Dream Catcher: A Memoir (52 page)

“Where’s the lady?” Sybil said.

“The lady?” the young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. “That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a
thousand places. At the hairdresser’s. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children, in her room.”

My father would, in all seriousness, rather step over a hungry man and do nothing to help him than help him and feel as though he were a swell guy to help. If you do a charitable act you have to do it perfectly, the left hand not knowing what the right hand does. Otherwise it’s all ego and not worth doing.

If you’re standing outside a theater and some old gal comes up selling gum, give her a buck if you’ve got a buck—but only if you can do it without patronizing her.

For
whom
is it not worth anything? one might ask. The recipient is not even in the picture. Only the reflection of the one attempting to make a mitzvah is beheld. Missing is the vast area between Mrs. Hayes and the nuns, between being such a jerk that you make the person you are giving to feel like dirt, and being the perfection of God incarnate. For my father there is nothing in between, no sense of God or “goodness” being able to use imperfect vessels. No sense of being good enough. No middle ground between perfection and damnation. No big round earth to walk on between heaven and hell.

Luckily, kids don’t need an explanation when you ask them not to talk about something in front of your parents. All parents are kind of weird anyway. Jenny said not to worry, she wouldn’t mention the concert.

My father arrived and we piled into the car. On the way home, Jenny and I sang to amuse ourselves. We had learned lots of rounds at school that fall. Daddy was enchanted. He made us promise to send him a tape, from school, of us singing. We never got around to it, though, I’m afraid to say. Partly because I didn’t bother, which isn’t nice, and partly because I had this weird feeling that he had mistaken me for someone else. Our singing in the car wasn’t just beautiful or pretty, to him it was
perfect,
it was poetry. He had made such a big deal of our singing that I felt like an impostor; if I taped it, he’d realize how ordinary and just plain pretty—not magnificent—it was. It’s a weird feeling to be given powers you know you don’t possess, to be put on a pedestal, albeit temporarily.

Four hours later, we arrived in Woodstock. The stage set was in
place and there were white Christmas lights, with bits of greenery and holly, on all the bridges and houses in the square. We said good-bye to Jenny and headed over the river to Cornish.

When you’re a kid, to know what your house really looks like, you have to go away for a while and come back again. This time I noticed things. You approach my father’s by making a sharp turn off the dirt road into his driveway. You can’t slow down in the wintertime to make the turn without the risk of not making it up the steep driveway. Unlike the road, which is packed dirt, the driveway has a layer of chipped stones, horrid stones to walk on with bare feet because they’re all pointy. They make a treacherous scree in the winter as well.

The driveway leads directly into the mouth of his garage. Between the garage and the house on the hill above it is an underground passageway of cement with dozens of small steps. The builder made a three-inch rise instead of the standard one for some reason, and it feels as though one is taking baby steps. We long-legged Salingers find this particularly annoying. At the top of the passage is a door leading into the cellar of the house. It’s more like a cave than a basement. This is because the land my father chose for a building site wasn’t meant to accommodate a house. The builders dynamited through a steep slope of thick granite, just enough to allow a house to perch on the edge, rather like mountaineers setting up camp with slings on a narrow ledge. The cellar is not built of concrete blocks; it’s just blasted-out rock with some cement poured on the floor to make it flat enough for the freezer and washer-dryer to sit. You come to another door and enter the house. Sort of. You have to climb up one more flight of stairs to reach the living room of this modest, chalet-style, one-level ranch.

The living room has what in modern parlance is called a cathedral ceiling, meaning it is higher than the regulation eight feet and set at an angle rather than flat. A wall of windows opens onto the view of Mt. Ascutney and beyond into New York State. Unlike the house in which I grew up in Cornish, where one had the comfortable feeling of being grounded somehow despite the immensity of the view, Daddy’s house is perched on the side of a steep hill with no cozy enfolding of trees and no feeling of being on the ground. It’s like the view out an airplane window or a skyscraper, a little less human, a little less real. A cliff wall.

