Dream Catcher: A Memoir (22 page)

My mother says she remembers coming upon us in the living room discussing a drawing I had done. She quietly backed out of the room so as not to disturb us at work. I wish I could remember the particulars of our conversations, but I recently came across a short poem that expresses beautifully how friendship with an old man could mean so much to a young child—how we would be landsmen. It is called “The Little Boy and the Old Man” by Shel Silverstein:

Said the little boy, “Sometimes I drop my spoon.”

Said the little old man, “I do that too.”

The little boy whispered, “I wet my pants.”

“I do that too,” laughed the little old man.

Said the little boy, “I often cry.”

The old man nodded, “So do I.”

“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems

Grown-ups don’t pay attention to me.”

And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.

“I know what you mean,” said the little old man.

Judge Hand died when I was five, the year Father John was sent to the South Seas. I miss him still. When I was a college student at Brandeis studying history and law, I often imagined conversations with him, wishing he were there to talk to, to share my excitement. Both he and Father John left a warm place in my life, though, not an empty one, the way the mouse in Leo Lionni’s book
Frederick
saves
the colors of summer in his mind to sustain him through the long, dark winter.

T
HE WINTER OF
’59 was a long, gray, sleepless night. Even my father longed for spring when the sunlight returned and Judge and Mrs. Hand once again warmed our lives with their good company. In a letter to the Hands, my father writes of the endless winter, and how he misses them terribly. He tells them he wished they lived in Cornish year-round. But my father, at least, had escaped the snow and ice for many weeks at a time. He’d been in Atlantic City hotel rooms trying to finish a final draft of
Seymour: An Introduction.

While my father was away, a terrible thing happened. It remained locked away, buried deep within my body, until nearly thirty-five years later, when all hell broke loose during the birth of my son. I had been in hard labor for some thirty-four hours when, suddenly, my water broke on the delivery table and I began to disappear. A three-year-old girl took my place at the window of my eyes and told the nurses what she saw. “I didn’t kill it, I didn’t kill the baby, I didn’t mean to,” she screamed, pleading with the nurses to believe her.

I’m three years old and terrible sounds are coming from the bathroom, sounds like the ones I hear in my ears now. My mother is in the bathroom, and I have to pee. I don’t dare knock on the bathroom door. I’m hiding in my room and stuffing my fingers in my ears, which doesn’t help. The noise stops. I hear the door shut and Mama’s footsteps fade down the hall to their bedroom. When the door is shut, I creep out quietly and steal into the bathroom. I haven’t peed in so long I just had to go in there or risk sitting in cold, wet clothes until somebody finds me. You never knew how long that could be. Just short of forever. I dash in and barely make it, plunk down on the toilet and pee. I get up and flush like a good girl. Mama’s shrieks reach me, too late. “Don’t flush the toilet. Don’t flush it!” I look and there in the toilet is a baby, all watery and bloody, but a small, real baby. And I’d killed it.

The attending nurse clicked her tongue and said in an Irish brogue, “It’s terrible, just terrible the things children see.” I asked her if we could all pretend that I was expelling a tumor, that there
wasn’t any baby, any
real
baby that could die, that I might kill by accident. That helped until the god of mercy came, Epidural is thy name.

After my son was born, I asked my mother about what I’d seen, the flashback in the delivery room. She confirmed that she did indeed have a miscarriage well into her sixth month of pregnancy and there was a baby in the toilet. She said she was saving it for Dr. Balantine to examine. She had no idea that I’d known anything about it.

My own “not knowing” about it until childbirth when the experience broke through into my consciousness with the force of a tidal wave was not, in hindsight, watertight. It leaked through in dreams. Throughout my entire childhood, I was plagued with recurring nightmares, some of which visited me regularly for years. One that’s been with me nearly my whole life is my waterbabies dream and variations. I’m on a beach trying to rescue babies from a tidal wave. It is a gray day with blackish clouds on the horizon. I see tens, sometimes hundreds, of babies playing on the sand, their parents oblivious to the wall of water, the great tsunami casting a shadow of death across the sand. I yell, try to warn them, but to no avail. I’m the only one who sees it coming. I rescue several, grabbing their arms, legs, whatever I can reach, and carry them off the beach. I often rescue many of them successfully, but never all of them. Sometimes, after the storm passes, I’m in a flooded beach house, water up to my knees, and a baby, horribly jellyfish-like, and not-put-togetherable-again, swirls by my legs in a pinky puddle. One I missed.

S
HORTLY AFTER MY FATHER
came home from Atlantic City, with the text of
Seymour: An Introduction
cradled in his arms, my mother became pregnant again. My brother, Matthew, was born on February 13, 1960.

Daddy and I drove to the hospital to pick up Mama. I moved to the back of the Jeep and watched as Mama sat on a red rubber inner tube in front. I asked what the tube was for and she said it was because of stitches. It wasn’t until we were nearly home that I heard a squealy noise and leaned forward, between the seats, to see what it was. I was stunned to see a baby’s face poking out of the bundle of blankets she was carrying.
I knew she went to the hospital to have a baby, but it never occurred to me that she’d actually bring one home.

