The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [9]
No one has the courage, the will, the impulse, the energy, to contradict her. For one thing, she is just too old.
At the same moment, Adam and Miranda grasp the tone of Valerie’s life. Between them stretches out a cord of simultaneous understanding. They are attached by a shared sympathy. For Valerie, the victim of a woman who never once considered that her gestures might be overlarge, who sees destruction as inevitable, unworthy of comment, certainly of surprise.
“And so, as I was saying, before I was interrupted by my son making a point beside the point, after the war, the first war, I mean, with Italy in disarray, my father, who was a physician, he treated many of Rome’s first families, he was a very great ophthalmologist, my father decided I should go to America for my education. I came back home in 1932. Mussolini had come to power. I was twenty years old. Still something of a flapper. Famous for my legs.”
She crosses and uncrosses her legs, thinking them, perhaps, still fetching. But Miranda can only be worried by them; to her they suggest nothing but potential fractures.
“I married Giancarlo’s father the next year. He was a press attaché for Mussolini. Very idealistic. He’d been a poor boy, and he saw how Mussolini had made his life better. People like to forget how bad most people’s lives were before Fascism, how badly things were run, and how much better it was for Italy to have a strong leader. You know, Mussolini came to power as a socialist.”
Miranda feels a half-dollar-sized pain in the back of her skull. She knows that it is rage. She believes in the concept of evil, though not being metaphysically inclined in the least, she does not know or feel the impulse to name its source. But the old woman, with her hooded eyes, her flat feet in their canvas shoes, her blade-thin crossed ankles, seems to her, if not evil, at least to be speaking evil words.
Valerie is passing crackers with a thin layer of pâté on each, and what Adam thinks must be capers, although they are the size of large pearls, bigger than any capers he has ever seen. Their bitterness is pleasing, and cuts satisfyingly through the meaty richness of the pâté, the dryness of the crackers. He wonders if, after all these years, Miranda will have changed enough to be able to keep silence in the face of the old lady’s words. If not, she will soon be saying something that will make a disaster of the evening, that will turn the room into a wreck.
Miranda is biting slowly at her cracker. She is saying nothing.
But the old woman wants something, Adam knows. She taps her cane. Valerie brings her a glass of water. Adam knows this is not what she wants; she wants something else. Discord: her thirst for it is much much stronger than her desire for the water that she demands, as if she were signaling a servant, wordlessly. Her spiteful mouth, blind seeming too because of the hooded eyes, is hungry; the dry lips are licked with relish for what she thinks she can make happen soon.
“When the Americans came, my husband was imprisoned. Twice. Once for three months, right here in Regina Coeli prison. Six months here, then nearly a year in the South. It was dreadfully unfair. My husband was punished for doing what he believed to help his country. I moved heaven and earth to have him released. I wrote to the pope. Finally, because of me, or because of my father, who had made the pope’s eyeglasses personally, my husband was released.”
“And afterward?” Miranda asks, engaged, despite her determination not to be.
“He became a lawyer. He was through with politics.”
Adam sees fear flicker in Valerie’s eyes. He remembers that the apartment belongs to her mother-in-law. That Giancarlo doesn’t have a job. Valerie confessed, just yesterday, that he’d been hospitalized for depression. That she