The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [81]
He eats most of his meals with people who make jokes about musical figures. “What’s half a bottle of Four Roses? A diminished fifth.” Some of them ask and then forget and ask again, “Why are you wearing that black armband on your jacket? Did someone die?” And he thinks this continued questioning must be aggressive; if it weren’t, they would be afraid to ask him in case someone in his family had really died. He knows this subtle aggression reflects an appetite for perversity in his semifriend Ronald, who is in love with Shostakovich.
On January 10 of 1969, Beverly Marshall, a piano student a year behind him, makes a suicide attempt in the practice room beside his. Adam barely knows her; he has noticed that she waits for him often outside his practice room, seems to want his attention in a way that makes him uncomfortable. He’s surprised that although they barely know each other she always wants to speak to him of her abiding sadness. When he hears what sounds like a fall, he knocks on her door, turns the handle, finds it locked, becomes alarmed, and persuades the janitor to open the door with one of the hundred keys that hang from a ring he carries on a chain attached to his thick webbed-leather belt.
It is the first thing he has been reluctant to talk about to Miranda.
As she is reluctant to tell him, or to remind him, that this summer she will go with her friend Fatima to Pakistan to work in her father’s clinic.
When she shows him her airline ticket, she can see that he is struggling: of course she must go, of course they had agreed on it more than a year ago, but she sees a flare of panic in his eyes, as if someone had lit a match inside his skull. He is afraid to be without her.
She is afraid of his being without her, but she knows it would be wrong to say that she is afraid of being without him.
But when she gets to Pakistan she is afraid, often afraid, at the sight of blood and hunger and too early death. She isn’t good at dealing with the sick, the dying; and Fatima’s father, a kind man, suggests that perhaps she’d prefer going into villages, teaching women about nutrition, which she does succeed at moderately. Back at the clinic, she listens to the staff’s complaints about disorganization, and there she succeeds, not just moderately, but brilliantly, at organizing the records, the rotas, at creating systems for ordering medicines and apportioning tasks. But she can’t love herself for this; she would love herself more if she were better at dealing with the sick and the dying. She determines that she will work on her nature; she will make herself better; this is the important work in the world and she must make herself take part in it.
She returns to Wellesley knowing that she is happier in the lab than at the bedsides of the dying, but she will not allow herself to make decisions based on accidents of happiness. All that fall, and into the winter, Adam can’t shake a cold, and finally, after they come back from Christmas vacation, he goes to the health service and is diagnosed with mono. He is sent to the infirmary, and then sent home.
At first, all during March and the beginning of April, she goes back to Hastings on the weekends, to help with nursing him, to keep him company. And then the world is different: Nixon invades Cambodia. She phones and speaks to Adam, who is so sleepy, he says, just so sleepy, but she also talks to Rose, who says she must stay in Boston, she must be involved in the demonstrations: Adam will be fine; he has plenty of people here to look after him. She is having to learn words like Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge and who Sianouk is and who is the hero and who is the villain and who is to blame and what is the role of the North Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Russians. And how to absorb, how to understand the shock of Kent State: the National Guard is shooting students, students like herself; the world has gone mad, and in order not to go mad she must be with people like herself, devoted to acknowledging the madness. But Adam is, literally, sleeping through it, sleeping