Back Then by Anne Bernays

disarming the young and naïve. Ian took me to dinner in a dusky Italian place in the Village near his apartment on Horatio Street. A nice touch, the Village apartment, suggesting a free spirit. Ian was as handsome as Bert though the mold he came out of was altogether different. Ian, another of whose aunts—on his father’s side—was a niece of Queen Victoria, was obviously the product of careful, aristocratic marriages. He had light hair, a thin, delicate nose, and a perfectly formed, mobile mouth. At the peak of each high cheekbone was a small patch of hair that he never shaved off; “bugger tufts,” he called them—all the men in his family apparently wore them as a badge of clannish pride. These tufts struck me as silly, I had to stop myself from saying “You forgot to shave those things,” but what did I know about the tribal customs of Scotland? He said he wore kilts back home in the Highlands, along with a tam, and a sporran, a small leather handbag that lay over his abdomen. His cousin was the much married duke of Argyll. An army captain during the war, Ian was private secretary to the British ambassador to the United Nations. This meant dark blue suits, subtly striped shirts of the softest Egyptian cotton, hair brushed to a sheen by the two-handed method favored by upper-class Brits. I felt I either had to dismiss the entire package as de trop or to fall in love with it.
    Ian was verbal, playful, slightly bookish, and he loved the United States. He loved New York, even its more dismal neighborhoods and its gritty atmosphere. He loved Massachusetts; in a rented car, we toured New England. He couldn’t seem to get over the road sign BEAR LEFT, preferring to read the verb as a noun, and pretty soon he gave me a private name: Bear. A thorough gent, who, surprisingly, did not try to bed me, he gave me the sense that I was no more than a cute American toy for him to play with, and that, for many reasons, he would never yearn for my heart—which I would gladly have torn from my chest and handed to him had he asked for it.

    Ian Anstruther in front of Inverary Castle, 1950.
    That summer, only five years after the end of the war, I went to Europe with my friend Patsy Fitzsimmons. Her boat tickets back and forth were paid for by my parents. They had been young during a time when rich folk regularly made the trip across the Atlantic on luxurious ocean liners to absorb the art and artifacts of a culture deemed superior to that of raw America. Wherever Patsy and I went we let guys pick us up, drive us around in sporty cars, take us places, buy us things—bathing suits, and four-course meals—and try some innocent kissing. Once an Italian man twice my age nearly raped me while his pal, under orders, had left the car with Patsy and gone deep into some nearby woods to engage in God knows what games. We ended our tour in late August by visiting Ian’s ancestral home on a loch in Strachur on the west coast of Scotland. He shared this castle with Dodo, the aunt related to Victoria, and Ian’s sister and her two small children, all of them peaches-and-cream beautiful and elegant. Patsy and I went rigid with the cold. Chilly in August in any year, the house, made of stone and uncarpeted, was unheated. The home-front effects of the war, only five years over, persisted like a doubt. There were no napkins—cloth or paper—no red meat, very little soap, stiff toilet paper, half cups of coffee in the morning; meals were tiny, greens from the garden predominating. It wasn’t until I stayed with Ian and his family for two weeks that I had any understanding of what the English had put up with since the war started for them in September 1939.
    In Scotland, Ian was barely recognizable. Could this remote presence be his evil twin brother? And, if so, what had he done with the Ian I loved? While in New York he was boyish, on his own turf, at Strachur, he was lord of the manor,