Come Dance With Me

24 Elias Newman

28 January 2003. When I left Peter and went down to the netherworld of the Piccadilly Line with the ghost of Bo padding after me I found myself remembering Mary Snyder, a girl I had a crush on when I was fourteen. I’m not sure how Bo led me to her but there she was. She was very pretty, with blue eyes, fair hair and a face that I’ve seen on porcelain figures. I got her to go fishing with me one summer day. I cycled over to her place in Kulpsville or maybe it was Souderton and we rode to a nice little tree-shaded part of the Perkiomen Creek. I caught one small sunfish which I grilled over a little fire. Fortunately we’d brought sandwiches and a thermos of iced tea with us. Mary was so graceful, so nicely finished, a real pleasure to look at. I was thrilled to be with her, my first magic shiksa. She didn’t like Tchaikovsky and she wasn’t much interested when I wanted to read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to her but she seemed to like me and I thought she might be my girlfriend. That summer day was all there was. A few days later when I asked her to go to the movies with me she turned me down. She said her parents didn’t want her to go out with me. I asked her if it was because I was Jewish and she said yes. At school after that I’d see her in the halls with Karl Gunther and we’d both look away.

Thoughts of Mary Snyder took me to the big old wild cherry tree in our backyard and the books I used to read there as a child, sitting in its branches and eating sun-warmed cherries: three of my favourites were illustrated editions of Robin Hood, The Arabian Nights and Treasure Island. I still had them through high school but in 1959 my heart was broken when Jessica Williams dumped me for an older fellow who was in the Navy. As a broken-hearted lover I felt that I had entered man’s estate. Life was hard, women were cruel; it was time to put childish things behind me, so I took those three books and burnt them in the backyard. I watched bits of charred pages flying and the smoke rising past the bare winter branches of the cherry tree with a lump in my throat and tears running down my face.

Jessica had been my first serious girlfriend as an adult, which is what I considered myself at seventeen when we began to go steady. In 1958 I cycled over a hundred miles to visit her in Wildwood, New Jersey where her parents had a seaside bungalow. They lived in Philadelphia and earlier that year I’d taken Jessica to a concert in Robin Hood Dell. The night was full of stars and the Philadelphia Orchestra played Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. The music swelled and my whole being swelled with it. I took her hand and squeezed it and she returned the pressure. First love!

Years later I wanted my three burnt books back, those editions and no others. They were, after all, a first love that never stopped being true to me even when their ashes were blowing in the wind. I haunted second-hand bookshops until I learned to use book searches and the Internet. I had no luck with The Arabian Nights because it was a cheap edition in which the illustrator had never been credited and I’d forgotten the publisher. I found the Robin Hood I wanted, illustrated by Edwin John Prittee, and only the other day I obtained from Abebooks my old Treasure Island with Louis Rhead’s wonderful illustrations. I held it in my hands and the pictures and text sprang to life as juicy and soul-satisfying as when I had them in the cherry tree. The book fell open to the page with the Hispaniola nearing the island at night. THE MAN AT THE HELM WAS WATCHING THE LUFF OF THE SAIL, said the caption under Rhead’s full-page pen-and-ink drawing in which Jim is about to get into the apple barrel, where he will hear:

Silver’s voice, and before I heard a dozen words I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity; for from those dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.

No matter that Rhead drew a square-rigged ship when the Hispaniola was a schooner. Seeing that white moon in the pen-and-ink sky and the moonlit sea below, I could feel the warm wind filling the luff of that wrong sail. I turned from the picture to the text again and I had tears running down my face.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was a teenage favourite that I never did think I outgrew; I still have the edition I wanted to read to Mary Snyder, the Fitzgerald translation, with an unforgettable drawing by Edmund J. Sullivan for each of the seventy-five quatrains of the first version. And I still know most of it by heart.

Recaptured childhood pleasures, however, were no help at present. Living alone was no longer good enough. Having opened myself to the possibility of not being alone, I now felt less than complete in Christabel’s absence and anxious in the uncertainty of where we were with each other. I sensed that the things I didn’t know about her were important. I also sensed that she was at some kind of hard place in herself. She was just as alone as I was and I didn’t think she should be alone right now. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to talk to her. She’d said she was going to Honolulu and Maui but she hadn’t given me any telephone numbers or the names of places where she could be reached.