My mother said she noticed that I seemed to go into a profound depression after my brother was born. She said I seemed afraid that I’d injure the baby somehow. She was concerned about it but didn’t know what to do. My father saw in me only the apple of his eye, his little soldier, his “Dynamo.” He told the Hands, “Matthew is an intelligent and smiley baby. . . . He doesn’t have his sister’s toughness and bounce. But who does?”

T
OUGHNESS AND BOUNCE: BE A
swell girl, a good soldier. This message penetrated my being so intensely that I can remember the first time it was put into words. Once, when I was still at the age where I could pull my father’s nose and ears and get away with it, I wandered into the bathroom as he was preparing to shave. Daddy lifted me up so I could see better. I was perched on the little counter beside the sink, my favorite spot from which to witness the mysteries, the morning ablutions, of shaving. He dipped his hands in a basin of hot water, heated on the stove in a big pot by my mother, and splashed the water on his face. Then he took the lathering brush from its special stand. The stubby brush had a chunk of jewel-like glass on top that fit snugly into a half ring of metal and clicked perfectly back into place when you were through playing with it. Daddy made a beard of white lather. As he drew the razor down his face, neat strips of pink appeared beneath the lather. I thought about the strips of ice, beautiful skateable ice, that emerged from underneath his shovel as he cleared the deep, powdery snow off our pond a few weeks before.

I wasn’t sure where the razor came from or went to. I knew it was dangerous and not to be touched; I thought it might slice my eyes if I looked at it, but I never saw it except when he was holding it. I heard it scritch across his face as he shaved off each strip of lather. I only liked to watch the down part. The up part, under his chin, sometimes left little blood droplets; also it unnerved me to see him with his head bent unnaturally to the side. Daddy disappeared and all I could see was a bent neck, like the necks of unlucky birds or chipmunks that dangled from our
cat’s mouth as she slunk past me emitting a weird, throaty growl to warn me off her prey.

Under the nose was last. Unlike the smooth, steady strokes on the rest of his face, lots of little scrapes happened so fast that he had to hold his nose out of the way with one finger of his other hand so that it didn’t get in the way of the razor. He rinsed his face, splashing up water with his hands and patting, and then we both paused and looked in the mirror to see what was there.

The reflection was all wrong. “Daddy, you don’t really look like that,” I said. He almost staggered, his knee bent as he looked at me with a smile as loud as a shout.
⁹
I could see in his face that I must have done something wonderfully good. But I flinched inside the same as I did when my mother came at me suddenly—bad, bad girl; any notion of what I’d done obliterated in the blizzard of her anger. I disappeared in the fog of the bathroom.

Years later he recounted
his
version of that story to me and said to me, with relief, that that was the moment when he knew I was going to be a
good
girl. It became clear to me, with the second or third telling, that he thought I had been being kind to him, in the opaque way of a child, telling a homely guy that he didn’t really look like that, that he really was the handsomest of all, and the mirror was wrong. I always thought, and still think, my father to be very handsome indeed; but that wasn’t what I’d meant at all. He has a very asymmetrical face: his big nose slants markedly to the left, his lips likewise are off-center. So when you look at him in the mirror, he really does look a lot different in his reflection than in person because all the off-center things are reversed, creating a very different-looking image. I was making a factual observation, not weaving a kind fiction about his appearance in the mirror. Although I realized he’d misunderstood me, I kept quiet, feeling like a liar.

He repeated this story to me many times growing up. After the part where I say “Daddy, you don’t really look like that,” he says, with as much relief at a disaster narrowly skirted as pride in the achievement,
“That’s
when I knew you were going to be a good girl.” A “swell girl,” as his character Babe Gladwaller put it while he looks at his ten-year-old sister, Mattie, sleeping. Babe thinks about how short a time it is to be a child, to be ten; “all of a sudden little girls wear lipstick, all of a sudden little boys shave and smoke.” He wants her to “try to live up to the best that’s in you.”

If you give your word to people, let them know that they’re getting the word of the best. If you room with some dopey girl at college, try to make her less dopey. If you’re standing outside a theater and some old gal comes up selling gum, give her a buck if you’ve got a buck—but only if you can do it without patronizing her. . . . You’re a little girl, but you understand me. You’re going to be smart when you grow up. But if you can’t be smart and a swell girl, too, then I don’t want to see you grow up. Be a swell girl, Mat.

(“Last Day of the Last Furlough”)

I didn’t read these words until I was long grown up, but the message—if you can’t be smart and a
swell
girl, too, then I don’t want to see you grow up—was imprinted in the marrow of my bones. It became part of the curse whispered in my ear, my personal
Semper Fi,
do or die. Whatever happened, I wanted to be a swell girl.