Dream Catcher: A Memoir
Page 52
Finally, I’d like to thank my husband and son who are the light of my life.
Aunt Doris and Granny before my father was born, around 1916.
Doris and “Sonny,” the future J. D. Salinger, August 1920. “You know, Peggy, your father and I were the best of friends growing up.”
Left to right: Two friends, Doris in background, Sonny, and their mother, Miriam. “In a Jewish family, you know, a boy is special,” Doris said. “Mother doted on him. He could do no wrong. I thought he was perfect too.”
Doris as a high school senior. “Mother told me that when a woman from a finishing school in Dobbs Ferry that I had applied to came to interview the family, she said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Salinger, it’s too bad you married a Jew.’ People talked that way in those days, you know. It was hard on me but it was hell on Sonny. I think he suffered terribly from anti-Semitism when he went away to military school.”
Sonny at Valley Forge Military Academy.
My father describes, in his fiction, exactly what I witnessed of his real-life visits with Granny, Grandpa, and Aunt Doris: “Sometimes . . . when I come in the front door, it’s like entering a kind of untidy, secular, two-woman convent. Sometimes when I leave, I have a peculiar feeling that both M. and her mother have stuffed my pockets with little bottles and tubes containing lipstick, rouge, hairnets, deodorants, and so on. . . . I don’t know what to do with their invisible gifts.” (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, p. 69)
In the spring of 1936, my father dropped out of college and took a job on a cruise ship.
Salinger rose from private to staff sergeant, landed on Utah beach on D-Day, was on or near the front lines with the Twelfth Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Division from D-Day to VE Day, from Utah beach to Cherbourg, on through the battles of the Hedgerows and bloody Mortain, to Hürtgen Forest, Luxembourg, and the Battle of the Bulge.
In the fall of 1950, Claire met a writer named Jerry Salinger at a party in New York. She was sixteen and had just begun her senior year at Shipley.
Jerry, at thirty-one, was nearly twice Claire’s age and was quite simply, or rather, quite complicatedly, tall, dark, and handsome.
Claire’s mother and stepfather in the Duveen Brothers Gallery, in the 1960s.
My grandfather, Solomon (“Sol”) Salinger.
My parents’ beloved yogi, Lahiri Mahasaya. When my brother and I were children, my father gave both of us a photograph of a yogi and asked us to tuck his picture away and take it with us wherever we went. Since Daddy never mentioned the yogi’s name, I never asked who he was. I just thought he looked a lot like Grandpa with his lush white hair and mustache.
The summer after her freshman year at Radcliffe, Claire was back in New York, where she worked as a model for Lord & Taylor. She hid the fact that she was modeling from Jerry. “Your father would not have approved, all that vain, worldly, women and clothes. . . . I didn’t dare tell him.”
When Claire’s pregnancy became obvious, she said that Jerry’s attraction turned to “abhorrence.”
My mother doesn’t remember many details about the first year of my life. It’s mostly lost in a dark haze of depression. What she does remember is that, in general, as my father became enchanted with me—by the time I was four months old and smiling he told his friends the Hands, “We grow more overjoyed every day”—my mother continued to lose ground.
Cornish, where we lived, was wild and woody.
Peggy pulling Daddy’s nose. “It was most exceedingly pullable-looking hair, and pulled it surely got; the babies in the family always automatically reached for it, even before the nose, which, God wot, was also Outstanding.” (“Seymour: An Introduction,” 1959)
This lovely woven slat fence, which as young as age four I climbed with ease, was referred to by reporters and biographers as an “eight-foot-tall impenetrable fence with a sort of guard tower overlooking the house.”
The “guard tower,” courtesy of FAO Schwarz.
My view of creation as a sort of miraculous immaculate conception was supported by my father’s mythic stories about me, such as how I went to the keyboard before I could barely stand unassisted, and picked out a tune perfectly, the first time.
My father told me stories about a naughty little girl, Lucia Ferenzi, and her lion, Samba, that bore a remarkable resemblance to things good little Peggy and her lion, Simba, might have done.
My aunt Doris told me strange and wonderful things. . . . She called the skin on my face “your complexion.”
Peggy and Matthew, 1960.
Claire Douglas, age five, is the first little girl on the left. Photo from Life magazine, July 17, 1939.
Peggy on vacation in Florida. I have the same bathing suit as the Mayfair Bath Club girls, but oh, that face!
The author, at age ten going on twenty, in 1966.
On my first day of boarding school, a Cheshire cat’s teeth appeared, smiling in the long corridor. It said, “Hi, I’m Holly. What’s your name?”
Peggy, age twelve, near the first day of boarding school.
Peggy, number 22. Joyce Maynard wrote: “I like Jerry’s children, but I have little in common with this cheerful, friendly twelve-year-old boy and his basketball-loving sixteen-year-old sister.”
Hanging out at the Cambridge School.
I was a Grade D auto and truck mechanic for the Boston Edison Co. and member of the United Utility Workers Union of America, A.F.L.-C.I.O., from 1975 to 1980—unaware at the time that Holden Caulfield had dreamed of dropping out of school and working in a garage somewhere, pumping gas.
Graduation day, 1982, Brandeis University. Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, with high honors in history and legal studies. Left to right: my mother, brother, me, and my father.
My brother, off camera, made my father laugh.
Number 5, captain of Oxford University Ladies’ Basketball Team.
Celebrating the end of examinations.
Graduation day, 1984, Oxford University. M.Phil. in Management Studies. To the left is my mentor and dear friend, the late Geoffrey Barraclough, with me and my brother, Matthew.
Chaplain Peggy Salinger, with Mia Klumpenhouwer, age nine, after performing a marriage ceremony for friends, September 1, 1990.
The author and her son.
A friend helps.
A friend laughs with you.
A friend helps you up when you are hurt.
(—the author’s son, age five)
MARGARET A. SALINGER earned her B.A. from Brandeis University summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa; earned an M.Phil. from Oxford University; and attended Harvard Divinity School as a Williams Scholar. She lives with her husband and son.
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“The Little Boy and the Old Man” by Shel Silverstein. Copyright © 1981 Evil Eye Music, Inc.
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Some of the names in this book have been changed.
A Washington Square Press Publication of
ATRIA BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2000 by Margaret A. Salinger
Originally published in hardcover in 2000 by Washington Square Press
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York,
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ISBN: 0-671-04282-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-2202-0 (eBook)
First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing October 2001
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Cover and interior design by C. Linda Dingler
Dream catcher illustration by David Upthegrove
Author photo: Brad Bellows
Front cover photo courtesy of the author