Dream Catcher: A Memoir (5 page)

After a little while, she asks him, “Do you know what a kike is, baby?”

Lionel was either unwilling or unable to speak up at once. At any rate, he waited till the hiccupping aftermath of his tears had subsided a little. Then his answer was delivered, muffled but intelligible, into the warmth of Boo Boo’s neck. “It’s one of those things that go up in the
air,”
he said. “With a
string
you hold.”

A
S
I
STARTED TO
tell Aunt Doris a story about my son, she interrupted me and said, “Peggy, make sure you have a job or something when your son is a little older. Don’t let him become your whole life. It’s no good. Mother lived through her children. She was very lucky that Sonny is as successful as he is. It was always Sonny and Mother, Mother and Sonny. Daddy got the short end of the stick always. He never got the recognition he deserved.”

I asked her if their father was around much during their childhood, or if he was at work most of the time, like all the offstage, absent fathers in my father’s stories, from Holden’s attorney father, whom we never meet, to “Les” Glass. She said, “Oh, no, he played with us a lot, especially when we went on vacation to the shore during the summers. When we were very little, Daddy used to hold Sonny and me around our middles, out in the waves, and say, ‘Keep your eyes peeled for the bananafish.’ Boy, did we look and look.”

Aunt Doris said that she has only one “real complaint” about her upbringing. What still troubles her wasn’t the general silence regarding their family stories and background, so much as the way her parents
kept one particular fact hidden from their children, then finally disclosed it in a revelation that Doris, a very levelheaded woman, given to understatement rather than to drama of any sort, said she could only describe as “traumatic.” It was so awful, she said, that she can’t even remember just how it happened, only that her parents “handled it terribly.” When Doris was nearly twenty, shortly after Sonny’s bar mitzvah, their parents told them that they weren’t
really
Jewish. Their mother, Miriam, was actually named Marie, and she had been “passing” as a Jew since her marriage to Sol.

Until that moment, I never knew that my father grew to adolescence believing both of his parents were Jews. He has often told me that he writes about half-Jews because, he says, that’s what he knows best. Unlike my aunt, however, I grew up knowing that my granny, their mother, was Catholic. But beyond the fact that nuns were somehow involved, I had no idea, nor did I question, what being Catholic meant. Daddy said that Granny sometimes told people she was “high Episcopalian” because it sounded “tonier,” but she was actually a Catholic girl from County Cork, Ireland. Aunt Doris told me that she was surprised to hear this. She said, in typical New Yorker fashion, she had always thought her mother was born in “Iowa, or Ohio, one of those places,” and wasn’t sure about the Catholic part even now. However, she said, Sonny probably knew better than she did. “He was more persistent at asking questions than I was, and also he got away with a lot more than I did, being a boy.” After they were told that their mother wasn’t Jewish, she remembered something her mother had said, and guessed, in hindsight, that her mother
might
have been Catholic, but Doris never asked. “Mother suffered from chronic jaw pain, you know. She once mentioned to me that it was because when she was a little girl, the nuns at her school used to take a wooden mallet and hammer her teeth once a week to cure an overbite.” I remember Granny rubbing her jaw and wincing. I always assumed it was out of irritation, though, because my dad makes the exact same gesture whenever someone asks him anything personal or begins “picking his brains,” as he calls it.

Doris and I inherited the family overbite, and something else, too: it was Doris’s aunts and uncles—Sol’s brothers and sisters—who passed on the family stories and told her something of her family history after she
was grown up. It was they who told her that her parents had met at a county fair near Marie’s parents’ farm (presumably in Ohio since Sol was there for the day from Chicago). Marie had beautiful auburn hair that hung down to her narrow waist. She turned heads when she passed by. “She was a real looker, your mother,” Doris was told by her uncle. Sol was a tall, handsome young man from the big city. When they eloped, he was twenty-two, she was seventeen. Marie Jillich became Miriam Salinger
⁵
and was never to speak to her parents again.

As with most families, it’s difficult to sort out who isn’t talking to whom. One can be certain, however, that in those days an Irish Catholic young woman did not marry a Jewish man with impunity.
⁶
Nor could a Jew marry out of his religion without a stir, but over time, Doris said, Sol’s mother grew to love Miriam as if she were one of her own daughters. When his mother died, Sol went to temple every day for a year. Doris believes that he did so because he felt guilty for marrying a non-Jew, even though his mother had accepted his choice. Who knows. From his mouth to God’s ear.

What I do know is that the whole subject of Jewishness is something my father is very touchy about indeed. The only way I can think of conveying a sense of this touchiness is to liken it to the way my son, at around four years old, behaved when the subject of bottoms came up (about a thousand times a day, if I recall rightly). It was a mixture of giggly interest, the “butt” of jokes, a swirling confluence of attraction and repulsion, the precious mystery withheld, and the flushed piece of himself. Totem and Taboo. In my father’s house, the arousal level occasioned
by the mention of anything Jewish was matched only by the degree of occlusion of the real facts of life.

