The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [87]
“He did very well. Made a fortune in the dot-com bubble, whatever that is. Lives with an ex-priest in the Napa Valley. They have a vineyard.”
“Why were you talking about John?”
“Well, on family holidays John and I would sit together and laugh and laugh and my mother would start to get nervous, and John’s mother, who was really as mean as a snake, would separate us. She would say of our laughter, ‘This will end in tears, mark my words.’ Just this year, John said to me: ‘It was the first time I thought: Maybe grown-ups don’t always know what they’re talking about. Why do they think laughter will end in tears? Maybe it will end in laughter?’ ”
“What if the satyr parents dance with their baby and then go home for a nice meal and put him to bed and then get into bed themselves and make love and fall happily into a healthy sleep?”
“And the kid gets two eight hundreds on his SATs and gets a scholarship to Harvard.”
“There’s something in us that doesn’t want it to turn out that way,” Adam says.
“What I most fear as a parent and a human being is that disaster will occur and I’ll be called upon to do something heroic and I will fail.”
“Once I was with my son in New York and we were surrounded by a group of boys and they demanded my wallet. I just gave it to them. They took it and ran off and my son ran after them. He was only twelve. I stood there, frozen. He couldn’t catch up with them, thank God, but he came back, defeated and despising me. And I despised myself. He said, ‘I had to do something. You didn’t even try.’ ”
She feels a little thrill of alarm. A son. That’s right: he had a son. His child by Beverly. It’s the first time he has mentioned him. She guesses that his history has not been happy. Of all fates, she has always believed the worst is to feel that you have failed your child. Even though she has no evidence to support her, she feels she must reassure him, because you must always reassure parents that whatever they did, it was the best, at that moment, they could have done.
“You were right to do as you did,” she says.
“It was the beginning of my son’s conviction that he couldn’t depend on me. He was, in a way, right. I can’t defend myself or anyone. I have never been in a fight. Never. When I was young I had to be careful of my hands. Suppose people I loved died because I couldn’t use my hands to save them. My precious hands. Musicians’ precious hands.”
She thinks of Yonatan, who fought in the ’67 War. The thought makes her want to protect Adam.
“But, you see, that hasn’t happened.”
“Vitae laudae.”
“Something like that.”
“Will you tell your cousin John I asked for him? And tell him that I hope he’s right.”
“Right?”
“That it won’t end in tears.”
Wednesday, October 24
THE PANTHEON
“The Smell of Drains”
She is, she tells him, feeling guilty about avoiding the great classical sites. The Colosseum. The Forum.
“I never know what I’m supposed to be looking at and looking for,” she says. “I always feel I’m pretending to be seeing something I don’t see, something that I’m sure isn’t there and other people seem to believe is there. To know is there. I go into a kind of trance. I pretend I’m seeing things I don’t see. And I end up saying things like ‘Oh, yes, the scale is massive.’ And then I want to leave. Also I keep expecting Victor Mature to be appearing from behind a column. There’s a part of me that doesn’t believe it’s real, that it was just made up for some heroic scene in a movie I wouldn’t dream of going to anymore.”
“Well, what we’ll do is look at the Pantheon. But only from the outside, the inside’s been destroyed, turned into a Christian church. And we’ll go at night, when the massiveness isn’t somehow quite so threatening.”
“They insisted on the massive, didn’t they? They had no ambivalence about the desirability of power.”
“None, absolutely none. Not being an imperial Roman, I wonder if I might just suggest that I take you to dinner. There’s a restaurant by the Pantheon that has wonderful pasta con vongole. That is, if you eat clams.”