Dream Catcher: A Memoir (32 page)

He used to borrow movies from the Dartmouth film library, and we often stopped there after a trip to the regular library. But someone at the film library apparently let it be known which movies J. D. Salinger borrowed, and he’s never since darkened their door. It’s not that he had any cause whatsoever to be embarrassed about his choice of movies; it was the violation of his privacy that so infuriated him.

After Daddy finished his business at the libraries, he’d take me to Lou’s or the Village Green for a tuna fish sandwich and french fries. Then we’d either go next door to the Dartmouth Bookstore or we’d go to do his marketing at the Hanover Co-op. He loved the fresh food but hated to go there because he stood a good chance of running into someone he knew and, to be polite, would have to stop and talk. The dreaded human encounter.
I liked the Co-op better than the local stores because it didn’t smell like ammonia and old sour-milk sponges or death at the meat counter, the way the others did, like the old wooden-floored IGA or the Grand Union with its S & H green stamps booklets we filled but never redeemed. When, years later, Purity Supreme, which he referred to as Puberty Supreme, built a megastore in Lebanon, he gave up the Co-op, even though he liked the Co-op’s food better. He preferred the impersonal atmosphere.

On the way home from a trip to Hanover, I mostly just looked out the window because if you engaged my father in conversation while driving, he’d turn and look right at you, forgetting he was at the wheel. He’d swerve back onto the road or into his lane at the last instant. It was even worse if you were in the backseat. He’d turn his head all the way around to listen to you. If my brother made a peep, I shot him my most murderous look that said, “Shut up, will you. Do you want to get us all killed?” In an era of two-lane highways—your lane and the traffic coming toward you—he was an absolutely terrifying passer. When someone ahead of us was going too slowly, being a “road hog” (one of his favorite movies was one where W. C. Fields inherits a million dollars and spends it all smashing, one by one, into the cars of offensive drivers), he would pull up to the offending car’s bumper, lurk there at forty-five miles an hour or so until he reached what was technically a passing zone, and then pull out to pass. We’d careen down the wrong side of the road heading straight for an oncoming car. He’d duck back just in time. In the Jeep it was always dicey whether it would have enough pickup to pass the car in front before hitting the oncoming one. Terrifying. My hands, he noticed, were never unclenched as we drove. He thought it was just a habit of mine.

Right by the beaver pond, before the Plainfield town line, a solitary road sign said
NO PASSING
. “Will you look at that,” he’d say, “tsking” his teeth. “What would Miss Chapman say? ‘No Pissing!’ Can you imagine?” I fell out in giggles every time he said it.

M
ISS
C
HAPMAN, MY FOURTH-GRADE TEACHER
, would
not
have been amused. Before they put in the interstate, we passed her house each way to and from Hanover. It sat at the edge of the road, brown, squat,
square, and unlike its neighbors, utterly devoid of any decoration: no flowers, no lawn ornaments, no shutters to soften the severe lines of the house. Miss Chapman, like her house, stood in stark contrast to the lush world of Mrs. Corette and pretty, young Mrs. Beaupre. After a whole year, the only sign of life on my report card was the terse comment “Peggy is often careless in her work. She is capable of better work.” I got A’s and A-’s in most subjects. My only bad grade was a C- in penmanship, but considering that my right arm was in a cast that term and I had to learn to print with my left, it could have been worse.

The contrast between the worlds, over the rainbow, of my books and the reality of our classroom became unbearable that winter. We sat for endless hours beneath banks of poorly maintained, maddeningly flickering fluorescent lights, buried beneath an endless pile of purple mimeo worksheets made up thirty years prior by a spinster whose motto was “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, active minds the devil’s spawning ground.” The more you did, the more they came—endless, boring, numbing. I nearly wept in despair.

One dreary day in late February, with yet another endless hurdle to span between boredom and recess, something magical was to happen. Winter meant, for the most part, keeping out of range of the snowball-throwing boys, which was no joke, for more than once I witnessed a boy packing his with a rock in the middle. This was the same boy who slit open live frogs, and whose father tied him to a tree and whipped him with a bullwhip for punishment. Telling on H., even if it hadn’t been against my personal code of ethics, was out of the question.

There was one big rule on the playground, and that was we were not allowed to go “over the bank.” About twenty feet into the pine forest, the ground fell away sharply, almost straight down. As in old maps before the world was round, that steep bank was where the known world ended. One day, at recess, as I stood at the edge and looked over the bank, I felt a rush of excitement. It suddenly seemed like the wardrobe entrance to Narnia. I hadn’t planned to, but, unknown to anyone, I slipped over the edge and entered another world. I was dizzy with the adventure and the peril of what would happen if I was caught. I slid down the bank slowly so as not to slip and fall without stopping. (All those weekends of ski lessons over at Mount Ascutney stood me in good stead; I knew how to do a controlled side-slip.) At the floor of the forest
where the bank leveled off was a brook with the most perfectly clear black ice I’d ever seen. It wove like a magical snake through the trees. Most ice is white and bumpy and you need skates to slide well; boots offer too much resistance. Here was skating heaven, even in boots, and it was my secret. I scrambled up the bank to make sure I was back before recess ended and walked back across the field when the bell rang. I had something to live for, I had a secret.

