Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 7

  What troubles me now, fifty years later, is that although the episode remained with me for such a long time and although it smarted both then and now, there seemed to be a fatalistic compact between my father and myself about our necessarily inferior status. He knew about it; I discovered it publicly for the first time face to face with Pilley. Yet neither of us saw it then as worth a struggle of any kind, and that realization shames me still.

  Such disparities in perception and reality could only become apparent to me decades and decades after I had left GPS. Very little of what surrounded me at the school—lessons, teachers, students, atmosphere—was sustaining or helpful to me. The best memories I have from my years at GPS belong to the end of the school day when my mother was always there for me to talk and listen to, as she enveloped my waking hours with an interpretation of everything taking place. She explained my teachers, my reading, and me. Except for activities like penmanship and art, I was a clever albeit erratic student, quick as well as perceptive, but my mother seemed unconsciously to take away from my achievements after initially celebrating them, by saying, “Of course you’re clever, you’re so so intelligent, but”—and here I was brought up short—“but that isn’t a real accomplishment of yours since God gave you those gifts.” Unlike my father, she communicated a kind of melting softness and supportive sentiment that sustained me for as long as it lasted. In her eyes, I felt, I was blessed, whole, marvelous. One compliment from her about my brightness, or my musicality, or my face caused me such a lift as momentarily to give me a feeling of actually belonging somewhere good and solid, although, alas, I soon became aware of how brief that feeling would be. Immediately then I would start to worry about whether I could give myself permission to be secure, and pretty soon I had lost confidence again, and the old insecurities and anxieties set in. I have never doubted that my mother really loved me as she said she did, but by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I also knew that in some unspoken and mysterious way she was deeply critical of me. She had developed an extraordinary capacity to draw one in, convincing you of her total commitment and then, with scarcely a moment’s notice, making you realize that she had judged and found you wanting. No matter how close I was to her she could always reveal a mysterious reserve or objectivity that never fully explained itself but nevertheless exercised harsh judgment and was simultaneously dispiriting and maddening to me.

  And when I returned home in the afternoon there was always the risk of a telephoned report about what mischief I had been up to or what class I hadn’t prepared for, to poison the respite from school supervision that I longed for. In this way I gradually lost my confidence, retaining only a fragile sense of security in self or surroundings, making me more dependent than ever on my mother’s approval and love. My father was quite a remote figure during the week. He seemed to have no domestic responsibilities except shopping for fruits and vegetables in enormous quantities, all of which arrived home by delivery boy, and all of which my mother quite routinely bewailed. “We’re drowning in oranges, bananas, cucumbers, tomatoes, Wadie. Why did you buy five kilos more today?” “You’re crazy!” he’d sometimes respond coldly and bury himself back in his evening paper, unless of course I had been “reported” by the school, or if my monthly “report” expressed the usual reservations about my misbehavior, carelessness, loitering, or fidgeting. Then he would confront me ferociously for an awful moment or two, and withdraw. The confrontations worsened later, especially when I went to Victoria College.

  I did have some lasting moments of unexpected well-being at GPS, however, the most notable of them having to do with my introduction to the theater, which took place in early 1944. It was an odd business coming back to school in the early evening, the classrooms dark and empty, the central hall dimly lit, beginning to be crowded with people filling the fastidiously arranged chairs. The slightly raised platform from which Mrs. Bullen made her morning pronouncements had been converted into a stage, complete with a wrinkled white curtain strung along the front. It was to be a performance of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; the novel had been passed on to me by my mother at about the same time, but I found it tiresomely arch and largely incomprehensible, except for the illustrations, one in particular, of a mouse swimming up a stream, his little nose barely above water, which mysteriously intrigued me. My mother’s rather vague and disappointed recommendation when I didn’t press on with the book—“But it’s for children, Edward!”—hadn’t changed my mind, although I was excited that I might find something different in the book if it was presented and realized on the stage. “Is it like the cinema?” I remember asking an older boy who pushed me along into one of the front rows.

