Dream Catcher: A Memoir (24 page)

Daddy didn’t read to me very often; he made up stories instead. The only book I remember him reading aloud was not one of mine, but an old children’s book that he’d kept from when he was a little boy. That, in itself, made it magical. It was called
The Weather Children.
As the story opens, Mattie and her little brother are playing in a field when a strange old man flies down from the sky. He is so tired he sits against a tree and asks the children if they would guard his satchel while he takes a rest. He tells them that he is The Weatherman and opens his satchel to show them just a few of the capes he wears as he flies through the sky creating the weather. There is a beautiful peach cape for sunrise, pale yellow for the morning sunshine, sky blue for a summer’s afternoon. He said the children might slip these over their shoulders and try them out, but they mustn’t put on any of the capes that wouldn’t be right for a summer’s day. Some of the others, he warned, are tricky to handle, and they shouldn’t even unfold them to look or they might get into trouble.

The children were delighted to soar above the countryside on a beautiful day, looking down upon picnics and farmers. After a while, though, they couldn’t resist peeking deeper into the satchel. They unfolded a deep violet cape with silvery flashes, and the farmers and picnickers below were dismayed at the big thunderstorm that seemed to come out of nowhere on a day that was supposed to be sunny and clear. The children were so blown about, they could not fold the cape neatly back into the bag as they had been shown. The trouble really started when they spotted, toward the bottom of the satchel, the most magnificent
cape they had ever seen. It was midnight blue with frosty silver swirls and snowflake patterns. Had The Weatherman not woken up in the cold and caught up with them, there’s no telling what trouble they might have caused the world. The Weatherman decided never again to take a holiday.

My father, too, created worlds and seasons and weather for me. As he cast his spell, the smoke of applewood fires and Balkan Sobranie rose, weaving tendrils of stories over the land. His early stories were not separate tales confined to nursery or bedtime; they intermingled freely with our daily life. They wove in and out as we fed the birds, went for the mail, took our afternoon walks, and so on. The content, too, was often rather spur-of-the-moment, depending on his mood.

A group of characters my father made up became friends who accompanied me throughout my childhood. There was Irving and Julius Grosbeak, who came to our bird feeder, year after year, when the grosbeaks returned to Cornish for the winter. They spoke with heavy Brooklyn accents and always came to the window the morning of their arrival and asked my father, “Say, Mack, who’s dat pretty little goil in da plaid bat[h]robe?”

“It’s Peggy,” Daddy told them.

“No! You don’t say. Boy, she sure has gotten pretty!”

Some were cautionary tales that cropped up as my behavior perhaps warranted. My favorite imaginary character was “that naughty little girl Lucia Ferenzi” and her toy lion, Samba. These stories usually began, “You’re not going to believe what that naughty little girl Lucia Ferenzi did!” And a tall tale would unfold that bore a striking resemblance to something that Peggy, who just happened to have a toy lion named Simba, had done. Of course Daddy and I knew that
I
would never do anything like that.
¹

The stories he told changed over time, from the ones in the fifties he told me throughout the day, to those he told my brother at bedtime in the mid-sixties. The later stories were much more organized. The longest, which continued each night at bedtime for many years, was,
like the wonderful “Laughing Man” in
Nine Stories,
a tale of high adventure. These were the travels of Cap’n Bruno and his mates as they sailed around the world on their submarine. My brother’s favorite mates were Dead-eye Dick, who always talked out of the side of his mouth in very gruff tones, and Hultch, who was so tall he had to lie flat along the bottom of the entire submarine to accompany them.

