Dream Catcher: A Memoir (17 page)

“Woman,” he said, “seek divine wealth, not the paltry tinsel of earth . . .”

I have to say that reading this, forty years after my parents’ engagement, was like reading the obituary of our family before we even became one, or going back to the beginning of a tragedy and this time, with the benefit of hindsight, deciphering the oracle’s cryptic prediction of the character’s undoing. “Some months after my initiation, I began to feel forlorn and neglected. . . . You spend all your time with the disciples.
What about your responsibilities for your wife and children?”
²
But that was yet to come.

While the relationship of Lahiri Mahasaya and his wife was, in a real sense, a foreshadowing of the state of my parents’ married life, I am convinced were it not for the teaching of Lahiri Mahasaya, that neither their marriage nor my birth would have taken place at all, so caught up was my father in the teachings of Ramakrishna. The teachings of Yogananda held out to my father the possibility of having his cake and eating it, too, of marriage as an institution not hopelessly defiling, setting back one’s karmic progression many lifetimes (recall Teddy’s comment about a woman being responsible for his having been reincarnated in an A
mer
ican body). As a model for a marriage, I find his teachings and life anything but “sweet,” but that said, it feels unseemly to speak ill of one whose teachings were so directly responsible for my birth.

Subsequent pregnancies, my mother said, came about because she wanted more babies and, at the right time of the month, would give my father far too much wine at dinner.

A
FTER READING
The Autobiography of a Yogi
together in the fall of 1954, they wrote, separately, to the publishers of the book, the Self-Realization Fellowship. Jerry soon asked if the fellowship could recommend a teacher-guru in their area who might consider initiating Claire and him into the fellowship. A member of the fellowship wrote back to say that the nearest disciple he could recommend was Swami Premananda, who had recently established a church of believers just outside of Washington, D.C., and suggested Jerry write to him. He did
so immediately. Swami Premananda wrote back and said he would receive them, after their marriage, and initiate them as householder devotees. They were instructed to abstain from eating breakfast on the day of their arrival and to bring offerings of fresh fruit, flowers, and a little money.

Claire had seen Vivekananda’s center off Fifth Avenue and loved its cathedral-like quiet and beautiful high ceilings. Her mind was filled with visions, from Paramahansa Yogananda’s lush autobiography, of saffron robes, incense, and refulgent palaces in the sky of the Indian pantheon. When they got off the train, however, she found herself in what she called a lower-middle-class suburban area, “home for porters on the trains and people who bag groceries, that atmosphere. It wasn’t my class of people.” The church itself was “sweet and storefronty, kind of like a small grocery store.” Then, much to my amusement, she summed up the ashram as, “you know, basic apple pie stuff.” Laughing, I blurted out, “Ma, on what planet?” With some self-realization, thank goodness, she laughed, too.

As the conversation progressed, the “good girl” patina on the story underwent a sort of reverse transmutation, turning Cinderella’s coach and coachmen back into a pumpkin and rats. The
“sweet
church” of her initial version became a “gaudied-up suburban tract house. The altar table had
photo
graphs on it.” (This comment is understandable, coming as it does from a young woman who grew up with Giotto and Fra Angelico altarpieces on the walls of her parents’ home.) And finally, “I didn’t like the low ceilings of this horrid little place.”

They were met by “this nice, sweet little Indian man, perhaps in his forties, but it’s hard to tell.” She said the man had no visible “whirls of glory” around him, as in Yogananda’s book. “Without his robes on you’d have never noticed him.” Jerry and Claire had a private meeting with the guru after the regular morning service, where the congregation sang “normal hymn tunes, but with funny words. He gave us each a mantra and taught us how to raise the breath and watch it.” The Kriya yoga breathing exercises were, she said, very soothing and calming. They were instructed to practice for ten minutes each morning, and ten minutes in the evening. Premananda told them to return for more advanced training if they saw a white light in the middle of their forehead. In my typically enlightened way I said with a big eye roll, “Oh, great!” “No, no,” she said. “I did see it, I think it has something
biological to do with the third eye. But I never went back to him. I went elsewhere.”

“On the train home to Cornish that evening, Jerry and I made love in our sleeper car. It was so nice to . . . we did not make love very often, the body was evil. . . . I’m certain I became pregnant with you that night.”

1
. I mentioned earlier that, as a child, Seymour threw a rock at a little girl who was sitting in the sunshine, inflicting serious injury, opening up her forehead and requiring stitches. In the story, everyone in the family understood that it was “because she looked so beautiful” sitting there in the sunshine. I don’t understand it, but to the Glass family and their author, it was an almost religious act and made perfect sense. The only way I have of approaching some feel for this is something I learned from my son. We went through a period during the terrible twos where he’d hug me and be really close, and then all of a sudden he’d throw something at me or hit me. It was so weird; he’d only misbehave like that when things were really lovey-dovey, not when he was mad about something. We figured out that at times it (Mommy and me) became too intense for him and that he felt engulfed, in danger of being swamped by me and his feelings for me. He still got put in time-out for doing it, but I could then help him with it by backing off a bit, and encouraging him to use his words, and also by having his dad take over more of the parenting stuff for a while, until he’d regained his equilibrium. It makes me think of my aunt saying, “It was always Sonny and Mother, Mother and Sonny. Daddy never got the recognition he deserved.” All I know is that a man who is too close to his mother, who can’t separate properly, is as much of a danger sign as one who hates his mother and can’t get close to women. It’s a tricky thing getting those boundaries right.

