Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  To this day I think of him as an angel entertained unawares.2 I didn’t know him very well. I’m not sure anyone did. He was the boy I mentioned that some kids teased because of his slight twitching and odd gait. Lying facedown in the snow, I think the other kids were probably afraid to come near me, the way an injured animal or a sick person can be sort of sickening or creepy to witness. Charles had left the group, unbeknownst to me—I was out of it—and sat down beside me in the snow where I lay. He said, “I just want you to know I think you’re really brave.”

  It was like being shocked with paddles back from death. I turned my face in the snow a little and looked at him with one eye and said, “Why?”

  Charles said, “I know Kit made you do this, and I think you’re really brave, that’s all.” We didn’t say any more. He gave me some water and I slowly drank. After a time I took a piece of bread, the first my body would accept that day, and then another. Communion. I didn’t pee until we arrived back at school a full day later. I only noticed because, back at the lean-to, I thought myself lucky not to have to bare my bottom to the dull, cold wind.

  When I plunged my face into the icy river by the campsite, it was a sharp pain, like cutting oneself, pain that said you’re still alive, away from the dull place beyond pain, the sluggish, sucking vortex where death comes slowly, like the thick, dark molasses that I finally urinated.

  * * *

  1. “We want our students to be lost and be able to find themselves, to be cold and know they can find warmth, to be hungry and know they won’t starve,” said Kit in an interview in 1968.

  2. Hebrews 13:2—“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, whereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

  24

  Springtime in Paradise: The Producers

  THE BIG PURGE CAME IN the spring. My friend Jamie and my boyfriend Dougal were expelled; Dougal’s best friend, Brion, and I were placed on probation till the end of the year. It had something to do with a pack of cigarettes, I think, but I honestly can’t remember the details. They got lost in the awfulness of the aftermath. I’m sure it was something dumb, equally sure it was not wicked or life-threatening. It was nothing like giving little kids cigarettes, I’d never ever do something like that, nor, may I say, like sending eight kids up a mountain in midwinter with only one adult.

  In recounting this tale, I’m conscious of setting a bad example: I haven’t forgiven myself, as I’d urge another to do, for the betrayal I was coerced into committing. Even saying “They made me do it” sounds lame. No one had a gun to my head. I violated one of my most deeply held principles of loyalty to my friends. I didn’t tell on someone, that would have taken many, many more “sessions” with Kit. But after I wrote the hugely embarrassing letter to my mother in which I confessed to being a sick sexual pervert, a lesbian, and a crazy, paranoid person who imagined that people were out to get me, Kit had one last thing she required. (Bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West.) If I was to graduate and get the hell out of that place, I had to write to my friend Jamie, who had just been expelled, a letter that Kit had composed, but in my own hand, confessing how wrong we all were and what loathsome creatures we were, etc. She told me I had an hour to think about it and come back with my decision. Write the letter and graduate, or not.

  I went up the hill alone to decide what to do. I asked myself, How can I bear another year in this place? If I run away, where do I have to go? I reasoned that Jamie knows Kit and won’t believe a word of it. She’ll know I’d never say anything crappy like that. I decided to copy Kit’s letter and send it. And that’s what I did. Jamie’s guardian, a great supporter of the school, wrote me a really nasty letter in return, which I received back at home in Cornish that summer. She said, quite rightly, that what Jamie needed now was support from her friends, not shaming, and that I should be ashamed of myself for writing such a letter. I was. Totally. “I betray you, you betray me underneath the chestnut tree,” as it says in Orwell’s 1984. Do it to her, not me, to her.

