Cambridge, Page 2

They smiled and chuckled and agreed with me, but they didn’t take her back.

  Her name was Miranda. In protest, I refused to use it. I referred to her, if I referred to her at all, as “the baby.” Oddly (maybe not so odd), she didn’t want to use her name either; she didn’t like it. The day she turned eighteen she had it legally changed to Jaye. But when we got to England, she was only three months old and couldn’t even say Mama, and I was pretending she didn’t exist. I became good at that.

  All the pretending—that we were going back home, that I was still the center of my parents’ attention—made me cranky and difficult. To distract me or to cheer me up or to quiet me down, my father proposed a trip to what he called the “real” Cambridge.

  Everybody piled into the tiny Hillman, my parents in front, Frederika with the baby on her lap in the backseat with me. Probably we stopped to eat pickles and Cheddar on a terrace overlooking the smooth, boring English hills. My parents had a knack for finding the perfect lunch spot in any country.

  “It’s the Cambridge Cambridge is named for,” my father said. “This is the first Cambridge. You’ll see.”

  When we got there, it wasn’t Cambridge at all.

  I burst into tears.

  “Look,” my father said, “here’s the river—not the Charles, it’s called the Cam—and here’s the university, and here are some towers like the tower at home on Memorial Hall.”

  None of it was any good.

  I gave up. I was a prisoner in England, sentence indeterminate. If I’d known that we were going home the following fall, I might have felt better, but either I didn’t know or, more likely, knowing that meant nothing to me. When you’re seven, one year is the same as twenty.

  We’d taken the Queen Mary to England. We hadn’t left until the middle of October, which accounted for some of my confusion. For more than a month I’d been walking the two blocks to school every day, then all of a sudden, my mother was putting sheets on the furniture and stuffing clothes into trunks and giving the cat (temporarily, she assured me) to our neighbors the Bigelows, and now, here I was, running up and down the stairs between decks and poking into off-duty ballrooms on a floating vacation that, for all I knew, was never going to end.

  October is late for an Atlantic crossing, and we had some bad weather. One night the dinner crew soaked the thick white tablecloths with ice water from the silver pitchers so the plates wouldn’t slide around as we bumped through the rough seas. I was delighted by the chilly table and the moist impression left by my glass when I took a drink and the way the waiters topped up the dampness with a little tip of the pitcher as they passed by. I was also pleased to be alone with my father. My mother was feeling seasick and had stayed in the cabin with the baby. I was superior, eating in the half-empty dining room. That didn’t last. We were all sick by the next afternoon, stuck in our humid, salty, stinky cabin together.

  That night we passed through the storm, and the morning was clear. For the rest of the trip I sat in a deck chair on the sunny side of the boat, looking at the horizon unbroken except by the teak-and-brass railing, listening to the lulling waves. The ship thrummed through the water, moving forward to the future but taking its time getting there. Out in the middle of the ocean there wasn’t even a gull, nothing but high, thin clouds drifting behind us, a wake in the sky.

  When I read The Magic Mountain for the first time a decade later, I recognized the rest cure—in a recliner, swaddled by a blanket on a balcony looking at the Alps—as a variation on the Queen Mary’s deck. Alps, Atlantic—not much difference. The point was to be immobilized, by blankets and circumstance, to be cold while being warm (the boat had huge steamer blankets smelling of brine piled beside each stack of chairs), and to have a view so panoramic, so nearly limitless, that it made any idea or worry trivial: tranquilization by landscape or, in this instance, seascape.

  But when we got there—and so forth.

  In the end (and even at the time it was an embarrassment to me after all the complaining I’d done) I settled into English life. I found a couple of things to like.

  The candy was the main thing. It was much sweeter than American candy. Compared to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, a Hershey bar seemed like a sketch of chocolate, a description of a candy bar rather than the thing itself. Dairy Milk was so startlingly sweet that it put me in a swoon, with black dots darting around my eyes and my head spinning in a sugar fog.

