Coming Ashore Read online

  “No.”

  “If we were, you must raise your hand and move to the side.”

  A student with binoculars wearing a Balliol T-shirt yelled from shore, “You’ve been bumped. Bump-over, coxie!”

  A tall man with curly hair and a scraggly beard who was just a few feet away on the bank cupped his hands and yelled in a southern American drawl, “There are no officials here — keep going.”

  I shouted through the megaphone at the rowers: “We are going to be bumped unless you can give me ten hard pulls right now.” I began counting each of the ten strokes and we shot ahead. Clive was giving his all; I could see the veins in his neck popping. The other boat fell back and never regained its lead on us. I bumped several more times as we threaded ourselves along the course. We finished in a really good position. I estimated we were now in the top quarter.

  At the end of the race, my rowers (interesting how quickly they became mine) all, with the exception of Clive, crowded around me and congratulated me, saying that tomorrow when the race continued they would start in a great position.

  Peter came up to the finish line breathless and said as we disembarked, “Cathy, Cathy, Cathy. You gave those Balliol wankers a run for their money. I thought they were bumping for sure. You really pulled it out of the water.”

  Everyone toasted me and yelled, “Speech!” I stood up and waved like the queen, saying, “It brings me great pride to be the queen of the bumps.”

  Clive said, almost inaudibly, “You are truly bumptious.” ­Knowing this to be a term slightly worse than arrogant and egotistical, I was a bit taken aback.

  Fortunately at that moment, the American with the Allen ­Ginsberg beard who had yelled from the sidelines entered the beer tent and strolled by our table. As he shot a smile my way, I said, “Thanks for the tip-off on the officials.”

  He replied, “Well I had no idea what the hell the rules were, but I figured just keep going until someone tells you otherwise.” It was strange to hear a southern American accent at Oxford, yet comforting to hear a countryman for a change.

  As he left, Peter said, “He is a big politico around Univer­sity College. He and some of his American buddies are organizing a big anti-Vietnam demonstration. He worked as an aide for ­Fulbright in Washington.”

  “I liked him. I actually picked him out of the crowd as we rowed by. I felt like he was rooting for our boat. What’s his name?”

  “Bill Clinton, I believe.”

  >> <<<br />
  After a day in the sun at the races, I was exhausted and hoarse from yelling. Clive and I walked back to Trinity without saying a word. Some silences are comfortable while others are fraught, and very quickly you know what kind of silence you are involved in. Finally I asked, “Would it be bumptious of me to ask what is wrong?”

  “We were bumped, weren’t we?”

  “No.”

  “The Balliol coxie gave me a dirty look when we docked.”

  “It could have been a wake or someone could have been out of sync in the back of the boat. There’re a million things that simulate a weenie bump. In my mind, the bump has to be unmistakable.”

  “In your mind. Ah, there is the rub. As a point of information, the bump has to be light or it would harm the scull and the bumper would be disqualified.”

  “Well, it isn’t like we were at the Olympics or even at the front of the line.”

  “You might have felt differently if you’d been the Balliol boat doing the bumping.”

  “But I wasn’t.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “Balliol could have screamed ‘bump-over’ or hit us slightly harder.”

  “They could have, but they wanted to follow the rules. Winning is when everyone follows the social contract.”

  “Sorry, Rousseau. It was the first time I ever did this and, lest you forget, I did it as a favour to you. I can’t know every single nuance and every bump in the road, so to speak. I didn’t know exactly what a bump is supposed to feel like. This was all new to me.”

  “Yes, you did know. Besides you were advised from the sidelines.”

  “By a Balliol undergraduate. Not an official. As a point of information, to borrow one of your favourite phrases, Peter and every other person in the tent thought that I’d done a great job. They don’t measure a bump as a wind current or a wake behind a boat. Sorry for disappointing you.”

  “Don’t say you are sorry when you are not and please stop the sophistry.” His voice remained quiet, as though we were having a discussion and not an argument.

