Dream Catcher: A Memoir (2 page)

My father once told a friend that for him the act of writing was inseparable from the quest for enlightenment, that he intended devoting his life to one great work, and that the work would be his life—there would be no separation. In real life, when he chooses to make himself available, he can be funny, intensely loving, and the person you most want to be with; however, for such
maya
as living persons to get in the way of his work, to interrupt the holy quest, is to commit sacrilege. I was nearly middle-aged before I broke the silence, broke the family idol guarding generations of moldy secrets, both real and imagined, and began to shed some light and fresh air, wholesome and life-giving as Cornish breezes.

After my son was born, I felt an urgency to make my way through the magic and the miasma alike, through both history and fiction, to figure out what is real and what is not, what is worth saving and passing on to my son as his precious inheritance, and what I want to filter out, as the Native American dream catcher that hangs over his bed filters out the nightmares in its web and lets the good dreams drip down the feather onto his sleeping forehead.

Although I thought that, as Holden said in the opening of
The Catcher in the Rye
, “my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them . . . especially my father,” I’m surprised and grateful about how generous the women in our family, my mother and my father’s only sister, have been with their stories when I finally worked up the nerve to ask. I also took my father’s advice to a young lady, an English student, many years ago, when he told her that he thought she’d do much better on her paper without any active cooperation by him. He was very polite and said he appreciated her good will; nevertheless, he told her, the biographical
facts you want are in my stories, in one form or another, including the traumatic experiences you asked about. So with the help of my reflections on our life together, my reading and research into my father’s life and work, and many long conversations with my aunt and my mother, I managed to piece together a story of how the Salinger family “was occupied and all.” It may resemble a crazy quilt, but perhaps that’s appropriate, too.

1
. “The Inverted Forest,”
Cosmopolitan
123 (Dec. 1947): 73–109.

“How my parents were occupied and all before they had me”

Four gray walls, and four gray towers,

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott. . . .

There she weaves by night and day

A magic web with colors gay.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.

—“The Lady of Shalott,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should
not
go on licking your paw like that—as if Dinah hadn’t washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it
must
have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!
Was
it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know—Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! I’m sure your paw can wait!”

—Chapter 12, “Which Dreamed It?”

Through the Looking-Glass,
Lewis Carroll

M
AMA SAID THAT WHEN SHE
was a little girl, before her house in London was bombed, she would often creep out of her bed at night and open the door between her nursery and the top of the back staircase that led down to the kitchen. She’d tiptoe downstairs to make sure the door was closed and no servants were around. Then, spreading her white nightgown around her and slowly rising off the ground, she would fly up and down the passageway. She knew she hadn’t been dreaming because when she awoke on mornings after flight, there would be dust on her fingertips where she had touched the ceiling.
²

My mother was a child hidden away. She, like many upper-class and upper-middle-class English children of her day, was raised by staff in the nursery. I grew up hearing grim tales of nursery life. The one brief, bright spot was a nice governess, Nurse Reed, who took little Claire home with her on visits to her family. Nurse Reed’s replacement, a Swiss-German who, among her many delightful qualities, used to force Claire, after lunch, to sit on the toilet until she “produced,” or until suppertime, whichever came first, was more the norm. I knew, too, that she was sent to convent boarding school when she was only five years old and that she was taught to bathe her little body under a sheet so God wouldn’t be offended by her nakedness. I used to think about that when I was a little girl sitting in the tub, how scary a wet sheet over you would feel, as if you’d get caught under the immensity of it and sucked down the drain. Once, when I was in the hospital with poison ivy, my mother told me that when she was at the convent and got poison ivy, the nuns scrubbed her head to toe, beneath the sheet of course, with a bristle brush and lye soap to remove the evil ivy boils.

