As for me, the art teacher’s terse two-line report speaks volumes: “Peggy has been generally uninterested and unproductive. She has made some drawings, paintings, and clay work.” Unproductive, yes. But I watched in awe. My own creations were aborted in their conception. They never even received a spark of life; instead I produced scraggy, sterile, unloved pieces of cloth as small as I could get away with and not cause trouble. Like Penelope, I tore apart in secret what I wove during the day. I never dared to love a lump of clay enough to succeed in erecting smooth, shapely mounds from the spinning wheel that magically, at the touch of a deft finger, opened themselves into perfectly shaped vessels. Mine rose up from the wheel, off center and misbegotten, only to collapse back into a flaccid heap.
I could, with effort, do an average job, academically, in the classroom, but it was written in stone that I could never create anything beautiful. My failure was further proof of all that was said, yelled, slapped, and hissed in my ears: something was terribly wrong with me. I had learned from my mother, early on, that there was something deeply shameful about me. I had learned from my father that there was something deeply shameful about any imperfection. He hid the process of his creation as if it were his most carefully guarded secret. He hid whatever he worked on, as well as himself I might add, until it was deemed perfect. I cannot tell you the raving lectures I heard up to this point about “second-rate” artists. Winning, being first-rate, a true creative genius, wasn’t everything, it was the only thing. God help the poor shnook who tried and was not, in my father’s view, a true Master. It was perfectly honorable to go into business or take up a trade of some sort; it was the artist who was pilloried with his rancor and contempt, as if he or she were a heretic blaspheming against all that was pure and holy. I’m not talking just about serious attempts at literature. I’d seen him go purple denouncing some hippie maker of macramé plant-holders at a crafts fair who had the nerve to call himself an artist. Folk art by housewives at the Cornish fair was okay, it just depressed him. But just let someone fancy him- or herself to be a real artist, and I’d receive an enraged outpouring that lasted the entire car ride if I was unlucky enough to be a captive audience.
The only things I could do well, in eighth grade, were things I had learned so long ago that I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to do them well. I learned to ski when I was three or four, play piano at three, read before kindergarten. My view of creation as a sort of miraculous immaculate conception was supported by my father’s mythic stories about me, like the time I went to the keyboard before I could barely stand unassisted and picked out a tune perfectly, the first time. I was surprised to learn at Cross Mountain that I wasn’t wonderful at the piano. I had a lot of natural talent, but there were kids who actually practiced, and practiced in an organized, disciplined fashion. My piano teacher that year wrote:
Peggy’s piano work is characterized by a desire to skim the fundamentals in order to achieve a momentary “splash.” Her ability to concentrate on work that is not of immediate and obvious appeal is curiously lacking. She has a talent and could probably easily achieve a considerable competence if she were more willing to work a little.
While I certainly understand this teacher’s interpretation of my behavior as a sort of laziness, the fact is that the concept of creation as a process, rather than as a product that magically appeared if you had the genius, eluded me totally and completely. Salingers do things perfectly or they keep quiet about it. Again, I’m not talking about poetry here, I mean every aspect of life you can imagine. I never even followed a recipe, for example, until I was married; I truly thought food just happened or flopped. Mine flopped, so why bother. I ate out of the box or carton. As for keeping a room clean, controlling and manipulating the stuff of life in actuality, rather than the stuff of the mind in daydreams, I waited in a panic until I was neck deep in mess and somehow hurled a drowning battle scream and attacked it. My closest and most eloquent friend, David, once stood at the transom to my Marlborough Street apartment and said, “Peggy, that’s not a kitchen, that’s a cry for help.” My college thesis adviser used to ask me, nearly every time he saw me, “Peggy, how do you eat an elephant?” The right answer: you cut it up into very small pieces. The Salinger answer: you drag it into a dark cave, alone, and swallow it whole or die trying to vomit it up. Or you declare that anyone who eats elephant is beneath contempt and stalk off in the other direction.
There was an even more pressing reason than shame and ignorance to hide away any interest or desire. Had I loved, it would be a small matter of time before the scent of my pleasure drifted upstairs to Kit’s den. It slipped out, that fall, probably via one of my teachers’ activity reports, that I passionately wanted to go on an overnight riding trip to Clifford’s Falls. Each time a trip came up, I would sign up, and each time Kit erased my name and informed me that I’d have to wait until next time. Finally, on the last trip before graduation, she let me plan and anticipate, rather than removing my name from the sign-up sheet as she had done before, right up until the evening before we were to leave. She caught me in the hall on the way upstairs to bed and said, “I’m sorry, Peggy, but I just don’t think you’ve earned the privilege of going on the riding trip tomorrow.” Had I had a horse phobia, you can bet I’d have been saddled up faster than Annie Oakley.
I PUT MY UNLOVELY CHRISTMAS presents into my suitcase along with my teddy bear, and a pile of clothes no one would know were mine without the name tags.2 As I closed my bag, Jenny called up the stairs to see if my father had arrived. She was going to catch a ride home with us. Her family lived in Woodstock, Vermont, which was directly on our way.
