Dream Catcher: A Memoir (70 page)

I sent my father a photograph I’d clipped out of a nature magazine that I thought he’d like and told him the news.
¹

Dear Daddy,

I found this photograph, or rather the fact that this frog exists, very cheering.

What a beauty.

Love,

PEGGY

P.S. If you don’t want to keep the photo clipping, send it back and I’ll find a place for it.

[I enclosed a photo of a (real, living) glass frog. It has transparent, palest-of-green skin, and you can see all its translucent insides, with just one beautiful little red line for an artery.]

The photo was returned with a note agreeing with me that it was a beautiful frog, and perhaps I might like to be a naturalist if such things really excited me. The few naturalists he’d seen on public television seemed to be happy in their work. The field of religion was another matter, however. Except for the rare person who comes around every two thousand years or so, there is little in religion that doesn’t come from man’s ego and man’s need or desire. And still less that doesn’t settle into an amalgam of sentiment and dogma, not to mention vanity, ecclesiastical vanity, plus some, evermore plus some. He closed his note by reminding me of Basho’s frog poem. Signing off, your merry father.

My mother was excited for me and told all her friends. My brother, I think, couldn’t quite wrap his brain around the idea of his sister in the ministry—quite understandably so—but he wished me well.

As Joseph Campbell would say, I “followed my bliss” for three restorative years. Sitting, listening, reading, and thinking are things I can do with a tissue-thin level of physical health. Slowly over the three years, with many good days and bad, I crept back to an acceptable quality of life. I still hit the wall where other people get the sniffles and am in the hospital where most people get a light flu. Marilyn and I can forecast the weather by the aches and pains in our joints like a couple of old ladies. I still sleep about eleven hours a night, but when I’m awake, I feel daytime awake rather than like those wretched somnambulists in
Night of the Living Dead.

On the way through the Divinity School’s core curriculum, I had a chance to stop by and visit the Jesuits at Weston for classes in the fundamentals of scriptural exegesis, and a class on the Psalms; Episcopal divinity school for classes on liturgical music; Harvard music department for some wonderful courses on everything from Bach to music theory and composition, ethnomusicology to choral conducting. I audited undergraduate classes on Japanese art, world religions, and even a literature class—sin of Salinger sins—called “Tragic Drama and Human Conflict” taught by (the devil himself!) a member of the psychiatry department at the medical school. It was anything but “a peerage of tin ears” as my father referred to psychiatrists, and though the actors wore masks in the ancient tragedies, I found Oedipus’ story a far more undisguised tale than all that business about “the eyes” in Salinger’s credo.
²

Oh, the things I shut my eyes to so as to remain forever “a swell girl.” As I awakened, I’m sure I looked sober enough walking around campus, but secretly I trailed ribbons from unbound feet, dancing my own private May Day celebration through library and classroom. For a time, I fell in love with a satyr disguised as a Ph.D. candidate in ethics and religion, who had a voice like sweet, dark Cuban coffee and called me
“preciosa”
when he growled softly in my ear.

Takeoffs and landings for me in matters of the heart are still rough. I tried to be careful, but the Glass family tradition of “vomiting the oyster” is still with me. I couldn’t eat for about a week after he went on to other nymphs. I made sure I drank plenty of water and tried my hardest to eat, but I vomited before I could swallow even crackers. My priest made a house call and packed me off to the emergency room again with dehydration. They kept me there on IV fluids all night and for most of the next day, when I was finally able to eat something and keep it down. When I told the doctors, who wanted to keep me for another day’s observation, that David, my best friend, had flown up from New York and was at my apartment roasting a chicken, they let me go home. What a sweetheart: he’d cleaned the place from top to bottom, singing “I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair.”

Things went rather more smoothly with the last man I dated before I met my husband. Instead of going down with the plane, gripping the controls ever tighter in a rictus of fear,
³
I ejected. I headed for my friends Henry and Liz and their children for a couple of days to make sure the old stuff didn’t come up—gross, sorry. But true. I lost weight that I couldn’t afford to lose, though this time, it didn’t get serious.

Sometimes that’s what getting better means, you learn to work around your disabilities rather than finding the perfect cure. If you know you’re going to crash land, you don’t keep it a secret; pray to your God by all means, but have a word with the local air traffic controller as well and make arrangements to have the runway sprayed with foam, fire engines standing by, just in case.

A
BOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THE PROGRAM
, the required field placement began to seem within the realm of possibility. I met a chaplain at one of the teaching hospitals who said she thought she could work around my health problems. Most of the patients were moved through
the hospital at such a rate that the problem of continuity, should I become unable to work, would not be an issue. Most of her encounters with patients were intense, onetime emergencies. I signed on for a ten-hour-a-week internship. What a unique, fascinating, inspiring encounter with life and death.

