Dream Catcher: A Memoir (65 page)

I’m not quite sure how it all came about, but Saturday morning bright and early my new friend Steve from Brandeis, fresh out of the army, and my old friend Lou, not so fresh out of the marines in Vietnam, showed up with a truck and began moving out matériel on the double. We were out of there by noon. I was in shock, physically and every other way, and I really don’t know much about what happened the next few weeks—just that my friend Lou took care of it. Took care of me. I stayed with him for a few months I think. The girl he was dating, who is now his wife, wasn’t thrilled, but she was both understanding and levelheaded, which is the way she is, one of the most thoroughly decent people I’ve had the privilege of knowing. Lou drove me to school and literally fed me food, with a spoon, in front of the TV until I came out of shock a few weeks later. He had done time in an orphanage as a kid. God bless friends—kinsmen—you don’t have to
explain
things to.

Thanks to friends, and maybe to the fact that as a kid I’d learned to read as if my life depended on it, I didn’t miss a single day of class and got straight A’s that semester. Later that fall, I found a beautiful, sunny apartment on the top floor of an old Victorian parish house behind a church in Concord center. It was flooded with light no matter the time of day from the tall, thin pairs of arched windows, north, south, east, and west, constructed to mirror the church’s arched windows. Morning and evening carillon from the church bells next door was like the cowbells to and from green pastures I listened to as a little girl in Cornish. The apartment cost too much money but my mom had called and said, “Take it, there are times in your life having a beautiful place to live is more important than being sensible,” and she sent me the extra money. She also didn’t make me feel like an idiot for being blindsided by a man.

When the shock wore off and I had a little time to think, I realized that, given the kinds of terrible things people do to each other, I had gotten off easy. All my ex-husband took was money; he never hurt my feelings. By disappearing, he also gave me a chance to start over.

G
OING TO
B
RANDEIS
was one of the best decisions I’ve made, or perhaps I should more modestly and accurately say, one of the best pieces of luck that has come my way. It was, in hindsight, as important to my sanity and growth and life as choosing, albeit unsaid, in seventh grade, to live in my body rather than to renounce it and stay a two-dimensional ten forever. As seventh grade was a discovery and a celebration of life in the body, Brandeis was a discovery and celebration of the life of the mind. My
own
mind, not somebody else’s. It was clear from the moment I set foot in the classroom and looked at the requirements of each class, each major, each degree, that Brandeis was totally committed to graduating
educated
students, people who knew how to think for themselves, and not simply regurgitate a reflection of the teacher’s point of view on an exam. I always had the feeling that students were there to learn, and that learning was a valued, respected activity. An education was something intrinsically valued rather than looked at merely as a means to an end, or in terms of what “product” they or we produced. Although we were well prepared to go on to jobs or further education when we graduated, we weren’t narrowly “pre” anything—pre-med, pre-law, and so on.

The extraordinary thing to me at the time, which I must say makes a lot of sense to me now that I’m twenty years older and a mother, is that this was not accomplished by letting students act like little pre-adults and do their own thing. There were (and I hope still are) requirements that made even an older student such as me chafe at the bit: Why did I
need to take an art class, a biology class, an English class, distributives across the spectrum of learning? And not one of these required distributives was a “rocks for jocks” class. They were the real thing. The “name” professors, the big guys and gals with the big salaries and reputations and books, were the ones teaching the freshman classes. The best was not saved for an elite of graduate seminars and senior concentrators. You got their best whether you wanted it or not. The big professors graded their own papers and exams, were available for conference hours whenever you or they thought you needed it. They helped their graduate students learn to be good teachers rather than treating them as cost-effective substitutions for themselves so they could get on with the business of publishing. I am, of course, particularly sensitive to feeling as though I am interrupting somebody’s work. There, I felt as though I
was
their work. And, boy, were we expected to work in return. I think that when teachers invest their time and energy in you, they have higher expectations of excellence, and a higher right to demand it. The “phony” quotient on the Salinger scale, in my experience at least, was subzero.

I can’t help but think that the roots of Brandeis University influence the way it regards the cultivation of the mind. It was founded by people of the Diaspora, people fleeing Hitler, people deeply aware that the things of true value are those that can be carried with you in your mind. The ups and downs of life can take away everything else in an instant. Being broadly educated leaves you less vulnerable to the changes life throws your way in bad times, and open to a hell of a lot more fun in good times. Take my friend and former basketball and softball teammate Margie, for example. She is a biochemist and can tell you some fascinating things about her research work, but she can also tell you some equally fascinating things about her vacation trips to Rome and Greece where she pursues an interest in ancient art and ruins that she was introduced to in an art class she was “forced” to take freshman year. My friend Wayne, one of the youngest recipients of a Ph.D. in economics and politics, currently a senior member of the World Bank, writes plays and teaches ancient Greek theater and philosophy in his “spare” time. These are professionals you don’t dread having your best friend marry or being seated next to at a dinner.

