Dream Catcher: A Memoir (20 page)

She hears me strike the board and say

That she is under ban of all good men and women,

Being mentioned with a man

That has the worst of all bad names;

And thereupon replies

That his hair is beautiful,

Cold as the March wind his eyes.

—“Father and Child,” W. B. Yeats

1
. A generation later, a girlfriend of my father’s wrote that when he came to pick her up from her student apartment at Yale, to come to live with him and drop out of school, he arrived in his BMW, not his big Chevy Blazer, so that nearly all of her possessions, including her beloved bicycle that she’d had since she was a kid, were left behind. (The girl, Joyce Maynard, was eighteen, he was fifty-four.) She wrote that while she waited for him, she thought about a classmate she had become friends with at Yale and realized that she’d probably never see her again.

2
. See Jesus to his disciples, Matt. 4:18–23, also Matt. 10:37–39; Mark 1:16–21; Luke 14:26; and especially Luke 5:1–12, “They left everything and followed him.”

3
. After my brother was born in 1960, my father finally allowed my mother to hire someone (Mrs. Sawyer) to help her with the house once a week. Recently, Mrs. Sawyer said to me, “I just don’t know how your mother did it. Your dad, God love him, was never home in those days. I think I was the only person she had to talk to all week.”

4
. My mother kept their joint tax returns. I went over them, and sure enough, the weeks at hotels, the travel expenses, the donations to various cults and charities, are all there in black and white.

5
. Like his character Buddy Glass, who had “written and histrionically burned at least a dozen stories or sketches . . . since 1948” (
Seymour: An Introduction,
p. 182).

6
. Common hymns.

7
. “ ‘Ow,’ said Mattie to Babe, ‘you’re hurting my hand.’ He loosened his grip.”

8
. Rachel Anders and James R. Lane, eds.,
Cults and Consequences
(Los Angeles: Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, 1988).

9
. I do not think for a moment that all Buddhists or Hindus are “cultists,” any more than I believe that Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or most any other religion for that matter are lacking in their share of pernicious cults.

10
. Robert W. Dellinger,
Cults and Kids
(Boys Town, n.d.).

11
. Margaret Thaler Singer, “Coming out of the Cults,”
Psychology Today,
January 1979.

12
. A study conducted by the Jewish Community Relations Committee of Philadelphia asked former cult members to list their reasons for joining. The committee found that, in order of relative importance, the number one reason was loneliness and the need for friendship. “More than any other factor, the desire for uncomplicated warmth and acceptance . . . leads people into cults.”

13
. Ibid.

14
. Ibid.

15
. Ibid. Esther Dietz, founder and former director of the B’nai B’rith Cult Education Project, also found that most who become involved are rather naive, middle or upper-middle class, searching for a meaningful spiritual experience.

16
. Edward Levine, Ph.D., professor emeritus of sociology, Loyola University; board of directors, Mental Health Association of Evanston.

17
. Rabbi Yehuda Fine, founder and director of the Jewish Institute; member of the New York Task Force on Missionaries and Cults, and of the Interfaith Council of Concern on Cults.

18
. Esther Dietz confirms that Jews are overrepresented in cult membership. She found that Jews are particularly likely to be drawn to cults based on the Eastern religions—Hinduism in particular: “The Eastern or Hindu-based groups seem to be the most attractive to Jews and to have a relatively high proportion—as much as 25–30 percent (Divine Light Mission, Hare Krishna, Muktananda, Rajneesh, T.M., would be included in this group).”

19
. Joyce Maynard,
At Home in the World: A Memoir
(New York: Picador, 1998), p. 158.

20
. “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.”

21
. Jewish Community Relations Committee of Philadelphia,
Challenge of the Cults.
See also Dr. Sandy Andron, youth program director of the Central Agency for Jewish Education in Miami, in Anders and Lane,
Cults and Consequences.

22
. Drs. Louis J. West and Margaret Thaler Singer in
Cults, Quacks, and Non-Professional Psychotherapists
include love bombing in their outline of ten key points to cult indoctrination. See also re “love bombing”: Arthur Dole, professor of educational psychology at University of Pennsylvania in
Cults and Consequences.
Joyce Maynard records, in her memoir, this early stage of her relationship with my father. She tells him she had signed a book contract, “news that I might have expected to elicit expressions of concern, but he is past censure now. He expresses nothing but pleasure and encouragement to me about my upcoming assignments. . . . As always, the letter Jerry writes to me, after receiving [mine], begins with a warm and loving appreciation of what I have written to him. . . . He calls my letter from Miami beautiful. Reading [her letters], he says, revives in him a deep love of writing that he doesn’t often feel these days.”

23
. Arthur Dole in
Cults and Consequences.

24
. Robert J. Lifton,
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
(Norton Press, 1963).