I don’t know if it ever struck my father that way. It’s not the sort of thing I’d bring up with him. He might have gotten touchy about it. The view is rarely visible, however. My father keeps the curtains drawn, or mostly drawn, day and night. Light comes through where the curtains stumble and fall across backs of chairs or little tables. The view is revealed a bit like the “good furniture” in a lower-middle-class living room—on special occasions and for visitors. My brother’s house, I noticed last time I visited, stands in a similar odd relation to the vast beauty of the view. He built his house on a steep slope in Malibu, gotten at a bargain price because developers had considered the land unusable to accommodate a house. A great wall of windows gives you a 180-degree panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. All the expense and design of a modern house to take advantage of the spectacular view, and the blinds, made of lovely transparent rice-paper-looking man-made material, are drawn 95 percent of the time, day and night. They’re lifted for the occasional sunset, or when I visit and like to sit and stare.

Perhaps the view becomes too familiar to notice over time, indistinguishable from a brick wall outside the window of a cheap apartment that you think you won’t be able to bear but in time becomes nearly invisible, part of the woodwork as it were. I have moved apartments probably twenty-five times in my life, most of the moves as a teenager and in my twenties. I learned that if you don’t make a change, paint the wall, fix an eyesore, replace an ugly tile within two weeks of moving in, you’ll never do it. The eye, in time, is a frighteningly good editor and smoother of flaws. It takes a guest coming to visit to remind one of the dwelling’s eyesores.

Eyesores. That brings me to my father’s deck. It was made cheaply and badly. The railings were rickety even when first built and offered little real security and much false. Over the years the boards rotted out in several places, leaving one with the precarious feeling of a rope bridge spanning a jungle river, the hero’s leg falling through a gap in the planks as the bad guys come nearer and nearer. I would
never
let my son out on it. The deck extends about four feet from the living room on two sides, chalet-style. It should be a glorious place to savor the wilderness from the safety of home, like a snowstorm watched from beside the hearth, or rain from shelter. It is nice to have drinks
out there, but it would have been nicer if it had been done right—providing that sense of security so necessary to porch pleasure. Instead, it’s like looking over the edge of a cliff. My father, as if seeing the deck through my eyes, and hating me a little for it, would wiggle the railings with a look of disgust and no little irritation. It was the same expression he wore when reaching his hand upward in a house with low ceilings and found he could touch them, or when entering a cab that was neither his beloved London cab nor a New York Checker cab, with their raised roof. He seemed ashamed of the broken stairs leading up to the deck, but he never had them repaired.
³
He just sort of hated you for witnessing it and thereby, as in the Zen tree falling in the forest, or Teddy’s orange peels, making it real.

My visiting, even as a child, but more so the older I got, made him aware, because of my otherness, my presence, not because I mentioned it, that the house was not perfect. Nor was it clean. It was neat and orderly, but not cared for beyond the surface tidying. The Oriental rugs in the living room were some beauties he had bought over the years at nearby auctions, along with an assortment of lamps and end tables. If you looked up, however, the air of tasteful country gentility ended abruptly at the wainscoting. The ceiling in the living room was a rather horrid, nubbly, sprayed-on, textured stuff that he cursed the builders for talking him into. Mind you, he
is
a tightwad about nearly everything, and the house is a prime example of the adage “you get what you pay for.” Cobwebs and soot from his fireplace clung to the nubbly ceiling, which, in a few years, went beyond “bachelor dirty” to eccentric. The toilet bowl in the bathroom my brother and I used, the “guest” bathroom, became stained and brown in only a year or two from minerals and lack of routine swishing. There were always clean towels for us, but I never liked to put my toothbrush down on the sink. Without putting it into words, I was aware that cleaning it myself would have been an embarrassment to him, an insult, a commentary on his lack of attention. He so disliked anything squalid and unclean that to acknowledge it would have been an unthinkably rude awakening. The water that came out of the faucets was from an artesian well, but unlike the water in the Red house, this smelled badly of sulfur.

