The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [79]
Except when they are in bed, to sleep or to make love, they are hardly ever indoors. All summer she reads almost nothing. They walk the streets from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. She asks him: Do you ever want to go to church. And he says no and blushes. So they do not enter a single church. Except to hear music: Palestrina, Monteverdi, sung in the places they were meant to be sung, part of something they were meant to be part of, not cut off, no longer museum pieces, but connected to something still alive. But he will not kneel and stand when the others kneel and stand, and he refuses to take communion.
Adam says he knows that his not going to communion would make his father sad. He tells her that it is Sal who has the religious life, Sal who is saddened that Adam seems uninterested. Rose knows why: Adam will not take communion because he knows that he is understood to be in a state of mortal sin on account of being Miranda’s lover. Since the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Catholic church’s stance against birth control, Rose herself has not entered a Catholic church. Sal is an usher at Mass on Sundays and often a communicant at Mass during the week. Each year he makes a retreat for five days with the Redemptorist Fathers, someplace upstate; no one ever questions him, and he says nothing to anyone about his religious life. Which Adam knows is serious, extensive, because of the books that line his shelves. John of the Cross. Meister Eckehart. Julian of Norwich. It seems not to come between his parents, Rose’s rage at the church, Sal’s devotion to it. Adam doesn’t understand why it doesn’t come between them, but the fact that it does not raises in him an enormous pride, as if his parents were great players in a long, demanding, but intensely private game.
Miranda knows that she and Adam are only playing house, but why not, she thinks, why not enjoy it? When they meet for dinner, tired after work, tired for the first time as adults are tired, she allows herself to be distracted as well by this new kind of adult exhaustion. And distracted by her job, a job involving the analysis of data, a task that, to her surprise, in its cool comfort, she enjoys. At her job she meets people from all over the world; she is the youngest, they indulge her, they are amused by her, but, at the same time, admiring her facility, they take her seriously. A competence with numbers, with what is called data, is something she didn’t know she had. She believes she is learning about the world. She likes her job; she likes the color of the stones and the sounds of the fountains; she likes their endless walks, though she never remembers for long what it is they saw. Only the color of the stones, the sounds of the fountains.
Adam feels himself being stretched, and yet relaxed, closer to becoming the kind of musician it is his life’s work to be. He does not spend the time in the practice rooms that he did in America. But none of his Italian friends do. They do not seem distorted, misshapen, his new Italian musical friends. They may be mad, he tells Miranda, but they’re not neurotic. I think it’s because serious music isn’t an oddity here, something people only pretend to think is important. It’s more ordinary, and it makes them much more