Without Reservations

by Alice Steinbach

  Listening to the voices around me I found myself remembering my first meeting with Naohiro. How quickly, I thought, he and I passed from small talk to real talk. I could still hear his soft, musical voice telling me on the train to Giverny, You must go to Sainte-Chapelle to stand in the light; and my own voice responding, And you must go to Père-Lachaise Cemetery to stand in the past.

  But it was unfair to compare this first meeting with my classmates to that encounter with Naohiro. It was also preemptory. As the candlelit dinner at Brasenose progressed, I found myself drawn to several people in the group.

  After dinner I set out alone to explore Oxford. It was a cold, windy night and the streets were almost deserted. Within a few minutes I was shivering, my body tensed in knots against the strong wind. Common sense told me to turn back, but the magic of Oxford propelled me forward, into one narrow lane after another. Finally, the cold and the cobblestone streets, some so uneven that the stones hurt right through my shoes, became too much of a struggle. I decided to return to Brasenose.

  The problem: I hadn’t a clue as to where I was or how to get back to the college. I’d brought along a map—I learned early in my travels never to be without a map—but it was the same one that had led me in circles earlier in the day.

  I looked up at the street signs. I was somewhere on a residential street called Holywell, which on the map appeared to be not too far from Brasenose. As I stood beneath a street light studying the map, a woman turned the corner and headed for one of the houses. She unlocked the door; a circle of light spilled out. I could see through the door the warm glow of lamps and pictures lining the pale yellow walls. An orange-and-white cat, back arched, tail plumed up into the air, suddenly appeared to greet her, rubbing up against her legs. The woman bent to stroke the top of his head; the cat leaned in to her caress. “Did you miss me?” I heard her ask in a voice flushed with affection.

  A wave of homesickness washed over me. Standing on a strange street, a cold mist swirling in on top of the wind, lost and alone, I thought of the warmth of my own house, of my friends, and of Tasha, the cat who waited patiently for me to come home. Then I remembered the cold, spartan rooms that awaited me at Brasenose, the lumpy cot with its unyielding pillow and scratchy sheets. A part of me wilted.

  Walking back to Radcliffe Square, I thought of something my mother used to read to me. It was a passage from a book by her favorite naturalist, Wendell Berry. In it he offers advice to those about to enter the wilderness. “Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place,” he wrote, “there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.”

  Eight years earlier my mother had carried his words with her into the hospital. I’d found them neatly copied in her handwriting on a piece of paper in her handbag, the one I took home from the hospital after she died. She’d taken them with her to prepare for the journey ahead of her. It was to be her last trip, one that would take her into a new kind of wilderness, an unmapped territory known only to those who entered it.

  Still, I knew that every small wilderness we enter—even one composed only of the unfamiliar streets of Oxford—offers a chance to practice for the larger one that lies in all our futures.

  The course on “The English Village and Cottage Life” focused on the history of village life in England and how these small communities shaped the character of the English people. I found the lectures to be mixed: some quite stimulating, others deeply boring. Lectures on England’s land migration patterns, for instance, simply did not do it for me. Still, others in the group seemed intensely interested in the same lectures I found dry and statistical.

  At least, that’s the impression conveyed by the fury of their note-taking and the number of questions they asked during such lectures. This kind of academic zeal often sent Ellen, a hip New Yorker with a sarcastic streak, into orbit. “What is it with this note-taking and question-asking?” she’d hiss into my ear. “Isn’t there a statute of limitations on trying to be the smartest kid in class?”

  The answer, I could have told her—but didn’t—was: no, there is no statute of limitations. I knew this to be true because occasionally during a class I found myself listening not only to Ellen’s mocking comments but to those of an inner companion as well: “Perhaps,” this companion—whose name was Insecurity—whispered to me, “you’re just not as smart as the others.”

  At such times I reminded myself that life was not a test and no one was grading me. Except my own superego, of course.

  As the days passed and the group settled into the routine of lectures followed by trips out into the English countryside, I realized how much life at Oxford resembled life in high school. Small groups formed, hints of romance surfaced, complaints about the lodgings arose, rumors flew.

  “Did you hear about Jane and Mike?” a classmate asked at breakfast one morning. “They’re gone. Just up and left. No one knows why.” But everyone had a theory. As the day progressed, several explanations emerged for Jane and Mike’s abrupt departure, ranging from sudden illness to impending divorce.

  I loved it. All of it. I loved being back in a learning situation surrounded by opinionated, smart, and complex people. I loved the political arguments that started at dinner and ended hours later in a pub on the High Street. I loved the rumors and the gossip. I even loved watching the way in which small circles formed and broke away from the group. I saw it as a valuable lesson in the psychology of how people select—often after an initial mis-selection—the company they prefer to keep.

  All of it, even the occasional petty or snide observation made by one person or another, I found endearing. Endearing because it was so human. I viewed the group, myself included, with a lenient, familial eye, one that ultimately valued our connectedness over everything else.

  Of course, caught up in the group dynamics of the situation, we were in fact functioning as a family. Although the hierarchy was blurred—sometimes one group seemed dominant, at other times not—we all had our roles within the family. There were the elders of the group and there were the young and the restless. There were the intellectuals and the practical-minded; the charismatic leaders and the uncertain followers; the sophisticates and the naifs; the winners and the losers; the fun-seekers and the complainers.

