Dream Catcher: A Memoir (3 page)

She stayed with her parents in their New York apartment on the occasional
school holiday, sleeping under the dining room table—for reasons unknown and probably unquestioned. In eighth grade, she refused to go back to the convent. “They were doing a number on my head, trying to coerce me into becoming a nun. The whole school was ordered to shun me, not to speak to me, until I had declared my decision. I was going mad.” Her parents did not, or could not, force her to return, and in the fall of 1947 they enrolled her, instead, at Shipley, a girls’ boarding school in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Three years later, in the fall of 1950, she met a writer named Jerry Salinger at a party in New York given by Bee Stein, an artist, and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, a writer for
The New Yorker.
Claire’s parents lived in the same apartment building as the Steegmullers on East Sixty-sixth Street, and through their shared interest in the arts, they had become good friends as well as neighbors. Claire was sixteen and had just begun her senior year at Shipley. She arrived at the party looking strikingly beautiful, with the wide-eyed, vulnerable, on-the-brink look of Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
or Leslie Caron in
Gigi,
a movie my father loved so much that he bought a reel-to-reel copy and played it for us so many times when I was growing up that, to this day, I can still sing the lyrics beginning to end. As a child, I never heard the names Holden Caulfield or Seymour Glass, but even now I can’t hold a glass of champagne without hearing in my mind the song “The Night They Invented Champagne” from
Gigi.

Our shared world was not books, but rather, my father’s collection of reel-to-reel movies. During the long winters, our human visitors were, essentially, supplied courtesy of MGM. My father would set up the screen in front of the fireplace in the living room, and I’d lie on the rug watching Hitchcock’s
The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent;
Laurel and Hardy; W. C. Fields; and the Marx Brothers, to name a few of our favorites. The neat, plastic videocassettes he now owns are a sterile substitute for the sensuous delight I remember then. My father would take the reel from the round metal case, as though unwrapping a present, and place it on the projector spindle. I watched him thread the film through the maze of the projector in a lovely over and under hide-and-seek; his hands knew the special moves and codes for each location. When I threaded my old treadle Singer sewing machine
for my 4-H class, I felt the same thrill of competence, of secrets mastered.

When he secured the tail of the film in the empty reel, he was ready for me to turn off the lights. A thin blue stream of light beamed from the projector, widening as it moved toward the screen, smoke and dust playing in the flickering light. First the leader tape passed through with its strange hieroglyphics of bull’s-eyes and numbers and scratches, absent the dire modern video warnings about the FBI, imprisonment, and fines written in legalese. Then the title appeared with the movie’s music and opening credits.

Most of his movies were on two or three reels, so in the middle of the movie we had to stop, turn on the lights, and wait while my father rewound the spent reel and threaded the next. I liked the sound of the film at the end of each reel slapping against my father’s hand as it pulled free of the projector. I’d never stick my hand in the midst of all that flapping. He wasn’t scared of getting cut at all, even when he had to stop the movie and splice the film together where it broke.

Rewinding the film at intervals was also a chance for me to rewind, have a drink of juice or some peanuts, reassurance that the world, as I knew it, still existed. Some of the Hitchcock movies scared me half to death, and not in a fun way. Much to my father’s disgust, I always had to leave the room in the middle of
Foreign Correspondent
and put my head under a pillow to block out the screams of that sweet old man, Van Meer, when the Nazis tortured him in a windmill, offscreen, to get him to talk. Of my flights to the next room, my father would say, “Christ, all you and your mother want to see are sentimental pictures about Thanksgiving and puppy dogs.” In my father’s vocabulary,
sentimental
was a very damning word indeed.

Old Hitchcock movies, especially, became our secret language. As late as my senior year of high school, I’d receive a postcard saying simply, “There is a man in Scotland I must meet if anything is to be done. These men act quickly, quickly”—signed, in my dad’s handwriting, “Annabella Smith, Alt-na Shelloch, Scotland” (from
The 39 Steps
). When my brother was at boarding school, I received many a letter from him signed “Huntley Haverstock”
(Foreign Correspondent).
In short, we’d all light on the choice of Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn, rather
than some literary character, to describe the young Claire when they first met.

Claire wore her chestnut hair smoothed back from her lovely forehead. Pretty mouth, fullish lips, and the kind of high cheekbones that promise a beauty that does not fade with youth. Claire’s large eyes are a limpid, liquid blue that reflect the ambient world, the way only hazel or green eyes are supposed to do. On a stormy day her eyes look gray and wind-tossed; on a bright day at the beach, like blue sea glass and white sails. When her eyes became the color of a burnt match, it was a signal to her children to run and hide, fast. When her eyes became opaque, like those of a dead fish belly-up at the pond, it was time for me, the elder of her children, to take charge and do whatever needed to be done to survive, because she could no more see us than a dead fish can see the flies buzzing around its eyes.

Those little eyes so helpless and appealing,

one day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling.

(“Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” from
Gigi
)

The night my parents met, her eyes shone like a beacon across the room. She was wearing a mid-blue linen dress with a darker blue velvet collar, simple and elegant as a wild iris.
“God,
I loved that dress. I was a model for a designer called Nan Duskin that summer in New York. She let me keep it at the end of the season . . . said it was made for me. And it was, it matched my eyes perfectly. I’ve never worn anything more beautiful in my life.”

“You wore a gown of gold . . .”

“I wore blue that night, and the month was June.”

