Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  She went to a college in the South where she is from and was a cheerleader. She was also on the bowling team. She is just the sort of pleasant, helpful person one wants at one’s sickbed. A bit cheery for my taste, but I can’t completely divorce myself from my grumpy heritage. She is by no means unintelligent; she is simply neither interested nor trained in things literary. She is an avid quilt maker and usually sweeps up the blue ribbons at the Cornish Fair, which she helps organize each year.

  On a recent tour of the house, my father and Colleen showed me how they’d made over his old study-bedroom, the one with the safes, into a sewing room. I looked at some of her quilting work in progress, and having flunked home economics rather spectacularly myself, I searched for a compliment. Of course I said it was pretty, but I also said I admired the patience and skill it must take to make all those tiny stitches. I said that I’ve always made such a mess of it when I’ve tried to do anything that requires that kind of concentration. My father, interrupting my less than elegant attempt, said, “It’s been my experience that people who excel at that kind of work never possess a really fine mind.” He said it without a trace of rancor in his voice, as if he were simply sharing an objective piece of wisdom he’d attained. It’s hard to explain this, but if I’d said, “How can you say such an insulting thing in front of Colleen?” he would have been shocked and incensed at my suggestion that he had said anything insulting to or about Colleen. And furious that I’d accused him of making anything other than a “purely objective” observation; and then he would have gone on to berate women for being such babies and always taking things personally.4 He is so clever, so facile with words, that the person he has insulted not only feels insulted, but feels stupid and ashamed for feeling insulted.

  What I find most maddening is that I often don’t even realize I’ve been insulted until days or sometimes years later. Then I feel stupid when I think of all the things I should have said. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been driving back to Boston from a visit with my father that seemed to go quite pleasantly when suddenly something he said to me sinks in and I’m left saying to my dashboard, “Hey, that wasn’t nice.”

  His comment in the sewing room seemed to sail right past her. All the same, it wasn’t nice.

  ALTHOUGH DADDY CLAIMED to be terribly concerned when I got out of the hospital, he never came to visit. He called three or four times every single day for the entire week or so that Colleen was with me, asking when she was coming home. I’d hear her side of long conversations about salad bowls and where is such and such in the kitchen and what he ate for lunch, on and on. I remember thinking it sounded more like a conversation between a traveling mother and her two-year-old at home—somebody wants his mummy and wants her now. He spoke to me exactly once. Although he had always been difficult about illness, nothing had prepared me for what was to happen.

  He attacked me with the impersonal viciousness of an earthquake. He asked me if I’d given any thought to how I was going to support my child. Thinking this was a preamble to an offer of help, I admitted that I worried about it daily. He said I had no right to bring a child into this “lousy” world that I couldn’t support, and he hoped I was considering an abortion.

  Nothing he had ever done in the past had prepared me for the unspeakable. I said that I didn’t believe in abortion for myself, at thirty-seven, though I had no intention of telling others what to do, and that it was a hell of a thing to say, to suggest that I kill my baby.

  He said, “Kill, kill, what a silly, dramatic word. I’m only saying what any parent of a child in your situation would say.”

  I don’t know where I found the courage—perhaps because I was a mother whose child was being attacked—but I’m proud to say that, for the first time in my life, I let him have it, straight from the gut, unedited. I said, “No, Daddy, any normal parent would offer support. All you offer is criticism.”

  He said, “I’ve never criticized you. When have I ever criticized you? I’ve always been there for you when you needed it.”

  I was totally shocked. I could not believe what I was hearing. I said, “That’s absolute crap. You’ve never once inconvenienced yourself for your children. You’ve never interrupted your precious work. You’ve always done exactly what you wanted, when you wanted.”

  “What about the time I took you guys to England? I didn’t have to do that, did I?”

  What can you say to a man who thinks the sacrifice of parenthood is a two-week trip to the U.K. when I was twelve?

  I said, “That’s it? That’s all you can come up with? A trip to England where half the reason we went was so you could hook up with a romantic pen pal.”

  “Christ, you’re sounding just like every other woman in my life, my sister, my ex-wives. They all accuse me of neglecting them.”

  I interrupted, “Well, if the shoe fits, wear it!”

  “I can be accused of a certain detachment, that’s all. Never neglect. You just need someone to hate. You always did. First it was your brother, then it was your mother, now it’s me. You’re still seeing a psychiatrist, aren’t you?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You are, aren’t you. You’re never happy with anything. You’re nothing but a neurotic malcontent.”

  At this point, the level of his denial was beginning to sink in. I had always thought he justified his neglect because of how important his work was to him. I thought he was at least a little ashamed of himself. Even when, during this conversation, I confronted him with evidence such as his allowing us to stay with a woman whom he believed had set fire to the house with us in it, he was totally unshaken in his view of himself.

  AS SOON AS I HUNG up, or rather, slammed down the phone, I’m not quite sure why, but I wrote down the conversation verbatim. I was outraged, furious, and shocked into intense lucidity where time slows down and one’s brain focuses like a laser beam. Who the hell is that person I was just talking to, the one I thought was my daddy? I’d always defended him loyally, been a good soldier, but loyal to what, loyal to whom?