  It was this last category that, ultimately, interested me most. I found myself observing each classmate from this angle, looking for signs—I gradually came to think of them as symptoms—that identified them as either fun-seekers or complainers. The fun-seekers, I noted, were spontaneous and flexible. They approached each day and each situation with a willingness to ride whatever wave came along, just for the experience of it. The complainers, on the other hand, would only catch a wave if it was exactly to their liking. Anything else drew loud protestations about how it was not what they expected.

  I wanted to be a fun-seeker. Not only because I just plain wanted more fun in my life, but because intuitively I knew my energies were working in that direction. To my surprise, it was Albert who gave me my first lesson in how to seek out fun.

  Albert, along with the rest of us, had been sucked into the vortex of this purloined family. He spent a lot of time with us, eating meals, going out in the evenings, acting as a sort of guide and concierge. His role was that of the Oxford insider; the one who knows the system and how it operates. My guess was that the insider role was not the one usually assumed by Albert, who seemed a reserved, almost shy young man. But as time passed he seemed to grow into it. And to enjoy it.

  Albert, the son of psychiatrists, liked to tell stories about Oxford and, as he grew more comfortable with us, about himself. Although he was probably not aware of it, his personal stories often opened up a view, for those who cared to look, into the inner Albert.

  One late afternoon while sharing a glass of sherry with a half-dozen of us, Albert recalled a temp
orary job he’d had in London, one ruled over by a difficult, demanding, never-satisfied boss. He commuted by train to London every day. One day his train was late. “By the time I arrived at the station in London I was already fifteen minutes late,” Albert told us. “And I knew when I got to work I would be fired. So I thought about it for a few minutes. Then I thought, ‘Why not turn this mishap into an adventure?’ So I decided to go to Cornwall right from Paddington Station.”

  He never returned to the job. “But,” he said, “I had a wonderful time in Cornwall.”

  For some reason I was quite taken with Albert’s philosophy of turning a mishap into an adventure. When I returned to my rooms that evening I, who never took notes in class, got out my spiral binder and wrote, “Must experimentally test Albert’s Theorem of M=EA (Mishap equals Excellent Adventure).”

  However, I didn’t realize fully how much it impressed me until several weeks later in Italy when I found myself, by mistake, on a train going to Assisi instead of Arezzo.

  Dumped out of the train, standing in the station at the foot of Monte Subasio, three miles below the Umbrian town of Assisi, I thought, “Why not turn this mishap into an adventure?” On an earlier day trip to Assisi I’d explored a charming small hotel that hung over the mountain’s edge, thinking that someday I would return for a longer visit.

  Fate, or so I convinced myself, had plunked me down in Assisi sooner rather than later for that visit. I decided to stay for a few days.

  That night, as I sat on the outdoor terrace of the hotel, I silently toasted Albert, the man who turned a mishap into an adventure. And who not so incidentally made me realize how simple it is to do. How simple and how necessary. It seemed an important lesson.

  As things turned out, it was not the only lesson I was to learn from Albert during my stay at Brasenose. It was through Albert that I met Barry, the Oxford instructor I would remember above all others.

  10

  A COTSWOLD ENCOUNTER

  Dear Alice,

  How odd that a chance meeting with a woman named Letty would add a large piece to the puzzle of how to enjoy life as you grow older. Letty’s found the secret, I think, to staying young. How? By responding as a child does: seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

  Love, Alice

  The first field trip scheduled for the class was to the Cotswold village of Burford. For me it came just in time, this jaunt out of the lecture hall and into the actual countryside that gave rise to cottage life in England. I had already cut class one morning to travel on my own to the nearby village of Woodstock, and was really looking forward to visiting Burford.

  It was a sunny, cool morning when we left Oxford for the hourlong drive to the Cotswolds. Through the windows of the bus I watched a gentle wind move the sun slantwise, like the beams from a lighthouse, across the sea of Oxfordshire meadows. Sheep grazed, streams gurgled, dales quietly rose into hills, tall grass bent before the wind. We had arrived in quintessential English countryside.

  I got out my book on the Cotswolds and read the names on the map: Shipton-under-Wychwood, Bourton-on-the-Water, Moreton-in-Marsh, Stow-on-the-Wold. How I loved these quaint names. In my head I had a picture, formed long ago by seeing photographs in one of Grandmother’s books, of what life was like in English villages such as these. The corner pub, the medieval church towers, the flocks of sheep driven to market through the village, the thatched-roof cottages and wild, blooming gardens, the square where everyone gathered: this was English country life as it existed in my head.

  The drive from Oxford to Burford took us first through Witney. It was a village that seemed less idyllic and picture-perfect than many of the better-known Cotswold tourist attractions.

