I don’t remember if I had a good time in Barbados that time or not. I imagine I did, and it seems a bit churlish to report that all I remember clearly about my own experience is that strange blisters appeared on my arms, and I suddenly had the chills and wanted thick blankets on my bed. I was sunburned, my mother told me as she put some kind of salve on my arms. This was quite a blow to my pride. My mother and brother were the fair ones who needed lots of smelly suntan lotion; Daddy and I never burned. The other thing I remember was the smell of sugarcane burning in the evening, which disturbed me greatly. All I knew about were forest fires raging out of control because, as Smokey the Bear warned, someone had been careless with a match. I had no concept of controlled stubble burning as a farming technique, and I lay awake at night terrified the fire would soon reach our hotel, and even more terrified that I seemed to be the only one who was concerned.
What I did notice was that sunning and resting did my mother a world of good. All the nice, playful, pretty things within my mother came out on vacation visits with her mother. She wasn’t just well-behaved, she was fun. There was new life in her veins, her face shone, her clothes were bright, Lilly Pulitzer colors, she even smelled different than she did at home. I liked being near her. There were no scenes, no punishments. This other Mama, the lovely one who smelled of Blue Grass lotion and lavender, put in an appearance, a transformation that happened most reliably when we were away from Cornish, and Daddy stayed behind.
My grandmother, too, seemed magically transformed. My brother and I had been forbidden to see her when we were very young, and I still recall clearly the image I created of her in my mind as a wicked witch, with wild hair and bony, jabbing, long fingers. When I met her, here was this tiny old lady with twinkling blue eyes and soft, curly, white hair, looking for all the world like a fairy godmother. Everything about our visits with her was enchanting. We left the cold, gray isolation of winter in Cornish and were transported to fairy land: Barbados or Venice, her house in Mount Kisco with its swimming pool and gardens, her apartment at Seventy-ninth and Madison with its beautifully scrolled front entrance door that looked as if someone had blinked and turned a secret garden of ivy and roses into everlasting metalwork, doormen who knew me and an elevator stop that was hers alone, and inside were paintings of voluptuous naked ladies, of people dressed like kings and queens, of Madonna and child illuminated by sparkling cut-glass lamps, and floors made of hundreds of small wooden rectangles in a rainbow of forest colors from honey to deep red to darkest brown, all pieced together in patterns that only a magician’s kaleidoscope could have made in its perfection.
For years, I thought of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just a block away from her apartment, as a natural extension of the magical world she inhabited. There, at the museum, most wondrous of all, to me, was that you could take a tray and fill it with food you could see and smell, laid out before your eyes for the taking in such abundance it was like the feasts I’d read about in my books where the king, or some pasha in silk pajamas, or a Mandarin emperor, clapped his hands and a hundred dishes might be paraded before him and his guests. After making your choices, you found a table fit for the gods set all around a long pool of water with various sprites making gentle, musical, sparkling fountains of water turning the air around them into a dance. As Holden said, I wish you could have been there—it has been renovated since then, if one can refer to what Mount Vesuvius did to Pompeii as a “renovation.” The pool has been covered over, or removed to make way for more tables, and all too human waiters bring your meal sight unseen chosen from letters and sentences and numbers on a menu. Gone the magical grotto, the sound and feel and shimmer of droplets in the air, copper penny wishes tossed in by children; now the raucous sounds of utensils and glass and plate, humanity in a hurry, with grown-ups signaling waiters to bring the check.
The civility I remember of the Metropolitan Museum, the quiet sanctuary, was similar to the way I felt about the relations between Granny and my mother. They maintained a formal, perhaps distant civility—though it didn’t strike me as distant when I was a child and thought everyone with an English accent conversed in that manner—that was contagious. Even when I was twelve and the possibility of the barest hint of civility between my mother and me seemed well nigh impossible, we had a lovely, peaceful time together exploring Italy with Granny. It makes me think, now, that my mother was quite right in saying how different things would have been had she stayed in New York and received some psychiatric help and support, rather than going back to Cornish after she ran away.
