Coming Ashore Read online

  Clive, knowing that Marcus was really discussing him, said, “Marcus, even as a man of the Tribe, you too will be an old boy some day.”

  “Aha, you have missed the point of the Chosen People, my good man,” replied Marcus. “Only Oxford and Cambridge have fully understood that biblical phrase since I believe they have a quota on those of the Hebrew persuasion.”

  Peter said, “Speaking of good men, wasn’t it Henry Miller who said, ‘Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?’”

  Clive said, “I notice you have brought us tidings of the colonies but none from the Promised Land. I read this morning that Moshe Dayan has hinted that Israel plans to keep much of the West Bank. Is it possible that he oversteps the original boundaries of Moses?”

  I slammed my white plate with its blue Trinity crest on the table. There was a terrible echo in the hall, giant marble-floored cavern that it was. I happened to do this in a moment of silence right before announcements were made by the windbag who ran the junior commons room, the man who was only slightly more of a prig than the one who ran the senior commons room. I looked up and announced, “You guys are so impossible.”

  “My apologies for having accused you of thought,” Marcus said.

  “You’re such pedants. You,” I accused Clive, “and Peter define everything in terms of who someone is based on their exact social status and some complicated system that has more complicated chutes and ladders than an Escher drawing. The U.S. may have its problems, but one thing I can say for sure: Marcus would just be a guy, albeit a grouchy guy, from Birmingham.”

  “No need to be effusive,” Marcus replied.

  “Shut up. He wouldn’t be the Jew whose father has new money from the schmatta business. You could just be Clive, a guy from Norfolk, Suffolk or some-folking-where.”

  “Not to be even more pedantic, but it’s Cornwall,” Clive said.

  “The point is you would just be Clive. But now you have to be third-generation Clive hyphenated-name who has old money, landed gentry, a flat in London — in Kensington no less — which has been in the family forever.” (I was now doing a really bad ­English accent.) “How do I know all this? Oh, it just slipped out.

  “You know when I first got here I was fooled by the fact that we spoke the same language. When you and Peter said you hadn’t studied, I, like a lamb to the slaughter, believed you until I failed the first test and you two shone like new shillings.” By now I was standing up, pacing and gesticulating. Reggie and the other waiters made only the slightest pretense of wiping down their tables as they listened. “Oh, sorry, I forgot I wasn’t supposed to mention money. That’s left to” — I lifted my fingers and made quotations marks — “‘the Chosen People.’”

  Margaret-Ann was looking confused, to say nothing of horrified, that I was yelling. So I began addressing her. “You see, ­Margaret-Ann, if you admit you study then it would mean that you were not born with a perfect memory of modern British poetry. That would not befit your station. Marcus is here on scholarship so he has to study, poor Shylock that he is. He has parents who don’t quote sonnets all day long. That means they were tawdry enough to have to work for a living. How prosaic! It’s vulgar to study. While Marcus is off in his room making up insults to exchange at meal times and finding incendiary newspaper articles, you guys are scurrying back to your rooms to study your asses off. You just make it look inherited. In America, if people study they say they study. If they move up in income and educational level in the good old U. S. of A., that would be called initiative. In America he’d be called a self-made man, not an upstart.”

  Peter pushed back his chair while saying, “You are throwing a wobbly and it is becoming boring.”

  “Becoming?” Marcus said.

  Peter said in a very quiet, calm tone, “You are bellowing like a fish-wife, Cathy. Something that may be acceptable in the bowels of Buffalo, but …”

  I was surprised to hear Margaret-Ann pipe up: “Not in front of the servants.”

  “Cathy, thank you for that précis on English social stratification. No doubt you have revolutionized the American political and social system with all of your … concern,” Peter said as he stood up.

