The trees seem older to her; she sets herself the task of learning their names.
Life is easy for them in the apartment owned by friends of the Levis, where she is for the first time a housewife. Although they never eat at home, except for breakfast; two doors from where they live in the Nomentana is a trattoria. The owner, who finds them charming, serves them meals for a dollar apiece.