"Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free," runs the old Shaker hymn, and especially, it seems to me, when it comes to travel. To travel uncluttered, to shuck off unnecessary possessions, even to do without modern comfort and the illusion of security can be curiously liberating. It means having to sort out our true needs, to flex forgotten muscles and stumble over hidden faults, or as the hymn says, "to come down where we ought to be."
 

  Though when I was twenty and for the first time gypsying my way across Europe, it seemed as if I had only strengths left to discover. Surely, I thought, my weaknesses were all behind me, gone with the scrawny schoolgirl who was called up for a date just once. On a dare. The kid with "chicken wing" shoulder blades that her family was always trying to push back into place. The stuttering child who chewed her nails to the quick and scratched mosquito bites into ugly, festering sores.

  Poor Mother, so careful to have me vaccinated on the upper thigh because she did not wish her first-born daughter--the one planned baby of our rabbity brood--to start life with a blemished arm! Today it is covered with a multitude of small self-inflicted scars. And now that I have children of my own and can recall how hard it was to accept any falling off from their baby perfection, I could weep for what she must have felt watching me grow up--watching the jerky movements that inspired one of my teachers to ask, "Did Jean ever have polio?"; listening to the breathless sounds that at one time only she and my brother Ned could comprehend, the would-be speech that set me apart from other children, though not from the creatures in the woods where I wandered alone for hours on end. There I was free of that paralyzing tightness that gripped me whenever I most intensely desired to communicate with my own kind and not just to spy on them as I spied on deer, on a fox den, on a red-eyed vireo's nest. Why had it always been so difficult?

  Was it because I sought to be different as intensely as I sought to be understood? For when other girls were setting their hair in curls and coquettish bangs, I yanked mine straight back from a high forehead; when they dropped their skirts to the tops of their bobby socks, mine stayed at the knee. And even when as a child I struggled to break into intelligible speech, I stubbornly cultivated my mother's English idiom. "It's tomayto," other children told me; "tomayto" repeated my adaptable brothers; "t-t-tomahto" I said and vowed not to forget it. Trivial differences maybe, but I brandished them like so many red flags.

  "When did you come over?" people are always asking, and the answer, "when I was six months old," leaves them puzzled. It does not explain the depths of my perversity: the way I embraced my British birth in the wild hope of perhaps not being an American citizen (as I finally figured out that I was, if I so chose); the way I privately blamed my American father for all that was disjointed in my life and, above all, for taking me away from my mythical "homeland."

  For I was the secret compatriot of a mother who protected me from my father's quick fury; a mother who insisted that I was just as pretty as my cuddlesome baby sister (Dad made a great fuss over her); a mother who disliked cats but let mine give birth in the middle of the diningroom rug and brought the discarded runt of the litter back to life in her warm hand. Officially an "alien" (though not, to be sure, an "enemy alien") she had to register with the government every time we moved. Yet I knew that her brothers had been fighting the Germans long before Pearl Harbor as I also knew that America, despite its boastful propaganda, had no corner on democracy.  So it seemed to me that there was something rather fine about not being an American.   And I saw myself in my favorite fantasy, of a school trip to a nearby defense plant where Dad worked: where officialdom would ask if we were all citizens, and the other children would all say "yes" and troop inside. But I would say, or better yet, be regretfully told "no" and be marched off to the guardhouse. Selected for glorious martyrdom! I kept the vision to myself, of course, and the school trip that might proclaim my exotic alien status never arose. But what a lovely excuse for all the pains of growing up, this childish daydream of mine--and have I ever truly given it up? How comforting to imagine that somewhere--elsewhere--I really belonged!

  Cold fantasy comfort. It didn't occur to me then that Ned might ever feel lonely too, or indeed that he might share any of my weaknesses. He was my Rock of Gibraltar, the boy I now try to resurrect from a faded snapshot set in a dimestore frame that sits amid the clutter of my dresser. It is the only framed photograph in the house, and I stare at it, trying to bring that shadowy figure into better focus: a gangling youth leaning against an old Nash with arms akimbo, jutting ears that anchor a pair of owlish spectacles, an engagingly lopsided grin. The teeth do not show, but I remember that they were overcrowded, like my mother's, and in another family would have been "put right" with braces. Money was tight though, and my parents didn't think a perfect smile was all that important. We kids agreed; Ned was just fine the way he was.

  I stare, and scraps of memory stir within me: warm and happy ones; awkward, silly ones and some so sharp and searing that I have never dared share them. That haunting double grip he has held on me for nineteen years--I cannot talk of it without seeming to hint at something hidden and wrong between us. And yet there was nothing but a sister's mute hero worship--an inarticulate, blundering love that must have embarrassed him horribly one Christmas, when I gave him all the money I had left in my piggy bank, a pile of pennies and nickels wrapped up in white tissue paper.

  How could I help worshiping the brother who had always been there and the only one in my eyes who really counted (as I made very clear by ignoring for a whole year an upstart baby brother). Ned was two grades above me in school and therefore perpetually smarter and stronger than me. And kindlier too, though that was not yet a quality I'd learned to prize. He won--he had to win--the prizes and scholarships; but he also kept company with the stragglers on a group hike while I raced ahead to the front, and he helped me with sticky math problems without making me feel stupid.
  "The one guy who'd ask the dumb question he knew someone else was ashamed to ask," a classmate later said of Ned. Yes, he was like that, while I, was I like my American grandmother, held up in our family as an awful example of egotistical charm and energy?

   "Just like Grandmother!" I cringed when I heard those words, for I knew they did not mean I was charming but rather that I was giddy and heedless of the trouble I caused others. Always wandering off without telling anyone where I was going or when I was coming back. Wondering why parents were such worrywarts about it. No, I was not as nice a person as Ned.

  "Christ, didn't this Lancelot have any vices?" The college bullpen suggests I dig up a few, but a sister's vision is limited, and even the faults I found in Ned reflect, it seems to me, more on me than him. It made me furious at the time, of course, when, after we'd shared the bathroom for years, Ned started selfishly locking me out and ignoring my loud pounding on the bathroom door; when he went away to prep school and came home on holiday to shirk his turn at the kitchen sink, laughing at me as I tugged and shoved at him, actually seeming to enjoy the tussle that for me was in deadly earnest.

