As we signed in at our second hotel, the helpful porter, hearing the sound of clinking beer cans, reached out his hands and said to Tyler, “Shall I chuck those for you?” at which Tyler yelped, “No!” Patrick had to explain—not for the first time—that these were quite precious to someone back in the States, and he endured the stares of the hotel personnel.
In Chester we gaped at the ancient two-story buildings, some of which leaned slightly inward over a narrow lane, and shops so old, we read, that knights had patronized them to buy their armor. Another walled city, and Patrick pointed out the sharp spikes along the top in places to keep the enemy out.
To do all we wanted to do in London, we could spend only a few hours in Wales. But we loved riding the train to Holyhead, water on one side, mountains on the other, and trees bent double by the force of the wind that blows off the Irish sea.
We did our best to pronounce the names of streets and towns along the way, and Patrick tried to photograph some of the signs as the train sped along. One was so long that the sign itself seemed to go on forever. The amused conductor, who must have seen tourists struggle over this many times, came by later with a piece of paper imprinted with the name: LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBWLLLLAN-DOSILIOGOGOGOCH.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Turn the paper over,” the conductor said. The translation read: Church of St. Mary in a hollow of white hazel near to a rapid whirlpool and St. Tysilio’s Church of the red cave.
We had a few hours to wander around Holyhead—it, too, once occupied by Romans—before we caught our train to London. But the journey to the end of Wales and back was worth it if only to see the Church of St. Mary sign, which we tried again and again to pronounce.
We spent the rest of our time in London. At breakfast the next morning in a hotel on the outskirts, we were marveling at the breakfasts served in some of the hotels, especially the one in York. “We’ll remember that as ‘Hotel Near Wall with Bacon and Tomatoes and Ham and Eggs and Kippers and Fruit on a Big Platter with Cream on the Side,’ ” said Patrick.
For the rest of the trip that was the trigger that could get us all laughing, and the kids tried to top each other with outlandish names. We visited the British Museum and the Tower of London. The changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace became, for Patricia, Place-of-Young-Hot-Guy-in-Beehive-Hat-and-Red-Jacket-Holding-Rifle-and-Not-Even-Looking-at-Me-When-I-Said-Hi.
We set aside one afternoon for each of us to go our separate ways and meet again for dinner. Tyler had a map of the London Underground, and just as he’d enjoyed mapping out the streets of our neighborhood in Barcelona, he enjoyed taking the different routes of the subway. Patricia haunted the shops and bookstores of Chelsea and came back with a paperbound copy of New Voices in Poetry by young British authors to give her teacher and some earrings for her friends. Patrick went to the observatory at Greenwich.
I simply explored the neighborhood outside our hotel, watching the preacher who stood on a trunk denouncing a demonstration a few feet away of a man lying on a bed of nails; the trio of young men playing a guitar, a flute, and a hurdy-gurdy; the proper-looking lady in hat and suit pedaling sedately down the street. I drank in the dialect, the wonderful cockney—a woman complaining to another about a friend who had invited her to tea, with nothing to eat, “Just a cup w’out anythin’ to hold in your han’.” Like Tyler, I loved the signs at important buildings or driveways that read DEAD STOP OR DEAD SLOW.
* * *
But there were places that made me sure that, were I to die in London, it would not be in a cab but by the simple act of crossing the street—places where, even though I checked for traffic on my right instead of my left, there was no walk light, and it was just a contest between cars and pedestrians.
I stood timidly by as swarm after swarm of cars and cabs and buses trapped me there on the curb. And then, on some unseen signal, the crowd waiting beside me would suddenly defy all odds and surge into the street with traffic coming right at them. Miraculously, the oncoming herd would stop, then inch forward again until, on that same unseen signal, all engines revved up and they were off again.
I couldn’t do it. When it was a wager between me and the grille of a double-decker bus, my bets were on the bus. I was trapped at Piccadilly Circus until a proper English gentleman suddenly took me by the arm, hustled me across, tipped his hat (yes, he wore a hat), and walked on.
* * *
Our most expensive outing in London was a medieval feast we had signed up for in advance. We’d read about it when planning our trip. Tyler was up for anything having to do with food, and Patricia had a special dress she thought would be just right for Elizabethan times.
The morning of the banquet, I woke feeling slightly feverish, with an unsettled stomach. Something I’d eaten, I thought, and I was careful of what I ate the rest of the day. By evening I didn’t feel better, but arguably, not any worse. I am not sick, I told myself as we climbed into a cab. Not at the price we paid for these tickets!
We were deposited in front of a hotel and led to the Elizabethan rooms by a minstrel strumming his lute. The banquet hall was lit by candles and, probably because of his height, Patrick was chosen as lord of the manor, and instructed to greet each arriving guest with a hearty “Drink! Hail!” to which the guests replied, “Wassail!”
Patrick took his role with gusto, and the four of us were seated at the head table. As all the other guests were “seated below the salt,” they had to come to him to ask for a pinch from the salt box. Specifically, the men sent their wives, and Patrick took great pleasure in the custom of requiring a kiss of each fair maiden before he obliged, to much laughter from his children.
