Coming Ashore

  coming ashore

  catherine gildiner

  ecw press

  To Michael

  All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

  — Ralph Waldo Emerson

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Thirteen years have passed since I wrote my first memoir, Too Close to the Falls, which covered my life from the age of four to thirteen. I grew up in the small town of Lewiston, New York, in the Eisenhower conformist years of the 1950s. I was the only child of older parents and was, as my mother said, “not the child theyexpected.” At age of two I began climbing trees, and by age three I was going solo to the general store and doing imitations of Ed Sullivan for money.

  Fortunately in 1948, the year I was born, there were no psychological labels for such singular and on occasion wild behaviour, so I was simply called “busy, bossy and Irish.” By the time I was four, my mother appealed to the pediatrician for help, saying that I was “born eccentric.” He said I needed to work full-time. Thus, before I went to kindergarten, I began my job in my father’s drugstore in Niagara Falls, working from 5:30 in the morning until 10:00 in the evening. I worked with a black delivery car driver named Roy. He drove and I read the map, and together we delivered drugs throughout the Niagara Frontier. It was a wonderful and secure childhood. After all, when you deliver narcotics, people are happy to see you. No one had more fun than Roy and me as we trudged through the snow, dining in taverns and delivering our prescriptions to the rich and poor alike, since illness does not discriminate.

  The second volume of my memoirs, After the Falls, covers the 1960s. It begins after my life took an abrupt turn at the age of thirteen. Roy left and the drugstore in Niagara Falls was sold because urban planner Robert Moses rerouted traffic out of the downtown core and the inner city died a quick death. My family moved to a Buffalo suburb where I would never again know everyone in town, nor would they know me. Our lives were rerouted again when I was fifteen, when my father was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

  While my family was falling apart, the ’60s were in full swing and America was also undergoing its own struggles. I was enmeshed in what was then called “heavy” political activity, and eventually the FBI investigated me for my role in “the movement” and my possible (but unfounded) involvement in a murder. Fortunately, I managed to procure a place at Oxford, which not only got me out of Ohio, but also out of the country.

  This volume, Coming Ashore, focuses on the late ’60s and early ’70s, chronicling my journey through three countries and from age twenty to twenty-seven. It saddens me to say that this is my last volume because as time goes on, other people enter my life and through no choice of their own get pulled into the narrative. (In this volume, I have used pseudonyms for most of the characters; however, for those who will eventually become my family, and I theirs, I have used their real names.) It is one thing to give an account of my own life in the subjective terms that a memoir necessitates, but it is quite another to describe the thoughts and feelings of those who travel with me. I feel I can only report on or interpret my own journey.

  Memory is such a tricky phenomenon that I want to take responsibility only for myself. I’ve accepted that memory is not ­reality. It does not give an accurate picture of the past, for no one can do that; every memory gets shifted through our unconscious needs. After running family therapy sessions for twenty-five years in my career as a psychologist, I learned that family members do not share memories; they share events. They have all taken the shards of the past and put them together into either a slightly skewed or drastically different picture. They see and interpret them through their own lens of need. When I did court work as a psychologist, it was interesting to me that people with drastically different interpretations or memories of the same event could all pass a lie-detector test. We all believe our own realities. As Walter Lippmann said, “We are all captives of the picture in our head — our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.”

  I will miss writing my memoirs. I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing my stories with you. I have thousands of letters and emails from readers telling me how much they liked the books. What was more important to me, however, was that so many people said that they shared my experiences, from thinking that the TV was talking to me at age four, to getting expelled from school, to beating up a bully and then paying the price. I was amazed by how many readers also swung on vines over a river. When I admitted to having been a poor judge of character, I received hundreds of letters reminding me that at least I got involved in social change and tried to make a difference. I will miss your support, and thanks for sharing your feelings. I guess we all think that the way we interpret the world is weird, or that we have made mistakes that no one else could ever have made, yet your comments have helped me to see that no matter what I have done or thought, I was never alone.

  Catherine McClure Gildiner

  January 2014

  coming ashore

  Part 1

  England

  CHAPTER 1

  hoisting the sails

  When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.

  — D.H. Lawrence

  You can get into a bad situation and have no idea how you got there. I’d done it many times, and I was barely out of my teenage years. One second you can think you’re helping humanity and the next you have to get out of the country.

  I’d been kicked out of grade schools, arrested at age thirteen, caused a three-alarm fire — all the normal things for an American girl. However, when the FBI turned up on my doorstep, flashing their identity cards and letting me know I was implicated in ­insurrection, drugs and murder, I realized this episode had trumped my other escapades by a long shot.

  The FBI coming knocking was just the last in a series of several shocks. The civil rights organization I had been in for years no longer wanted white people in the rank and file, so I was summarily kicked out. Laurie, the black poet I had been involved with, turned out to be married with children. Splits, our mutual friend in the movement, turned out to be a drug dealer and was killed behind a building at the University of Buffalo in what remained an unsolved crime.