   "Who does he think he is anyway, visiting royalty?" I fumed and wondered why Mother wasn't supporting the cause of justice. And I hated it when he and Dad engaged in long, boring discussions about math and physics at the dinner table.

  "Suppose," Dad would say as he emptied a salt cellar onto the tablecloth, "this beach here has a gradient of 20 degrees, and the waves"--he looked hopefully in the direction of the water pitcher--"have developed a force . . ." Ned always rose to the bait. They had been at it ever since he was old enough to count, until he and Dad were speaking a whole other language. But I turned a deaf ear to my father's discourses on the physical principles of the universe and refused to consider the problems he set before us. He had one disciple; I would not be another.  I would not court this father I resented and also resembled in all the wrong ways.  Ah, that silent feud at the dinner table! I fiddling with my napkin ring and Dad drumming his bony fingers on a dinner plate, glaring at my  nail-bitten hand from across the smooth tablecloth.  I knew he wanted me to take the napkin out of the ring and place it on my lap; instead I gave it another flick. . .. "John dear," Mother would intervene just before the explosion. Somehow she kept the peace between us.

  Yes, Mother tried to shield me from my father's often justifiable anger, and from other things too. She was outraged when she heard about the test administered by a school I once attended. It had questions like "who is your best friend?" "how many friends do you have?" and, worst of all, "who do you think will list you as their friend?" A wonderfully detailed chart, full of little circles with (or without) interconnecting lines, was composed from this data and shown to the class. Names naturally were deleted, but I knew I must be one of those lone circles on the outside--someone not contributing to the "social cohesiveness" that we were praised for attaining. We were also praised for our lack of "cliquishness"; and certainly no one could have accused me of forming any cliques.  Not after Mother prevailed upon me to throw a party for my classmates in the eighth grade, and out of some twenty invited guests, two girls showed up. I do not even think they were the ones I had listed, after much headscratching, as "best friends."

  Am I painting too black a picture? For I have never thought of my childhood as unhappy, nor was the singing, gay spirited wood sprite that others remember altogether a pose. I suppose I was defying the dark, learning early to laugh at myself if only to beat others to it. Yet from the beginning there was also a dimly felt core of rightness in me.  With the blythe conviction that I was indeed the proverbial "Sunday's child, I cultivated an ability to take my hurts and twist them into blessings in disguise. Or (more heroically) into trials to test my spirit. It was an unarguable, infuriating optimism.

  "You just have no sense of tragedy," grumbled the brother I'd once tried to pretend out of existence when I told him my happy ending for "The Red Shoes." Of course, the movie needed its distraught heroine to throw herself in the path of a speeding train, "but I would have managed things differently." George just snorted.

   By the time I'd saved $600 for a summer in Europe, though, the facts of my life were beginning to justify my faith in it. One weakness was well behind me: the stuttering that had also bedeviled my father. Could he ever lecture, people had wondered? On his first job (rehearsing lectures beforehand to my mother), he somehow managed to do so. And in seventh grade a drama teacher taught me to slide (or bounce) my way into words with an intentional stammer--a crutch I was gradually able to do without but knew I could reach for at any time. The words came tumbling out then (as they'd always come in a rush between "blockages"). What a relief to discard the strategems I had devised to cope with the minetraps of spoken language, to be able to leap into a sentence without first stopping to consider all its parts and how the more difficult ones might best be circumvented, to know that I could say any old thing that entered my head! (Perhaps it was not such a great leap forward after all.)
   I babbled in French and German as well as English, for I'd discovered that languages were fun--though nothing to be taken seriously, said my father, who never bothered with case or gender in German and deplored the confusing way the "Frenchies" ran their words together. Still, he had to admit it was the French language that had brought him and Mother together; that if he had not been staying in Grenoble to improve his awful French, if Mme Soubron had not seated him next to the English girl who spoke it so beautifully....

  So going back to Europe--to France, where my parents courted, and to England, where I was born--was something I'd wanted to do for a long time. And at twenty I felt marvelously fortified for the adventure: possessed of a new body, a loosened tongue and a positively cocky heart. The University of Chicago hadn't done much with my mind maybe, but it was hardly their fault if I chose to concentrate on limbers and handsprings, rock climbing and feats of derring-do instead of the Great Books. Gymnastics for me was a case of perseverance prevailing over natural aptitude; and if I never lived up to my dreams of airborne grace, at least the "chicken wings" receded and my chest developed a bit. Enough so that I can recall with a smile that awful day of the surprise gift.

  It was the last day of my summer job in a Michigan Avenue soda shop as my giggling co-workers watched me tear off the wrapping paper. And stare at two cones of white foam rubber with a maraschino cherry taped to the tip of each.
  "What are they?"
  "You don't know?" the girls hooted. And suddenly I did know. Knew and could not escape. Too stunned, too humiliated to resist their urging, I inserted the objects into my bra and walked out of the shop looking, as everyone agreed, "ever so much sexier." It was true; I was getting glances that had never come my way before. But I knew it was not I, not my evidently defective body, that drew men's eyes; and I could not imagine going back to my mother's honest home wearing those mounds of phony flesh.  So I flung them into Lake Michigan. (My apologies to the lake--the damn things floated.)

  Happily, U of C students were a different breed from Michigan Avenue shopgirls. And it seemed that my mother was a different breed too. "No mother in her right mind" would grant the permission I needed for our Devil's Lake outing, said my roommate Alison--not after reading my enthusiastic letter about how much more exciting our own group of two girls (she and I) and some half dozen boys was than the official Outing Club. Mine only wrote back to "take along a flashlight and have fun, dear." So we did, clinging to rock faces, bathing in an icy lake, sleeping in culverts and barns--and not exactly encouraging other girls to join us (indeed we actively discouraged a girl with "big bosoms"--"they'll get in the way of her pack straps," said Alison). But then we didn't think that most of them wanted to join our strenuous fun, especially in March, when we could only say--by way of explanation to the rest of the dorm--how good it felt to get warm again. So I had to pinch myself when the floor head knocked on our door to say that some girls were feeling "left out" and could we please try not to be so exclusive. We kooks were a "clique"?