  We walked on in silence until I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Fine. I felt the bump. I figured they needed one more stroke to make it an official bump. Then I would really have had to ­acknowledge it. I decided to keep going. I wanted to win the race. Happy now?”

  He didn’t answer. As we approached the gate, the Barson tore out and said, “I heard you gave what’s-it to those Balliol wastrels.”

  Tears welled in my eyes as we crossed the green. I thought of my father and how disappointed in me he would be if he’d heard what Clive had said. I thought I’d done a great job and now I realized I’d cheated, and the pathetic thing was I knew it at the time. I wanted to look as though I could stick-handle through the race. I didn’t want to be a wimpy girl. Clive had said exactly what my father would have said if he’d been there and in his right mind. I could hear my father’s Buffalo accent echoing in my head: “Hope it was worth it to you.”

  Climbing up our stairwell, I could hear my leaden feet. When we were at Clive’s door, I said, “I cheated and knew it. It was ­pathetic. Should I tell the officials I was bumped?”

  “No. That would create melodrama. Just know that you’ve been bumped.” Then he smiled a sweet, forgiving smile my way, and I trudged up to my room.

  The next morning, I lay in my bed, replaying the race. Mostly I thought of Clive and I stuffed together into the tiny confines of the stern. I pictured Clive’s firm thighs and the collision of our knees every time he shot up the slide. As I thought about how my hands had rested on his muscled thighs before we began the race, I had my first sexual thoughts about Clive. I wondered if he’d had any about me.

  >> <<<br />
  I had just begun what was to be my favourite course — Modern British Poetry. The Brits have their foibles, but you could never say they can’t use the language. Our poetry fellow never looked in a book. He recited everything from memory (as did bar­tenders, truck drivers and store clerks). Most of the students did the same thing. When they were called upon, they answered in long convoluted sentences and never searched for words or appeared inarticulate. The Brits could switch disciplines on a dime. If they wanted to make an argument about a critic or a theory of English criticism, they could interweave it with philosophy and history with no difficulty.

  Some times of your life are so memorable that you can almost reach into your mind and touch them. The perfect memories are locked in with the horrific ones. It is the everyday tedium that gets wiped out, while the extremes go on file.

  I had the traumas burned into my mind as though they’d ­occurred yesterday. I can remember the weather, the time, what I was wearing, where I was standing and exactly what was said or not said. I can flip through them like shuffling a deck of cards: the day Roy disappeared or was taken away by the two men, having to go to a psychiatrist for stabbing a bully, getting kicked out of Catholic school, Father Rodwick’s sexual betrayal, Kennedy’s death, the fire I caused at the doughnut shop, the moment I ­realized my father had lost his mind, finding out that Laurie was married, Splits’s murder and the FBI rapping at my door. These traumas were all stored and could pop up in Technicolor leaping across my ­synapses like a ballerina at any associative moment.

  Fortunately memory also has a file for perfect joy. I can still remember hearing Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” for the first time. I w
as in my Modern British Poetry class at Magdalen College, sitting right off the cloister on the first floor. The leaded casement windows were cranked fully open, letting in the early morning breeze, and I was looking out on the cowslips that lined the Cherwell River. River daffodils danced to Thomas’s lyric as the fellow recited:

  Time let me play and be

  Golden in the mercy of his means,

  And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

  Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

  And the Sabbath rang slowly

  In the pebbles of the holy streams.

  Dylan Thomas’s exuberant innocence drove me right back to Lewiston and Niagara Falls, where I had “the pebbles of my holy stream”: the Niagara Escarpment with its rough cliffs of fossils layered one upon another; the joy of the Niagara River in the spring, bubbling its fury while I stood safely on the warm rocks along the bank; the lemonade on the summer nights when fireflies danced, the ones my dad said only came to the home of perfect girls that looked like peaches in August.

