Dream Catcher: A Memoir

Introduction

Dreams, books, are each a world . . .

with tendrils strong as flesh and blood . . .

—Personal Talk, William Wordsworth

I GREW UP IN A world nearly devoid of living people. Cornish, where we lived, was wild and woody, our nearest neighbors a group of seven moss-covered gravestones that my brother and I once discovered while tracking a red salamander in the rain, two large stones with five small ones at their feet marking the passing of a family long ago. My father discouraged living visitors to such an extent that an outsider, looking in, might have observed a wasteland of isolation. Yet, as one of my father’s characters, Raymond Ford, once wrote in his poem The Inverted Forest¹: Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest, With all foliage underground. My childhood was lush with make-believe: wood sprites, fairies, a bower of imaginary friends, books about lands somewhere East of the Sun and West of the Moon. My father, too, spun tales of characters, both animal and human, who accompanied us throughout our day. My mother read to me by the hour. Years later, I read that my father’s character Holden Caulfield had dreamt of having children in such a place someday; we’d hide them away, he said, in his little cabin by the edge of a forest. He and his wife would buy them lots of books and teach them how to read and write.

In real life, however, it was a world that dangled between dream and nightmare on a gossamer thread my parents wove, without the reality of solid ground to catch a body should he or she fall. My parents dreamt beautiful dreams, but did not have the skill to wrest them from the air and bring them to fruition in daily life. My mother was a child when she had me. She remained a dreamer, and, like Lady Macbeth, a tortured nightwalker, for many years. My father, a writer of fiction, is a dreamer who barely can tie his own shoelaces in the real world, let alone warn his daughter she might stumble and fall.

Fiction, other worlds, other realities, were, for my father, far more real than living flora and fauna, flesh and blood. I remember once we were looking out of his living room window together at the beautiful view of field and forest, a patchwork of farms and mountains fading into the far distance. He waved a hand across it all as if to wipe it out and said, "All of this is maya, all an illusion. Isn’t that wonderful?" I didn’t say anything, but for me, who had fought long and hard for anything resembling solid ground, the idea of its vanishing from underneath me in one fell swoop was anything but wonderful. Vertigo, annihilation, terror, are words that come to my mind, certainly not wonderful. This was the dark side of the Inverted Forest.

I grew up in a world both terrible and beautiful, and grossly out of balance. It is, perhaps, part of the human condition that children, as they grow to adulthood, must disentangle themselves from who their parents dreamt they might be, in order to figure out who they really are or hope to be. For my mother, for my father’s sister, and myself, this task brought us near to drowning, so entangled were we in tendrils, strong as flesh and blood, fantastic garlands of my father’s dreams.

My father once told a friend that for him the act of writing was inseparable from the quest for enlightenment, that he intended devoting his life to one great work, and that the work would be his life—there would be no separation. In real life, when he chooses to make himself available, he can be funny, intensely loving, and the person you most want to be with; however, for such maya as living persons to get in the way of his work, to interrupt the holy quest, is to commit sacrilege. I was nearly middle-aged before I broke the silence, broke the family idol guarding generations of moldy secrets, both real and imagined, and began to shed some light and fresh air, wholesome and life-giving as Cornish breezes.

After my son was born, I felt an urgency to make my way through the magic and the miasma alike, through both history and fiction, to figure out what is real and what is not, what is worth saving and passing on to my son as his precious inheritance, and what I want to filter out, as the Native American dream catcher that hangs over his bed filters out the nightmares in its web and lets the good dreams drip down the feather onto his sleeping forehead.

Although I thought that, as Holden said in the opening of The Catcher in the Rye, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them . . . especially my father, I’m surprised and grateful about how generous the women in our family, my mother and my father’s only sister, have been with their stories when I finally worked up the nerve to ask. I also took my father’s advice to a young lady, an English student, many years ago, when he told her that he thought she’d do much better on her paper without any active cooperation by him. He was very polite and said he appreciated her good will; nevertheless, he told her, the biographical facts you want are in my stories, in one form or another, including the traumatic experiences you asked about. So with the help of my reflections on our life together, my reading and research into my father’s life and work, and many long conversations with my aunt and my mother, I managed to piece together a story of how the Salinger family was occupied and all. It may resemble a crazy quilt, but perhaps that’s appropriate, too.

1. The Inverted Forest, Cosmopolitan 123 (Dec. 1947): 73–109.

PART ONE

A FAMILY HISTORY:

1900–1955

How my parents were occupied and all before they had me

Four gray walls, and four gray towers,

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott. . . .

There she weaves by night and day

A magic web with colors gay.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.

—The Lady of Shalott, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1

Sometimes Thro’ the Mirror Blue

¹

"Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that—as if Dinah hadn’t washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know—Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! I’m sure your paw can wait!"

—Chapter 12, Which Dreamed It?

Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll

MAMA SAID THAT WHEN SHE was a little girl, before her house in London was bombed, she would often creep out of her bed at night and open the door between her nursery and the top of the back staircase that led down to the kitchen. She’d tiptoe downstairs to make sure the door was closed and no servants were around. Then, spreading her white nightgown around her and slowly rising off the ground, she would fly up and down the passageway. She knew she hadn’t been dreaming because when she awoke on mornings after flight, there would be dust on her fingertips where she had touched the ceiling.²

My mother was a child hidden away. She, like many upper-class and upper-middle-class English children of her day, was raised by staff in the nursery. I grew up hearing grim tales of nursery life. The one brief, bright spot was a nice governess, Nurse Reed, who took little Claire home with her on visits to her family. Nurse Reed’s replacement, a Swiss-German who, among her many delightful qualities, used to force Claire, after lunch, to sit on the toilet until she produced, or until suppertime, whichever came first, was more the norm. I knew, too, that she was sent to convent boarding school when she was only five years old and that she was taught to bathe her little body under a sheet so God wouldn’t be offended by her nakedness. I used to think about that when I was a little girl sitting in the tub, how scary a wet sheet over you would feel, as if you’d get caught under the immensity of it and sucked down the drain. Once, when I was in the hospital with poison ivy, my mother told me that when she was at the convent and got poison ivy, the nuns scrubbed her head to toe, beneath the sheet of course, with a bristle brush and lye soap to remove the evil ivy boils.

What I didn’t understand was why she was there. I didn’t wonder about it when I was little and assumed that things just happen to children as inexorably as the catechism. But now, as an adult, it no longer made sense to me, and I asked her about it. My mother explained that at the time, in the fall of 1939, the fact that loomed largest in most Londoners’ lives was that there was a war on. During the Blitz, parents with the means and "any sense at all, she said, took their families out of London and went to stay with friends or relatives in the country. The Douglas family had both country relations and money; nevertheless, Claire and her brother, Gavin, were packed on a train, unaccompanied, with all the poor children," and evacuated to a convent at St. Leonard’s-by-the-Sea. St. Leonard’s had the unfortunate geographical attribute of being opposite Dunkirk, and they were soon evacuated again, this time inland to a sister convent in what my mother only remembers as a red-bricked city. She was five years old.

There was no comfort to be found in her elder brother, who, at seven, had a well-developed penchant for torturing animals and small girls. He liked to cause pain, poor boy, it confused him terribly. Why? I asked, grateful that she had never let the poor boy anywhere near her daughter while he was alive. "Mom, what was wrong with Gavin? The answer came back flat and blunt: The man my mother got her black market meat from was a pederast. When he came to the house, he bothered me a couple of times, but it was mostly my brother he was interested in, not me, thank God. I don’t think he ever recovered from it."

In the fall of 1941, as Jerome Salinger had his first story, The Young Folks, published, Claire, age seven, and her nine-year-old brother, Gavin, were put on a train to Southampton, where they were met by a governess. She informed them that their family’s house had been bombed and had burnt to the ground. The Douglases had been out for the evening when the bomb struck, but Claire’s beloved kitten, Tiger Lily, was nowhere to be found. The governess deposited Claire and Gavin on a ship, the Scythia, offering the children no explanation. Her duty accomplished, she turned and marched off the ship.

The ship was packed with stunned, weeping children headed for the safety of the United States to sit out the war. One bit of contact, which Claire clung to like a life preserver, was to stand on the deck each day and wave to the children on the deck of their sister ship, The City of Benares, which carried the same cargo of unaccompanied children and sailed alongside them in close convoy. The children would wave back to her. Several days out of Southampton, as Claire was exchanging waves, a German torpedo ripped into the side of the Benares. It exploded into flames. Claire watched in mute horror as it sank, children screaming and dancing as they burned.

The Scythia disembarked at Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax, Claire and Gavin traveled alone by train to Waycross, Georgia, to meet their first host family. They were in Georgia when, on December 7 of that year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Before the war’s end, they would be removed from eight different American foster homes because of Gavin’s behavior. And you know what happens to little girls in foster care . . . , my mother said, as though we were both in on some kind of secret not to be mentioned, only hinted at.

Their second placement was in Tampa, Florida. She remembers being terribly sunburned and attributes her midlife melanoma to her Tampa stay. The next stop, about the time Staff Sergeant Jerome Salinger was preparing to take Utah Beach on D-Day, was Wilmington, Delaware, where she attended the Tower Hill School for about a year. This was followed by placements with families in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Sea Girt, New Jersey; and Glens Falls, New York.

I never heard about these places growing up. My mother didn’t have to think for two seconds, though, to remember. The towns, and the order in which the placements occurred, were literally at her fingertips as she ticked them off, counting on her fingers the way my son, at age four, might display his mastery of the days of the week. Waycross, Tampa, Wilmington . . .

