Dream Catcher: A Memoir (23 page)

With my increase in rank to “big sister” came the responsibility for those under my command. Sometimes it nearly broke my back. One hot August evening, my brother, Matthew, now seven months old, and I were put to bed as usual long before dark. Matthew had learned to pull himself up in the crib. He was holding, teeteringly, on to the crib rail with one hand and throwing his precious bottle out of the crib with the other. He began to wail “ba-ba,” which was his word for bottle.
¹⁰

Mama swept into the room in a tight-lipped fury, plunked the bottle back in his bed, and said to him, “Next time it will stay on the floor till morning.” At seven months old, he didn’t know that she meant it, but at four and a half years old, I was sure as hell smart enough to know she did.

I watched him with the horror of watching someone who can’t read the danger sign walk into a trap. Again, he laboriously pulled himself up and threw the bottle out of the crib. He began to wail. When Mama didn’t come, he threw out his teddy, his blankie, his socks—one by one the contents of his world, as if on some life-or-death fishing expedition where you gamble all you own, including the last of your food, in hopes of hooking the big one. I got it instinctively: I understood the game and understood just as well that Mama did not. I knew he just wanted to know,
had
to know, that if he threw something away, it would come back. I knew that was all he wanted and that, however many times it took, at some point, he’d finally be satisfied, he’d know he could keep the bottle and drink it and go to sleep.

He needed to know that it was safe to love it because it comes back. I didn’t say all the words in my mind, but I knew. My parents used to joke about my knowing what he wanted when they didn’t have a clue. They’d say, “How come Peggy is the only one who can speak his language?”
¹¹

I didn’t think it was at all amusing or cute. It
enraged
me that they could be so obtuse. I also began to have a sense, which grew rapidly into conviction, that I was the only grown-up in the house. Oddly, though, the fact that I often knew better than my mother what the baby wanted gave me a great gift, a compass of normalcy as it were: I became aware that something was wrong with her that wasn’t wrong with me.

Matthew threw his bottle out of his crib again and, of course, began to cry. I knew she’d think he was just being naughty and punish him. So I snuck out of bed and tiptoed across the room, frightened that she might relent and come back into the room and we’d both be in big trouble. I picked up the bottle and, as quietly as I could, dragged a chair up to the crib so I could reach him. He took the bottle and put it in his mouth. Through his residual sobs, he watched me pick up the blanket and teddy and socks one by one. I climbed down and put the chair back, but before I could get into bed, out came the bottle, out came the blankie, and the socks. This may go on all night, I thought, but I was
grimly determined not to let her come in and spank him. The second time I retrieved the contents of his crib he smiled. The third time he laughed, the fourth time he laughed so hard that I was afraid she’d hear us. “Shhh! It’s our secret.”

I stood on the chair on tiptoes, my arm hanging over the crib rail, and was prepared to pat his head until he dropped off to sleep or until my arm dropped off—whichever came first. Luckily, he drifted off, and I crept back into bed.

As my brother lay sleeping in his crib, from my bed I could hear his snuffly breathing. He always had a cold, it seemed. Or was crying, one or the other. As his breath deepened, I let mine out. I knew by the sound that he would not wake up again soon. I listened to the night noises gathering, the songs of the grasshoppers and evening orioles as they faded seamlessly into the deeper night songs of crickets and owls, the world a monastery where the treble chant of the novices as they fall asleep is overtaken by the bass voices of the elders of the night watch.

The night-light in our room cast a gentle glow. I pretended that I lived on the ceiling. The ceiling tiles were my floor and I imagined walking around on them. After playing in the corner for a while, I tried to get down off the ceiling, but my bed had disappeared. The tiles disappeared, too. All I could see was gray, like a thick fog. I opened my eyes and I tried to get a breath of air. I was horribly hot. My sheets were all around me, tucked in so tightly that I couldn’t lift them off. I sort of breaststroked forward, and they only became tighter and tighter. I tried every direction but, like a lost traveler, I began to turn circles. My skin prickled with heat and panic. If I yelled for help, I’d wake my brother. Finally, I gave up, stopped struggling, and lay there, a “swell girl,” resigned to suffocate.

Mama came in around midnight to check on us. She undid the sheets and found a dripping-wet, glassy-eyed four-year-old girl.

“How long have you been like this?” she asked me.

“I don’t know, Mama,” I whispered.

“Why didn’t you call me when you got stuck in the sheets?”

I thought I was in trouble, but I had to answer or I’d be in worse trouble. I said, “Because I can’t wake up Matthew.”

She bit her lip, and the weather, the prevailing winds behind her eyes, shifted. She took my hand gently and brought me outside onto the
lawn bathed in the moonlight. I had never seen the world by moonlight, and like the little raccoon in my book by Garth Williams,
Wait Till the Moon Is Full,
I “wondered.” I drank in the clear night air. She led me up to the low stone wall that was built to keep the children playing on the lawn from falling down the steep side of the meadow. I looked over the wall, and there, in the valley below, were hundreds of tiny twinkling lights dancing the entire breadth and height of the meadow. Fireflies.

1
. (Billings) Learned Hand, 1872–1961. In a fifty-two-year career as district judge, appeals court judge, and chief judge (1939–51) of the second U.S. Court of Appeals, he issued some three thousand opinions touching virtually every area of law. His opinions were so highly regarded that he became known as “the tenth judge” of the U.S. Supreme Court (excerpted from
Who’s Who in America).

2
. I reviewed their income tax returns documenting payments to Christian Science practitioners who, presumably, prayed for me long distance.

