A MAN IN A UNIFORM announced that the plane was ready for boarding. We went out the door of the shack onto the tarmac. A waist-high chain-link fence stood between us and the runway. We watched the men push a great staircase on wheels up to the plane’s door, high off the ground, and then someone opened the little gate in the fence, which most of us could have stepped over, and welcomed us aboard. I climbed the stairs and went inside the airplane. The aisle sloped sharply upward and I automatically reached for the seat-backs to help me propel myself up to the front. My brother and I looked into the open cockpit. The captain chatted with my brother and showed him stuff. Once we were all seated, the captain started to rev up the propellers, which seemed to come on one by one, at least that’s what it sounded like. The stewardess talked to us in a friendly way and checked our seat belts and we were off. Later she gave us soda with roundish ice cubes in it and a “snack”—a word not permitted in our house. Daddy was disgusted that my brother and I had each eaten our whole roll of Life Savers. He said, “Can’t you just eat one or two and put the rest in your pocket to save for later?” “No” remained unsaid.
Someone told me that the pink blanket we could see over the island of Manhattan was smog. I still find it frightening. I told myself to try not to breathe too much when we landed. La Guardia was a blur as we disembarked (the bastard word deplane was not yet invented), collected our luggage, and made our way to the taxi that took us into the city for an overnight stay. My father had something to do in the city before we went to England I guess, I don’t remember.
I was twelve, my brother eight, my father forty-nine. The Plaza had fallen out of favor with my father, and carrousel horses had fallen out of favor with me. We stayed across Fifth Avenue at the Sherry Netherland. I was nearly beside myself when the maid, all aflutter, told me the Beatles had just vacated our room. I was madly in love with Paul McCartney. (Oh, middle age, I just had to look up how to spell McCartney!) I spent hours looking for strands of hair or other such treasures—alas, to no avail. My little brother humored me and looked, too; that is, when he could tear himself away from the window where he was counting taxicabs. He kept coming up to me, helpfully, with lint.
I was soon to have a second chance to be near my beloved Paul in England, center of the universe. We took a Checker cab to JFK International Airport. It “cost a fortune,” my father said.
I would see St. Mark’s in Venice a few years later and hear Monteverdi vespers sung by a four-part choir from its balconies, north, south, east, and west, but my first cathedral, and, to date, unsurpassed in heights of wonder and awesome vastness, was the new Trans World Airlines Terminal. What is it about hugeness, vastness that is enclosed and encompassed, that feels the way it does? Here were polished walkways suspended in the air like two arms stretching upward to the heavens. It was like The Jetsons, only better. Trees were growing inside in containers; I’d never in my wildest imagination thought of an indoor glade. The trees had smooth, jet-black pebbles covering their feet. My father picked one up and caressed the surface with his thumb. He said how marvelous it would be to have some beautiful stones like that at home. He put it back carefully.
We went upstairs to a restaurant where we could look out a floor-to-ceiling window and see planes taking off and landing. Lights began to come on. Spotlights in blues and whites lit up the stage drama before us. We were up past our bedtime, and we knew it, which added to the excitement.
When we boarded the transatlantic jet, I was in for another big surprise. Daddy had booked us in first class. The seats were enormous. He complained unquietly about the cost; it was fabulously expensive, something he’d never do for himself, but he thought it was worth it when traveling with children, “so you guys can stretch out and sleep,” he explained, justifying himself to I’m not sure whom.
Matthew collected things. Some small boys are like little crows. He collected the little salt and pepper containers, the wet-wash, the small, individual-size wrapped bars of soap, and our flight-pack cologne. By the end of our vacation, he had more tiny bottles of cologne and little soaps than any other eight-year-old boy on the planet. As if any eight-year-old boy would ever “freshen up” as invited on the packet. These went right into his shoe boxes and dresser drawers alongside his marbles and Matchbox cars. Matthew wasn’t just a casual collector who tossed his specimens into a drawer and forgot about them. He reveled in his collections. He took them out again and again, and not just to look; he patted them, sorted them, ran his fingers through them. His was a truly sensual pleasure in accumulation. He told me once, when he was in second grade, that he wished he were Richie Rich (a wealthy comic-book character) so that he could have a room full of gold coins and just roll around in them.
I, on the other hand, wished to feel Paul’s lips on mine as he sang, “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you.” In sixth grade, I cut out of a magazine a large picture of Paul’s face and taped it to a pillow so I could practice kissing him. How far to open my lips troubled me, to find the right distance between the Scylla of closed-mouth child’s kissing and the Charybdis of gross tongues. The pillow fell far too short of reality; it was maddeningly frustrating, like when I was little and my friend Rachel and I lay in a field staring up at the stars, willing ourselves to fly. We almost did, we felt ourselves lifting, but just couldn’t quite make it off the ground. So close and yet so far. But every mile our jet traveled across the Atlantic was bringing me closer to that sweet object of my desire. My father had said it might be possible to meet John Lennon through his publisher but he didn’t make any promises. Where there is John, there is Paul . . .