   Then there was folk music. Folk music and, of course, Hal with his clumpy feet and his gravelly voice. Hal didn't dance--unless I wanted to--or sing or play a musical instrument. His hobby was electronics, and he toyed with tape recorders, capturing other people's music. And their talk, although that was one sure way to keep me from talking. The high pitched, out-of-breath voice always came as a shock to me, and what I was saying as an embarrassment. Better by far to sing and at least not be responsible for the words coming out of my mouth if that eavesdropping black box was running. 

    How strange that I so resented it then--and now find solace in the knowledge that Hal guards a forgotten part of me: the blithe caroling that today is strained and unsure of itself. Or has he erased those reels of tape? But Hal does not throw things away as carelessly as I do. And captured voices live on, as that snapshot on my dresser--the picture of a stranger whom I struggle, and fail, to keep familiar--does not. But a recording, ah.... No, Hal will not have erased me.
  

  Other boys came and went, boys whom I generally decided, after one mushy kiss, I could not stand to be around. But Hal stuck. "Like a burr!" exclaimed Mother when she came'up for a visit and wanted to take me out to lunch.
  "I'll come too," said Hal. And he did. They struck up an instant antipathy; she found him presumptious, he found her cold and "managing." And blamed her, no doubt, for my attachment to an old-fashioned code of love.
  

   But it wasn't anything as thought out as a code: simply a feeling and yes, a fear. Fantasy sex was one thing, and my fantasies had been deliciously depraved for years. An old man started fondling me once (through a thick winter coat) in the natural history museum, and afterwards, in my shivery daydreams I did not move away (and the daydream shifted to a springtime park).  But man-in-the-flesh was another matter.

   So I squirmed when Hal talked to me of love; if there was a cat handy, I caressed it. Cats were safer than men. For I could not imagine being as close to a man as I was in my dreams and not giving over to him--wanting to give over to him--a say in the life that I alone controlled. And my body would be mine alone too--not forever, oh no, but until I should be "swept away" by the sort of love I was sure my parents shared. At least, so I explained to my little sister those sounds in the middle of the night that I used to wake up and listen to, wonderingly and a little scared--as she evidently did too. "Is Daddy hurting Mother?" she went around asking everyone but them one morning, and I assured her gravely that those were the sounds of "real love."

   Other people succumbed to sexual itches, other people "slept around," but I was different. Or so it seemed from the talk I heard about me. Girls in Hal's crowd boasted about losing their virginity; and if they felt any resistance, they yielded, so they said, to superior logic. We were supposed to be intellectuals, weren't we? So I was a little ashamed of not being able to defend rationally the way I felt about sex.

  "I'm surprised at you, Jean, the terrible arguments you're giving me!" Hal gazed at me sternly, as we sat on the floor of the narrow dormitory entrance hall and rehashed, for the hundredth time, why I was living there and not with him.
  "Aren't you two ever going to get married and stop cluttering up this hallway?" It did seem to take a lot longer to say goodnight to Hal than to anyone else I dated. And the more he saw of me, the more he found to criticize: my flip judgments, my show-off, competitive spirit, my lack of consideration for other people and, of course, my tunnel vision of love. What the hell does he want to marry me for anyway? I sometimes thought. We're obviously incompatible.
 

   Yet somehow our fights led into (almost) lovemaking, where Hal insisted that we were very compatible. "I can tell you'll make a good mother by the way you like to be touched," he told me. What on earth was he talking about anyway? Motherhood! I much preferred kittens and puppies to the prune-faced creatures that other women made such fools of themselves over. But Hal's fingers brushing my breasts under the cotton sundress invited rebel stirrings in me. And dorm rules, well, they invited breaking too, for the solution to running short on "hours" was simply to stay out all night.
  It was a bit awkward, walking up the dorm steps barefoot one morning, one hand in Hal's, the other swinging a single shoe--and running smack into the house mother, who only the day before had congratulated me on not staying out so late. "Hi there," I said with a smile of utter innocence that wasn't entirely feigned. Because rulebreaking didn't mean breaking my own rules; it didn't mean "sleeping with Hal," just sleeping in a bag on his floor, where he woke me with a kiss and all I could say--for it seemed as if he'd just finished kissing me goodnight--was "you again?" Or sleeping on a friend's couch, where Hal started making love to me and the clean pajamas that Jane had lent me stayed on--but to my mortification didn't stay clean. Whatever would she think of me, cuddling with Hal and then, as the pajamas made only too clear, refusing him? I managed to sneak them out, wash them in the dorm and somehow reintroduce them into the apartment again. It wasn't easy; Jane must have seen through my guilty maneuvering. A pity I assumed she was on "Hal's side" and therefore could only condemn me. I assume a lot of things that turn out not to be so.

  "You know what you have against we, Jean? I'm not your father." I looked at Hal in amazement. Hadn't I always thought that I'd seek out a man as different as possible from my father (who paid Mother what we kids considered the most ridiculous compliments--when he woke up to her existence)?  Someone warm and loving and not fanatically wedded to his work. That was really what I meant when I said, "I will never marry a scientist." Hal clearly didn't have my father's ruthless drive--he was already neglecting his chemistry studies for me--and yes, I suddenly realized, I did hold it against him. I wanted to be hitched to a star as my mother was. Not always happily maybe, but excitingly. And where was the excitement in a man more interested in following my star than his own?

  "I'm coming too," Hal announced when he heard I was going to Europe in June. It was great to have a hitchhiking companion to Quebec, but on board ship he began to seem like a shopworn bit of ancient history. For I was intoxicated with my foot-loose freedom and with the motion of the sea too--the sea that reminded me of my own shifting future, of the things that were going to happen to me although I couldn't yet say what they were. And I flaunted my freedom by running around for eight days with types Hal frowned upon.  Like the terrific ping-pong player who invited me over to his table for the festive captain's dinner, while my place at "our" table stayed empty all evening.

  "Honestly, Jean, did you have to pick a homosexual?" Hal sounded angry the next morning. And hurt.

  "How do you know what he is?   Besides, he asked me--you didn't." But I felt like a louse. And was I really so blind to what everyone else seemed to pick up on right away? I do seem to attract these interesting types...