She left her suitcase at the door, but carried her precious violin upstairs. By seventh grade, Jenny was already an accomplished musician. I had accompanied her several times in concert, playing the simple basso continuo while she soared above. That week Jenny, Jason—another violinist—and I had played a Vivaldi concerto for two violins and harpsichord/piano as we had done earlier for the Thanksgiving “showcase” for the parents. This time we were taken in a van to an old-age home to play. I was a little frightened to be around old people. Frightened of the smells and the infirmity. Some of the old people did sit in their wheelchairs in the day room and drool, their minds a million miles away. But the joy that lit up many of the faces as they listened to us play was something to behold. I couldn’t believe that playing music could make someone’s eyes come to life like that. It was the most valuable piece of education I could possibly have been given. It is natural, I think, to feel small and helpless in the face of great suffering and need. I felt I had so little to offer. I still feel that way. Yet somehow, miraculously, our meager offering of a few loaves and fishes was transformed into a feast for the multitudes. This first Christmas concert gave me the courage, year after year, to visit the sick, the aged, the lonely, often with empty hands but trusting that somehow in touching the hands of a stranger a gift would appear.
I asked Jenny not to mention the concert to my father. I just said he was weird about that stuff. I knew exactly what his reaction would be, but it was too hard to explain. Charity was a highly combustible subject at our house. If my mother was foolish enough to let him get wind of any charitable act she might have undertaken, he’d say, “Oh, Christ, it’s the Lady Bountiful. Ego, ego, ego,” or, “The Lady Bountiful, thinking how good and kind and generous she is being—Phooey!” Twenty years later when I finally read his books, again and again I came across the same haranguing suspicion and denunciation of any unveiled female act of charity. Holden, reflecting on the nuns he met collecting for charity, thought how his aunt, or Sally Hayes’s mother, both of whom did a lot of charitable work, would never do it without lipstick and fancy dresses “and all that crap,” and people around to “kiss their asses.” Or again, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” a four-year-old girl asks Seymour about his wife:
“Where’s the lady?” Sybil said.
“The lady?” the young ma
n brushed some sand out of his thin hair. “That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser’s. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children, in her room.”
My father would, in all seriousness, rather step over a hungry man and do nothing to help him than help him and feel as though he were a swell guy to help. If you do a charitable act you have to do it perfectly, the left hand not knowing what the right hand does. Otherwise it’s all ego and not worth doing.
If you’re standing outside a theater and some old gal comes up selling gum, give her a buck if you’ve got a buck—but only if you can do it without patronizing her.
For whom is it not worth anything? one might ask. The recipient is not even in the picture. Only the reflection of the one attempting to make a mitzvah is beheld. Missing is the vast area between Mrs. Hayes and the nuns, between being such a jerk that you make the person you are giving to feel like dirt, and being the perfection of God incarnate. For my father there is nothing in between, no sense of God or “goodness” being able to use imperfect vessels. No sense of being good enough. No middle ground between perfection and damnation. No big round earth to walk on between heaven and hell.
Luckily, kids don’t need an explanation when you ask them not to talk about something in front of your parents. All parents are kind of weird anyway. Jenny said not to worry, she wouldn’t mention the concert.
My father arrived and we piled into the car. On the way home, Jenny and I sang to amuse ourselves. We had learned lots of rounds at school that fall. Daddy was enchanted. He made us promise to send him a tape, from school, of us singing. We never got around to it, though, I’m afraid to say. Partly because I didn’t bother, which isn’t nice, and partly because I had this weird feeling that he had mistaken me for someone else. Our singing in the car wasn’t just beautiful or pretty, to him it was perfect, it was poetry. He had made such a big deal of our singing that I felt like an impostor; if I taped it, he’d realize how ordinary and just plain pretty—not magnificent—it was. It’s a weird feeling to be given powers you know you don’t possess, to be put on a pedestal, albeit temporarily.
Four hours later, we arrived in Woodstock. The stage set was in place and there were white Christmas lights, with bits of greenery and holly, on all the bridges and houses in the square. We said good-bye to Jenny and headed over the river to Cornish.
When you’re a kid, to know what your house really looks like, you have to go away for a while and come back again. This time I noticed things. You approach my father’s by making a sharp turn off the dirt road into his driveway. You can’t slow down in the wintertime to make the turn without the risk of not making it up the steep driveway. Unlike the road, which is packed dirt, the driveway has a layer of chipped stones, horrid stones to walk on with bare feet because they’re all pointy. They make a treacherous scree in the winter as well.
The driveway leads directly into the mouth of his garage. Between the garage and the house on the hill above it is an underground passageway of cement with dozens of small steps. The builder made a three-inch rise instead of the standard one for some reason, and it feels as though one is taking baby steps. We long-legged Salingers find this particularly annoying. At the top of the passage is a door leading into the cellar of the house. It’s more like a cave than a basement. This is because the land my father chose for a building site wasn’t meant to accommodate a house. The builders dynamited through a steep slope of thick granite, just enough to allow a house to perch on the edge, rather like mountaineers setting up camp with slings on a narrow ledge. The cellar is not built of concrete blocks; it’s just blasted-out rock with some cement poured on the floor to make it flat enough for the freezer and washer-dryer to sit. You come to another door and enter the house. Sort of. You have to climb up one more flight of stairs to reach the living room of this modest, chalet-style, one-level ranch.