My father told me that Mummy De-ah was a terrible liar and if I had any self-respect, I’d have nothing to do with such a person. I didn’t disagree with him, about the lying that is, but what I didn’t tell him is that I enjoyed her, and even some of the lies, or “stories,” just the same. Like the whopper she told us about riding on the back of dolphins from the Cipriani, that glorious island hotel, to the dock by Saint Mark’s Square in Venice. Although Daddy had a fit about the vacations that my mother, brother, and I took with her, he’d still send me love notes, even in enemy territory.
MRS. CORETTE, WHO HAD PROBABLY never taken such a vacation, refers cheerfully and generously to my absence from school during this time.
[Report card: period 4]
Peggy’s reading work continues to be satisfactory this period. With your help during her absences, she has progressed satisfactorily with her group.
Her travel experience must have been richly rewarding as she came back looking so rested and tanned.
Peggy has been a most interesting child with whom to work. She completes her seatwork assignments and is a helper in our room. She has a very nice, sweet little singing voice and she likes to sing for us. Peggy has shown qualities of leadership and her enthusiasm has been most enjoyable. We shall miss her in our room next year.
We want to say a big “thank you” to you for allowing Peggy to bring so many interesting things to our classroom. Plants, books, etc. are always appreciated and enjoyed by the little children.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Corette
WE WANT TO SAY A big “thank you” to Mrs. Corette. I revisited the school playground this year, on a sad trip to Plainfield for the funeral of my friend Viola’s little sister. During the break between the church service and the burial, I walked a block over to the old school, which is now an auction house. I had driven by there hundreds of times, but I hadn’t been back behind the school, where the playground was, in over thirty years. I remembered the playground as huge and was curious to see how big it really was, or rather, how small it might have become to the eyes of a grown-up after all those years. I rounded the corner of the old school building and found, for the first time in my experience of revisiting childhood places, it was even bigger than I’d remembered. It was immense. I have been a city dweller for so long that I now measure what urban real estate agents call “outdoor space” in square feet, not acres. I paced off 125 long-legged strides from the back of the building across the field to the edge of the woods. There were probably twenty feet of woods, which was part of our playground as well, before it fell sharply over the forbidden bank into an old dirt pit. In fair weather we ate our lunch outside in circles of friends on the field. I wish I’d brought my lunch box and thermos.
I thought about Viola’s sister. I’d been with her a few days before she died from a long battle with brain cancer. Viola and I were forty; Carol was thirty-one years old. The tumor had devoured most of her spark. She could still walk a little and sit up with assistance, but the light was nearly gone from her eyes. The town minister, who had been Carol’s sixth-grade teacher and soccer coach, arrived for a visit. We sat around talking out back of Viola’s house. To include Carol in the conversation, I asked her, “Did you have Miss Chapman, or Mrs. Spaulding?” I was met with a blank look, and her mother answered for her that she did have Mrs. Spaulding in fifth grade but wasn’t sure about Miss Chapman. “You did have Mrs. Corette though, didn’t
you?” I asked. She smiled, not just with her lips but her dark eyes lit up. “Mrs. Corette,” she said slowly. “Mrs. Corette, yes.”
A few days later, the pain was outrunning the morphine, and Viola, in her gentle way, told her beloved, feisty little sister that it was time to stop fighting and urged her to turn toward the light and take Dad’s hand. Carol died minutes later, sitting up in her easy chair, her family and her cats surrounding her, loving her to the last. It occurred to me that if I ever die (!)—yes, I just wrote that—I mean if I’m scared when I’m dying, which I most probably will be, I hate going anyplace strange (my son was playing with our cheap folding closet doors yesterday and said, “It’s just like we’re on an airplane, Mommy”—they were, indeed, like bathroom doors on a plane, site of several whopping panic attacks, and just the mention of it made me run to the bathroom to empty my gripping bowels. No, I won’t be going gently into the night I think). When I die, I don’t really want the Saints or Jesus or any of those big guys to stretch out their hand to me in the light. I’d like to see Mrs. Corette in her pink dress with frog appliqués on the pockets, holding out her hand and inviting me to come and join the circle in the field. “Bluebird, bluebird, through my window, take a little girl and tap her on the shoulder.”