  I can still see and hear bits of that school production of Alice, especially the tea party, the Red Queen playing croquet and bellowing “Off with their heads,” and above all, Alice wandering in and out of situations we found funny but that alarmed and disoriented her. I could not grasp what the whole thing was about except that it totally transformed and gave an aura of irreducible glamour and strangeness to the actors, who during the day had been children at the GPS like myself. For no one was this more powerfully true than for Micheline Lindell, the girl who played Alice. The others—the Mad Hatter and March Hare, the Queen of Hearts—were older students I didn’t have much to do with; Colette Amiel, a preternaturally large girl who seemed born to play the Queen, was the sister of Jean-Pierre Amiel, an exact contemporary and neighbor of David Ades, so I knew her by affiliation, and with only a little familiarity. The others were just “big” boys and girls whom I had glimpsed around the school. Micheline, on the other hand, was no more than a year older than me; she had once or twice sat one row away from me in French when, for unknown reasons, different classes were combined. She had a mole on the left side of her mouth, was about my height, and had the most beautifully clear voice, fluent in perfect English and Cairo French.

  In Alice she was dressed in a white dress, with long white stockings and white ballet slippers. She was supposed to look virginal but did not at all, so artfully did her underlyingly seductive message get through the tight primness of her clothes, appealing very directly to a completely transfixed and, it must be added, mystified boy of nine. I felt no defined sexual attraction since I simply had no conception of what sex was, but looking at Micheline I did feel stirred and excited at how completely transformed she was and, even more exciting, how easily during the three days of performances she glided between being one of us, average, humdrum, uninteresting, to being a creature with so unmistakable an aura of glamour and elevation. During the day I would watch Micheline being ordinary, marveling at how like us she spoke, bore the teachers’ criticism, had trouble with her lessons. No allowances seemed to be made for her success as an actress. Then at night she became the isolated and gifted girl, aglow with her power and skill. I saw every performance, although my parents demurred each time, but then reluctantly gave in on the grounds identified by my father as “it’s a part of his education.” I liked to stand quietly and unnoticed just outside the school gate to watch her leave, her eyes gleaming with the excitement of having won the evening for herself, her white dress only partly hidden beneath the black coat held around her shoulders by her father. I felt some guilt at my “sneakiness,” but it was overridden by the thrill of concealment and of having seen Micheline exiting from one life into another.

  There were no such passages for me. Something was clearly wrong in my life for which systematic remedies were devised, all of them out of school, many of them extensions of it. For a few months when I was in my last year at GPS (1946) I found myself deposited for two afternoons a week across the tramway tracks at the Greenwoods’ house for extra exercises and sport. Like all the English children at school whose parents were not teachers, Jeremy Greenwood was the son of a company executive whose Zamalek villa, which I never entered, was surrounded by both a large garden and a high wall. On the lawn, and led by a wiry Egyptian instructor dressed impeccably in cricket whites, a fe
w boys were guided through an hour of calisthenics, followed by some running and ball-throwing. I learned no skills at the Greenwood sessions, but as the only non-English boy I did learn something about “fair play” and “sportsmanship,” a word I distinctly recall our instructor’s pronouncing with an accent on the man and a heavily rolled r. I understood that both were about appearances; “fair play” meant complaining loudly to an adult that something your opponent did was “not fair,” and sportsmanship meant never revealing your real feelings of anger and hatred. I was the only non-English boy at the Greenwood afternoons, and felt awkward and forlorn as a result.

  After a few unhappy and aimless weeks of exercise I was switched to the Cubs, whose bedraggled rump—the whole troop never seemed to turn up—met its two scoutmasters behind a shed somewhere on the Gezira Club grounds. There was a lot of squatting and bellowing into the wind: “Ak-e-la will do our best.” I was particularly proud of this ritual of loyalty since it put me explicitly for the first time into a frontline position with the English boys and with the distasteful Ades, to whose whispered threats I was impervious in the Cub ranks. We met on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when I proudly wore my khaki shirt and shorts, my red kerchief and brown leather knot, my smart green stockings and red garters. My mother didn’t like what she took to be the militarization of my spirit; having read about Mowgli, Kaa, Akela, and even Rikki-tikki-tavi with me, she couldn’t accept the hierarchies and authorities imposed on her boy by the English, and she scarcely cared for my costume. My sisters Rosemarie and Jean, who were seven and four, respectively, were cowed into momentary awe by my rousing whoops and cries.

