Читать книгу Then Again: Travels in search of my younger self - Irma Kurtz - Страница 6

From our arrival into life, a journey that frees the spirit must cross water. No matter how arduous and dangerous, overland travel leads logically from one foregone conclusion to the next on this mapped world. But on all the breadth of oceans there is no fixed logic, no still border, no language except the one you carry on board; in all the depths of oceans there is no history but prehistory. Time itself is adrift; clocks run down while terrestrial minutes give up their ground to a celestial measure. Somehow, I have conspired to spend more of my life at sea than any woman I know of similarly constrained upbringing. And when I say ‘at sea’, I do mean in fact as well as fancifully.

‘1954: At sea! I have only ever been on the ocean before when Dad took me deep-sea fishing once in Florida. This is different; tonight for the first time ever I will sleep at sea! All at sea! It is divine to be alone. And it was divine to walk around the ship and learn it, all by myself.’

‘All by myself’: favourite words since the first time you tied your shoes all by yourself, and rode the bus all by yourself, and finally when you were fourteen or so stayed in the city sometimes all by yourself while your family went to the house in the country for weekends. Of course, dear child, one of the disadvantages of keeping any sort of journal is that it presupposes some sort of reader, even if it is only oneself years later. The moment pen is put to paper the writer ceases to be all by herself. Nor, strictly speaking, were you anything like alone on your first trip to Europe. The deck was crowded with young Americans, thirty or forty of them on the very same undergraduate tour as you. And even as the ship was leaving port, the suitcase in which you had packed your pristine journal was being tossed on an upper berth by one of four cabin mates you had yet to meet. You could be a snooty little Manhattan bitch on the quiet, by the by.

‘July, 1954: They are dreadful girls from the Midwest, not with our group. We are called “Study Abroad”, mostly from the east. One of them is with some sort of religious tour called “Faith Studies” and headed straight for Rome. She is called Sally or Jane or Mary. Possibly all three. She spent all the time we were pulling away playing solitaire hands of bridge. And while I was on deck, she was busy moving me out of my berth into a less desirable upper one. She had the nerve to say the steward assigned her to the lower bunk. According to the brochure, allocation of bunks is first come, first served, and Dad got us to the pier really early to secure a lower bunk for me. He was afraid when the sea was rough I might roll out of the top one. But what can I do? With a long journey ahead, I must let it pass. Hereafter, I will call her Ass-in-igned. The other two are Ruth and Ethel. They are with a group from their college. Hereafter I’ll call them Nothing A and Nothing B. Sat out on deck with the Nothings until 2.30. They twittered nothingspeak about their boring college and their boring boyfriends. But my mind was somewhere else. I kept seeing the dear old Statue of Liberty and remembering how a few hours earlier she had reversed the welcome she had given Grandpa Joe and Grandma Ida half a century before into a “bon voyage” for me. How do you know when you leave home for the last time? How do you know when you are leaving home for ever?’

In spite of a nod to my paternal grandparents on departing, I was not looking for my roots or expecting to find them abroad. Student tours such as the one I was on went nowhere near the misty regions of Eastern Europe whence most of my people had fled their unplumbed villages besieged by dangers rarely spoken of to their well-nourished American grandchildren.

‘But why, why do you want to live there?’ my father cried years later when my schooling was finished and I announced my imminent expatriation to Europe. ‘All of them want to come and live here!’

I come from a tribe of tumbleweed nature; we rolled up our roots in shawls and scrolls, and ran with them before the wind. No, I was not looking for roots; I took them with me. I was looking for the source of what I knew as culture – the places where words and art and music came from – and I was looking for a good time. My best friend and room-mate at university, Marjorie, had taken the Study Abroad tour the preceding year and she promised me I would certainly find the fun.

The upper berth I complained about was next to a porthole, and it turned out to be wonderful. Movies were mainly in black and white back then. Without colour telly, without computers or computer games, our adventures were never virtual: they had to be the real thing or nothing. True enough, books have always been able to take an imaginative landlubber out to sea, but they cannot keep her there when the ship is becalmed and she would rather be somewhere else. Besides, on a literary voyage the author has to tag along. But for one week every sunrise was all my own. Six times through the porthole with my own eyes I watched the new sun tenderly separate the infinite black round into sky and sea: six times I watched life being created again out of space and brine.

