Dream Catcher: A Memoir (45 page)

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 neighbors 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.

After lunch, Daddy, Bet, my brother, and I went to visit Edna O’Brien for the afternoon. He told me with a conspiratorial wink that Edna was a good writer and a hell of a nice girl, but she wrote some
really
dirty stuff. (Not crummy, bad dirty, but sexy, naughty dirty.) Like a kid talking about a naughty and daring classmate, he clearly was really rather shocked and giggly about what she chose to write about. I wonder how many other writers of banned books are, in fact, rather prudish.

After tea, Edna took us out to a park where something was going on that was supposed to be of interest to children. The park was packed with people, and I had an attack of claustrophobia. I had trouble breathing and told my father quietly so the others wouldn’t hear. He picked me up and put me on his shoulders, high above the crowd. He said to the others that it was too crowded here to see anything and strode off across the park as if it were the most natural thing in the world to carry a five-foot-seven-inch twelve-year-old on one’s shoulders, which perhaps he thought it was.

The only not so fun part of the trip was the main reason he had come over in the first place. He had been corresponding with a teenage girl, and things had blossomed into a pen pal romance. He was to meet her for the first time in person. We planned to drive through Scotland with her in search of where my father’s beloved
39 Steps
was filmed.

We flew to Edinburgh, where the girl met our plane. I could tell something was wrong the instant they greeted each other. I didn’t know what was wrong until he told me, later in the trip, how terribly embarrassed he was when he saw her. Embarrassed and guilty. I asked him why, and he looked at me as if I were puzzlingly obtuse, when it was as plain as the nose on her face. “She’s terribly homely, poor girl, I had no idea.” Now this girl did not have two heads, nor was she ugly; she was plain. And that was that for my father. At the time I accepted it as law: boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, requiring no further
question on my part. Who knows, maybe she didn’t think he was such a bargain either. I rather doubt it though.

She was quite nice, but rather shy and awkward, and I had to share a room with her for the duration of the trip. They would not have shared a room, regardless of attraction, since, unlike my mother, my father was not of a generation or a mind-set in which a gentleman was remotely open about his sexual activities, if indeed there were any. This made all the difference in the world to me; the lack of overt sexuality on his part made things decent in my own mind, unlike my mother’s behavior, which so mortified and disgusted me. I wish, for this girl’s sake, though, that she had had a room of her own, rather than having to share one with me. I felt so sorry for her and I thought she probably wanted to cry but couldn’t because I was around. She sniffled a lot at night, but I was afraid to say anything, to try to offer a kind word, because she was the type to have allergies and adenoids, and I didn’t want to make her feel any more homely if she was just sniffling and not crying. My memory gets a bit cloudy at this point because I saw Hitchcock’s
Psycho
at a local Scottish movie theater, which unhinged me so that the next couple of days are a blurry mess, as if seen through a shower curtain.

What I saw of Scotland, as we drove from Edinburgh to the west coast, I thought was spectacularly beautiful, but most of the time I was horribly carsick and either throwing up or lying still in the backseat with my eyes squeezed shut trying not to throw up. Most of the scenery I saw was at the all too few and far between spots in the road where it was possible to pull over and let me vomit outside. The respite from the nauseating motion, the cool air in my face, and the relief of having just vomited made the already beautiful countryside look like God’s finest on the day of creation. Damp heather and heath smelled heavenly, lakes sparkled like Pearly Gates.

My father was absolutely delighted when we were delayed by a flock of sheep in the road. That was how, in
The 39 Steps,
the hero and heroine were able to escape, handcuffed to each other, from their captor’s car. The sheep blocked the road, and while the driver was shooing them, our heroes snuck out the back door and hid under a little stone bridge over a stream. We looked for signs to Alt-na Shelloch, but came up empty.

Years later, when I was home from Oxford, I was dating a British
investment banker whose family had a house and farm in Scotland. My dad asked him, when they were playing golf over in Windsor, about
The 39 Steps,
if he knew where it was filmed. My friend’s mother not only knew, she remembered the filming, and when I visited, she pointed out the very house, still with its lovely diamond windowpanes, where Robert Donat was “led up the garden path, or is it down, I’m never sure.” I sent my father some photographs I took of the house and of the little stone bridge where they hid by the stream.