Dream Catcher: A Memoir (27 page)

M
RS
. C
ORETTE, WHO HAD PROBABLY
never taken such a vacation, refers cheerfully and generously to my absence from school during this time.

[Report card: period 4]

Peggy’s reading work continues to be satisfactory this period. With your help during her absences, she has progressed satisfactorily with her group.

Her travel experience must have been richly rewarding as she came back looking so rested and tanned.

Peggy has been a most interesting child with whom to work. She completes her seatwork assignments and is a helper in our room. She has a very nice, sweet little singing voice and she likes to sing for us. Peggy has shown qualities of leadership and her enthusiasm has been most enjoyable. We shall miss her in our room next year.

We want to say a big “thank you” to you for allowing Peggy to bring so many interesting things to our classroom. Plants, books, etc. are always appreciated and enjoyed by the little children.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Corette

W
E WANT TO SAY A
big “thank you” to Mrs. Corette. I revisited the school playground this year, on a sad trip to Plainfield for the funeral of my friend Viola’s little sister. During the break between the church service and the burial, I walked a block over to the old school, which is now an auction house. I had driven by there hundreds of times, but I hadn’t been back behind the school, where the playground was, in over thirty years. I remembered the playground as huge and was curious to see how big it really was, or rather, how small it might have become to the eyes of a grown-up after all those years. I rounded the corner of the old school building and found, for the first time in my experience of revisiting childhood places, it was even bigger than I’d remembered. It was immense. I have been a city dweller for so long that I now measure what urban real estate agents call “outdoor space” in square feet, not acres. I paced off 125 long-legged strides from the back of the building across the field to the edge of the woods. There were probably twenty feet of woods, which was part of our playground as well, before it fell sharply over the forbidden bank into an old dirt pit. In fair weather we ate our lunch outside in circles of friends on the field. I wish I’d brought my lunch box and thermos.

I thought about Viola’s sister. I’d been with her a few days before she died from a long battle with brain cancer. Viola and I were forty; Carol was thirty-one years old. The tumor had devoured most of her spark. She could still walk a little and sit up with assistance, but the light was nearly gone from her eyes. The town minister, who had been Carol’s sixth-grade teacher and soccer coach, arrived for a visit. We sat around talking out back of Viola’s house. To include Carol in the conversation, I asked her, “Did you have Miss Chapman, or Mrs. Spaulding?” I was met with a blank look, and her mother answered for her
that she did have Mrs. Spaulding in fifth grade but wasn’t sure about Miss Chapman. “You did have Mrs. Corette though, didn’t you?” I asked. She smiled, not just with her lips but her dark eyes lit up. “Mrs. Corette,” she said slowly. “Mrs. Corette, yes.”

A few days later, the pain was outrunning the morphine, and Viola, in her gentle way, told her beloved, feisty little sister that it was time to stop fighting and urged her to turn toward the light and take Dad’s hand. Carol died minutes later, sitting up in her easy chair, her family and her cats surrounding her, loving her to the last. It occurred to me that if I ever die (!)—yes, I just wrote that—I mean if I’m scared when I’m dying, which I most probably will be, I hate going anyplace strange (my son was playing with our cheap folding closet doors yesterday and said, “It’s just like we’re on an airplane, Mommy”—they were, indeed, like bathroom doors on a plane, site of several whopping panic attacks, and just the mention of it made me run to the bathroom to empty my gripping bowels. No, I won’t be going gently into the night I think). When I die, I don’t really want the Saints or Jesus or any of those big guys to stretch out their hand to me in the light. I’d like to see Mrs. Corette in her pink dress with frog appliqués on the pockets, holding out her hand and inviting me to come and join the circle in the field. “Bluebird, bluebird, through my window, take a little girl and tap her on the shoulder.”

Requiem eternam.
Recess eternal.

I
WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD
when I entered third grade in the fall of ’63, the same age and grade as Seymour was in the story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” published in
The New Yorker
a year and a half later, in 1965. The “story” consists of a letter, the length of which took up nearly the entire issue of the magazine, written by Seymour, age seven, from summer camp, to his parents back home. He asks them to send a “few” books for his brother Buddy, age five, and him to read over the summer. His request includes the complete works of Tolstoy; Cervantes’
Don Quixote; Raja-Yoga
and
Bhakti-Yoga
by Vivekananda; all of Charles Dickens, some of George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters;
Chinese Materia Medica
by Porter Smith; some Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac; selections from the works of Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Martin Leppert, Eugène Sue; the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and so the list goes on and on.

