Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [70]
Despite the cold they seemed to be rehearsing something in a small amphitheater at the next college. I could see them gesturing theatrically as they entered and exited with great flourish, but even after opening my window I could not make out the words above the wind.
For a long while I stood watching at my window. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I decided, finally. That’s what they’re rehearsing.
I closed the window, and walked across the room to the view I loved most. I could see the majestic dome of the Radcliffe Camera and St. Mary’s spire, both lit from below. The lights from the rooms surrounding Brasenose formed changing patterns on the emerald-green grass below. As people turned off their lights to retire for the night, pieces of the pattern disappeared. Then, as late-night concertgoers returned to their rooms, switching on the lamps inside, other patterns took their place.
I inhaled the air, deeply, as if to take it all in and make it a part of me.
But perhaps what I really wanted was to make me a part of it: of Oxford and its history, of this windy starry night, of these rooms in Brasenose College that for this brief time belonged to me.
That night I dreamed. One of those crazy, mixed-up dreams that if you were going to your analyst the next day, you’d spend the whole hour talking about—partly because you wanted to understand what your unconscious was telling you and partly because you wanted to experience again the feelings unlocked by the dream.
It is a sunny Saturday morning and Ducky Harris and I are walking along Clay Street, a small alley near the YWCA that is home to several wholesale florists. Suddenly Ducky bends over to pick up a discarded snapdragon stalk. When she stands up I notice she has on a hat, a green plaid tam-o’-shanter, one just like Grandmother wore when we went Christmas shopping downtown at Hutzler’s department store.
But Ducky doesn’t look like Grandmother. She also doesn’t look like Ducky. She looks like some movie star I’d seen on the posters outside the old Century movie house.
She says something to me, the red-haired woman who’s wearing Grandmother’s tam-o’-shanter. I try to make out exactly what the words are, but there’s just too much unconscious dream static in the way. I can see her mouth moving, forming words, but the sound disappears before reaching me.
Then suddenly I could hear her. “Hello, it’s me,” she said, smiling. “I’m still here.”
11
THE DANCING PROFESSOR
Dear Alice,
I think what I will remember long after I’ve forgotten rural England’s economic history & patterns of settlement may be the lesson taught by Barry, an instructor in ballroom dancing. Not only did I learn the quickstep & cha-cha from Barry, but, more important, I relearned something I had forgotten: the pure joy of letting go & just having fun. Alice, try not to forget this again. Further down the road you may need this knowledge much more than English history.
Love, Alice
One night at dinner Albert asked if anyone in the group would like to take a lesson in ballroom dancing. Immediately a groan went up from one end of the table. Oxford was filled with concerts and plays and lectures, so why, the groan suggested, would anyone be interested in ballroom dancing? Particularly, as someone pointed out, when a Chopin concert was being offered at a nearby hall.
Often it was fun to go to one of the concerts or plays that seemed to take place in every church or hall in Oxford. But occasionally I liked to break away from the group and see what I could find on my own.
Sometimes I was lucky. The night, for instance, I watched a movie—The Bodyguard—with a group of American college students. They were spending the summer at Oxford, taking courses and quartered in a dorm on the other side of Brasenose in the New Quad—so named because of its recent arrival on the Oxford landscape: circa 1878. I met