Dream Catcher: A Memoir (26 page)

W
HEN THE SNOW FELL IN
1961, I was told not to put it in my mouth. This might not seem like a big deal to a city kid, but in Cornish where we drank out of the brooks, tapped maple sap from the trees, boiled it down, and poured it on snow for candy, and ate wild berries and apples by the handful, this was strange and disturbing. My mother said it had “fallout” in it from nuclear bomb testing. I examined great drifts of it that winter, looking for fallout, the deadly black flecks I expected to find sprinkled in amongst the white snowflakes. I never found any until we went to visit Granny, Grandpa, and Aunt Doris in New York City for a long weekend after Thanksgiving. The place was radioactive! Black, sooty flecks and more yellow dog pee than I could stomach.

The trip had not started out well either. We woke up in the dark, which was creepy. (It was a revelation to me, when I became of age to make my own travel plans, that it is, in fact, totally unnecessary to rise before dawn when going on a journey. Nor does one have to get to the airport several hours in advance.) I had a beautiful dress laid out on my bed in the nursery. It was a red print jumper with little smocked flowers across the chest, and underneath a white blouse with the same red print at the border of the cuffs and collar. I got myself dressed, except for the buttons up the back, and went in to use the bathroom. I sat down. Splash! Backwards into the toilet. Daddy had forgotten to put down the lid. Drowning in horror and disgust and panic, things went dark for a while, and then I remember arms wrapping me in “soft pinky,” my mohair blanket. I was inconsolable about having to wear a different dress. Life, as we know it, was ruined.

I’m not sure it’s possible, but I distinctly remember my grandmother walking out onto the tarmac to meet us as we climbed down the steep, narrow stairs that a man rolled up to the plane door when we landed. Life proceeded to get unruined as Aunt Doris said I could have the beautiful blue butterfly broach she was wearing, for keeps. Her bedroom in my grandparents’ apartment at 1133 Park Avenue was my favorite place to visit. She had a beautiful dressing table with a little chair she let me sit on and look into the mirror. But the best thing was she let me look into all the drawers and touch her make-up and jewelry and glass bottles of perfume and soft gloves. I could even take things out carefully and try them on one by one in the mirror. She told me strange and wonderful facts. For example, she called the skin on my face “your complexion” and said I should never wash my face with soap because it dries out your complexion and leads to wrinkles. I should use this pretty-smelling stuff in a jar, pat it on my face with warm water, and then rinse it off with cold water and pat dry.

Did you know water can smell? Water at home is just water, but in New York it smells nice as it comes out of the faucet and into the sink. My mother wrinkled her nose and said, “That’s
chlor
ine, dear. It’s a chemical.” Well,
I
had learned a thing or two myself. Getting ready for bed that evening, I announced to my mother as she began to wash her face, “Soap
ruins
your complexion, you know.”

My grandparents had a dining room off the living room. You could see it from the couch, but you had to go through a sort of archway to sit down at the table. In the corner of the dining room stood a big black-and-white television set at an angle where the three of them, my aunt, grandmother, and grandfather, could watch the news throughout dinner. I couldn’t see it very well; I think I was too small to see over the table anyway, but I remember the flickering light from the television reflecting across the polished table and the dark, disapproving looks my aunt and grandmother exchanged in silent commentary. I was glad it was someone on television who had been naughty instead of me. I got gingersnaps to dip in whipped cream for dessert.

I only remember the living room at night with the lights on. Grandpa sat in a big chair at one end of the room and listened to the Mills Brothers on a huge Victrola. He had a nice singing voice, and a good ear like me, and I couldn’t figure out why his singing made Daddy squirm the way he did when Mama sang off-key. There was also something
embarrassing about Granny’s prints of the
Life of the Orchid
that hung over the living room couch; I could tell by the way he mentioned them, but I didn’t get that either.

I went to sleep with the comforting hum of traffic and city buses a dozen stories below. I loved it that, in the city, the night had people in it. In the country, the night, like the winter, is too solitary, too devoid of human consort.

T
HE NEXT YEAR, IN THE
fall of 1962, a wonderful thing happened. The earth opened up and swallowed the big girls. Plainfield and Meriden townships consolidated their school districts: we sent over our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders; they sent us their third, fourth, and fifth. So now, with the exception of first and second grades, there would be only one grade per room. We not only kept our beloved Mrs. Corette for another year, but the playground, in all its glory, was ours.

That winter, we did not take our family trip to Florida, as planned. Instead my mother was going to take my brother and me to spend several weeks in Barbados with her mother, whom my father referred to as “Mummy De-ah,” which he always said in a strained, high-pitched voice, mimicking Claire and her mother talking together. Daddy had some business to take care of in New York, I was told. No one mentioned that his book
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
was to be published that January. In fact, I’d venture to say that no title of any of his books was ever spoken in our house; they were like the boxes of books with his name on them, sent by his publisher I suppose, that I discovered in the cellar, stowed away and unmentioned. He used to tell us things his characters said though, quoting them as though he were talking about old friends, like Mr. Custe or Mr. Curzon or Bill Shawn.

