Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 31

  Their apartment in Jackson Heights, 72-42 Fifty-first Drive, was on the second floor of a house in a row of identical townhouse lookalikes with which those streets were lined for mile upon mile on end. The space in the Said apartment became extremely cramped after I arrived with my gigantic suitcases (I could have left them over at school but neurotically and categorically refused to go anywhere without all my belongings). It must have been hell for my aunt and her children to have me there, but to their undying credit none made me feel unwelcome or in the way.

  Abie and Charlie by now had regular jobs at a bank and insurance agency, respectively, and went to New York University night school in business. Dorothy still worked as a secretary at Reuben Donnelley, the enormous printing firm responsible for producing the phone book. The three of them were gone by about seven-thirty a.m. and did not return until eight or nine at night. Emily would prowl the apartment most of the morning, talking constantly to herself in Arabic punctuated by peals of mysterious laughter, making beds (but not mine, which I made up soon as I could), picking up clothes, puttering in the kitchen-cum–dining room with lots of clattering, breaking, slamming, all of it without pattern or obvious system. She seemed quite deaf to the sounds around her, so even though she turned on the radio to some dreadful talk and music show, I was usually able to keep switching it to WQXR, even though that snooty station—its nine-thirty “Piano Personalities” show being my favorite—was, I thought, too often insanely submerged in Barney’s and Rogers Peet commercials. These sometimes caught the attention of Emily, who would then sing along and, later, gratuitously sing alone, “You save at Barney’s, you save at Barney’s,” certainly unaware of what she was saying. At around ten she would ask me if I’d like something to eat: I never ventured to the fridge or breadbox on my own, partly because even if she was making beds or messing about in the bathroom, she’d suddenly interrupt herself and shoot back to the kitchen like a bull to its querencia. I quickly understood that she not only cared for the kitchen but also guarded it, as if it contained some sort of primitive treasure hoard.

  At about noon she usually announced that she was going out and I was made to understand that if she left I couldn’t remain at home unattended or alone. I usually took the Woodside bus to the Jackson Heights subway station, then flew into Times Square, where I had my daily lunch of a Nedick’s hot dog and orange drink and began to walk around, mainly among newsreels and third-run films plus an occasional foray into Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not. Museums, libraries, places of profit and education seemed not to be part of my perspective, but from Dorothy I discovered that quiz shows gave away tickets to their live audiences, so I did frequent those at Rockefeller Center for a while, then moved on to more films and newsreels (continuous in those days) before heading for Jackson Heights in the late afternoon. On Christmas Day there’d be a short phone call from Cairo but with my cousins and Emily requested by my parents for a formulaic salutation, I had the briefest but satisfying feeling from my mother’s incredibly warm “Happy Christmas, darling,” and then it was over.

  Abie and I usually did companionable things on the weekend evenings that he wasn’t busy with his Masonic lodge. My cousins belonged to an Arabic-Protestant church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (two hours and several changes away by subway), which provided the “Syrian” community, as the Arab-Americans were known in those days, with a social center, at which haflés (dinner and dancing) made it possible for everyone to mix together over kibbeh and hummus. Abie and I ended up by going together without the others, I quite reluctantly, since I found the elderly Arab-Americans lost in a world of commerce—rug selling, groceries, furniture. They were strange, almost Swiftlike creatures, with Poconos summer homes, fragmentary 1920s Arabic, and studiously patriotic Americanism: the phrase “Uncle Sam” appeared regularly in their speech, although they spoke more about the “Communist threat” than (to the disappointed ears of a Palestinian teenager) about Israel. The women were dowdy and unhappy at being separated from their villages, marooned in Brooklyn, their daughters overdressed, gum-chewing, squeaky-voiced bobby-soxers.

  Or Abie and I would go to the weekly Arabic film showing on Atlantic Avenue, Saturdays at midnight, which got us back to Queens at four a.m., totally exhausted. But the effort was leavened for me by seeing sultry actresses like Naeema Akif, Samia Gamal, or Tahia Carioca dance and Ismail Yassin shoot off his moronic yet endearingly toothy one-liners. It was the Cairo lilt in their dialogue that made us nostalgic as we rode back in the empty clattering train, but after about three such excursions we were too worn out for more.

