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triumph, too, and physical pleasure, and horror with myself. It was a muddle. It’s rare to surprise yourself. The dim streetlamps still shone at intervals before me, and by their light I could see the austere and enduring spires of Oxford, rising in the middle distance, untroubled by human grief.
    When I came to the end of the street I knew roughly where I was in relation to Fleet and started back toward home. As I went I pulled on the T-shirt I was carrying and realized that it was the wrong one. I turned it inside out and saw that it was pink and bore an inscription, in Union Jack–colored glitter: BRITISH GIRL .
    I laughed. Then I took a sip of the beer and within a few seconds of swallowing it I lurched toward a potted plant beside another blue mailbox and threw up into it. When I was finished I wiped my mouth, swished it out with beer, then stood, looking up at Oxford, feeling that I was finally there, and drank the rest of it.
    I had only just started walking again when the peal of the different colleges’ bells startled me out of my still reverie, each with its own melody, all out of kilter with one another. So it was five in the morning. The walk was another fifteen minutes, and as I drew closer to the Cottages and Fleet I kept thinking to myself, Shit, shit, but also, somewhere else, early days, early days.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    I come from that vague northeastern gentry inside which families dip and rise, but from which perhaps they never depart entirely. My first paternal ancestor in America was a man named Abraham Backer—described as “surly and ill-tempered” by John Winthrop, who was so surly and ill-tempered himself that the description has an inflection of admiration in my reading of it. Abraham’s great claim to glory in life, other than venturing across the ocean to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1623, was the inadvertent submission of his family to wholesale slaughter by a group of Pequot Indians, who, again in the words of Winthrop, “burned them in their wigwams.” Great.
    All families are equally old, whether or not there are records of their age, but Abraham is mine, and I feel a half-serious pride in him. Nobody in history is more real to me. He left seven books to his son William—who survived the Pequots—in a time of almost unexceptioned illiteracy. Before his death he was a magistrate in the colony. These cinders from the fire of life, those seven books: I feel his human presence down the years. I can imagine that he breathed as I do, stretched his stomach too full with food, loved his dog, annoyed his wife.
    My mother’s family has its own tales of Mayflower glory, and on both sides there are the leavings of long centuries, the painted sea chest that traveled from Boston Harbor to China aboard my great-great-great-grandfather’s clipper ship, the set of silver hairbrushes descended from Age of Innocence New York. There is the large, privately printed, grammatically dubious family genealogy, assembled in the fifties and annotated in its margins with ferocious corrective irritation by my grandfather. There’s the Social Register, the anecdote of Colonel Simon Baker and George Washington sharing a carriage from Boston to Virginia. The Cherry Orchard tales of lost houses and subdivided lands that could have been ours, ought to have been ours. I went to the same boarding school that my father and his father and his father did. The same college, too.
    Then there were the manners. To say “beverage,” or “pardon,” or “patio,” or any of a few dozen other words was within my family to commit a grave solecism. Cheerfulness in social situations was considered perhaps the greatest virtue a human being could possess, and its cousin, stoicism during adversity, was second. To have a complete matching set of silver flatware—no, hopeless, your silver had to have gotten mixed up over the generations.
    Indeed, anything that matched at all was considered to be in poor taste. “They have