Dream Catcher: A Memoir (31 page)

“Where will you drill?” Daddy asked him.

“Don’t know that yet. Have to dowse for it first.”

The driller surveyed a couple of our trees and found what he was looking for, a sturdy yet supple Y-shaped branch. He took a jackknife out of his pocket, and cut it down. Then he began slowly, deliberately, but in a relaxed manner, walking across the property, holding the stick, one fork in each hand, parallel to the ground.

My father asked him with the hushed respect of a novice inquiring who is your master, “How did you learn how to do that?”

“My mother was a dowser. Showed me when I was about your girl’s age.”

The stick began to waggle slightly and the nose slowly pointed down toward the ground. “See that? There’s a water vein under there, but it’s a weak one. We’ll keep moving.” After a time he found one he liked and stopped. “Now here’s a real good one. Feel it?” He put the stick in my father’s hands. “No, not like that, you have to pull out on ’em. Not too much or you’ll split the stick, but too little and you won’t feel it pulling.”

Daddy and I spent several afternoons dowsing the property and felt some really good pulls, sure enough, in the area the driller had chosen.
He came back with his equipment a few days later and the whole family stood around to watch. He guessed he’d have to go down about two hundred and fifty feet. We each took a guess, and my mother wrote them down to see who’d come the closest. My father guessed three hundred; my mother, two hundred; my brother said four, which, not coincidentally, was also his age; and I said ninety-eight feet.

Ninety-eight feet to the inch later, we struck water. The driller nodded at me, making a “hats off to you, kid” gesture, and said, “Jerry, you’ve got yourself a little water witch there.” What in many families would be considered an amazing hole in one was simply par for the course for the Salingers, myself included; or, as with the dowser and his family, taken for granted that some folks simply have the gift. When you
know
it’s going to be ninety-eight feet, it is a shoulder shrug to have it confirmed, just like most of the “experiments” we did in school where we already knew what the outcome was supposed to be. These “glimpses” are not in any way the same experience as the “Eureka!” of discovery, or the thrill of winning a game of chance, as when I guessed—but didn’t know—the number of marbles in a jar at a town auction and got to keep them because I came the closest.

One night during the long drought, however, those “portals” did matter. I had had glimpses all that week, a recurring vision of Christmas trees on the lawn bursting into flame. I think there is something about chronic danger that is conducive to developing such sensitivities. You learn to listen with more than your ears. Like a wild animal, I could sense danger approaching by the smell of the ground and the feel of the air. That night, I felt an electricity in the air that made the hair on my arms stand on end. I lay in my bed in the dark and watched.

My mother had set fire to our house. I smelled smoke, ran into my little brother’s room, and said firmly, “Matthew, wake up. We have to get out of here.” Mom may have shouted “Fire,” I don’t know. I was focused on the little hand in mine and getting us safely out the front door. I didn’t know if Matthew was asleep or awake. Sometimes he was in between and would walk into my room at night and pee against the wall thinking he was in the bathroom or something, so I held him tightly and went by feel down the stairs to the landing near the front door. Flames were coming up the other set of stairs from the kitchen
addition below the landing. My mother was on the other side of the flames. She yelled, “Go get Daddy. I have to call the fire department.” I remember thinking it was crazy to stay where she was and to make a phone call, leaving no safe passage to the door should the flames spread as they were likely to do. I shooed the cats out the door, and to my great relief, they took off. I followed them into the Indian-summer night, my brother firmly in hand.

My father’s new house was about a half a mile away, down a steep and stony dirt road. In the valley between two hills the road became so dark that I saw sparkles in front of my eyes and absolutely nothing else. Country darkness. One of the things I love best about living in the city is that it never, ever gets that kind of blind dark. We were in pajamas and bare feet, and Matthew stepped on a sharp stone and started to cry. I talked to him and sang so he wouldn’t be scared. We got to Daddy’s house and told him the house was on fire. He went over, and I was told later that he and my mother held a hose on the house; apparently it took over half an hour for the fire engines to get there. At some point that night, Daddy came back from the fire to take us to stay with the Jones family over in Plainfield while he saw about the house. I wasn’t sure where my mother was. She later told me she didn’t leave the house because she was afraid of burglars ransacking the place. Daddy must have brought me some clothes from the house because I stank when I went to school the next day. My clothes weren’t burned but they smelled bad for a long time after.

There were no admissions or accusations. I simply assumed my mother had set the fire. I may have been wrong, she says now that I was mistaken, but at the time, the thought that it could have been an accident
never once
crossed my mind. A few days later I mentioned it in passing to my father, rolling my eyes about her story that she smelled something strange which she assumed were my Creepy Crawlers, those plastic toy bugs you baked in an oven.

Although the firemen determined that the fire had started in the hall closet and ventured a guess that perhaps a lightbulb had touched a sleeping bag and ignited it, and she, herself, to this day denies, perhaps quite rightly, that she had anything to do with it, Daddy shared my point of view, but for a different reason. He thought that she set it because of
where
it started. The hall closet was where her clothes were. He
said she set it because she wanted some new clothes and he was unwilling to pay for them. It only confirmed his view of what women will do for vanity.

As soon as the workmen had made some progress rebuilding, Daddy came and collected my brother and me from the neighbors who had taken us in. He dropped us off at the house on the edge of a crazy cliff and went back to his house alone to work.