   We landed in England, and everything about Hal grated on me: his ugly mid-Western accent, his abrupt un-English way of asking directions, his thumping stride and his presumptiously romantic talk. "You sound just like Dad," I said and meant it as a put-down. For I could smell marriage in the air (and so could others--Hal received at least one Christmas card that year addressed to "Jean and Hal Hartman"). Marriage and babies and disgusting domesticity, just as I was feeling--when Hal wasn't there--wonderfully carefree and unencumbered, my worldly possessions reduced for the moment to one light pack.

   In London I stayed with relatives while Hal slept in the youth hostel. Or he was supposed to; but he hung around until the buses stopped running and the hostel, he said, was locked for the night. Trying to weasel his way into my bed--what nerve! And Granny, who'd thrilled at once to the scent of romance, now turned quite sniffy with this young man who refused to play by the rules. I'm afraid Hal found us a standoffish lot.

  I bought a bicycle and escaped to Scotland, where a handsome roadworker took me to tea and for a walk on the slopes of Edinburgh Castle. Married women drove him wild, he confided, "because they've had it, you see--they know what it's like, and when they look at you . . ." We'd just had an inconclusive tussle on the turf, and I couldn't help wondering what it would be like to have that "married" look. Its effect on men sounded tremendously exciting. Someday . . . At least Hal would have to admit that my taste in the men I picked up was improving.

  Hal followed me north, and I finally got the words off my chest: "I'll never marry you, and I'm not travelling with you anymore after Scotland." Immediately--and confusingly for poor Hal--I felt much friendlier toward him, so we had a warm and cuddly parting in the bracken. Several partings, as a matter of fact, now that I'd set the record straight and knew I'd soon be leaving him for good....

  Back to England by myself--through the Lake District and down to Cornwall and Devonshire. In Winchester I stopped to see an old friend of my mothers, who exclaimed as I got off the bike, "Why you must be Lilian's daughter!" And then she stared and said, "but you don't look like her at all; it's the way you have of looking." Which seemed to me a great compliment, though I didn't quite know what she meant. Did my childhood fantasy perhaps have a kernel of truth?  In any case, I felt at home in England and found it very hard to leave.

  But I crossed the Channel at last and wrote home from Paris in August that things were going so swimmingly and the $300 left over from boat fare was stretching to such amazing lengths--youth hostels cost about $1 a night then--that I couldn't possibly come home yet. And I was leaving the bicycle with a Dutch boy in Paris because hitchhiking was more freewheeling; it didn't require the careful route planning of cycling, only nerve and a certain flair. But not to worry--as long as I wasn't afraid of iunger or cold or rain, I knew that nothing really bad could happen to me. Nothing. It was a crazy confident letter, and I meant every word of it.

  "Oh, have you been youth hosteling?" The American girl I'd bumped into in the Place de l'Opéra fastened pleading spaniel eyes on me. "How do you do it?"

  "You just go--there's a hostel by the Porte d'Orléans." And get rid of those suitcases, I might have added, but I knew it was a lost cause. She'd never see the inside of a youth hostel unless I took her by the hand, and then I'd be stuck with her. (Hell, she couldn't even speak French!)

  A little ashamed of my hardheartedness, I made a feeble last effort: "It's really very simple. And much more fun than staying in hotels if it's company you want."

  "I know," she said and then, after an embarrassing silence, "I guess I'll go to Cook's and arrange a tour. See you on the boat back." Of course I wasn't on that boat. By then perhaps I was riding down the Moselle valley with two truckers, who kept stopping to pick up cases of wine from inns along the way. I would accompany them down to the cellar and sip a glass from the cask. The innkeeper's wife, however, always declined the proffered drink, and I began to wonder if my mighty thirst for Moselle wine was altogether proper in a woman. Perhaps not--but by nightfall, when they drove me up to a hilltop fortress that turned out to be the Koblenz youth hostel, I had blissfully solved all the problems of my life. Cook's couldn't have arranged it better.

  Hosteling was a gamble. You never knew quite what to expect beyond the basics: bunk beds with bare mattresses and stacked blankets (you provided the "sleeping sheet"), a communal kitchen with pots and plates and utensils. There were medieval castles and efficient resort hotels and (in France and Italy) seedy dumps that had the virtue of keeping their doors open all night. Some things could be checked out beforehand in the hostel handbook, like group meals and hot showers.

  And some things were a complete surprise. I'd just checked into the Innsbruck hostel when a beaming youth ran up to me, pulled me into the next room and led me to--oh no, not again! "Dein Liebchen," he announced to the gray-eyed American and placed my hand in Hal's, pressing them together for a moment as if he were blessing the reunion of Tristan and Isolde. What had Hal been telling people about us? And how romantic his devotion suddenly seemed! If this had been France or Italy now . . . It was a proper Austrian hostel, however. amd by the time Hal found a bed for us--in a. farmhouse perched high above the Tyrolean village of Heiligenblut--my defenses were ready. An incredibly idyllic spot, and of course the farmer's wife thought we were married--"It's simpler that way," said Hal--and gave us a four poster bed with the down comforter that the Germans use instead of blankets. Very cozy if you can keep it on top of you, and Hal claimed the only way to do that was to curl up in the middle of the mattress. Together. I said that if he would; just hold onto one edge while I held onto the opposite edge, "and please stop being so silly, Hal. Stop it." I jumped out of bed and threw a pillow at him.

  "You have a lot of growing up to do, Jeanie. I'll wait," said Hal when we parted in northern Italy. He evidently considered me retarded for twenty; and the blond Sicilian youth who drove me down to Sorrento on the back of his motorscooter agreed. We'd swum and talked and eaten together for a week; but when he suggested we share one of the beds in this hostel-by-the-sea where cats and dogs and people wandered freely in and out, I demurred.

  "I don't love you."

  "So you go through life holding your little candle, waiting for love--that is very beautiful and very foolish," he said. "You will be sorry when it is too late."

   He was right; at times I have regretted those unexplored pathways of delight. And yet I cannot completely renounce my little candle. If at forty I am readier to compromise, to settle for less than I would have settled for twenty years ago--is that wisdom, or simply the voice of defeat and disappointment? Perhaps we cannot help regretting. Whichever paths we take.