  I had always thought my father, whatever his shortcomings, would make a perfect grandfather. He peeks into baby carriages in the supermarket line, makes goo-goo eyes, chats with pleasure to any little kid who happens to be around. Just like Seymour and little Sybil in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” he’s a natural with them. I was totally unprepared, blindsided, by the ugliness of his reaction. Instead of being the apple of his eye, I was changed, in a twinkling, into woman: “a body which contains only blood, phlegm, filth, and excreta.”

  I phoned my mother, stunned, to ask her if she thought he was losing his mind. She became very quiet on the other end of the line and then said, “Peggy, the same thing happened to me when I became pregnant with you.” And she began to tell me her story, our family’s story. As I listened and began to ask questions, one thought seized me body and soul: This must stop. No more passing on the family inheritance generation to generation unexamined, in silent ignorance of our own past, destined to repeat it. No more reclusion.

  My family has a long history of creating beautiful things and hiding them or destroying them with the same hand. My grandmother shrouded her parents in secrecy. What my grandmother left, my father has hidden; what my father left, his children have hidden. My mother tried to destroy her child and herself. My father couldn’t begin to introduce his most beloved creation, his “ring-ding mukta,” Seymour, without killing him off. And those characters he does permit to live must never grow up. They are forever confined to a Salinger Never-Never Land of youth, like boxed butterflies with pins through their bellies.

  I want something different for my son. I want him to inherit a connection to where he came from, with all its talent and beauty. I want to pass on a family inheritance rich in intelligence and humor, but without the “four gray walls and four gray towers” we are so good at constructing. I want him to enjoy a future free of the burden of perfection and the urge to destroy any
thing less.

  Most of all I want him to know he has options, that there is a fertile middle ground between perfection and destruction, between heaven and hell. I want him to know forgiveness. I want him to be able to say to himself, “I may not like all the things I do, but I am lovable”; I want him to be able to say to a friend, a partner, a child, “I may not like everything you do, but I love you, and you can count on that.” My father is incapable of that. In his world, to be flawed is to be banished. To have a defect is to be a defector, a traitor. It is little wonder that his life is so devoid of living human beings and that his fictional world has such prominent suicides.

  * * *

  1. Holden did not offer much hope of a good reception: “If you want to know the truth, I can’t even stand ministers . . . they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. . . . They sound so phony when they talk” (Catcher, p. 100).

  2. See Seymour: An Introduction, pp. 104–5. The “whole ambulance load” of pain that the true artist suffers comes not from a “troubled childhood” nor a “disordered libido.” It’s the eyes: “Don’t those cries come straight from the eyes? . . . the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience. My credo is stated.”

  3. I love science fiction: Have you noticed how in sci-fi novels everybody and his uncle’s face contorts into a “rictus” of fear?

  4. Joyce, for example, wrote that she wore an old mini-skirt on a day I was to come over for a visit.

  “Don’t you have something else you can wear?” he says.

  “I like this skirt,” I say. “You look ridiculous,” he says. I start to cry.

  “Don’t take it personally,” he says. “It’s a common failing of mankind.”

  (At Home, p. 157)

  34

  Awakening

  “So I wasn’t dreaming, after all,” she said to herself, “unless—unless we’re all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it’s my dream, and not the Red King’s! I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream. . . . I’ve a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!”

  —Chapter 8, “It’s My Own Invention”

  Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll

  I CALLED LARRY AND SAID we have some talking to do. He said, That’s what I’ve been trying to do for weeks. I showed him the ultrasound picture of the baby they took when they wanted to make sure “it”—now most definitely a “he”—was all right. Larry hugged me and cried. With the help of a terrific therapist, and some hard work and will and good fortune of our own, we began to make a real family. “We hope to give our children these two things: one is roots, the other wings.” Larry and I want to be like the dream catcher I’ve hung over my son’s bed, letting the nightmares of generations pass through the web, the filter of discernment, and letting the good dreams, his inheritance, run down the feather to where he lies sleeping. We want to make a safe place for him to play and dance with his friends and family in a circle right here on earth, far away from the edge of some crazy cliff.

  This is not going to happen by abracadabra, by imagining that when we pull this baby out from inside the cover of my body, he’ll be healed like Babe’s fingernail and in a safe place rather than in the middle of a battlefield. It was time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. I began to think about a thorough tilling of the soil, and to do some hard digging into places I had always left untouched, covered by weeds and wasteland. I began to open my eyes and look around where I’d always averted my eyes altogether, and to ask questions where previously I’d passed silently by on tiptoes. I had an inkling that this work might grow into a book. I hardly dared think it. When I decided to talk to my mother about what I was considering, she put her hand over her mouth like a Catholic schoolgirl and, with eyes wide, said, “That’s sacrilege!” When she dropped her hand from her mouth, though, she was smiling.