Where were your parents? I asked, assuming they must have been unable to leave England. She told me that her father, an art dealer, came to America shortly after she did, in 1941, to sell some pictures in New York. He was stuck there while the shipping passage was blocked by German U-boats. When it opened, he sent for his wife and they spent the duration of the war in New York City building up the business at Duveen Brothers³ and getting established.

When the war ended, the foster program ended, too, and the Douglases had to collect their children, at which point Claire was sent off to the Convent of the Holy Child in Suffern, New York, where she stayed until the end of eighth grade; Gavin went to Milton Academy. How were they able to have their children taken care of by American families on that war program when they were in the country themselves? I asked her as she told me this story. She shook her head and said, God only knows what story my mother told them.

She stayed with her parents in their New York apartment on the occasional school holiday, sleeping under the dining room table—for reasons unknown and probably unquestioned. In eighth grade, she refused to go back to the convent. They were doing a number on my head, trying to coerce me into becoming a nun. The whole school was ordered to shun me, not to speak to me, until I had declared my decision. I was going mad. Her parents did not, or could not, force her to return, and in the fall of 1947 they enrolled her, instead, at Shipley, a girls’ boarding school in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Three years later, in the fall of 1950, she met a writer named Jerry Salinger at a party in New York given by Bee Stein, an artist, and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, a writer for The New Yorker. Claire’s parents lived in the same apartment building as the Steegmullers on East Sixty-sixth Street, and through their shared interest in the arts, they had become good friends as well as neighbors. Claire was sixteen and had just begun her senior year at Shipley. She arrived at the party looking strikingly beautiful, with the wide-eyed, vulnerable, on-the-brink look of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Leslie Caron in Gigi, a movie my father loved so much that he bought a reel-to-reel copy and played it for us so many times when I was growing up that, to this day, I can still sing the lyrics beginning to end. As a child, I never heard the names Holden Caulfield or Seymour Glass, but even now I can’t hold a glass of champagne without hearing in my mind the song The Night They Invented Champagne from Gigi.

Our shared world was not books, but rather, my father’s collection of reel-to-reel movies. During the long winters, our human visitors were, essentially, supplied courtesy of MGM. My father would set up the screen in front of the fireplace in the living room, and I’d lie on the rug watching Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent; Laurel and Hardy; W. C. Fields; and the Marx Brothers, to name a few of our favorites. The neat, plastic videocassettes he now owns are a sterile substitute for the sensuous delight I remember then. My father would take the reel from the round metal case, as though unwrapping a present, and place it on the projector spindle. I watched him thread the film through the maze of the projector in a lovely over and under hide-and-seek; his hands knew the special moves and codes for each location. When I threaded my old treadle Singer sewing machine for my 4-H class, I felt the same thrill of competence, of secrets mastered.

When he secured the tail of the film in the empty reel, he was ready for me to turn off the lights. A thin blue stream of light beamed from the projector, widening as it moved toward the screen, smoke and dust playing in the flickering light. First the leader tape passed through with its strange hieroglyphics of bull’s-eyes and numbers and scratches, absent the dire modern video warnings about the FBI, imprisonment, and fines written in legalese. Then the title appeared with the movie’s music and opening credits.

Most of his movies were on two or three reels, so in the middle of the movie we had to stop, turn on the lights, and wait while my father rewound the spent reel and threaded the next. I liked the sound of the film at the end of each reel slapping against my father’s hand as it pulled free of the projector. I’d never stick my hand in the midst of all that flapping. He wasn’t scared of getting cut at all, even when he had to stop the movie and splice the film together where it broke.

Rewinding the film at intervals was also a chance for me to rewind, have a drink of juice or some peanuts, reassurance that the world, as I knew it, still existed. Some of the Hitchcock movies scared me half to death, and not in a fun way. Much to my father’s disgust, I always had to leave the room in the middle of Foreign Correspondent and put my head under a pillow to block out the screams of that sweet old man, Van Meer, when the Nazis tortured him in a windmill, offscreen, to get him to talk. Of my flights to the next room, my father would say, Christ, all you and your mother want to see are sentimental pictures about Thanksgiving and puppy dogs. In my father’s vocabulary, sentimental was a very damning word indeed.

Old Hitchcock movies, especially, became our secret language. As late as my senior year of high school, I’d receive a postcard saying simply, There is a man in Scotland I must meet if anything is to be done. These men act quickly, quickly—signed, in my dad’s handwriting, Annabella Smith, Alt-na Shelloch, Scotland (from The 39 Steps). When my brother was at boarding school, I received many a letter from him signed Huntley Haverstock (Foreign Correspondent). In short, we’d all light on the choice of Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn, rather than some literary character, to describe the young Claire when they first met.

