The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [97]
“What a ridiculous thing to do,” Miranda says. “Why would anyone think that was interesting or amusing? Worth paying money for?”
“I have great news,” Adam says, as if he hasn’t heard what Miranda has just said, or the tone in which she said it. “I’ve got us tickets for the Galleria Borghese.”
“Without asking if that’s what I wanted to do?”
She is pleased and not pleased by his dashed look. A taste, a delicious remembrance, of her old power. The quick slice, the quick blow, she always had a feel for it. But in the end it was he who delivered the blow that was, if not mortal, then nearly. It had not been quick and it had not been over quickly, as her blows were. But unlike her, he hadn’t meant to hurt. After all these years, she is still sure of that.
“I’m sorry … I just thought …”
“No, Adam, that’s just it. You didn’t think. You just went ahead. As it happens, I’m not feeling well today. My head aches and I’m tired. I ate and drank too much last night and I slept badly. The last thing I want to do is go to a museum and push my way through a crowd of retired Americans and Germans looking like oxen struck by a mallet, longing to be back home so they can use their own toilets.”
“I’ll make a deal with you.” She hears the old, patient, conciliating voice. She is determined to resist the pull of its comfort. “We’ll just look at three things. Three Bernini sculptures. We can leave as soon as you like after that.”
She would like very much to childishly refuse. But she knows there’s a chance that she’ll regret it later. So they cross the piazza, navigate the death-defying street beside the church, and climb the stairs into the park. She hears herself making the sighing noise her boys make when she asks them to help her to carry groceries.
They are at the opposite end of the park, and she walks beside him sullenly. When they get to the Galleria, she sees that the line for collecting their tickets is endless. Then there is another for required checking of all bags, and a third to present their tickets to enter the museum.
“This is absurd,” she says. “Can it really be true about the Italians having no talent for organization? Maybe Mussolini was right; maybe they should give up their pasta.”
“On the other hand,” he says, pointing to the view from the balcony, the long avenue of trees, the statues flanking.
“There is no other hand,” she says. “Let’s try to get to the front of the line so we don’t have to wait another half hour to be let in.”
The guard opens the doors and they are shown to the first room, each surface covered, embellished. What she might have thought of another day as richness strikes her now as assault.
“My head aches so,” she says. “This is not a good room for me right now.”
“Just do what you can,” he says, taking her elbow, steering her past the monumental heads, the allegorical walls and floors. They stop before Bernini’s David.
This David is not young, not boyish, not in the slightest delicate. He is tall, well muscled, anything but innocent, adamantly unpoetic. Miranda’s eyes go to his mouth, the lips rendered invisible by resolve; this is a mouth not used for love or speech or the taking in of food; it is a mouth that finds its purpose in one thing only. Resolve. Resolve to beat the odds. No one can stop the damage he will do, gripping the slingshot, his body torqued by the determination to do harm.
From her past, a memory swims up. Of a clenched mouth. That tightness. The resolve against all impulse. She remembers: it was her own mouth. And she remembers that her mouth went like that because someone had put a hand against it, had put a hand before her mouth to silence her. And she had acceded to the silencing. But the will, her will, had not succumbed.
She knows very well whose hand it was. Rose’s hand. The hand of Adam’s mother.
Out of her mind, beside herself. The phrases overused had become real. She felt herself watching herself from another place, a place of wildness where any words or actions were allowed. With Adam, she had been silent. Her vanity