  The other thing I liked was that one time, for less than three seconds, I managed to fly.

  Maybe I was tanked up on chocolate that day. I’d tried flying hundreds of times before, jumping off a rock and willing myself to stay airborne, or running across a lawn as fast as I could, copying the take-off technique of a duck in the water. I could get very close to it but I never got up. I was a diligent student, though. Sometimes I’d repeat my effort ten or twenty times in a row. If I just tuck my legs in, if I hold my arms closer to my body, if I jump one inch higher. I was always refining my practice.

  It was November. I was sitting on the wall outside the school, apart from the others. I didn’t have friends, but I’d been careful not to get enemies either. I stayed in my private reading world and avoided conversation. The wall was about three feet high and, like the toilet, required a hop if I wanted to get onto it. The school was at the top of a hill and the wall got higher as it progressed down the street, so by scooting along the top I could sit farther above the ground than I could hop up to.

  We all sat there every day after school waiting for our mothers or nannies or chauffeurs to pick us up. Frederika would come for me, pushing the rattly black pram with the baby, and we’d walk the six blocks back to home.

  I’d tried several times to fly off that wall, with my usual result: not flying.

  One day, something in the universe bent a little and gave in to me for a few seconds. I jumped off the wall, knowing I’d bang onto the ground but at the same time hoping that maybe today I’d get it right. And there it was, finally, what I’d been after: the sensation of rising. My chest pressed against the English air as if it were water, and I was buoyed up, going forward instead of down. I took a breath and hung by my full lungs for one more second. Then, boom, I was scrambling with both feet on the pavement, winded and thrilled.

  I was so excited I had to say something.

  “I flew,” I said.

  My classmates, perched like so many crows (they called them rooks), turned to look. Quickly, before the law of gravity could be reinstated, I jumped again.

  Is there anything today that I would pursue with such fervor?

  When Frederika arrived she was surprised and worried by my knee.

  “You hurted your leg badly,” she said.

  “It’s just scraped,” I said. But bits of English gravel had got stuck in it, and my knee took a long time to heal.

  I’d read Barrie. The idea of Peter Pan—and the fact that the real Kensington Gardens was just across town—had something to do with my determination to fly and with whatever did or didn’t happen on the day I did or didn’t fly. Giving up flying was therefore freighted with an extra sadness: Now I was a grownup.

  It was a nasty winter. Everybody said so. There was no snow, just ice and grimy puddles and a damp that seeped into our coffin-house and made things cold in a way that was much colder than winter at home in Cambridge. Sometimes the only warm place in the house was bed, where I’d curl up under damp blankets and read or sleep. I hid in sleep. Because I slept so much, I was rarely tired at bedtime, and I lay staring through the gloom of the streetlight-twilight of my bedroom at an elaborate plaster knot in the center of the ceiling for what felt like hours, waiting to conk out. Strange things began to happen while I lay there, odd sensations and thoughts. It took a while—several months—for them to gain enough momentum to become Something.

  It began with falling. Falling asleep, but slowly, being aware of falling asleep, the stages of it enfolding me, and a sense of dropping into it, as if “it” were a place. I realized I could
resist and suspend myself above sleep, or even now and then go into it and rise up out of it again. I experimented with that for a while, dipping into sleep as if it were a body of water and I a giant toe.

  One night I felt an amazing thing. I became two creatures, one that was my physical self, sliding into and under the lake of sleep, and another that was also me, but a me without the bother of a body, and that rose out of my chest—as if I’d been cracked open at the breastbone to let myself out—and was free to float around as high up as the body-me was down, in the lake of sleep. They were opposites, they had to move in equal measure from each other, so the further I sank into sleep, the further the other me could go up into the air. What was best about it was the feeling of being peeled apart, a moment as rewarding as the one when a scab finally gives way, when the itch stops and the new, naked skin can breathe.

  It was a while before I understood that I didn’t have to stay in my bedroom.

