Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 29

  I am only now aware that those talks before we were to leave for the United States constituted a sort of leave-taking ceremony. “Let’s go to Groppi’s for tea for the last time,” or “Wouldn’t you like us to go to the Kursaal for dinner once more before you go?” she would ask. But much of it took place in some complicated labyrinth of her own making, which also involved the arrangements she was making for herself and my four sisters, whom she would be alone with after I left. There was something so terribly giving about her attitude in the last week before we packed the house for the first stage of our trip via Lebanon. As I later realized, she thought of that giving as motivated entirely by unselfish love, whereas of course her sovereign ego played a major part in what she was up to, namely, struggling in a limiting domestic household to find a means of self-expression, self-articulation, self-elaboration. These I think were my mother’s deepest needs, though she never managed to say it explicitly. I was her only son, and shared her facility of communication, her passion for music and words, so I became her instrument for self-expression and self-elaboration as she struggled against my father’s unbending, mostly silent iron will. Her sudden withdrawal of affection, which I dreaded, were her way of responding to my absences. From 1951 until her death in 1990 my mother and I lived on different continents, yet she never stopped lamenting the fact that, alone of all her friends, she suffered the pangs of separation from her children, most particularly me. I felt guilt at having abandoned her, even though she had finally acquiesced in the first and most decisive of my many departures.

  The sheer gravity of my coming to the United States in 1951 amazes me even today. I have only the most shadowy notion of what my life might have been had I not come to America. I do know that I was beginning again in the United States, unlearning to some extent what I had learned before, relearning things from scratch, improvising, self-inventing, trying and failing, experimenting, canceling, and restarting in surprising and frequently painful ways. To this day I still feel that I am away from home, ludicrous as that may sound, and though I believe I have no illusions about the “better” life I might have had, had I remained in the Arab world, or lived and studied in Europe, there is still some measure of regret. This memoir is on some level a reenactment of the experience of departure and separation as I feel the pressure of time hastening and running out. The fact that I live in New York with a sense of provisionality despite thirty-seven years of residence here accentuates the disorientation that has accrued to me, rather than the advantages.

  We made our annual removal to Lebanon in late June 1951 and spent two weeks in Dhour. Then, on the fifteenth of July, my parents and I departed from Beirut Airport (Khaldé, as it was called then) by Pan-American Stratocruiser for Paris. From almost the moment we stepped off the plane in Paris until we left for London by night sleeper I was afflicted with a plague of styes in both my eyes, which, apart from two small apertures, effectively closed them. This aggravated the sense of drifting and indeterminacy that followed my withdrawal from all aspects of my familiar world, the sense of not really knowing what I was doing or where I was going.

  Within hours of arriving in London, where we stayed grandly in an imposingly grandiose suite at the Savoy, my cousin Albert was summoned from Birmingham, where he was doing a degree in chemical engineering, and was installed luxuriously with us at the hotel. He appeared to be unaware of the tensions between my father and his brothers, so jolly and admirably rakish did he seem while with us. I spent many hours eating my first fish and chips with Albert, visiting the new Battersea Fun Fair, and going to an unending number of pubs in search of girls and excitement, all the while trying to learn from him the arts of enjoying oneself without feeling either guilty or lonely. He was the one close relative whom for the first twenty years of my life I found myself hoping to emulate because he was everything I was not. He had an erect posture, was an excellent footballer and runner, seemed to be a successful ladies’ man, and was a natural leader as well as a brilliant student. London was certainly the most pleasurable interlude of our trip. The moment he left, his tonic effect dissipated, and I settled back into the anxious gloom of the trip.

  From Southampton we boarded the Nieuw Amsterdam, a larger, more luxurious version of the Saturnia. The six-day crossing to New York was uneventfully crammed with sumptuous dinners and lunches, nightly movies, and my parents’ ubiquitous presence. “I hate America and Americans,” my mother would say. “What are we doing here, Wadie? Please explain this whole crazy business to me. Must we take the boy there? You know he’ll never come back. We’re robbing ourselves.” My mother was querulous and sad, while my father reveled in his pancakes and coffee, apple pie à la mode, excited about America and his determination, now that I was going to be there, to buy a house. I found myself avoiding, except at dinner, the conflicting moods of my parents with no stable idea of where I was going or for how long.

  No sooner did we arrive in a steamy, unpleasantly overcast and dark New York than my mother persuaded my father to let us visit her cousin Eva Malik in Washington. We checked in to the Mayflower for only about an hour: Eva came by in her husband’s black ambassadorial limousine almost immediately and, brooking no dissent, pried us and our lordly array of luggage out of the hotel and into the nicely comfortable chancellory. In his capacity as Lebanese minister plenipotentiary in the United States, Charles Malik was away at a U.N. meeting in San Francisco, so we had Aunt Eva to ourselves for a few days of tourism and general relaxation. It was she who also insisted that they would be my guardians while I was at boarding school, an arrangement my mother welcomed, as did I, since I might spend my vacations in the splendors of the Lebanese ambassador’s residence, in a style that resembled what I thought I had left behind in Cairo. My father was noncommittal, for reasons that I would only later discover. I could sense, however, that both my parents were soon chafing at our stay, which, they kept reminding Eva—who, being alone and otherwise not engaged or obligated by domestic duties, was obviously enjoying our presence—was already too protracted. They both had this notion that one shouldn’t in the Arab sense be “heavy”—in effect, not stay anywhere more than three, at most four, days, all the while taking out our hosts for dinner every night, buying lots of flowers and chocolates, making themselves “lighter” by so doing.

