In Oxford
Wehave emerged from the tunnel of time zones and sky to London, then Oxford,where we check into a modest guesthouse on Iffley Road. Then we wander theblustery streets in that strange transitional trance, wired but exhausted, andmeet our daughter at the pub near her house. She wears a black and silverscarf and a chunky line-up of bracelets, and her hair is pinned up to revealdangling earrings shaped like leaves. She looks exotic and startlinglybeautiful, and I suddenly see her as though she is someone other than mydaughter, perhaps because that is exactly what she has become.
Ithought Boston was far. Now taking a walk together or sitting across from herat a table like this demands all the time, expense and complexity of atranscontinental and transatlantic journey, and I see no sign of it changing anytime soon. Indeed she is as happy as I have ever seen her, and what motherwouldn’t want that for her child? She writes about Oxford in lyrical, luminousprose; its literary ghosts enchant her, as do its libraries and legends, asdoes its light, and the honey color of its stone buildings. She is astonishedto have stepped into this dream and become a part of it. I try to look at thecity through a lens like that, but its magic registers on me only in glimmers,and at times, particularly in the wind and the damp, I just feel lost. But of course, I amneither young nor newly in love.
(“Igrow old…I grow old…I shall wear the trousers of my pants rolled.”)
Onthis day there is sunshine and cinematic clouds and it’s windy and chilly butall the girls are defiantly underdressed, many pedaling along on their bicyclesin tank tops and summer skirts. Students in subfusc hurry to exams; confettilitters cobblestone streets, and here and there we step past the remnants of apost-exam trashing of flour and eggs. I stop to marvel at a bed of beardedirises in a shade I have never seen, an almost black sort of aubergine. Arusset-haired boy stands in front of a door painted cornflower blue. `The skyis still light at 9 p.m., a disorienting but beautiful sort of whiteness.
Wesleep the sleep of the exhausted and confused.
Thenext morning is rainy, but breakfast includes a Chinese gooseberry and lemon marmalade, and we go to the Botanic Gardens where the colors are saturated andburgeoning beds of bearded irises are bejeweled with beads of raindrops. Itdoes my heart good to see people hovering over flowers, pausing to marvel. It is inthe garden that I come to terms with the divergence of our lives, my own and mydaughter’s. It's an epiphany of sorts, and I try to explain to her afterwards that it hasn’t been easy but Iam letting her go, a rhetorical statement to someone long gone. I tell herI am happy for her and ready to revisit some dreams of my own, and I chatter nonsensically until Monte says, “Leave it to Mom to say whatever happens to pop into her mind at any given moment.” But that isn’t why I stop talking. I stopbecause I realize that I am trying to convey an experience for which thereexists no translation to a person in her twenties.
Dinnerwith our friends that night, including Mr. Harbor, who has heard that we areplanning a trip to the Lake District and brought us a map and two old books of black and white photographs from 1951, with pastoral views of dirt roadsthrough mountains, grazing sheep, stone bridges and cottages. He cycled thereas a boy with his father, and it holds many fond memories for him.
The prevailing conversation is downright frothy and includes a lively discussion on the pronunciation ofsaws, source, sores, sauce, and sausage. But Mr. Harbor is preoccupied, for heis dealing with hard times. He is nattily dressed in his suit and vest but hehas no appetite, and there is a great sadness emanating from him.
“Iknow it isn’t easy,” I say to him, in a well-intentioned if lame attempt at sympathy.
“Itsurely isn’t,” is his only response. He is 89 and too gracious to mock me, butI am beginning to know that I don't really know.
Newtopic: He has heard that I am going to Italy in a few weeks. “I went toItaly once,” he says. “In 1957. Padua. I didn’t like it very much. I came back early.”
Iask him what his favorite trip was, the best place ever, the place where he washappiest.
“Right here,” he says, pointing to the Lake District books. And perhaps for a moment he is a young man again cresting a hill, descending into green, everything in front of him.Afterwards we walk with our daughter through the quiet streets and hug her good-bye at the door of the house she calls home.