Dream Catcher: A Memoir (47 page)

T
OWARD THE END OF THE
summer, the whole family—Mr. and Mrs. R., Liza, Sig, Joel, and I—piled into the station wagon to drive me back to
Cornish. Mrs. R. asked me recently if I remembered the big argument my parents had had after we arrived. “You had a strep throat and Claire wanted to get you on antibiotics. Jerry wanted to treat it homeopathically. I think your mother won.” She smiled, shaking her head.
Plus ça change . . .

I don’t remember that particular argument; why should I when I’d heard variations on that wretched theme my whole life. Even if it had been a real doozy, it would have been eclipsed anyway by emerging events. Shortly after the R.s went home, Daddy called to take us swimming in the Coxes’ pond in Windsor. This is something we often did each summer—we had a standing invitation. I put on my new two-piece bathing suit that I’d bought at Mr. R.’s store, threw on a T-shirt and shorts, and waited outside for my father to pick up my brother and me.

I’m sitting in the front seat of the Jeep. Daddy all of a sudden looks at me as though he’s never seen me before. Oh, God, he’s looking right at my chest. “Is that really you under there?” he asks. There is no right answer. Either way I’m a phony.

They weren’t falsies exactly; all bathing suits had shaped cups in them back then. Which isn’t to say, however, that I didn’t like the effect, but
not
on him. The boobs were real enough . . . well, almost, but immediately I noticed a change in his behavior. I’d come under watch, suspected of being one of
them,
the enemy, a phony. I started to become the object of his suspicion and attacks, previously reserved for my mother, athletic men, and college professors.

At the same time that my sexual development was catapulting me out of my father’s world, life at my mother’s was increasingly sexually charged and unsafe. She was sleeping with younger and younger guys, college students in fact, and as I grew taller and prettier, they were looking at me in that predatory way. It was mortifying having my mother behaving like a wild, rebellious sister. I had heard from several different sources, usually kids with much older brothers, that my mother’s nickname around Dartmouth’s campus was Mrs. Robinson. I didn’t understand the full implications of that until I saw
The Graduate,
where, to my horror, both the mother, Mrs. Robinson, and her daughter were objects of Dustin Hoffman’s character’s sexual attention. This added an additional layer of humiliation and revoltingness to the Mac “baby-sitting” affair, to think that he might have been playing the “Graduate.” I also
took it to be a portent and knew I had to get out of that house before I got any more developed, or it was just a matter of time before one of those boys woke me in the middle of the night and might not take no for an answer. I slept with my fists balled in readiness and my baseball bat under the bed.

I wanted to move in with my dad and continue on at Hanover Junior High where I had had my first happy school year ever. Next fall, in eighth grade, maybe I’d get the nerve to write to Dave and see if he could ever like me again, and maybe Mom would get back together with Ray and settle down. No maybes, it was
out
of the question. It would have interfered too much with my father’s work. With that door slammed, it may surprise some fans of Holden Caulfield, hater of prep schools, but at age twelve I was packed off to boarding school for the remainder of my “childhood.” There was no room at either of my parents’ for me to grow up any more.

And moving thro’ a mirror clear

That hangs before her all the year,

Shadows of the world appear.

There she sees the highway near

Winding down to Camelot.

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

While this is often a very stimulating and touching place, I personally suspect that certain children in this world, like your magnificent son Buddy as well as myself, are perhaps best suited to enjoying this privilege only in a dire emergency or when they know great discord in their family life.

—Seymour Glass, “Hapworth 16, 1924”

T
HE BROCHURE FOR
C
ROSS
M
OUNTAIN
School had arrived. It was a foregone conclusion that, were I to go to boarding school, it would be Cross Mountain, since my grandmother had offered to pay for my tuition as she’d done for my cousin, Gavin’s child, to attend. All the “best” people sent their children there, dear. The Rockefellers, the Biddles, the Aga Khan’s daughter, heads of foreign dictatorships with messy wars in Central America, heiresses with messy divorces, people in the arts, writers, producers, movie stars. I looked at the pictures. The school was in the midst of the Adirondack Mountains. About eighty children, age seven or eight to thirteen, fourth through the eighth grade, had the privilege of living there September through May. Parents had the option of sending their children to camp there, too, June through August. Like Holden Caulfield’s Pencey Prep, Cross Mountain appeared to be bullish on “molding character.” Holden, reading from Pencey’s brochure, said:

“Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.” Strictly for the birds. They don’t do any damn more
mold
ing at Pencey than they do at any other school.
And I didn’t know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably
came
to Pencey that way.

