I wrote to my father “a day in the life” sort of letter, and he wrote back thanking me for my good news and said it made good sense that I was savoring it. He suggested I read a book—which as usual I filed in my overflowing bin of books I “should” read but didn’t—by Joanna Field called A Life of One’s Own, in which she tried, on paper, he said, to take a close look at her life to discern the underlying reasons for what she called the “fat moments,” moments of contentment close to bliss. He said it might be both fun and instructive for me to undertake a similar look at the real whys and wherefores of why Oxford seemed to suit me to a T. What there is about a certain Oxford street or land or hall or room that excites pleasure or well-being in me. Or makes me feel tranquil or wonderfully independent or full of goodwill.
I had also mentioned in a letter, rather delicately and obliquely, that I was happy in a love affair that was not his prescribed “like with like.” He said it was duly noted that I have a big, good-looking boyfriend who doesn’t take long walks by himself or do or say anything particularly sensitive, but nonetheless suits me. The business of pairing off, he said, of alleviating solitariness, is a problem that can’t be solved satisfactorily short of nirvana.
In my thoughts I underestimated Marc’s sensitivity, but my body didn’t; it knew this was someone it could trust. My skin began to thaw after a lifetime of numbness and retreat. He noticed it first and put it into words, sensitively, I might add in belated admission. In fact, I think he understood something about me that I wouldn’t know for years to come. In one of his letters to me in San Francisco, he told me that he had felt a momentous change in me. He said simply that on a certain night, just before I’d left for vacation, we were making love as usual when suddenly, without warning, he felt me open up to him. I guess he met my body for the first time. I know I did.1
I wrote to Holly telling her about Marc. Always on the lookout for my well-being, and having reached that certain age, most especially my financial well-being, she was not pleased with me. “You go all the way to Oxford, England, where guys have titles and castles for God’s sake and you fall for a New Yorker!” I, however, had had enough of reclusion in four gray walls and four gray towers.
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two lovers lately wed:
“I am half sick of shadows,” said
The Lady of Shalott
DADDY CAME TO VISIT ME once while I was at Oxford, but he didn’t tell me he was coming, so Marc and I were in Portugal for term break. I arrived back to numerous phone messages, and when I rang, his flight home was the next day. I met him in London for a quick lunch, and I never did get to show him my beautiful college, or some of the other places I’d written about. He had stayed for days in a terrible hotel room where the air conditioner was broken. I asked him why he didn’t insist on moving to a better room or a different hotel. (I wouldn’t have put up with it for even a night, if there was an alternative.) He shook his head in a way that made me sad; he seemed so much less powerful than the Daddy I knew. So much less powerful in the world, dare I say it, than I. I thought about the golf games my brother and he used to play over in Windsor. Daddy always won, until one day my brother found he was beating him, rather easily. Matthew came home and told me he threw the game. I don’t think he’s played my father since. Like the pencil markings on the bathroom wall that record our heights. Somehow they stopped when my brother, now six feet five inches tall, was within about a quarter of an inch of my father’s mark at six feet two inches. Seeing him inept, in comparison to me, I think I finally understood how my brother had felt. “But I thought you wanted to win,” I had said to my sporting, competitive brother. Sometimes you do want to win, sometimes it’s just too sad.
MY GROUP OF FRIENDS AT Oxford were decidedly unsporty. A bit of tennis maybe, a brisk walk through the countryside to a pub. I led a second, separate life from them. I was captain of the basketball team in my second year, and at the University ski race held in Wengen, Switzerland, I placed second in giant slalom, and third in slalom—the first-place winner in both categories was a young Scotswoman from Cambridge University, who had been on the British Olympic ski team, and her time score was in a different universe from those of the rest of us mortals. She was such a terrific sport, setting up courses, gate-keeping, cheering us on, that no one had anything but respect for her. My beloved uncle Terrence (my mother’s youngest half brother and a professor of economics) was thrilled at the news. Two half-Blues2 in the family! He dutifully tried to introduce me to the pleasures of cricket, taking me to his club matches with him. I liked him so much, I gave it my best effort, but I guess I just don’t have it in my blood. God, it goes on for so long! I hope he wasn’t too disappointed when he saw that “I’m locked in an elevator and I’m never going to get out” look of panic on my face after a few (hundred!) hours in the stands. He just said cheerfully, “Well, then, I think we’ve had enough, wouldn’t you say? Shall we go home to tea?”
MARC WAS IN NEW YORK my last year at Oxford. We spent the long holidays together, ran up terrible phone bills, and wrote to each other. He surprised me with a visit on Valentine’s Day, calling me from Gatwick at about six in the morning to say he’d just landed. He arrived carrying an overnight case in one hand and a lovely blue hydrangea plant in the other, mumbling shyly something about he would have brought a bouquet of flowers or roses, but they wouldn’t have lasted as long. Bliss.