  Once during the vacation I went to Bay Ridge by myself as a guest of Aunt Salimeh and Uncle Amin Badr. She was a lively, witty, pretty, and unmistakably lusty woman in her forties, and he—Faris Badr’s younger brother, who had been resident in the United States for at least fifty years—was an incredibly precise, very carefully put together man (never had I seen such razor-sharp trouser creases and so fastidiously pressed shirts) in his middle seventies, a retired sheet and towel salesman. Salimeh’s volubility and irreverence, which she exaggerated to further dramatize the age difference between her and Amin, amused me enormously, a vivid contrast to my life at Queens; besides, Salimeh’s connection by marriage to my mother’s family I treated subliminally as an antidote to the Saidian dourness of my father’s far less colorful family.

  I would meet Salimeh at her Fourth Avenue store, Mrs. Beder’s Bra and Corset Shop, where with two assistants she labored from early morning to evening. My mother was a customer, I knew, as was Eva Malik, though both found Salimeh’s tiresome complaints against her plainly exploited underlings both comic and unseemly. “They keep asking me for more money and an eight-hour day. Do you think I only work eight hours? Hawdy”—mountain Lebanese for “those”—“are communistic ideas,” she would say, but never so solemnly as not to let me in fact stand up for the girls. “You’re too soft,” she’d say with a smile. “You need more of your father’s guts.” What particularly endeared me to her was not only her wonderful abundant cooking for dinner that night, nor the comfortable bed in a room of my own, nor even the gay banter between herself and the “old guy,” as she called him, but her ingenuity for promoting her trade. There, right in her shop window, she had installed a headless, legless manikin whose ample bosom was clad in one of her shocking-pink bras. Underneath the two breasts was a taunting sign that read: UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL. “Doncha think I know what I’m doing here? Your uncle Amin is scandalized by the model, but doncha think I’ll ever pay attention to him. He won’t come near the place, but wait until I put up my corset display!”

  The next morning as we set off, she to work, me to Jackson Heights, she stuffed my overnight bag with a jar of pickles, a container of green olives, and a large bag of spinach cakes that she had baked. “Give my regards to your people,” she said, “especially Abie. He’d make a good husband.” It wasn’t until some years later that I started to see her as a kind of Wife of Bath figure, elemental and irrepressible, hopelessly out of place among the solemn Syrian denizens of Bay Ridge, borne along by a rare energy and humor that created a bond between us that has lasted till now, retired as she is, and mostly amnesiac, in Florida.

  THE UTTER LONELINESS AT MOUNT HERMON SEEMED heightened three weeks after I returned to school in early January. We were entombed, I felt, in the aftermath of another huge ravaging blizzard, trees bent over in snowdrifts of ten feet nearly everywhere, temperatures near zero, a bright sun lighting up the unyielding whiteness almost luridly. Hatless I went from dorm to class, to gym, to dining hall, busily cursing the sense of confinement and impediment I felt all around me, totally unprepared for the message delivered to me as I left my late-afternoon chemistry class with the diminutive, bespectacled Dr. Paul Bowman. A student helper from the headmaster’s office was standing at the door waiting for me; he said, “Dr. Rubendall would like to see you now.” As we trudged off together I wondered almost absentmindedly what new infraction I had committed, even
though my general behavior at Mount Hermon had been, I thought, unimpeachable. There were no gangs, no hated masters, no volatile political situations. Rubendall was the one urbane and totally agreeable man in the school, partly because of his fond memories of his days as basketball coach in Cairo, partly, I speculated, because at six foot four, with a massive yet graceful bearing and great charm, he exuded a kind of confidence that had little to do with the Moody legacy that seemed to weigh down the others. I couldn’t imagine him having much to do with the dour Ned Alexander, though both had Cairo in their background. But I was always glad when Rubendall picked me out of the crowd—“Ed,” he would say using my new Americanized name, “how are things going? I hope you’re enjoying Hermon. My best to your parents and to Cairo. Drop up to the house some evening,” which I of course didn’t, but the man’s genuine welcome and friendliness carried me a long way past the daily gloom of the school, even though during my two years there this was the only time I entered his house.

