The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [91]
She sticks her tongue out at him. But she’s delighted that her scruples were shared by Rose, her beloved ghost.
“My father and I would visit the churches and let her walk the streets, talking to people, drinking her endless espressi. I would watch my father pray and think: My father is a good man. My father has the ear for goodness. And I knew that I did not.”
What he doesn’t tell her: how Beverly, in her last madness, became obsessed with a vision of the Holy Ghost and the saints, obsessed with Messiaen, convincing herself she was his unacknowledged daughter, making Adam’s father take her to Lourdes (he never told Adam a thing about it, only that he thought Beverly had a hard time). She kept hoping Adam’s father would join her in her mad vision; she wanted him to go with her to Latin Masses at an ultratraditionalist church, but he wouldn’t. Adam found it all sickening and frightening. And the thought of prayer, after that, sickened and frightened him.
“If there is a God,” he says, “it is the God of music. If there’s a life after death, it will be, I think, some kind of music.”
“I think it will be nothing or I will be with everyone I love.”
The door bangs open and a tall muscular man, cameras dripping from his neck like heavy vines, walks up and down, around and around, snapping pictures.
“Aren’t you not supposed to do that?” Miranda says. “This is where I’d like a police state.”
The man is flipping open several guidebooks, handing them to his companion, a slender, languid, unfresh-looking bottle brunette, whose long thin feet look tired in their platform espadrilles. He keeps telling her to look at things, pointing to pages in the books, pointing to the dome, the arches, the stones on the floor. She sits down and puts on her sunglasses. He leaves her, and they can hear his boots clomping on the stones of the cloister next door; they hear the swish swish of his camera lens.
His companion sits with her eyes closed. She has taken off her sunglasses.
He comes back into the chapel, nearly pulling her into the cloister, insisting that they make their way downstairs to the crypt.
“Tell me their story,” Adam says.
“Oh, that’s easy,” says Miranda. “He’s a professor of entomology at Tübingen. He met her on an expedition studying beetles in Latvia. He got drunk one night and let his colleagues take him to a brothel. She had the bad luck to draw him. He woke up beside her, in love, and said he would marry her and bring her to Germany. Of course she took him up on it, as she’d been sold into sexual slavery in the brothel as a twelve-year-old. But now, she’s thinking of going back to the brothel; she thinks it might be preferable to his endless enthusiasm, his endless attempts to educate her. It will break his heart, but in the end, he’ll find a graduate student to console him.”
They hear the man shouting in German words that Miranda thinks mean “marvelous” or “a marvel.” The woman says nothing.
“I hate to leave this place to them,” Miranda says. “I’d like to protect it from them.”
“I’m sure it’s been through worse. Though poor Borromini did kill himself here. Not right in this place, but here in Rome.”
“Maybe it was types like this guy who drove him to it.”
Immediately she is horrified at herself. What has she just said? It’s not a good idea to make jokes about suicide to the husband of a suicide.
She doesn’t know if he’s pretending that he hadn’t heard, but he says nothing, leans his head back, opens and closes his eyes.
“A dream of whiteness,” he says.
“Yes,