  Suddenly we embarked for Madison, Wisconsin, which in a recent National Geographic had been described to my father’s satisfaction as the “nicest” town in the United States. We spent two days in the pretty town, going around with real estate agents who showed us one imposing house after another, each of which the three of us collectively imagined ourselves living in: “That’s your mother’s desk” said my father, pointing to an unprepossessing corner filled carelessly with a decrepit bridge table. “Here’s where we can put the piano,” said my mother with noticeably less enthusiasm as the hours wore on. We gathered great quantities of pamphlets and business cards, all of which my father cavalierly tossed into the hotel wastebasket that evening. There was something disconnected and eerie about our house hunting in Madison, but my mother and I played along with my father, although I never grasped what Madison was a fictional projection of for him, except the opportunity to come to the United States like me and settle here, despite his by now elaborate domestic establishment, prospering business, and very full life in Egypt and Lebanon. He always used to say, and my mother repeated often, that had he been twenty years younger after World War II, he would have come to the United States. When we went to Madison he was already fifty-six, but I know that to some extent his interest in the United States was partly theoretical patriotism, partly the invigoration he felt at being out of his family’s grasp, partly the desire to make me feel that I was getting the greatest opportunity ever, and that my clinging moroseness and expectant dread about staying on alone would be dissolved in due course. He had an ideological hatred of sentimentality, represented by the regretted effect of his own mother’s importunings to return and my mother’s behavior toward m
e just prior to our trip.

  We returned to New York via the Milwaukee Road Railroad and a TWA flight from Midway Airport, and the day after Labor Day finally found ourselves on a train leaving Grand Central Station bound for Mount Hermon. The only part of the long journey on the White River Junction train that I remember was our arrival at the tiny, excessively rural Massachusetts station, where a lone taxicab was waiting to take us the final couple of miles to the school. We barely had an hour together, since my parents were to take the return train to New York. When we had found my room, and my parents had had a brief meeting alone with the headmaster, my mother spent fifteen minutes helping me to unpack and make the bed (my unknown roommate was already neatly installed). Then they rapidly departed, leaving me standing with a lump in my throat at the entrance to my imposing dormitory building, Crossley Hall, as they disappeared from view. The void that suddenly surrounded me and that I knew I had to endure for the one academic year I was to be at Mount Hermon seemed unbearable, but I also knew that I had to return to my room to recover some sense of my mother’s recent presence—her smell, a trace of her hands, even perhaps a message.

  A blond and blue-eyed youth of my own age was there to greet me. “Hi. I’m your roommate, Bob Salisbury,” he said pleasantly, leaving me no opportunity to recuperate some of my mother’s disappearing aura as I realized that I had now definitively arrived.

  Mount Hermon School, originally founded by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody in the late nineteenth century, was larger than Victoria College. It was the male counterpart of the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, and the two establishments occupied several thousand acres on opposite sides of the Connecticut River. A six-mile road and a bridge connected the two quite separate but affiliated schools. Mount Hermon, unlike Northfield, was not in a town or village but was entirely self-enclosed and self-sufficient. Unmarried teachers lived among students in the dorm; married faculty with children had little houses scattered over the campus. Although it was in the traditional picture-book sense a beautiful, leafy, hilly, and perfectly maintained New England site, I found it altogether alienating and desolate. The beauties of nature spoke little to me, and at Mount Hermon I found them particularly unseen and repressed.

  Crossley Hall was the largest building on campus, a long, glowering redbrick Victorian building that could have been a factory. Salisbury and I were on the second floor; the toilets and showers, which stood in an open row, each exposed to its neighbor, were in the basement. Each student was required to do manual work for ten to twelve hours a week, according to Moody, whose quotations were an early analogue of Chairman Mao’s little red book, inculcating in us “the dignity of manual labor.” My task with four other boys was to pick the eyes out of potatoes. For the amount that was required each night the job took us a solid one hour and forty-five minutes, during which time we worked nonstop, singing, cracking jokes, but otherwise totally focused on our work, which began right after breakfast, at seven-fifteen, and ended at nine, just before our first class. Our supervisor was a short, stocky middle-aged man—Eddie Benny—a former army sergeant who treated us as recalcitrant, not to say unfit, recruits who had to be ridden constantly.

  The daily routine was not only rigorous, it was also long, repetitive, and unrelieved by any of the urban amusements I had grown accustomed to in Cairo. Mount Hermon had a post office and a store, which was open only a few hours a day, where you could buy toothpaste, postcards and stamps, candy bars, and a tiny selection of books. Classes ran until noon. All meals included grace, and lunch was followed by announcements about sports and club meetings. At one we broke for two hours of sports.