  Marcus said, “Well …”

  I cut him off. “Oh, Marcus, give it up.” I turned to Peter and Clive and said, “Of course Marcus plans to say only snide things. He knows he’ll never get into the inner sanctum even if he gets a first with honours, which he will, so he refuses to dance around the edges pleading for inclusion. I’d rather eat in my room than be ‘the Jew from Birmingham,’ of whom it has been begrudgingly acknowledged, ‘No one can doubt he’s clever.’ Of course he’s ­always marching his brilliance around on a diamond-studded leash. He has to be supercilious and annoying. But brains are all you’ve allowed him. He’s never allowed inclusion. The really sad thing is you’ve both gone to the same rotten posh school so you’ve known each other since you were in shorts and knee socks. Every day you both draw your sabres. Every day it’s the same bout. Clive and Peter pull the silver spoon number, while Marcus parries with the ‘but I’m clever’ blow of the shofar. At least in America, we dislike one another for our personal traits rather than our social rank. It’s a subtle but important difference, at least to me.”

  My throat hurt and I suddenly realized I had indeed been screaming. I pushed my chair back and didn’t mean for it to fall backward but it did and made thunderous clamour as I stomped out of the dining hall. The cooks were lined up in their white ­jackets like human swans with their necks craned around the corner of the scullery.

  As I passed the door, I heard one hair-netted woman with pendulous breasts say, “My, my” to the carver.

  “Some-folking-where? Never ’eard it.” The tall, thin carver in the bloody apron answered as they both went through the swinging door back into the kitchen.

  >> <<<br />
  I spiralled up the staircase, opened my door and locked it behind me. I needn’t have bothered since no one followed. As I lay on my bed, my chest heaved up and down like a bellows. My hands felt tingly, my mouth was dry and my larynx burned. I began to calm down, and I realized I’d had one mighty outburst or, as my mother would have said, “made quite a fuss.” So goddamn what? I said to myself as I curled into the fetal position and pulled my quilt up under my chin.

  Roy had referred to my flare-ups as “tongue flapping”; my ­father called them “flying off the handle.” Neither paid them much heed, for I got over them quickly and forgot I’d been angry. I was never one to, as they say in England, “stew in my own juices.” As I lay in bed, I thought how hard it was to explain a bad temper. Your heart suddenly starts to pound and you feel horribly wronged. William James, the first psychologist, asked how we know what we feel. If our heart pounds and our hands feel sweaty and a bear is in front of us, then we interpret those symptoms as fear. Bodily signs of a similar sort also signify rage. Sometimes your body can turn up the volume on all of its vital signs and you act based on your bodily cues or miscues. Only when the internal cacophony quiets down can you look around, assess the wreckage and say, “Wow, that was somewhat of an overreaction.”

  God knows what this episode had been. An outburst? A flare-up? It wasn’t a fight since no one was yelling back. Anyway it gave the kitchen staff something to talk about besides the ­weather and the investiture. It had to be the most exciting thing in ­Margaret-Ann’s and Marcus’s summer. I suspected Peter and Clive were mostly miffed not by what I’d said, but because I’d caused “a scene.”

  Once I had calmed down, I realized that Clive, the person I cared for most in the group — actually in all of England or, now that I thought about it, anywhere in the world — had said very ­little during my egalitarian diatribe. He had simply gawked at me as though I’d been speaking Swahili and performing a bizarre medicine dance in a death mask.

  Clive had done the most for me since I’d been at Oxford. He’d devote
d hours to showing me artifacts at the Ashmolean Museum and patiently explained all of their history. Only graduate students were allowed lengthy appointments to examine original manuscripts at the Balliol library, so he took me as his “assistant” to see Coleridge’s manuscripts with his original crossings-out. In my outburst, I’d clearly gone over whatever line was acceptable for him, but hey … I sat up and looked in the mirror … tomorrow was another day. I’d get up early in the morning, go to Wales and when I got back in four days’ time, this dust-up would have settled.

  >> <<<br />
  I started off at 5:00 in the morning wearing my cut-off jeans, a faded tie-dye tank top, espadrille sandals and a red bandanna on my head. I had a small backpack with only a toothbrush, jeans, a sweater and an old rain poncho I’d found in my closet stuffed behind my gowns.