Requiem eternam. Recess eternal.
10
Snipers
I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD when I entered third grade in the fall of ’63, the same age and grade as Seymour was in the story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” published in The New Yorker a year and a half later, in 1965. The “story” consists of a letter, the length of which took up nearly the entire issue of the magazine, written by Seymour, age seven, from summer camp, to his parents back home. He asks them to send a “few” books for his brother Buddy, age five, and him to read over the summer. His request includes the complete works of Tolstoy; Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Raja-Yoga and Bhakti-Yoga by Vivekananda; all of Charles Dickens, some of George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters; Chinese Materia Medica by Porter Smith; some Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac; selections from the works of Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Martin Leppert, Eugène Sue; the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and so the list goes on and on.
This is not simply the summer reading list of a peculiar fictional character; it is my father’s way of treating the reader to the same advice and exhortation he gave his own real children, though at a slightly older age. With the exception of the foreign-language books such as conversational Italian, and the “two invaluably stupid books” by Erdonna and Baum, there wasn’t one of the books on Seymour’s list that my brother and I hadn’t heard him canonize or declare anathema, using the same language, ad nauseam, I’m afraid. It was hard for me to maintain an adult reference point as I read “Hapworth” in my late thirties—lots of adolescent eye-rolling and tooth-sucking at being lectured—“I know, Dad, you’ve said it about a million times already.” No one else, that I know anyway, talks like this. Phrases I could recite from memory:
Both are written by distinguished, false scholars, men of condescension, exploitation, and quiet, personal ambition. . . . I would greatly appreciate anything not containing excellent photographs . . . a damned beautifully self-reliant spinster . . . a genius beyond easy or cheap compare! . . . Vivekananda of India. He is one of the most exciting, original, and best equipped giants of this century I have ever run into . . . godsent models of the feculent curse of intellectuality and smooth education running rampant without talent or penetrating humanity . . . preferably unwritten by vainglorious or nostalgic veterans or enterprising journalists of slight ability or conscience . . .
(“Hapworth 16, 1924”)
We third graders in Plainfield were pleased to begin reading in the Junior Classics of the Collier’s Encyclopedia. On the first day of school, pretty Mrs. Beaupre told us to bring the volume home and have our mothers help us cover it in brown paper from a shopping bag, and write the title on the cover, centered, with our name and class in the upper right-hand corner. I remember illustrations of Indians having a lot more fun than the Pilgrims, and being so bored sitting there in class that I used to disappear and walk around in the pictures.
One day just after recess, we all took our seats and folded our hands. Mrs. Beaupre said, “Children, open your desks and take out your Junior Readers.” Roseanne LaPlante was about to read aloud when Mrs. Spaulding, the principal, entered our classroom. She asked Mrs. Beaupre if she would step into the hall for a moment. Marilyn Percy, one of the front-row girls, was appointed monitor, which meant she was supposed to write down the names of all the children who misbehaved during the teacher’s absence and tattle when the teacher returned. Neither Viola nor I, who sat in the back with the boys and could shoot spitballs with the best of them, was ever appointed monitor, nor were any of the boys, who, in those days, were, by definition, unfit to snitch, being made of “snips and snails and puppy dog tails,” as opposed to “sugar and spice and everything nice.”
This time, though, not one of us budged. We were all wondering whose father had had an accident at home with the farm machinery, or over at the split ball-bearing factory, and who’d have to get home right away. Mrs. Beaupre looked strange when she and Mrs. Spaulding stepped back into the classroom. She said, “Children, President Kennedy has just been shot.”
Bedlam broke out in our classroom as several children stood on their chairs and stomped and clapped and whistled.1 I could not have been more shocked than if Mrs. Spaulding had entered our classroom and pulled down her pants. Not about the president so much as that anyone would think that someone being shot was something to cheer about, and that they dared do it in class, in front of the principal.