The ground floor of the house was gutted. The upstairs looked shocking. All the bathroom lighting casements, toothbrushes, and other stuff had melted and formed long pools of black, twisted plastic. Nothing looked the way it was supposed to. The gerbils, I found out, had been trapped in their cage when the fire swept through the room. I thought of them not being able to run and hide.

1
. When I was in college, for example, I lay down for a nap, but before I fell asleep, I was jolted upright by a vision, a “glimpse,” of my roommate jumping off the bridge in town. I leapt up, told my friend James, who was in the room, to grab his parka, and we went running down to the river. We searched up and down the riverbank; no Annie. We went back to the dorm to wait for her to come home. Four hours later, she walked through the door soaking wet. She’d thrown herself off the bridge all right, but when the icy water hit her body, she snapped out of it, grabbed for the nearest branch, and pulled herself up onto the riverbank. She was fine except for a frostbitten toe. Some help my glimpse was!
Bubkes.
The message hadn’t come through stamped with the date and time.

A magic web with colors gay . . .

—“The Lady of Shalott,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A
FTER THE FIRE
, I began to read as if my life depended on it. I snuck books into school and read them behind the dreary, brown-paper-bag-covered schoolbooks that I was supposed to be reading, wherein plodded those aggressively unthrilling Pilgrims and drawings of equally unnaked Indians. Having exhausted the resources of the children’s library in Plainfield, my mother drove me twenty miles to the children’s library in Hanover, where, each week, I was allowed to check out six books. The books I chose were portals to other worlds offering foreign travel, time travel, psychic travel, intergalactic travel, dream travel.
East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Chronicles of Narnia, Five Go Off to Smugglers Cave, Mystery at the Old South Lake, At the Back of the North Wind, A Diamond in the Window, The Phantom Toll Booth, A Wrinkle in Time, Tal,
the
Oz
books. The last even provided a portal out of my own private nightmares. By some miracle, I was able to bring Dorothy’s technique into my dreams, and instead of being stuck in them, I could now click my heels three times, start spinning around, whirling through the galaxy, away from the dream, toward earth, then the map, then Cornish and my rooftop, and finally I’d land with a thump in my bed and wake up. I now held the keys both into and out of dream worlds.

My fictional Glass siblings with their precocious, grown-up reading
lists were robbed, I think, of the wonderful experience of childhood reading.

M
Y FATHER LET ME COME
with him to the Dartmouth College Library, where he browsed the stacks and sometimes borrowed books. It was a sanctuary of cool in the summer and cozy warmth in the winter and smelled wonderfully of dust, lemon oil, and old leather. You entered through a revolving door, exciting to begin with, and found yourself in a vast, quiet space with, I couldn’t believe it, a huge black-and-white tile floor like an almost endless chessboard. Daddy taught me how to play checkers, which I liked if I won, and chess, which took too long, especially when the only thing I really liked was to move my bishops—tall, oval-headed things with slits for mouths—on the diagonal. While Daddy went about his business in the stacks, I happily played games of patterns on the black-and-white squares.

At the end of the squares, just off the main hall, students sat reading at long tables by lamplight surrounded by a cozy glow. I hopscotched back across the main floor to look at the huge murals on the walls. I think they were of Indians, but I couldn’t show too much interest. It would have been a betrayal of the unwritten Salinger code of good taste. My father had made it stingingly clear that murals, as an art form, were beneath contempt. Ditto anything “primitive,” like the African art at my friend Rachel’s house. For him, there are those such as his “wondrous Chinese, and noble Hindus” with their “fine and subtle minds”
¹
and delicate features; and then there are the primitive, the physically strong, the great unwashed, including Negroes, Hispanics, and the vast majority of Caucasians. He has the taste in physiognomy of an Hasidic Jew: the paler and frailer and more studious looking, the more valued the being. For my father, there is something most definitely suspect—not kosher—about physical robustness. When I brought home an A in Spanish one year, he said, “Oh, terrific, now you’re studying the language of the ignorant!”

It’s not that in his day these were atypical cultural prejudices, but they are strange attitudes, it seems to me, for someone who considers himself to be well read, to think Spanish-speaking writers and poets and
painters, for example, are ignorant. Though my father considers himself to be widely read, I discovered as I grew older that what he is, in fact, is deeply and passionately read in very selected areas. He becomes an expert in whatever he falls in love with, whatever he is passionate about, and leaves the rest untouched.

His worldview is, essentially, a product of the movies of his day. To my father, all Spanish speakers are Puerto Rican washerwomen, or the toothless, grinning gypsy types in a Marx Brothers movie. Once, when he was criticizing me about my black friends in high school—“coarse” was what he called my friends and me—he said that blacks had no subtlety of humor at all. “Wasn’t it all that crap?” he said as he put on a big stupid grin and rolled his eyes and waved his hands. I said, “Dad, that’s in the movies, they don’t do that in real life amongst themselves. That’s for the camera, because that is what white people want to see.” His expression changed and he said thoughtfully, “No . . . of course you’re right. That makes sense.” He is by no means a heartfelt bigot who will hold to an idea in the face of evidence to the contrary. But his frame of reference is Hollywood in the twenties, thirties, and forties. When I was a teenager and announced my engagement to my karate teacher, who was black, my father was terribly concerned, but for fictional rather than real-life reasons, of which there were plenty; e.g., you’ve only known the guy a few months, you aren’t out of school, he doesn’t have a job except teaching karate and the occasional guitar gig, and so on. Instead, he cautioned me, saying he saw a movie once called
The Jazz Man
or something where a white woman married a black singer and “it worked out terribly.”