  First I went up and down the street and looked at the neighbors’ houses and the edge of Hampstead Heath. But I didn’t really want to see that stuff, which was what I saw all the time, although it was fun to look in people’s windows. So I went to Cambridge.

  I crossed the Atlantic to Boston Harbor and went upstream along the Charles until I saw the Harvard boathouses. Then I took a right up Massachusetts Avenue, past the flooded frozen Cambridge Common, a temporary skating rink that glistened in the dark. There was my school, my asphalt playground where I’d skinned my knees on American gravel. There was the snow heaped on corners and curbs. There was our house and our backyard willow with its branches short and stiff from winter. Up the hill was the penny candy store—who cared if the chocolate wasn’t as sweet? I could move quickly with my hovering and encompass the whole of the known city (known to me, that is) in ten minutes. From the swimming pool by the river at Magazine Street where my mother took me in the dog days to the Star Market on the way to Watertown where she dragged me weekly was at least four miles, but I’d get there in a moment with my floating non-body. I wanted the comfort of seeing the wooden houses and their painted shutters and the spread of deciduous trees (in those days there were still elms in North America), even if they were naked in February. I didn’t want brick townhouses, iron railings, yews and cobblestones and equestrian statues.

  Every night that I could manage to separate myself, I went home. I called it soul traveling.

  It was flying, really.

  It was some sort of flying. I hovered above my dream-Cambridge, that was sleeping and frozen below me, and I was happy.

  And then, on to Italy.

  Everything was new and strange and beautiful. The key to the front door of our villa out on the via Bolognese in the hills above Florence was as big as my arm and looked like a child’s drawing of a key, a schematic, enormous proto-key, which nobody ever used but which was handed over to us in a welcoming ceremony by the farmer who lived across the way in a house a third the size of ours and looked after the property in a feudal arrangement with the contessa whose villa it was and who was summering elsewhere. In the tradition of Italian contessas she was broke—she must have been to rent out such a house with such a magnificent view and so well situated that it caught any trace of breeze that managed to blow off the Apennines. Instead of doorknobs there were handles you pushed down to open the doors. The windows divided in the center and opened to the outside instead of going up and down. A shutter hidden in the frame clanked down in metal segments, sort of like an alligator. The farmer showed us how to pull it closed while leaving the windows open, catching the air but foiling the sun. The speckled floors were made of marble chips embedded in cement and polished to a shiny finish. Never a rug to get in the way of my sliding down the hall or round and round the dining room, pushing myself along on the dark, high, dusty gnarled furniture that fortified every inch of the walls. Highboys, lowboys, breakfronts, serving tables, linen chests, armoires, extra chairs (eight in addition to the six at the table): That villa had enough furniture for three villas. All of it was carved from black wood, or wood that time had blackened, and all of it was heavy, thick, oily with the touch of hundreds of hands. Walnut, chestnut, ancient fruit trees—these woods felt and smelled different from what I was used to, Scandinavian birch or teak in Cambridge and the cracking oak veneer and dried-out mahogany of the bad, war-torn furniture in the London house.

  Once again I had to hop—up into bed. I liked this hop, which landed me in my more-than-double four-poster with curly columns terminating in pinecones that might have been acorns or perhaps the fleurs-de-lis that decorated every aspect of Florentine life from the red leather wallets that smelled of fish (something in the tanning process?) to the waxy, translucent paper bag in which the farmer’s wife delivered our groceries twice a week.

  The bathrooms were the best of all.

  “The Romans invented plumbing,” said my father, “and it shows.”

  The bathrooms were as big as the bedrooms and there were lots of them. They had large windows and spacious bathtubs and skittery white marble floors veined with green streaks in my parents’ bathroom and rosy streaks in mine and blue-gray streaks in the one at Frederika’s end of the hall. The only disturbing thing about them—and it was puzzling more than bothersome—was that the fixtures were oddly placed. A sink popped up at a peculiar angle, off-center between two windows, and a toilet was too far into the middle of the room, acting as if it were an armchair. Probably the bathrooms had been bedrooms once, before the plumbing was put in at the turn of the century, and before bathroom layouts had been routinized.