He used to have a cleaning lady come in to help out, but she was so talkative that it drove him crazy to have her around. Had she been unpleasant or mean, he could have cut her off and retreated to his study guiltlessly. The problem was that he knew her to be a kind woman, and he therefore felt terribly guilty about not being able to bear her chattering presence. In the end, the human encounter proved too much for him and he eased her out.

Behind the living room, going into the hillside as it were, is a galley kitchen and a parallel narrow, long bathroom, each ending in the door to my brother’s and my room. It was not really ours, but it was the one that was called ours when we visited. When Daddy had the house built, we were allowed to choose the colors for the paint and trim for the room. Being kids, we chose our favorite Crayola-crayon colors, aqua (pronounced a resounding New Hampshire
ack-wa
not
ah-kwa
) and magenta. We wound up with a subdued pastel pink, not magenta, and the trim was forest green, not aqua, but it was close enough; we weren’t too disappointed. The closet mostly held Daddy’s good suits and jackets, the top shelf, one or two hats and some bags of things that we never looked into. We made room in the closet for our stuff when we visited. I think a drawer or two in “our” dresser was made available as well. Mostly though, our things just stayed in our suitcases under the twin beds.

I don’t know why his suits didn’t fit into his own bedroom closet. Though I’ve visited his house for more than thirty years now, I’ve never seen his closet or his bathroom. His bedroom, bath, and study are in an L off the kitchen. The door is kept locked. I’ve been invited inside maybe two or three times in my life when he wanted to show me something in his study. Once it was some new bookshelves he was thrilled with. Another time to show me a new filing system he had thought up for the material in one of his safes. A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this “as is,” blue meant publish but edit first, and so on.

Several big, floor-to-ceiling safes were housed in the room that was his study/bedroom before he built the L. My memory is a bit hazy about this room, but I remember clearly that at one time he slept in it, because he showed me how he had rigged up the bed so that his feet would be higher than his head, for some yoga reason. Beds had to
point due north as well, for electromagnetic health. Above the safes in the old bedroom/study were reels and reels of movies collected over the years before video. The top edges of the room, where a picture rail might be, were papered with my old drawings from his Green house.

The dogs, Joey and Nice Doggie, barked like madmen as always when we arrived. Joey was the dachshund we got after Malinka, a large white husky, began snacking on our neighbor’s pigs. Apparently she didn’t even bother to kill them first: she just bit chunks out of them on the hoof. I was about seven at the time. My mother told me what Malinka had done and said that we had to give her away to an Alaskan sled-dog team. When I was fifteen, my boyfriend Dan, who loved Nice Doggie, asked me about other dogs I’d grown up with. I told him about Malinka and how we had had to give her away to an Alaskan sled-dog team. He looked at me in silence and then with an eyebrow raised said, “Pegs, Alaska?” “Ooh!” I remembered hearing at the Windsor diner that someone had shot a white wolf, but I hadn’t put two and two together. Funny how certain things from one’s youth get buried in a time capsule. Just as well.

After the great white Malinka, my parents bought Joey, a dachshund puppy whose tail had been slammed in a door by accident. When he wagged, it looked a bit like a propeller. Looking at silly city dachshunds in their sweaters and bootees, you’d never guess that they were bred for badger hunting. Real badgers, not the cute ones in stories, have a set of nasty teeth and a temperament to match and are about the last creature you’d want to go down a hole and drag out. That’s just what dachshunds do. Joey turned out to be a far more avid and bloodthirsty hunter than Malinka had ever dreamed of being; she was just too lazy to come home for lunch, I think, and stopped for a bite to eat. Joey
lived
for hunting. But his chosen prey were wild, not domestic, animals, so he was not deported to an Austrian badger team. He would disappear for days at a time, and you could hear his blood-crazed howl coming from somewhere deep in the forest. He was either a little crazy or a little stupid or probably both in his single-minded pursuit; I cannot tell you how many times he came home with a face full of porcupine quills that my parents had to pull out one by one with pliers. And the number of tomato-juice baths after being sprayed by a skunk—countless.