PART ONE
A FAMILY HISTORY:
1900â1955
âHow my parents were occupied and all before they had meâ
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott. . . .
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colors gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
ââThe Lady of Shalott,â Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1
âSometimes Throâ the Mirror Blueâ1
âNow, Kitty, letâs consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like thatâas if Dinah hadnât washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of courseâbut then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to knowâOh, Kitty, do help to settle it! Iâm sure your paw can wait!â
âChapter 12, âWhich Dreamed It?â
Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
MAMA SAID THAT WHEN SHE was a little girl, before her house in London was bombed, she would often creep out of her bed at night and open the door between her nursery and the top of the back staircase that led down to the kitchen. Sheâd tiptoe downstairs to make sure the door was closed and no servants were around. Then, spreading her white nightgown around her and slowly rising off the ground, she would fly up and down the passageway. She knew she hadnât been dreaming because when she awoke on mornings after flight, there would be dust on her fingertips where she had touched the ceiling.2
My mother was a child hidden away. She, like many upper-class and upper-middle-class English children of her day, was raised by staff in the nursery. I grew up hearing grim tales of nursery life. The one brief, bright spot was a nice governess, Nurse Reed, who took little Claire home with her on visits to her family. Nurse Reedâs replacement, a Swiss-German who, among her many delightful qualities, used to force Claire, after lunch, to sit on the toilet until she âproduced,â or until suppertime, whichever came first, was more the norm. I knew, too, that she was sent to convent boarding school when she was only five years old and that she was taught to bathe her little body under a sheet so God wouldnât be offended by her nakedness. I used to think about that when I was a little girl sitting in the tub, how scary a wet sheet over you would feel, as if youâd get caught under the immensity of it and sucked down the drain. Once, when I was in the hospital with poison ivy, my mother told me that when she was at the convent and got poison ivy, the nuns scrubbed her head to toe, beneath the sheet of course, with a bristle brush and lye soap to remove the evil ivy boils.
What I didnât understand was why she was there. I didnât wonder about it when I was little and assumed that things just happen to children as inexorably as the catechism. But now, as an adult, it no longer made sense to me, and I asked her about it. My mother explained that at the time, in the fall of 1939, the fact that loomed largest in most Londonersâ lives was that there was a war on. During the Blitz, parents with the means and âany sense at all,â she said, took their families out of London and went to stay with friends or relatives in the country. The Douglas family had both country relations and money; nevertheless, Claire and her brother, Gavin, were packed on a train, unaccompanied, âwith all the poor children,â and evacuated to a convent at St. Leonardâs-by-the-Sea. St. Leonardâs had the unfortunate geographical attribute of being opposite Dunkirk, and they were soon evacuated again, this time inland to a sister convent in what my mother only remembers as a red-bricked city. She was five years old.
There was no comfort to be found in her elder brother, who, at seven, had a well-developed penchant for torturing animals and small girls. âHe liked to cause pain, poor boy, it confused him terribly.â âWhy?â I asked, grateful that she had never let âthe poor boyâ anywhere near her daughter while he was alive. âMom, what was wrong with Gavin?â The answer came back flat and blunt: âThe man my mother got her black market meat from was a pederast. When he came to the house, he bothered me a couple of times, but it was mostly my brother he was interested in, not me, thank God. I donât think he ever recovered from it.â
In the fall of 1941, as Jerome Salinger had his first story, âThe Young Folks,â published, Claire, age seven, and her nine-year-old brother, Gavin, were put on a train to Southampton, where they were met by a governess. She informed them that their familyâs house had been bombed and had burnt to the ground. The Douglases had been out for the evening when the bomb struck, but Claireâs beloved kitten, Tiger Lily, was nowhere to be found. The governess deposited Claire and Gavin on a ship, the Scythia, offering the children no explanation. Her duty accomplished, she turned and marched off the ship.
The ship was packed with stunned, weeping children headed for the safety of the United States to sit out the war. One bit of contact, which Claire clung to like a life preserver, was to stand on the deck each day and wave to the children on the deck of their sister ship, The City of Benares, which carried the same cargo of unaccompanied children and sailed alongside them in close convoy. The children would wave back to her. Several days out of Southampton, as Claire was exchanging waves, a German torpedo ripped into the side of the Benares. It exploded into flames. Claire watched in mute horror as it sank, children screaming and dancing as they burned.
The Scythia disembarked at Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax, Claire and Gavin traveled alone by train to Waycross, Georgia, to meet their first host family. They were in Georgia when, on December 7 of that year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Before the warâs end, they would be removed from eight different American foster homes because of Gavinâs behavior. âAnd you know what happens to little girls in foster care . . . ,â my mother said, as though we were both in on some kind of secret not to be mentioned, only hinted at.
Their second placement was in Tampa, Florida. She remembers being terribly sunburned and attributes her midlife melanoma to her Tampa stay. The next stop, about the time Staff Sergeant Jerome Salinger was preparing to take Utah Beach on D-Day, was Wilmington, Delaware, where she attended the Tower Hill School for about a year. This was followed by placements with families in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Sea Girt, New Jersey; and Glens Falls, New York.