‘July 1954: It is so very big. Every day or two the Captain tells us to set our watches up an hour. Columbus needed such a long time to cross the ocean going the other way, he must have accumulated hours much, much slower than we are losing them. Did he factor the slow gain into his navigation, I wonder? Did he expect to find a new time in the New World? Do I expect to find an Old Time in the Old World? What will I find there, I wonder?’

And I wonder now, deciphering my faded scrawl: did we have biros in 1953? If we did, they must have been newfangled and dear, for by the fourth day at sea I complain of losing my pen, and ink does not reappear in the journal until weeks later when the tour arrived in Venice. For all my importuning of solitude – ‘O, to be alone!’ I wrote near the end of the crossing, ‘without another American sophomore always at my elbow!’ – I have always been indiscriminately social, seeing all strangers as diminutive nations full of curiosities and odd customs. Only in middle age did I learn how to wriggle guiltlessly off the hook of my own conviviality and walk away alone; when I was younger and hopeful of soulmates, I often found myself in too deep. After merely one day at sea a potential best friend had arisen out of the welter of college students aboard. A best friend was necessary to a smart American college girl’s life in the early 1950s, as a psychoanalyst was to become a few years later and her own credit card is now. Evelyn Esposito was majoring in Biology at I forget which state university and was on the same tour as I. She was a happy choice for temporary best friend: not only did she appear, at least in the beginning, to be laid back and cheerful, she also spoke a smattering of Italian and had relatives in Genoa who were going to welcome us into their home for a few happy hours off the itinerary. She and her tall, stringy and slightly dour travelling companion, Midge, were three years older than I. For a teenager in those days, and perhaps even now, three years separated underclassmen from seniors, garter belts from girdles, and virgins from women of the world.

‘1953: Like others I have met, they are surprised at my extreme youth and great maturity. Must it always be like that?’

No, you little drip, believe me, some day it will be your great age and extreme silliness that surprise them. But I must not be too hard on myself then, for judging every word I wrote, even more tellingly those I didn’t, was the phantom of my journal’s only likely reader, my most severe critic, my mother. Moreover, I suffered from the inescapable pretensions of late teen years, as well as the darned and ravelling yet distinctly bluestocking standards of Barnard College.

In the days after my journal came to light I began to consider and finally to plan retracing the journey that changed me for keeps. During the more than thirty years I have lived in Europe, I have travelled out of my neighbourhood, England, occasionally and only for a purpose generally connected to my profession of jobbing journalist and writer. True enough, I often go to France, but it hardly counts as a journey for I have a small flat in the Pas de Calais; I call it the ‘west wing’ of my equally small flat in London. Italy? I have been only once or twice in all these decades to visit friends in Tuscany; I’ve been to Mexico many times more than to Holland, and to Africa twice as often as to Germany. Soon, the idea of repeating the Grand Tour of my youth started to become compelling. Now that I am coming to the end of most desires, would I rediscover the joyous excitement of my first journal? Now that I am catching up in years with the stones of Rome, would I find the same enchantment in antiquity? Now that American tourists are two a penny, not the rare birds we were in the 1950s, would there be the same dawning sense not only of discovery, also of being discovered? And with the guide and talisman of my old journal in hand could I perhaps reverse time for a moment? Could I meet myself as I was at eighteen, sitting in the Tuileries gardens in Paris, weeping because I did not want to leave? I wish I could have begun precisely as I did the first time, sailing away from Manhattan, a jagged comb on the beach, to embark on a long, slow voyage over what I hear Americans now refer to as ‘the pond’. We did not take the Atlantic so lightly in those days. Many of us had living ancestors like mine who had crossed that great sea in terror and in hope. East-coast kids with itchy feet commonly undertook a pioneering trek into America’s alien inner spaces where a lot of them settled to raise local standards and money and children. Fewer of us, however, were called to a choppy crossing of the mighty ocean that separated us Americans from our history.

The Castel Felice was no insulated five-star liner, that’s for sure.

‘1954: We eat at long trestle tables. It looks like the set for a prison movie except it never stops moving and there are no attempted escapes. Where there is a strong breeze, hardly anyone turns up for meals. Ass-in-igned has hardly moved out of the lower berth and the Nothings are green. I haven’t felt a twinge of seasickness yet. But I’d better not crow about that until the journey is over. The food is surprisingly awful. But the Italian stewards are delicious. While he was serving the awful soup, one of them whispered in English that he was very fond of me. Alas, I love another. The man who makes the crew announcements over the loudspeaker has stolen my heart. “Subito, Adriano …” he says three or four times a day. Evelyn says Adriano must be a real good-for-nothing as he is never where he ought to be. I don’t know who Adriano is but isn’t it a lovely name? And I envy him being summoned to that dreamy voice.’