  Her impulse, her immediate reaction, hit the nail right on the head. Sacrilege. I had no idea how deeply his vision was woven into my being, how much I belonged to my father’s dream, until I tried to start untangling myself from it, and to defy the cult of secrecy by writing this book. I use the word cult intentionally. Many of my experiences in attempting to “awaken the Red King,” to figure out who dreamed what, correspond strikingly to those I’ve read of persons who have survived leaving a cult, and who took a stand not to pass on such a legacy to their children. I’m sure many went through far worse than I, both in enduring what happened and in the courage it took them to leave, but their stories are the only ones in which I found a bizarre resonance to my own experience. “Dreams, books, are each a world . . . with tendrils strong as flesh and blood.” Never underestimate the power of a dream, especially one dreamt by a charismatic dreamer, a speaker for the gods, a man on a sacred mission.

  I didn’t have much time to think, let alone write, until my son was about a year old. When I tried to begin writing, it was not pleasant. I found myself re-experiencing the nightmare world of a terrorized little girl. I had not expected to find myself, once again, at the edge of the cliff. I had an overwhelming, disorienting, vertiginous feeling that if I wrote this book, something terrible and evil would happen to me or to my loved ones as punishment. God or some Powerful Forces would get me if I told anyone. Never mind that I don’t believe in that kind of theology, even if I had been doing something bad. The grown-up person that I am knew better, but it didn’t seem to matter. I am at a loss for words to adequately describe the force of this. It was as though I needed a snake charmer or exorcist to release me from those tendrils.

  I prayed about it a lot and finally called Marilyn, a sensitive1 friend whom the police use from time to time to find missing persons. I asked her to consult one of her spirit guides as to whether I should undertake this project. This is not a thing I am in the habit of doing; I don’t even read my horoscope in the paper, I so avoid toying with things supernatural. A few months later she called me and said that a woman had appeared to her in a dream and told her to tell me that I should do it, that it would be important to my son. The point I’m making here isn’t about psychic phenomena, but rather that I needed that kind of reassurance. I was spooked to my core.

  I still couldn’t write, the fear of punishment was so strong. Even though I knew full well that it was irrational, I spent nearly a year frozen by the fear that something BAD would happen if I spoke.2 Finally, I went incognito—stopping just short of donning funny nose and dark sunglasses—and snuck into the “personal growth” section of a bookstore. I bought a book that contained exercises for getting in touch with one’s guardian angel, one’s helper and protector. Never mind that I’m paying $85 an hour for therapy! What can I say, it helped. I started to write.

  However, with every productive writing session and consequent sense of accomplishment, the nightmares would return. One night my father was in a tractor trying to mow me down. All night long this went on, running in a field, tractor in pursuit. Another night he was stalking me. On and on. But I kept at it, and after a while, reality began to gain some ground, displacing the nightmares.

  As I made inroads on the most intense fear, I realized that something else was bothering me that made it hard to write. Although I was plagued by pursuing nightmares, I was also trying to hold on to a dream. It was a dream of lullabies and applewood, where I was cradled in the warmth of my father’s love, and the apple of his eye. The dream was tattered and worn, like an old blanket that has been through the wash one too many times, but it was all I had to hold on to. It was faded, but precious, and part of me hoped to find it again someday. I didn’t want to lose my perfect daddy entirely.

  It has taken all the nerve I could muster to search for who he really is in three dimensions rather than curl up by the fire with a good piece of fiction. It has been hard to let go of the great and powerful man behind the curtain who, if I were onl
y able to do the little thing he asked and remain forever young, forever like him, had the power to take me home. But as the Wizard said to Dorothy, floating away in his hot-air balloon leaving her on the ground, “I can’t come back, I don’t know how it works.”

  I am beginning to figure out “how it works,” how the man I worshiped as a child came to hide behind curtains and enrobe himself in religious abracadabra. As the great J.D. himself told me many times when I was still a girl, “The old Zen masters refused to accept any false satoris—any false unions with the Absolute—any false gods. ‘If you see a Buddha,’ they warned their disciples, ‘knock him down.’ ” One isn’t advised by the masters to beat the living daylights out of a false god and run him out of town on a rail, just to knock down the facade, to look behind the curtain. Doing so is a matter of no small importance—to me, or to anyone else confronted with such a one. History shows us time and again that such figures, humans who would be as God, lead us neither to a sustainable life on earth, nor to heaven; rather, they lead us over the cliff, at the bottom of which you’ll find a great heap of dead lemmings.

  The exhortation to look behind the curtain concealing those who claim to be godlike, to knock it down rather than follow, is something my father passed on to me (although I doubt he thought I’d apply it to him); something that I, in turn, wish to pass on to my son. There are, however, several nightmarish creatures, misbegotten offspring of my father’s conflation of aesthetics, talent, and theology, that I wish to have pass through the dream catcher’s web and disappear. My father’s belief that perfection of character and perfection of craft are inseparable, for example, drives me crazy. From the leaky Cornish nursery, misconstructed by well-intentioned, unskilled carpenters, to the holy quacks preaching miracle cures, to not allowing me to see regular doctors as a young child, this belief of his could have turned deadly. Can you really live anywhere but in dreamland and believe, for example, that the nicest, most decent man is necessarily going to be the best heart surgeon? I swear to you he’d stake his own life, and the lives of his children, on the surgeon who had a good book of poetry in the office, rather than the one who had the most skill and highest success rate. This may be picturesque in the abstract, but living with it is nuts.