  "You promised you'd be home for Christmas," wrote my sister Alice in December. By then I'd joined a workcamp in the impoverished southern tip of Italy. So I washed the red Calabrian clay off my feet and set off at dawn. Alone, which was a foolhardy thing to do south of Naples, but I had fool's luck and covered 700 kilometers in one lift, sold the bicycle in Amsterdam, boarded a boat in England...and landed in the US with a dime in my pocket.  I wired home for train fare, as I didn't think they would want me to hitchhike from New York City.   And I was home in time for Christmas on the 27th. They'd waited.

   Alice stared goggle-eyed as I fished presents from a dirty pack, Andy asked if they played baseball in Europe, and Ned said I "looked French." He and Dad were soon going hammer and tongs at another physics problem--a welcome sound after that terribly silent year when Dad fetched him home from Harvard in mid-term. We'd heard that Ned had been cutting classes, burying himself in trashy paperbacks, sleeping all day. Yet he was still my big brother, and it was shattering to think that he shared my moments of worthlessness.   As he slumped up to his room, I'd wanted to hug him and say, "I know how you feel, Ned; I feel that way too sometimes." But the words caught in my throat, and my arms stuck fast to my sides. We were never much of a family for soppy displays of affection. That was Grandmother's forte (and she'd always seemed a bit of a phony to me ever since the day I took her for a walk in the woods and tried to show her a wood thrush, while she looked in the wrong direction and gushed about the "beauties of nature.") Besides, how could I know the pressures Ned labored under? Dad's expectations were so much lower for me. 

   But Ned found out what he wanted to do with his life--and it turned out to be physics, after all. He had a serious girlfriend too, said Alice, who whispered to me all about Solveg (who'd had to go back to Norway for a sick father)... But how exciting Ned's summer plans were for a two-week canoe trip in the Algonquin with his friend Hugh, our cousin Luke, Andy and me (George couldn't come).  Five of us in two canoes, with me as camp cook and careful food planner (reveling in that exercise of power?--I later learned that I was "stingy with the raisins").  We'd set out from the southern end of the park and wouldn't be able to reprovision until Cedar Lake. "That's eight days out," said Ned; he stuck his finger on the map, and I gazed, entranced, at a web of blue blobs and squiggly blue lines--the whole watery wilderness of the Algonquin!

  Yes, that Christmas held hope and excitement. Tragedy was still a faraway word, for books or for other people. Christmases since then have turned flat, and I have never been able to recapture my childhood sense of shivery anticipation and mystery. Is it because of growing up and knowing most of the secrets beforehand? Or growing a year older and seeing my mother's tears on Christmas morning. Our first Christmas with Ned gone, dead-and-gone at the bottom of Cedar Lake. They recovered the bodies of course, his and Luke's. But for me, he will always be buried in the lake where I left him, the lake where he held so tightly onto me...

  "For men must work and women must weep, though storms be sudden and waters deep." George gave Mother the Richard Dyer-Bennet album that sent her from the livingroom weeping. My father followed and closed the door behind them. As always.  Always this weeping behind closed doors. Was it to shield us from something they feared themselves?  

   With Dad, I cannot but feel the "burned child." For tears had spouted from his mother's eyes as freely as I-love-you-darling's and promises which could not be counted upon (though Grandmother probably meant every word she said at the time she said it) from her shapely lips. From bitter experience he distrusted the language of feeling as the language of falsity, of unfair manipulation and of lazy thinking too (something we kids learned early to be a cardinal sin!). Indeed he married my mother before he was able to tell her that he "loved" her, so contaminated for him was the very word.  Didn't Nixon do that for many of us to the word "peace" for a while?  For my father, it was a lifetime distrust of the whole arena of "feeling."

   In him, the hurt of Ned's drowning ran deep and boxed. And in Mother?  She and I talked as we sifted through family photographs and she said why she refused to give way to grief--carrying on with a scheduled Girl Scout meeting, holding at a distance friends who wanted to offer comfort... It shocked them that she could seem so unaffected by tragedy, so determined to share no part of her private pain; but if she "let go" in the slightest, she said, "I knew I should start weeping and weeping and not be able to stop." 

    Ah, the indiscipline of raw feeling. Was that what you feared, Mother dear? Not the inconstancy of other people and their lying language, but the loss of your own constant self?  To lose control of yourself, to be, for a time, truly lost.  "And would that have been so terrible?" my sister seems to ask. 

   For Alice blames Mother, as I cannot, for the way she tried to hold feeling itself at a seemly distance--blames her for what I only learned about ten years later, when she told me her side of the "morning after."  She said that Mother sent her out from the lodge at the first sound of an engine in the air--sent her to look and report back on how many were in the returning seaplane that had flown the two fathers north at first light. ("Ned and Luke missing," said the telegram of the night before, leaving room for torturous hope.)  Ten years later, my grown-up sister was still replaying her little girl messenger role, remembering how she came back with the news, "two," and sat primly sewing a row of X's across a much stitched sampler until I ran into the room and hugged her to me.

  "No one else touched me, Jeanie," she said with bitterness in her soft voice, and I marveled that we could have such different memories of the same time. For I remember rising with the first light and pacing the lake shore, straining for the drone of aircraft, for the moment I could not see beyond--could scarcely imagine living beyond--when my father stepped ashore and all I could think to say was "I tried to save him, I tried..."  Without a word, then, my father laid his arm on my quaking shoulders, and I felt as if a great weight were lifted. Had he ever held me close and comfortingly like this before? As if he loved me after all, even after the terrible hurt I had given him?

  So for me at least, there was a strange balm in the tragedy. But I hungered for healing words.  Or to speak more more accurately, I hungered for hurtful words.  Words to keep my wound alive and combat the disloyalty of forgetting, words to bring my brother back, if only in borrowed memory.  Ah, if only I could have found someone who did not know he had drowned, someone who would talk and talk as if he were still here! I remember trying to entice outsiders into talking--and turning hot and red-faced when they did. "Go on, go on," I silently pleaded (but of course they always stopped when they saw my face). And I can still make a perfect fool of myself at a school reunion or an alumni gathering, searching for someone who remembers my brother after more than nineteen years. 