Like many of my father’s characters, I, too, wondered, “in a real panic,” how I would survive until Marc’s next visit. I quite literally would feel my stability and energy draining out of me after a few days of not having him near. My well-being was very much “a liquid, slipping through my fingers,” without my hand in his. Fortunately, I was excited about my thesis project so I was able to throw myself into my work between visits and hang on—barely.
I wrote a letter to my father to tell him about the work I was doing. I still have the letter because I never mailed it. I’d never written such a lengthy, spontaneous letter to him, and I didn’t feel confident enough to send it. The envelope says “Wrote this ages ago. Well sat on!”
Dear Daddy,
(Long but nothing serious—just talkative this evening)
I’ve been thinking of you a lot lately. Maybe because a dear old friend of mine is dying of cancer and it reminds me of feelings I picked up when I was little about (not really about but from being around) your nice friendships with Dammy Littel and with Mrs. Hand. Professor Barraclough, who insists I call him “Geoffrey” so I do, but I don’t think of him that way, is 75 and we’ve spent the last two Christmases together—once with Mom and Matthew in New York and once here in England with his 2nd wife (he’s had 3 or so). He went trudging around Oxford with me the year before I decided to come and it was during a record snowfall—cold wet and stupidly English—they don’t clear the sidewalks just walk right through the sludge miserably. He has been genuinely sweet and kind to me at Brandeis and on ’till now. It makes him happy to see me eating and enjoying chocolates if that makes any sense. Anyway he’s in remission now so the first thing I asked him, at the risk of being too blunt about talking about death but not that much of a risk, was whether or not he had his work in order since I remembered how relieved I was when you showed me one time how you had everything labeled and organized so it wouldn’t either be thrown out by stupid people or make things hellish for smart ones. He had done about half of it but had been putting off the rest.
Some work I’m doing for my thesis has been so interesting lately. I’ve been interviewing some people at a newspaper printing plant. It’s an old plant, 80 or so years out of date in some of its technology and the biggest one (except for one new thing in Japan) in the world. An old dinosaur in interesting ways. They still set lines of type manually on huge old linotype machines and one of the setters showed me how it worked and gave me a slug with my name in raised letters. I was actually dying to have one but I felt too embarrassed to ask.
I we
nt in around 10:30 at night and started at one end—where they receive some of the pages through facsimile transfer (sort of a xerox by phone lines—not really but good enough) from London, then on to a room that was like being on the inside of a camera where they change the size of photographs, then to the artists room where 5 men sit on stools with grey and black paint pots and touch up photographs by hand. Miss World was on that night so they were doing photos of the girls and T.V.s were on all over the plant in various “tea” corners.
Then I went up to the linotype area filled with machines and clicking noises and people running up and down to get bits of copy to set in type. Next to the linotype room was a room with low, suspended ceilings and greenish florescant (?) light and about six or seven guys were sitting at computer terminals setting the pages by computer (the advance on the old lino method) and feeding computer punchout tape into a machine. They looked tired, bored and were wearing ties which wouldn’t have seemed sad if they were young but they had rough old hands and drinker’s complexions just like the guys out on the floors. Outside that room again I came up behind one of the guys operating a machine and he didn’t see me and swore at something that had gone wrong and right afterwards looked up and saw me. All his mates (or in U.S. buddies) started laughing and teasing him and he turned red and apologised—it was just what used to happen when I worked at Boston Edison. Anyway it was quite funny and familiar. From there it was down three floors (on the way the supervisor who was taking me around yelled at a guy who was running up the stairs because he had recently had a heart attack) to where the metal page of print is made into a thick semi-circle—almost like truck breakshoes if you’ve ever seen them—out of a vat of molten metal. These are then carried over to the printing machines themselves and placed on a spinning roller. There a man mixes the ink (from a panel of about 15–20 adjustment nobs—almost as complicated as an organ) that sprays onto the roller that the huge rolls of newsprint (the blank paper) pass over.
The noise in there once the machines start up is incredible. I got there just as they were starting up (about 40 or 50 in all maybe fewer). Just when you thought it was as noisy as it gets, some more machines would kick in and it got louder still. Not sickeningly loud, more on the verge like some fair ride which was fun—I thought so anyway. It did take your breath away though. Every fourth machine or so was a folder so that the stream of flat newsprint went through something that happened too fast to see and came out as folded newspapers which went in little, well almost like train tracks but holding the papers in metal-like things that you make toast on campfires with, and this train of thousands of them wound round about the machines and then (like Santa, finger on nose, was whisked in blink of an eye) straight up two stories and through the ceiling. Bundled up put on trucks sent out to trains to Edinburgh, Glasgow all over. Everyone was so friendly and patient and showed me what they were doing in a very nice way—not paying too much attention to me or too little.