The Castel Felice was, in fact, an endearing old tub; in timorous, litigious times like these she would certainly be retired as unseaworthy. Her sort of no-frills ship for students was going to be replaced by cheap charter flights that turn the sea lanes into freeways and their crossings into airborne traffic jams. But the ‘Happy Castle’ was small enough to let us feel the Atlantic through her hull and to transmit every trill and tremor of the deep for good or very, very ill. The last person I expected to see on board such a maritime flivver was a member of Barnard’s exalted faculty, albeit a raffish one. Mr Sweet was the coach of our college drama society. I knew him on sight, of course, though he gave no sign of knowing me, or remembering my tremulous performance the previous semester when I read for Juliet. I have always been stagestruck; my main reason for choosing a Manhattan-based university was to stay near Broadway. From the time I had begun to know hazily that I had to escape the mild academic life followed by suburban domesticity on the cards for girls where I came from, the only way that presented itself as romantic, tragic, dramatic, sexy, comic, stand-up, bohemian, the only way to be all I dreamed of being without too much risk of dreaded parental disapproval, was to act the part. But I had neither the gift for acting nor the necessary determination, nor the required tolerance for repetition, and Mr Sweet gave Juliet to a more single-minded undergraduate.

Dolph Sweet still pops up occasionally on movies made for early TV. He plays craggy villains or policemen on the edge of retirement and his acting is a trifle too big to fit the small screen comfortably. He already seemed pretty old to us Barnard girls in those days, at least as old as Shelley when he gave up the ghost. Although Mr Sweet was affable on campus and as far as the young can ascribe emotions to old men he seemed happy enough, I realise now that it was all an act. Barnard College was hell for a ‘resting’ thespian. The bargain-basement trip to Europe must have been a treat he promised himself after a year spent trying to persuade self-conscious scholarly young women to let their hair down and perform.

‘1954: Odd to see Mr Sweet in the dining salon today. He was off to one side at one of the few small tables with a handsome Negro’ (politically correct form of the day) ‘who is certainement pas sa femme!’

The conclusion I jumped to that Mr Sweet was having an affair with his handsome dinner companion was understandable, I guess. Four kitchen chairs piled high had long before taken me to the top shelf of our bookcase at home where salacious literature was stashed optimistically beyond the reach of children. Teetering at that giddy height, I found sheet music for the ‘Internationale’, already in those pre-McCarthy days an inflammatory document, widely considered suitable for burning. It was crammed between Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre and Krafft-Ebing’s immensely instructive Psychopathia Sexualis. Thanks to vertiginous curiosity and older friends, among them plenty of young men who were queer – a politically correct form of those days for the current ‘gay’ – my knowledge of other people’s sexual conduct was as wide as experience of my own was narrow. Moreover, like many clever, liberal, passionate yet strangely virginal women, I was an incipient fag-hag. My assumption about the Sweet menage was pretty sophisticated, I must say, for the early 1950s; too sophisticated by half, as it turned out. That very afternoon the young man told me from a neighbouring deckchair that he was on his way to meet a girlfriend in Paris, not with Mr Sweet at all.

‘Quel dommage!’ wrote this little busybody.

Mr Sweet had his share of devotees among my classmates and an unorthodox liaison would have made resonant gossip in the halls of Academe. Also, my homosexual men friends were always thrilled, though they pretended not to be surprised, when any figure of even the slightest eminence was revealed to share their persuasion. Privately and in their cups they maintained that all interesting men – Shakespeare, Mozart, Da Vinci, Rock Hudson, only not Hitler, thank you very much, and who would have imagined J. Edgar Hoover? – were that way inclined. And the more butch a guy appeared to be, the more he was resisting the inclination. I have since observed that shoe fetishists, paedophiles, mild sadomasochists and practically all erotic minorities genuinely believe that if mankind were liberated from prejudice, it would choose their way, too, to a man. And to a woman, it follows; it never precedes. I know it has become unfashionable to the point of derision to say so, but the fact is when it comes to sex, we women have less time to fool around and more important things to do.