I don’t mean to say that Brandeis has never graduated what my father calls “a narrow-minded bore, a mindless follower,” or someone
who’d jump out the window at the first layoff, but it sure didn’t encourage it. This was brought home to me perhaps most poignantly at the time in a history seminar in which two of my classmates were graduate students from the People’s Republic of China. The culture clash was astonishing, and a priceless education to the entire class. Each of us would, at some point, read out loud to the class a paper we’d written. When it was their turn to present their papers, the Chinese scholars reported to the class what everyone and his grandmother had said about a particular question. But when asked what do
you
think, they showed blank or confused stares, even after a year of being encouraged to do so. Some of the Americans’ papers were short on roots—what others had thought before them—and, with the hubris of youth, proudly reinvented the wheel. We were sent back to the books, of course, but the excitement, the growth, the life of the mind, though pruned, was vigorous.

At the end of the school year my leave of absence from work was up, and I went back to work at the garage for the summer. It was good to be back, but sad, too, as I suspected it would be for the last time. I decided at the end of the summer to cut the cord and risk college full-time. That December, it was my basketball teammates, rather than my workmates this time, who threw me a birthday party. My friend and favorite sender of rude birthday cards, Margie, was in charge of decorating the cake. The frosting was green and in big bold neon letters it said Happy Quarter of a Century! (I guess twenty-five seems old when you’re nineteen or so.) It was pretty great. I’m looking forward to what she comes up with for my fiftieth.

D
URING THE SUMMER
between my sophomore and junior years, I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend some time alone with my maternal grandmother. She invited me to come with her to Aspen to attend a round-table seminar chaired by Mortimer Adler at The Aspen Institute. The reading list was right up my alley, a continuation of my Brandeis introduction to what Adler calls Great Ideas, from Aristotle to Zoroaster. (Well, I made up the
Z
part; Zoroaster wasn’t on the list, but I liked the sound of it; I think the list ended with
T
for de Tocqueville on
Democracy in America.
) These seminars provided senior members of
management—heads of Fortune 500 companies, as well as labor leaders and a mix of people from the arts and government (plus two students, myself and a local high school student)—the opportunity to examine rigorously their assumptions and beliefs about the proper conduct of men and nations. I truly can’t think of a few weeks better spent. It was particularly moving to see how much the experience meant to some very successful heads of companies who had come up through the engineering route and had never had the opportunity to do this kind of work and reading and thinking. But this was no touchy-feely group; Adler was more like a drill sergeant in his rigor and intolerance of sloppy thinking, and like an old judge in his fairness in hearing different points of view. I shall never forget sitting up at night with my grandmother, each of us in a twin bed, preparing the next day’s reading. It is an especially precious memory as she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer a month later and died shortly after Christmas that year.

One morning after I had been arguing a labor point of view on a subject, with some success, in seminar, one of the observers, an older man with broad shoulders and big hands, walked up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Well, now, who are you, and how do you know anything about trade unions?” and invited me to lunch with him and his wife. He said he was Jim Callaghan, and when someone called him Mr. Prime Minister, I suddenly realized that the nice chap to his right was also a bodyguard. We corresponded off and on for some years, and he and his wife invited me to tea at the House of Commons and asked if I might like to come to England and work for him as an intern after I graduated. I declined with regrets, because I’d been accepted to a master’s program in management studies at Oxford University and had decided to do that instead.

What impressed me the most, however, was not the excitement of the House of Commons, but what I observed in a quiet moment during a dinner at Aspen. Someone was giving an after-dinner talk, and Mr. Callaghan and his wife, Audrey, were seated across the table from me, dutifully listening, as I’m sure they’ve done many thousands of times. Their chairs were turned slightly toward the speaker so Mrs. Callaghan’s back was toward her husband. I watched as he gently traced with his forefinger a little pattern on her back, almost absentmindedly, the way you reach for someone you love in your sleep. I’ll never forget it.
And the way he spoke of her volunteer work at a London hospital with the respect of a statesman, putting her first. What a marvelous thing it is to meet someone who truly loves and respects his wife and in old age still reaches for her quietly, a sanctuary in the midst of a madding crowd.