  In Witney, the quick eye caught glimpses of real people living real lives. Housewives with hunched shoulders and weary expressions carried their string-tied packages from the butcher shops. Elderly men sat in the sun, canes by their sides, caps pushed back to reveal faces sculpted by hard work. Bored-looking teenagers gathered in front of a drugstore, flirting and puffing on cigarettes, their schoolbooks lying in piles on the ground. At Angelina’s Beauty Shop a young shampoo girl with butter-colored streaks in her long, dark hair stood daydreaming at the half-open door, a wet towel slung over her shoulder.

  I tried to imagine what it was like to be young in a place such as Witney. Does growing up in a small town make for a smaller life? I wondered. Or does it offer a more secure, less complicated one?

  I knew from my conversations with the owner of an Oxford bookshop—a smart, observant man who grew up in Oxfordshire—that many young people from nearby villages, restless for adventure, emigrated at an early age. “I’m too old for that,” he said. “Oxfordshire is where I’ll make my stand.”

  After talking to him, I thought of Grandmother, who moved to America in her late fifties. Unlike so many younger people, she moved out of necessity, not the desire for adventure. From her I learned that the older emigrant feels something the young do not: the deep sadness of leaving home. The “Old Country,” she used to call it, when telling me bedtime stories about her life in Scotland. Occasionally, she would pull out from under the bed a cardboard box. Inside, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, was a kilt woven in the tartan of her clan. “It’s from the Old Country,” she would tell me with pride and, I later realized, sadness, too.

  For a long time I thought the Old Country was the name of an ancient land, one that, like Atlantis, no longer existed. I pictured it as a place of rolling green hills and deep glens, of cottages with smoke puffing through chimneys; a place populated with kind When we arrived in Burford I set out to explore the town on my own. Positioned on a hillside, its main street rising dramatically from a small stone bridge spanning the poetically named Windrush River, Burford retains the unspoiled charm of the seventeenth-century wool town it once was. With its steep main street—the High Street—and its quaint, honey-colored limestone inns and shops, Burford emerges from the Oxfordshire countryside like a mirage bathed in golden light.

  Standing at the low point of the town, looking up the long street that seemed to rise until it simply disappeared into the sky, I felt as though I’d stumbled across an English version of Brigadoon: a storybook village that existed somewhere out of real time. But it was not just the look of the village; even the friendly, sturdy locals out on their morning errands conjured up some primitive image of how life ought to be.

  Earlier that morning I had been told by one of the Brasenose “scouts”—the name given to the good-natured women who clean the rooms at Oxford’s colleges—that there were two things I should do in Burford. “You mustn’t miss the church,” my scout said as we chatted at the top of the perilously steep steps leading to my rooms. “Oh, it’s a beauty, dear. And mind you, get a jar or two of the homemade lemon curd. There’s nowhere you’ll get better curd than Burford, I always say. It’s quite lovely.”

  Her recommendations suited me. Not only do I, too, think lemon curd—a custardlike combination of lemons, sugar, eggs, and butter—quite lovely, I also think there is nothing better than having as short a list as possible of must-see places when you travel. A two-item list seemed about right. I decided to visit the church first. That, I reasoned, would open the rest of the day for lemon-curd shopping and creative wandering.

  The Church of St. John the Baptist was just as my scout described it: a beauty. Left behind by the Normans, the church had changed and grown over the centuries—it was fairly large for a village the size of Burford—but care had been taken to preserve its splendid original architecture. I lingered for quite a while in the cool stone interior. The air inside was redolent with the smell of the damp, fertile earth seeping in from the surrounding countryside; it was like breathing in life itself.

  Outside, on my way back to the High Street, I stopped to admire the stalks of purple lavender blooming along the pathway. I smiled, remembering all the handmade sachets Grandmother and I had filled with lavender from her garden. Months later the sma
ll, stitched-together squares of blue silk would be given away as Christmas gifts.

  I squeezed the blossoms between my fingers, releasing their aromatic scent. Instantly, like a genie let loose from a bottle, Grandmother was there, standing beside me, in her no-nonsense pith helmet. The helmet was a gift from my father, who wore one himself during the summer months. Grandmother wore hers as a sun hat when she worked in the garden.

  Suddenly a voice behind me broke into my thoughts: “If you put the crushed lavender under your pillow, you’ll get a fine night’s sleep.”

  I turned around and saw the voice belonged to a woman with wavy, reddish-gray hair, lively blue eyes, and fair skin that was papery and lined, like a sheet of parchment. She wore a well-tailored poplin raincoat and carried a smart-looking tan leather purse with a gold clasp. A tweed skirt peeked out from beneath her raincoat. She looked, I thought, as Mrs. Miniver might have looked in her later years. She also struck me as a woman who in her youth might very well have had a rose named in her honor.

  “Yes, I’ve been told that about lavender,” I said. “By my grandmother.”

  “Well, now, that’s what a grandmother’s for, isn’t it? To pass on stories about lavender and such.”

  I was struck by the wry tone of her voice; it conveyed a sharpness that attracted me. Emboldened, I told her the story of the lavender sachets and my thrifty Scottish grandmother. I think I even mentioned the pith helmet. It pleased me that she laughed in all the right places. Then I told her about my mission to purchase some of Burford’s finest lemon curd. For some reason she seemed interested in all this, so I took the next step: I introduced myself. She replied, saying, “And I’m Letty Thompson.”