Without Reservations (23 page)

D
riving up to Oxford from London on a clear Sunday morning, alone, and with no traffic on the road, the air still fragrant from Saturday’s rain, singing along with Ella Fitzgerald on the radio, I felt like a sixteen-year-old who’s just been given permission to drive the family car. And like an adolescent, I felt up to the challenge of whatever lay ahead.

Even the act of driving, which I usually found boring, took on an edge of pleasure. I shifted into overdrive and, still singing out loud with Ella, purposely passed a silver Jaguar. It was a move, I realized, that allowed me to relive simultaneously two of my adolescent fantasies: one, to be a singer like Ella, and two, to own a souped-up convertible and cruise the highways leaving startled but admiring drivers in my dust.

The souped-up car thing never worked out, but I actually pursued the Ella thing. At the Miss Henrietta Freedenberg School of Music in Baltimore, to be exact. Once a week, armed with my Rodgers and Hart songbook, I took three streetcars to Miss Henrietta’s studio for a private singing lesson. There, Miss Henrietta would accompany me on the piano in her living room—or “studio” as she called it—while coaching me on how to properly breathe and “emote.” Words to be “emoted” were penciled on my score in all capital letters by Miss Henrietta.

Although I had every reason to doubt my singing talent, I had no fear of failure. Not even when I got to the part in “My Funny Valentine” that begins “Is your mouth a little weak” and then rises precipitously to the phrase “When you open it to speak, are you SMART?” I still remember my excitement as I vocally climbed, or
thought I climbed, the octaves to the summit where the word “SMART” stood alone, waiting to be conquered.

I do not remember when I wised up to the fact that my only musical talent lay in listening, not singing. Still, for the year or so that I sang Rodgers and Hart and the occasional Cole Porter tune in Miss Henrietta’s living room, my adolescent optimism made the illusion of a career in jazz singing seem possible. Other illusions followed and, adolescence being what it is, they all seemed possible.

That’s it
, I thought, driving up to Oxford.
That’s exactly what I’m feeling: the return of adolescent optimism.

I don’t know why I felt this way. Perhaps my excitement had to do with driving alone in a foreign country, where every road is an unknown one and every turn holds out the promise of an adventure. Perhaps it was the idea of returning briefly to the academic life; I was going up to Oxford to take a course in the history of the English village. Or perhaps it had to do with something I was learning about myself: that I was a naturally optimistic and curious person.

The funny thing is, I knew, that most of my friends would describe me in just such a way. But, to be honest, I’d never been sure it wasn’t an act I was putting on—not to fool other people, but to fool myself. The world, I’d always thought, was much more welcoming and much less threatening if a person approached it with curiosity and optimism. It was an approach that had worked well for me, in both my personal and professional life. But sometimes I wondered if this really reflected my true nature, or whether I’d shaped my personality to fit some perceived notion of what it required to successfully navigate life.

But there was no one to please or not please on this trip. I could be as inward or as outward as I felt; I could be an observing person
or an experiencing person; I could be optimistic or skeptical. And I was learning each day that, depending on the occasion and my mood, I had in my arsenal of feelings all of these responses.

Still, the dominant person I saw emerging was genuinely optimistic and curious. She really did love to meet people and explore new places. And, best of all, when things didn’t work out, she moved on.

What can I say? She was plucky and, most of the time, not a whiner. Except for the occasional and sometimes expensive preoccupation about what to do with her not-so-manageable hair, I found her quite an agreeable traveling companion.

Friends in London had told me the drive to Oxford was an easy one, and they were right. What was not easy, however, was finding my way, once in Oxford, to Brasenose College, where those enrolled in the course were to stay.

I had been given a map of Oxford and directions to Brasenose, which was located in historic Radcliffe Square. I was also given instructions on how to gain access for my car into the gated and locked square: I was to leave the car at the entrance to Radcliffe Square, walk to the porter’s lodge at Brasenose, pick up the key to unlock the gate to the square, walk back to my car, unlock the gate, drive into the square, park my car, and then get out and relock the gate before proceeding to the heavy, wooden doors of Brasenose. There, theoretically, a college porter would allow me to enter the college’s interior courtyard and give me further instructions as to where to go.

What followed was a two-hour fiasco. To begin with, nothing
on the Oxford street map I had corresponded with reality. Most of the streets, it turned out, were one-way and to my annoyance always seemed to go the way I didn’t want to go. For the next hour I found myself driving around the center of town in ever-widening circles. At one point I wound up on a road out in the Oxfordshire countryside.

The narrow, cobblestoned, tourist-filled streets were hellish enough, but the directions given by pedestrians whom I judged to be locals were even worse. At one point, however, I actually found myself at the corner of Brasenose Lane. I was elated, thinking I must at last be close to my destination. And I was. But there was a problem: I was at the back of Brasenose College and in order to enter the front—which was on Radcliffe Square—I had to start circling all over again.