  My father said nothing very much until the day he heard me practicing the oath, in particular the part about God and King. “Why are you saying that?” he asked me, as if I had devised the words myself. “You’re an American, and we have no king, only a president. You are loyal to the President. God and President.” Momentarily taken aback by this (I had no idea who the president was or what role he played in my life: the king after all was the latest I had studied in a long line from Edward the Confessor to the Plantagenets, the Stuarts, and beyond) I stammered a few words of mild objection: “ ‘God and President’ doesn’t work,” I volunteered at first. Then I wailed, “I can’t say that, Daddy, I can’t.” He seemed puzzled by my pathetic refusal, since he clearly could not imagine what it would mean for a nine-year-old boy to challenge the Cub Scout authorities on a fine point of exact allegiance. He turned to my mother, who, as always, was nearby, and said to her in Arabic: “Hilda, come, try to figure out what’s wrong with your son.”

  For the first time I took in what it meant to have failed his expectations; there was soon to be a second, also associated with the Cubs. On a fine Saturday afternoon in March a group of Cubs were taken to the nearby football field on the other, more open side of our Gezira Club shed. Our match against the Heliopolis Cubs had been announced a week earlier, so I had naïvely alerted my father—a great football forward himself as a young man thirty years ago in Jerusalem—to attend in order to watch me carry on the family tradition. Albert, my cousin, who played on, as had his uncle Wadie, the St. George’s First Eleven, was lithe, powerful, a very fast runner—much like my father in appearance and his interest in sports. I would have liked to have been like him. In any event, I associated Albert with my father as he had been, and assumed, with considerable encouragement from my debonair cousin, that my father was in fact a great player who would appreciate my playing. Please come and see me play, I said, and he, not surprisingly, came.

  The Cubmaster and I had overlooked the matter of football shoes, so I ended up as the only player on the field running about in immaculate brown Paul Favre shoes. Assigned to one of the halfback positions, I suddenly found myself at a complete loss as to what I was meant to be doing. I was brought up short even more intensely when I grasped, as if for the first time, that I had never actually played on a team before, and that my father, standing impassively about fifty feet away from me, was watching not only a very incompetent but a doubtless shamingly awkward son playing a position he had no business occupying. My feet seemed gigantic, and extremely heavy at the same time. I kicked at, but completely missed, the first ball to come my way, all in all the perfect beginning for what was to be a thoroughly undistinguished performance. “Said [pronounced Side],” one of the masters announced to me, “move about a bit more. Can’t have you just standing there!” I later saw him giving me a disapproving look for having three or four, instead of one or two, orange slices during half-time. During the second half, I was just as immobilized by timidity and uncertainty. We lost.

  After church the next day my father intercepted me in the corridor leading to the dining room. Lunch was about to be served—on rare occasions we had “people,” i.e., family, in for the main Sunday meal, which enlivened an otherwise monotonous day of enforced piety—but I could tell the encounter with my father was going to be a little less than pleasant. He held my shoulder after he had turned me around in front of him: together we faced down the corridor. As he swung his right leg to emulate a football kick, he began: “I watched you yesterday.” Pause. “You kick the ball and then you stop. You should go after it, move, move, move. Why do you stand still? Why don’t you rush after it?” This last question was accompanied by a great shove as he propelled me down the corridor in supposed pursuit of a nonexistent ball. All I could do was to stumble badly as I ungracefully recovered my balance. There was nothing I could say at all.

