Although I didn’t see Alistair again that summer, I had fantasies of running into him once I got to college in the fall. I knew Princeton men had sought the company of Bryn Mawrters since F. Scott Fitzgerald was an undergraduate, and Alistair Milbourne was at Princeton. I was bound to meet up with him again. How could I not?
That hope got me through my first scary weeks of college.
Maybe I shouldn’t call them scary. Everyone was terribly, terribly nice. We had lovely teas with tiny sandwiches, exuberant song-fests, and exciting field hockey games (Wogs was on the varsity team) but I wandered around feeling unanchored, unarmored and raw—like a creature that had shed its skin but was unable to grow a new one.
My father had refused to drive me and my tattered luggage all the way into Boston to the train station, since Harvard began its new semester on the same day as Bryn Mawr. He was frantically preparing his classes—doubly difficult, he said, “since he no longer had anyone to look after him.” I couldn’t carry all my suitcases on the MTA, so I spent a lot of my cash on a taxi into Boston. Much of the remainder of my money went to another taxi in New York to ferry me and the bags from Grand Central to Penn Station, and check the damned things through to Bryn Mawr.
That meant I had no money left to buy food on the train, so I arrived, quite late at night, starving. My luggage failed to arrive at all.
I’d been assigned to a suite in Cardigan Hall, where my new roommate, Lois Meyerson and I had tiny single bedrooms and a shared living room—already decorated in up-to-the minute furnishings by Lois’s devoted Scarsdale mom.
Lois fed me cheerfully with her store of New York deli goodies, and even offered to lend me some clothes, so I wouldn’t look like “such a ragamuffin.”
My classes were challenging, and allowed me to immerse myself in a cerebral world of Greek philosophy, medieval art, and French verb forms, but I was terrified of social interaction. The all-female world of Bryn Mawr was nothing like Cambridge Latin, where I’d hung out with other ragamuffins, mostly male, who liked to play chess, discuss Kerouac, smoke the occasional joint—and never made me feel inadequate because I didn’t know how to use an eyelash curler.
It seemed to be of vital importance to Lois that I learn such things and make myself attractive—a difficulty, since my daily calls to the Bryn Mawr train station gave no clue to the fate of my lost luggage and I was stuck with the clothes I’d worn on the train, plus a couple of T-shirts I’d stuck in my carry-on.
But Lois was sweetly generous with her things, and especially eager that I look good for the Princeton Freshman Mixer in early October. This was a Major Event—as opposed to the minor events of our first three weekends, where Mawrters met the local peaceniks from Haverford, business geeks from Penn and Wharton, and cute but déclassé jocks from Villanova.
But to Lois and her friends, the Princeton Freshman Mixer existed on a higher plane—both in terms of write-home-to-Mom prestige and pre-med-student quotient.
Marrying a doctor was high on Lois’s agenda.
One of her sophomore friends explained to all of us Freshmen, over tea and Sara Lee, that the goal of the Princeton mixer was to snag an invitation to Homecoming weekend, held two weeks after. Lois had already picked out a traveling outfit and the perfect sweater to wear to her first Ivy League game.
I don’t know why I thought Alistair would show up at a dance for eighteen-year-olds, but he was all I knew of Princeton, so every mention of the mixer lit up the part of my brain occupied with fantasies of happy-ever-aftering with the man from Punch Albright’s bathroom.
Talking about him scored me a lot of points with Lois and her friends. I told them I’d met him at a party at the Albright estate, and that he dressed like English royalty and picked up his dates in a limousine. (OK, I exaggerated there, but he had offered to.)
On the night of the mixer, Lois dressed me in a little black dress, disciplined my hair into a remarkable bouffant flip, and plastered my face with Cover Girl and Twiggy lashes. I looked like somebody about to be sexually exploited by James Bond.
Or, we both hoped, by Alistair Milbourne.
But Alistair was not among the tweedy young men who stepped off the Princeton buses to join us in the Taylor Hall gymnasium. Instead, a smirking red-haired boy made a bee-line toward me, told me I had “great tits,” and asked if I wanted to have his babies. I declined, but agreed to dance with him, because Lois whispered in my ear that she knew his cousin, who was pre-med at Johns Hopkins.
The third dance was a slow one, and I felt sweaty and invaded as my partner held me too close and slithered a hand toward my breast. I was wondering how to escape without incurring Lois’s disapproval when I felt a presence behind me.
