Coming Ashore Read online

  “I am Helen of Troy,” I said, teetering on my shiny red toes.

  “Then you won’t mind our Spartan conditions,” said Peter, the plainer guy who lived below the handsome guy named Clive. ­Peter could have been considered handsome as well if he had not been standing next to the imposingly tall, willowy Clive. While Clive looked relaxed and perpetually amused, Peter looked earnest, like the men who have their pictures in The Economist.

  “Reggie led me to believe we might eat together — as a stairwell,” I said lamely, hoping they would invite me.

  “Not tonight, Helen. We understand you are placed at the high table,” Peter said.

  “Launching a thousand forks,” I added.

  Clive, Peter and I walked into the magnificent dining hall with coffered ceilings and walls covered with dour portraits of famous alumni. I always sat under Sir John Willes, Chief Justice of ­Common Pleas, 1737. All the long, dark tables were lined up in solemn rows with benches. The room actually resembled the one on TV that Robin Hood used to swing through when he’d surprised the Sheriff of Nottingham at mealtime. One huge table at the far end of the room was perpendicular to the rest and was placed on a separate dais a few steps up from the others. You didn’t have to be Queen Elizabeth to figure it was the high table. It was filled with white-haired men, some of whom looked ­older than any professor I’d ever seen, including all those who had crawled up to emeritus status.

  Clive tapped my shoulder, saying, “You don’t wear gowns at high table.”

  Uh-oh. I’d counted on this robe to cover my halter-top mini. Remembering the Mary Kay Cosmetic School saying, “Fake it till you make it,” I threw the black gown on the chair by the door, strode up to the high table and asked, “Is one of you Professor Beech?”

  “I beg your pardon?” one old codger said.

  Another smiled and said, “May I offer you a seat.” This guy was at least ninety and could have been a portrait on the wall. He could barely stand up to shake my hand. His shirt looked like it had been thrown in the wash with black socks, taken out while wet and then had wrinkles ironed into it. He had cut himself ­shaving and had a little piece of ragged cloth covering the bloody nick on his scrawny gullet.

  We were interrupted by the approach of a fat man with strange lower teeth that actually poked out of his mouth and rested on his upper lip when his mouth was closed. “Good evening. Miss McClure, I presume.”

  “Professor Beech?”

  “Ah, welcome to the adamantine island chained to the shifting bank of the Channel. I see you met our esteemed poet and guest of honour this evening? You’ve been placed next to him for mutual dining pleasure.”

  While I nodded assent, the esteemed poet said, “Ye—es.” I had never heard the word yes spoken in two syllables. Professor Beech scuttled (as fast as a man whose silhouette matched that of Alfred Hitchcock could scuttle) back to his end of the table, saying we would meet in “his rooms” tomorrow afternoon. That sounded kind of creepy to me.

  As I sat down next to the esteemed poet, I blathered, “Sorry I’m late. That stairwell is a challenge in these shoes.”

  “Winding ancient stair; Set your entire mind upon the steep ­ascent,” the esteemed poet said. By this point I was too embarrassed to ask his name. Everyone else seemed to know him.

  “Hey Yeats.” Thank God I’d recognized him. “I love that guy.”

  “As do I.”

  “You know him too?” I asked.

  “I knew him quite well.”

  “Me too.”

  “He gave me much help in dark times,” said the esteemed poet.

  “Oh. You knew him as in knew the man not just the poetry.”

  “If one ever knows another.”

  “Wow!” Wanting to keep the conversation going, I added my own brush with celebrity. “I knew Marilyn Monroe.”

  He turned and looked at me with true interest for the first time. “Do tell.”

  I can spin a yarn for hours, so I told him the full version of when Roy and I delivered Nembutal to Marilyn Monroe while she was filming Niagara in the 1950s. I told how she answered the door in a slip and bra and had chipped nail polish.

  “I say,” he said. “Do please press on.”

  Neither of us noticed that the room was quiet and when we finally looked up we met hundreds of eyes looking expectantly at us. The esteemed poet had been introduced to say grace but neither of us had heard.

  He stood up really slowly, favouring one leg, and said by way of apology, “The peril of discussing Yeats is that all else recedes.”

  He was great on his feet, never used a note and spoke in a ­definitive, yet warm voice for five or ten minutes. He said grace in Latin and in English and then said that tonight might be a perfect night to quote Yeats. He said you can be assured of a poet’s genius when he always has a line or two that expresses exactly your sentiments at the present moment. He turned to me and said,

  God be praised for woman

  That gives up all her mind,

  A man may find in no man

  A friendship of her kind

  That covers all he has brought

  As with her flesh and bone …

  He recited the whole poem and smiled at me as he sat down.

  When dinner was over, I helped the doddering poet down the stairs, and while patting my hand, he again quoted Yeats: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.”

  To this day I don’t know his name.

  I shake my head now thinking of what the Barson called “my plethora of errors” upon arrival. The seat next to the guest of honour was saved for Professor Beech, who’d been one of the esteemed poet’s students, and I had blundered into it. My outfit combined with my Marilyn Monroe vignette was all so wildly ­inappropriate. Yet no one complained or embarrassed me. In truth, my behaviour in England barely improved over time.