25
. Mark Roggeman, police officer, Colorado; national chair, Security for Cult Awareness Network; in Anders and Lane,
Cults and Consequences,
Chap. 3, p. 16.

26
. Hamilton,
Salinger,
pp. 126–27.

27
. Joyce writes of her breakup with my father: “One day Jerry Salinger is the only man in my universe. I look to him to tell me what to write, what to think, what to wear, to read, to eat. He tells me who I am, who I should be. The next day he’s gone. . . . Not having Jerry to lead me, I feel left behind and lost, not simply alone physically, but spiritually stranded. I’ve been well acquainted with the sensation of loneliness all my life. Never like this” (
At Home,
p. 211).

Someone from
Esquire
interviewed Joyce the following winter, after their breakup. The interviewer wrote: “Her purity blows through the room like a draft. . . . She hugs her sides and sits by the fire, rocking . . .” (p. 223).

28
. Joyce, too, came to believe that she was incapable of the “purity” my father expects, though, sadly, she does not question the standard. “My only hope of redemption,” she writes, “is to have a baby. To me, having a baby with Jerry would be a way of experiencing a childhood I never had but longed for. If I cannot be the child myself that he would have wanted, I will be her next of kin anyway. If I can’t please him enough for who I am myself—and indications are that I cannot—I will please him by providing him with this other person who will be perfect in all the ways I am not. . . . He will never leave me, because I am the child’s mother” (Maynard, op. cit., pp. 167–68).

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro’ the field the road runs by . . .

The island of Shalott. . . .

Four gray walls, and four gray towers,

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

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

“I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what
can
have happened to me! When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one—but I’m grown up now,” she added in a sorrowful tone: “at least there’s no room to grow up any more
here.”

—Chapter 4, “The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
Lewis Carroll

A
S THE RABBIT SAID
, I think the trouble may have started because I was late. I was three weeks overdue when I finally arrived, yellow with jaundice and my hair all black. The nurse took me in to show to the proud father. He bellowed at her, “You’ve brought the wrong baby! Can’t you see this one’s Chinese?”

Later, when I was able to go home, he was in for another shock. Sitting on the couch, holding me gingerly, my father suddenly cried out and tossed me up in the air. My mother said that it was sheer luck that I landed on a cushion. This event was to be passed down for posterity in the following family verse:

Fire! Fire! False alarm.

Peggy peed on Daddy’s arm.

Daddy said that wasn’t nice.

Peggy said I’ll do it twice.

In the opening paragraph of
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,
published a month before my birth, in a passing of the torch, as it were, Franny Glass is no longer college-girl Claire’s age, as she was in
Franny,
but an infant. Baby Franny awakens, crying, at 2
A.M
. Her eldest brother, Seymour, who had warmed a bottle and fed her less than an hour ago, begins to read a Taoist tale to quiet her. Franny not only stops crying instantly, but years later “swears she remembers it.” The author tells us he chose to reproduce the Taoist tale, in its entirety, in the opening paragraphs of the story, “not just because I invariably go out of my way to recommend a good prose pacifier to parents or older brothers of ten-month-old babies.”

I was on a collision course with my father’s fiction. This baby was anything but “mute,” and the impossibility of “hiding me away somewhere,” as Holden dreamed, was beginning to turn into a nightmare. My father told my godparents, Judge and Mrs. Learned Hand,
¹
that the first month was terrible—the panic of having an infant in the wilderness, the incessant crying: we nearly gave her away. My father began construction of his own place, nearly a quarter of a mile into the forest. Soon he was spending several days at a time in his one-room cabin, leaving my mother and me alone, in his dream house at the edge of the forest.

My mother, I’m alive to testify, managed not to destroy her less than perfect creation. But she came very, very close. She was determined not to repeat with me what had been done to her by various nannies and governesses in the nursery. I would be read to, sung to, breast-fed, and gently toilet trained. She had great hopes and dreams of childhood being different for me than it was for her, and it was, but it’s hard to make the dream a reality with no help or instruction, no neighbors or friends, alone in the woods, especially when you have not been cared for adequately. It is well nigh impossible to reach the standard she had set for herself when the mother is as deeply, suicidally depressed as she was.

She doesn’t remember many details about that first year of my life. It’s mostly a dark blur. What she does remember is that, in general, as my
father became enchanted with me (by the time I was four months old and smiling he told the Hands, “We grow more overjoyed every day”), my mother continued to lose ground. She admits that her jealousy and rage over my replacement of her in my father’s affections would continue to give, for years to come, a particularly serrated edge to her punishments.

My father complained to the Hands of my “constant illness” and told them we had seen no one all winter. But what he doesn’t tell them is that I had not been brought to a doctor. He had suddenly embraced Christian Science, and now, in addition to being forbidden any friends or visitors, doctors were out.
²
There was absolutely no one to see or hear if I was left alone, for great pits of time, while my mother disappeared into depression’s oblivion.