Dream Catcher: A Memoir (21 page)

My father was off in the woods writing
Zooey,
the sequel to
Franny,
which would end with Franny on the couch, at home, having had a nervous breakdown, looking up at the ceiling smiling, rising from her litter, as it were, healed by Seymour’s revelation that we are all Christ Himself.

Back at the Red house on the edge of the forest, my mother was lying on the couch, too, but she was not smiling up at the ceiling. She was in serious trouble, and no abracadabra revelation of Seymour’s was forthcoming. By midwinter of ’57, when I was about thirteen months old, my mother’s mental grip, tenuous at best, teetered over the edge. With the “adamantine logic of dreamland,”
³
she began to make plans to murder me and then commit suicide.
⁴

A few weeks later, my mother had sorted out the details of our murder/suicide. It would happen during a brief trip in town for a
New Yorker
gathering, a “summons to Rome” that my father was not yet in a position to refuse. She planned to accompany him. It would be she,
Claire, not the fictional Seymour, who’d go bananas and leave guts spattered across the hotel room for the horrified spouse to witness. Dumb luck? Grace? A sudden flash of mothers’ life force? Lahiri Mahasaya?
Some
thing intervened and whispered into her ear. While my father was out of the hotel room, my mother decided, suddenly, on impulse, to pack me up and run away instead.

Her stepfather arranged for an apartment and a nurse to care for me while she saw a psychiatrist three times a week.
⁵
My mother said that life would have been very different for her, and for me, had my father not come to New York, four months later, to convince her to return. She was far from “cured,” but following the advice of her “paternalistic, sexist, Freudian psychiatrist,” Claire went home to her husband. It was better for the child, she was told; how could she deprive her child of a father? She wishes now that she had had the courage to remain in New York, and to separate from a relationship she felt was destructive. Nevertheless, the four months of therapy, as well as the rest she had gained by having a nurse to take me to the park, gave her the strength to insist that if she were to return to my father, it would be under the following conditions: I was to have some friends to play with,
she
was to have some friends to play with, he was to build a proper nursery and a lawn—a contemptibly bourgeois trapping—and she was to be allowed to take me to a regular doctor for regular checkups and when I got sick. He agreed.

When Claire returned to Cornish in the summer of ’57, the lawn and the nursery were well under way. Although the nursery was Claire’s idea, its execution was pure Jerry. He didn’t trust the integrity of the builders who had good credentials. He often equates honesty with ignorance, purity with educational virginity. Here, he preferred the “purity” of some guys whom my mother called “absolute rubes” and who had little or no skill as carpenters. They built a flat roof, which of course had to be shoveled off, by my mother, every time it snowed. Throughout the long winters, buckets were placed strategically around the room to catch dripping water from the ceiling. The cream-colored ceiling tiles soon became dappled, like the concentric circles of rain on the surface of our
pond, with rust-colored rings from the leaks. The nursery was built of concrete cinder blocks and was not insulated. It had electric baseboards and was, my mother said, “hell to heat, but, at least I had someplace to put you.”

In writing to the Hands that summer, my father mentioned nothing of the winter’s events. But it’s clear that a certain amount of reality had penetrated Shangri-La. His response, however, was not actually to
do
something about it, but to trade one dream, one wish, for another. He told the Hands he wanted to move the family to Scotland. Living in Cornish was hard on Claire, he said, particularly during the long winters, and he wished that they lived just outside a little Scottish village, where they might walk to visit the vicar and have tea-time visits to and from people in the village. As for me, he said, my Peggy dances slowly and thoughtfully to jazz on the radio, solo, with her teddy bear tucked under one arm.

I
WAS TOO YOUNG
to understand the isolation in which my mother and I lived, but with an intensity born of long hunger, I savored the visits of the few human beings who came to Cornish. After my mother’s negotiated return to my father, her “revolt” as she calls it, a handful of people were on what my mother called the “authorized list,” who, as such, were allowed to trespass. The first visitor I remember was Father John, a priest and the only man my father allowed to stay the night in our house during the ten years that he and my mother were married. I was not yet three, and it was past my bedtime when Daddy took me down the road in his Jeep to the station in Windsor, Vermont, to meet Father John’s train. This was something special, I knew, because breaching my mother’s bedtime rule required nothing short of a papal dispensation.

I held my father’s hand tightly as we walked through the train station toward the platform. I remember being nearly blinded by bright sunlight, but it must have been fluorescent light since it was nighttime. I felt a little dizzy watching the sea of legs around me opening and closing, opening and closing. Shafts of light pierced the openings like sunlight seen from watery depths. I was tossed, like seaweed, in a sleepy reverie as I watched the movement around me. Suddenly a whistle exploded in my ear and the train came screaming through the walls of the
station, smashing the vision to smithereens. I was knocked off my feet and lifted into the air. I came to rest wedged between my father’s jacket and his chest. The last thing I saw before it went dark was a swirling tornado of legs and suitcases and people. As the screaming train reached my daddy’s jacket, it paused and, instead of crushing us, wisely went around, having met its match.

In years to come whenever we would hear the train whistle from deep in the valley below our house, my father would tell the story of Peggy and the Nighttime Train. Only in his version, when the train whistle blew, I leapt into his arms and flung myself under his jacket and wouldn’t come out. Not ever. But before he got to the part where he would make a low, rumbling whistle, I’d hide my head under his jacket and press my ear to his chest and listen to the rest of the story in that safe place with no words, where my father smelled like applewood smoke from the fireplace in his cabin, and Balkan Sobranie pipe tobacco, his voice a lullaby.