‘July 1954: Bored! Bored! Bored! I went to sea to see the world, and what did I see? I saw the sea! Finished the book I brought with me: The Greek Passion. Nothing to read. Nothing to do. I guess I should have brought Boswell after all. Will these long days never end? Ass-in-igned moved out last night while the rest of us were having dinner. Where to? She hasn’t jumped overboard, I guess. Maybe there is a first-class deck hidden on this ship where she’s had herself ass-in-igned to live like a queen in clover.’

How I would relish days and nights at sea right now: no telephone, no television, no interruptions, no demands beyond breathing in and out the salty blue air. And now I have come to the age of rereading, how many more than one book would I pack for such a journey! What was tedious in the long, long days to spare of youth becomes on short time a welcome respite from work and a rehearsal for eternal rest.

Ass-in-igned’s name was Barbara. She was from a small state college and had just turned nineteen. A pale girl, she was too plump and languid to have climbed comfortably to the upper berth. We learned later that while we were all at dinner on 7 July, the night before landfall, a steward found her in a diabetic coma. He carried her to the infirmary where she died a few hours later. Barbara’s death was not announced publicly; we learned about it on the shipboard grapevine and, as the news spread, students gathered in mutinous groups on the decks. Damn it. Boredom is an affliction of youth; death should rightly be an affliction of old age. Betrayal of that prevailing logic made us all furious at someone or something.

‘1954: How could it have happened? They say the drug needed to save her was not on board because her parents had not informed the ship’s doctor of her condition. How could it have happened? Because the family doctor had not told them how serious the condition was. Or so I have heard. And how the hell could it have happened? How, how, how the hell did any of it happen? Because. Because. Because. It is too stupid that she is dead.’

Only now, fifty years on and the mother of a child of my own, do I think of the dead girl with pain and melancholy instead of anger. Only now do I think of her at all. Perhaps we were less sensitive in the 1950s, before flying doctors and sophisticated medication and grief counsellors, when life was that much younger and closer to its primal cave. By the time we sighted land, the waters had closed over Barbara’s memory as they have throughout the ages over graves of sailors lost at sea.

‘Today is 8 July 1954. In one month, three weeks and five days I will be nineteen. Nineteen! Getting on a bit! We have been at sea for seven days and should see land any moment now. Days without end on the ocean are like long sentences with no punctuation. I told Evelyn that I thought days at sea were Henry James without commas! She didn’t seem to get it. Maybe natural science majors don’t have to read Henry James? Do they have to read anything? Maybe they do it all by touch.’

Ha! Very funny! Your brother became a doctor in the end, and is he not to this day the most avid reader I know, obsessive almost? He reads for the joy of acquiring information, the more recherché it is the more joyous is he, history and biography, rarely fiction, never poetry, or so I dare say. The tale of how my new baby brother and only sibling was introduced to me sixty-odd years ago is one of my cherished false memories. As I like to recall, they brought the bundle home from hospital, plunked him into the baby scales set up on the kitchen table and said: ‘Irma, meet your seven-pound-brother-the-doctor …’ I was not yet four years old at the time and this had to be an invention of my later life. Nevertheless, there is no denying that conception is contaminated by preconception and parental love in general spoiled by ambition. Names given babies are tiny epitaphs in advance. My brother’s name, for instance, Michael David, was a parental ploy; even after it was changed briefly to Michael Dean during an episode of Semitic collywobbles when American medical schools were rumoured to have begun imposing Jewish quotas, the poor little tyke remained stuck with the initials MD. As for me, my name, Irma, is practically an anagram of my mother’s name: Myra. My middle name, Lois on my birth certificate but Louise or Leah depending on which member of my family I asked, provided the initials ILK as in: you will be of that ILK and you will like it. When it came to my own introduction to waiting family members, in one of my rummages I found and have kept in my possession a letter my mother sent to her mother, who was still back in Indiana, announcing my birth. ‘It’s a girl,’ she wrote in her tight, controlled backhand. ‘Drat it!’

