Dream Catcher: A Memoir (16 page)

The realtor said that on a clear day, you could see the Adirondack Mountains hundreds of miles away. The living room windows faced due west, the perfect spot, she said, to view the sun setting over Mt. Ascutney. Doris agreed that the view was magnificent, but the house itself was another story. “It wasn’t a house, Peggy, it was a di
sas
ter.” She felt rather insulted at having been shown the place at all. There was no running water, and no bathroom facilities to speak of. The kitchen was a hovel. The rest of the house consisted of one small, water-stained bedroom, and a living room that resembled a barn, two stories high, with exposed beams and an arched wooden ceiling. A large family of squirrels had set up housekeeping in the living room rafters. “Vermin,” said Doris. Away from the view, on the east side of the living room where it shared a wall and chimney with the kitchen, was a blackened fieldstone fireplace. Beside the fireplace, a rickety wooden staircase, built along the wall, led up to a little loft.

Doris could not believe that her brother would even consider buying the place—this was well before the days of rustic chic; livestock, not writers, lived in barns. She knew that Sonny had just enough money to buy the house “as is,” with nothing left over to repair it, or, as Doris thought more appropriate, to raze the thing and build something decent from the ground up. But she hadn’t been listening very carefully to Holden’s dream:

. . . I’d build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life. I’d build it right near
the woods, but not right
in
them, because I’d want it to be sunny as hell all the time. . . . I’d meet this beautiful girl that was also a deaf-mute and we’d get married. . . . If we had any children, we’d hide them somewhere. We could buy them a lot of books and teach them how to read and write by ourselves.

(
Catcher,
p. 199)

On New Year’s Day, 1953, Jerry’s thirty-fourth birthday, he moved into that house in Cornish. Claire spent many long weekends with him there. This being the fifties, a young lady had to obtain written permission from a respectable person to be away from college for the weekend. Claire and Jerry made up a certain “Mrs. Trowbridge” and composed some very funny letters to Claire’s mother and to those
in loco parentis
at Radcliffe, with lots of silly, patrician news about Claire’s lovely visits with the little Trowbridges, and how much we enjoy having her come to stay with us at our winter cottage.

In a scene straight out of
The Catcher in the Rye,
where Holden on an impulse asks Sally Hayes to run away with him to the sunny cabin he imagines right on the edge of a forest, Jerry asked Claire to drop out of school and come live with him in Cornish. When Claire refused, Jerry dropped out of sight. She thinks he spent the year in Europe but isn’t sure. In desperation, she borrowed a car and drove up to the house, but there were no signs of life. Had she been able to contact him, she said, she would have done anything to be with him. “The whole world was your father—everything he said, wrote, and thought. I read the things he told me to read, not the college stuff nearly as much, looked on the world through his eyes, lived my life as if he were watching me. When I stood up to him on that one thing, college, he vanished.”

Claire was not a person with her faculties intact. When he left, she collapsed. She was hospitalized with a long bout of mononucleosis complicated by a rather dubious appendectomy. My mother’s version of what happened next has remained remarkably stable over the years in its instability, like a snapshot of a building collapsing. I could recite it in my sleep. It begins: “I was sooooo tired. A very nice man from the business school wanted to marry me. He kept coming by my hospital room and asking me to marry him and finally I said yes. It was such a relief just to be left alone where it was sooooo quiet.”

They eloped sometime that spring; she is fuzzy about the details. The marriage was annulled within the year. The impression I had as a young girl hearing this story was of somebody sleepwalking or in a fevered state. It worried me that such important things could happen to you in a dream or somewhere stuck between dreaming and waking. It also angered me. This quality of depicting herself as a person without will, a marionette almost, in someone else’s hands, acknowledging no responsibility for her part in all this, made me a little crazy. It may have been her reality, but mine, as a young child, felt like an almost constant struggle between the often violent urge to shake her into sensibility, hoping she’d be my lost mother, and self-protection—a Pyrrhic victory—as I tiptoed away, invisible, and let sleeping tigers lie.

J
ERRY REAPPEARED IN
C
LAIRE’S LIFE
during the summer of ’54. By the fall, Claire had moved in with him. They drove down to Cambridge each week from Cornish so that she could attend classes Tuesday through Thursday. Jerry took a room at the Commodore Hotel, and she shared an apartment with five other divorced or otherwise “not quite dorm material” girls, as she put it. He became increasingly unhappy with this arrangement and the effect it had on his work, a story that would be called “Franny.” This bothers my mother to think about because, as she says, “it wasn’t even ‘Franny’s’ story, it was mine, and that’s
not
how it happened.” In real life, the girl in a blue dress, with the blue-and-white overnight bag slung over her shoulder, was named Claire, not Franny. She still has the order slip from Brentano’s Bookbinding Department for “Franny’s” book,
The Way of a Pilgrim.

In January of 1955, “Franny,” the thirty-seven-page first part of what would become the book
Franny and Zooey,
was published in
The New Yorker.
During that same month, just after the midyear examination period of Claire’s senior year, she said she was given an ultimatum. “The choice was the same as last time, choose Jerry and Cornish, or Radcliffe and a degree.”

