MetroNorth Reverie

Seven years and four months on, I still get a shock when I look down 8th Avenue to where the World Trade Center used to be. Professor Brandt once told me that before it went up, the view of downtown Manhattan from her apartment on Washington Square was like the prow of a gigantic ship, and, before they started building the new Freedom Tower, for a while I suppose it must have looked like that again.

Heading north along Lower Fifth Avenue early this morning was magical: bright and frigid, so that last evening’s inch of snow has congealed in places into lethal floes of crackling ice.

The Empire State Building was trumpeting its silent metallic fanfare, as usual. What a stately old matron she is! I walked as far as Andrew’s rectory, then took a cab to Grand Central.

The MetroNorth Railroad is always entertaining, despite the hardship. The open carriages are colossally uncomfortable; the seats are far too close together, slippery, dirty, and saggy. Such privacy as is proffered to your average Connecticut commuter consists of reasonably high seat backs, though if you happen to be tall, as I am, you can almost always see the upper half of the other passengers’ faces, if they choose not to slump. There is an element of intrigue to this, as in libraries.

Loud public cell-phone conversations—too much information—have dampened the entertainment value of gradually assembling small but surprisingly elaborate portraits of certain passengers who for various reasons arouse your curiosity. Occasionally, however, one may still play that diverting game.

This morning, for example, a handsome young man—mid-twenties—got on my carriage, hauling a large backpack, and a suitcase with still-fresh “IST” airline luggage tags: Atatürk International Airport, in Istanbul.

He was wearing a dark green knitted woolly hat; neat spectacles; the suggestion of a youthful five o’clock shadow; a dark red Boston College hoodie; and a navy blue pea jacket, which he carefully removed, folded, and stowed aloft. He immediately attended to his fine, blond hair, using the window as a mirror: a charming hint of fastidiousness, if not vanity.

Out of his backpack he took the current issue of the Economist, and an Arabic broadsheet newspaper, which he opened and read in the correct, back-to-front manner, with much absorption, between 125^th Street and Stamford, Conn.—at least that was what he was doing when, at regular intervals, I awoke from my motion-induced coma.

MetroNorth carriage windows are usually so maculated with filth on the outside, especially after a snow storm, that their only practical purpose is to provide many oblique reflections with which discreetly to observe passengers on the inside. In any event, that was when and, in due course how, our earnest young friend with the fine features and the Roman nose caught my eye.

A Yale graduate student perhaps? Should I in fact recognize him? But, no, probably not: He gets off at Stratford, deftly contriving to arrange the hoodie over the collar of his pea jacket—the kind of maneuver I can somehow never achieve in similar circumstances without getting hopelessly tied up in knots, or scattering the contents of my pockets on the floor.

Walking down the aisle, the scuffed but sturdy Timberland two-eyelet boat shoes with leather thongs instead of laces give him away: almost certainly rich, or preppy with a twist. Maybe heading back to the family home, somewhere leafy.

But, at the same time, largely in view of this accurate socio-economic data so freely displayed, he is, I imagine, impressively frugal, possibly independent-minded also—why else schlep from Terminal 1 at JFK (Turkish) to Grand Central and then take MetroNorth, and not be collected? No doubt he has learned from bitter experience how ghastly and interminable the so-called “Connecticut limo” service can be.

There’s also the issue of snarled traffic on I-95 and the Merritt Parkway to consider, even your carbon footprint. These days young people can be quite serious about their carbon footprint.

Will he, or won’t he?

It’s very easy to miscontrue those moments when on a train you repeatedly, maybe inadvertently, meet the other person’s gaze, and earlier I am insisting to myself that he is merely wondering why the middle-aged homosexualist in the far corner is having such a lot of trouble staying awake.

But then, at Stratford, Conn., after the doors have closed, at the top of the steps down into the parking lot, he pauses to retract the handle of his suitcase on wheels, hoicks it off the ground, then looks over his shoulder, and flashes me a coy but winning smile. Not even a shadow of a doubt about it.