Anger has not been one of my outstanding characteristics; the moment insult enters my system it encounters my grotesquely enlarged sense of responsibility and is converted immediately into guilt and hurt. As I grow older I understand and will at last accept that mine was the final generation of females in Western society to be born into an ancient tradition that found each newborn daughter a new burden. Love your little girl if you can, but above love and, over all, keep her safe for a stranger’s pleasure and another family’s benefit. To that end, let her possess beauty but only to a modest degree, so it shouldn’t incite desire among the goyim. As for education, an adornment for girls of my ilk, may it be decorative yet not so flashy or deep that it threatens her good sense or the vanity of her future husband, not so costly that it subtracts one penny from the more important school fees of her brothers. Margaret Mead, eminent graduate of Barnard College for Women, in the address she delivered to my graduating class in 1956 congratulated us on having accumulated great words and thoughts and poems to mull over in the future while we prepared dinner for our families and washed dishes at our kitchen sinks. Many years later I realised the lady was being ironical and provocative. But her audience was too young for irony. Besides, we were American, weren’t we? And thus we were indoctrinated from the cradle with characteristic literal thinking. At the time, her words made me unhappy and a little provoked, too. Oh, so few of us girls then became anthropologists or lawyers or doctors! Even fewer put out to sea.

The late teenager I used to be, I mean you there, intense and long-haired youngster leaning on the rail and eastward-bound, you are lacking in self-confidence, lacking in self-awareness and, to a great degree, lacking in self. I know, I remember, how you sometimes drift away to hover in a high corner of the room watching your family at dinner and hearing yourself ask, please, for the salt or water. You did not always feel all there; you don’t now. But you had a strong sense that your self had not yet arrived, was waiting somewhere in the wings. The selfish years have ended now; your self dropped in, barely made herself known and is departing. I hardly knew anything about myself at all back then. I did not even realise, for example, that I was exhausting most of my lifetime’s allowance of rage in battles with my father. They marked my adolescence, those screaming matches toe to toe with Daddy, and as long as each one lasted I felt an inkling of my own weight and stamina. Mother stood in the background during these struggles: has sly memory superimposed a smile on her face? Her own father died when she was barely seven; is it possible she thought this late and agonising parturition was what fathers were for? No. It is more likely that my mother believed it was not my battle I fought with the man she regretted having married, but her own. And what were our endless screaming matches ostensibly about? About right and wrong, tolerance and intolerance, food, entertainment, what was safe and what was dangerous: all the murderous and petty strategies of revolution.

And yet, after the shouting, my father had himself to thank for my war of independence, and I thank him for it, too. When I was barely nine, and our bloodline had been mercilessly cauterised in the fascist camps of Europe, he used to take me to lectures at Cooper Union where lefties and crypto-anarchists still dared hold forth. At the end of the fiery screeds discussion was thrown open to the floor and my father glowed with pride when I stood up on a chair to squeal precocious questions at the speakers: from whom does an unenlightened, uneducated proletariat learn the precepts of self-government? How can killing people ever stop people from killing people? Is Russian a Western language? Suddenly and only now, recollecting his pride, his sorrow, his carpentry and his singing voice, I realise to what degree I trusted my father, more than I have trusted anyone. I trusted him enough to show him all my anger. And he, staunch in his love, was soon afraid: for me.

Intellectual parent-bashing was a relatively new sport in the 1950s, a kind of emotional lacrosse, played almost exclusively by girls. I was an enthusiastic amateur who never achieved the thrust and style of, say, my room-mate, Marjorie, or any other of the proto-analysands at my college. Those chicks blamed their daddies for crimes too subtle even for my imagining. But Marjorie herself, in spite of the coaching of a Park Avenue shrink, never attempted serious mama-bashing, a sophisticated permutation of the game. Blaming mama rose to a competitive level only after the daughters and granddaughters of my generation were liberated to know that our own sex could be just as bullying, cruel, egotistical, possessive, venal and even more judgemental than men. No parent can ever get it just right or ever will. So what do you think about that, young one, squinting into the dawn for your first sight of land? Parents fuck us up from the moment we are born, it’s in the nature of the beast: they are bigger than we are, they are older – our parents have us. You too, in your time, for all the love in the world will get it not just right. Hey, pay attention! This is you I’m talking about. It is you I am talking to. You’d like to tell me to mind my own business. I am. And we must be growing very old indeed to talk to ourself so shamelessly. Senility never lacks for company.