Claire wore her chestnut hair smoothed back from her lovely forehead. Pretty mouth, fullish lips, and the kind of high cheekbones that promise a beauty that does not fade with youth. Claire’s large eyes are a limpid, liquid blue that reflect the ambient world, the way only hazel or green eyes are supposed to do. On a stormy day her eyes look gray and wind-tossed; on a bright day at the beach, like blue sea glass and white sails. When her eyes became the color of a burnt match, it was a signal to her children to run and hide, fast. When her eyes became opaque, like those of a dead fish belly-up at the pond, it was time for me, the elder of her children, to take charge and do whatever needed to be done to survive, because she could no more see us than a dead fish can see the flies buzzing around its eyes.

Those little eyes so helpless and appealing,

one day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling.

(Thank Heaven for Little Girls, from Gigi)

The night my parents met, her eyes shone like a beacon across the room. She was wearing a mid-blue linen dress with a darker blue velvet collar, simple and elegant as a wild iris. "God, I loved that dress. I was a model for a designer called Nan Duskin that summer in New York. She let me keep it at the end of the season . . . said it was made for me. And it was, it matched my eyes perfectly. I’ve never worn anything more beautiful in my life."

You wore a gown of gold . . .

I wore blue that night, and the month was June.

(I Remember It Well, from Gigi)

Jerry, at thirty-one, was nearly twice her age and was quite simply, or rather, quite complicatedly, tall, dark, and handsome. My father captures his own image, refracted through the eyes of his beloved, fictional Glass family. Under the guise of Buddy Glass as the purported author of Seymour: An Introduction, he writes that several members of the Glass family, including himself, have eyes that could all be rather bashfully described as extra-dark oxtail in color, or Plaintive Jewish Brown. What I can tell you as his daughter, without the bashfulness of a male narrator, or the self-consciousness of a person looking at his own image in the mirror, is that my father’s eyes are absolutely beautiful, with thick, long, black eyelashes—inherited by my brother and, a generation later, by my son; the kind that women in the park, peeking into a carriage, click their tongues over and say, "Why is it always the boys who get those gorgeous long lashes?"

Buddy, continuing to describe or introduce his revered, dead brother, Seymour, writes: . . . he had very wiry black hair. The word is almost kinky, but not quite; . . . It was most exceedingly pullable-looking hair, and pulled it surely got; the babies in the family always automatically reached for it, even before the nose, which, God wot, was also Outstanding.

WHEN JERRY AND CLAIRE saw each other from across the room at the Steegmullers’ party, Claire was dumbstruck.⁴ They had each brought a date to the party, so we couldn’t really talk much, she told me. Every time she looked up, though, their eyes seemed to meet and she felt herself blush, afraid he might think she was rather forward. The next day Jerry phoned the hostess to thank her, and to ask her about that beautiful girl in the blue dress. She gave him Claire’s address at Shipley.

The next week, Claire received a letter from Jerry. She wrote a letter to him in return, agonizing over it, afraid she might not sound clever enough to a real writer. He telephoned and wrote to her off and on throughout the 1950–51 school year. She knew from his letters that he was hard at work finishing a novel. She thinks he changed the school that Holden’s friend Jane Gallagher attended to Shipley for her. It was the sort of thing he’d do, but I was too in awe and on my best behavior to ask.

She knew, too, that Jerry was seriously considering becoming a monk. He had become friends with Daisetz Suzuki and meditated, he told her, at a Zen center in the Thousand Islands. The next year, when The Catcher in the Rye was published, he abruptly switched to Vedanta⁵ and often studied with Swami Nikhilananda at the Vedanta center in the East Nineties. But he had already met Claire.

That’s right, Teddy said. I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditating. He took his arms down from the armrests, and tucked his hands, as if to keep them warm, under his thighs. "I would have had to take another body and come back to earth again anyway—I mean I wasn’t so spiritually advanced that I could have died, if I hadn’t met that lady, and then gone straight to Brahma and never again have to come back to earth. But I wouldn’t have had to get incarnated in an American body if I hadn’t met that lady."

(Teddy in Nine Stories, JDS)

When Claire came home to New York from Shipley for the summer, they started seeing each other. This was soon interrupted when each left for Europe, Jerry to the British Isles, to avoid being in America for the publication of The Catcher. It’s a goddam embarrassment, publishing, he once said to a fellow writer. The poor boob who lets himself in for it might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down.

Claire went to Italy, to be with her dying father. It did not come as a surprise to anyone who knew her father that old age finally caught up with Robert Langdon Douglas, or RLD as he was called by friends. He was nearly seventy when Claire, the last of his fifteen or so children, was born in 1933. Baron’s Knights and Peerage records nine of them. By the time she can remember him, he was suffering from senile dementia. She told me once, at an age when I, too, would have died of embarrassment, that in the middle of a formal dinner party at their home in London, he boomed across the table in his plummy churchman’s voice, Claire, have you moved your bowels today?