The Managing Director of the company started as an apprenticed printer on the shopfloor and is missing the top two joints on one finger and the top joint on the one next to it. He is absolutely and unself-consciously knocked out about the ancient Greeks. He took his wife to the (I forget the name of it right now but the Greek amphitheatre in stone where the Orestia was performed) and made her climb up the stairs to the top so he could show her that when he whispered from down below she could hear him perfectly. But he’s not interested just in the tricky things—I probably chose the wrong example—he reads up on all of it and goes tracking things down in museums with the slightly nosy but totally innocent persistent curiosity of say Mrs. Marple in Agatha Christie. “Oh, Peggy, you should see the beautiful line” (tracing a line from his hip over his head and up his arm) on some statue of a god who was in some eternal trial he said I must see. “But watch out,” he said wagging his finger at me, “it will make you weary just looking at it.” He had a thick old Scots accent that made the telling of it even more enchanting.
I just realized it’s late and I have to finish a labor economics essay (it’s not all enjoyable). There were four or five words I was going to check the spelling on but if I go back over and read this I’ll never send it. Don’t show Mrs. Corette.
I’ll probably be in N.Y.C. visiting and looking for jobs, not sure where, in January. Middle term doesn’t begin again till late Jan. I’ll call if I am in town. I won’t call on Christmas probably—my boyfriend is a pain about Christmas too—I still like presents wrapped nicely and with bows. He’ll oblige though. (yes, there’s an “or else” lurking there)
Love,
PEGGY
MY MOTHER AND BROTHER came over for graduation. A fancy medieval thing in robes and hats and Latin held in the Sheldonian Theatre. Matthew and Mom were to stay and do a bit of sightseeing with me for a week or so. I was worried about how we’d all get along, but I have to say it was lovely from beginning to end. The other miracle was that it didn’t rain for the entire week.
* * *
1. I am not discreetly referring to orgasms here. Press the right buttons, and that can be accomplished and I’m not even present—I’m a million miles away in my tower. I’m talking about something much harder; that is, actually inhabiting my body long enough to invite someone in. If you have survived childhood trauma, you’ll know just what I’m talking about. If you don’t understand, consider yourself fortunate—I mean that.
2. Rather like being a letterman in America. At Oxford and Cambridge one is awarded a “Blue” for excellence in some sports, such as rugby and cricket, “half-Blue” in others that aren’t quite as “British.”
31
Woman Overboard!
I STAYED ON IN OXFORD to staff a summer program for American labor arbitrators. My title was “dean,” but my duties were far from impressive, attending to my fellow Yanks’ complaints about hard pillows, lack of air-conditioning, and so on. But I did get to sit in on the classes and discussions and meet some terrific people in the field. Toward the end of the course, I was offered a job as an apprentice to an arbitrator in Boston.
When I arrived back in the States, the arbitrator who had offered me the apprenticeship told me that her current apprentice’s new job had fallen through so she would be staying on, terribly sorry, but I wasn’t needed. I had expected to move back into my old apartment on Marlborough Street, but my landlady said I’d have to wait several months at least because the tenants were suing her about something or other. She would have called me, but she had lost my number and couldn’t remember where in England I was staying. I thought that under the circumstances, I might go to New York for a while and stay with my boyfriend, who had just started a big job with an investment bank. Well, when I called to see what he thought, he told me he loved me dearly, but I couldn’t come and stay with him. He just couldn’t be with me anymore with the level of Sturm und Dräng, or as the Rolling Stones song says, “Nothin’ I do don’t seem to work, it only seems to make matters worse . . .” Marc was quite right, but I wasn’t prepared to see it that way at the time, nor any time probably. No job, no apartment, no beloved; three strikes and I was in free fall over the edge.
Just after my twenty-ninth birthday, and right before Christmas, I nearly died. Sig and Joel (my old friends from ski camp and Woodstock, Liza’s brothers) were living in Cambridge and they invited me to stay with them as long as I needed. After a few weeks of staying with the boys, I moved to a dumpy apartment down the street where I was a “tenant at will.” I was not doing well alone. One night, at around two-thirty in the morning, I called Marc, woke him up, and tried to convince him that he was making a terrible mistake breaking up with me. Screaming down the phone “I can so be normal!” in the wee hours of the morning is not, as we say in business school, a strategy with a high probability of success. I knew it, but I was in such pain without him that I couldn’t stop myself; like a panicked person drowning, I gripped his neck so tightly, I threatened to take him under with me. I felt as though a large piece of m
e had been ripped from my side, and my head was swimming as if from a severe loss of blood.
I had felt that before when I was eight and I carried my broken arm, across a wide field, staying awake as long as I could, cradling my arm, until too much blood had drained away and I fainted. Imprinted on the deepest parts of my mind as a child was the idea that hospitals are where you go when the pain is so bad you lose consciousness, and there are clean white sheets and people take care of you. Even your mother is nice to you in the hospital.
That night, some twenty years later, when I got off the phone with my boyfriend at three in the morning, knowing I’d driven another nail into the coffin of our relationship, my homing instinct took over. The pain was so bad I couldn’t stand it. I felt myself losing consciousness and I knew I had to get to the hospital. But this time there was no blood to show for my pain. So I had to swallow the bottles of pills or they’d be mad at me and call me a liar and send me home. With the “adamantine logic of dreamland,” this made perfect sense to me. Never tell a lie.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 45