Love is quite definitely in the air.

First Love On Both Sides

Among my grandmother’s papers was the following letter she received shortly after the death of her own mother, Sophie Pearson (above), photographed here in about 1913 at Pontresina in Switzerland:

24 October, 1923

Sussex

Dear Mrs. Borthwick,

Your letter, received tonight, gave me a painful shock.

Your mother and I were drawn together very much when she was in England first. It was necessary that we should part, because in the state of our finances and prospects marriage was impossible.

I wanted her to know that mine was no passing fancy, but that my admiration for her had remained with me all the years, for there was little enough explanation when we parted. I felt she would like to know it, and so I sent her the book and the letter.

Will you please destroy the letter, and keep the book? People who read the letter might think there was more passed between us than was right, which was not the case.

Only it was first love on both sides.

I have had no letter, I am sorry to say, and never will get one now.

I should like to know, if it is possible, how long it was before she had her fatal illness that she received the book, and the letter. The postmark might tell.

Many thanks to you for writing.

Believe me

Yours very sincerely,

Arthur F. Somerset

Sophie, my great-grandmother, her seven siblings, and their mother, Emily Gooch, first sailed from Australia to England in the early to mid-1880s. The return voyage was evidently paid for by Sophie’s aunt, Mrs. Henry Hughes (Mrs. Gooch’s sister Sophia, rhymes with briar), who lived comfortably in London. My great-great-grandfather, George Cornelius Gooch, a grazier in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, stayed behind.

Almost as soon as Sophie returned to Melbourne—surviving terrific storms en route, in the midst of which her mother gave birth to another, eighth sibling, Florence; her numerous little brothers were set to work pumping bilge water, and a dour Scottish clergyman made an irritating habit of regularly saying, “goodnight and goodbye, Mrs. Gooch, as I fear we will never see another morn”—Sophie’s aunt wrote from London, asking her to sail back again, this time unaccompanied.

In a handwritten memoir, my grandmother recalled that, on that second visit, her mother Sophie “had a wonderful time ‘growing up’ with balls, riding in the Park, staying in country houses, etc.”

Sophie met Arthur, and they fell in love.

All this must have been well before 1887, because instead, on July 2 of that year, Sophie married my great-grandfather, William Pearson, and settled soon afterwards at Bonegilla in the Riverina, on the Victorian side of the Murray River, about six miles northeast of Wodonga.

Long after William Pearsons sold it and took up his father’s Kilmany Park in East Gippsland, that large cattle station was turned into the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, which was for many postwar immigrants their first Australian home, as indeed, under radically different circumstances, it was for my grandmother and her siblings fifty years earlier.

Arthur William FitzRoy Somerset, of Castle Goring, Sussex, who died in 1937, was a grandson of the Rev. Lord William Somerset, himself the sixth son of the fifth Duke of Beaufort (1744–1803).

Notwithstanding Arthur’s gloomy assessment of their prospects, perhaps slightly overstated in his letter to Granny, or else offered by way of tactful explanation—the not particularly effective salve for a guilty conscience maybe?—it seems possible that Arthur Somerset and Sophie Gooch may also have encountered the at times sharp prejudice in Victorian England against marriage to young ladies who were born and raised in the Australasian colonies. We shall never know.

Forty years later, Arthur may have been prompted to send his tribute by learning that Sophie had become a wealthy widow. One senses that Arthur was hurt that, although she certainly received it, Sophie never acknowledged the gesture before she died.

A no-nonsense, “water under the bridge” outlook is powerfully evident in the Gooch X chromosome, much fortified by the cultural environment of East Gippsland. Or perhaps in retirement at Metung Sophie knew she was dying. Either way, it fell to Granny to write to Mr. Somerset and let him know.

Afterwards, Granny must have complied with Mr. Somerset’s request to destroy his original letter, which is a pity, but my elder brother Hamish still owns the book. It is a sumptuously illuminated, hand-tooled, de-luxe edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.