I recognized the voice before I saw his face.
Alistair’s lazy, faux-Cary Grant tones zinged me like an electrical surge. I was probably giving off sparks.
“Well, if it isn’t little Nicky Conway. Visited any good washrooms lately?” Alistair gave my partner’s shoulder a cut-in tap. “Sorry, but this lady and I have some catching up to do. I’m afraid you’ll have to run along.”
The boy gave him a dark look and vanished into the crowd.
“Freshmen need to learn their place,” Alistair said, raising an ironic eyebrow. Or I assumed it was ironic. He took me in his arms and somehow managed to lead me in an elegant foxtrot to the military beat of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction.”
I felt like a fairy tale princess, especially when I caught Lois checking out Alistair’s suit. One of her friends gave me an approving nod. I had arrived.
But the next song was Hendricks’ version of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” Not even Alistair could move gracefully to it. We gyrated for a few moments, until he stopped and repeated the line, “‘there must be some kinda way outta here.’” He pointed at the gymnasium doors. “Escape,” he said. “You don’t really want to stay trapped in here all evening with these sweaty children, do you?”
I shook my bouffant head and batted my Twiggy lashes. I sort of wanted to stay and dance, but at that moment I would have happily followed Alistair Milbourne to the gates of Hell.
Where he actually took me was not Hell, but New Jersey. Princeton, of course. He didn’t tell me where we were going right away. He drove for a while along Lancaster Avenue and then got on the parkway going north. I thought about being nervous, but only for a moment. Alistair’s magic spell was infinitely more powerful than my underdeveloped sense of self-preservation.
His car was perfect—a classic Triumph TR3 in British racing green with leather seats and spokey wheels—and it seemed to be zooming at the speed of light into another time and dimension. I didn’t even care that my hair was deflating into a mop of hippy-dippy curls. Every word Alistair said increased my enchantment.
And he was full of words. He told me he was an English major and an avid photographer and planned to be a photojournalist—and maybe make films some day. He’d written three screenplays and was working on a play about the early life of Jay Gatsby. He’d prepped at Groton, his favorite author was F. Scott Fitzgerald and he adored the songs of Cole Porter. His preferred comfort food was the sherry trifle served at Claridge’s Hotel in London, where he stayed when he flew over the pond to have his suits made. He had lived all over the world, and was on close personal terms with dozens of celebrities, including Jane Fonda and Andy Warhol.
He quoted Dorothy Parker: “Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves;” and Oscar Wilde: “I can resist anything but temptation,” and of course, Fitzgerald: “The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?”
I was so bewitched I almost didn’t mind that his tiny dorm room was such a mess—with jeans and underwear scattered over the floor, and the bed unmade. I found it rather endearing that he scurried around trying to tidy the place for me, tossing everything into an already-stuffed closet.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I don’t mind chaos. My dad’s room looks like this all the time. He says neatness is the mark of an uncreative mind. He won’t let me clean a thing when he’s working on a poem.”
I probably shouldn’t have brought up my father. Alistair stopped, in the midst of extricating a pair of grayish jockey shorts from the cushions of the reading chair. “Your father? A poet?” He gave me a penetrating stare. “Not F. Nicholson Conway?”
I nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“Why didn’t I know that?” Alistair’s voice had an edge of anger, as if he thought I’d been purposely keeping information from him. “I had no idea the F. Nicholson was related to the boat-building Conways. He has such a blue-collar image.”
“The result of some very hard work on his part…and some even harder drinking.”
I tried to sound bored. I did not want to talk about this at all.
My nonchalant tone worked. Alistair gave a big laugh.
“Speaking of drinking.” He pulled a silver flask from a coat pocket. “How about a wee dram of Glenfiddich? It’s the best scotch in the world. I always insist on the best.”
He produced a couple of silver shot glasses and filled them. I’d never tasted straight whiskey—and even my father drank it with an ice cube or two, but of course I wasn’t going to say so. I downed a burning shot. And another.
Alistair told me I looked sexy in the little black dress, and said he approved of my change to a “New York sophisticate” image.
Being a compulsive truth-teller, even without the benefit of single malt scotch, I told him the clothes were borrowed and related the catastrophe of my lost luggage.