  Rubendall greeted me warmly. “I’ve just heard from Cairo, Ed. Your family’s fine. The news, or what we have of it, is pretty alarming, but everyone’s safe.” Not knowing what exactly he was referring to, but alarmed nevertheless, I asked for more details. “There have been riots, much of the city has been burned, no one knows who is behind it. Come up to the house at seven and we’ll see what the TV has.” Of course I did, but the reception was extremely poor: images of large crowds and burning buildings alternated with unclear pictures of officials, generals, and politicians presided over by a smudgy photograph of King Farouk taken well before he had become a 350-pound caricature. It was a Monday evening: the fire had taken place two days earlier, and somehow my father had gotten through to Rubendall on the phone.

  I was truly frightened as much for what might have happened to my parents, my father especially, in this unprecedented maelstrom, as for the possibility that I would have nothing to return to. I knew that something had irrevocably changed. The stunning scenes of destruction that lasted for about twenty seconds on the Rubendall family TV—he and his wife stood protectively next to me as I sat squarely in front of the large brown console—originated somewhere else and from somebody I had never imagined as being lodged in the familiar Cairo of my early days: “impersonal forces”? enraged people? foreign spies? I could not imagine nor articulate the causes of what I saw before me. The next day, reading the Tuesday Boston Globe in the Crossley lounge, I was stunned to see my father’s name in a three-page report that detailed the enormous damage done on Black Saturday.

  It was the first time that our existence had taken so objective and, to me, so vulnerably assertive a form. “The Standard Stationery,” ran the passage, “owned by an American citizen, William A. Said, was totally gutted by the mob as it moved down Malika Farida Street, destroying the British Turf Club, a noted British Cairo institution …” Other familiar places mentioned were Papazian’s Music shop, where I had bought music books and records, Kodak, Salon Vert, Gattegno. All of them up-market, obviously foreign, right in the heart of the modern colonial city. The mob was stopped by a valiant police captain (who for his pains was later fired) at the head of a handful of his men just at the beginning of the Kasr el Nil bridge, which led across the Nile to Zamalek, our residence. And there but for that captain … I couldn’t possibly take in everything that had happened, although my mother’s letter about ten days later filled in some of the blanks. The important thing is that both our main places of business (B Branch was destroyed too) had been reduced to rubble; a month later they sent me pictures of the damage, the only recognizable objects being some Sebel tables and chairs twisted into surrealistic shapes beneath which were fragments of typewriters, Ellams duplicators, and one large but apparently unharmed Chubb safe (an image later to be used by my father in his sales material) and huge amounts of charred paper. My mother sadly commented on how at that time my cousins and aunt expressed to my father their desire to separate themselves from the firm, so summoning all his financial reserves (I never really understood from where) he bought them out, leaving himself alone in charge of a completely ruined establishment. “All right, Lampas” he was quoted by my mother as telling his old manager, “let’s roll up our sleeves”—the phrase has stuck in my head for over forty-six years—“and begin again.” And so they did: clearing up the debris with a few faithful helpers, announcing that business as usual would be conducted from his unharmed office across the road, getting all the requisite bank loans, plus small compensation for damages from a hastily convened government commission, beginning reconstruction on an altogether grander and more luxurious scale. By the time I arrived home in June for the summer vacation the last remaining effects on his business of the January 26, 1952, fire—apparently set by the Muslim Brothers—were a string of photographs showing the ruins that he had had framed and hung behind the cashier’s desk and in his office.