The living room has what in modern parlance is called a cathedral ceiling, meaning it is higher than the regulation eight feet and set at an angle rather than flat. A wall of windows opens onto the view of Mt. Ascutney and beyond into New York State. Unlike the house in which I grew up in Cornish, where one had the comfortable feeling of being grounded somehow despite the immensity of the view, Daddy’s house is perched on the side of a steep hill with no cozy enfolding of trees and no feeling of being on the ground. It’s like the view out an airplane window or a skyscraper, a little less human, a little less real. A cliff wall.
I don’t know if it ever struck my father that way. It’s not the sort of thing I’d bring up with him. He might have gotten touchy about it. The view is rarely visible, however. My father keeps the curtains drawn, or mostly drawn, day and night. Light comes through where the curtains stumble and fall across backs of chairs or little tables. The view is revealed a bit like the “good furniture” in a lower-middle-class living room—on special occasions and for visitors. My brother’s house, I noticed last time I visited, stands in a similar odd relation to the vast beauty of the view. He built his house on a steep slope in Malibu, gotten at a bargain price because developers had considered the land unusable to accommodate a house. A great wall of windows gives you a 180-degree panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. All the expense and design of a modern house to take advantage of the spectacular view, and the blinds, made of lovely transparent rice-paper-looking man-made material, are drawn 95 percent of the time, day and night. They’re lifted for the occasional sunset, or when I visit and like to sit and stare.
Perhaps the view becomes too familiar to notice over time, indistinguishable from a brick wall outside the window of a cheap apartment that you think you won’t be able to bear but in time becomes nearly invisible, part of the woodwork as it were. I have moved apartments probably twenty-five times in my life, most of the moves as a teenager and in my twenties. I learned that if you don’t make a change, paint the wall, fix an eyesore, replace an ugly tile within two weeks of moving in, you’ll never do it. The eye, in time, is a frighteningly good editor and smoother of flaws. It takes a guest coming to visit to remind one of the dwelling’s eyesores.
Eyesores. That brings me to my father’s deck. It was made cheaply and badly. The railings were rickety even when first built and offered little real security and much false. Over the years the boards rotted out in several places, leaving one with the precarious feeling of a rope bridge spanning a jungle river, the hero’s leg falling through a gap in the planks as the bad guys come nearer and nearer. I would never let my son out on it. The deck extends about four feet from the living room on two sides, chalet-style. It should be a glorious place to savor the wilderness from the safety of home, like a snowstorm watched from beside the hearth, or rain from shelter. It is nice to have drinks out there, but it would have been nicer if it had been done right—providing that sense of security so necessary to porch pleasure. Instead, it’s like looking over the edge of a cliff. My father, as if seeing the deck through my eyes, and hating me a little for it, would wiggle the railings with a look of disgust and no little irritation. It was the same expression he wore when reaching his hand upward in a house with low ceilings and found he could touch them, or when entering a cab that was neither his beloved London cab nor a New York Checker cab, with their raised roof. He seemed ashamed of the broken stairs leading up to the deck, but he never had them repaired.3 He just sort of hated you for witnessing it and thereby, as in the Zen tree falling in the forest, or Teddy’s orange peels, making it real.
My visiting, even as a child, but more so the older I got, made him aware, because of my otherness, my presence, not because I mentioned it, that the house was not perfect. Nor was it clean. It was neat and orderly, but not cared for beyond the surface tidying. The Oriental rugs in the living room were some beauties he had bought over the years at nearby auctions, along with an assortment of lamps and end tables. If you looked up, however, the air of tasteful country gentility ended abruptly at the wainscoting. The ceiling in the living ro
om was a rather horrid, nubbly, sprayed-on, textured stuff that he cursed the builders for talking him into. Mind you, he is a tightwad about nearly everything, and the house is a prime example of the adage “you get what you pay for.” Cobwebs and soot from his fireplace clung to the nubbly ceiling, which, in a few years, went beyond “bachelor dirty” to eccentric. The toilet bowl in the bathroom my brother and I used, the “guest” bathroom, became stained and brown in only a year or two from minerals and lack of routine swishing. There were always clean towels for us, but I never liked to put my toothbrush down on the sink. Without putting it into words, I was aware that cleaning it myself would have been an embarrassment to him, an insult, a commentary on his lack of attention. He so disliked anything squalid and unclean that to acknowledge it would have been an unthinkably rude awakening. The water that came out of the faucets was from an artesian well, but unlike the water in the Red house, this smelled badly of sulfur.
He used to have a cleaning lady come in to help out, but she was so talkative that it drove him crazy to have her around. Had she been unpleasant or mean, he could have cut her off and retreated to his study guiltlessly. The problem was that he knew her to be a kind woman, and he therefore felt terribly guilty about not being able to bear her chattering presence. In the end, the human encounter proved too much for him and he eased her out.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 35