In the fifties, however, the boundaries between story and life were so fluid, so entwined, that not only did the characters accompany us throughout the day in Cornish, they even ventured beyond the boundaries of Cornish itself and followed us down the mount into town. I often went with my father as he drove into Windsor to get his mail from the post office.
²
Part of our routine, as we rode down the hill in his Jeep, was that I’d ask him at a particular stretch of the forest, “Daddy, what are the mosquitoes saying?” The mosquitoes, I had decided for reasons I no longer remember, resided among a dark thicket of trees we passed beneath, just before emerging into sky and open highway by the Connecticut River. “They’re saying, ‘Look, there’s Peggy and Daddy going for the mail. We understand that Peggy is going to visit Mrs. Hand tomorrow. Do you think she’ll bring Sootie and Kertiss Icebox (my toy bear and squirrel respectively) with her?’ ” It was our version of “Talk of the Town.”

Two of our make-believe friends, Mr. Custe and Mr. Curzon, lived in Windsor and wore brown felt city hats like the ones Daddy wore when we went to New York. They always asked for me when Daddy went into Windsor alone. We never seemed to run into them, though, when we went into town together, not even at the diner where they usually ate lunch. I’m sure I would have spotted them; no one else in Windsor wore those hats. Sometimes Daddy and I would sit at the lunch counter and have jelly omelettes. I’d twirl my stool while he chatted with the girls behind the counter and gave me nickels to play my favorite song, over and over, on the jukebox:

Walk right in, sit right down,

Daddy let your hair hang down.

Everybody’s talking ’bout a new way of walking,

Do you want to lose your mind?

(The Roof Top Singers)

B
Y THE TIME
I
WAS
five and a half, in the summer of 1961, I no longer had to wait at home for Daddy to make an appearance; I was finally big enough to breach his tower. It was a special treat to walk all by myself through the woods to the cabin where my father worked and bring him his lunch. One day my best friend, Viola, came over to play while her mother cleaned our house. My mother packed our lunches and we took one paper sack for us and one for my father and set off down the path through the field on the other side of the house.

Just past the juniper bushes that concealed one of my secret forts, the path reached the woods and dropped off sharply. There, my father had set into the hill large, beautiful stepping-stones, so getting down was easy even for little legs. Beside the path, dappled sunshine fell on the thick blanket of pine needles. As we reached a clearing, the path leveled off and you could hear the stream and a little waterfall. The path stopped beside a deep, fresh spring. There were clumps of wild purple iris on the banks of the stream and iridescent dragonflies, but by far the most beautiful thing, magical almost, to us was deep within the spring. If you knelt down on the path and reached down into the cold water, you could pull out green glass bottles of Coca-Cola that Daddy put there to keep cool.

My father had built a simple wooden footbridge, about ten feet long, across the stream, just high enough that we could sit on it and dangle our feet in the water. Viola and I sat down on the footbridge in the sunshine and opened our lunch. My mother was good at packing lunch boxes and presents. She knew how to make things special and pretty, the way kids like them, with separate compartments for things—like my beloved roll-top wooden pencil box that had a special place for everything one might need. Viola and I ate our lunch and drank our Cokes and imagined swimming in the stream and wondered if there were any fish in it (yuck!) and what happened to them if they swam near the edge where the stream dropped out of sight. Viola’s shoe fell in the water and floated away. We knew we were in trouble, but for now it was so funny we nearly fell in after it. We went on our way one shoe lighter.

The last part of the path I only liked once a year when the gauntlet of brambles on either side turned to blackberries. In the next clearing was Daddy’s Green house. It was built of cinder blocks painted dark green like the pine trees around it. It had just one small room inside and a big overhang outside where he stored cords of wood to feed his wood-burning stove in the winter. He used to pat the stacked wood with his hand, the way a farmer might pat his prize heifer on her plump flanks, or a farmer’s wife her plump jars of tomatoes and preserves put up for the winter.