  Afternoon classes resumed from four till six. Dinner was immediately followed by a short break period for activities. Then we were confined (“locked in” would be a better phrase) in our rooms between eight and ten-fifteen for a two-and-a-quarter-hour study period, policed by floor officers. These were students elevated to this position not because of seniority or academic accomplishment but for mysterious reasons having to do with “leadership,” a word I heard for the first time at Mount Hermon. Talking during study hall was forbidden. At ten-fifteen we were allowed a fifteen-minute bathroom and toothbrushing seance, then lights out and silence.

  Each student was allowed two Saturday afternoons per semester to go to Greenfield, a miserable little place about ten miles away. Other than that, except for sport team trips, we were imprisoned in Mount Hermon’s stifling, claustrophobic regimen for three months. Phones were both scarce and rare. My parents called me once from New York before they returned to Cairo to break the news that “Dr. Rubendall and we thought that you should repeat your junior year, even though technically you passed Upper Five.” My father came on the line. “If you graduate next spring you’ll only be sixteen. That’s too young to go to university. So you’ll be at that school”—he often forgot the school’s name—“for two years. You’re a lucky fellow!” he said cheerily, and without irony. “I wish I had had your chances.” I knew he meant this, although I realized that as someone who had struggled hard earlier in his life he also slightly resented the privileged life he was giving me. I remembered the shock I had felt a few weeks earlier in London, when, having put us and Albert in rooms and suites at the Savoy with no expense spared, and having taken us to fancy restaurants, theaters, or concerts every night (including the most memorable musical comedy I ever saw, Kiss Me Kate with Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison, and a super H.M.S. Pinafore with Martyn Green at the Savoy Theatre), he rounded on me angrily for spending sixpence to buy a theater program. “Do you think you’re the son of a rich man, throwing money away like that?” he said harshly. When I turned to my mother for help and comfort, she explained, “He had to work so hard,” leaving me speechless and shamed, unable to point out the disparity between the rage over sixpence and the vast expenses being disbursed in luxury hotels and restaurants.

  “Goodbye, sweetheart. When you feel blue,” my mother ended the call impetuously, “try not to be alone. Find someone and sit with them.” Her voice started to quiver disturbingly. “And think of me and how much I miss you.” The void around me increased. “Daddy says we must go. I love you, darling.” Then, nothing. Why, I remember asking myself in the silence, had I been sent so far away to this dreadful, godforsaken place? But these thoughts were blown away by the dry New England voice of Mr. Fred McVeigh, the French teacher, in whose tiny Crossley apartment I had just received my parents’ call. “Okay?” he asked me laconically as if to say, if you’re done, please return to your room. Which I did, with the dawning realization that here were no lingering, suggestive communications but only cut-and-dry, mean-what-you-say exchanges, which in their own way, I discovered, were just as coded and complex as the ones I had supposedly left behind.

  A day later I wandered over to see Mr. Edmund Alexander, the tennis coach and English teacher. Aside from Dr. Rubendall, “Ned” Alexander was the only other Cairo connection at Hermon. I had been told about him by Freddie Maalouf, a close family friend who had been a classmate of Ned’s. Small, dark, and wiry, wearing a white wool tennis sweater, Alexander was not at all welcoming. We stood facing each other across a tan station wagon parked in the driveway of his large white clapboard house. “Yes?” he asked curtly. “I’m from Cairo,” I said enthusiastically. “Freddie Maalouf urged me to look you up and say hello.” Not a line softened in his hard, leathery expression. “Oh, yes, Freddie Maalouf,” was all he said, without a single additional comment. Undaunted I switched into Arabic, thinking that his and my native language might open up a more generous avenue of interaction. It had exactly the opposite effect. Stopping me in midsentence, Alexander held up his right hand, “No brother”—a very Arab locution, I thought, even though uttered in English—“no Arabic here. I left all that behind. Here we are Americans”—another Arabic turn of phrase, instead of “We’re in America now”—“and we should talk and act like Americans.”

  It was worse than I thought. All I wanted was some f
riendly contact emanating from home, something to make an opening in the immense fabric of loneliness and separation that I felt surrounding me. Alexander revealed himself as not only unfriendly but something of an antagonist. He immediately placed me on the varsity–junior varsity tennis ladder, which meant weeks of challenge matches that protected the varsity from newcomers, and when those ended with the first onset of snow in early November I was established (unfairly I thought) on the JV list. Then for a year I had nothing more to do with Alexander, whom I would see with his wife, the senior Mount Hermon farmer’s daughter, tooling around on campus in their station wagon, being as American as could be. I became a charge of the British JV coach and American history teacher, Hugh Silk, to whose “coaching” I brought all my residual anti-British sentiment. Even though I had won the top spot, he kept me at number 2 because, he once told me admonishingly, I wasn’t fit to be number 1. Too many gestures, too many complaints, too many temperamental outbursts proved that I wasn’t, he said, “equable enough.”