Chapter 22

My father was reluctant to take me to Oxford. He would be there six days, he said, a long time for me to miss school again. I was surprised that he was willing to leave me at home; he hadn’t done that even once since I’d found the dragon book. Was he planning to leave me with particular precautions? I pointed out that our trip along the Yugoslav coast had taken almost two weeks, without any sign of detriment to my schoolwork. He said education should always come first. I pointed out that he had always postulated travel as the best education, and that May was the pleasantest month for travel. I produced my latest report card, which gleamed with high grades, and a history paper on which my rather pompous instructor had written, “You show extraordinary insight into the nature of historical research, especially for one of your years,” a comment I had memorized and often repeated to myself as a mantra before I slept.

My father wavered visibly, setting his knife and fork down in a way I knew meant a pause in our dinner in the old Dutch dining room, not a decisive end to the first course. He said his work would prevent him from showing me around properly this time and he didn’t want to spoil my first impressions of Oxford by keeping me cooped up somewhere. I said I preferred being cooped up in Oxford to being cooped up at home with Mrs. Clay-at this point we dropped our voices, although she was having her evening off. Besides, I was old enough, I said, to wander around by myself. He said he just didn’t know if it was a good idea for me to go, since these talks promised to be rather-tense. It might not be quite-but he couldn’t go on and I knew why. Just as I could not use my real argument for going to Oxford, he could not use his for wanting to prevent me from going. I could not tell him aloud that I couldn’t bear to let him, with his dark-circled eyes and the fatigued stoop of shoulder and head, out of my sight now. And he could not counter aloud that he might not be safe in Oxford and that, therefore, I might not be safe with him. He was silent for a minute or two, and then he asked me very gently what we were having for dessert, and I brought in Mrs. Clay’s dreary rice pudding with currants, which she always left as a compensation for going out to the movies at the British Centre without us.

Ihad imagined Oxford hushed and green, a kind of outdoor cathedral where dons in medieval dress paraded around, each with a single student at his side, lecturing on history, literature, obscure theology. The reality was shockingly lively: beeping motorcycles, little cars darting here and there and narrowly missing students as they crossed the streets, a crowd of tourists photographing a cross on the sidewalk where a couple of bishops had been burned at the stake four hundred years earlier, before sidewalks. The dons and students alike wore disappointingly modern dress, mostly wool sweaters, with dark flannel trousers for the mentor and blue jeans for the disciple. I thought with regret that in Rossi’s time, a good forty years before we stepped off our bus onto Broad Street, Oxford must at least have dressed with a little more dignity.

Then I caught sight of the first college I ever saw there, towering over its walled enclosure in the morning light, and looming near it the perfect shape of the Radcliffe Camera, which I took at first for a small observatory. Behind that rose the spires of a great brown church, and along the street ran a wall that looked so old even the lichens on it seemed antique. I couldn’t imagine how we would have appeared to whoever had walked these streets when that wall was young-I in my short red dress and crocheted white stockings and my book bag, my father in his navy jacket and gray slacks, his black turtleneck and tweed hat, each of us lugging a small suitcase. “Here we are,” my father pronounced, and to my delight we turned in at a gate in the lichened wall. It was locked, and we waited there until a student held the wrought-iron bars open for us.

At Oxford my father was to speak at a conference on political relations between the United States and Eastern Europe, now in the full flower of a thaw. Because the university was hosting the conference, we were invited to stay in private rooms in the house of one of the college masters. The masters, my father explained, were benevolent dictators who looked after the students who lived in each college. As we made our way through the dark, low entryway and into the blazing sunlight of the college quadrangle, I realized for the first time that soon I, too, would go to college, and I crossed my fingers on my book-bag handle and breathed a wish that I would then find myself in a haven like this one.

Around us lay softly worn flagstones, interrupted here and there by heavy shade trees-serious, melancholy old trees with the occasional bench underneath. A little rectangle of perfect grass and a narrow pool of water lay at the feet of the college’s main building. It was one of Oxford ’s oldest, endowed by Edward III in the thirteenth century, its newest additions shaped by Elizabethan architects. Even that patch of carefully clipped grass looked venerable; certainly I never saw anyone step on it.

We skirted the grass and water and made our way to the porter’s office just inside, and from there to a suite of rooms adjoining the master’s house. These rooms must have been part of the original design of the college, although it was hard to tell what they had originally been used for; they were very low-ceilinged, with dark paneling and tiny leaded windows. My father’s bedroom had blue draperies. Mine, to my infinite satisfaction, had a high chintz canopy bed.

We unpacked a little, washed our travelers’ faces in a pale-yellow basin in our shared bathroom, and went to meet Master James, who was expecting us in his office at the other end of the building. He turned out to be a hearty, kind-spoken man with graying hair and a knobby scar on one cheekbone. I liked his warm handshake and the expression of his large, rather protuberant hazel eyes. He seemed to find nothing strange about my accompanying my father to the conference and went so far as to suggest that I tour the college with his student assistant that afternoon. His assistant, he said, was an obliging and very knowledgeable young gentleman. My father said I could certainly do that; he himself would be busy with meetings then, and why shouldn’t I see the treasures of the place while I was there?

I turned up eagerly at three o’clock, my new beret in one hand and a notebook in the other, since my father had suggested I might get notes for a school paper out of the tour. My guide was a pale-haired, gangly undergraduate, whom Master James introduced as Stephen Barley. I liked Stephen’s fine, blue-veined hands and heavy fisherman’s sweater-“jumpah,” he called it when I admired it aloud. It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quaver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I slipped my hand into his as we walked along, a door would fall open somewhere in the long wall of reality as I knew it, never to be closed again. I’ve explained that I had led an extremely sheltered life-so sheltered, I see now, that even at nearly eighteen I hadn’t realized how close its confines were. The quiver of rebellion I felt walking beside a handsome university student came to me like a strain of music from an alien culture. But I clutched my notebook and my childhood more tightly and asked him why the courtyard was mainly stone instead of grass. He smiled down at me. “Well, I don’t know. No one’s asked that before.”

He took me into the dining hall, a high-ceilinged, Tudor-beamed barn full of wooden tables, and showed me where a young Earl of Rochester had cut something rude into a bench while dining there. The hall was lined with leaded windows, each ornamented in the center with an ancient scene of good works: Thomas à Becket kneeling at a deathbed, a priest in a long gown ladling out soup for a line of the cowering poor, a medieval doctor bandaging someone’s leg. Above the Rochester bench was a scene I couldn’t figure out, a man with a cross around his neck and a stick in one hand bending over what looked like a bundle of black rags. “Oh, that’s a curiosity indeed,” Stephen Barley told me. “We’re very proud of that. You see, this man is a don from the early years of the college, driving a silver stake through the heart of a vampire.”