Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  In a scene straight out of The Catcher in the Rye, where Holden on an impulse asks Sally Hayes to run away with him to the sunny cabin he imagines right on the edge of a forest, Jerry asked Claire to drop out of school and come live with him in Cornish. When Claire refused, Jerry dropped out of sight. She thinks he spent the year in Europe but isn’t sure. In desperation, she borrowed a car and drove up to the house, but there were no signs of life. Had she been able to contact him, she said, she would have done anything to be with him. “The whole world was your father—everything he said, wrote, and thought. I read the things he told me to read, not the college stuff nearly as much, looked on the world through his eyes, lived my life as if he were watching me. When I stood up to him on that one thing, college, he vanished.”

  Claire was not a person with her faculties intact. When he left, she collapsed. She was hospitalized with a long bout of mononucleosis complicated by a rather dubious appendectomy. My mother’s version of what happened next has remained remarkably stable over the years in its instability, like a snapshot of a building collapsing. I could recite it in my sleep. It begins: “I was sooooo tired. A very nice man from the business school wanted to marry me. He kept coming by my hospital room and asking me to marry him and finally I said yes. It was such a relief just to be left alone where it was sooooo quiet.”

  They eloped sometime that spring; she is fuzzy about the details. The marriage was annulled within the year. The impression I had as a young girl hearing this story was of somebody sleepwalking or in a fevered state. It worried me that such important things could happen to you in a dream or somewhere stuck between dreaming and waking. It also angered me. This quality of depicting herself as a person without will, a marionette almost, in someone else’s hands, acknowledging no responsibility for her part in all this, made me a little crazy. It may have been her reality, but mine, as a young child, felt like an almost constant struggle between the often violent urge to shake her into sensibility, hoping she’d be my lost mother, and self-protection—a Pyrrhic victory—as I tiptoed away, invisible, and let sleeping tigers lie.

  JERRY REAPPEARED IN CLAIRE’S LIFE during the summer of ’54. By the fall, Claire had moved in with him. They drove down to Cambridge each week from Cornish so that she could attend classes Tuesday through Thursday. Jerry took a room at the Commodore Hotel, and she shared an apartment with five other divorced or otherwise “not quite dorm material” girls, as she put it. He became increasingly unhappy with this arrangement and the effect it had on his work, a story that would be called “Franny.” This bothers my mother to think about because, as she says, “it wasn’t even ‘Franny’s’ story, it was mine, and that’s not how it happened.” In real life, the girl in a blue dress, with the blue-and-white overnight bag slung over her shoulder, was named Claire, not Franny. She still has the order slip from Brentano’s Bookbinding Department for “Franny’s” book, The Way of a Pilgrim.

  In January of 1955, “Franny,” the thirty-seven-page first part of what would become the book Franny and Zooey, was published in The New Yorker. During that same month, just after the midyear examination period of Claire’s senior year, she said she was given an ultimatum. “The choice was the same as last time, choose Jerry and Cornish, or Radcliffe and a degree.”

  Just four months shy of graduation, Claire dropped out of college. The story of what happened when Claire, as in the dream of Sister Irma, a young girl just short of her vows, left the verdant grounds of Cambridge with her Peter Abelard, reminds me of one of our favorite movies, Lost Horizon: outside the gate of the verdant valley, a blizzard howled. On their wedding day, Claire and Jerry drove, or rather crept, thirty miles through a nearly impenetrable gray, February sleet, from Cornish, New Hampshire, to Bradford, Vermont, to find a justice of the peace. My mother describes the four of them packed into my father’s drafty old Jeep, Jerry cursing the road, their witnesses—Bet and Mike Mitchell—in the back, silent, probably petrified, as he is a terrifying driver under the best of circumstances. My father’s version of the wedding, oft repeated to my brother and me, usually starts out with him grumbling that he’s never forgiven Bet and Mike, friends of his from his Westport days some years before he moved to Cornish, for not “speaking up” and letting him go through with such an obvious mistake.