   He slipped so quickly out of family conversation. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was banished, both he and cousin Luke. Dad's taut face warned us not to speak of them in his hearing, to let them drop out of our lives as if they had never been. And Alice, who tried to please her father in all things, learned the lesson so well that two years later when our visiting uncle let fall the name of his drowned son, she had no idea who he was talking about. She'd succeeded in blanking out the hawk-like youth with an uncanny resemblance to Dad, even in his way of talking and laughing. Our father as he might have been twenty-five-years earlier, except that Luke wrote poetry while Dad preferred unambiguous mathematical symbols.

  "Luke? Luke? Who's he?" Alice looked around the circle of faces, and then she saw Dad's. His lips were drawn back above his worn-down teeth, and a muscle twitched in the clenched, overshot jaw. No words, just that soundless snarl. Alice knew who Luke was now, remembered that he had been in the same canoe with Ned and me. God, what had she done, asking about that!

  "I was so scared, Jeanie. Daddy looked like a wild animal." But of course, Alice! An animal at bay, a wild grief at bay... I do not altogether understand it, but I cannot fault my father for this fierce love of his. I felt like lashing out too sometimes.

   There was fourteen-year-old Andy pawing through Ned's dresser after we came back from Canada. "I'll just take this old shirt," he said. "It doesn't belong to anyone now." The little monster! How could he be so callous? Mother insisted he was only "covering up," but "you'd better not talk that way around your father," she warned, and Andy, retreated to the safe topic of baseball. I thought it a very dull topic--and Andy, when he wasn't being simply obnoxious, a not very interesting person. He was someone I never really listened to.

   But today I am listening hard when he asks straight out, "Why couldn't we mourn for Ned together?"

   You too, Andy? "But we did," I cry and instantly realize how wrong I am, how cruelly love and hurt, yes, and pride and anger and stupid blindness have conspired to shut the doors between our separate sufferings.

   Some doors I kept open. Hal knew all about the drowning even before I got back to Chicago, for I'd felt a compulsion to write him a vivid account, omitting only that part I couldn't make sense of myself: the embrace that was surely meant for another girl. Although none of it made any sense in the way I was used to making sense of things. This was a black cloud that I couldn't bargain away, that I couldn't somehow turn to good account--indeed the very thought of a "silver lining" seemed a kind of betrayal. I could only go on living, even when it would have been so easy, I remember thinking as I bicycled into town beside a large truck--so easy to turn into it, just a nudge of the wheel to the left, and why not, what difference did it make anyway whether I lived or died?--but I knew, even as I considered the action, that my body would never let me take it.  Of its own volition, my body insisted on steering straight

  Back in Chicago, Hal watched me throw myself into foreign languages and folk music, especially Scottish ballads of lament. Ned became by turns all the brave men they bewailed, from Willie drowned in Yarrow to the bonnie Earl of Moray, "the flo'er amang them all." He became more and more of a myth, his features harder and harder to recall, the more I imbibed their spirit of defiant grief

  The tears came only at night, when I stalked the lakefront with glazed eyes and head high. At least I held it up and quickened my pace when anyone approached. I spoke to no one except the police, who picked me up on 18th St.

  "What are you doing here, miss?"

  "Taking a walk." Wasn't it obvious?

  "Hop in. We'll drive you home."  I appreciated that.  At 4 A.M. I was reaching my goal: a state of benumbed exhaustion. And I appreciated their not preaching at me; in fact they said very little on the way back to my 57th St. lodgings. It was a little disappointing, though, that they believed me when I said, "No one can help." I meant it; and yet I wanted to break down in front of them, to be all soft and weak and for a change.  Perhaps I really wanted something to happen to me on those long walks; perhaps I was deliberately courting danger. For my invulnerability to physical hurt no longer seemed such a wonderful thing. Instead I felt cursed with this terrible talent for surviving.

   Motion, physical activity--that has always been my substitute for hard thought, a way of running away from questions I couldn't find easy answers for. Like what I was going to do with my life? Grades weren't an embarrassment anymore, but I was still floundering: vacillating between the French and German departments and not quite knowing what I would do with either language. Teach? Write scholarly dissertations? Whenever the awkward question surfaced, I took another walk. Sometimes with Hal, who did not see any problem. I would marry him of course (as if marriage were the grand solution) when I had come to my senses. There were moments indeed when I came very near losing them. When I felt as if Hal had stripped me of all pretense and bravado, and the touch of his hand sent a shock wave through my whole body.

  "Come back with me, Jeanie." Hal didn't mean to a sleeping bag on the floor; he knew I wanted to be properly bedded. We seemed so close then, on what I had decreed would be our last date. Already lovers, except for the bit of flesh that meant a promise to me, a promise I could not give.

  "When I can stay for good, Hal." And he accepted that weaselly half-promise of mine. Treasured it even as he went on to other girls that I was relieved to hear he didn't love and I played with other men that, as Hal had smugly predicted, I didn't want to marry either.

   Until Alex came along, the young man who talked so well that at first I thought he wasn't a chemistry student, and who once sang Gilbert and Sullivan songs with me. I cannot recall how we met, but I well remember suddenly acting at twenty-three like a moonstruck high school girl and conniving with my roommate Aleta to accidentally bump into him on 55th St. "You're growing up fast," she said as we made frenzied plans to intercept our quarry.

  "He looks like Mephistopheles," I wrote home in a rare burst of gushing prose. (What a strange thing that now seems to say about Alex, when he lectures me and knits arching black eyebrows! Was their rakish tilt an inevitable casualty of marriage? And where do I get this vision of plodding old age when other people are always saying how young he looks? Perhaps if I could see him with fresh eyes...)

  "It sounds like the coup de foudre," Mother wrote back. But the thunderbolt struck in a shattering way. Yes, I was soon, by my turtle-slow standards, sleeping with Alex. "Don't you want me to fetch you some clothes?" Aleta asked me that fall, a week after I'd left our flat to help Alex move into his new basement apartment. Clothes! I was only interested in shedding them, obsessed day and night with lovemaking. Welcoming Alex into the body that had become a stranger to me with its aching needs (and that surprised me whenever I looked into a mirror and saw a new roundness--God, was I pregnant?) Welcoming him into a heart that yearned to be swept away.