  On Thanksgiving weekend in 1968, I was home visiting from Ohio University when the two agents arrived at my home in Buffalo, New York. Fortunately my mother was at a master bridge lesson, and my father, who was in his sixth year of a brain tumour, thought that the FBI men were selling Hoover vacuums.

  One FBI agent, who had a red flushed face, a houndstooth jacket and must have bathed in English Leather, carried legal-size boxes, which he plopped onto the kitchen table, then began leafing through their contents. Each letter I’d written to the poet was individually wrapped and sealed in a plastic cover. There were also mementos of our time together that Laurie must have kept such as playbills, which were carefully inscribed with the date and notes like cool spring evening — magical. I saw the beer coasters on which I’d written rhyming couplets when we were in bars. There was the tiny felt zebra I’d bought him when I was eighteen — I’d written interracial dating on its tag. I was surprised he’d saved it all.

  Each of these bags contained a cherished memory for me. There was a pile of bagged, broken dreams on my table. I looked at them bewildered. I wanted to light them as kindling
and have a bonfire in honour of my spectacular bad judgment. The profoundly sad part of it was I never saw the bad side of him so I couldn’t use it to hate him. All I could do was sit down beside the mountain of delusion in my kitchen and watch the FBI set up a recording machine that would chronicle my idiocy on a kelly-green record for posterity.

  The perspiring FBI man said in a befuddled tone, “All these letters are about books or poems or details of voters’ registration. Did you have any idea what these guys were up to?” The FBI sidekick had a good line that pretty well summed up my life to date: “You can either see the best in everyone or else you can miss the elephant in the room.” I hoped for the former but suspected it was the latter.

  When I told Leora, my best friend since junior high school, that the FBI had just turned up on my doorstep, she suggested that I get out of town, pointing out that when there are murders and drugs there are trials. I wouldn’t be leaving much behind: I was an English major along with thousands of the other hapless hayseeds planted at Ohio University and longing to be harvested. I had no idea how I’d become marooned in the breadbasket of America surrounded by people who had the linguistic parlance of Gomer Pyle. Leora reminded me that in my political zeal, or more likely my years of attachment to the wrong male, I had turned down a great opportunity. The previous year I had been offered a spot at Oxford. I wonder how many women turn down stellar offers for a man? Probably more than there are hayseeds in Ohio.

  This Oxford opportunity was, appropriately for the ’60s, drug related. I had too many essays to write in too short a time, so I did something I’d never done before — I bought a green pill for five dollars from a girl in my dormitory who had majored in fashion merchandising. She, in turn, had bought the pills from a clerk who worked in accessories at May Department Store in Cleveland. The pill, a shimmering accessory, was guaranteed to keep me awake to write a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  After ingesting this kick-ass army-green pellet of inspiration, I locked myself in my room for two days. During that time I began to believe that I was the serpent in Paradise Lost and that I had been unfairly demonized for merely delivering a message from God to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. (I got my five dollars’ worth on that one.) Instead of writing the paper, in a fit of hallucinatory self-righteousness I wrote a lengthy poem that answered God in the same rhyme that Milton used in his twelve books of Paradise Lost. I called it “Book Thirteen.” Once the pill wore off, I shed my serpentine skin, realizing it had been a psycho-pharmaceutically induced delusion. However, I handed in the paper anyway since I was going home for spring break.

  Ohio had buckets of football money and could afford to pluck big-name academics from the top schools, and my professor was a famous poetry critic who was on leave from Oxford. He was beguiled by “Book Thirteen,” the only poem I’d ever written before or since, and sponsored me to go to Oxford as a “promising poetry student.” I had declined his offer at the time, thinking that I was involved with the love of my life and in changing the world, both of which were far more delusional than believing I was a snake in the Garden of Eden.

  The FBI visit forced me to hoist my sails, and Leora set my direction. I was hoping to catch the trade winds for England. It was time to leave the country quickly and I needed to revisit the Oxford offer. This time I’d grab the apple, call the professor and tell him I’d changed my mind.

  CHAPTER 2

  special delivery

  ’Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze;

  He turned away the good old horse that served him many days;

  He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen;

  He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine;

  And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride,

  The grinning shop assistant said, “Excuse me, can you ride?”

  — Banjo Paterson, “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle”

  The following January, as my London-bound plane prepared to taxi out of one of the Buffalo airport’s two icy runways, I caught a last glimpse of my parents standing at the fence, waving to their only child as she was about to leave them. My father waved his denuded head and his purple, I.V.-ravaged hand in my direction. When I watched him more carefully, I realized he was waving to all the planes, wishing all the departures a good flight. Even as his brain was eaten away by cancer and he slowly lost his mind, he never lost his cheerfulness, his cordiality or his egalitarianism.

