I knew I couldn’t afford the tuition, but I decided to take a look anyway. I really liked the program at Harvard Divinity School; it looked terrific in and of itself, but had, in addition, the wonderful advantage of allowing its students access to Harvard undergraduate courses in any field, as well as classes at Episcopal Divinity School, and the Jesuits’ Weston School of Theology just across the Cambridge Common.
I made an appointment with the admissions and financial-aid dean and spilled the beans. I discussed my medical condition and uncertainty, as well as, among other things, the problem of having a famous parent who doesn’t approve and will not contribute. The dean said, “We’ll see what we can do.” A few weeks later a fat package came in the mail informing me that I’d been selected for a merit-based fellowship offered to ten incoming students based on their past academic record. I was awarded a full scholarship and a low-interest loan to provide for living expenses. I would automatically be enrolled in the university’s health insurance plan, and the office for students with disabilities would provide me with a tutor to take notes in my classes if I was unable to attend for periods of time, a parking sticker for handicapped students so I wouldn’t have to walk far, and an ombudsman should any difficulties arise. There was even a quiet room in the library with a couch if I needed to lie down between classes.
I sent my father a photograph I’d clipped out of a nature magazine that I thought he’d like and told him the news.1
Dear Daddy,
I found this photograph, or rather the fact that this frog exists, very cheering.
What a beauty.
Love,
PEGGY
P.S. If you don’t want to keep the photo clipping, send it back and I’ll find a place for it.
[I enclosed a photo of a (real, living) glass frog. It has transparent, palest-of-green skin, and you can see all its translucent insides, with just one beautiful little red line for an artery.]
The photo was returned with a note agreeing with me that it was a beautiful frog, and perhaps I might like to be a naturalist if such things really excited me. The few naturalists he’d seen on public television seemed to be happy in their work. The field of religion was another matter, however. Except for the rare person who comes around every two thousand years or so, there is little in religion that doesn’t come from man’s ego and man’s need or desire. And still less that doesn’t settle into an amalgam of sentiment and dogma, not to mention vanity, ecclesiastical vanity, plus some, evermore plus some. He closed his note by reminding me of Basho’s frog poem. Signing off, your merry father.
My mother was excited for me and told all her friends. My brother, I think, couldn’t quite wrap his brain around the idea of his sister in the ministry—quite understandably so—but he wished me well.
As Joseph Campbell would say, I “followed my bliss” for three restorative years. Sitting, listening, reading, and thinking are things I can do with a tissue-thin level of physical health. Slowly over the three years, with many good days and bad, I crept back to an acceptable quality of life. I still hit the wall where other people get the sniffles and am in the hospital where most people get a light flu. Marilyn and I can forecast the weather by the aches and pains in our joints like a couple of old ladies. I still sleep about eleven hours a night, but when I’m awake, I feel daytime awake rather than like those wretched somnambulists in Night of the Living Dead.
On the way through the Divinity School’s core curriculum, I had a chance to stop by and visit the Jesuits at Weston for classes in the fundamentals of scriptural exegesis, and a class on the Psalms; Episcopal divinity school for classes on liturgical music; Harvard music department for some wonderful courses on everything from Bach to music theory and composition, ethnomusicology to choral conducting. I audited undergraduate classes on Japanese art, world religions, and even a literature class—sin of Salinger sins—called “Tragic Drama and Human Conflict” taught by (the devil himself!) a member of the psychiatry department at the medical school. It was anything but “a peerage of tin ears” as my father referred to psychiatrists, and though the actors wore masks in the ancient tragedies, I found Oedipus’ story a far more undisguised tale than all that business about “the eyes” in Salinger’s credo.2
Oh, the things I shut my eyes to so as to remain forever “a swell girl.” As I awakened, I’m sure I looked sober enough walking around campus, but secretly I trailed ribbons from unbound feet, dancing my own private May Day celebration through library and classroom. For a time, I fell in love with a satyr disguised as a Ph.D. candidate in ethics and religion, who had a voice like sweet, dark Cuban coffee and called me “preciosa” when he growled softly in my ear.
Takeoffs and landings for me in matters of the heart are still rough. I tried to be careful, but the Glass family tradition of “vomiting the oyster” is still with me. I couldn’t eat for about a week after he went on to other nymphs. I made sure I drank plenty of water and tried my hardest to eat, but I vomited before I could swallow even crackers. My priest made a house call and packed me off to the emergency room again with dehydration. They kept me there on IV fluids all night and for most of the next day, when I was finally able to eat something and keep it down. When I told the doctors, who wanted to keep me for another day’s observation, that David, my best friend, had flown up from New York and was at my apartment roasting a chicken, they let me go home. What a sweetheart: he’d cleaned the place from top to bottom, singing “I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair.”
Things went rather more smoothly with the last man I dated before I met my husband. Instead of going down with the plane, gripping the controls ever tighter in a rictus of fear,3 I ejected. I headed for my friends Henry and Liz and their children for a couple of days to make sure the old stuff didn’t come up—gross, sorry. But true. I lost weight that I couldn’t afford to lose, though this time, it didn’t get serious.