  In England time had been thick and impenetrable. It might as well have been plaster. It was immovable, obdurate, and sheer. It was also repetitive. Every day was as bad or bad in the same way as the previous day. Going to school was like putting an iron block on my head and balancing it for six hours. When I got home in the brief gloomy afternoon, I didn’t know what to do other than flop onto my bed and disappear into a book. Real bedtime was a relief. I could just lie there and hope to take one of my flying trips—except for the toilet worries that constituted a small but unceasing pressure, as if I wore a too-tight collar at night.

  In Italy time had an utterly different shape and feel. A day was a long, coherent totality, shining and hot, all of one piece, though the piece was variegated and speckled like the floor.

  In part I was transformed by love, because in Italy I fell in love again, this time with a single entity rather than with a city, which, no matter how much I loved it, could never return my affection. I didn’t do much better the second time. I fell in love with a statue.

  He stood in his niche on the wall of Orsanmichele, the old grain market in the center of Florence. Lots of other saints and heroes stood nearby, but he was striking for his straight, upright beauty: Saint George, the patron of England, emblazoned on flags and walls and letterheads there, but never looking like this.

  For one thing, no dragon. The dragon was understood. This was a post-slaying portrait. He was holding his triangular shield between his feet, resting a hand across the top, looking out at the passersby with a faraway, tired expression. Because he was an Italian saint, he was wearing a sort of toga and cloak getup rather than the chain mail he wore in England.

  His face was dreamy, not only his expression but his features. It was slightly rounded, with a small, delicate chin and little ears tucked in close. A northern Italian face. I could see the fair skin and light eyes even in the stained, pockmarked bronze.

  It happened because the statues were placed around the first story of the building instead of up along the roofline as usual. If they’d been up where they were supposed to be, I wouldn’t have gotten a good look at them. These statues were so close they could have been people on the street who’d hopped up to stand on the ledge of rusticated granite that ran in courses along each floor.

  I looked up and our eyes met. I blushed. I had to look down at the cobbles right away. Then I looked up and stared. I wanted to drink him. I
wanted to breathe his quiet, steady being and smell his smooth, warm metal mouth and cheeks.

  An attractive statue, and I was attracted. But there had to be something else—that’s the way love is. Something special, something that made me know.

  Later that week we were in the Bargello Museum. We were always in a museum in Italy. And standing on a plinth, no niche, there he was again. This time he was made of marble.

  He’s following me! He loves me too! That’s what I thought.

  I stood looking at him.

  “It’s Saint George,” my mother said. “You know him from England.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I couldn’t talk. Also, I didn’t like her saying his name, though at the same time I was thrilled to hear it spoken. Saint George, Saint George, I said silently over and over. I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.

  “Donatello,” my father said.

  “Donatello what?” I asked.

  “Donatello made it,” he said.

  I didn’t like this idea.

  “This room is full of him. Here’s another good one,” my father said, moving off to the left.

  It was nice. It was a young bronze man with a wonderful little hat, naked except for this crazy, jaunty hat, smiling, and with long curly hair.

  “That’s David,” my father said. “David and Goliath, remember?”

  I remembered.

  “Like the huge David in the piazza where the best gelato is,” my mother said. “By Michelangelo.”

  I was getting a good art education in Italy. I didn’t know that, of course.

  We’d left the Bargello and were having gelato in another place, not quite as good as the one near the big David, before I dared to ask: “Isn’t Saint George on the outside of a building too?”

  “I’m sure,” said my mother.

  “Oh.” My father started rummaging through the guidebook. “You’re right. That one is a copy. They moved the original into the Bargello.”

  “David is a copy too,” my mother observed, wiping chocolate off the baby’s chin.