Dream Catcher: A Memoir (19 page)

My father’s final two novels restate the identical problem and solution. In
Franny and Zooey,
Franny is cracking up, unmoored and battered by the phoniness of life at college. She regains her faculties through the revelation that everyone is Christ. “Don’t you know the secret?” Zooey asks her. Each and every one of those phonies, those irrigation devices, “even the terrible Professor Tupper . . . is Christ Himself.” The book ends: “For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.”

My father’s last published book,
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,
ends with Buddy realizing that Seymour was right, that the “awful Room 307,” Buddy’s classroom of college girls just back from Ivy weekends, is really “Holy Ground,” and every one of those girls, “even the terrible Miss Zabel, is as much his sister as Boo Boo or Franny.”

In each book, the tension is resolved by the revelation, as Rabbi Fine
said, that “we are one.” The suffering character no longer has to deal with any of the historical or minority problems that we first saw in “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett,” or with Lionel in “Down at the Dinghy,” or with Holden’s “half-Catholic” background, or with my father, hurt, as my aunt said, by “people talking that way.” We are one.

M
Y FATHER’S FICTIONAL SOLUTION
falls apart at the boundary of reality, however. It is one thing to merge with humanity, or even just one person, in an ecstatic experience of joy, quite another to live with him or her the morning after, day after day, week after week. Peter Abelard leaves the verdant green of the convent with the pure young girl, just short of her vows, and finds that once outside the gate, she is transformed into a sack of phlegm, filth, and excreta.

In a conversation recalled by one young woman, my father is caught in the web of his own conundrum. She described to him a folk concert she attended:

“For a few minutes it felt as though everybody in the room was
good.
We were all friends. I just looked around and loved everyone. It was such a relief, feeling that way.”

“The song ended eventually, I imagine?” Jerry says, with a bitter edge in his voice that takes me by surprise. “There’s the catch. You can only go on for so many verses before people start remembering how much everyone else actually irritates the hell out of them.”
¹⁹

My father could not have described any better his real life, as opposed to the world of his fiction. Time and again I’ve witnessed that his epiphanous experiences of joy and unity with all creation are “like joy, a liquid,” rather than “happiness, a solid.”
²⁰
The morning after, they slip through his fingers like the mists of a dream.

Outside of the realm of fiction, my father is able to hold on to his
“we are one” solution, albeit tenuously, only in reclusion. It is here that the two meanings of reclusion are made manifest, whereby one man’s chosen hermitage (the condition or fact of becoming a recluse) becomes another’s prison (the condition or fact of being in solitary confinement). For my father to realize the promise that Paramahansa Yogananda held out, and reconcile the reclusive religious life with the life of a married man, the real girls and young women to whom he reaches out must become part of his dream.

To become one with him, each gives up her previous world, as well as her own hopes and dreams, to join his world, and his dream. Recall Yogananda’s story of the marriage of my parents’ beloved yogi, Lahiri Mahasaya, as his wife tells the story of her vision of the divine nature of 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?”

I often wondered how his wives and lovers, intelligent young women, so full of promise, could become like the mythological Echo, wasting away. Although on reflection, it seems to me that their backgrounds left them vulnerable perhaps to an unusual or extreme degree—certainly my mother’s childhood is an ode to the agony of the unmoored, the child adrift and at sea—the trajectory of their entry into my father’s world could not be more typical of standard cult entry.

My mother left all and married my father just before the last term of her senior year at Radcliffe. It is during such stressful times of the year—the first week of classes on the college campus, for instance, when new students are often feeling alone and disoriented in a strange new environment, or during finals week and graduation time, when many students are feeling a great deal of pressure and uncertainty about the future—that cult recruiters are especially active and successful on college campuses.
²¹

A key part of the attraction to the cultic relationship at such vulnerable times is what researchers refer to as “love bombing”
²²
—sincere smiles, eye contact, hand-holding, and general expressions of great affection; a kind of total and unconditional love that is hard to describe in its dazzling intensity unless you, too, have been blinded by its light, though few would not understand the appeal. It is certainly understandable that my mother should have been tremendously awed and moved by the attention of an author in his thirties writing letters to her, a senior in high school. What is harder for me to understand is how she came to drop everything and follow him, how she became entangled, in tendrils strong as flesh and blood, even after the criticism began. Here again, I found that the pattern is classic. It is referred to by many names,
milieu control
and
totalism,
for example, but the method doesn’t change. The essential element in this seemingly mysterious dance macabre is reclusion. The glasshouse flower of a dream cannot withstand the elements outside protected walls. Such a relationship and belief system cannot withstand a reality check. Therefore, “the probability of conversion is much higher if the cult is able to gain control of the individual’s environment and communication channels.”
²³
Methods include control over all forms of communication with the outside world, sleep deprivation, change of diet, control over whom one can see and talk to, the message that the subject has been chosen to play a special role in the divine order, the need for purity, and convincing the subject of his/her former impurity and of the necessity of becoming pure or perfect, the introduction of “sacred science,” and convincing the subject
that the control group’s (or person’s) beliefs are the only logical system and must therefore be accepted and obeyed, and that all who disagree are doomed.
²⁴
The dissociation of the past, your family, friends, and your own past identity is, according to exit counselor Officer Mark Roggeman, the most important step in maintaining control over the person.
²⁵