The menu consisted of dishes served in medieval times, and everything was done to make the meal as authentic as possible, down to the chipped platters, the wooden bowls, and the straw on the floor. We were to drink our soup right from the bowl, then wipe our bowls clean with huge hunks of bread. I stared down at the grease left in my bowl and realized that dinner, for me, was over. I was going to have to fake the rest of the evening. I am not sick, I reminded myself.
Patricia leaned around Patrick to say, “Isn’t this fun, Mom?” and I gave her a wan smile.
I watched as my glass was filled with fermented apple juice. Each course had to be presented first to the lord of the manor, and when a costumed wench appeared with a huge platter of shellfish, I held my breath while she heaped a pile of mussels onto each of our plates.
“Are you all right?” Patrick asked me as I tried unobtrusively to stuff each gray creature back into its shell.
“Don’t ask,” I said. “Carry on for old England.”
The fish was followed with an assortment of chopped vegetables that looked like cold chop suey, and then the minstrel came in with an authentic boar’s head, high on a platter, singing all the while, and when he presented it to us, its foggy eye staring up at me, the apple askew in its hairy mouth, I changed my mantra to, I am not going to throw up. I had not vomited even once when I was pregnant, I told myself, so I wouldn’t now. This medieval feast was my idea, and I was jolly well going to sit here and watch my family enjoy themselves.
Chicken pâté was served along with the boar’s head—its cheeks, I imagine—with admonitions that we would be fined if we did not leave some on our plates to give to the poor, and I was the most charitable one in the room.
Then the main course—huge slabs of roast beef that the wenches forked off slovenly onto our plates in a splatter of fat and grease. Where were those medieval dogs under the table when we needed them? I silently moaned.
Tyler, who had finished his beef, noticed me sliding my portion back and forth across my plate, and asked, “You going to eat that, Mom?” I told him to wait until the guests were pounding the table again to applaud the minstrel at the other end of the room and then I would slide my serving onto his plate.
When the main course was finished, the wenches came around with a large bowl, into
which each guest unceremoniously dumped all leftovers. I stared down into the gray shellfish, the chop suey, the fatty slabs of leftover beef, and—I couldn’t help myself—the desecrated boar’s head, with one eye still intact.
Then I turned suddenly and asked permission of the lord of the manor to use the restroom. Out in the hall, I remember one of the wenches saying, “You don’t want to miss the raspberries with clotted cream,” and the next thing I knew I was lying on a sofa outside the hotel kitchen, with three wenches, two chefs, and one minstrel looking down at me.
I had not thrown up. I had evidently thrown myself onto the floor, or started to, until a wench caught me when I passed out and, once revived, I begged to be allowed to remain there until the feast was over. The lord of the manor and his children, I instructed, were not to be disturbed.
Later, back in our hotel room, as the kids were enthusiastically recounting the evening, Tyler summed it up in one sentence: “Feast-of-Boar’s-Head-and-Mussels-and-Eating-with-Hands-While-Mom-on-Couch-Turns-Green.”
I recovered soon after, and for our final night in London, we splurged and stayed in a hotel in the heart of the city. Up until now we had been sleeping in two bedrooms, females in one, males in the other, so there wouldn’t be a pileup in the bathroom. But to save money in this expensive hotel, we got a room with two double beds; I slept with Patricia in one, Patrick with Tyler in the other.
After we’d turned out the lights, we were talking about all the trips we’d taken as a family—what we remembered most.
“I remember our trip out west, when we got out of the car at the Grand Canyon and you held on to our shirts because you were afraid we’d fall in,” Patricia said, and they guffawed.
“And you and Dad never told us that our last stop was going to be Disneyland! And every time you talked about it, you called it Frisbee Water. What was that all about?” Tyler demanded.
I laughed. “Because if you guys knew that the last stop on our trip was Disneyland, you would have wanted to rush through everything else, and we didn’t want to spoil the trip listening to, ‘How long before we get there?’ ”
“Oh,” said Patricia. And a minute later, “Remember when we stopped at the Dinosaur National Monument just before dark? And we were about the only ones there? And Dad locked the keys in the car, and we were afraid we’d have to be there all night, and we didn’t have any water, and—”
“I know, I know, and we didn’t have food, and we were all going to starve to death before they found our bodies in the morning,” Patrick finished.
“And that ranch outside Yellowstone, remember?” Patricia went on, and we started laughing even before she told the story. “You were afraid Tyler might be too little, Mom, so you asked for their most gentle horse, and every time we turned around, Tyler’s horse was just standing there!”
“Dead stop,” said Patrick, and we roared.
I lay there beside Patricia, smiling up into the dark. Maybe this will be the favorite part of this trip for me, I thought. Lying here with my family, laughing and sharing memories, knowing that someday this night might be one of the ones they remember and laugh about too.