  As I passed the porter’s lodge, I popped my head in to tell the Barson I’d be gone a few days. There, parked patiently on the long bench across from the mailboxes, sat Clive with a backpack propped up next to him. He wore cut-off jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. When he stood up with exposed arms and legs, I realized I’d never seen him in shorts before or even a short-sleeve shirt other than at the rowing match. I was again hit with what a muscular, tight body he had. I tried not to look at it, but it wasn’t easy since his long, tanned legs were splayed across the tiny porter’s lodge.

  I looked at him blankly. I was sick of being the one who said everything, so I simply said goodbye to the Barson. The red-nosed gatekeeper, who had his back to both of us as he sorted the mail into the ancient nicked wooden slots, said, “Miss McClure, Master Hunter-Parsons is willin’.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh, and then said in my best Peggotty imitation, “Well, he best be moving off then, hey?” At this Clive got up, slung on his “rucksack,” as they say in England, and we walked silently down High Street together as the orange dawn set the Bodleian Library spires aflame. We maintained our hush to the first roundabout. I put out my thumb and within seconds a lorry took us all the way to the M40. The driver was a big man with a long, narrow face — so long that it looked as though someone had professionally stretched it. His face was framed by a long black beard and curly black hair on his head. He turned his sunken black eyes toward me and asked where we were headed. (He had such a thick accent that I couldn’t understand most of what he said.) Clive responded, “We’re on our way to Wales, Snowdonia, then down to Swansea.”

  “You daft?”

  “Why?” I asked, this being the first thing I’d understood.

  “Only one road up in there, and all of England and a good chunk of Europe goin’ to Caernarfon for the investiture at the weekend. They’ll be pulling the cars off the road from what I heard. The trains are already in a muddle.”

  “Ever try to tell an American woman what to do?” Clive asked in a matter-of-fact tone, as though it was a sociological inquiry rather than a complaint.

  “Any woman,” the lorry driver clarified, pulling up a hill in his thirteen-gear rig.

  After hours of silent travel, he announced, “Tea time comin’ up.” He actually went to all the trouble of pulling off the M40 to find this little shop that had hot, homemade scones and loose-leaf tea served in a previously warmed pot. When we went in, he took his book, Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche. Clive opened Yeats and I followed suit with Thomas. I had worked at truck stops and I never once saw an American truck driver bring a book. Nor had I ever known a trucker to pull off the highway and lose twenty minutes for the sake of a good cup of tea.

  “Well, mates,” he said when we got up to leave, “I have some good news for you. I’m going as far as Stoke-on-Trent, so I can just drop you off along the way and you can get a ride west to Snowdonia.”

  “Brilliant,” said Clive.

  “How come you didn’t say that hours ago?” I asked.

  “Wanted to make sure I could read me books as I didn’t fancy a chin wag.”

  “I’m Cathy,” I said, hoping that wasn’t too much information.

  “Rufus.”

  “Clive.” He leaned over and shook hands.

  The sun came out and we barrelled on through the Black Country, the industrial wasteland of England, which made Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes look like the Garden of Eden. It got its name from the nineteenth-century iron foundries that sent black smoke into the air. The buildings were still covered in black soot. Rufus told us everything about the history of making leather, mining limestone and coal in the most detailed yet fascinating way imaginable.

  He’d inherited his lorry from his father. As the rig shuddered up the hills of Wolverhampton, he reached into the glove compartment and retrieved a small tape recorder and said that only a sacred few got to listen to his tapes of Roger Miller, a Nashville country and western singer. Clive was a bit lost on this one, but I’d kept an eye on the country and western charts since I’d worked with truck drivers at an all-night doughnut shop in Buffalo. Rufus and I sang along with Miller as he crooned, “Dang Me,” “King of the Road” and “England Swings.” Then Miller sang one of my all-time favourites, later made famous by Janis Joplin, called “Me and Bobby McGee.”