When my father called and asked me what I was up to these days, like a fool, I told him. I knew before speaking that we would not see eye to eye about chaplaincy. I knew it just as I knew in eighth grade to ask Jenny not to mention to him our concerts at the nursing home. He asked me about my work and I answered him with stories of patients. This was not what interested him. What he wanted to know, in asking about my work, was about
me.
Didn’t I struggle with my own ego, feeling holier-than-thou walking down the corridors of my Harvard hospital? Wasn’t it all “ego and ecclesiastical vanity”?

Zooey issues Franny much the same challenge, and she, unlike me, is interested in precisely the same thing. She replies:

Don’t you think I have sense enough to
worry
about my motives for saying the [Jesus] prayer? That’s exactly what’s
both
ering me so. Just because I’m choosy about what I want—in this case, en
light
enment, or
peace,
instead of money or pres
tige
or
fame
or any of those things—doesn’t mean I’m not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I’m more so! I don’t need the famous Zachary Glass to tell me that!

(
Franny and Zooey,
p. 149)

Holden, likewise, is preoccupied with the same concern. His sister Phoebe challenges him to name something he’d like to be when he grows up and suggests a lawyer like their father. He replies:

. . . how would you know if you did it [became a lawyer] because you really
wanted
to save guys’ lives, or you did it because what you
really
wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody . . . ?
How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is, you
wouldn’t
.

(
Catcher,
p. 172)

To be honest, my “ego” was about the
last
thing I had time to worry about on the ward. That’s why chaplain interns meet with their supervisors after work, at the end of the week, to take a structured pause for reflection. I just can’t see worrying over one’s motivations with the single-minded absorption of an adolescent going at his pimples in the mirror. I’m aware that some saints and other religious persons spend lifetimes in the quest to root out the slightest blemish on their soul. I have to confess, this is something that escapes me, and I say this acknowledging the possibility I may well be wrong; but self-flagellation, mortification, falling “in hate” with oneself, strikes me as much an occupation of Narcissus as falling in love with one’s own reflection. Sure I fussed in the mirror the first day, trying to decide what cross to wear: too big, they’ll think you’re a nun; too small, they might not realize that this relatively young woman really is a chaplain. But to tell you the truth, it makes me smile to remember that, not hate myself like Franny. That good things can come from imperfect vessels, that God can use us just as we are, is something my father and I will never agree on.

Time and again I have had the experience of seeing my meager offering, replete with imperfections, being transformed into something of real use. I remember reading a book of poetry in Spanish, in my own, quite flawed Spanish mind you, to an old man on the ward who didn’t speak English and was far from his family. Seeing the tears of joy in his eyes and the comfort it brought is an experience so far beyond oneself, it’s humbling. Or figuring out what an old Portuguese woman was raving about in her dread of surgery the next day: “My statues! My statues!” she was crying out. I sat with her for a while and finally pieced it together that she had scores of statues of saints and the Blessed Mother all over her little apartment, and she missed them terribly. They were her family and they’d abandoned her when she needed them most. How small a thing it was to get a little figurine from the gift shop to watch over her through her long night. And how enormous. You pick up your brother’s teddy, his bottle, his blankie, and you place them back within reach. It’s simple.

I harbor no illusions that I walk on water as I pass down the corridor or sit beside someone’s bed. Nor do I have the hubris to think I can call out to the sick and command them to rise from their beds, abracadabra, and be healed. I don’t try to fix a person, I don’t try to cure his or her disease or to make them “a better person” as a swell girl should. I stay up and watch with a person during the long night in the garden of Gethsemane. If they want to talk, I listen or we talk; if they want to pray, we pray; if they want to hear about the Red Sox—and they aren’t at risk for a coronary—I go and find out how the Sox blew it in the ninth from the security guard with a radio.

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE
new in my life, but unlike anything “charitable,” I fully expected my father would be excited about it. My expectation stemmed from that car ride home from Cross Mountain with Jenny at Christmas so long ago. I had rediscovered the pleasure of singing, only this time, I no longer labored under the illusion of immaculate conception; I had learned the art of practice. I am not blessed with a soloist’s voice. But what I discovered is that with hard work, it’s amazing how far some fairly basic human machinery can take you. Mine has taken me closer to heaven than I ever dared dream. After three years of auditioning, I finally made it into Tanglewood, the chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. What an extraordinary, shining counterexample to Salinger law—that a mere mortal, one of the crowd, can make music with celestial choirs, Seiji Ozawa conducting.

The night of my first concert with the BSO, I took a cab. I told the driver, “Symphony Hall, please, stage entrance.” The driver was an old man, and when I said, “Can I say that again, it sounds so wonderful: stage entrance, please,” he was so happy for me. The whole way there, he talked about the operas he’d seen, and the operas he dreamed of.

That Christmas, my mother came to one of our concerts and brought a visiting scholar from Africa in full regalia who thought I was a star. My father had just come back from seeing my brother in a play in New York; he told me over the phone as I was about to leave for a concert.
Without reflection, without my guard up, I asked him, “When are you going to come and see one of
my
performances?”

“When I can pick you out of the crowd,” he said.