Leila Hadley—the writer my father dated briefly around the time he met Claire—said, reflecting on their relationship, “I think he liked putting me down. There was something sadistic about it. . . . He was very much like that character of his in ‘The Inverted Forest’—Raymond Ford. . . . It wasn’t a sexual power, it was a mental power. You felt he had the power to imprison someone mentally. It was as if one’s mind were at risk, rather than one’s virtue.”
²⁶

I think of this as my mother tells me of her early courtship with my father: “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 Claire refused to give up college the first time Jerry asked, and he left her, the feeling of abandonment was so terrible, she said she would have done anything to be with him, but she couldn’t find him. She wound up in the hospital on the verge of a breakdown and jumped into a marriage with another man.
²⁷
When my father did come back into her life, she did indeed try to do everything she could to keep in his good graces, but as time went by, she pleased him less and less. My mother said she felt as though she
were trapped in a fairy tale in which every time she met his demands, the standards increased ad infinitum. Although she came to believe, quite early on, that she was incapable of redemption in my father’s eyes through any effort of her own, she imagined that by producing a child—knowing how much he loved children—she might, vicariously, regain some lost ground.
²⁸
She was shocked into a suicidal depression when she realized that her pregnancy only repulsed him, sending him deeper into the forest, where, after countless hours of hard labor, two Glass children came into the world:
Franny,
published in
The New Yorker
in January of 1955, followed by
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,
in November.

At the end of that same year, on the tenth of December, another child was born, untimely torn as it were, from my father’s imagination. I was nearly christened Phoebe, my father’s choice of name for Holden’s beloved little sister, but my mother prevailed, and at the last moment I was given my own name, Margaret Ann, “Peggy” for short. My father’s version of my naming certainly has changed over time. He told me on a visit during the summer of 1997 that if it were not for Claire, “I’d have given you guys [my brother and me] no names at all and let you name yourselves at about twelve years of age.” At present, he has three cats whose names are Kitty 1, Kitty 2, and Kitty 3.

A
FULL GENERATION AFTER MY
mother became pregnant, and I was nearly grown up, I found out that my father was still dealing in dreams, rather than real children. Because I lived through the reality of this as a child, and because I’m now a parent myself, with a very real child, the hardest thing for me to read in Joyce Maynard’s memoir was that nothing
had changed. Regardless of the problem that Joyce mentions of their inability to consummate their relationship due to sexual difficulties, she writes:

We talk about the baby more and more, and when we talk about the baby, it’s always a girl. We don’t talk about where we might live, what our days will look like, caring for a baby; we don’t discuss how Matthew and Peggy might view any of this, or even where, in this small, crowded house, the baby might sleep and play, though surely these are all the kinds of questions that Jerry has had to deal with before with his wife Claire when Matthew and Peggy were born, and in the years before his divorce when they were very small. I don’t ask how we will avoid immunizing the baby, though I know Jerry will be adamant about that. Maybe she just won’t go to school.

“I’ll make her a dollhouse,” I say. “We’ll make dolls and furniture, and play food out of cornstarch and salt dough with food coloring.” I tell him about the pies my mother used to make for my Barbies. . . .

The problem [their inability to have intercourse] remains unchanged and increasingly, unaddressed, even though the baby plan has continued to the point where a name has been selected for our future child. It’s an odd name—not a name at all.

“I dreamed you and I had a baby,” he tells me one morning. “I saw her face clearly. Her name was
Bint.”

He looks the word up in the dictionary. “What do you know?” Jerry says. “It’s archaic British, for little girl.” From that point on, we refer to our future child by the name from Jerry’s dream.

(At Home in the World: A Memoir,
pp. 168, 177)

My father’s current wife, Colleen—Gaelic for “young girl”—whom he met, some fifty years her elder, when she was a young girl in her early twenties, looks up at me with her clear blue eyes, pretty smile, lovely peach skin glowing beneath her reddish gold hair cut pixie style—all that is missing is the Catholic-school uniform—tells me now, in my middle age, that she and my father are trying to get pregnant. I begin to
tell her what life is really like for a child in reclusion; I ask, would they move? I mention that my father is nearing eighty. Then, I fall silent, feeling as though I’m talking to a girl, too young to be having sex, about responsibility and consequences, hurling limp reason at a dream glowing in the moonlight.