The next morning I woke up, and hearing voices, I followed the unfamiliar sound. Father John was sitting in the kitchen talking to my mother. He turned and said hello to me. I remember clearly that he waited quietly as I moved closer to him, the way I’d been taught to approach creatures in the wild. “I’ve brought you a little present. Perhaps you’d like it now?” I nodded. Mama said, “Yes,
please,
Peggy.” I said, “Yes, please,” and sat down and unwrapped the present by myself. There, in the folds of tissue paper, sat a beautiful, fragile, little blue-and-white china bowl. Something beautiful and delicate for me. When he placed it in my clumsy, oft-slapped hands, they were anointed and, in that moment, washed clean, more graceful than slow-falling snow.

I loved Father John, without reflection, without hesitation; the way plants turn toward the sun, it was a response of the soul. I loved him, as the children’s hymn about loving Jesus says, so simply, “because He first loved me.” There would be only a few more visits over the years until I was five and Father John was sent to the South Seas. I never saw him again. I had forgotten, until my mother reminded me recently, that he continued to send me strange little gifts from time to time, things carved from coconuts and sea grass. But I’ve never, ever forgotten that he loved me.

H
UMAN VISITORS WERE FEW
and far between. Besides Father John, there was but one other person who seemed to come and go as she pleased. Old Mrs. Cox (the mother of Archibald Cox
⁶
and a formidable woman in her own right) used to spend summers in Vermont, but after her husband died, she lived year-round in Windsor. She had a handsome, weathered face, and thick gray hair that she wore swept back in a sensible bun at the back of her head. Mrs. Cox had been a visitor even when visitors weren’t allowed. When she heard from someone that my mother was all alone up in the hills with a new baby, she set her broad Yankee jaw, donned woolen skirt and sensible shoes, and marched over to pay a social call on the new mother. My mother said that Mrs. Cox had a way of simply blustering past Daddy, paying no attention to his nonsense.
⁷
My mother was not allowed to return Mrs. Cox’s visit, however, until her “revolt.” After that, she and I were invited to afternoon tea with Mrs. Cox on occasion, and I remember well the smoky smell of Lapsang souchong tea, her beautiful silver tea set with its sugar bowl piled high with little white cubes, forbidden at home, that Mrs. Cox permitted me to take with little silver tongs and drop one-by-one into my milky cup of tea. I have no idea how she, her tea set, or her beautiful house with its formal gardens and statuary arrived in working-class Windsor. I think she willed it and they simply materialized.

Such was the force of her person that, ever since I can remember, my father was unable to refuse Mrs. Cox’s invitations. While she lived, he obeyed her summonses and faithfully attended her seasonal rituals: Fourth of July picnics, Labor Day softball games, Christmas eggnog, and so on. My father
hates
holidays. All of them put him in a foul mood, even Sunday because the mail doesn’t come. Summer, being an extended sort of holiday, never fails to depress him. He said
it “always reminds him of a red-haired, freckle-faced kid eating an ice-cream cone.” And then he shivers with the willies at the image. (Sometimes when I’m angry at him, I imagine a whole host of such “freckle-faced” Norman Rockwell characters coming to life and appearing at his doorstep.) Mrs. Cox’s were the only holiday gatherings I recall him attending during the entire time we lived together as a family.

One family, with girls around my own age, was on the “approved list” from about the time I was three years old until I was five or so, and that was Bill and Emmy Maxwell
⁸
and their children, Kate and Brooke. My mother said it was mutually agreed that it would work out better for all concerned that we visit them at their summer place, rather than having them come see us. She said I loved our visits to the “bear’s cabin,” as I apparently called their summer place.

My father’s Jeep partner throughout all five campaigns of World War II, John Keenan, visited a few times, but Judge and Mrs. Hand were the only people we entertained with any regularity. They lived in New York but spent summers in Cornish. Once a week, they would come to our house, or we would go to theirs. We would have an early dinner, then my parents and the Hands would read aloud, sometimes well into the night. I remember the voices, light and happy, instead of the dark, angry ones I often heard when I fell asleep at home with a knot in my stomach. I’m sad to say I don’t remember Mrs. Hand much except that she was old and Daddy read to her. But I loved loved loved Judge Hand. On these evenings I’d often fall asleep on the Judge’s lap. My mother remembers those visits as “delightful.” She said, “Jerry and Bee [Judge Hand] loved to talk literature together; they’d read aloud from one of Constance Black Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy’s novels. I liked to ask him questions about history, Roosevelt, life in New York, his past. Mrs. Hand was very quiet but liked wit in all its varieties, but in good taste.”

My mother and I went to tea at the Hands’ every Thursday afternoon during the summer. She told me, “This is when Judge Hand got to
know you well. He liked you very much and found in you a kindred spirit.” He used to call me The Dynamo.

Judge Hand often took long walks with me. He’d ask me what I’d been thinking about lately and tell me what was on his mind as well. He listened with care and real understanding, person to person, from the heart and from the mind. I didn’t have all the words for it at the time, but he gave me the feeling that I was a unique self who had a mind and feelings worth paying attention to, and worth the hard work of growing and thinking for myself, rather than becoming someone else’s dream. I was not surprised, years later, to come across a famous quotation by Judge Hand: “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”