RLD’s final years were characterized by similar occurrences of progressive unpredictability; however, his decision to repair to Italy to spend his last days rather than to the Black Douglas Clan’s lair in Scotland was well considered. Two divergent paths of his long life led him, at the end, to San Girolamo, a convent and nursing home for retired clergy, high in the hills above Florence. He had been an Anglican priest and had had a parish in Oxford, England, for a time. Several wives and even more offspring later, it was thought best that he find some other mode of employment, and he began his second, highly successful career as an art dealer and historian. Your grandfather, I’ve been told, was largely responsible for putting the early Italian Masters, especially the Sienese, back on the map. He wrote a lovely book on Fra Angelico, and though RLD was dead long before I was born, I used to take great comfort falling asleep beneath Giotto’s dark-skinned Madonna and Child when, as a young girl, I visited my grandmother in New York. Perhaps RLD did, too; toward the end of his life he converted to Catholicism.

When he died, he was awarded a hero’s funeral in Siena, where he is entombed in a great wall. My mother said the whole city turned out in medieval procession that day, with costumes, trumpets, and pageantry, to pay homage to the man who, through his work, had restored such honor to their city. My mother gave me his funeral proclamation by the city of Siena, a two-foot-by-three-foot document worthy of an honorary Italian.

After the funeral, Claire returned to New York. Jerry was back as well and had settled into an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street. When Claire first saw it, she was speechless. It was, she told me, one of those partly underground, ground-floor places, very underwater feeling. The whole apartment was black and white. I was appalled, frightened, excited, bug-eyed at the black sheets on his bed. They were the height of sophistication and depravity to me. For Jerry, though, I think the black sheets and the black bookshelves, black coffee table, and so on matched his depression. He really had black holes where he could hardly move, barely talk.

Claire would stay the night with him on those black sheets, but they were not intimate. Jerry was very involved with Vivekananda’s Vedanta center at the time, she told me, and as his character Teddy said, meeting a woman was heading in the wrong direction for enlightenment. Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda’s guru and predecessor, expressed the same opinion, though more forcibly, in his book The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna (which my father sent to his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, as the only thing worth reading), saying:

A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts, and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on woman and gold, I say, Shame on him! Woman and gold are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he can not act as he likes.

When a disciple of Ramakrishna’s confesses that he has been enjoying sexual intercourse with his wife, Ramakrishna replies, Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You have children, and still you enjoy intercourse with your wife. Don’t you hate yourself for thus leading an animal life? Don’t you hate yourself for dallying with a body which contains only blood, phlegm, filth, and excreta?

The summer after her freshman year at Radcliffe, Claire was back in New York, where she had a summer job as a model for Lord & Taylor. She was careful to hide this from Jerry: "Your father would not have approved, all that vain, worldly, women-and-clothes stuff. . . . I didn’t dare tell him."

Around the time Jerry began seeing Claire, he went on a couple of dates with Leila Hadley, a writer, whom he met through his friend S. J. Perelman. When Ms. Hadley saw that same apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street, she described it as extremely bare:

There was just a lamp and an artist’s drawing board. He used to do rather good sketches, and when I read De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, I was sure he had based the hero on himself. On the wall of his apartment there was a picture of himself in uniform.⁶

In contrast to the young Claire, who was too in awe and on my best behavior to ask any personal questions, Ms. Hadley was confident enough, mature enough, to ask him questions and offer her own opinions rather than reflect his own. She said that Jerry never talked about himself and he resented any personal questions—about his family, or his background. . . . [He] was not easy to be with. Their relationship was a brief one.

THIS RESENTMENT OF QUESTIONS about family and background, about connections from island to mainland, runs like a mother lode through our family. (Recall the opening of The Catcher in the Rye: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me . . . my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.) My aunt Doris—Daddy’s only sister—and I were talking recently about being raised not to ask any questions, and most especially, not to ask questions about one’s background, or as Holden put it, how one’s parents were occupied and all before they had you. Doris told me that by the time she was about seven, shortly after her brother was born, she had learned enough about the birds and the bees to figure out that her mother, Miriam, must have had parents. One day she said, "Mother, you must have a mother and daddy somewhere. Where are they?"

Her mother snapped, People die, don’t they?

That’s it. That was all she said. Doris heard from one of her aunts on the Salinger side that Miriam was heartbroken when, years later, her mother actually did die. Miriam never said a word about it to Doris though. Later that same year Doris saw her mother packing a box full of their baby clothes. Thinking they might be for her mysterious family, Doris asked her whom she was sending them to. It is none of your business, she was told with a glare.

Well, I just shut up and took it like I always did, Doris told me.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.

1. And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue, The knights come riding two and two: She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott.

2. "[Franny, age seven] went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. . . . He said she surely just dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs" (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, p. 9).