  Why I couldn’t organize myself to write back and tell her guardian what had happened I don’t know, and I sorely regret it. But Kit would probably have lied her way out of it in any case. I felt like a piece of shit for agreeing to sign the letter and copy it in my own handwriting. I really thought Jamie wouldn’t pay a bit of attention, but of course I’m sure Kit didn’t let her go without setting her up to believe she, too, was a worthless piece of shit. Jamie had been a dues-paying member of the Prob Kids Club for years and a recipient of Kit’s “help” for too long not to be thoroughly convinced that she was an orphan because no one, except Kit of course, could want such a defective kid in the first place. How could Jamie ever expect to be attractive and lose all that blubber if she persisted in sneaking in candy—as if a clandestine candy bar every month or so would cause the perhaps fifteen pounds extra she carried, perfectly natural for a twelve-year-old. Kit, whether bluntly or by intimation, let Jamie know that her guardian entrusted her to Kit to make a young lady out of her. Everyone else had given up on her, and it was Kit’s duty to help.

  That was the deep mind-“melting” message: we’re the last stop before nobody takes care of you. I was convinced it was CMS or the streets. I had no idea of any other options. None. No shark-infested waters were needed around this Alcatraz. We “prob kids” were convinced that we had no place else to go, and worse, that no one else would take us in.

  One kid, and only one, saw through the big lie. He was a seventh-grade scholarship boy from Harlem. After he figured out the bus schedule, he stole out of the dorm one night, about a month into the term, walked the seven miles to the bus station under cover of darkness, and was halfway to Harlem before he was discovered missing. He was the only kid we had ever heard of who ran away. You can bet his mama didn’t send him back to those crazy white folks either. From deep within the library chimney, we cheered and cheered.

  THE SENIORS, AS WE EIGHTH graders were called, had to apply to schools for next year. A few of us had no choice in the matter: these were legacy kids running back several generations at certain schools. For most of us, though, the matter was decided during library time where we pored over the large guide to independent secondary schools. Camilla, who lived for horses, chose a school that didn’t even bother to show the school buildings—they went right to the thoroughbred stables, Foxy Croft or something. I hope it was a lovely choice. Five of us, including Holly, chose the Cambridge School of Weston on the basis of one outstanding feature: it was the closest co-ed boarding school to a major city. The description in the book said students often took the train into Boston on weekends to take advantage of the rich cultural attractions the area has to offer. Bliss! Coffee, sidewalks, public transportation, freedom.

  The girls all wore new white dresses for graduation. Mom and I found a beautiful one in Hanover with cutout lace flowers on the sleeves. Jason, who would also attend the Cambridge School in the fall, and I performed a concerto for violin and piano. I played Robespierre in the senior play. Both my parents came. I rode home in Dad’s car. My brother rode with my mother.

  HERBERT AND KIT RETIRED several years after I was graduated. They were gone by the time my brother went to Cross Mountain. He loved it. He might have loved it even if they were still in charge, who knows? He even held a fund-raiser for the school at his home in Malibu and is currently on the board of directors. A brief perusal of the alumni magazine makes clear that some people, looking back, remember Cross Mountain as the best years of their lives. None of us is wrong about the place. Like most places it can be heaven or hell depending on the company. The point I tried to impress upon my brother is that any total environment like that—a boarding school, a prison, a mental institution, the family, the army—needs far more checks and balances built in to ensure that vulnerable populations are treated appropriately by those charged with their welfare.

  This did not happen for my friends. When I left Cross Mountain for Cambridge School, I kept in touch with eight classmat
es out of a total graduating class of about twenty. By the end of ninth grade, within the year following graduation from Cross Mountain, Jason, my concertmate who had had the privilege of four years at Cross Mountain, was in a mental hospital—I watched him start having to count everything in the universe or it would blow up; Dougal was in a mental hospital and later took his own life; Jamie was in a mental hospital; Charles, the boy who saved my life, was in a mental hospital the following year and is now dead; Holly was drinking herself into a benumbed stupor; Brion was dead, Dougal told me, from an overdose of heroin; and as for me, I was not a girl who had come through with all her f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact. When I was finally scared into seeking psychiatric help at age sixteen, I was diagnosed as a “borderline,” a designation that could not have described more accurately a young person at the edge of a crazy cliff.

  Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae, libera animas omnium fidelium de poenis inferni et de profundo lacu: libera eas de ore leonis, ne absorbeat eas tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum: sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam. Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus.1

  Or, please say the Mourners’ Kaddish, which concludes:

  O’seh shalom beem-romav, hoo ya’ah-seh shalom aleynu v’al kol Yisrael, ve’imru amen. (Let He who makes peace in the heavens, grant peace to all of us and to all Israel. Let us say Amen.)

  * * *

  1. “Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver all faithful souls from pain infernal and from the bottomless abyss: deliver us from the jaws of the Lion, let not her teeth devour us and swallow us down into dark oblivion: let St. Michael lead us into holy light. As Thou promised of old to Abraham and to his seed.” From the Latin Mass for the Dead.

  25

  Woodstock

  On either side the river lie

  Long fields of barley and of rye,

  That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

  And thro’ the field the road runs by

  To many-tower’d Camelot.

  LIZA, MY FRIEND FROM SKI camp, called to tell me the big news: there was going to be a music festival not too far from her house, on Yasgur’s farm. Could I come? Wild horses . . . There was only one problem; when I told my father about the festival, he said it sounded like fun and wanted to come along. Okay, forget for a moment that you think Holden’s creator is the coolest guy in the universe. Imagine it was your dad who wanted to join the fun. Oh, boy! Later that week, he decided he had too much work piled up on his desk to take a break and go with us. Gee, Dad, that’s too bad, really. I called Liza and told her the bad news: WE’RE SAVED!!!

  I arrived at their house with a small bag containing what would be my uniform for the next three years: blue jeans and my dad’s button-down oxford shirts worn untucked. A few days before the festival, Liza and I were devastated to learn that her parents had no intention of letting us stay the night at Woodstock—notwithstanding my howls of “But my dad would have let me.” Mrs. R. knew the back way to the farm and dropped us off each morning within about a mile or so of the concert field and picked us up each evening at the same meeting spot. Liza and I slipped right into the gentle crowd and were gone. “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

  I don’t care how impossible it is to believe, Woodstock really was a momentary glimpse of paradise on earth. I find it hard to write about, because so many of the things I want to say that were beautiful are things that in any other context make me squirm, such as being all brothers and sisters, sharing food, sharing hugs; even the word sharing now sets off my cult-alert button. Then, however, it was as though the entire natural world declared a three-day cease-fire on carnivorous activity. I have never before or since felt so able to “let my hair down” and be myself in public. Boundaries could come down because there was such an extraordinary absence of predatory trespassing. And I’m not talking about those gatherings and workshops where people are coerced into “open” behavior, mandated “sharing time,” like being caught passing notes in school and the teacher asks you if you’d like to come up front and share it with the rest of the class. At Woodstock, for a few moments, there was no pressure to conform and no pressure to nonconform. If you wanted to take your clothes off and go swimming, that was cool; if you weren’t comfortable with that, you could wear your underwear or go in dressed, whatever. I could smile at a stranger and not feel like, Oh, shit, now I’ll never get rid of him. So strong was the ethic of live and let live, do your thing but don’t step on someone else’s toes, I felt free to say no. You could say stuff like “Okay, I’m done talking now, I’m going to go for a walk,” and the person would just say, “That’s cool,” wish you well, and move on. I remember the public service announcements that would come over the sound system: “Hey, we hear there’s some brown acid out there that’s not great. It isn’t poison, so don’t trip out, it just isn’t made so clean, so you might want to avoid it. I mean it’s your trip so you do what you want, but if you’re going to do it, we suggest you just do half. . . . Joe Griggs, come to the medic’s tent to the left of the speakers, your old lady is having a baby. . . . Sharon Schwartz, call your father.”

  Doing your own thing usually seems to amount to some jerk smoking a stinky cigar upwind from you or pissing upstream, but not here. People were so incredibly polite at Woodstock. That’s what the townspeople kept saying in amazement, those kids with all the long hair and stuff, they’re so polite. The chief of police even said, Don’t get caught up in what they look like—that’s just on the outside—inside I’ve never seen such a bunch of real good American citizens. Another old guy in the documentary Woodstock said, Can you imagine if you got five hundred of us adults together with booze? You’d have a nightmare on your hands, and here there are five hundred thousand of these kids and not one fight, not one incident.