  I could still see Roy and me parting the multicoloured maple leaves that glowed at dusk. I could still hear us singing Ella ­Fitzgerald’s version of “A-Tisket A-Tasket” as we collected chestnuts. I could still feel the stingers on the pea-green chestnut shells that ripped into our hands. We wound our bleeding digits with crimson Virginia creeper leaves. All the way back to work, we ­admired our mahogany chestnuts that glowed as though shellacked.

  The coldness of winter still had a hold of me too: the blinding storms in winter that crusted us all with sleet and knocked those schooldays right off the map; I could still feel the ice that froze the rushing falls in mid air, sending star-studded glitter on our windshield. I marvelled at a force of nature that sent snow from heaven that could bury our footprints in seconds; in minutes our angels-in-the-snow and our ducks-and-geese games would be only memories.

  I had no idea then how glorious it was, how I basked in my parents’ love like a lizard warming himself on a sunny rock. The dew cleansed each new day, filtering yesterday’s folly through the soil. The tragedy is that you had no idea how perfect it was ­until you realized time was the herdsman. What you once thought was life was really youth, and it was fading. Hearing “Fern Hill” made tears run down my face at Oxford in the early morning of ­mourning.

  You don’t feel the steel cable of time. It tightens gradually, link by link, until one day you feel that shackle digs into your breast when you try to take a carefree breath.

  And yet life still offered golden moments, like that crisp ­English morning. I can still feel the bracing air as I rode my bike (now having mastered the brakes) in my heather Marks and Spencer sweater on my way to Magdalen College. Whole fields of sweet peas and bluebells would genuflect when I rode by on my bike in the dew-drenched morning. I could smell the lush green as I sat on a gargoyle stone bench alone in the deer park behind Magdalen cloister. I would read aloud to the deer in the foggy dawn before they’d become skittish and flee. If I talked directly to them, they shied away, but if I read Dylan Thomas to the field, they turned their doe eyes toward me and breathed steam my way, lulled by the rhythm of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” I thought of my father dying at home, and reading Thomas gave me great comfort:

  And you, my father, there on the sad height,

  Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  There were three things I didn’t know at the time: one was how wonderful the age of twenty-one was with all the possibilities ­before me. Nor did I know that poetry would never bring tears to my eyes again. The last was that I would soon be reading that poem at my father’s funeral.

  CHAPTER 5

  “he’s willin’”

  “Ah!” he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me. “Well! If you was writin’ to her, p’raps you’d recollect to say that Barkis was willin’; would you?”

  — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

  I had taken to Oxford. When you sat across from a professor and you had to fill an hour, it was excruciating to be unprepared, so I never worked so hard in my entire life — still, I loved every ­minute I’d been there. I didn’t get a lot of praise for my work, but I did write a paper on Dylan Thomas that my fellow called “inspired,” and he said, in true English style, “That it is an insightful piece is not in dispute, but I have no idea if it would pass the criteria for publication, particularly since the journal in question is American.” He suggested that to perfect the article and to verify some of my theories of origin, I should take, as he called it, “a field trip” to Wales to check on the local environs. The idea of seeing some of the places Dylan Thomas wrote about absolutely thrilled me.

  My best friends at Oxford turned out to be from my stairwell mostly due to their proximity. Clive I liked a lot. Peter I liked because he was Clive’s friend. Marcus was always dour, but I ­appreciated how he never stepped out of character. Margaret-­Ann was the only woman there, and all girls need girlfriends so she was on the list by default. Since the staircase quartet were my best friends, I ran to tell them that I was going on a pilgrimage to Wales, determined to see Thomas’s boathouse home and the locales that influenced him.

  It was now the last weekend in June, and summer was upon us as the purple clematis wreathed every doorway like a royal Eliza­bethian collar. I was preparing to depart on a long holiday weekend, but the foursome informed me that it was sheer folly to ­travel, as it was the week of Prince Charles’s investiture at Caernarfon.