  The gray reality of their elopement contrasted sharply with Seymour’s resplendent dream of a “sacred, sacred day.” On the eve of his elopement, my father’s character, Seymour Glass, wrote in his diary:

  I really called to ask her, to beg her for the last time to just go off alone with me and get married. I’m too keyed up to be with people. I feel as though I’m about to be born. Sacred, sacred day. . . . I’ve been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. . . . How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.

  (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, pp. 90–91)

  On his honeymoon, however, Seymour sat down on the hotel bed where his new wife, Muriel, lay sleeping, took out a pistol, and blew his brains out in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” written around 1947. My father wrote the “sacred, sacred day” passage above, from Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, around 1955. He had dropped out of Claire’s life in 1953, when he wrote “Teddy,” an ode to the renunciation of earthly attachment of any sort, most especially sexual attachment; and then, in 1955, less than two years later, he asked Claire to marry him. What happened? Was it just another impulsive scene in the drama between blissful engagement and blowing one’s brains out, attraction and repulsion, attachment and renunciation, bringing flowers and throwing stones?1

  I assumed that his off-again, on-again relationship with Claire, before they were married, was just another act in this drama of conflict. Then I found out, in talking to my mother, that something quite different had happened that led to their marriage: my father had found a new guru with a message that appeared to reconcile the conflict between earthly attraction and heavenly renunciation. According to the teachings of this guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, women and gold, the two enemies of enlightenment and karmic progress, were transmuted from Ramakrishna’s bags of “phlegm, filth, and excreta” into something potentially holy. Marriage, for the first time in my father’s post-war study of religion, was held out as something potentially sacred rather than automatically defiling; Eve and the serpent were no longer ineluctably entwined.

  During the fall and winter evenings prior to Jerry and Claire’s wedding, they had been reading a miscellany not of Vedanta, as Seymour had prior to his marriage, but rather, Paramahansa Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi. My mother told me that what was so appealing to them at the time were the stories about Lahiri Mahasaya, Yogananda’s guru, who lived from 1828 to 1895. Lahiri Mahasaya is told that he has been chosen by God to bring the path of the yogi, heretofore restricted to celibate renunciates of the world, to those who desire enlightenment but are “encumbered” by family ties and jobs, or “worldly burdens.” His message is that even the highest yogic attainments are open to such a family man.

  My mother recently sent me a copy of the book with a note telling me to “look up Lahiri Mahasaya and householders in the index rather than ploughing your way through.” She said that I was to read the “sweet passages” about Lahiri Mahasaya and his wife, their duties as “householders”—that is to say, as married persons with children rather than monks or nuns.

  My mother said she remembers feeling “full of joy at having found a path,” a religious way that said “women can,” in contrast to her Catholic upbringing with its male-dominated hierarchy, and in contrast to Vedanta and the Vivekananda center where celibate men were, she said, again the valued ones. She remembered Paramahansa Yogananda’s book as tremendously liberating. When I read the book, I wondered if we were reading the same thi
ng, particularly as I read Yogananda’s interview with Lahiri Mahasaya’s widow, whom he calls the Sacred Mother or Kashi Moni. In this passage, Kashi Moni tells Yogananda that it was years before she realized the “divine” status of her husband. In a vision she saw her husband floating in midair, in the lotus position, surrounded by angels who were worshiping him. As he came back down to the floor of their bedroom, she threw herself prostrate at his feet, begging him to forgive her for having thought of him as her husband.

  “Master,” I cried . . . “I die with shame to realize that I have remained asleep in ignorance by the side of one who is divinely awakened. From this night, you are no longer my husband, but my guru. Will you accept my insignificant self as your disciple?”

  In a ritual gesture he accepts her as a disciple and instructs her to bow before the angels. In divine chorus, the angels sing to her:

  “Consort of the Divine One, thou art blessed. We salute thee.” They bowed at my feet and lo! Their refulgent forms vanished. . . .

