The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [8]
“You’re blonde,” he says, holding his hand out to her.
“Among other things,” she says. So her first words to him are harsh. Is it that she wants to strike a blow? It’s not a good beginning. But no beginning would have been good.
Adam blushes. She remembers now how easily he colored. It was meant to be genetic, she had learned. There was no helping it; it was like perfect pitch, which he had also been born with. He hated it, that because he blushed so easily his inner life was readily visible. She had suffered with him for it. She had loved him for it, too.
He sees that she has kept her freshness. She has not diminished. She is lovely still. He wonders if she thinks him old. If she’s surprised that he’s no longer thin. What I said was stupid, he thinks, and he hates the loop of time that will not allow him to unsay.
Valerie hands him prosecco.
The old lady crosses her birdy legs.
• • •
“We are only the five of us,” she says, “and only I am a stranger to you two. Please understand that I have been apprised of everything in your past. Also understand that I was educated in America. Rosemary Hall. Vassar. You read a novel called The Group by Mary McCarthy? I was there then. A stupid novel, still it got the flavor of the times. I mean to say that I believe, above all, in plain speech. It is a waste of time pretending this is an ordinary evening. You should learn about one another’s lives, what has happened to you. I mean, of course, Adam and Miranda. Because to Valerie and Giancarlo nothing of importance has happened, or will happen. Then you will see if you have interest in knowing each other once again.”
Her distressingly thin legs, her feet, fish flat in canvas shoes, her hands with their resplendent rings, her eyes, invisible behind dark glasses, further hidden by a sun shade—something Miranda had seen women wearing in America when they play tennis—render this woman if not un-, then extra-human. Oracular. Imperious. Someone to be obeyed.
“To break the ice, as you Americans say, I will tell you about my life. It has been very interesting to anyone intelligent enough to be interested in what really happened to the world in the twentieth century. You understand that I am ninety-five years old, but my mind is perfect. I prefer that my body disintegrate before my mind, and this is happening, but I am ready for that, it is all right.
“I was born just before the First World War, at the end of the Old World. You are Americans, and so history is to you an abstraction.”
“Mama, that’s a bit of a generalization, wouldn’t you say,” Giancarlo says, barely audibly. Miranda realizes it’s the first word she’s heard him say in fifteen years. Giancarlo is very quiet. Reticent son of a voluble mother. Perhaps that’s why he married Valerie. For her chatter. For some reason she knows the Italian word for chatter. Chiacchiere. A good onomatopoeia. Valerie’s chattering, the mother’s chattering, are like a thorny maze she must walk through, abrading her skin, catching the edges of her clothing. But where must she get through to? To an understanding of what she is to do. With Adam.
He is still beautiful, she thinks. He is the first man of whom I used the word “beautiful.” Still apt.
Adam looks at her, ascertaining the shape of her strong legs beneath the silk of her long skirt. I always thought she was stronger than I, he thinks, but that last day when she wept and wept without making a sound, I thought I’d broken her heart. I could do nothing else. No other path was open to me. I believed that at the time. What good can it do to question it now? I should not have come. But of the mistakes I’ve made, agreeing to see her again is not a great one. Nothing will come of it, nothing will lead from it. Except, perhaps, the satisfaction of a curiosity. And the reassurance: she was not destroyed. I did not destroy her. Life went on. The harm I did was not so great, was covered over by events. Time. Good fortune. Her own gifts. Her strength.
“Only a small mind is afraid of generalization, my son,” says Giancarlo