We knocked on the door. I was always a little nervous, though I’m not sure why. Daddy opened the door, surprised, but happy to see us. We came in and sat on the army cot that took up almost the entire wall. There were bookshelves above the cot with cool things on them like tins of salty corn parchies, and glass honey jars full of silver coins or peppermints. Lots of my drawings were taped up on the wall. Opposite the cot was the wood-burning stove. At the far end, way up in the air where I couldn’t reach it, was an old, brown leather car bench seat that my father used for a desk chair. (I guess he had a tall platform built underneath it, but from my child’s-eye view, it seemed suspended in the air.) He showed me how he sat, lotus position, legs crossed beneath him. Even at the flexible age of five I couldn’t copy him. On the plain slab of wood he used for a desk was an old manual typewriter, which he used in his self-taught two-fingers-only style. Light shone onto his desk from a milky skylight above, a thing that positively delighted my father. Lots of small yellow pieces of paper with notes written in dark, soft-lead pencil were taped, here and there, to almost every surface within reach of the desk—the wall, the lampshade, and so on. I never had to be told not to look directly at his desk, nor did I ever read any of those notes. I even avoided looking in their direction just to make sure I didn’t read something by mistake.

He shooed us outside, but came out and talked to us for a while. He was always so nice to my friends when I was very young. And he wasn’t like most other grown-ups who talked to you about stupid stuff like what
grades
you were getting in school. He talked about things that we kids might talk about with each other. I’ve lost that touch now that I’m grown up. I often catch myself asking kids about things that I thought were dumb then. It also occurs to me now that his Green house was cool the way a kid’s tree fort is cool, not the way I, or other adults I know, would build a study.

I’m not sure why, but I’m glad he had that Green house in the
woods. It feels like a loss somehow that, after my parents were divorced, he built a real house just down the road, with a study that seems just another room with bookshelves. He still uses the same old car seat and typewriter though. My old drawings from kindergarten and grammar school, like Tuffy the Tooth, who whitely cautioned him to “watch out for between-meal treats,” also made the move and stood guard over his work until they were burned, together with the dogs Daisy and Tillie, in a house fire in 1992.

1
. Like Seymour in “Bananafish,” talking to his four-year-old friend, Sybil: “You probably won’t believe this, but some little girls like to poke that little dog with balloon sticks.”

2
. I don’t know when he started getting his own mail at a P.O. box in Windsor instead of our family mailbox down the road.

D
URING THE FALL OF
1961, two of my father’s Glass children, Franny and Zooey, ventured beyond the safe confines of
The New Yorker
and were introduced to the readership of the world at large. It was a big move from magazine to book. Another big move into the world occurred that fall as Viola and I entered the first grade of the Plainfield elementary school. I don’t think either of my parents saw Cornish and the next town over, Plainfield, except “Thro’ the Mirror Blue,” through the reflection of their own dreams. I saw clearly that these towns were not the creations of a New Yorker’s dream, such as Rockefeller’s Woodstock, Vermont, or stage sets for Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, and Marjorie Reynolds in
Holiday Inn
or for Danny Kaye, Bing Crosby, and Rosemary Clooney in
White Christmas.
They were the real McCoy. And Hatfield. The sublime and the squalid coexist in a way that’s hard to believe unless you’ve lived in a place like that. In the center of town there is a plain and lovely white New England church, a small brick library, one tiny general store with wooden floors, cans of Campbell’s soup, Wonder bread, Crisco, and the most beautiful glass case of penny candy in the universe, complete with wax lips that you could both wear and chew, Pixy Stix—straws full of tart sugar that you bit open and sprinkled out on your tongue—and jawbreakers that magically turned different colors as you sucked them. Across the street from the store is the town hall, a square, brick, one-story building with peeling paint on the windowsills. Inside, the citizens of Plainfield held auctions,
potluck suppers, and on the stage at the back of the hall, ceremonies of all sorts, such as kindergarten graduations. On the town hall stage, a Plainfield artist had built and painted a three-dimensional backdrop of natural scenery—trees, fields, flowers—which, when you shine different sets of colored lights on it from the projection room, actually changes seasons, from spring to summer to fall and winter. It is glorious, luminous, transcendent; by far my favorite of Maxfield Parrish’s works. I saw it again last summer at a school reunion, and it was still a sight to behold.