  >> <<<br />
  The next morning, after donning half of the clothes I’d brought with me just to eat breakfast, I went to “let” my bicycle in some godforsaken back alley that had no name. Reggie referred to it as “off the map,” under the first bridge I would meet after taking two right turns not including the right I took out of the college. Reggie said to go past the bridge, then double back and go under the bridge and there between the river and the bridge, I’d find the shop. As strange as it seemed, there was indeed a bike lean-to under the bridge. The proprietor had a crooked back, presumably from crouching under the bridge for most of his life. As he handed me over an old, rickety bike, I noticed the lifelines in his hands were grey as though his skin had been tattooed with grease. I rented the bike for the year; I asked if it came with a lock. He replied in a thick Scottish accent that nothing in Oxford had been stolen as far as he was aware. He added in his thick Highland Burr, “You’ll have to go to the United States of America to get your bike stolen.” I asked if there was a light. He groused that it was a generator light, which worked when I pedaled. “If you learn how to work, light will be shed, now won’t it?”

  He began to explain how the bike worked. I rolled my eyes and told him that I’d been riding a bike all my life and knew how to do it. He said that Americans, “who think they’ve invented the wheel,” often have a problem with English brakes. I rode away while he was still going on because he wouldn’t stop, and besides I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I cycled over the top of the bridge and waved gaily to the old Glaswegian troll under it. He just shook his head as he wiped some oil off on his pants, shiny with layers of accumulated toil.

  I loved physical activity and bike riding was the best since it combined exercise with transportation. In Oxford, almost every­one rode a bike no matter if you were twenty or eighty. The university was made up of different colleges that were spread around the town and some were quite far apart. Although you were housed at a certain co
llege, you could have courses at other colleges so everyone had to cycle. Little old women in thick Marks and ­Spencer flesh-coloured tights rode a bike to the shops. Men with cigarettes perched on their lower lips drove along in dress trousers and tweed jackets and Dubliner wool hats.

  There is nothing more gorgeous than an English morning. The sunlight sparkled off the icy gauze of early morning dew on the crunchy greens. Everything was fresh and clear and the colours seemed supersaturated. A bracing English morning could wash away all sins, no matter how mortal, from the night before. The colleges all had manicured lawns and the shops looked Victorian, with many small rooms lined in wood — just as I had imagined. I sped along the road, going faster and faster. I decided to go to the post office, which I had seen right across from the Trinity College gate, and send my parents a postcard to let them know I’d arrived safely. Actually my mother had never asked me to do this, but I continued the form as though we were a normal family instead of one where my addled father thought J. Edgar Hoover was a ­vacuum and that President Johnson said no Irish Catholics could drive until the war in Vietnam was over.

  At the age of twenty, I still loved the rush of speed. I was now going at full tilt, not slowing down for the one-room post office. I was speeding up, planning my stunning dismount, when at the last second I pressed back on my pedals with all my might. But the bike didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down. There were no brakes, so the pedals just spun backwards. Oh my God, the bike mechanic had said something about English brakes. Where the hell were they?

  I hit the post-office window at full velocity and flew right through it, shattering the glass. I went airborne past the stamp line-up and, with a loud thud, came to an abrupt landing against the old mahogany counter. I was bleeding, but I did manage to stand. The postal employee looked at me dripping in blood and said, “Special delivery?” The postmaster came out from the mailroom and quipped, “Americans always want air mail, I’m afraid.”

  One old woman whispered to another in the line-up. “American, I’ll wager, cutting in line.”

  The other replied, “They’re taught that at home.”

  No one suggested calling an ambulance or a doctor. They acted as though I’d decided to go through the window as opposed to ­using the door just to save time. The postmaster cleaned my arm off with an old cloth used for dampening stamps. Fortunately it was mostly my coat that was ripped to shreds. There was surprisingly little tissue damage other than a long brush burn on the side of my face. I had a gash on the top of my head, but my hair caught the blood from that. They gave me a “plaster” from a rusty first aid box and that was it. Later, when I went to the doctor in London, he looked at the scar on my head and said, “That could have used a stitch or two — but never mind.”

  A local bobby arrived with a legal-size sheaf of paper in his hand and said to me, “In a bit of rush, were we?”

  “I didn’t realize the brakes were on the handlebars.”

  “Who do you think is going to remunerate the offended party for the window, what with the emergency glass service required and all?”

  “Send me the bill at Trinity College.”

  “You at the college, then?” he inquired, trying to hide his ­incredulity.

  “Yes.” My head was spinning and I was feeling nauseous from the bang on my skull.

  The two women shook their heads. What was the world coming to if Oxford could let in not only girls, but American girls who drove through windows?

  “Scholarship student?” asked the clerk who was now sweeping up the glass.

  “Yes — well, sort of — partly. Is that pertinent information?” I asked, now seeing double and leaning on the counter.

  “Going to be a pretty penny, I can tell you that.”