I heard, or rather felt, the pitch of emotion surrounding things Jewish when he told me stories about his childhood, but I never knew what to make of it. One story was about the time his grandfather from Chicago came to visit them in New York and my father, then a young boy, nearly died of embarrassment as his grandfather called out each street number on the Madison Avenue bus they were riding. “Forty-feef Street, Forty-seex Street,” my father would call out in a loud voice with a heavy Yiddish accent as he told the story.
⁷

As with most things deeply embarrassing in our family, this story was transformed into a sort of running family joke. In sixth grade when I went away to camp, for example, Daddy wrote a letter kidding me that his grandfather, the one who called out the street names, would be joining me at camp, as a cabin-mate. Not to worry about pajamas, he didn’t really care for them anyway. Even though I was only nine at the time, I knew this was a little joke within a joke, a bit of shared snobbery about language, that some people think it sounds “tonier” to say I don’t “care for” pajamas when you mean I don’t
like
pajamas. I should just
enjoy
him, Daddy said.

This is not to say, however, that painful or embarrassing things were treated as humorous at the time they happened. I remember once my father, face flushed with emotion, looked up from a letter he was reading. He told me that he had been corresponding with a small group of Hasidic Jews for whom he felt real affection. This feeling of kinship, of finding landsmen, has been, in my father’s life, as precious as it was rare. He said he even sent them a little money from time to time, because they were quite poor. In the letter he was holding, the rebbe had asked him what was his mother’s maiden name.
⁸
“I’ll cut them off,” he said, slashing the air with his hand. “I’ll never speak to them again.” I knew he
was as good as his word; I’d seen it happen too often not to know he spoke with the finality of a man sitting
shiva
for a living son.
⁹

W
HEN
I
FOLLOWED MY FATHER
across the boundary from daily life into fictional life, I’d hoped to find, in his published stories, some clarification of the confusing, powerful feelings that things Jewish, and questions of background in general, evoke in him time and again. I came across this kind of exchange many times in my father’s fiction, this vetting of your true landsman status. However, in every story except “Down at the Dinghy,” the one about the four-year-old boy Lionel, the Jewishness at the heart of the matter is disguised, raising, until I spoke to my aunt, more questions than were answered. For example, whereas Daddy’s grandfather in real life had a loud, embarrassing Yiddish accent, his character, Les Glass, Seymour’s father, has an embarrassing Australian accent. (Australia, Gracie?) In my father’s last published story, “Hapworth,” the young Seymour writes from camp advising his father, a vaudeville singer, to lose the accent next time he makes a recording if he wants it to be a success. Seymour assures his father that the family is fond of his accent, but “the general public will not share that affection.”

In
The Catcher in the Rye,
this touchy subject comes up several times in regard to Holden’s religious background. In the scene in the train station where Holden has a pleasant conversation with two nuns at a breakfast counter, he tells them he really enjoyed talking to them. He tells the reader he really meant it; nevertheless, he would have enjoyed it more if he hadn’t been sort of afraid, the whole time he was talking to them, that they’d all of a sudden try to find out if he was Catholic. It happens to him a lot, he tells us, because his last name is Irish. Actually, Holden’s father had been an Irish Catholic until his marriage to Holden’s mother, at which time “he quit.” Holden tells the reader another story colored by the same anxiety about a conversation wending its way to questions of his background. He and a nice boy from Whooton were talking about tennis
when the boy asked if he had happened to notice a Catholic church in town. Here, again, Holden tells us, it didn’t “ruin the conversation exactly,” but he knew the boy would have enjoyed it a lot more if Holden had been Catholic. “That kind of stuff drives me crazy.”

In the mirror of fiction, the Salingers switch places: my father’s Irish Catholic mother becomes, instead, Holden’s father, who quits his religion when he marries. The subject of anxiety changes from questions vetting one’s Jewishness to whether one is Catholic or not. Reading my father’s work recently, I wondered, Why the disguise? Why would the central character of his first book, which he had told friends would be an “autobiographical novel,”
¹⁰
not be half-Jewish? Why would the Glass family, openly half-Jewish, wish to disguise an
Australian
accent? Why does my father get touchy in his fiction and in real life when the subject of background, especially Jewish background, arises?

Had I been born in my father’s generation, or had I been told what life was like for Jews of my father’s generation, I wouldn’t have asked these questions. The answer would have been as plain as the nose on my face. My aunt set me straight:

It wasn’t nice to be part-Jewish in those days. It was no asset to be Jewish either, but at least you belonged somewhere. This way you were neither fish nor fowl. Mother told me—she shouldn’t have, it was wrong of her—but she told me that when a woman from a finishing school in Dobbs Ferry that I had applied to came to interview the family, she said, “Oh, Mrs. Salinger, it’s too bad you married a Jew.” People talked like that in those days, you know. It was hard on me but it was hell on Sonny. I think he suffered terribly from anti-Semitism when he went away to military school.

“People talked like that in those days, you know.” In fact, I
didn’t
know. What people? I had always associated outspoken anti-Semitism in this country with the lunatic fringe, familiar TV news images of fat, unemployed guys with more guns than teeth ranting about how it’s the
Jews’ fault he has no job and no teeth, a few disturbed adolescents vandalizing Jewish cemeteries, and the occasional neo-Nazi weirdos, heiling Hitler in their pine-paneled basement rec rooms. How I managed to reach the age of forty with such a mix of ignorance and snobbery is something I’m not proud of. It is truly frightening what you miss when you don’t ask the right questions and when whole subjects, such as your family history, are taboo. Never mind the ancient Greeks and Romans I learned about as a history major at Brandeis; better late than never, I set out to learn something about my own family’s story, and especially that off-limits subject: what life was like when my father was growing up. With my mother, I found out in middle age, rather like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, that all I had to do was ask and she’d take me to her childhood home, she’d bring to light all those things she’d been silent about that had come to me in nightmares for so long. With my father, I first turned to written stories rather than spoken ones for answers.