At recess time I went straight across the field and stood at the edge of the pine trees and busied myself with some feigned play and waited, one eye on the playground monitor, until she turned her back and I whisked over the bank. After a few days the enchantment of the secret began to wear off; it needed the added magic of a secret shared. I told Viola and she came, too. Suddenly, from up above, we heard someone shout, “Miss Chapman’s coming!”

Miss Chapman, Viola has said in her kindly, generous way, should have retired years before. She was neither mean nor cruel, but she was
fierce.
Perhaps I can say this without being too mean since she is long dead: Miss Chapman looked like a gargoyle perched on the gates to every child’s land of nightmares. She had thick, terrible lips that, when she became enraged, were home to great stringy wads of white matter. Her great wrinkled wattle shook and her eyes bulged like a wrung rooster’s when she struggled to give breath to her fury at some misbehaving child. At particularly daring moments we whispered under our breath and
well
out of earshot, “The old battle-ax.” She was, indeed, old and terrible as medieval weapons. “Miss Chapman is coming!”

She strode across the playground like the Huns across the plains and she was headed straight for us. Somehow, in my mind’s eye, I recall seeing her coming from the point of view of an aerial camera, impossible in real life, panning the entire playground from above. We scrambled up the bank, and like the condemned without the mercy of a blindfold, we saw the whites of her eyes. We knew that she knew. We had gone over the bank.

It was such a huge offense, something I like to think not attempted before nor since the days when Brave Peggy and the Fair Viola walked the earth behind Plainfield Elementary School; my mind simply could not imagine the punishment. Miss Chapman, too, was speechless. She sputtered, but nothing came out. The rage came coursing through her
hand as it seized my shoulder, talonlike, to carry her prey back to the nest to be torn to shreds. She shook Viola so hard she wet her pants. She must have shaken me as well, but I don’t remember it. As she dragged us—for I can only assume Viola was pinioned on the other side—across the long field, my senses registered only the wind howling in my ears, Miss Chapman’s brown wool coat flapping in my face.

There was no principal’s office at our school, no detention room, no escape from our dreaded captor. We were hers from 8
A.M
. until 2:30
P.M
. for an interminably long month of days. There was no morning recess for us. We sat with our heads down on our desks while the rest of the class was excused. No lunchtime with the rest of the school; we ate alone in the room under the watchful eye of herself, bread sticking in our throats. No afternoon recess, again heads down on our desk for the entire period while we listened to her breathe and swallow and clear her throat and smack her thick lips—all manner of terrible intimacy with the bodily functions of the feared one. It was the longest March in the long history of endless rural New England Marches. Mud season. The bowels of Mother Nature.

1
. “Hapworth.”

I
T MAY COME AS
a surprise, but throughout my childhood, my father was an ideal traveling companion, not just at home on our walks in the woods, but in public as well. When we visited New York, he would let me run down the hotel corridors, ride the store escalators five times, laugh out loud, go to the Central Park Zoo and only visit the seals if that was all I wanted to look at the whole time, visit the Museum of Natural History and head straight for the dinosaurs, with nothing “educational” in between. The New York I knew was Holden’s New York: the Museum, Central Park with its zoo and carrousel and lagoon with the ducks, the doormen and the lobbies of good hotels. After my grandparents and aunt moved from Park Avenue to a smaller apartment, we stayed at the Plaza when we were in town. I came to think of “Eloise” as a close relation. Like Eloise, “my absolutely most favorite thing” was room-service breakfast. Plates came with beautiful silver lids on them to keep eggs or pancakes warm, or rested on a bed of ice to chill the grapefruit or melon. Everything had to be opened like a present, even the heavy linen napkins, just the way I imagined the princesses in my fairy books would have breakfast served to them.

It was at the Plaza, in the Oak Room, that my father taught me formal table manners. I’ll never forget it, I was so impressed at the time. I still am. He told me that
he
didn’t care if I used the proper fork, that was my choice. But he wanted to make sure that it was a choice, and that I never embarrassed myself because I didn’t know any better. Or had to feel awkward on a date when I grew up.

After breakfast, we’d walk across the street into the park. Daddy always took me for a ride on the carrousel. I remember how happy my father looked, how he stood there grinning from one big ear to the other, waving to me each time I came around on my horse.

This time, however, we had to cut short our visit to the park because we were going to see Bill at
The New Yorker.
After Judge Hand died, my father asked Bill Shawn, the editor of
The New Yorker,
if he would be my godfather. I had seen him many times before, but never at work. I could tell by the way Daddy talked about it that this was something special. Sort of like being allowed inside his Green house.

I always liked to see Bill. His face looked like an illustration of the old man in the moon in one of my books: kind and round and softly twinkling when he smiled at me, which was often. He moved at a slow, gentle, steady, and sedate pace across my path. His wife, Cecile, reminded me of black twigs blowing across the face of the moon on a windy night. I never really saw her face; it never registered, that is. She was all movement. Where a face might be, I remember a blur of jagged black scribbles and pink and the feeling that someone had just left the spot where she had been standing. She wore a black velvet bow in her hair, which I simply coveted, and beautiful black patent-leather high heels that clicked marvelously when she walked across the floor of their apartment.