I never heard about these places growing up. My mother didnât have to think for two seconds, though, to remember. The towns, and the order in which the placements occurred, were literally at her fingertips as she ticked them off, counting on her fingers the way my son, at age four, might display his mastery of the days of the week. âWaycross, Tampa, Wilmington . . .â
âWhere were your parents?â I asked, assuming they must have been unable to leave England. She told me that her father, an art dealer, came to America shortly after she did, in 1941, to sell some pictures in New York. He was stuck there while the shipping passage was blocked by German U-boats. When it opened, he sent for his wife and they spent the duration of the war in New York City building up the business at Duveen Brothers3 and getting established.
When the war ended, the foster program ended, too, and the Douglases had to collect their children, at which point Claire was sent off to the Convent of the Holy Child in Suffern, New York, where she stayed until the end of eighth grade; Gavin went to Milton Academy. âHow were they able to have their children taken care of by American families on that war program when they were in the country themselves?â I asked her as she told me this story. She shook her head and said, âGod only knows what story my mother told them.â
She stayed with her parents in their New York apartment on the occasional school holiday, sleeping under the dining room tableâfor reasons unknown and probably unquestioned. In eighth grade, she refused to go back to the convent. âThey were doing a number on my head, trying to coerce me into becoming a nun. The whole school was ordered to shun me, not to speak to me, until I had declared my decision. I was going mad.â Her parents did not, or could not, force her to return, and in the fall of 1947 they enrolled her, instead, at Shipley, a girlsâ boarding school in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Three years later, in the fall of 1950, she met a writer named Jerry Salinger at a party in New York given by Bee Stein, an artist, and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, a writer for The New Yorker. Claireâs parents lived in the same apartment building as the Steegmullers on East Sixty-sixth Street, and through their shared interest in the arts, they had become good friends as well as neighbors. Claire was sixteen and had just begun her senior year at Shipley. She arrived at the party looking strikingly beautiful, with the wide-eyed, vulnerable, on-the-brink look of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanyâs or Leslie Caron in Gigi, a movie my father loved so much that he bought a reel-to-reel copy and played it for us so many times when I was growing up that, to this day, I can still sing the lyrics beginning to end. As a child, I never heard the names Holden Caulfield or Seymour Glass, but even now I canât hold a glass of champagne without hearing in my mind the song âThe Night They Invented Champagneâ from Gigi.
Our shared world was not books, but rather, my fatherâs collection of reel-to-reel movies. During the long winters, our human visitors were, essentially, supplied courtesy of MGM. My father would set up the screen in front of the fireplace in the living room, and Iâd lie on the rug watching Hitchcockâs The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent; Laurel and Hardy; W. C. Fields; and the Marx Brothers, to name a few of our favorites. The neat, plastic videocassettes he now owns are a sterile substitute for the sensuous delight I remember then. My father would take the reel from the round metal case, as though unwrapping a present, and place it on the projector spindle. I watched him thread the film through the maze of the projector in a lovely over and under hide-and-seek; his hands knew the special moves and codes for each location. When I threaded my old treadle Singer sewing machine for my 4-H class, I felt the same thrill of competence, of secrets mastered.
When he secured the tail of the film in the empty reel, he was ready for me to turn off the lights. A thin blue stream of light beamed from the projector, widening as it moved toward the screen, smoke and dust playing in the flickering light. First the leader tape passed through with its strange hieroglyphics of bullâs-eyes and numbers and scratches, absent the dire modern video warnings about the FBI, imprisonment, and fines written in legalese. Then the title appeared with the movieâs music and opening credits.
Most of his movies were on two or three reels, so in the middle of the movie we had to stop, turn on the lights, and wait while my father rewound the spent reel and threaded the next. I liked the sound of the film at the end of each reel slapping against my fatherâs hand as it pulled free of the projector. Iâd never stick my hand in the midst of all that flapping. He wasnât scared of getting cut at all, even when he had to stop the movie and splice the film together where it broke.
Rewinding the film at intervals was also a chance for me to rewind, have a drink of juice or some peanuts, reassurance that the world, as I knew it, still existed. Some of the Hitchcock movies scared me half to death, and not in a fun way. Much to my fatherâs disgust, I always had to leave the room in the middle of Foreign Correspondent and put my head under a pillow to block out the screams of that sweet old man, Van Meer, when the Nazis tortured him in a windmill, offscreen, to get him to talk. Of my flights to the next room, my father would say, âChrist, all you and your mother want to see are sentimental pictures about Thanksgiving and puppy dogs.â In my fatherâs vocabulary, sentimental was a very damning word indeed.
Old Hitchcock movies, especially, became our secret language. As late as my senior year of high school, Iâd receive a postcard saying simply, âThere is a man in Scotland I must meet if anything is to be done. These men act quickly, quicklyââsigned, in my dadâs handwriting, âAnnabella Smith, Alt-na Shelloch, Scotlandâ (from The 39 Steps). When my brother was at boarding school, I received many a letter from him signed âHuntley Haverstockâ (Foreign Correspondent). In short, weâd all light on the choice of Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn, rather than some literary character, to describe the young Claire when they first met.
Claire wore her chestnut hair smoothed back from her lovely forehead. Pretty mouth, fullish lips, and the kind of high cheekbones that promise ...