    But no, I wasn't at all sure I wanted to marry him. "You were a reluctant bride," Alex says, and he is right. A part of me looked at him critically, disrespectfully, even then. I kissed him as he fell asleep on my shoulder and wondered if we would ever have any exciting arguments, listened to his well modulated phrases and at times felt like saying, "Oh do shut up!"--times when his words seemed empty (did I babble on like that too?), or worse, when he talked and I wanted him only to act, to be beyond words. No, a part of me was clearly not swept away.

   What a terrible admission to make! It turned my neat world topsy-turvy, and I could only right matters by plunging on. By marrying Alex and confirming the decision my body had already taken for me.  There was no conscious will behind that decision; I didn't want to be pregnant, and yet once I knew that I carried a child, nothing could have induced me to miscarry him.  A boy, I thought in desperation; it must be a boy, and I will name him Edward.

  It wasn't a boy of course, but by then I was well and truly married--with no regrets for the fussy explications de texte that I'd cheerfully tossed aside. What did I want with a Master's degree anyway? Giving birth was far more exciting, and I wanted nothing so much as to do it all over again.

  "She's like the swallow that flies so high; she's like the river that never runs dry," I caroled up and down the hospital corridors, pitying the women who'd been buffaloed into taking "drying up" pills.  I even spied on the nursery, when they failed to bring my baby at 2AM, to see that they weren't sneaking any formula feedings into her. That was a way of drying up the milk too.

   It was a love affair from the start with the little creature who rooted and nuzzled and tugged--just like a litter of kittens, I thought after falling asleep and waking up to her pushing and kicking at me in the middle of the night. And I remember, with glee, an embarrassed grad student at the the beer party for Alex's new doctorate; we'd been chatting for ten minutes before Mary slurped--and the boy suddenly realized what that snuggly baby was doing right under his nose. "It's d-d-drinking," he stammered and backed hastily off, his face a beautiful shade of pink. Sexy, safe motherhood!

   Two years later I was suckling another baby girl, savoring my bondage and at peace with the world once more. But it didn't last, any more than my astounding new curves did. Was that why I slid from baby to baby--to recapture those moments of grace, that sense of mission in my life? To put off the evil day when I would no longer be able to lose myself in earthy motherhood? Although even back then, when I wallowed in domesticity--babies and bread-baking and growing green things out of doors--it was on my own terms. On a loose rein.

   I remember skipping along the rocks by Lake Michigan and on the way home meeting Alex with two-week-old Mary in his arms: "She's hungry,"he said. And proceeded to fashion a sort of papoose. It made sense; the babies all bounced to sleep on my back. And when they got older, they made other adjustments.

   "I was shocked when I visited you in Long Island," says Alice. "Six o'clock and no supper, no mother. And the family so unperturbed about it all--they said you were probably watching the fox den.

   But of course! The children knew about the den on the edge of the meadow. And they knew where the food in the kitchen was too: apples and carrots and peppers, bread and cheese. They learned to fend early. But Alice was used to a properly run household; she has never lived with a vagabonding mother.

   Neither had Alex. As a graduate student, in fact, he was still sending dirty socks home for his mother to wash. He's had an awful lot of adjusting to do with me--has it been worth it to him?

   "You're not supportive," he complains, and again he is right. Seventeen years ago I gave myself in law to him and then bit by bit began taking myself back behind walls of hurt silence. For our arguments--when we finally had them--never led to lovemaking. Instead I'd get more and more upset as Alex withdrew into a cold professorial shell, and in the end I wouldn't even know what we were arguing over. Only that I was crying and that he hated tears. So I shrank from real arguments, shrank from provoking that cold anger as I erected walls of remembered resentments and brooded over thoughtless words that Alex has long forgotten.

  "There couldn't have been much competition," was all he said when I returned from a small folk festival with a first prize in mountain music. (We'd moved to West Virginia, and I'd learned to play the dulcimer.) That comment didn't surprise me, for I'd already stopped singing around Alex. But it pricked my bubble of happiness then, and it hurts still. How can you love someone you cannot sing for?

  Hal liked me to sing. I remember telling him rather huffily in Scotland that I wasn't a jukebox "to be turned on whenever you want a song--I'll sing when I feel like it." Now I lied and said how happy I was for him when he married Maria from our folk music circle.   We kept in touch through letters and visits, for weren't they both old friends? And when they stopped by our Long Island home on the way to the 1964 Newport Folk Festival with their two children, I jumped at the chance (that is, at Hal's invitation) to go with them. Leaving my children--three daughters by now--with a neighbor.

   Alex went into a cold, sulking fury when I came home four days later, glowing all over. He knew something had happened, though for once he was wrong about the details. Yes, I'd broken down in Newport and told Hal what I'd thought was obvious to everyone: how unhappy I was and what a mess I'd made of my marriage. And Hal had taken my hand and kissed me: "I've been dreaming of doing that for a long time, Jeanie." That was all we did on one early morning walk out of town through the mist: talked and kissed, with Hal's three-year-old daughter Amy trotting along beside us. But oh, the beauty and the pain of that shimmery morning when every grass blade was beaded with pearls of dew and every web looked newly spun. I remember collapsing at Hal's feet at last and crying, "I wish I was old, I wish I was old and couldn't feel anymore!"

   There was a new rift between Alex and me after that. And when I pried loose his suspicions and tried to set matters straight, it only made them worse. "If you'd just slept with the guy and got him out of your system," he muttered. Poor Alex, competing with a dream lover/drowned brother. But I was competing too--with a sacred bank balance and investments that received, I thought, more loving care and attention than any of us. I put a dent in the family car, and he asked, "Are you trying to destroy it?" Would he have minded half as much if I'd only dented myself?

   Knowing that I was still someone special to Hal sustained me then; I hugged the knowledge to myself over years of mounting frustration and growing apartness from Alex. Although there were interludes, to be sure, times when the walls crumbled and I was open and vulnerable to him again. As in '69, when the doctors had to realign my face after a car crash. "Look, she can smile!" they exclaimed a week later, as if I'd performed a minor miracle. And Alex's care, when I was cringing from the rest of the world and their handsome faces, seemed a miracle too. I remembered his anguished cry after I hit the dashboard: "I've killed her!"  So it was me and not the car, after all?