  >> <<<br />
  By noon everyone had heard about my airmail delivery. Not one person said anything like, “Oh my God, you went through the post-office window on your first day at Oxford?” or “What an ­idiot,” or “How amazing,” or “How hilarious,” or “Are you all right?” Everyone commented on it but only obliquely. At lunch Clive said, “You are aware that airmail requires a surcharge.”

  “I didn’t go airmail but airborne, which is far more expensive,” I retorted.

  “Ah, but if you are airborne in a postal outlet, are you airmail?” Marcus asked.

  “A question for Wittgenstein,” Peter added.

  That afternoon, my tutorial included only one bruised American girl with Professor Beech in his luxurious study. When he saw me, he said absolutely nothing about my injuries. He ignored my shut eye, my bruising and my swollen face. He never alluded to my cranium, swollen to a point on the top, which made me ­resemble a recent forceps delivery. He proceeded to discuss Coleridge.

  Several years later, when I went through my mother’s belongings after she died, I found my letter to her describing the post-­office caper. My mother loved that letter. She said she opened it in the brain tumour radiation waiting room and burst out laughing. To prevent herself from looking crazy, she read it to the waiting room and they howled too. It really made me feel good that so many people enjoyed the outing. My mother said that my father loved the story as well, and when she thought he might be feeling a bit down she would read him the letter. One of the great things about having no memory is something funny can amuse you again and again. My mother said no matter what the window cost it was worth it.

  I did finally receive a bill that amounted to two hundred American dollars, which was a fair chunk of change in the 1960s. When I rode up to the post office to pay the bill, everyone stood back. I approached the postmaster, who said, “It’s all taken care of, Miss.”

  “Who paid for it?” I asked.

  “Compliments of the Queen in the year of the Prince’s investiture.”

  “That was nice of her given how busy she must be,” I said.

  When I got back to dinner, the two-hundred-dollar cheque in my hand, Clive recited:

  This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,

  Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

  Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

  The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

  Margaret-Ann uttered her first word at dinner. “Auden,” she said, then spooned in her toad-in-the-hole.

  “Oh, was it Auden? Sir Clive, you disappoint me. I thought it was original,” Peter responded.

  “Ah, Margaret-Ann, you have sniffed us out again. It must be that superior American education,” Clive said.

  She just looked at them in irritated bewilderment. Margaret-­Ann, like me, had no idea how to stick-handle through the ­labyrinth of English high society. It took me a long time, but not as long as Margaret-Ann, to be able to interpret the subtext. Their tone never gave away their meaning. Once I broke the Etonian code, I realized they were saying that everyone knew Auden’s work by heart and it was pedantic of Margaret-Ann to source it for the group. Peter, Marcus and Clive were saying that only an American would believe recognizing Auden should be considered an achievement. To top off such academic delusion, only an American would boast such paltry knowledge.

  I had landed with a thud in a truly foreign land. The terrifying thing was they did speak English so you could have the false sense that you shared more than you actually did. George Bernard Shaw expressed my sentiments perfectly: “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”

  CHAPTER 3

  foxy lady

  Is it like this

  In death’s other kingdom

  Waking alone

  At the hour when we are

  Trembling with tenderness

  Lips that would kiss

  Form prayers to broken stone.

  — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

  The semester steamed ahead. I almost failed my Old English course, but Clive came to my
rescue, as I was honestly a prioress in distress. We had to put on The Canterbury Tales, and I had to redeem my bad test performance with a stellar play performance. I had to play several of the female characters, and Clive devoted untold hours to tutoring me in the accents. He never criticized my tin ear but only said after dozens of mistakes, “Let’s try the Nun’s Priest once more.” He also was invaluable in translating ­English humour for me. He encouraged me to go over the top with the piece, assuring me that the audience would love it. He also contacted his mother, who had gone to school with the costume ­designer at Stratford, and she sent up dozens of costumes as a favour. Clive was right about the whole business, and I would never have made it a success without him. His steady hand and constant reassurance when I was on such shaky ground did not go unnoticed. Yet when I told him he’d saved my wild boar, he took very little credit.

  The entire stairwell was taking Restoration Drama together. (These are English comedies that weren’t funny, written from 1660–1710.) Since we generally had a great time together, we made a group field trip to London to see The Way of the World, The Country Wife and She Stoops to Conquer. We were hoping to catch these in matinees so we could rock on in the evenings.

  I had to bunk with Margaret-Ann at a cheap bed-sit that smelled like Shepherd’s pie left over from the Dark Ages. She announced that she didn’t like my cigarette smoke. I had never met anyone who had said anything against cigarettes before. Peter said just to ignore her, as it was pure hysteria.

  At night, Margaret-Ann, in her long white undershirt, flannel pyjamas and long braid, knelt by her bed and said her prayers. When she got into bed, she said to me, “It wouldn’t hurt you to pray instead of jumping around like a ninny.” When I informed her that it was because of my largesse that she was even included on this trip, instead of shutting up and saying thank you she said, “Well, it shocks me that you went to a Catholic school for years and you don’t even pray.”