Dream Catcher: A Memoir (15 page)

The first two students are an embodiment, almost a caricature, of what Sri Ramakrishna, whose work my father was studying deeply at the time, referred to as the excreta of “woman and gold.” The first is a young housewife who has given herself the professional name “Bambi.” She includes in her application a large pinup-style photo of herself in a bathing suit. Her sample drawings, desperately bad both in choice of subject and workmanship, are attached “rather subordinately” to her photo. She writes that her favorite artists are Rembrandt and Walt Disney.

The second student is a society photographer, R. Howard Ridgefield, who said that his wife thought he should get “into the painting racket.”
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His painting, obscene in subject and rendering, depicts a young woman with “udder-size breasts” being sexually assaulted in church.

Nearly overcome with despair, he opens the third envelope. It is from a nun named Sister Irma. She teaches cooking and drawing at a convent elementary school. Instead of a photograph of herself, she sends a snapshot of her convent. Her hobbies are “loving her Lord and the Word of her Lord” and “collecting leaves but only when they are laying right on the ground.” She was assigned to teach the children to draw when another sister died. The children, she writes, like to draw people when they are running and she asks his help because she doesn’t know how to do that. She wants to work hard to improve and sends some paintings—unsigned. Her work is described as that of a “true artist.” He stashes Sister Irma’s envelope in his breast pocket where “neither thieves [nor his employers] could break in. . . . I didn’t care to risk having Sister Irma taken away from me. . . . That evening, however, with Sister Irma’s envelope warm against my chest, I had never felt more relaxed.”
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That night, he stays up working on Sister Irma’s sketches and writing to her a long, “almost endless” letter, which he describes as both passionate and chaste. The next day he wonders “in a real panic” how he’ll manage to keep his sanity until her next envelope arrives. He doesn’t. As he stands outside the window of an orthopedic-appliance shop,

something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss.

He somehow makes his way back to his room, where he lies in bed shivering for hours, sleep eluding him, until he forces himself to concentrate on the image of Sister Irma, and of his visiting her at the convent. He imagines her behind a high fence, coming to meet him. In his mind she is

a shy, beautiful girl of eighteen who had not yet taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world with the Peter Abelard–type man of her choice. I saw us walking slowly, silently, toward a far, verdant part of the convent grounds, where suddenly, and without sin, I would put my arm around her waist. The image was too ecstatic to hold in place, and, finally, I let go, and fell asleep.

The following day, in front of the same orthopedic-appliance store, he has a mystical vision, a reversal of the one that so upset him where he saw everything, including himself, turned to excreta and its paraphernalia. Now, suddenly, in a whirl of light, the enamel urinals and bed-pans are mystically turned into a shimmering garden of “twice-blessed flowers.”

I
T IS UNCANNY HOW
C
LAIRE
, a shy, beautiful girl, fresh from convent school, should walk into my father’s life as if on cue, shaped into reality from the mists of his dream, the way Cornish would appear as if in response to Holden’s dream of a little cabin somewhere right at the edge of a forest. When Jerry came to visit her, she said it was blissful. They took long walks by the river and talked late into the night. But she also remembers long stretches of time that year when he neither called nor visited, leaving her feeling, once again, bereft, and at sea.

1
. This is the poem that Babe, in “A Boy in France,” wished for as he withdrew his hand under the blanket and created, in his battlefield foxhole, a dream in which he imagines himself clean, at home, and with a girl: “I’ll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me—that one about being chartless . . . and I’ll bolt the door.”

3
. In a similar scene, Holden spots a family walking ahead of him and tells us the parents were paying no attention to their little boy:

The kid was swell. He was walking in the street, instead of on the sidewalk, but right next to the curb. . . . I got up closer so I could hear what he was singing. . . . The cars zoomed by, brakes screeched all over the place, his parents paid no attention to him, and he kept on walking next to the curb and singing “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” It made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed anymore. (
Catcher
, p. 115)

When I read this passage as a mother, rather than as I first did, in my twenties and single, I was outraged. I thought, how nice for you, so glad you’re not feeling so blue and have had your Dostoevskian “ability to love” restored, but would somebody please get that child off the street and out of traffic so he doesn’t get killed?

4
. This was true in our family life as well. To give but one instance, typical of hundreds, when I was about nine I asked—begged—my dad for a pair of white go-go boots. The swirl of emotional invective that rained down upon my unsuspecting head might have been appropriate to his having been asked if I could join the Nazi party and wear those cute jackboots. Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

5
. My mother’s language here reminds me of the language my father uses in the scene where Holden fears he’ll sink down into oblivion and cries out for Allie to save him. Also where Holden describes his brother, D.B. (“a writer by profession,” which is how both Sergeant X in “Esmé” and Buddy in
Seymour: An Introduction
describe themselves), when he returned from the war after having spent, as did my father, four years in the army and landing on D-Day; when he came home, all he did was “lie on his bed, practically.” See, too, my father’s last published book,
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,
in which he speaks of the period of time after the war and through the publication of
The Catcher in the Rye,
saying that he/Buddy wrote the short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” “just a couple of months after Seymour’s death, and not too very long after I myself, like both the ‘Seymour’ in the story and the Seymour in Real Life, had returned from the European Theater of Operations. I was using a very poorly rehabilitated, not to say unbalanced, German typewriter.”