My mother picked me up at the usual time. I got into the car and she started to tell me about the president. I said I already knew that. During the funeral, Daddy was in front of the television, his face an ashen green, with tears rolling silently down his cheeks as he sat and stared. The only time I have ever seen my father cry in my whole life was the day he watched JFK’s funeral procession on television.
I thought, as I watched the procession, I must never forget this. So, for some reason, I set myself the task of memorizing the drumbeat of the long funeral march: dum, dum, dum, da-da-da; dum, dum, dum, da-da-da; dum, dum, dum, da-da-da; dum, dum, da-dum—all those blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Arlington National Cemetery. As I listened, I thought about Granny, sitting by the window in her bedroom overlooking Park Avenue, as she did every morning, hoping to catch a glimpse of little Caroline Kennedy going to school.2 She called me in and we sat there together by the window as she told me that Caroline and I were almost the same age and how prettily she was dressed the last time she had seen her. She was thrilled by a “sighting.” The little boy, John junior, whom we saw saluting his father’s casket, was the same age as my brother. They wound up, years later, at boarding school together.
My mother had already shed tears over the Kennedys the spring before the president was shot. President Kennedy had decided to have a party to honor American writers and artists, and he had invited my parents to the White House. I remember thinking how wonderful, having cake and ice cream with the president. They almost went, such were my father’s feelings for President Kennedy (to this day, although I have warm feelings for President Kennedy, I don’t know why he was singled out in my father’s affections). My father delayed replying to think it over.
Mrs. Kennedy placed a call from the White House to our house in Cornish. Our telephone number at the time was 401. She spoke to my mother, who said she’d love to come but was embarrassed to say that she was having trouble convincing her husband, you know how he is about his privacy. Mrs. Kennedy said let me try. A conspiracy of well-brought-up young ladies. My mother told me, “Jackie got on the phone with him and then again with me. She really wanted him at the dinner. But I must have let on I wanted it. So he said no way to me. Jerry didn’t want me to feel I was worth anything, an
d above all, he wanted to make sure that I be prevented from having a chance to fall into the feminine vice of vanity. . . . I may still have the invitation. I wrote a haiku at the time and kept it for years. It was something like:
“Having to decline
The White House invitation,
She dreams of her gown.”
Killing was in the air. My mother told me years later that there was a specific reason for my feeling that the level of danger in the house suddenly became so palpable at the time. My parents had begun to receive bizarre, anonymous notes, in graphic and sexually perverse language, threatening to kidnap the children and do horrible stuff to us. This coincided, most unfortunately, with the rapid rise in my father’s fame as well as the mystique of his reputation as a recluse. Occasionally we glimpsed reporters sneaking about, and at least once, one even climbed up a tree. We saw him through the kitchen window. There was no way of knowing if these men were kidnappers, escapees from Windsor Prison across the river, plain old perverts, or reporters. It fanned the pervasive odor of fear and skittishness around the house almost to the choking point.
Worse still, I somehow came across a library book that had photographs of concentration camp prisoners, which is enough to send anyone’s terror off the Richter scale, let alone an already frightened seven-year-old girl. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware that I was one-quarter Jewish and that that was enough to get me sent to the gas chamber had I been in Hitler’s Germany. That threat, that fact, was part of my being since the beginning, since I was aware I was a being. This is not to say I had any concept whatsoever about what Judaism is or what being a Jew entails. The heart and soul and breadth and depth of what I knew was that it was dangerous. It was passed down to me as the unedited, unsubtitled nightmares of my father, brief things said about the war—such as the fact, he said, that you could live a lifetime and never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose—congeries of primal images and emotion, no context, no narrative, no explanations. When I saw the stark, black-and-white photographs of the death camps, a new and terrible fact struck me: these people were mostly naked. With the logic of a child, I concluded that that was what happened to bad little Jewish girls—even quarter-Jewish girls like me—who, like me, thought about sex and naked bodies and pulled my pants down in front of a boy to show him my thing and for him to show me his. Here were whole rows of people being punished and starved and killed for the same thing.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 18