(
Catcher,
p. 2)

Cross Mountain School promised to teach children what they called the three Rs: to mold them into persons “Rugged, Resourceful, and Resilient.” (I recall Winston Churchill referring to the B.S.s of his British boarding school. We were, he said, “Beaten, Buggered, and Starved.”) The brochure was full of photographs of smiling, pink-cheeked children harvesting vegetables on the school farm, doing barn chores—very
Little Red Book.
No paisley dresses with pumps and stockings here. Their list of required clothing was specific and Spartan: work boots, black buckle galoshes, denim barn jacket, long underwear, and thick socks, jeans, and work shirts. Dresses were permitted on Sunday evenings at dinner.

If I’d known how the school’s creators, Herbert and Kit Watson, had been occupied before they had students, how they came to teaching, that icy apprehension that I was entering someone else’s dream that was to become my nightmare would have been a certainty. Recently I read the Watsons’ biographies in the alumni brochure. Herbert Watson’s story is entitled, in bold letters:

All Things That Go On At The School Come Right Out Of My Childhood

As a child, I might have thought, how cool, the same way countless people have said to me, “It must be so cool to have J. D. Salinger for your father.” When
young
persons, for whom my father has said he writes, read Holden’s response to his little sister when she asked him what he wants to be when he grows up, I think they have a very different reaction from that of a real grown-up, one for whom all things do
not
come right out of one’s childhood, unmediated by maturation. Holden said:

. . . I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean
if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and
catch
them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

(
Catcher,
p. 173)

When I read this passage as an adult with a child of my own, my first reaction was outrage. Not at Holden, it’s a nice dream for a boy to have. But outrage at the fact that I once was one of those kids. Where are the grown-ups? Why are those kids allowed to play so close to the edge of a cliff? Where are the responsible adults who should build a secure place for those kids to play, or a fence at least so that some young boy like Holden or some young girl like me doesn’t have to engage in perpetual rescue?

My grown-up reaction to the title of Herbert Watson’s biography is to wonder: Have you learned nothing as an adult? On reflection, my experience at this school is a story about what can
really
happen when people—“nobody big”—get together and decide to play school at the edge of some crazy cliff. In Kit’s bio she said, “After college I came to New York City. . . . I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or what I
could
do. Mamma said that as a child I collected younger children and played school, made markets, and ran shows. I loved children. I applied at several of the progressive schools—no luck. Eventually I got a job as a playground supervisor to tide me over that first winter.” She applied for a job with Harriet Johnson at the Bureau of Educational Experiments. She was accepted, and in her interview she said she was asked, “ ‘Miss Cavendish, do you know why we gave you the job?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘Because you don’t know a
thing
about education.’ I didn’t have a lot of preconceived ideas!”

Her husband Herbert’s story begins with his family’s farm on the edge of failure. After high school, he won a scholarship to Cornell’s School of Agriculture to take a twelve-week course on farm management. He worked at the liberal arts part of the college to make ends meet, he said, “waiting table for the rich college boys wearing raccoon coats” (the very same rich boys and girls whose children would be waiting table and mucking out stalls at Herbert’s Cross Mountain). He took courses in farm machinery repair, veterinary medicine, feeds, and feeding. “I came home an educated farmer after my twelve-week winter course at Cornell. I started out big guns—next summer I was going
to make the farm break even. Then one hot summer’s day I was cultivating corn in a field with a horse and a cultivator, and a man came down the road and wanted to know what I’d be doing in the fall. I said I’d be tending the cows and putting out the cowshit—that’s how farmers talk. So he said, ‘I’m looking for a schoolteacher,’ and I said I didn’t know of any in the neighborhood, and he said, ‘I’m looking at you. I’ve been talking to the principal of your old high school, and he thought you could do the job.’ ” That was how Herbert Watson became a teacher at the age of eighteen. He liked teaching and enrolled in a tuition-free teachers college, but was not satisfied with it. He knew he could never afford the tuition at Cornell—about the equivalent of Cross Mountain tuition—but eventually went to Antioch, where the students could work their way through. There, he supported himself working as an assembly-line worker at Ford, a magazine salesman, and a teacher at the New Jersey State Institution for Feeble-Minded Males . . .

Herbert, in his speech to the Cross Mountain School graduating class of 1950, said, “Generally speaking, I think life is too easy, too soft, too undemanding, at least so far as natural, basic primitive experiences are concerned. It is fortunate that you have lived here close to the wilderness and that you have traveled in the forest enough to be sometimes hungry, thirsty, fatigued, wet, cold, lost, fighting black flies, or surrounded by darkness and strange noises. I wish there had been time for more experiences of this nature.”

“Fanatics have their dreams,” wrote Keats, “wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.”
¹
But fanaticism also converts paradise into private prisons.