Sometimes that’s what getting better means, you learn to work around your disabilities rather than finding the perfect cure. If you know you’re going to crash land, you don’t keep it a secret; pray to your God by all means, but have a word with the local air traffic controller as well and make arrangements to have the runway sprayed with foam, fire engines standing by, just in case.
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THE PROGRAM, the required field placement began to seem within the realm of possibility. I met a chaplain at one of the teaching hospitals who said she thought she could work around my health problems. Most of the patients were moved through the hospital at such a rate that the problem of continuity, should I become unable to work, would not be an issue. Most of her encounters with patients were intense, onetime emergencies. I signed on for a ten-hour-a-week internship. What a unique, fascinating, inspiring encounter with life and death.
When my father called and asked me what I was up to these days, like a fool, I told him. I knew before speaking that we would not see eye to eye about chaplaincy. I knew it just as I knew in eighth grade to ask Jenny not to mention to him our concerts at the nursing home. He asked me about my work and I answered him with stories of patients. This was not what interested him. What he wanted to know, in asking about my work, was about me. Didn’t I struggle with my own ego, feeling holier-than-thou walking down the corridors of my Harvard hospital? Wasn’t it all “ego and ecclesiastical vanity”?
Zooey issues Franny much the same challenge, and she, unlike me, is interested in precisely the same thing. She replies:
Don’t you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the [Jesus] prayer? That’s exactly what’s bothering me so. Just because I’m choosy about what I want—in this case, enlightenment, or peace, instead of money or prestige or fame or any of those things—doesn’t mean I’m not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I’m more so! I don’t need the famous Zachary Glass to tell me that!
(Franny and Zooey, p. 149)
Holden, likewise, is preoccupied with the same concern. His sist
er Phoebe challenges him to name something he’d like to be when he grows up and suggests a lawyer like their father. He replies:
. . . how would you know if you did it [became a lawyer] because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody . . . ? How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn’t.
(Catcher, p. 172)
To be honest, my “ego” was about the last thing I had time to worry about on the ward. That’s why chaplain interns meet with their supervisors after work, at the end of the week, to take a structured pause for reflection. I just can’t see worrying over one’s motivations with the single-minded absorption of an adolescent going at his pimples in the mirror. I’m aware that some saints and other religious persons spend lifetimes in the quest to root out the slightest blemish on their soul. I have to confess, this is something that escapes me, and I say this acknowledging the possibility I may well be wrong; but self-flagellation, mortification, falling “in hate” with oneself, strikes me as much an occupation of Narcissus as falling in love with one’s own reflection. Sure I fussed in the mirror the first day, trying to decide what cross to wear: too big, they’ll think you’re a nun; too small, they might not realize that this relatively young woman really is a chaplain. But to tell you the truth, it makes me smile to remember that, not hate myself like Franny. That good things can come from imperfect vessels, that God can use us just as we are, is something my father and I will never agree on.
Time and again I have had the experience of seeing my meager offering, replete with imperfections, being transformed into something of real use. I remember reading a book of poetry in Spanish, in my own, quite flawed Spanish mind you, to an old man on the ward who didn’t speak English and was far from his family. Seeing the tears of joy in his eyes and the comfort it brought is an experience so far beyond oneself, it’s humbling. Or figuring out what an old Portuguese woman was raving about in her dread of surgery the next day: “My statues! My statues!” she was crying out. I sat with her for a while and finally pieced it together that she had scores of statues of saints and the Blessed Mother all over her little apartment, and she missed them terribly. They were her family and they’d abandoned her when she needed them most. How small a thing it was to get a little figurine from the gift shop to watch over her through her long night. And how enormous. You pick up your brother’s teddy, his bottle, his blankie, and you place them back within reach. It’s simple.
I harbor no illusions that I walk on water as I pass down the corridor or sit beside someone’s bed. Nor do I have the hubris to think I can call out to the sick and command them to rise from their beds, abracadabra, and be healed. I don’t try to fix a person, I don’t try to cure his or her disease or to make them “a better person” as a swell girl should. I stay up and watch with a person during the long night in the garden of Gethsemane. If they want to talk, I listen or we talk; if they want to pray, we pray; if they want to hear about the Red Sox—and they aren’t at risk for a coronary—I go and find out how the Sox blew it in the ninth from the security guard with a radio.
THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE new in my life, but unlike anything “charitable,” I fully expected my father would be excited about it. My expectation stemmed from that car ride home from Cross Mountain with Jenny at Christmas so long ago. I had rediscovered the pleasure of singing, only this time, I no longer labored under the illusion of immaculate conception; I had learned the art of practice. I am not blessed with a soloist’s voice. But what I discovered is that with hard work, it’s amazing how far some fairly basic human machinery can take you. Mine has taken me closer to heaven than I ever dared dream. After three years of auditioning, I finally made it into Tanglewood, the chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. What an extraordinary, shining counterexample to Salinger law—that a mere mortal, one of the crowd, can make music with celestial choirs, Seiji Ozawa conducting.