After supper, I put on the eyeshades and slippers that were in my TWA toiletry kit and tried to go to sleep. I’d never slept except in a bed lying down and I tried to lie down in my chair. My brother fit perfectly and was asleep amid the comforting glow from the rows of night-lights, and cozy pools of light shining on private readers. I kept trying to crumple up my legs like those bendy wire tricks that, I’m told, if you fold them just the right way, unlocks the puzzle. Finally, I draped my legs over the armrest into my brother’s seat, which, had he been awake, would have elicited howls of protest and probably a border war. It was safe for now and I fell asleep.
We awoke to washcloths and orange juice and too-bright lighting. The captain said we’d be landing at Heathrow in twenty minutes, where the local time was 7:25 A.M. My brother collected more things off his breakfast tray. We took off our TWA slippers and put on our shoes again, brushed our teeth with these cool toothbrushes that came in two pieces inside a plastic case, and looked out the window for land. England.
At Heathrow, we walked through miles of corridors. Daddy had a rule that you had to carry your own luggage—not the big stuff that was checked, but whatever you had brought with you—toys, handbags, overnight cases—you were responsible for. It seemed fair and sensible to me and nipped in the bud all that whining about carry me, carry this, etc. It also made me feel proud to carry my own weight, as it were. At customs, a man with an English accent asked if my father was traveling for business or pleasure, and Daddy answered him succinctly and politely. He often horsed around with people, but having been in the army, he always knew when not to horse around. I never saw him joke around with a stranger—a waitress, someone in line at a checkout counter—who didn’t truly laugh and enjoy the familiarity and the humor. He was a terrific judge about that sort of thing. He never made strangers feel as though the joke were on them, but rather, that they were in on a joke. And you never had to cringe the way most kids do if their father starts to joke around in public. The customs officer stamped our passports, and we were on our way.
We waited in a queue for a taxi to take us to our hotel. We got into one of the large, identical black London taxis waiting patiently, no honking or hollering—“C’mon, Mac, let’s move it, pedal’s on the right”—as in New York. My father reached his hand up and touched the roof of the cab, a gesture of benediction. He loves anything with headroom—London cabs,
rooms with high ceilings—and takes anything less as a personal affront. He used to reach his hand up and touch the ceiling in the addition to the Red house my mother had planned, cursing it and scowling darkly nearly every time he entered the room. I believe he remarked how marvelous London taxis are, touching the roof, every single time we entered one the entire trip. I’ll eat my hat if he didn’t do the exact same thing, gesture and words, last year, some thirty years later, when he and his new wife traveled to London.
The cab let us off in front of the Cadogan Hotel in Sloane Square. It was across the street from a beautiful little park that shone in the bright morning sun. The hotel wasn’t like the big ones I was used to in New York; it seemed more like a friendly old brownstone on the Upper East Side, all gleaming brass and Oriental rugs rather than the Plaza’s large chandeliers and fields of plush carpeting. I liked both varieties very, very much. What I didn’t like was the birdcage elevator that was to bring us up to our rooms on the third floor. I’d never seen one before, and when the operator opened the screen to let us in, I balked. I knew instantly, and with total certainty, that there was absolutely no chance I could make my body step inside. Wild horses, Nazis, it was just not going to happen. I stood there, blocking the way, I imagine, for enough time that the porter began looking impatient in that tight, superior way the British can do when they want to. I said simply, “I can’t.” My father didn’t say a word to me; he informed the porter we preferred to walk, and upstairs we went, suitcases and all, as if it were the most normal thing in the world not to be able to get into an elevator all of a sudden. Sometimes my father’s topsy-turvy, Alice-like inversions of what’s normal can be pretty wonderful. He is the only person I know who would not have at least tried, with varying degrees of patience, to suggest, “Oh, honey, don’t be silly, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
At the top of the stairs, the porter opened our rooms and my brother and I walked into the twin-bedded one. Daddy followed us in and motioned me to keep walking. Mine was the single room. Unbeknownst to me, he had booked me into a single, and he and my brother were to share a room. He said, matter-of-factly, that I was getting to an age where I should have my own room. The boys would bunk in together. Somehow both my brother and I felt special.
My room was lovely. It had tiny blue flowers on the wallpaper and a sink, right in the room, with stiff white linen hand towels. It was probably the first time in my life I washed up voluntarily. I sat on the bed and looked out the window at the park. It was green, green, green. I’d never seen anything like it. It didn’t have that dusty look of parks in New York, nor the wildness of the outdoors in New Hampshire, nor the marigold artificiality of gardens planted in front of banks or courthouses or traffic islands. Lush, verdant, vibrant, you could feel the energy of the plants and flowers tumbling and laughing in great masses, like children at recess, rather than sitting in stiff rows like soldiers. Yet somehow there was a pleasing order to it all; each plant had room to express the shape it held within its roots, without crowding out its neighbor. Lovely green lawns flowed around islands and banks of flowers creating calm, open places to rest the eyes and mind and soul.