6
. See “Hapworth,” where Seymour requests many books, “preferably containing no excellent photographs.” My father goes ballistic at the suggestion that photography is an art.

7
. Babe, too, stashed in his breast pocket a letter from his little sister Mattie to keep his faculties intact in his terrible foxhole, as does Sergeant X, just out of a military hospital, a letter from a young girl, Esmé; in all three stories the fragile mental stability of the man is held together by a thin letter. As Mattie’s letter sustains Babe amidst the obscene carnage of the battlefield, Sister Irma’s sustains de Daumier-Smith through the long afternoon of correcting Ridgefield’s nudes, male and female “sans sex organs” that he had “genteely and obscenely drawn.”

I am not One who much or oft delight

To season my fireside with personal talk,—

Of friends, who live within an easy walk,

Or neighbours, daily, weekly, in my sight:

And, for my chance-acquaintance, ladies bright,

Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk,

These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk

Painted on rich men’s floors, for one feast-night.

Better than such discourse doth silence long,

Long, barren silence, square with my desire;

To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,

In the loved presence of my cottage-fire,

And listen to the flapping of the flame,

Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

—“Personal Talk,” William Wordsworth

M
Y AUNT
D
ORIS
, Daddy’s sister, told me, some forty-odd years later, how the two of them found their way to Cornish. In the fall of 1952, during a glorious Indian summer, Doris and her brother decided to take a holiday. She told me that he had some money in his pocket from the publication, the previous summer, of
The Catcher in the Rye
and wanted to look for a little place in the country where he could live and work without the distractions of the city. Doris was what was called
in those days a career girl. She was divorced, thirty-eight, living at home with her parents in Manhattan, and busy traveling back and forth to Europe as a buyer for the Green Room at Bloomingdale’s. Nevertheless, when he suggested that she come with him, she said she dropped everything and “jumped” at the chance for a pleasant drive in the country with her beloved brother.

They drove up the New England coast and stopped at Cape Ann, an area north of Boston, with its old seafaring towns of Essex, Ipswich, and Gloucester. They loved Cape Ann. He would have bought a place and settled there, in Melville’s old stomping grounds, but after looking at houses for a few days, he realized he couldn’t afford it. No one at the time, least of all he, expected
The Catcher in the Rye
to take off the way it later did.

They headed inland and north along the Connecticut River valley and stopped for lunch in Windsor, Vermont. A local real estate agent, Hilda Russell, struck up a conversation with them at the town diner. After lunch, she drove them across the covered bridge that spans the Connecticut River between Windsor, Vermont, and Cornish, New Hampshire, and up a rough, steep, dirt road, miles into the hills and woods. They passed a dairy farm, cows perched, as they do in the Alps, on impossibly steep pastures. Like their cows, the dairy farmers up in the hills maintained a precarious existence. Many spent winters working over at the split ball-bearing factory in Windsor, or at the Goodyear rubber plant before it closed. Others left for months at a time, signing on with winter fishing boats that sailed from Gloucester, while their wives and children held the fort at home.

The road took a sharp turn just past the farm and climbed straight up between two steep pastures, the fields humming with the Indian-summer colors of goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, Indian paintbrushes, and black-eyed Susans, and the songs of birds, bees, cicadas, and grasshoppers. As they reached the crest of the hill, the pasture faded softly into woods, and they continued upward at a gentler pace, through birch trees, pines, old maple, and oak. Along this stretch of the road, the only sign of human existence was a group of seven rough, unmarked gravestones concealed in a tangle of underbrush and green moss.

After another mile or so, they approached a clearing in the woods. There, at the highest point of the hilly road, stands a small barn-red
house. It is perched on the edge of a meadow that falls sharply downward for about an acre or so to the brook below. The meadow is so steep, in fact, that if you go over the edge, you have to hold on to strong weeds to pull yourself back up. The brook, and the remaining few feet of old pasture at the bottom, disappear into a forest of tall pine trees that slopes steadily downward to the Connecticut River valley many miles below. Beyond the river, Mount Ascutney rises up from the floor of the valley to the sky like a dark blue pyramid. To the right of the mountain, a patchwork of green and brown dairy farms spreads over the valley. Above and behind the farms, rows upon rows of smaller mountains fade to lighter and lighter blue as they roll like waves across Vermont, spilling into New York State.