He looked at me with real concern. “That’s outrageous,” he said. “Somebody at the college should have helped you with that. Don’t they know who you are?”
At that moment, Alistair Milbourne became my own personal god. Here was a man actually validating my feelings of anger and frustration in the face of the railroad/ college bureaucracy. He didn’t blame me, as my father had, or pity me like Lois and her friends. Overwhelmed with Alistair’s wonderfulness, I leaned over and kissed him.
He kissed me back, and pulled me down onto the rumpled bed.
I knew perfectly well what was going to happen next, and it never occurred to me to stop it. It wasn’t much fun, and he got into an awful temper when he realized it was my first time and I’d bled on the sheets, but it happened, and at least it was over quickly.
When he’d finished—both with the sex and the yelling at me about the sheets—the spell started to unravel and I realized what I’d done. He’d used a condom, but I knew they weren’t foolproof.
What was worse, I’d forgotten to sign out to leave campus. I stewed and helped myself to another shot of scotch before I finally blurted this out. I explained that if I didn’t appear back at the dorm by two AM, dire things would happen, including a phone call to the Lower Merion township police.
I braced for more rage, but none came. He smiled benignly. Apparently driving two hours back and forth to Bryn Mawr didn’t bother him anywhere near as much as virgins bleeding on his sheets.
The drive back didn’t have the same magic-carpet feel, but he was sweet and kept entertaining me with his glamorous stories. I arrived back at one AM feeling as if I’d had a successful Princeton mixer night.
It wasn’t until I tried to tell Lois about it the next day that the anxiety set in. Although she and her friends talked about sex non-stop, sex on the first date was an absolute no-no. Boys never called you back if they got what they wanted on the first date. Now they told me. You had to wait until date number three. And then only if there had been some expensive meals or theater tickets involved.
That’s when I started to cry. I was still such a kid. The thought that Alistair might never call again was more than I could bear. But Lois thought I was worried about being pregnant, so she insisted I take a very hot bath and then sent me to her sophomore mentor to get the number of a doctor who would give me a prescription for the pill.
All my trepidation vanished on Monday afternoon, when the girl on “bells”—the dorm switchboard—rang my room and told me I had a visitor. She also asked if I wanted her to ring a porter to help carry my things inside.
I scampered down the mahogany staircase and there, in the middle of Cardigan Arch, was Alistair. And my battered luggage. All of it. I ran outside.
Alistair gave me a friendly hug. “It was a bit of a tight squeeze fitting it into my car, but I think I’ve got it all. Your things were in Philadelphia—in storage at 30th Street Station. They didn’t put it on the Paoli local for some reason, so it was sitting in a warehouse, ringing up a dollar a day in storage fees.”
“A dollar a day?” It had been almost a month. “I’ll have to go to my bank…” This was a stall tactic. The account had no money in it. My father believed I didn’t need more than ten dollars a week, since that’s what his father gave him when he was at Harvard.
But Alistair beamed and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“Please. My treat. And how about some dinner? Have you been to the Old Original Bookbinders in the city?”
I put on my favorite dress—a hot pink Marimekko shift, very short, with matching tights—and as he drove me into Philadelphia, I felt my confidence grow. We had a superb seafood dinner in the legendary restaurant while chatting about our mutual likes and dislikes. We agreed on how annoying we found patchouli, guilt-tripping vegetarians, and the oeuvre of Iron Butterfly.
But on the way home, he sailed right past the Bryn Mawr exit and barreled on in the direction of the blue-collar town of West Conshohocken. He was singing Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” in a full-throated baritone, so I he didn’t seem to hear me.
“Um, where are we going?” I said.
“You're a Bendel bonnet. A Shakespeare's sonnet. You're Mickey Mouse.”
“You missed the exit for Bryn Mawr.” I shouted this time. “It’s back there.”
“You're the Nile. You're the Tower of Pisa. You're the smile/On the Mona Lisa.”
I looked at my watch. Only eight. I probably could get away with not studying tonight. I was traveling with a rich, handsome Princeton man who seemed to like me a lot. What did it matter where he was taking me?
I didn’t say another word as he draped an arm over my shoulders and sang: “I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop. But if, baby, I'm the bottom—you're the top!”
I felt as if I had indeed been raised atop some enchanted pinnacle. I breathed in the rarified air and potent magic of Alistair Milbourne’s spell. I was in love