Just four months shy of graduation, Claire dropped out of college. The story of what happened when Claire, as in the dream of Sister Irma, a young girl just short of her vows, left the verdant grounds of Cambridge
with her Peter Abelard, reminds me of one of our favorite movies,
Lost Horizon:
outside the gate of the verdant valley, a blizzard howled. On their wedding day, Claire and Jerry drove, or rather crept, thirty miles through a nearly impenetrable gray, February sleet, from Cornish, New Hampshire, to Bradford, Vermont, to find a justice of the peace. My mother describes the four of them packed into my father’s drafty old Jeep, Jerry cursing the road, their witnesses—Bet and Mike Mitchell—in the back, silent, probably petrified, as he is a terrifying driver under the best of circumstances. My father’s version of the wedding, oft repeated to my brother and me, usually starts out with him grumbling that he’s never forgiven Bet and Mike, friends of his from his Westport days some years before he moved to Cornish, for not “speaking up” and letting him go through with such an obvious mistake.

The gray reality of their elopement contrasted sharply with Seymour’s resplendent dream of a “sacred, sacred day.” On the eve of his elopement, my father’s character, Seymour Glass, wrote in his diary:

I really called to ask her, to beg her for the last time to just go off alone with me and get married. I’m too keyed up to be with people. I feel as though I’m about to be born. Sacred, sacred day. . . . I’ve been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all,
serve.
Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. . . . How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.

(
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,
pp. 90–91)

On his honeymoon, however, Seymour sat down on the hotel bed where his new wife, Muriel, lay sleeping, took out a pistol, and blew his brains out in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” written around 1947. My father wrote the “sacred, sacred day” passage above, from
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,
around 1955. He had dropped out of Claire’s life in 1953, when he wrote “Teddy,” an ode to the renunciation of earthly attachment of any sort, most especially sexual attachment; and then, in 1955, less than two years later, he asked Claire to marry him. What happened? Was it just another impulsive scene in the drama between blissful
engagement and blowing one’s brains out, attraction and repulsion, attachment and renunciation, bringing flowers and throwing stones?
¹

I assumed that his off-again, on-again relationship with Claire, before they were married, was just another act in this drama of conflict. Then I found out, in talking to my mother, that something quite different had happened that led to their marriage: my father had found a new guru with a message that appeared to reconcile the conflict between earthly attraction and heavenly renunciation. According to the teachings of this guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, women and gold, the two enemies of enlightenment and karmic progress, were transmuted from Ramakrishna’s bags of “phlegm, filth, and excreta” into something potentially holy. Marriage, for the first time in my father’s post-war study of religion, was held out as something potentially sacred rather than automatically defiling; Eve and the serpent were no longer ineluctably entwined.

During the fall and winter evenings prior to Jerry and Claire’s wedding, they had been reading a miscellany not of Vedanta, as Seymour had prior to his marriage, but rather, Paramahansa Yogananda’s book
Autobiography of a Yogi.
My mother told me that what was so appealing to them at the time were the stories about Lahiri Mahasaya, Yogananda’s guru, who lived from 1828 to 1895. Lahiri Mahasaya is told
that he has been chosen by God to bring the path of the yogi, heretofore restricted to celibate renunciates of the world, to those who desire enlightenment but are “encumbered” by family ties and jobs, or “worldly burdens.” His message is that even the highest yogic attainments are open to such a family man.

My mother recently sent me a copy of the book with a note telling me to “look up Lahiri Mahasaya and householders in the index rather than ploughing your way through.” She said that I was to read the “sweet passages” about Lahiri Mahasaya and his wife, their duties as “householders”—that is to say, as married persons with children rather than monks or nuns.

My mother said she remembers feeling “full of joy at having found a path,” a religious way that said “women can,” in contrast to her Catholic upbringing with its male-dominated hierarchy, and in contrast to Vedanta and the Vivekananda center where celibate men were, she said, again the valued ones. She remembered Paramahansa Yogananda’s book as tremendously liberating. When I read the book, I wondered if we were reading the same thing, particularly as I read Yogananda’s interview with Lahiri Mahasaya’s widow, whom he calls the Sacred Mother or Kashi Moni. In this passage, Kashi Moni tells Yogananda that it was years before she realized the “divine” status of her husband. In a vision she saw her husband floating in midair, in the lotus position, surrounded by angels who were worshiping him. As he came back down to the floor of their bedroom, she threw herself prostrate at his feet, begging him to forgive her for having thought of him as her husband.

“Master,” I cried . . . “I die with shame to realize that I have remained asleep in ignorance by the side of one who is divinely awakened. From this night, you are no longer my husband, but my guru. Will you accept my insignificant self as your disciple?”

In a ritual gesture he accepts her as a disciple and instructs her to bow before the angels. In divine chorus, the angels sing to her:

“Consort of the Divine One, thou art blessed. We salute thee.” They bowed at my feet and lo! Their refulgent forms vanished. . . .

From that night on, Lahiri Mahasaya never slept in my room again. Nor, thereafter, did he ever sleep. He remained in the front room downstairs, in the company of his disciples both by day and by night.

Kashi Moni then tells Yogananda that she will confess to him a “sin” she committed against her “guru-husband,” when, several months after her vision and initiation as a disciple, she began to feel “forlorn and neglected.”

One morning Lahiri Mahasaya entered this little room to fetch an article; I quickly followed him. Overcome by delusion, I addressed him scathingly.

“You spend all your time with the disciples. What about your responsibilities for your wife and children? I regret that you do not interest yourself in providing more money for the family.”

The master glanced at me for a moment, then lo! He was gone. Awed and frightened, I heard a voice resounding from every part of the room:

“It is all nothing, don’t you see? How could a nothing like me produce riches for you?”

“Guruji,” I cried, “I implore pardon a million times! My sinful eyes can see you no more; please appear in your sacred form.”

“I am here.” This reply came from above me. I looked up and saw the master materialize in the air, his head touching the ceiling. His eyes were like blinding flames. Beside myself with fear, I lay sobbing at his feet after he had quietly descended to the floor.