What I didn’t understand was
why
she was there. I didn’t wonder about it when I was little and assumed that things just happen to children as inexorably as the catechism. But now, as an adult, it no longer made sense to me, and I asked her about it. My mother explained that at the time, in the fall of 1939, the fact that loomed largest in most Londoners’ lives was that there was a war on. During the Blitz, parents with the means and “any
sense
at all,” she said, took their families out of London and went to stay with friends or relatives in the country. The Douglas family had both country relations and money; nevertheless, Claire and her brother, Gavin, were packed on a train, unaccompanied, “with all the poor children,” and evacuated to a convent at St. Leonard’s-by-the-Sea. St. Leonard’s had the unfortunate geographical attribute of being opposite Dunkirk, and they were soon evacuated again, this time inland to a sister convent in what my mother only remembers as a red-bricked city. She was five years old.

There was no comfort to be found in her elder brother, who, at seven, had a well-developed penchant for torturing animals and small girls. “He liked to cause pain, poor boy, it confused him terribly.” “Why?” I asked, grateful that she had never let “the poor boy” anywhere near
her
daughter while he was alive. “Mom, what was
wrong
with Gavin?” The answer came back flat and blunt: “The man my mother got her black market meat from was a pederast. When he came to the house, he bothered me a couple of times, but it was mostly my brother he was interested in, not me, thank God. I don’t think he ever recovered from it.”

In the fall of 1941, as Jerome Salinger had his first story, “The Young Folks,” published, Claire, age seven, and her nine-year-old brother, Gavin, were put on a train to Southampton, where they were met by a governess. She informed them that their family’s house had been bombed and had burnt to the ground. The Douglases had been out for the evening when the bomb struck, but Claire’s beloved kitten, Tiger Lily, was nowhere to be found. The governess deposited Claire and Gavin on a ship, the
Scythia,
offering the children no explanation. Her duty accomplished, she turned and marched off the ship.

The ship was packed with stunned, weeping children headed for the safety of the United States to sit out the war. One bit of contact, which Claire clung to like a life preserver, was to stand on the deck each day and wave to the children on the deck of their sister ship,
The City of Benares,
which carried the same cargo of unaccompanied children and sailed alongside them in close convoy. The children would wave back to her. Several days out of Southampton, as Claire was exchanging waves, a German torpedo ripped into the side of the
Benares.
It exploded into flames. Claire watched in mute horror as it sank, children screaming and dancing as they burned.

The
Scythia
disembarked at Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax, Claire and Gavin traveled alone by train to Waycross, Georgia, to meet their first host family. They were in Georgia when, on December 7 of that year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Before the war’s end, they would be removed from eight different American foster homes because of Gavin’s behavior. “And you know what happens to little girls in foster care . . . ,” my mother said, as though we were both in on some kind of secret not to be mentioned, only hinted at.

Their second placement was in Tampa, Florida. She remembers being terribly sunburned and attributes her midlife melanoma to her Tampa stay. The next stop, about the time Staff Sergeant Jerome Salinger was preparing to take Utah Beach on D-Day, was Wilmington, Delaware, where she attended the Tower Hill School for about a year. This was followed by placements with families in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Sea Girt, New Jersey; and Glens Falls, New York.

I never heard about these places growing up. My mother didn’t have to think for two seconds, though, to remember. The towns, and the order in which the placements occurred, were literally at her fingertips as she ticked them off, counting on her fingers the way my son, at age four, might display his mastery of the days of the week. “Waycross, Tampa, Wilmington . . .”

“Where were your parents?” I asked, assuming they must have been unable to leave England. She told me that her father, an art dealer, came to America shortly after she did, in 1941, to sell some pictures in New York. He was stuck there while the shipping passage was blocked by German U-boats. When it opened, he sent for his wife and they spent the duration of the war in New York City building up the business at Duveen Brothers
³
and getting established.

When the war ended, the foster program ended, too, and the Douglases had to collect their children, at which point Claire was sent off to the Convent of the Holy Child in Suffern, New York, where she stayed until the end of eighth grade; Gavin went to Milton Academy. “How were they able to have their children taken care of by American families on that war program when they were in the country themselves?” I asked her as she told me this story. She shook her head and said, “God only knows what story my mother told them.”