‘1954: Land! This morning I saw land! Several rocks, beautiful, beautiful rocks, and an island called Wight that was once a hideout for pirates, and a big, proud, lonely lighthouse. Evelyn joined me and we watched the rocks slip by. English rocks! Pointed white rocks! We waved to skinny soldiers on a troopship behind us. English soldiers! Skinny English soldiers! Evelyn said they looked more worried than pleased to see us. I told her they’ve had a lot more to worry about recently than we have in the States. I agree, though, they did not look half as pleased at the sight of us as the Italian stewards did every time they sauntered past while we were splashing around the little swimming pool on deck, that’s for sure! And here we are! Here we are! And the formalities: my first ever formalities! The first stamp in my passport! My heart is jumping! The docks and countryside look neat, trimmed, pretty, planned, charming. The people too, perhaps? My God! They’re English and in their own land. Not in a black-and-white movie on television! The English in England, at last! Through Customs. The officials are gentle and nice. The trains! The people! Pale and small! Everyone not on this train is riding a bike. No doubt there will be cars when we get to London proper. Proper London! Headline on a newspaper: CANDID ON THE DUCHESS OF WINDSOR. Outside a sign: “Entry: frontal parking”. “Mind the gap”! Mind the gap! I thought of the Wife of Bath and her lecherous teeth! But what does it mean? So many people look like Alec Guinness!’

Alec Guinness, yet! Where would a girl have been in those days without exclamation marks! The pages of the notebook are slit in places by the shrieking lead of my pencil! Old excitement is contagious; it was those noisy exclamation marks that made me decide one dull day only last week to go back to my European landfall. The Needles! The Isle of Wight! To see them again! From the other side and half a century later, to take a look at my first glimpse of Europe, and with luck to stumble into a glitch of time where the ghost of my ship is forever slipping into port so from the cliffs above I can look down and see the ghost of myself dancing on the deck. Would I know myself as I was then? What I did not know then, had never been told (for my own good) and could never allow anyone to tell me, what I can hear and admit only from the desiccation of age, and what is patently evident in the ‘photograph of bearer’ of my first passport, is that I was really quite beautiful. My face, a classic oval, showed fine cheekbones and a clear, balanced, starry gaze. As I recall, this old body wasn’t all that bad either, toned by an energetic childhood, lots of swimming, rowing, hiking, as well as endless games of badminton in a homicidal version my brother and I invented that depended more on endurance than style. Had I known myself then to be good-looking, would it have made a great difference? Certainly, I would have expected more good things to come my way for free. Beautiful women are raised to expect a lot for nothing and to require very little of themselves, as nothing much more than beauty is required of them by others. Caretakers of the gift, vestal virgins, they soon learn to avoid hard travelling that makes squints, and hard work that makes wrinkles, and unguarded passion that makes shadows.

My first passport was not valid for travel to Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czhechoslovakia (correct spelling of the day), Hungary, Poland, Rumania or what was still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I could not visit Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Syria, nor any portion of Korea or Viet-nam (hyphenated as it was then) under Communist control. Cuba, on the other hand, was hunky-dory. For my photo on page 4, and probably on the day of landing in England, I would have worn the usual dark-blue nylon trench coat and white turtleneck pullover probably over blue jeans as usual. The suitcase in my cabin was full of similar costumes suitable to the star of one of the classic romances of that time: the long-haired brunette of alien origin, fast-moving, intellectual, a little dangerous, no time for wimps. Incidentally, the brunette rarely got the man back then; in American movies she walked alone out of the last reel. Also, we American girls packed enough boxes of newfangled Tampax to see us through lest the Europeans hadn’t caught up with American know-how. Those of us who were not yet convinced tampons did not compromise the maidenhead and were too timid to ask for sanitary napkins in foreign languages had to cram a bulk of sanitary napkins into their fake-leather suitcases. Whether a girl of my generation styled herself after Juliette Greco or June Allyson, each of us was the star, looking for her co-star, and at the bottom of her chest packed hopefully lay the evangelical Hollywood-based tenet that one and only one true lover was out there, in search of her. And even though girls back then were shamelessly taught to tease and lead men on, she and he – he and I – were bound to know each other on sight and without brokering or pre-arrangement to make each other deliriously happy for ever after: Ginger and Fred, Katie and Spence, Bacall and Bogart. Always with parental approval, of course. Never mind the heresy we saw every day in the family home, true love was the distaff faith of my generation. I too was a believer. I knew I would find one true love, my mate and heart’s twin. I was just as persuaded then I would end my life with a man whose mind and mine were one as I know now that I did not even come close. Even in my darkest days I never lapsed from the faith; I exhausted it.