The night of my first concert with the BSO, I took a cab. I told the driver, “Symphony Hall, please, stage entrance.” The driver was an old man, and when I said, “Can I say that again, it sounds so wonderful: stage entrance, please,” he was so happy for me. The whole way there, he talked about the operas he’d seen, and the operas he dreamed of.
That Christmas, my mother came to one of our concerts and brought a visiting scholar from Africa in full regalia who thought I was a star. My father had just come back from seeing my brother in a play in New York; he told me over the phone as I was about to leave for a concert. Without reflection, without my guard up, I asked him, “When are you going to come and see one of my performances?”
“When I can pick you out of the crowd,” he said.
ONE NIGHT AS I WAS about to leave for a performance, the stairs were blocked by a new guy moving into the upstairs “bachelor club,” a four-bedroom apartment shared by a bunch of really nice guys, their jukebox, Coca-Cola machine, retro posters, and rock-and-roll paraphernalia. The new guy was a big one, moving a couch up the four flights single-handedly. He saw me in my fancy black-tie symphony wear and with a wide Midwestern grin said, “Well, aren’t you all dressed up. What’s the occasion?”
“I’m singing in Symphony Hall tonight,” I swanned in reply.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Simon Rattle is guest conductor. I’d forgotten it was so soon. It should be a good one.”
Folding my wings beneath me, I introduced myself. Larry knew about the concert because he’d sung with the Opera Company of Boston for the past seven years, until it went bankrupt, and was still friends with singers all over town. He comes from a musical family, although he is the only one with classical training. In high school, he had a voice that could be heard across two counties, which is how he wound up in conservatory rather than working for “Generous” Motors as had most of his high school friends and neighbors in his Michigan hometown. What a change in the building! Instead of being serenaded by the likes of Twisted Sister from the jukebox upstairs, strains of Aida wafted through my bedroom window on summer evenings. Not too much later we were engaged, and not too long after that, well, reality struck as accurately as Cupid’s arrow, and as the jukebox song goes, “Baby’s feeling sick in the morning, says she’s havin’ trouble gettin’ into her jeans.”
Unfortunately, this babe was sick morning, noon, and night. Hyperemesis, vomiting for six solid months. I started out skinny and lost eight pounds in the first six months. I basically held a snail’s-eye view of the bathroom floor, because the floor felt cool on my face and because it wasn’t worth the bother of moving myself too far from the toilet. Toward the middle of my sixth month I started feeling some relief and tried singing again. In the middle of a concert, I suddenly began to feel faint. I sat down on the riser and the singers to either side moved over slightly to cover me. My chorus conductor from Harvard had come to see us. She said afterward, “It was strange, suddenly you just weren’t there.” The flu was going around the chorus like wildfire and I was in big trouble.
As I had been feeling better lately, Larry was away on a two-week course for singers and actors. Liza’s brother Sig came and picked me up to take me home with him so he could keep an eye on me. Instead, he took one look at me and drove me to the nearest emergency room. They agreed it was probably the flu and said I could go home, but to keep a close watch in case I got worse. I called Larry and asked him to come back right away. We had a major league fight. Phones slammed, don’t you ever darken my door again if you’re not home by this evening, and so on.
Oh, it appears to be a long, such a long, long time before the dawn.
(Crosby, Stills, and Nash)
FOLLOWING IN MY PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER’S footsteps, I became gravely ill in the sixth month of my pregnancy. And like my paternal grandmother before me, I, too, was in danger of losing the baby. The following day, Sig, his fiancée, and
a fellow chaplain dragged me semiconscious from bed and took me to the hospital, over my delirious objections that I felt too sick to move. I was hospitalized for acute septicemia and dehydration. If I had been a day later, a doctor scolded, I could well have been dead.
After several weeks in the hospital, I was given permission to go home if I had someone to look after me around the clock for a few days to make sure I didn’t relapse and lose consciousness. My father had married a young nurse a few years ago, and she offered to drive down and look after me for a while. He was on the other line, so I heard every word he said when he blew up. He said, “What does she need a nurse for anyway? You’re just encouraging her invalidism.” She said quietly that she’d have to call me back. Sig, who has known my father since we were twelve years old, was in the room at the hospital visiting me when this call came through and was appalled. I was still crying when she called back twenty minutes later and said she’d be there first thing tomorrow morning. She hadn’t thought he was going to let her, but she managed to persuade him somehow.
He was not happy about it. I thought she was really brave to come. I had seen how he treated her on my visits up there. It was a revelation. I began to understand something that had been a mystery to me for most of my life: how he manages to annihilate the women around him and yet maintain the gentlemanly image of clean hands and correctness.
Colleen, his wife, is nearly fifty years younger than my father. She is pretty in a schoolgirlish way. Soft red hair in a pixie cut, green eyes, and a pretty smile. “Roller-skate skinny,” as Holden described his beloved little sister, Phoebe. Colleen looks terrific in a blue blazer. My father should thank his lucky stars. Perhaps in some moments he does, but what I’ve witnessed is that, instead, he throws stones. He berates her for just those things that make her attractive to him, her age and innocence and simplicity, the same characteristics that allow her to put up with him.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 47