This is not simply the summer reading list of a peculiar fictional character; it is my father’s way of treating the reader to the same advice and exhortation he gave his own real children, though at a slightly older age. With the exception of the foreign-language books such as conversational Italian, and the “two invaluably stupid books” by Erdonna and Baum, there wasn’t one of the books on Seymour’s list that my brother and I hadn’t heard him canonize or declare anathema, using the same language, ad nauseam, I’m afraid. It was hard for me to maintain an adult reference point as I read “Hapworth” in my late thirties—lots of
adolescent eye-rolling and tooth-sucking at being lectured—“I
know,
Dad, you’ve said it about a
mill
ion times already.” No one else, that I know anyway, talks like this. Phrases I could recite from memory:

Both are written by distinguished, false scholars, men of condescension, exploitation, and quiet, personal ambition. . . . I would greatly appreciate anything not containing excellent photographs . . . a damned beautifully self-reliant spinster . . . a genius beyond easy or cheap compare! . . . Vivekananda of India. He is one of the most exciting, original, and best equipped giants of this century I have ever run into . . . godsent models of the feculent curse of intellectuality and smooth education running rampant without talent or penetrating humanity . . . preferably unwritten by vainglorious or nostalgic veterans or enterprising journalists of slight ability or conscience . . .

(“Hapworth 16, 1924”)

We third graders in Plainfield were pleased to begin reading in the
Junior Classics of the Collier’s Encyclopedia.
On the first day of school, pretty Mrs. Beaupre told us to bring the volume home and have our mothers help us cover it in brown paper from a shopping bag, and write the title on the cover, centered, with our name and class in the upper right-hand corner. I remember illustrations of Indians having a lot more fun than the Pilgrims, and being so bored sitting there in class that I used to disappear and walk around in the pictures.

One day just after recess, we all took our seats and folded our hands. Mrs. Beaupre said, “Children, open your desks and take out your
Junior Reader
s.” Roseanne LaPlante was about to read aloud when Mrs. Spaulding, the principal, entered our classroom. She asked Mrs. Beaupre if she would step into the hall for a moment. Marilyn Percy, one of the front-row girls, was appointed monitor, which meant she was supposed to write down the names of all the children who misbehaved during the teacher’s absence and tattle when the teacher returned. Neither Viola nor I, who sat in the back with the boys and could shoot spitballs with the best of them, was ever appointed monitor, nor were any of the boys, who, in those days, were, by definition, unfit to snitch, being made of “snips and snails and puppy dog tails,” as opposed to “sugar and spice and everything nice.”

This time, though, not one of us budged. We were all wondering whose father had had an accident at home with the farm machinery, or over at the split ball-bearing factory, and who’d have to get home right away. Mrs. Beaupre looked strange when she and Mrs. Spaulding stepped back into the classroom. She said, “Children, President Kennedy has just been shot.”

Bedlam broke out in our classroom as several children stood on their chairs and stomped and clapped and whistled.
¹
I could not have been more shocked than if Mrs. Spaulding had entered our classroom and pulled down her pants. Not about the president so much as that anyone would think that someone being shot was something to cheer about, and that they dared do it in class, in front of the principal.

My mother picked me up at the usual time. I got into the car and she started to tell me about the president. I said I already knew that. During the funeral, Daddy was in front of the television, his face an ashen green, with tears rolling silently down his cheeks as he sat and stared. The only time I have ever seen my father cry in my whole life was the day he watched JFK’s funeral procession on television.

I thought, as I watched the procession, I must never forget this. So, for some reason, I set myself the task of memorizing the drumbeat of the long funeral march: dum, dum, dum, da-da-da; dum, dum, dum, da-da-da; dum, dum, dum, da-da-da; dum, dum, da-dum—all those blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Arlington National Cemetery. As I listened, I thought about Granny, sitting by the window in her bedroom overlooking Park Avenue, as she did every morning, hoping to catch a glimpse of little Caroline Kennedy going to school.
²
She called me in and we sat there together by the window as she told me that Caroline and I were almost the same age and how prettily she was
dressed the last time she had seen her. She was thrilled by a “sighting.” The little boy, John junior, whom we saw saluting his father’s casket, was the same age as my brother. They wound up, years later, at boarding school together.

My mother had already shed tears over the Kennedys the spring before the president was shot. President Kennedy had decided to have a party to honor American writers and artists, and he had invited my parents to the White House. I remember thinking how wonderful, having cake and ice cream with the president. They almost went, such were my father’s feelings for President Kennedy (to this day, although I have warm feelings for President Kennedy, I don’t know why he was singled out in my father’s affections). My father delayed replying to think it over.

Mrs. Kennedy placed a call from the White House to our house in Cornish. Our telephone number at the time was 401. She spoke to my mother, who said she’d love to come but was embarrassed to say that she was having trouble convincing her husband, you know how he is about his privacy. Mrs. Kennedy said let me try. A conspiracy of well-brought-up young ladies. My mother told me, “Jackie got on the phone with him and then again with me. She really wanted him at the dinner. But I must have let on I wanted it. So he said no way to me. Jerry didn’t want me to feel I was worth anything, and above all, he wanted to make sure that I be prevented from having a chance to fall into the feminine vice of vanity. . . . I may still have the invitation. I wrote a haiku at the time and kept it for years. It was something like: