Dream Catcher: A Memoir (74 page)

She made a gesture with her arm of sweeping everything away, of dismissal, and paused.

“He takes any opportunity to dig the knife in,” she said, turning an imaginary knife in the air between us. “Do you know what he said, the first thing he asked me, when he called after my heart attack? ‘You’ve gotten so fat lately, did the doctors tell you to lose weight?’ I confronted him. I told him he always criticizes.”

I broke in and asked, “Was Granny critical of him?”

“Oh, no!” Aunt Doris said, surprised at the suggestion. “He was perfect, he could do no wrong in her eyes.”

The perfect artist’s eyes. “The whole ambulance load of pain,” of the “true artists,” according to his credo, comes straight from the eyes. “Isn’t he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred conscience.” You may see, as in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” a pile of orthopedic appliances mystically turn into a dazzling vision of twice-blessed flowers, but it still smells like a load of bedpans to me.

I
F MY FATHER
is to be judged on his own terms, with the moral yardstick by which he measures himself either about his duty in life, or his daily duty, he can meet his maker with his head held high. As Seymour writes to Buddy:

Do you know what I was smiling at [when they registered together for the draft]? You wrote down that you were a writer by
profession
. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. . . . Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. . . . I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions.
Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?
If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions.

(
Seymour,
p. 160)

My father has, indeed, spent his life busy writing his heart out. I am not convinced, however, that the way of life he upholds is a well-balanced model of doing one’s duty, nor a way to a sustainable peace. Maybe he is wrong, maybe he is right. And maybe he is right and using it wrongly. What I do know is that this philosophy or religion or attitude served to justify his living life
exactly
as he wished, others be damned. To get in the way of his work for any reason whatsoever is not just a nuisance or an inconvenience; it is committing an act of sacrilege. Do not stand in the path of a holy quest; move aside or perish. Right or wrong, it fits his narcissistic bent to a T, sanctifying even the most extreme narcissism. It’s a tricky business, though: one man’s narcissist is another man’s saint. As Zooey said, “Treasure’s treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as ac
quis
itive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”

I feel the same way about my father’s way of life as Zooey did about Franny’s following
The Way of a Pilgrim.
Zooey said to her:

No matter what I say, I sound as though I’m undermining your Jesus Prayer. And I’m
not,
God damn it. All I
am
is against why and how and
where
you’re using it. I’d like to be convinced—I’d
love
to be convinced—that you’re not using it as a substitute for doing what ever the hell your duty is in life, or just your daily duty . . .

(
Zooey,
p. 169)

Once again, I found Rabbi Fine’s guidance to be invaluable in picking one’s way through this minefield of a question—as he put it, “How do I know if what I’m doing is good and right?” The rabbi was asked if there were any theological criteria he uses to evaluate the ways of life espoused by “the new religions.” He answered:

Yes, certainly, there are criteria. I’ll speak Jewishly. Judaism says there are basically three criteria. . . . First, you have to ask, Am I hurting anybody? Second, Am I adding to what is here? Although there is an intuitive experience in Judaism that is private, personal, and indescribable, you should be able to speak about it in a rational way. Not the experience, but the effect of that experience. Third, Is a positive action modality present in my life? Can I see that I am a better husband, that I’m not as angry, I’m more compassionate, more caring? Those are very powerful value statements. The Jews have ways of serving God which include all kinds of improved interrelationships and interactions. If the quality of life improves after a religious experience, then something true has happened. That includes the affirmation of family and community values. . . . Glaring problems exist in most groups. Nothing is really happening except in the member’s “own little world.” They’re not really doing anything. Ask them why.

I, too, had to give up living in my own little dream world to “ask them why.” Nevertheless, in giving up the dream of a perfect Daddy, some of my memories of happy times with my father returned. These are real, and they belong to me. I can, now, take them out and savor them whenever I want to. I don’t have to wait for his return from ethereal realms. Similarly, in giving up my pursuit of the heavenly Daddy,
the nightmare of the hellish Daddy began to give up its pursuit of me. I am able to see a talented man who, like the rest of us, is neither all good nor all bad. As the Wizard said to Dorothy, I’m not a very bad man, in fact I’m a rather good one, I’m just a very bad wizard.

What I found that is mine to keep and precious is a sense of admiration for my parents’ attempt to create a sort of Eden in the rye, a perfect world. I have also found pleasure in the ways in which they succeeded. There is great beauty in the pursuit of a dream even though, in practice, it often becomes a nightmare.
⁵

Being a member of that imperfect society, the Salinger family, has strengths and weaknesses, costs and benefits. There is both a beauty and a danger in attempting to create paradise on earth. To sustain paradise requires perfect people—or dead ones, not mere mortals who are “works in progress,” imperfect but forgiven. But the attempt also permits a glimpse of heaven, without which life can be too hard to bear.

I
T’S HARD WORK
to find the proper balance, the point of equinox for oneself. My friend Jacobo Timerman told me something nearly twenty years ago, when he was newly released from torture in a clandestine jail in Argentina. To this day, it remains the single most useful thing anyone has ever said to me. I can’t re-create the elegance of a lifelong journalist’s language, but the gist of what he said to me is as follows. He asked me why I had such sad eyes. I didn’t have an answer; that was part of the problem. I felt like an idiot for having sad eyes: I’d not been in jail, I’d not been tortured by the military. He said, It is a very hard thing to find happiness. Hundreds and thousands of examples exist of how to be miserable, and they are everywhere you look for you to copy. It is
easy
to be miserable, he said, millions can show you the way. It requires no thought
or creativity of your own, just following. To be happy is hard, because no one can show you, it is something you have to work out, create for yourself. No one can give you a model to copy, though many will volunteer, because happiness is not off the rack, one size fits all, it is something each of us has to tailor-make for himself or herself.

Up until that point, I had felt ashamed of myself, as well as sad. He took the shame away. When I saw him off at the airport, he gave me a painting of a pasture, surrounded by barbed wire, in the highlands in Argentina. On the back of the painting he wrote, “¡Ánimo! Margarita” (which translates loosely as grab some life, fill yourself with life; it’s a cry that urges you on, all that and more).

The last few years have taken the sadness away, the quiet wish I had until recently that, if I had my choice, I’d have never been born. It happened a while ago that the balance between sadness and happiness in my life tilted toward the living, but I didn’t really realize it until one moment, shortly after my hellish pregnancy and worse childbirth replete with flashbacks, and unspeakable postpartum panic attacks. I remember looking at my son sleeping in his cradle at the end of a long day and thinking, I would live my life all over again just to have spent this one day with you. Even if he or I should die tomorrow, as I envisioned over and over in my panic attacks, life is in balance, nothing missing, nothing owed.

T
HE OTHER DAY
my son came home from nursery school very upset. He’d had a fight with Katie, one of his best friends, and there had been some harsh words and name-calling. Someone may even have thrown something, but he wasn’t volunteering who. Larry and I tried to reassure him; we said, “You have to learn to use your words, and you both will.” I said, “Daddy and I fight about stuff sometimes, but we always work it out.” He looked at us as if to say, Do you think I was born yesterday? He said slowly and clearly so we fools would understand, “Grown-ups don’t fight; only kids do.” Larry said, Yes, we do, honey; our son interrupted, “My teachers don’t, you and Mommy don’t, grown-ups don’t fight and that’s that.” Larry and I looked at each other. We’re very different and we sometimes disagree, but we couldn’t remember
the last real fight, the child’s equivalent of name-calling, throwing things, hurt feelings, and so on, we had had. It suddenly dawned on us: boy, are things ever peaceful around this house. I can scarcely imagine growing up with parents who genuinely enjoy each other’s company, who are committed to lifelong “learning to use their words,” and who think that marriage and children are the best things that ever came their way. It’s so out of the realm of my experience that it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment just how far we’d come, and how very, very different my son’s world is from mine growing up. Now
that’s
a keeper, that’s a happy ending. Not perfect, but real, and beyond my wildest dreams.

It is so still in the house.

There is a calm in the house,

The snowstorm wails out there

And the dogs are rolled up with snouts under the tail.

My little boy is sleeping on the ledge,

On his back he lies, breathing through his open mouth.

His little stomach is bulging round—

Is it strange if I start to cry with joy?

(Anonymous Inuit mother’s poem)

L’ Chaim

1
. This is the word “psychics” usually prefer to use in referring to themselves and one another.

2
. See the previously cited article “Post Mind Control Syndrome” in
Social Work
(March 1982) by Lorna Goldberg and William Goldberg, who co-lead a therapeutic group for former members of religious cults: “Individuals fear punishment for leaving the cult. For example, they fear that the airplane they will ride in will crash or that their parents will be hit by cars. Nightmares are not unusual during the first few months after leaving the cult.”