Dream Catcher: A Memoir (4 page)

A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts, and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on “woman and gold,” I say, “Shame on him!” “Woman and gold” are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he can not act as he likes.

When a disciple of Ramakrishna’s confesses that he has been enjoying sexual intercourse with his wife, Ramakrishna replies, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You have children, and still you enjoy intercourse with your wife. Don’t you hate yourself for thus leading an animal life? Don’t you hate yourself for dallying with a body which contains only blood, phlegm, filth, and excreta?”

The summer after her freshman year at Radcliffe, Claire was back in New York, where she had a summer job as a model for Lord & Taylor. She was careful to hide this from Jerry: “Your father would
not
have approved, all that vain, worldly, women-and-clothes stuff. . . . I didn’t dare tell him.”

Around the time Jerry began seeing Claire, he went on a couple of dates with Leila Hadley, a writer, whom he met through his friend S. J. Perelman. When Ms. Hadley saw that same apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street, she described it as “extremely bare”:

There was just a lamp and an artist’s drawing board. He used to do rather good sketches, and when I read “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” I was sure he had based the hero on himself.
On the wall of his apartment there was a picture of himself in uniform.
⁶

In contrast to the young Claire, who was “too in awe and on my best behavior to ask” any personal questions, Ms. Hadley was confident enough, mature enough, to ask him questions and offer her own opinions rather than reflect his own. She said that Jerry “never talked about himself and he resented any personal questions—about his family, or his background. . . . [He] was not easy to be with.” Their relationship was a brief one.

T
HIS RESENTMENT OF QUESTIONS
about family and background, about connections from island to mainland, runs like a mother lode through our family. (Recall the opening of
The Catcher in the Rye:
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me . . . my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.”) My aunt Doris—Daddy’s only sister—and I were talking recently about being raised not to ask any questions, and most especially, not to ask questions about one’s background, or as Holden put it, how one’s parents “were occupied and all before they had” you. Doris told me that by the time she was about seven, shortly after her brother was born, she had “learned enough about the birds and the bees” to figure out that her mother, Miriam, must have had parents. One day she said, “Mother, you
must
have a mother and daddy somewhere. Where are they?”

Her mother snapped, “People die, don’t they?”

That’s it. That was all she said. Doris heard from one of her aunts on the Salinger side that Miriam was heartbroken when, years later, her mother actually did die. Miriam never said a word about it to Doris though. Later that same year Doris saw her mother packing a box full of their baby clothes. Thinking they might be for her mysterious family,
Doris asked her whom she was sending them to. “It is none of your business,” she was told with a glare.

“Well, I just shut up and took it like I always did,” Doris told me.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.

1
. “And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue, The knights come riding two and two: She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott.”

2
. “[Franny, age seven] went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. . . . He said she surely just
dreamt
that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she
knew
she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs” (
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
, p. 9).

3
. A privately owned art gallery in Paris and Manhattan, specializing in Old Masters. Edward Fowles and a partner inherited the business when Lord Duveen died in 1939. My grandmother married “Uncle” Edward, as we called him, after my grandfather died. Uncle Edward’s memoir,
Memories of Duveen Brothers: Seventy Years in the Art World,
is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the wheelings and dealings of the art world—its patrons, saints, forgers, and other colorful people.

4
. The wife of a New York editor told Ian Hamilton about meeting Jerry a year or two later: “I met Jerry Salinger at a party given, I think, by or for his English publisher. . . . I was not prepared for the extraordinary impact of his physical presence. There was a kind of black aura about him. He was dressed in black; he had black hair, dark eyes, and he was of course extremely tall. I was kind of spellbound” (Ian Hamilton,
In Search of J. D. Salinger
[New York: Random House, 1988], p. 124). The author Leila Hadley, who went on a few dates with him just before
The Catcher
was published, recalls a similar reaction. She speaks of his “extraordinary presence—very tall, with a sort of darkness surrounding him. His face was like an El Greco.”

5
.
Vedanta:
a system of Hindu monistic or pantheistic philosophy founded on the Vedas
(Webster’s)
.

6
. Hamilton,
Salinger,
p. 127.

Landsman:
(Yiddish) someone who came from the same town or village or
shtetl
in Europe as you. A kinsman in foreign lands of “gray walls and gray towers.” A kindred spirit.