3. A privately owned art gallery in Paris and Manhattan, specializing in Old Masters. Edward Fowles and a partner inherited the business when Lord Duveen died in 1939. My grandmother married Uncle Edward, as we called him, after my grandfather died. Uncle Edward’s memoir, Memories of Duveen Brothers: Seventy Years in the Art World, is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the wheelings and dealings of the art world—its patrons, saints, forgers, and other colorful people.

4. The wife of a New York editor told Ian Hamilton about meeting Jerry a year or two later: I met Jerry Salinger at a party given, I think, by or for his English publisher. . . . I was not prepared for the extraordinary impact of his physical presence. There was a kind of black aura about him. He was dressed in black; he had black hair, dark eyes, and he was of course extremely tall. I was kind of spellbound (Ian Hamilton, In Search of J. D. Salinger [New York: Random House, 1988], p. 124). The author Leila Hadley, who went on a few dates with him just before The Catcher was published, recalls a similar reaction. She speaks of his extraordinary presence—very tall, with a sort of darkness surrounding him. His face was like an El Greco.

5. Vedanta: a system of Hindu monistic or pantheistic philosophy founded on the Vedas (Webster’s).

6. Hamilton, Salinger, p. 127.

2

Landsman

Landsman: (Yiddish) someone who came from the same town or village or shtetl in Europe as you. A kinsman in foreign lands of gray walls and gray towers. A kindred spirit.

MY HUSBAND AND I WENT to visit Aunt Doris after our son was born to show her the baby while she still retained some of her eyesight.¹ Perhaps because of the presence of new life, questions of where do we come from, who are we, and where are we going pressed upon me. My aunt is no longer one to just shut up and take it, and she graciously provided me with some vital connections to the mainland as it were; she spoke to me as though it were naturally my business to wonder about our family. After offering us tea and sitting down, she paused and brushed some imaginary crumbs off the couch in her one-bedroom assisted living unit in the Berkshires. She is nearly blind now and partially deaf, but even my father, the recipient of several heated conversations and letters in which she accused him of neglecting her and the rest of his family, admits her mind is sharp. Knowing this, I respect her silences and don’t try to bring her back as one might with a person whose mind wanders off, the years gobbling up the crumbs left behind as a trail to find one’s way home through the dark forest. She was deep in thought. You know, Peggy, your father and I were the best of friends growing up. I used to take him to the movies with me when he was very little. In those days, you know, the movies were silent and had subtitles that I had to read to him out loud. Boy, he wouldn’t let you miss a single one. The rows used to empty out all around us!

Doris told me that when she was a very little girl, before my father was born, the family lived in Chicago where Sol, her father, ran a movie theater and her mother, Miriam, took the tickets and sold concessions. Of all those Jews in the business at that time, Doris said, Daddy was the only one who didn’t make it big. Instead, Sol went into the food importing business for J. S. Hoffman and Co. based in Chicago. He was successful, so much so that Hoffman asked him to manage the New York office. Sol took the promotion and moved the family to New York, where my father was born.

Doris said that her upbringing was very different from her brother’s. "We had some money by the time Sonny² was born. That made a big difference. There were six years between them, because their mother had had two miscarriages. When she was hospitalized with pneumonia during her sixth month of pregnancy, the doctors said that there wasn’t much hope for the baby. But on New Year’s Day, 1919, out came a nine-pound baby boy, Jerome David, nicknamed Sonny. That was really something special, Doris said. In a Jewish family, you know, a boy is special. Mother doted on him, he could do no wrong. I thought he was perfect, too. Although she spent a lot of her time looking after her little brother, she didn’t mind. Mother was very good about not asking me to baby-sit when I had friends over or some other plans. Interrupting her own train of thought—permission to change course without explanation or self-consciousness is a gift only old people seem to have the grace and authority of years to give themselves—she said, Did Mother ever tell you the Little Indian story about Sonny? I shook my head. Well, one afternoon I was supposed to be taking care of Sonny while Mother was out shopping. He couldn’t have been older than three or four at the most. I was about ten. Well, we had a big fight about something, I forget what it was about, but Sonny got so mad he packed his suitcase and ran away. He was always running away. When Mother came home from shopping a few hours later, she found him in the lobby. He was dressed from head to toe in his Indian costume, long feather headdress and all.³ He said, ‘Mother, I’m running away, but I stayed to say good-bye to you.’

When she unpacked his suitcase, it was full of toy soldiers.

MY AUNT’S RETELLING OF THIS family story brought to mind one of my father’s characters, Lionel, in a short story called Down at the Dinghy (reprinted in Nine Stories), who is about the same age as the Little Indian, Sonny. As the story opens, Lionel, like Sonny, has run away again. The housekeeper, Mrs. Snell, and the maid, Sandra, are talking about it:

I mean ya gotta weigh every word ya say around him, Sandra said. It drives ya loony. . . . Sandra snorted . . . A four-year-old kid!