We went to St. James’s Park and fed the ducks, marveling at the variety, and successfully identified them by name with the help of a poster of English waterfowl that the park service had so sensibly and thoughtfully posted for the benefit of those interested in such things. Matthew fed peanuts to the chubby little black squirrels, distant cousins of our big American gray ones.
We went to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard. Matthew watched for about ten seconds and then turned around to resume taking pictures of cars. He took rolls and rolls of film, with my father’s blessing, of exactly what interested him and nothing else. We have almost a whole album full of pictures of nothing but cars and the occasional stranger’s behind who happened to get in the way of his camera as he focused on yet another car or lorry or taxi.
My father, again, was terrific about not forcing museums or other things one “should” see on children. We took a ride up the Thames on a tour boat, and the guy kept talking about Greenwich mean time, and let us off, presumably in Greenwich, for a few minutes to see absolutely nothing. Someone, I forget who, got snotty with my father. He was incensed, not so much at the snottiness itself, but at the injustice of it, of the British looking down their noses at Americans. “They forget we bailed them out in the war,” he said to me. It’s a touchy thing with Yankee Anglophiles, being snubbed that is. I saw a lot of it during my three years at Oxford. Some Yanks reacted by becoming more British than the British. I honest to God met a first-year graduate student who, at a drinks party, when I asked him where he was from, thinking Sussex or Surrey, proclaimed in Shakespearean alto voce, “Gaddy, Indi-onna.” (Yes, that’s Gary, Indiana, folks.)
Other Yanks, such as myself, who had been raised saying trousers and tomahtos, had a heretofore unexperienced surge of patriotism; I was tempted to go out and buy a “jogging costume,” that is to say, track suit, emblazoned with the American flag on one shoulder and PEGGY #1 on the other. (Wearing your workout clothes outside the sporting arena is, for the British, akin to wearing one’s pajamas in public; it’s just not done, dear, except, of course, by those dreadful Frisbee-playing Americans noising up the college gardens.)
My father was most comfortable in the company of the not-quite-English Brits from the former colonies. We ate Indian food at every opportunity and listened to Daddy talk about how marvelous the Indians were as a people. He admired their delicate hands and wrists, gentle manners, and their religion, which he called the jewel of the East. Like all his love affairs, it was successful from afar. Had he experienced the diverse humanity of the continent, the sometimes officious, tangled bureaucracy, and the daily reality of pecking orders at the post office or on trains, instead of waiters in London restaurants, or holy men in his books, I think his ardor would have soured as quickly as it did with any loved one in the flesh.
We spent the next morning at Harrods. My father marveled at the great Food Hall; we could hardly tear him away. He finally went upstairs and bought my brother a beautiful Harris Tweed suit. I chose a blue mini-skirt with suede buttons up the front and a suede-fringed belt. It cost ten pounds, and my father was absolutely appalled by the price. He almost ruined it for me, but not quite. I took the tags off and wore it on the spot, for we were headed for Carnaby Street. He calmed down during the walk, and by the time we got to Carnaby Street, he discreetly stepped back and let me walk a little bit ahead of him so it wasn’t totally obvious to all those cool kids that I was with the old guy behind me. I didn’t dare buy any of the cool stuff like dangly plastic daisy earrings while he was around, though I vowed to sneak off somehow and come back later in the week.
I got my chance when we went to visit a family we knew from Maine, in London on sabbatical. Their son, Keith, object of Rachel’s long-distance desire, was my age and had been in a movie. He had a blond Beatle haircut and offered to show me around. My father told me later that he watched us walk across the park together from the MacNamaras’ window. “You guys looked good together,” he said.
Keith’s mother approached me at a funeral last year. I hadn’t seen her in nearly thirty years, and she asked me if I remembered visiting them in London. “Your father was quite upset that you’d rather go off with Keith than with him, do you remember?” No, I hadn’t noticed in my rush for the door. Keith took me to Madame Tussaud’s and back to Carnaby Street and we held hands walking. He wore a button that said “If you had sex last night smile!” When we met up with my father and brother in a Wimpy’s for hamburgers later on, Daddy laughed just as hard as we did at the grown-ups’ reactions to the button. Our young waitress blushed deeply and giggled as if we had found her out somehow.
The following day we took a trip to Hampton Court to go through the maze and to see one of Daddy’s oldest friends, Bet Mitchell. She and her former husband Mike were my father’s closest friends and also his ne
ighbors when he’d lived in Westport, Connecticut. Matthew enjoyed racing around the paths through the hedge maze at Hampton Court. I panicked and, I’m sorry to say, bolted through the six-foot-tall hedges in the direction of the sun and got the hell out. Bet took us to lunch and I ordered duck à l’orange, which sounded fancy and grown-up, and I tried not to struggle with the cutlery. Bet was like The New Yorker people in that she included me fully in the conversation, listened to me with great interest and quiet respect when I felt like saying something, but left me just as respectfully alone when I didn’t. Somehow I felt included even when I wasn’t talking and “joining in” in the conventional sense.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 30