He wrote to us in Barbados from his room at “The Sherry Netherland 781 5th Avenue 10022 ELDORADO 5-2800.” It was addressed to Miss Peggy and Master Matthew Salinger c/o the Buccaneer Bay Hotel St. James Barbados W.I. He said he loved and missed us and hoped we were having warm weather. He also assured us that he’d pick up Joey, our dog, from the kennel the minute he got home. The next letter included my mother, sort of, beginning Dear Girls and Boy. It was a very
funny letter, full of news about our imaginary friend Mr. Curzon. Again he tells us he misses us, but adds that his work is going well so we should just concentrate on swimming and being warm. What I took as my due then, but now strikes me as not exactly
normal,
is that all the lavish expressions of affection in my father’s letters to us as a family were directed, almost without exception, solely to me. The last letter we received before returning home from Barbados began Dear Fambly, but ended in boldface type that he was convinced more than ever that Peggy Salingers don’t grow on trees. It was signed with about a million XXXs.

I don’t remember if I had a good time in Barbados that time or not. I imagine I did, and it seems a bit churlish to report that all I remember clearly about my own experience is that strange blisters appeared on my arms, and I suddenly had the chills and wanted thick blankets on my bed. I was sunburned, my mother told me as she put some kind of salve on my arms. This was quite a blow to my pride. My mother and brother were the fair ones who needed lots of smelly suntan lotion; Daddy and I never burned. The other thing I remember was the smell of sugarcane burning in the evening, which disturbed me greatly. All I knew about were forest fires raging out of control because, as Smokey the Bear warned, someone had been careless with a match. I had no concept of controlled stubble burning as a farming technique, and I lay awake at night terrified the fire would soon reach our hotel, and even more terrified that I seemed to be the only one who was concerned.

What I did notice was that sunning and resting did my mother a world of good. All the nice, playful, pretty things within my mother came out on vacation visits with her mother. She wasn’t just well-behaved, she was fun. There was new life in her veins, her face shone, her clothes were bright, Lilly Pulitzer colors, she even smelled different than she did at home. I liked being near her. There were no scenes, no punishments. This other Mama, the lovely one who smelled of Blue Grass lotion and lavender, put in an appearance, a transformation that happened most reliably when we were away from Cornish, and Daddy stayed behind.

My grandmother, too, seemed magically transformed. My brother and I had been forbidden to see her when we were very young, and I still recall clearly the image I created of her in my mind as a wicked witch, with wild hair and bony, jabbing, long fingers. When I met her, here was
this tiny old lady with twinkling blue eyes and soft, curly, white hair, looking for all the world like a fairy godmother. Everything about our visits with her was enchanting. We left the cold, gray isolation of winter in Cornish and were transported to fairy land: Barbados or Venice, her house in Mount Kisco with its swimming pool and gardens, her apartment at Seventy-ninth and Madison with its beautifully scrolled front entrance door that looked as if someone had blinked and turned a secret garden of ivy and roses into everlasting metalwork, doormen who knew me and an elevator stop that was hers alone, and inside were paintings of voluptuous naked ladies, of people dressed like kings and queens, of Madonna and child illuminated by sparkling cut-glass lamps, and floors made of hundreds of small wooden rectangles in a rainbow of forest colors from honey to deep red to darkest brown, all pieced together in patterns that only a magician’s kaleidoscope could have made in its perfection.

For years, I thought of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just a block away from her apartment, as a natural extension of the magical world she inhabited. There, at the museum, most wondrous of all, to me, was that you could take a tray and fill it with food you could see and smell, laid out before your eyes for the taking in such abundance it was like the feasts I’d read about in my books where the king, or some pasha in silk pajamas, or a Mandarin emperor, clapped his hands and a hundred dishes might be paraded before him and his guests. After making your choices, you found a table fit for the gods set all around a long pool of water with various sprites making gentle, musical, sparkling fountains of water turning the air around them into a dance. As Holden said, I wish you could have been there—it has been renovated since then, if one can refer to what Mount Vesuvius did to Pompeii as a “renovation.” The pool has been covered over, or removed to make way for more tables, and all too human waiters bring your meal sight unseen chosen from letters and sentences and numbers on a menu. Gone the magical grotto, the sound and feel and shimmer of droplets in the air, copper penny wishes tossed in by children; now the raucous sounds of utensils and glass and plate, humanity in a hurry, with grown-ups signaling waiters to bring the check.

The civility I remember of the Metropolitan Museum, the quiet sanctuary, was similar to the way I felt about the relations between Granny and my mother. They maintained a formal, perhaps distant civility—though
it didn’t strike me as distant when I was a child and thought everyone with an English accent conversed in that manner—that was contagious. Even when I was twelve and the possibility of the barest hint of civility between my mother and me seemed well nigh impossible, we had a lovely, peaceful time together exploring Italy with Granny. It makes me think, now, that my mother was quite right in saying how different things would have been had she stayed in New York and received some psychiatric help and support, rather than going back to Cornish after she ran away.

My father told me that Mummy De-ah was a terrible liar and if I had any self-respect, I’d have nothing to do with such a person. I didn’t disagree with him, about the lying that is, but what I didn’t tell him is that I enjoyed her, and even some of the lies, or “stories,” just the same. Like the whopper she told us about riding on the back of dolphins from the Cipriani, that glorious island hotel, to the dock by Saint Mark’s Square in Venice. Although Daddy had a fit about the vacations that my mother, brother, and I took with her, he’d still send me love notes, even in enemy territory.