He’s kind of a good-lookin’ kid, said Mrs. Snell. Them big brown eyes and all.

Sandra snorted again. He’s gonna have a nose just like the father.⁴

Lionel’s mother, Boo Boo Tannenbaum, née Glass (sister of Seymour, Franny and Zooey, Walt and Waker, and Buddy Glass), enters the room, which silences their unpleasant exchange, but leaves it unclear why he has run away. Boo Boo finds Lionel down at their dinghy. He is wearing a T-shirt with a dye picture, across the chest, of Jerome the Ostrich, hiding his head in the sand, as it were. After a long conversation in which Lionel refuses to tell his mother what happened to make him break his promise never to run away again, Boo Boo climbs into the dinghy and tries to say something comforting. She is interrupted by his sobbing outburst: Sandra—told Mrs. Smell—that Daddy’s a big—sloppy—kike.

After a little while, she asks him, Do you know what a kike is, baby?

Lionel was either unwilling or unable to speak up at once. At any rate, he waited till the hiccupping aftermath of his tears had subsided a little. Then his answer was delivered, muffled but intelligible, into the warmth of Boo Boo’s neck. "It’s one of those things that go up in the air," he said. "With a string you hold."

AS I STARTED TO tell Aunt Doris a story about my son, she interrupted me and said, Peggy, make sure you have a job or something when your son is a little older. Don’t let him become your whole life. It’s no good. Mother lived through her children. She was very lucky that Sonny is as successful as he is. It was always Sonny and Mother, Mother and Sonny. Daddy got the short end of the stick always. He never got the recognition he deserved.

I asked her if their father was around much during their childhood, or if he was at work most of the time, like all the offstage, absent fathers in my father’s stories, from Holden’s attorney father, whom we never meet, to Les Glass. She said, Oh, no, he played with us a lot, especially when we went on vacation to the shore during the summers. When we were very little, Daddy used to hold Sonny and me around our middles, out in the waves, and say, ‘Keep your eyes peeled for the bananafish.’ Boy, did we look and look.

Aunt Doris said that she has only one real complaint about her upbringing. What still troubles her wasn’t the general silence regarding their family stories and background, so much as the way her parents kept one particular fact hidden from their children, then finally disclosed it in a revelation that Doris, a very levelheaded woman, given to understatement rather than to drama of any sort, said she could only describe as traumatic. It was so awful, she said, that she can’t even remember just how it happened, only that her parents handled it terribly. When Doris was nearly twenty, shortly after Sonny’s bar mitzvah, their parents told them that they weren’t really Jewish. Their mother, Miriam, was actually named Marie, and she had been passing as a Jew since her marriage to Sol.

Until that moment, I never knew that my father grew to adolescence believing both of his parents were Jews. He has often told me that he writes about half-Jews because, he says, that’s what he knows best. Unlike my aunt, however, I grew up knowing that my granny, their mother, was Catholic. But beyond the fact that nuns were somehow involved, I had no idea, nor did I question, what being Catholic meant. Daddy said that Granny sometimes told people she was high Episcopalian because it sounded tonier, but she was actually a Catholic girl from County Cork, Ireland. Aunt Doris told me that she was surprised to hear this. She said, in typical New Yorker fashion, she had always thought her mother was born in Iowa, or Ohio, one of those places, and wasn’t sure about the Catholic part even now. However, she said, Sonny probably knew better than she did. He was more persistent at asking questions than I was, and also he got away with a lot more than I did, being a boy. After they were told that their mother wasn’t Jewish, she remembered something her mother had said, and guessed, in hindsight, that her mother might have been Catholic, but Doris never asked. Mother suffered from chronic jaw pain, you know. She once mentioned to me that it was because when she was a little girl, the nuns at her school used to take a wooden mallet and hammer her teeth once a week to cure an overbite. I remember Granny rubbing her jaw and wincing. I always assumed it was out of irritation, though, because my dad makes the exact same gesture whenever someone asks him anything personal or begins picking his brains, as he calls it.

Doris and I inherited the family overbite, and something else, too: it was Doris’s aunts and uncles—Sol’s brothers and sisters—who passed on the family stories and told her something of her family history after she was grown up. It was they who told her that her parents had met at a county fair near Marie’s parents’ farm (presumably in Ohio since Sol was there for the day from Chicago). Marie had beautiful auburn hair that hung down to her narrow waist. She turned heads when she passed by. She was a real looker, your mother, Doris was told by her uncle. Sol was a tall, handsome young man from the big city. When they eloped, he was twenty-two, she was seventeen. Marie Jillich became Miriam Salinger⁵ and was never to speak to her parents again.

