Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 8

  When I did see the play at the Opera House I was jolted out of my seat by Gielgud’s declaiming, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” and the sense it conveyed of being a miraculous confirmation of what I had read privately with Mother. The trembling resonance of his voice, the darkened, windy stage, the distantly shining figure of the ghost, all seemed to have brought to life the Fuseli drawing that I had long studied, and it raised my sensuous apprehension to a pitch I do not think I have ever again experienced at quite that intensity. But I was also disheartened by the physical incongruencies between myself and the men, whose green and crimson tights set off fully rounded, perfectly shaped legs, which seemed to mock my spindly, shapeless legs, my awkward carriage, my unskilled movements. Everything about Gielgud and the blond man who played Laertes communicated an ease and confidence of being—they were English heroes, after all—that reduced me to inferior status, curtailing my capacities for enjoying the play. A few days later, when an Anglo-American classmate called Tony Howard invited me to meet Gielgud at his house, it was all I could do to manage a feeble, silent handshake. Gielgud was in a gray suit, but said nothing; he pressed my small hand with an Olympian half-smile.

  It must have been the memory of those long-ago Hamlet afternoons in Cairo that made my mother, during the last two or three years of her life, enthusiastic once again about our going to the theater together. The most memorable time was when—her cancer afflictions already pronounced—she arrived in London from Beirut on her way to the United States to consult a specialist; I met her at the airport and brought her to Brown’s Hotel for the one night she had to spend there. With barely two hours to get ready and have an early supper she nevertheless said an unhesitating yes to my suggestion that we see Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Dalton as Anthony and Cleopatra at the Haymarket Theatre. An understated, unopulent production, the long play positively transfixed her in a way that surprised me; after years of Lebanese war and Israeli invasion she had become distracted, often querulous, worried about her health and what she should do with herself. All of this, however, went into abeyance as we watched and heard Shakespeare’s lines—“Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brows bent”—as if spoken in the accents of wartime Cairo, back in our little cocoon, the two of us very quiet and concentrated, sharing the language and communion despite the disparity in our ages and the fact that we were nevertheless mother and son, for the very last time. Eight months later she began her final descent into the disease that killed her, her mind ravaged by metastases that before striking her completely silent for the two months before she died caused her to speak fearsomely of plots around her, then to utter what was the last lucidly intimate thing she ever said to me, “My poor little child,” pronounced with such sad resignation, a mother taking final leave of her son.

  When I was growing up I always wished that she might have been the one to watch me play football or tennis, or that she alone could have talked to my teachers, relieved of her duties as my father’s partner in the joint program for my reform and betterment. After she died, and I no longer wrote her my weekly letter nor (when she was in Washington nursing her illness) spoke directly to her in our daily phone call, I kept her as a silent companion anyway. To be held in her arms when she wished to cuddle and stroke me as a small boy was bliss indeed, but such attention could never be sought or asked for. Her moods regulated mine, and I recall one of the most anguished moods of my childhood and early adolescence was trying, with nothing to guide me and no great success at all, to distract her from her role as taskmaster, and to tease her into giving me approval and support. A good deed, a decent grade, a well-executed passage on the piano might nevertheless cause in her a sudden transfiguration of her face, a dramatic elevation in her tone, a breathtakingly wide opening of arms, as she took me in with “Bravo Edward, my darling boy, bravo, bravo. Let me kiss you.” Yet most of the time she was so driven by her sense of duty as mother and supervisor of household life that the habitual voice of those years that has also stayed with me is the one she used to call out injunctions: “Practice your piano, Edward!”; “Get back to your homework”; “Don’t waste time: begin your composition”; “Have you had your milk, your tomato juice, your cod liver oil?”; “Finish your plate”; “Who ate the chocolates? A full box has disappeared. Edward!”

  IV

  MY FATHER’S STRENGTH, MORAL AND PHYSICAL, DOMINATED the early part of my life. He had a massive back and a barrel chest, and although he was quite short he communicated indomitability and, at least to me, a sense of overpowering confidence. His most striking physical feature was his ramrod-stiff, nearly caricaturelike upright carriage. And with that, in contrast to my shrinking, nervous timidity and shyness, went a kind of swagger that furnished another browbeating contrast with me: he never seemed to be afraid to go anywhere or do anything. I was, always. Not only did I not rush forward, as I should have done in the unfortunate football game, but I felt myself to be seriously unwilling to let myself be looked at, so conscious was I of innumerable physical defects, all of which I was convinced reflected my inner deformations. To be looked at directly, and to return the gaze, was most difficult for me. When I was about ten I mentioned this to my father. “Don’t look at their eyes; look at their nose,” he said, thereby communicating to me a secret technique I have used for decades. When I began to teach as a graduate student in the late fifties I found it imperative to take off my glasses in order to turn the class into a blur that I couldn’t see. And to this day I find it unbearably difficult to look at myself on television, or even read about myself.