  I began singing “Bobby McGee” with Rufus in the lead. I was, of course, thrilled because I was in a truck, in a dirty red bandanna, as the lyrics suggested. The driver reached in the back seat and pulled out an old guitar, which he said he strummed at night when he was on the road. Clive took the guitar and played beautifully as the driver put on a harpoon, or as he called it a “Texas harmonica,” which looked like braces for an elephant, so he could play and drive. We all sang “Me and Bobby McGee” and screamed out my favourite line from that song, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

  Later we turned on the radio to BBC and they were having a Janis Joplin concert. This time Rufus was at a loss, and Clive and I could lead the singing. I have the worst voice in North ­America. Clive suggested there was no need to stop at North America. Every­one did, however, agree that I did a mean imitation of Janis Joplin; the only detectable difference was she sometimes sang on key. We sang everything from “Ball and Chain” to “Summertime” to “Down on Me” to “Piece of My Heart.” We sang until we were hoarse and the Black Country was at our backs.

  I often wonder why a person remembers one moment and not another. This scene of so long ago is perfectly etched in my mind. I can feel the knot of the bandanna, hear the whistle of the air brakes and the whine of the diesel engine as it climbed the black foothills. It wasn’t the scenery, as the Black Country was not in any way beautiful. It was the feeling of freedom — that glorious freedom of youth. I was twenty-one and free as a black crow in a cornfield. I felt it from my heart to my shoes. We were young, on the road; the trip was before us as we wailed with Janis Joplin. We were going to get it while we could.

  Sixteen months later, shortly after I’d left England, my father was dead. I was living in Toronto when I turned on the radio and heard the same BBC concert, but now it was called a tribute to ­Janis Joplin, for she too had died. This time when I heard the songs, she seemed to be crying as she sang and her lyrics didn’t ring of raucous freedom, but of lonely pain. I remember Roy used to say, “You’d best have fun, ’cause life can turn on a dime.”

  CHAPTER 6

  adam and eve

  That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.

  — D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

  It was dark in the country — like being in the middle of a black cylinder. Suddenly life is a deprivation chamber and since you have nothing to look out at, you have to look inward. There are no clues from the outside world anywhere.

  Clive and I inched along, hoping to find something to hold onto. We desperately n
eeded somewhere to crash. I actually hadn’t thought of sleeping arrangements until that moment. I figured since he sprang his attendance upon me, he could figure out the hotel arrangements. I was, however, getting nervous. It was the era of free love, and people who were free enough to hitchhike around Europe and travel with male companions usually slept with them. I was sure that Clive had no idea I was a virgin. As my best friend Leora had said, I was a package of extremes. Margaret-­Ann, on the other hand, was a dead giveaway.

  Being a virgin was getting beyond boring — it was almost an albatross. I guess I still bought the notion that the first time was supposed to be special and with someone you loved. I knew that was a hangover from the ’50s, but I couldn’t feign the casually cool attitude practically every other woman my age who knew how to walk, talk and spin a birth control wheel seemed to have mastered with aplomb. Now people just “got it on.” As Janis Joplin said, “Get it while you can.” It was a right of passage, and I’d become stuck in the doorway.

  I have to confess that, in retrospect, I wished I’d slept with ­Laurie, my first, and thus far only, love. At least I’d been with him for years and had loved him or thought I had. He wasn’t the man I thought he was, but my sexual organs would never have guessed that. Besides I could tell by the way he touched and kissed it would have been great. What had I been thinking? What had I been afraid of? Maybe somewhere under all my bravado I was afraid the gates of Paradise would slam on me. I was afraid that St. Peter would meet me at the entrance of the kingdom of heaven and say, “You did that?” Somewhere in my ex-Catholic heart a nun’s voice tremulously warbled, “Eternity is a long time, Catherine.”

  I don’t think it helped that the first time I saw a sexual act was witnessing a gang bang at age thirteen. My girlfriend and I hid in a closet to spy on her older brother’s fraternity meeting. The first order on their agenda was to bring in a pathetically deluded neighbourhood girl, and then all of them proceeded to have sex with her. When they were finished with her, they left her in the rec room and went upstairs for pizza. They told her to go out through the garage.