  I still marvel at his almost superhuman recovery. I never heard him speak regretfully about the prefire days or about how much he lost or about what a catastrophe it had been for him. And the twice-monthly typed letters kept arriving on precisely the same day, as if nothing had changed, except news of arriving “goods” as he called them, supplied to SSCo with emergency speed by his European and American suppliers. Trying perhaps to penetrate the mystery of his overwhelming strength, I wrote my mother complaining that his formal, typed, obviously dictated letters signed “Yours truly, W. A. Said” were perplexing and that “I couldn’t understand” why he never wrote me a truly personal letter. I was concerned about the pressures on him and wanted some human indication of his continued and assured presence in my life. “Dear Edward,” ran a one-page letter that arrived two weeks later, written in his untidy scrawl, “Your mother tells me that you don’t like my typed letters to you, but I am very busy as you can imagine. Anyway, here is a hand-written letter for you. Yours truly, W. A. Said.” I kept the letter for at least twenty years, since it seemed to symbolize perfectly my father and his attitude to me. It was as if he believed that expression and feeling could never be equal or interchangeable, and that if they were there was something clearly wrong with either or both. So he kept his council, reserving his efforts for what he did, which he protected with the silence or lapidary style that so maddened me.

  All his life my father was deliberately circumspect about what property or wealth he possessed, and now that he had to rebuild a business with a large load of debt he became uncharacteristically voluble on the subject of his obligations. “Can’t you see,” he would say exasperatedly to us dozens and dozens of times “how heavily I am in debts?” using the plural “s” as an emphatic reminder that this was no ordinary amount of debt. “Debts” in fact plagued us (as a family) for three or four years, until once, while I was in his office, taking over for him during a summer afternoon, I started idly leafing through his accountant’s report for the recently concluded fiscal year. I was astounded at the many many thousands of pounds he was making on a quarterly basis. When I raised this with him, he looked at me with great contempt. “Stop talking nonsense, Edward. Perhaps one day you’ll learn to read a balance sheet. In the meantime concentrate on your studies, and let me take care of the business.” But it was difficult not to notice that during the mid-fifties my parents had more frequent and larger parties, acquired handsome objects, and had moved out of the Sharia Aziz Osman apartment and into a larger and luxuriously appointed one in a building next door that housed embassy residences. Nonetheless, his protests about being “in debts” never stopped.

  By the early spring of 1952 I had suspended my feelings of paralyzed solitude—missing my mother, my room, the familiar sounds and objects that embodied Cairo’s grace—and allowed another less sentimental, less incapacitated self to take over. Forty years later a similar process occurred, when I had been diagnosed with leukemia and discovered myself for a while almost completely gripped by the grimmest thoughts of imminent suffering and death. My principal concern was how terrible it was to
have to separate from my family and indeed from the whole edifice of my life, which in thinking about it I realized I loved very much. Only when I saw that this dire scenario constituted a paralyzing block at the center of my consciousness could I begin to see its outlines, which helped me first to divine and then make out its limits. Soon I became conscious of being able to move this debilitating block off center, and then to focus, sometimes only very briefly, on other, much more concrete things, including enjoyment of an accomplishment, music, or a particular encounter with a friend. I have not lost the acute sense of vulnerability to illness and death I felt on discovering my condition, but it has become possible—as with my early exile—to regard all the day’s hours and activities (including my obsession with my illness) as altogether provisional. Within that perspective I can evaluate which activities to hold on to, perform, and enjoy. I never lost my sense of dislike and discomfort at Mount Hermon, but I did learn to minimize its effect on me, and in a kind of self-forgetting way I plunged into the things I found it possible to enjoy.

  Most, if not all, were intellectual. During my first year we were all required to take a simple-minded class (doubtless an idea of Dr. Moody’s) designed to make us pious. This not only repeated the material I had already gone through for my confirmation, but went further in literalistic and, I must say, fundamentalist Old Testament interpretation than I would have thought was humanly possible. Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, stick in my mind: we not only read over the texts, student by student, but no less relentlessly paraphrased what they said, literally, unimaginatively, repetitiously. Were it not that my record was so good I’d have had the same Bible teacher (Chester something) in senior year, with the New Testament as our text, but instead I was allowed to take the alternate Bible IV given by the school chaplain and co-swimming coach Reverend Whyte, known to all as Friar Tuck for his portliness, red hair, and all-around good humor. I was seventeen, but thanks to his openness and total absence of dogmatism we had a superb reading course in classical philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle, through the Enlightenment to Kierkegaard.