* * *
The next morning Patrick and Tyler packed all the collected beer cans in boxes the concierge had found for us and took them to customs to mail home. Patricia and I used the opportunity for one last stroll around the neighborhood, and as we were admiring a jacket in a shop window, we were assailed by a confused English tourist from some small town wanting directions to Victoria Station. She had her coach tickets and knew her son would be frantic, and somebody had told her to go down to the bridge and turn left, but she was all confused. We finally found a local to explain the directions to her, but the station was still a long way off. She started out, and we followed her for a bit and saw that she was doing exactly the opposite of everything she’d been told to do. So we chased her down, called a taxi for her, and paid the driver to take her to the station. By then she was in tears of frustration, and I kept thinking that little old woman could well be me in twenty years, every bit as overwhelmed and baffled by London as she was.
“That was a nice thing to do, Mom,” Patricia said.
“Just paying it forward,” I said, and told her about the man who had changed a tire for us when Pamela and Liz and I were on that trip to California years ago.
When Patrick and Tyler came back, Patrick said, “Alice, you should have seen the face of that man at customs. We got out of the cab, carrying all these boxes that weighed hardly anything at all, and he asked what we wanted to declare. When we told him they were empty beer cans, he actually stepped back a little, like we were lunatics.”
We were still laughing as we loaded our bags into a cab for our final journey to the airport. Every day since we’d left, my thoughts had been centered on what we were going to do the next morning in the next city and the next and the next. And then, seated beside Tyler on the plane, clouds appearing and disappearing outside our window, all I could think of was home. There’s a comforting familiarity in the usual buzz of activity and urgency of tasks—the old routines. Two weeks after we returned from London, Patrick was deep in a new project at work; I was sitting in on a support group for eighth graders, anxious about attending high school in the fall; Patricia was shopping for pants to go with a pair of shoes she’d bought in Soho, and within minutes of Tyler’s boxes arriving from London, his cell phone was ringing like the New York Stock Exchange, and he was trading cans right and left with friends willing to sell not only their souls but their baby brothers for a British beer can.
This is my life, and I like it, I thought one evening as I checked a lasagna in the oven. The bustle, the humor, the spontaneity, the teasing . . . I smiled as I thought of the name we would give our home, were we to have a sign above our door frame as they had in Wales: “House of Four People in Town of Chevy Chase with Big Hearts and Usual Frailties Living Joyfully the Best They Know How.”
* * *
About three months later, Mr. Long died. It wasn’t unexpected, as he’d grown increasingly frail. He died in his sleep, and Patrick took some time off work to arrange the memorial service, the burial. . . .
Patricia and Tyler went about the house soberly and helped out where they could. The obituary in the Post gave an extended account of Mr. Long’s years in the State Department—the many overseas assignments and the countries where he had served. The mail brought numerous notes from people who had known Mr. Long in government, but few came to his memorial service, because most of his friends and coworkers had scattered to other parts of the country.
As he had at his mother’s memorial service, Patrick stood up and gave a moving tribute to his dad. He choked up once or twice and had to stop momentarily, but I was glad that Patricia and Tyler could see this depth of feeling in their father, who obviously seemed so strong and capable to them over the years.
Later, when the service was over and friends had come and gone, Patrick and I sat out on the glider on our back porch holding hands. We were watching two sparrows building a nest under the eaves of our toolshed—one flying in and out with a piece of string or straw, then the other taking its place. Soon, just as the sparrows had done last year, there would be nests on both sides of the toolshed, parents teaching their young to fly, until one day they’d be gone and the nest empty.
“I guess it’s just beginning to hit me that I’m an orphan,” Patrick said.
I caressed his hand with my thumb.
“Never really thought of it that way before, but now the realization has struck that if I ever need advice—help, consolation—my parents are gone. Not that I ever really asked their advice once I was grown, but it’s the knowledge that I couldn’t now if I wanted. That if there were ever any questions I wanted to ask them—about their lives, about myself as a child or places we had lived before I was old enough to remember—I’ve lost the chance. Strange . . .”
“I imagine so,” I said.
“I’m glad we had
two children,” he said after a bit. “They can lean on each other after we’re gone. Share memories.”
“True.”
“And someday we’ll be the old wise ones,” he said. “Our children will be coming to us for advice.”
“Or not,” I said, and finally saw him smile.
* * *
IBM was starting another charitable grant program, this time in some African east coast countries, and once again, Patrick was offered the job as coordinator. But this time he turned it down. With Patricia applying to colleges and Tyler now a freshman in high school, he didn’t want to uproot the family; and, as he admitted to me, all that travel didn’t appeal to him as much as it used to.
Tyler had joined the track team, and he and his dad were still enjoying those five- and ten-mile runs on Sundays. Patricia had enrolled in a number of advanced courses and was showing a remarkable aptitude for science, surprising us both.
So Patrick took a different job within the company and also signed on to head a committee to reelect one of the best congressmen we’d had in our district.
I smiled as I rubbed his feet for him after a long Saturday campaigning door-to-door.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, raising his head off the pillow and looking at me. “My feet stink? I just washed them.”
“No, I’m just thinking that trying to harness your energy is like trying to harness the sea. Just when I think I’ve got you home for a spell, you’re out campaigning.”
“I’m home!” he protested.
“Yes, but your mind is always on the next job or project and the next and the next. I’m not complaining, really. Just observing.”
He wiggled his toes in my hands. “I like to make a difference.”
“I know. That’s what attracted me to you. Last year you headed the food drive at the church and the—”