  Why sometimes an absence of normal rules brings out a rampaging hell of looting, rapine, and murder, and other times a green pasture where the lamb lies down with the lion, and the scorpion has no sting, is a mystery to me. I surely need a piece of Woodstock to get me through the evening news sometimes. Remembrance of sweet apple blossoms and bees, and dancing in the rye.

  HIGH SCHOOL STARTED OUT sort of like a continuation of Woodstock, but it went on too long. In the beginning of the year, we had our distinctly 1960s version of the Fresher teas and mixers my mother had told me about. A whole bunch of us would get together, someone would bring wine, someone the cheese or other munchies, another some joints, and we’d all troop off into the woods, find a nice open spot on the pine needles, and sit in a big circle and pass stuff around. These were afternoon forays, garden parties, a time for conversation and laughter, not opportunities to get blitzed—that was for nighttime.

  I wasn’t the only one, I found out years later, who didn’t inhale. My dad had told me that marijuana does some kind of damage to the kundalini, a spiritual passage in the spine that opens naturally with meditation but is forced open unnaturally with drugs. My brother said once, when we were in our thirties, that he, too, stayed away from drugs throughout high school because of what Dad had said. It’s just the kind of thing that speaks to an adolescent. None of that corny “killer weed” crap (I’d been smoking Marlboros since I was eight years old, when I figured out that anyone with change for a dollar could get them from the machine at the ski lodge); here was something that could cripple one’s journey toward enlightenment. That spoke to me. But it sure was fun to sit in a circle and pass it around. The spell woven by the scent of the pine trees and spruce, burning hemp and patchouli, friendship and laughter; I left a little ring of pine needles.

  My father’s metaphysical warnings were not the only cause of my avoidance of many things dangerous; I had inherited, for better or for worse, his soldier’s sixth sense for trouble brewing, as well as his interrogator’s fundamental distrust. And for some reason, I never developed the adolescent sense of invulnerability or “not me.” I figured if a piano were to drop out of the sky,
I had a great big X somewhere on my back. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. My attitude toward others’ disasters ranged from “there but for the grace of God go I,” to my number must be up next.

  Several weeks into ninth grade, a friend took a tab of acid (LSD) that he thought was a one-way tab but turned out to be at least triple strength. He stared at the sun and permanently damaged his eyes, not terribly—he became a lawyer I heard—but he will always see spots. After the hospital, he was locked up at McLean’s, a mental institution. I took two buses and a cab to visit him each week. Holy shit, what a terrifying place. He was in a beautiful old mansion with a grand staircase that I had to have a badge to ascend and an escort as well to lock and unlock doors as I made my way through the labyrinth of corridors to where my friend was being kept. He had a room to himself, fit for a grand hotel, but the maids and janitors were running the place and had control of all the keys with access to food and water and toilets and fresh air. My friend told me they were playing mind games with him. He wasn’t stupid and he figured out that it was to increase his resistance to frustration or some damn thing, but it stank. They’d say he could have a certain number of cigarettes and then give him a different number, fewer, and tell him they never promised the original number. The games he told me were dead-on; I’d seen similar myself, as a victim of Kit’s psychological “treatment.” I could tell he needed to rest and get his head together, that was for sure, but I could also tell he wasn’t the kind of crazy where you imagine those things. We wrote up a plan to get him out of there, back and forth on a piece of paper, in case anyone was listening in, and talked out loud about poetry, pretending that’s what we were writing, in case anyone was observing. He was to cooperate and give them exactly what they wanted, methodically, until he gained campus privileges. As soon as he could walk to certain places unescorted, somebody would meet him in a car by the trees and take him to an apartment where it was safe to crash. He must have slept for three weeks straight on a couch in a room with the curtains drawn, waking only to eat what the people who were living there, or staying there, made for him.