3
. James Russell Lowell on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

4
. This is not something I grew up knowing about. She, generously, told me on a “need to know” basis when I was grappling with my own teetering luggage. The doctors who evaluated me noted that the bizarre symptoms I exhibited were common to the community of what they called “torture babies,” infants who had experienced repeated and sustained trauma over time.

5
. The names of M.D.s and amounts charged were listed on the following year’s income tax return as my father paid back “Uncle” Edward, as we called my widowed grandmother’s new husband.

6
. Archibald Cox, born 1912. Professor of law, Harvard, 1946–61 and 1965–84. Solicitor general of the United States under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (1961–65). He became widely known as director of the office of the Watergate special prosecution force (1973) and was fired when he demanded that President Richard Nixon turn over possibly incriminating tapes. In 1980 he became chairman of Common Cause.

7
. Not unlike the matriarch of my father’s fictional Glass family, Bessie Glass, in her behavior toward her privacy-loving boys.

8
. William Maxwell, writer, editor. He worked at
The New Yorker
for a long time, which is how he and my father became friends.

9
. In his story
Seymour: An Introduction,
published that year in
The New Yorker,
he wrote, “In 1959 . . . I think on the quantities of joy they [their youngest sister and brother] brought Seymour. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him, and saying, with immense admiration, ‘Seymour, your teeth are so nice and
yellow!’
He literally staggered over to me to ask if I’d heard what she said” (pp. 165–66).

10
. Ba-Ba was also his name for me. It predated Mama or Dada, who were nameless at the time, by a wide margin and lasted for years, it seemed, until the unfortunate months of “Baggy” finally changed into “Peggy.”

11
. As an adult, I am, of course, aware that this is a little fiction many parents tell their children, hoping to make them feel special, and perhaps, to mitigate the intrusion of a new baby brother or sister. In the “Inverted Forest” of our family, however, this was not comforting fiction, but rather, the awful truth.

. . . Fairy Elves,

Whose midnight revels by a forest side

Or fountain some belated peasant sees,

Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon

Sits arbitress . . .

—
Paradise Lost,
book 1, lines 781–85, Milton

M
Y CHILDHOOD HOUSE IN
C
ORNISH
sits high on a hill near the forest and is situated in such a way as to welcome little people and deter large ones from visiting. Miles of often impassable, never-signposted dirt roads served as a modest moat of mud in the spring; dust, bumps, and washboard in the summer; and ice and snow in the winter. Autumn simply dazzled and bewitched people, like cows drunk on fallen apples, into losing their way. It was sheer kismet, or perhaps Holden’s homing instinct, that permitted my father to find Cornish at all.

A child, especially a lonely one, one “hidden away,” is sometimes permitted a glimpse of the little people who inhabit these remote places. These creatures shun the limelight and the intrusion of large humans, preferring to dance, in field and forest, by the light of the moon. Deep within the old forest of tall pines at the foot of the steep meadow below our house is a small clearing where the sun shines through onto the forest floor. It smells wonderful as the sun warms the dry pine needles that lie in a carpet several feet thick on the ground. As a little girl, I visited
this spot every few weeks to make a house for the fairies who lived there. First, I’d form the castle wall of pine needles in a circle. Next, some smaller walls for separate rooms. In several of these rooms, I’d put soft bits of green moss for their beds and leaves for coverlets; in others, twigs for chairs and tables. But the largest room of all I just swept flat and clean of all debris. This was their dancing room. On moonlit nights they gathered here from all corners of the forest for the dance. It went on so late and so long that they danced the walls down. I could tell because whenever I returned, the outline of the walls remained but they always needed to be built up again with more pine needles. And the bedding, of course, needed changing as well.

The other place the fairies lived was beneath a large fungus that grew on a fallen maple tree beside our pond. The fungus was big enough for me to sit on, had I been so ill-mannered as to sit on someone’s house. I never saw the woodland fairies, since they only came out at night when I had to be in bed. I knew of their existence the way I knew of Santa Claus, by thrilling evidence of what was left behind—Santa’s half-drunk glass of milk I’d left for him, the pine-needle walls worn down by hundreds of tiny dancing feet. Once, though, I heard Santa’s sleigh land on the flat roof of my nursery as I lay in bed on Christmas Eve. I held perfectly still for several minutes, listening. Then I heard a loud woosh as it took off again. I told my mother about it in the morning. She solemnly and completely believed me. Were you to ask her today if it happened, I’m sure she would swear to it.

What I shall go to my grave swearing to is that, when I was little, I saw a house fairy. She was caught by the sunrise long after she was supposed to be gone. I woke up in my bed, and all I can say is that I felt a presence. I turned over, and there she was on my bed. She was as tall as my hand, and like a ballerina in stage lights, she was all movement and light and gossamer tulle. I watched as she twirled, spinning round and round, becoming smaller and smaller until she gradually faded into nothingness. Like a morning star, there was no identifiable time, no exact point dividing here and gone. Being and unbeing blended seamlessly into each other, and after a while I realized that only the afterglow remained etched, for a time, on my retina. A profound sense of otherness remained with me, and I told myself never to forget.

The scarcity of both woodland creatures and human friends, especially during the long winters, was equaled only by the abundance of fictional ones. Like the celibate monk in his dark cave, I sometimes was blessed with visions of paradise and wonder dancing before my eyes. Mama read books to me by the hour. Beautiful books with tales of other worlds, lands with no snow, where there were playmates and magical transportings, and dogs with eyes big as saucers, and princes riding up glass pyramids after golden apples. The Little Lame Prince imprisoned in a tower escapes through the window on a magic carpet and soars over the countryside; the lonely orphan girl discovers a secret garden and brings it back to life and in so doing finds a friend and family.