Accidents of Influence: Writing as a Woman and a Jew in America

The Luck of the Trip

The Luck of the Trip Even in these days of easy access, foreign travel can still hold something of the mysterious and the magical: the unaccustomed can release soundings from the deep. "For the world ... ," in Matthew Arnold's words, is "so various, so beautiful, so new...." Yet it is the same world that is "Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight." Various kinds of luck go with us when we travel, little seeming miracles along the way, if luck is good. I don't mean only the lugubrious miracle of a canceled ticket on a plane that later flies out carrying a terrorist's bomb. I mean simpler ones too, like a historic house kept open beyond regular hours on just the day your tour bus arrives late. There's also bad travel luck, of course. You arrive at the museum the week it's shut for repairs. The luck of the trip, the serendipity of it, or its opposite, frustration and the feeling of being shut out, can flavor memories the way, for some of us, spices do a meal. One summer my husband and I spent some highly flavored days in a tiny village in East Lothian, a province in the Lowlands of Scotland in view of the Lammermuir Hills, site of literary mystery and romance. Not far from our inn stood a great Scottish estate that during World War II had been turned into a school for Jewish refugee children. It had provided blessed safety to a lucky few in an encroaching world of terror. We were going there for my husband's first adult return. A taxi from the neighboring town of Dunbar brought us along a winding road at the end of which the broad-winged mansion still stood ("It seems like a miracle," my husband said) amid parklike acres bordered by forest. We peered through the massive groundfloor windows at first in delight, then in awful disappointment, as my husband saw that all 197 198 LIFE NOTES the rooms were bare. The whole place was locked and empty, about to be sold. As we stood wondering what to do next, out of the forest, as in a fairy tale, came a beautiful young woman in full riding habit, astride an enormous horse. After a few moments of conversation she said she knew the caretaker well, and galloped off to fetch him. In what seemed miraculously little time (the driver from Dunbar meanwhile leaning against his car and watching with sympathetic interest), a sprightly gray-haired man of about sixty arrived. He opened the mansion, marched us up the stairs to the great rooms-even helping my husband identify the specific master bedroom that had been his dormitory-and down to the cavernous kitchens. My husband gazed at the great fireplaces. One of his jobs had been to build the fires. Then, while I photographed from below, the caretaker took my husband scampering over the rooftops so he could look down at the broad and sunny countryside. The return to this estate caused floods of memories in my husband. We went back for many more visits, and he walked the orchards and fields and gazed his fill at the stones of the house. My husband also wanted to see, at last, the surrounding countryside that had been unknown to him at that school in wartime . After our encounter with the young woman and the caretaker, we were ready for Scottish serendipities everywhere. Soon another one was offered that might have provided at least a small album of mementos. Were we mistaken not to follow luck a second time? Our inn included a comfortable pub whose Scottish host was warmly responsive to the purpose of our trip. No doubt thinking we needed some restorative, he urged on us our first taste of singlemalt whisky. Amid the dark woods and gleaming brasses of the pub, we sampled the fortifying native brew. Mismatched gustatory pair though we are, my husband and I ate in peace before the fire in the dining room. His taste for plain cooking was fulfilled, and our host joked that he would pour onto my food all the spices and dressings he left off my husband's. Young Scottish waitresses in tartan skirts, as if in sympathy with what we ordered, blended sauciness and straightforwardness. Indeed , one of our pleasures was to listen to the tough coquetry of The Luck of the Trip 199 their banter with the gentlemen who dined singly...