  I do not know whether my feelings of physical incompetence, which came from a sense that neither my body nor my character naturally inhabited my assigned spaces in life, derived from this quite unpleasant ordeal at my father’s hands, but certainly I have always found myself tracing these feelings back to that event. Body and character were, I began to discover, interchangeable so far as his scrutiny was concerned. One particularly durable theme in his comments from early youth right through to the end of my undergraduate education was my penchant for never going far enough, for skimming the surface, for not “doing your best.” Whenever he drew my attention to each of these failings he made a particular gesture with his hands, a clenched fist pulled back toward his shoulder in the first instance, a fluttering pass from left to right in the second, a wagging finger in the third. Most of the time he would cite my experience at the scout football game as an illustration of what he meant, from which I concluded that I did not have the moral force actually to do what was necessary for “my best.” I was weak in all senses of the word, but especially (I made the unspoken connection myself) with reference to him.

  A little later in the same year (1944) that I was so captivated by Micheline Lindell in Alice, I was to have another extraordinary theatrical experience. My mother announced that John Gielgud was coming to Cairo to perform Hamlet at the Opera House. “We must go,” she said with infectious resolve, and indeed it was duly set up, although of course I had no idea who John Gielgud was. I was nine at the time, and had just learned a bit about the play in the volume of Shakespeare stories by Charles and Mary Lamb I had been given for Christmas a few months earlier. Mother’s idea was that she and I should gradually read through the play together. For that purpose a beautiful one-volume complete Shakespeare was brought down from the shelf, its handsome red morocco leather binding and delicate onion-skin paper embodying for me all that was luxurious and exciting in a book. Its opulence was heightened by the pencil or charcoal drawings illustrating the dramas, Hamlet’s being an exceptionally taut tableau by Henry Fuseli of the Prince of Denmark, Horatio, and the Ghost seeming to struggle against each other as the announcement of murder and the agitated response to it theatrically gripped them.

  The two of us sat in the front reception room, she in a big armchair, I on a stool next to her, with a smoky smoldering fire in the fireplace on her left, and we read Hamlet together. She was Gertrude and Ophelia, I, Hamlet, Horatio, and Claudius. She also played Polonius as if in implicit solidarity with
my father, who often admonishingly quoted “neither a borrower nor a lender be” to me as a reminder of how risky it was for me to be given money to spend on my own. We skipped the whole play-within-a-play sequence as too bewilderingly ornate and complicated for the two of us. There must have been at least four, and perhaps even five or six, sessions when, sharing the book, we read and tried to make sense of the play, the two of us completely alone and together, for four afternoons after school, with Cairo, my sisters, and father totally shut out.

  I only half-consciously understood the lines, though Hamlet’s basic situation, his outrage at his father’s murder and his mother’s remarriage, his endless wordy vacillation, did come through. I had no idea what incest and adultery were, but could not ask my mother, whose concentration on the play seemed to me to have drawn her in and away from me. What I remember above all was the change from her normal voice to a new stage voice as Gertrude: it went up in pitch, smoothed out, became exceptionally fluent and, most of all, acquired a bewitchingly flirtatious and calming tone. “Good Hamlet,” I remember her clearly saying to me, not to Hamlet, “cast thy nighted colour and let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.” I felt that she was speaking to my better, less disabled, and still fresh self, hoping perhaps to lift me out of the sodden delinquency of my life, already burdened with worries and anxieties that I was now sure were to threaten my future.

  Reading Hamlet as an affirmation of my status in her eyes, not as someone devalued, which I had become in mine, was one of the great moments in my childhood. We were two voices to each other, two happily allied spirits in language. I knew nothing conscious of the inner dynamics that linked desperate prince and adulterous queen at the play’s interior, nor did I really take in the fury of the scene between them when Polonius is killed and Gertrude is verbally flayed by Hamlet. We read together through all that, since what mattered to me was that in a curiously un-Hamlet-like way, I could count on her to be someone whose emotions and affections engaged mine without her really being more than an exquisitely maternal, protective, and reassuring person. Far from feeling that she had tampered with her obligations to her son, I felt that these readings confirmed the deepness of our connection to each other; for years I kept in my mind the higher than usual pitch of her voice, the unagitated poise of her manner, the soothing, altogether conclusively patient outline of her presence as goods to be held on to at all costs, but rarer and rarer as my delinquencies increased in number and her destructive and certainly dislocating capacities threatened me more.