2
. When my brother and I were children, my father gave both of us a photograph of a yogi and asked us to tuck his picture away, in our breast pockets where thieves could not break in, as it were, and take it with us wherever we went—off to boarding school and so on. Since Daddy never mentioned the yogi’s name, I never asked who he was. I just thought he looked a lot like Grandpa with his lush white hair and mustache. Imagine my surprise to see “our” yogi’s photograph in the center of Yogananda’s book when my mother sent it to me. It was Lahiri Mahasaya. Yogananda relates several miraculous instances where people were saved from death—lightning bolts repelled, and so on—by the photographic image they had of Lahiri Mahasaya.

reclusion, n.

1. the condition or fact of becoming or being a recluse.

2. the condition or fact of being in solitary confinement.

—Webster’s

W
HEN
C
LAIRE’S PREGNANCY BECAME OBVIOUS
, she said that Jerry’s attraction turned to “abhorrence.” There is a point in every woman’s pregnancy, excepting perhaps that of the Virgin Mother herself, where the fiction of virginity can be maintained no longer. Gone was the pure novitiate, swept across her convent’s verdant meadows by Peter Abelard, as de Daumier-Smith desired so ardently, and so desperately. Claire was no longer pure; her every motive was now suspect and tainted.

My mother told me that before she and my father were married, they had seen a lot of his friends and traveled often to New York and Boston; once married, however, she was increasingly isolated to the point where she felt she became “a virtual prisoner.” From the fourth month of her pregnancy on they saw no one.

There is one thing you need to understand clearly. In Cornish, “seeing no one” doesn’t mean that you have stopped entertaining formally; it means you do not lay eyes on a living soul, with the exception, perhaps, of Alex White, the man who came to empty our garbage shed once every two weeks or so and take it to the dump, or Mr. McCauley, who delivered the mail to a mailbox at the crossroads,
a quarter of a mile down the road from the house, and only came by in person if there was something my father had to sign. My mother is not sure when they finally had a phone line run to the house, but whom would she have called? She had burnt her bridges, at my father’s request. She said that he had asked that she not bring with her to Cornish any baggage from her past life as a student at Radcliffe.
¹
She burned all her papers, including some fictional pieces and plays she had written while at college. As for maintaining contact with her school friends and family, I didn’t need to be told how he dealt with that; I’d seen, through the years, how he derided any friend she might have had, as well as any contact with her family. It was fine for us to visit his family, but visits to my maternal grandmother were a source of major friction. Even as a little girl, he’d demand to know how I could accept gifts and vacations from someone I didn’t “respect,” as he put it. To this day he still puts his young wife, Colleen, through the wringer about contact with her family, as if the desire to see her family were a sign of shameful weakness and imperfection. Leave all and follow me.
²

My mother, living in virtual isolation with my father in Cornish, didn’t see much of him either. During the years when he was still publishing, she told me that he had not yet established the comfortable, regular routine that I remember well of rising at dawn, working until mid to late morning, driving into Windsor for the mail, coming home and doing his correspondence, or what he called “that damn stuff piled up on my desk,” and then finishing for the day, leaving the afternoon free for gardening, going for walks, playing with his children or dogs, and doing a few errands. Instead, back then, sixteen-hour days were the
norm, and often, he’d work all night and through the following day as well.
³

When he was around, Claire said she was kept busier and busier. The house was primitive; there was no hot water, and poor heat, but Jerry demanded what she called “Park Avenue service.” Much like the great Thoreau, who had his mother deliver lunch to his little cabin in the wilderness, my father required three good “New York restaurant” meals a day to please him, or so she thought. Then, just when she thought she could manage that, “It was decreed that the sheets should be laundered and ironed twice a week—with no hot water, and cold water that left everything rust-colored. It felt very like the fairy tale where, whatever the girl did, another impossible task was added on. . . . I was in despair, trapped. And I was subject to Jerry’s constant and lacerating criticism when I failed to come up to his standards.”

All was not a wicked fairy tale, however. My mother said she loved the beauty of Cornish, her garden, the peace and quiet. She also loved having the pictures of their Indian gurus around as company. “It was like my pictures of saints as a little Catholic girl.” She practiced Yogananda’s Kriya yoga faithfully and contentedly, morning and evening. The peace and quiet never lasted very long, however. “I wanted to stay with that [Kriya yoga], but Jerry jumped to Dianetics. He went to L. Ron Hubbard himself, I think. He started to pick on me for any thoughts I might have that weren’t Dianetically correct. Such thoughts, he believed, injured you. He soon became disenchanted with that and it was on to Christian Science, and here was I still struggling with the Kriya yoga technique. I dropped it when I became too depressed after I had you.”

His radical changes had an alarming pattern to them. When he reached the point of almost finishing up a piece, the “home stretch,” he’d leave for weeks at a time and go to New York or Montreal or Atlantic City to work. My mother said that he would go away for several weeks only to return with the piece he was supposed to be finishing all undone
or destroyed and some new “ism” we had to follow.
⁴
These came with every botched or unpublished work: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, 1950s off and on; Kriya yoga, 1954–55; Christian Science, 1955 off and on to present; Scientology, called Dianetics at the time, 1950s; something having to do with the work of Edgar Cayce; homeopathy and acupuncture, 1960s to present; macrobiotics, 1966 through the end of their divorce.