As with most families, it’s difficult to sort out who isn’t talking to whom. One can be certain, however, that in those days an Irish Catholic young woman did not marry a Jewish man with impunity.⁶ Nor could a Jew marry out of his religion without a stir, but over time, Doris said, Sol’s mother grew to love Miriam as if she were one of her own daughters. When his mother died, Sol went to temple every day for a year. Doris believes that he did so because he felt guilty for marrying a non-Jew, even though his mother had accepted his choice. Who knows. From his mouth to God’s ear.

What I do know is that the whole subject of Jewishness is something my father is very touchy about indeed. The only way I can think of conveying a sense of this touchiness is to liken it to the way my son, at around four years old, behaved when the subject of bottoms came up (about a thousand times a day, if I recall rightly). It was a mixture of giggly interest, the butt of jokes, a swirling confluence of attraction and repulsion, the precious mystery withheld, and the flushed piece of himself. Totem and Taboo. In my father’s house, the arousal level occasioned by the mention of anything Jewish was matched only by the degree of occlusion of the real facts of life.

I heard, or rather felt, the pitch of emotion surrounding things Jewish when he told me stories about his childhood, but I never knew what to make of it. One story was about the time his grandfather from Chicago came to visit them in New York and my father, then a young boy, nearly died of embarrassment as his grandfather called out each street number on the Madison Avenue bus they were riding. Forty-feef Street, Forty-seex Street, my father would call out in a loud voice with a heavy Yiddish accent as he told the story.⁷

As with most things deeply embarrassing in our family, this story was transformed into a sort of running family joke. In sixth grade when I went away to camp, for example, Daddy wrote a letter kidding me that his grandfather, the one who called out the street names, would be joining me at camp, as a cabin-mate. Not to worry about pajamas, he didn’t really care for them anyway. Even though I was only nine at the time, I knew this was a little joke within a joke, a bit of shared snobbery about language, that some people think it sounds tonier to say I don’t care for pajamas when you mean I don’t like pajamas. I should just enjoy him, Daddy said.

This is not to say, however, that painful or embarrassing things were treated as humorous at the time they happened. I remember once my father, face flushed with emotion, looked up from a letter he was reading. He told me that he had been corresponding with a small group of Hasidic Jews for whom he felt real affection. This feeling of kinship, of finding landsmen, has been, in my father’s life, as precious as it was rare. He said he even sent them a little money from time to time, because they were quite poor. In the letter he was holding, the rebbe had asked him what was his mother’s maiden name.⁸ I’ll cut them off, he said, slashing the air with his hand. I’ll never speak to them again. I knew he was as good as his word; I’d seen it happen too often not to know he spoke with the finality of a man sitting shiva for a living son.⁹

WHEN I FOLLOWED MY FATHER across the boundary from daily life into fictional life, I’d hoped to find, in his published stories, some clarification of the confusing, powerful feelings that things Jewish, and questions of background in general, evoke in him time and again. I came across this kind of exchange many times in my father’s fiction, this vetting of your true landsman status. However, in every story except Down at the Dinghy, the one about the four-year-old boy Lionel, the Jewishness at the heart of the matter is disguised, raising, until I spoke to my aunt, more questions than were answered. For example, whereas Daddy’s grandfather in real life had a loud, embarrassing Yiddish accent, his character, Les Glass, Seymour’s father, has an embarrassing Australian accent. (Australia, Gracie?) In my father’s last published story, Hapworth, the young Seymour writes from camp advising his father, a vaudeville singer, to lose the accent next time he makes a recording if he wants it to be a success. Seymour assures his father that the family is fond of his accent, but the general public will not share that affection.

In The Catcher in the Rye, this touchy subject comes up several times in regard to Holden’s religious background. In the scene in the train station where Holden has a pleasant conversation with two nuns at a breakfast counter, he tells them he really enjoyed talking to them. He tells the reader he really meant it; nevertheless, he would have enjoyed it more if he hadn’t been sort of afraid, the whole time he was talking to them, that they’d all of a sudden try to find out if he was Catholic. It happens to him a lot, he tells us, because his last name is Irish. Actually, Holden’s father had been an Irish Catholic until his marriage to Holden’s mother, at which time he quit. Holden tells the reader another story colored by the same anxiety about a conversation wending its way to questions of his background. He and a nice boy from Whooton were talking about tennis when the boy asked if he had happened to notice a Catholic church in town. Here, again, Holden tells us, it didn’t ruin the conversation exactly, but he knew the boy would have enjoyed it a lot more if Holden had been Catholic. That kind of stuff drives me crazy.

In the mirror of fiction, the Salingers switch places: my father’s Irish Catholic mother becomes, instead, Holden’s father, who quits his religion when he marries. The subject of anxiety changes from questions vetting one’s Jewishness to whether one is Catholic or not. Reading my father’s work recently, I wondered, Why the disguise? Why would the central character of his first book, which he had told friends would be an autobiographical novel,¹⁰ not be half-Jewish? Why would the Glass family, openly half-Jewish, wish