  From that night on, Lahiri Mahasaya never slept in my room again. Nor, thereafter, did he ever sleep. He remained in the front room downstairs, in the company of his disciples both by day and by night.

  Kashi Moni then tells Yogananda that she will confess to him a “sin” she committed against her “guru-husband,” when, several months after her vision and initiation as a disciple, she began to feel “forlorn and neglected.”

  One morning Lahiri Mahasaya entered this little room to fetch an article; I quickly followed him. Overcome by delusion, I addressed him scathingly.

  “You spend all your time with the disciples. What about your responsibilities for your wife and children? I regret that you do not interest yourself in providing more money for the family.”

  The master glanced at me for a moment, then lo! He was gone. Awed and frightened, I heard a voice resounding from every part of the room:

  “It is all nothing, don’t you see? How could a nothing like me produce riches for you?”

  “Guruji,” I cried, “I implore pardon a million times! My sinful eyes can see you no more; please appear in your sacred form.”

  “I am here.” This reply came from above me. I looked up and saw the master materialize in the air, his head touching the ceiling. His eyes were like blinding flames. Beside myself with fear, I lay sobbing at his feet after he had quietly descended to the floor.

  “Woman,” he said, “seek divine wealth, not the paltry tinsel of earth . . .”

  I have to say that reading this, forty years after my parents’ engagement, was like reading the obituary of our family before we even became one, or going back to the beginning of a tragedy and this time, with the benefit of hindsight, deciphering the oracle’s cryptic prediction of the character’s undoing. “Some months after my initiation, I began to feel forlorn and neglected. . . . You spend all your time with the disciples. What about your responsibilities for your wife and children?”2 But that was yet to come.

  While the relationship of Lahiri Mahasaya and his wife was, in a real sense, a foreshadowing of the state of my parents’ married life, I am convinced were it not for the teaching of Lahiri Mahasaya, that neither their marriage nor my birth would have taken place at all, so caught up was my father in the teachings of Ramakrishna. The teachings of Yogananda held out to my father the possibility of having his cake and eating it, too, of marriage as an institution not hopelessly defiling, setting back one’s karmic progression many lifetimes (recall Teddy’s comment about a woman being responsible for his having been reincarnated in an American body). As a model for a marriage, I find his teachings and life anything but “sweet,” but that said, it feels unseemly to speak ill of one whose teachings were so directly responsible for my birth.

  Subsequent pregnancies, my mother said, came about because she wanted more babies and, at the right time of the month, would give my father far too much wine at dinner.

  AFTER READING The Autobiography of a Yogi together in the fall of 1954, they wrote, separately, to the publishers of the book, the Self-Realization Fellowship. Jerry soon asked if the fellowship could recommend a teacher-guru in their area who might consider initiating Claire and him into the fellowship. A member of the fellowship wrote back to say that the nearest disciple he could recommend was Swami Premananda, who had recently established a church of believers just outside of Washington, D.C., and suggested Jerry write to him. He did so immediately. Swami Premananda wrote back and said he would receive them, after their marriage, and initiate them as householder devotees. They were instructed to abstain from eating breakfast on the day of their arrival and to bring offerings of fresh fruit, flowers, and a little money.

  Claire had seen Vivekananda’s center off Fifth Avenue and loved its cathedral-like quiet and beautiful high ceilings. Her mind was filled with visions, from Paramahansa Yogananda’s lush autobiography, of saffron robes, incense, and refulgent palaces in the sky of the Indian pantheon. When they got off the train, however, she found herself in what she called a lower-middle-class suburban area, “home for porters on the trains and people who bag groceries, that atmosphere. It wasn’t my class of people.” The church itself was “sweet and storefronty, kind of like a small grocery store.” Then, much to my amusement, she summed up the ashram as, “you know, basic apple pie stuff.” Laughing, I blurted out, “Ma, on what planet?” With some self-realization, thank goodness, she laughed, too.