(“I Remember It Well,” from
Gigi
)

Jerry, at thirty-one, was nearly twice her age and was quite simply, or rather, quite complicatedly, tall, dark, and handsome. My father captures his own image, refracted through the eyes of his beloved, fictional Glass family. Under the guise of Buddy Glass as the purported author of
Seymour: An Introduction,
he writes that several members of the Glass
family, including himself, have eyes that “could all be rather bashfully described as extra-dark oxtail in color, or Plaintive Jewish Brown.” What I can tell you as his daughter, without the bashfulness of a male narrator, or the self-consciousness of a person looking at his own image in the mirror, is that my father’s eyes are absolutely beautiful, with thick, long, black eyelashes—inherited by my brother and, a generation later, by my son; the kind that women in the park, peeking into a carriage, click their tongues over and say, “Why is it always the
boys
who get those gorgeous long lashes?”

Buddy, continuing to describe or “introduce” his revered, dead brother, Seymour, writes: “. . . he had very wiry black hair. The word is almost kinky, but not quite; . . . It was most exceedingly pullable-looking hair, and pulled it surely got; the babies in the family always automatically reached for it, even before the nose, which, God wot, was also Outstanding.”

W
HEN
J
ERRY AND
C
LAIRE
saw each other from across the room at the Steegmullers’ party, Claire was dumbstruck.
⁴
They had each brought a date to the party, “so we couldn’t really talk much,” she told me. Every time she looked up, though, their eyes seemed to meet and she felt herself blush, afraid he might think she was rather forward. The next day Jerry phoned the hostess to thank her, and to ask her about that beautiful girl in the blue dress. She gave him Claire’s address at Shipley.

The next week, Claire received a letter from Jerry. She wrote a letter to him in return, agonizing over it, afraid she might not sound clever
enough to a real writer. He telephoned and wrote to her off and on throughout the 1950–51 school year. She knew from his letters that he was hard at work finishing a novel. She thinks he changed the school that Holden’s friend Jane Gallagher attended to Shipley for her. “It was the sort of thing he’d do, but I was too in awe and on my best behavior to ask.”

She knew, too, that Jerry was seriously considering becoming a monk. He had become friends with Daisetz Suzuki and meditated, he told her, at a Zen center in the Thousand Islands. The next year, when
The Catcher in the Rye
was published, he abruptly switched to Vedanta
⁵
and often studied with Swami Nikhilananda at the Vedanta center in the East Nineties. But he had already met Claire.

“That’s right,” Teddy said. “I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditating.” He took his arms down from the armrests, and tucked his hands, as if to keep them warm, under his thighs. “I would have had to take another body and come back to earth again
any
way—I mean I wasn’t so spiritually advanced that I could have died, if I hadn’t met that lady, and then gone straight to Brahma and never again have to come back to earth. But I wouldn’t have had to get incarnated in an A
mer
ican body if I hadn’t met that lady.”

(“Teddy” in
Nine Stories,
JDS)

When Claire came home to New York from Shipley for the summer, they started seeing each other. This was soon interrupted when each left for Europe, Jerry to the British Isles, to avoid being in America for the publication of
The Catcher.
“It’s a goddam embarrassment, publishing,” he once said to a fellow writer. “The poor boob who lets himself in for it might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down.”

Claire went to Italy, to be with her dying father. It did not come as a surprise to anyone who knew her father that old age finally caught up with Robert Langdon Douglas, or RLD as he was called by friends. He was nearly seventy when Claire, the last of his fifteen or so children, was born in 1933. Baron’s
Knights and Peerage
records nine of them. By the time she can remember him, he was suffering from senile dementia. She
told me once, at an age when I, too, would have “died” of embarrassment, that in the middle of a formal dinner party at their home in London, he boomed across the table in his plummy churchman’s voice, “Claire, have you moved your bowels today?”

RLD’s final years were characterized by similar occurrences of progressive unpredictability; however, his decision to repair to Italy to spend his last days rather than to the Black Douglas Clan’s lair in Scotland was well considered. Two divergent paths of his long life led him, at the end, to San Girolamo, a convent and nursing home for retired clergy, high in the hills above Florence. He had been an Anglican priest and had had a parish in Oxford, England, for a time. Several wives and even more offspring later, it was thought best that he find some other mode of employment, and he began his second, highly successful career as an art dealer and historian. “Your grandfather,” I’ve been told, “was largely responsible for putting the early Italian Masters, especially the Sienese, back on the map.” He wrote a lovely book on Fra Angelico, and though RLD was dead long before I was born, I used to take great comfort falling asleep beneath Giotto’s dark-skinned
Madonna and Child
when, as a young girl, I visited my grandmother in New York. Perhaps RLD did, too; toward the end of his life he converted to Catholicism.

When he died, he was awarded a hero’s funeral in Siena, where he is entombed in a great wall. My mother said the whole city turned out in medieval procession that day, with costumes, trumpets, and pageantry, to pay homage to the man who, through his work, had restored such honor to their city. My mother gave me his funeral proclamation by the city of Siena, a two-foot-by-three-foot document worthy of an honorary Italian.

After the funeral, Claire returned to New York. Jerry was back as well and had settled into an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street. When Claire first saw it, she was speechless. It was, she told me, “one of those partly underground, ground-floor places, very underwater feeling. The whole apartment was black and white. I was appalled, frightened, excited, bug-eyed at the black sheets on his bed. They were the height of sophistication and depravity to me. For Jerry, though, I think the black sheets and the black bookshelves, black coffee table, and so on matched his depression. He really had black holes where he could hardly move, barely talk.”

Claire would stay the night with him on those black sheets, but they were not intimate. Jerry was very involved with Vivekananda’s Vedanta center at the time, she told me, and as his character Teddy said, meeting a woman was heading in the wrong direction for enlightenment. Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda’s guru and predecessor, expressed the same opinion, though more forcibly, in his book
The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna
(which my father sent to his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, as the
only
thing worth reading), saying: