Dream Catcher: A Memoir (78 page)

In the spring of 1936, my father dropped out of college and took a job on a cruise ship.

Salinger rose from private to staff sergeant, landed on Utah beach on D-Day, was on or near the front lines with the Twelfth Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Division from D-Day to VE Day, from Utah beach to Cherbourg, on through the battles of the Hedgerows and bloody Mortain, to Hürtgen Forest, Luxembourg, and the Battle of the Bulge.

In the fall of 1950, Claire met a writer named Jerry Salinger at a party in New York. She was sixteen and had just begun her senior year at Shipley.

Jerry, at thirty-one, was nearly twice Claire’s age and was quite simply, or rather, quite complicatedly, tall, dark, and handsome.

Claire’s mother and stepfather in the Duveen Brothers Gallery, in the 1960s.

My grandfather, Solomon (“Sol”) Salinger.

My parents’ beloved yogi, Lahiri Mahasaya. When my brother and I were children, my father gave both of us a photograph of a yogi and asked us to tuck his picture away and take it with us wherever we went. Since Daddy never mentioned the yogi’s name, I never asked who he was. I just thought he looked a lot like Grandpa with his lush white hair and mustache.

The summer after her freshman year at Radcliffe, Claire was back in New York, where she worked as a model for Lord & Taylor. She hid the fact that she was modeling from Jerry. “Your father would not have approved, all that vain, worldly, women and clothes. . . . I didn’t dare tell him.”

When Claire’s pregnancy became obvious, she said that Jerry’s attraction turned to “abhorrence.”

My mother doesn’t remember many details about the first year of my life. It’s mostly lost in a dark haze of depression. What she does remember is that, in general, as my father became enchanted with me—by the time I was four months old and smiling he told his friends the Hands, “We grow more overjoyed every day”—my mother continued to lose ground.

Cornish, where we lived, was wild and woody.