  As the conversation progressed, the “good girl” patina on the story underwent a sort of reverse transmutation, turning Cinderella’s coach and coachmen back into a pumpkin and rats. The “sweet church” of her initial version became a “gaudied-up suburban tract house. The altar table had photographs on it.” (This comment is understandable, coming as it does from a young woman who grew up with Giotto and Fra Angelico altarpieces on the walls of her parents’ home.) And finally, “I didn’t like the low ceilings of this horrid little place.”

  They were met by “this nice, sweet little Indian man, perhaps in his forties, but it’s hard to tell.” She said the man had no visible “whirls of glory” around him, as in Yogananda’s book. “Without his robes on you’d have never noticed him.” Jerry and Claire had a private meeting with the guru after the regular morning service, where the congregation sang “normal hymn tunes, but with funny words. He gave us each a mantra and taught us how to raise the breath and watch it.” The Kriya yoga breathing exercises were, she said, very soothing and calming. They were instructed to practice for ten minutes each morning, and ten minutes in the evening. Premananda told them to return for more advanced training if they saw a white light in the middle of their forehead. In my typically enlightened way I said with a big eye roll, “Oh, great!” “No, no,” she said. “I did see it, I think it has something biological to do with the third eye. But I never went back to him. I went elsewhere.”

  “On the train home to Cornish that evening, Jerry and I made love in our sleeper car. It was so nice to . . . we did not make love very often, the body was evil. . . . I’m certain I became pregnant with you that night.”

  * * *

  1. I mentioned earlier that, as a child, Seymour threw a rock at a little girl who was sitting in the sunshine, inflicting serious injury, opening up her forehead and requiring stitches. In the story, everyone in the family understood that it was “because she looked so beautiful” sitting there in the sunshine. I don’t understand it, but to the Glass family and their author, it was an almost religious act and made perfect sense. The only way I have of approaching some feel for this is something I learned from my son. We went through a period during the terrible twos where he’d hug me and be really close, and then all of a sudden he’d throw something at me or hit me. It was so weird; he’d only misbehave like that when things were really lovey-dovey, not when he was mad about something. We figured out that at times it (Mommy and me) became too intense for him and that he felt engulfed, in danger of being swamped by me and his feelings for me. He still got put in time-out for doin
g it, but I could then help him with it by backing off a bit, and encouraging him to use his words, and also by having his dad take over more of the parenting stuff for a while, until he’d regained his equilibrium. It makes me think of my aunt saying, “It was always Sonny and Mother, Mother and Sonny. Daddy never got the recognition he deserved.” All I know is that a man who is too close to his mother, who can’t separate properly, is as much of a danger sign as one who hates his mother and can’t get close to women. It’s a tricky thing getting those boundaries right.

  2. 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, in our breast pockets where thieves could not break in, as it were, and take it with us wherever we went—off to boarding school and so on. 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. Imagine my surprise to see “our” yogi’s photograph in the center of Yogananda’s book when my mother sent it to me. It was Lahiri Mahasaya. Yogananda relates several miraculous instances where people were saved from death—lightning bolts repelled, and so on—by the photographic image they had of Lahiri Mahasaya.

  6

  Reclusion

  reclusion, n.

  1. the condition or fact of becoming or being a recluse.

  2. the condition or fact of being in solitary confinement.

  —Webster’s

  WHEN CLAIRE’S PREGNANCY BECAME OBVIOUS, she said that Jerry’s attraction turned to “abhorrence.” There is a point in every woman’s pregnancy, excepting perhaps that of the Virgin Mother herself, where the fiction of virginity can be maintained no longer. Gone was the pure novitiate, swept across her convent’s verdant meadows by Peter Abelard, as de Daumier-Smith desired so ardently, and so desperately. Claire was no longer pure; her every motive was now suspect and tainted.