Somewhere in this last Circle of Hell I lost, temporarily, all my adolescent optimism and high spirits.

Finally, just as I was considering abandoning the car and setting out on foot, I came upon the gated entrance to Radcliffe Square. Parking the car was easy; opening the gate was not. The key handed me by the college porter, a surly, unhelpful man dressed in a tired, shapeless black suit, was a huge, ancient-looking thing attached to a large board. As I struggled to open the gate, small crowds of tourists gathered to watch. Help finally came in the form of a passing taxi driver. He opened the gate; I drove through and parked in front of the massive, sixteenth-century stone walls guarding Brasenose College.

From the outside it looked like a medieval fortress: forbidding, impenetrable, damp. The unwelcome thought crossed my mind: had I made a mistake? Should I have taken a room at some nice bed-and-breakfast where there might be heat to warm the cold Oxford nights and a tea kettle whistling on the stove all day long? I
found myself wondering, as Elisabeth Bishop did in a poem, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?”

But once I passed through the outer walls, through the damp darkness of the porter’s lodge, and stepped out into the light of the interior courtyard—a rectangle of perfect emerald-green grass surrounded by buildings whose casement windows blazed with trailing red flowers—my doubts vanished. It was as though I had stepped into the Middle Ages. And into the great history of all those who throughout the centuries have studied at Oxford. Now, in a small way, I was a part of that.

I was shown to my rooms in the “Old Quad” part of Brasenose by Albert, a tall, thin student at nearby Lincoln College. Albert, who was born in Sri Lanka, earned money during the summer vacation by looking out for off-season students like me.

“You’re lucky,” Albert said, as he lugged my huge suitcase up three steep flights of narrow, winding steps. “Your rooms have a private bathroom.” His accent was very British, clipped and clear.

My “rooms” during the school year were occupied by an undergrad and they looked it. The larger of the two rooms contained an aging mud-colored leather chair and matching sofa, a threadbare Turkish rug, a small desk, and a wooden table with matching chairs. The walls were bare and the tilted floors creaked. The overall effect was that of a rundown hospital waiting room. The bedroom was tiny; just a chest with drawers that either stuck or fell on the floor when pulled out, a small night table, and a lumpy cot that could barely support my weight.

But as Albert pointed out again, there was a private bath. Even better, I had been assigned rooms with a view. A breathtaking view; a view in its own way that rivaled the glories of E. M. Forster’s Florentine room with a view.

On one side of the living room was a row of wide casement windows through which I could see not only the green grass and flowering courtyard of Brasenose, but also the outlines of the medieval Radcliffe Square buildings: the massive dome of the oddly named Radcliffe Camera, home to part of the Bodleian Library’s two million volumes; the fourteenth-century spires of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, the spectacular towers of All Souls’ College, where the legendary Lawrence of Arabia once studied.

I opened the windows and leaned out. No matter where I looked there was a spire or dome pushing its way into the soft, pliant backdrop of the Oxford sky. It looked unreal, like a stage set for a fairy tale.

I looked around the room, so stark and yet so full of the past. Who, I wondered, had lived here and studied here over the centuries? I knew that George Washington’s great-grandfather studied at Brasenose, and so did the grandfather of John Adams; it was not inconceivable that one of them might have occupied these rooms. Of course, if I strolled farther down the road I would come across Merton, where T. S. Eliot studied, and St. John’s, the college that was home to A. E. Housman.

I looked through the windows again. Oxford beckoned.

Oxford.
The word rolled around in my mind, conjuring up the best of Britain. Not to mention several episodes of my favorite television show,
Masterpiece Theatre.
It thrilled me to know that the Oxford portion of
Brideshead Revisited
had been filmed right here at Brasenose. If I closed my eyes, I could see Sebastian Flyte leaning
across the window box into Charles Ryder’s room on the day they first met.

I couldn’t wait to get out on the streets and walk among all that history. The Ashmolean Museum, established in 1683 and the oldest museum in Britain. Blackwell’s bookshop, offering one of the largest selections of books in the world since 1879. The Sheldonian Theatre, the first building designed by Sir Christopher Wren, in 1663.

But there was something I needed to do before leaving my ivory tower to hit the Oxford streets: I needed to take a nap.

At dinner that night I met my classmates. There were eighteen of us, ranging in age from the middle twenties to upward of sixty. We took our first meal in the soaring, formal dining hall at Brasenose, where the regular undergrads ate. It was an evening of get-acquainted small talk, pleasant enough, but ultimately unsatisfying. Everyone was in their introductory, best-foot-forward mode; I longed for some real conversation.