   Edward's birth three years before had been another interlude, another reconciliation of sorts. And then at last I'd decided that this baby madness had to stop. I hadn't planned for Edward or Janet or Jill or Mary; I'd been careless.  And I'd begun to feel trapped afterwards, resentful not of the children--how can you resent a child?--but of my own fecklessness. The babies grew, and my life no longer centered on theirs (it seemed to happen sooner and sooner with each baby). But neither, when I was feeling whole and strong, did it center on Alex and his unexciting academic career.  Eclipsed by my father's, of course. ("A family of stars," says Alice, looking at Dad and George; "you have to shine awfully bright to be noticed around here.") And disrespected by Alex himself.  Still, for all his complaining about the academic "rat race," at least it was his; what did I have that was truly mine?

  I tried a lot of things. There was family backpacking--an excuse for me to get back to the wilderness that wasn't always appreciated by the rest of them. ("I never felt more like a pack animal," says Alex.)  There was the folk music that I loved and folk festivals where I knew that I would never shine (Alex was right, I decided, about my high, tight voice). And, of course, foreign language study.

   I plunged into French and German again at the U. of Utah, polishing off courses for an M.A. before we moved back to West Virginia, where I wrote my thesis, in French, for an eventual readership of one. All through that year of solitary scholarship I'd dreamed of defending the thing--of having a real conversation about Andre Gide--but the only committee member who understood what I was trying to say when I flew back to Utah for my defense was my advisor.  Did I notice, he asked afterwards, the compliment I received from a colleague who couldn't understand my best ideas and who finally said they were "above him."  Yes, I noticed, and it was no consolation. Fighting back tears, I even articulated the wish that I were stupid "and had nice simple thoughts that other people could understand." (When I reread my thesis two months later, though, I had trouble following some of my own arguments. Hmm...)

    If my M.A. was the road to madness, it was also a certificate to unemployment back in West Virginia, where I needed education courses to teach high school or a doctorate to teach at the college level. And a doctorate meant leaving the family and expecting an abandoned husband to support me--or at least them--for a year or so. Starting on the path that Alex had almost completed when he married me. "He had his turn," the women's movement tells me. Yes, when he didn't have four children. How could I turn the clock back? I did go so far as to be admitted to Ohio State U. graduate school--and found they wanted three more years of course work from me! No, I'm not that ruthless. Not that much of a scholar?

   So in the end I spent a year listening to a former football coach expound on theories of education and the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning but out of rying not to listen after a while-- \because the questions I asked were disrupting the class. I didn't like myself very much that year.

  "You were bitchy," says Alex, and he isn't talking about classroom debates. He means in the bedroom, where we seemed to have reached an impasse. Over babies (and how many other things?). Neither of us wanted any more, and neither of us was willing to take an irreversible step to prevent them. "Only if you will promise to stay with me," said Alex, and I couldn't. And neither was I ready to submit my perfectly functioning body to the surgeon's knife, though lesser measures had clearly failed. Twice now I had torn new life out of me. For I knew I should soon turn into an embittered, nagging mother if I followed my instincts any longer, if I didn't grab hold of my life before it was too late. And I could almost feel the baby tugging at my swelling breasts, smell his milky infant scent, even as I hardened myself to say, "no, not again, not this time."

  Alex stopped "bothering" me, as he put it, until I should want him enough to make the promise; instead I stopped wanting him at all. I shrank from his tentative embrace; then he turned from me, and I dared not investigate what he was doing. "You've always made love by a set of rules," says Alex accusingly. "Like soccer, no hands." But what did those sordid hidden spasms have to do with love or even honest passion? I lay there in the dark and felt dirty and degraded, whether he was caressing me with respectful restraint or, as I suspected, himself. It was all so damned weak and controllable. "You weren't interested in sex, Jean." Ah, if he had only shared my dreams . . .

   I longed to escape from that cold bed. And from the dreary person I seemed to have become in the classroom too. For I'd advanced to student teaching in a local high school, where by turns I confused and bored my prisoners who retaliated with spitballs and yawns. A few of them were going on a guided tour to Europe that summer, and I thought of my own ramblings twenty years earlier and dreamed a favorite dream. Could I do it again? Could I recapture that crazy confidence in life and in myself? Now was the time (and surely I deserved something after qualifying for a teaching certificate, my passport to self-respecting employment?). Now or never!

   And Hal encouraged me. He'd been in Paris for three years, working toward a long delayed doctorate and supporting a family of four. "When are you coming?" he wrote ("though I didn't think you'd have the guts to do it," he later confessed) and I finally wrote back, "Now." It was a surprisingly easy decision to announce to the family. I'd expected Alex to raise all sorts of objections. "Why not?" he said.

   So I traveled again at forty, a no-longer-innocent vagabond with a pack and a dulcimer on my back, reaching out for something lost in the years between. A sense of desperation driving me now, I flew to Europe and stayed six telescoped weeks in France for the same grand sum of $600, airfare included, that I'd spent twenty years before. Still on a shoestring. ("I wish I could afford to send my wife to France," grumbled one of the other professors; I don't think he quite got the picture.) And I wrote; for somehow it seemed terribly important that I seize and retain this trip--the wonder and the pain of it. I scribbled in cafes and by the roadside, and sometimes I left gaping holes in my account. "Well there goes the journal--you blew it, Jean!" I remember saying to myself one bright blue morning. Was I thinking of an audience back then, secretly hoping to share with others what I claimed I was writing for myself alone?

    A wild, impossible idea. But I handed the revised notes to a trusted college teacher and hung on her words when she said how wonderful it made her feel to know that "a woman past the first bloom" could have this reckless adventure. "Of course you're going to do something with it!" Of course--now that I knew someone was listening. I went back to the typewriter, and what began to emerge as I slowly fleshed in those gaping holes and strove to bring my journey to life on paper surprised me. Indeed the journal became as much a voyage of discovery as the trip itself. A process of peeling off onionskin layers of subterfuge, coming closer and closer to an elusive truth. To a self I could no longer run away from. And I began to wonder if other married women, not as foolhardy as I nor as demon-driven, do not perhaps ask themselves some of the same disturbing questions. If perhaps I am not so different, after all. . . .

on to Leavetaking journal