  Next to him stood my pretty mother, holding his hand as if he were a child who might run onto the icy tarmac at any second. As always, she dressed for the airport as though she were travelling or being met by foreign dignitaries when she disembarked. In fact, she was being met by no one. She had to return to her dreary Buffalo bungalow, with a man who would die soon, leaving her a penniless widow. (His six years of illness had devoured their savings faster than the cancer had ravaged his brain.) She had to manage a six-foot-tall man who had lost his mind but not his ability to walk and talk. He forgot everything that was said to him within seconds of it being uttered. Once the cancer had chewed up his short-term memory, it started on his long-term. When I left for England, he knew who I was; but when I returned home, he thought I was a nurse. He did retain a memory that he’d had a daughter at one time and he told me about her when I went to see him. He said, “You never met Cathy? She was a real pip.” A real pip. His mind was now stuck in the ’50s, our family’s heyday, the Eisenhower years when he owned the drugstore in Niagara Falls.

  The plane took off, and I turned my attention to Professor ­Clifford Beech’s note on white stationery with royal blue lettering that said Trinity College, Oxford:

  Dear Miss McClure,

  I would find it most rewarding to act as your tutor and would be gratified if you would join me at high table the night of your arrival. You may have some difficulty locating me upon the dais. I could tell you that I am desiccated and doddering; however, I fear that would not distinguish me from the other members of our humble establishment. Please inform the Barson, our earthy gatekeeper, who hopefully has not barred our paradise with flaming swords, to ring me when you’ve arrived. Although we are far from a classless society, I fear the Barson may have trouble detecting the accent of a Sauropsida. However, I am sure he will have no trouble with your forked tongue and undulating gait.

  The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline,

  Clifford Beech

  Leora thought it was hilarious that I could transfer to Oxford based on a one-paragraph letter. We figured when a guy was ­famous and he took you on, no one would say boo. Of course, little did ­Professor Beech know that I would never again write one more word of poetry in my life — not even a couplet. I lost my poetic licence when my green pill wore off.

  Hours later, as the plane flew over England, I began to feel ­lighter. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been shouldering. Out of the plane’s small window, I saw the orderly fields with their straight furrows. I longed for the stability that their tidy rows promised. The countryside lay like a quilt made of myriad shades of taupe in different fabrics and textures. Occasionally there was a row of evergreens standing like soldiers on the march guarding their furrowed fields. I was soothed by the order and I felt the ­nascent anglophile that lived within me kicking to get out.

  While we circled for a landing at Heathrow, it was slowly ­sinking in that I no longer had to endure the stigma of having an interracial relationship, which would have been hard enough in New York City but was even more ostracizing on the border of West Virginia in Ohio, where I’d been marooned for two years. I wouldn’t be shunned anymore, nor would I have to live with the constant fear of reprisal. I was no longer in charge of political change. I no longer had to worry about the grinding details of the American civil rights fight; I no longer had to organize the voter lists, nor canvass to get new signatures while still getting my schoolwork done an
d maintaining an A average. I could take my first break from the harried home front, where I’d been in charge of my father’s illness from my early teenage years. It was no longer my job to make sure my father did not drive or try to withdraw funds from an already empty bank account. I didn’t have to wrestle the car keys away from him; I could take a breather. When family, relationship and sanity crumble, you need to hold onto something even if it’s the image of straight rows of evergreens.

  Now all I had to worry about was that Oxford thought they were getting an inspired poet. They were really getting a rather ­ordinary, uninspired tall blond from Buffalo who’d taken a pill from the clerk at May’s accessory counter and been creative for a day.

  >> <<<br />
  On my way to Oxford, the train porter shook his head and told me to prepare for cold weather and a big snow when I got there. I didn’t find it cold, snowy or windy by Buffalo standards; in fact it was downright balmy. In terms of snow, there was only a slight dusting of what looked like icing sugar on some of the roofs.

  The beauty of the town bowled me over. I immediately fell in love with not only the spires of the university but the small town that was packed with Dickensian characters, old bookshops and tobacconists. It reminded me of simpler times in historic Lewiston. There were the High and the Broad Streets and a few other narrow, winding roads and that was it. I had never seen a bookstore before other than one for university textbooks, but England was full of new and used bookshops with real lit fireplaces and stationery shops with rows of fountain pens where I could poke around for hours.

  Trinity College, or “Trins” as even I would come to call it, was surrounded by a high stone wall, and an immense iron gate that had a guardhouse manned by a white-haired man. He had red spidery veins on his plump face and, as they say in England, “high colour.” I had no idea, and still don’t know, if all men who manned the guardhouses of all the thirty-eight colleges were called “Barsons” or if this particular man’s name was Barson. If the latter was true, then I never understood why he was called the Barson in the letter from Professor Beech. I was never called the McClure. When I said I was looking for the Barson, he took his pipe out of his mouth and I noticed his teeth, which were the yellow-orange of a Tibetan monk’s robe. They had become moulded around his pipe, leaving a pipe-gap when he took it out to speak. Looking over the top of his half spectacles, he said, “I am he.”