M
Y HUSBAND AND
I
WENT
to visit Aunt Doris after our son was born to show her the baby while she still retained some of her eyesight.
¹
Perhaps because of the presence of new life, questions of where do we come from, who are we, and where are we going pressed upon me. My aunt is no longer one to just “shut up and take it,” and she graciously provided me with some vital connections to the mainland as it were; she spoke to me as though it were naturally my business to wonder about our family. After offering us tea and sitting down, she paused and brushed some imaginary crumbs off the couch in her one-bedroom “assisted living” unit in the Berkshires. She is nearly blind now and partially deaf, but even my father, the recipient of several heated conversations and letters in which she accused him of neglecting her and the rest of his family, admits her mind is sharp. Knowing this, I respect her silences and don’t try to “bring her back” as one might with a person whose mind wanders off, the years gobbling up the crumbs left behind as a trail to find one’s way home through the dark forest. She was deep in thought. “You know, Peggy, your father and I were the best of friends
growing up. I used to take him to the movies with me when he was very little. In those days, you know, the movies were silent and had subtitles that I had to read to him out loud. Boy, he wouldn’t let you miss a single one. The rows used to empty out all around us!”

Doris told me that when she was a very little girl, before my father was born, the family lived in Chicago where Sol, her father, ran a movie theater and her mother, Miriam, took the tickets and sold concessions. “Of all those Jews in the business at that time,” Doris said, “Daddy was the only one who didn’t make it big.” Instead, Sol went into the food importing business for J. S. Hoffman and Co. based in Chicago. He was successful, so much so that Hoffman asked him to manage the New York office. Sol took the promotion and moved the family to New York, where my father was born.

Doris said that her upbringing was very different from her brother’s. “We had some money by the time Sonny
²
was born. That made a
big
difference.” There were six years between them, because their mother had had two miscarriages. When she was hospitalized with pneumonia during her sixth month of pregnancy, the doctors said that there wasn’t much hope for the baby. But on New Year’s Day, 1919, out came a nine-pound baby boy, Jerome David, nicknamed “Sonny.” “That was really something special,” Doris said. “In a Jewish family, you know, a boy is special. Mother doted on him, he could do no wrong. I thought he was perfect, too.” Although she spent a lot of her time looking after her little brother, she didn’t mind. “Mother was very good about not asking me to baby-sit when I had friends over or some other plans.” Interrupting her own train of thought—permission to change course without explanation or self-consciousness is a gift only old people seem to have the grace and authority of years to give themselves—she said, “Did Mother ever tell you the Little Indian story about Sonny?” I shook
my head. “Well, one afternoon I was supposed to be taking care of Sonny while Mother was out shopping. He couldn’t have been older than three or four at the most. I was about ten. Well, we had a big fight about something, I forget what it was about, but Sonny got so mad he packed his suitcase and ran away. He was always running away. When Mother came home from shopping a few hours later, she found him in the lobby. He was dressed from head to toe in his Indian costume, long feather headdress and all.
³
He said, ‘Mother, I’m running away, but I stayed to say good-bye to you.’

“When she unpacked his suitcase, it was full of toy soldiers.”

M
Y AUNT’S RETELLING OF THIS
family story brought to mind one of my father’s characters, Lionel, in a short story called “Down at the Dinghy” (reprinted in
Nine Stories
), who is about the same age as the Little Indian, Sonny. As the story opens, Lionel, like Sonny, has run away again. The housekeeper, Mrs. Snell, and the maid, Sandra, are talking about it:

“I mean ya gotta weigh every word ya say around him,” Sandra said. “It drives ya loony.” . . . Sandra snorted . . . “A four-year-old kid!”

“He’s kind of a good-lookin’ kid,” said Mrs. Snell. “Them big brown eyes and all.”

Sandra snorted again. “He’s gonna have a nose just like the father.”
⁴

Lionel’s mother, Boo Boo Tannenbaum, née Glass (sister of Seymour, Franny and Zooey, Walt and Waker, and Buddy Glass), enters the room, which silences their unpleasant exchange, but leaves it unclear
why he has run away. Boo Boo finds Lionel down at their dinghy. He is wearing a T-shirt with a “dye picture, across the chest, of Jerome the Ostrich,” hiding his head in the sand, as it were. After a long conversation in which Lionel refuses to tell his mother what happened to make him break his promise never to run away again, Boo Boo climbs into the dinghy and tries to say something comforting. She is interrupted by his sobbing outburst: “Sandra—told Mrs. Smell—that Daddy’s a big—sloppy—kike.”