  “Who’s investing?” I asked.

  “Charles is being invested as Prince of Wales,” Clive said, as though it was the biggest deal.

  “So?”

  “Wales is the key word here,” Peter added.

  “You know those old biddies who only discuss the bus routes in that Pinter short?” Clive asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well every one of those women will drag her truculent spouse to the investiture, which is exactly en route to where you are going.”

  “I want to see Swansea and the boathouse and Augharne, where Thomas lived. I also want to go to Snowdonia. Professor Beech said it’s the most rustic part of Wales, packed with people who speak Welsh. It’s the best way to take a trip through Thomas’s past.”

  “Cathy, what you don’t understand is that Caernarfon is in the northern tip of Wales, which is remote and mountainous. There is one main road to get there. The rest is through winding mountain paths. We are not in America, you know.”

  “Ah ha,” I said, hitting myself Eureka-style on the side of my head. “That must be why I’m eating toad-in-the-hole.”

  My parents worried about things like traffic and the weather. If you want to get somewhere, my theory was you just hit the road. It was the only long weekend we had. Besides, I’d not met one person in England who ever mentioned the Prince of Wales.

  >> <<<br />
  On the eve of my June departure, Margaret-Ann, Peter, Clive and I were sitting in the hall at our long Edwardian tables with the straight back chairs eating strawberries and clotted cream from Guernsey. It was the freshest and most delicious cream I’ve ever had. The English may not know how to heat a room, but those dairy maids that Thomas Hardy talked about knew what they were doing.

  Margaret-Ann, as usual, interrupted my tranquility by saying with a great deal of self-satisfaction, “When I checked, on your behalf, train and bus tickets to Wales were sold out for the long holiday weekend.”

  “So I’ll hitchhike,” I heard myself saying. “Jiminy Cricket! What are you guys going to worry about when you’re forty if you’re worrying about the traffic in your twenties?”

  Marcus sauntered up to our table and said in a casually calculated tone, which for him passed for spo
ntaneity, “Mind if I join you?” Marcus almost always ate from a tray in his room and only joined us when necessary. He said, “I heard your remonstrations from across the room.” (In England, that remark is to be inter­preted as an insult.) “Not that you were making a spectacle of yourself, since nothing could compare to your airmail parcel, but since it was impossible not to overhear you, you might want to know that the papers have announced that Welsh nationalists have threatened to bomb the railway in Wales and Caernarfon Castle on the day of the almighty dubbing.”

  “How profoundly moronic,” Peter said. “Given Welsh technical acumen, I’m sure they’ll blow themselves up first.”

  “Speaking of moronic,” Marcus said as he stole a fleeting glimpse my way, “I have something to show you.”

  “Marcus, I quake when you join us,” Peter said.

  “What are you grimly reaping today?” Clive asked. “Come on, man, out with it. I have known you too long. You have not crept out of your lair to peddle some glad tidings.”

  “Ah, I shall credit you with good intuition. You have gone such a long way on it. I bring an interesting missive from our disloyal colonies.” Marcus Aaronson was the only man I had ever met who subscribed to nine newspapers in various languages. The only ­reason he didn’t have one in Old English was because there was no news.

  Marcus laid the June 9, 1969, New York Times in front of me. He must have saved it for weeks so he could watch me writhe. The headline, sprawled in huge, depressing black letters, said that the most recent Gallup poll had indicated that President Nixon’s popularity was at an all-time high.

  The article said that Nixon had disagreed with the tactics of student demonstrations. I said, “Listen to this!” and I read aloud, “Sixteen students from Harvard who had been involved in a takeover of university buildings were expelled.”

  Marcus said, “I have actually read about those students. The irony was that they were ‘old boys.’ Their fathers and grand­fathers had actually donated some of the buildings they’d occupied. Given the ingenuity of most ‘old boys,’ they probably had no idea what they were doing.”