  When I was eleven, this fear of being seen prevented me from doing something I really wanted to do. It was perhaps my second opera performance in the Cairo house that was a miniature replica of the Paris Garnier behemoth and had canonized Aida. I was excited by the solemn rituals of the stage and costumed people, but also by the music itself, its enactments and formality. I was particularly intrigued by the orchestra pit and, at its center, the conductor’s podium, with its enormous score and long baton. I wanted a closer look at both during intermission, which our center baignoire seats did not afford. “Can I look at them?” I asked my father. “Go ahead. Go down there,” he responded. The idea of walking alone through the parquet suddenly struck me as impossible: I was too ashamed, my physical vulnerability to inquiring (perhaps even condemning) looks too great. “All right,” he said with exasperation. “I’ll go.” I saw him commandeer the aisle, almost strutting toward the podium, which he very slowly, deliberately, reached; then, adding to my discomfort, he pretended to turn the pages of the score with curiosity and daring all over his face. I sank further into my seat, allowing myself only a peep over the banister, unable to bear the combined embarrassment, perhaps even fear, at my father’s exposure, and my shrinking timidity.

  It was my mother’s often melting warmth which offered me a rare opportunity to be the person I felt I truly was in contrast to the “Edward” who failed at school and sports, and could never match the manliness my father represented. And yet my relationship with her grew more ambivalent, and her disapproval of me became far more emotionally devastating to me than my father’s virile bullying and reproaches. One summer afternoon in Lebanon when I was sixteen and in more than usual need of her sympathy, she delivered a judgment on all her children that I have never forgotten. I had just spent the first of two unhappy years at Mount Hermon, a repressive New England boarding school, and this particular summer of 1952 was critically important, mainly because I could spend time with her. We had developed the habit of sitting together in the afternoons, talking quite intimately, exchanging news and opinions. Suddenly she said, “My children have all been a disappointment to me. All of them.” Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say, “But surely not me,” even though it had been well established that I was her favorite, so much so (my sisters told me) that during my first year away from home she would lay a place for me at table on important occasions like Christmas Eve, and would not allow
Beethoven’s Ninth (my preferred piece of music) to be played in the house.

  “Why,” I asked, “why do you feel that way about us?” She pursed her lips and withdrew further into herself, physically and spiritually. “Please tell me why,” I continued. “What have I done?”

  “Someday perhaps you will know, maybe after I die, but it’s very clear to me that you are all a great disappointment.” For some years I would re-ask my questions, to no avail: the reasons for her disappointment in us, and obviously in me, remained her best-kept secret, as well as a weapon in her arsenal for manipulating us, keeping us off balance, and putting me at odds with my sisters and the world. Had it always been like this? What did it mean that I had once believed our intimacy was so secure as to admit few doubts and no undermining at all of my position? Now as I looked back on my frank and, despite the disparity in age, deep liaison with my mother, I realized how her critical ambivalence had always been there.

  During the GPS years my two oldest younger sisters, Rosy and Jean, and I began slowly, almost imperceptibly, to develop a contestatory relationship that played or was made to play in to my mother’s skills at managing and manipulating us. I had felt protective of Rosy: I helped her along, since she was somewhat younger and less physically adept than I; I cherished her and would frequently embrace her as we played on the balcony; I kept up a constant stream of chatter, to which she responded with smiles and chuckles. We went off to GPS together in the morning, but we separated once we got there since she was in a younger class. She had lots of giggling little girlfriends—Shahira, Nazli, Nadia, Vivette—and I, my “fighting” classmates like Dickie Cooper or Guy Mosseri. Quickly she established herself as a “good” girl, while I lurked about the school with a growing sense of discomfort, rebelliousness, drift, and loneliness.

  After school the troubles began between us. They were accompanied by our enforced physical separation: no baths together, no wrestling or hugging, separate rooms, separate regimens, mine more physical and disciplined than hers. When Mother came home she would discuss my performance in contrast to my younger sister’s. “Look at Rosy. All the teachers say she’s doing very well.” Soon enough, Jean—exceptionally pretty in her thick, auburn pigtails—changed from a tagalong younger version of Rosy into another “good” girl, with her own circle of apparently like-minded girlfriends. And she also was complimented by the GPS authorities, while I continued to sink into protracted “disgrace,” an English word that hovered around me from the time I was seven. Rosy and Jean occupied the same room; I was down the corridor; my parents in between; Joyce and Grace (eight and eleven years younger than I) had their bedrooms moved from the glassed-in balcony to one or another of the other rooms as the apartment was modified to accommodate the growing children.

  The closed door of Rosy and Jean’s room signified the definitive physical as well as emotional gulf that slowly opened between us. There was once even an absolute commandment against my entering the room, forcefully pronounced and occasionally administered by my father, who now openly sided with them, as their defender and patron; I gradually assumed the part of their dubiously intentioned brother, a role of course pioneered (in my father’s eyes) by my maternal uncles. “Protect them,” I was always being told, to no effect whatever. For Rosy especially I was a sort of prowling predator-target, to be taunted or cajoled into straying into their room, only to be pelted with erasers, hit over the head with pillows, and shrieked at with terror and dangerous enjoyment. They seemed eager to study and learn at school and home, whereas I kept putting off such activities in order to torment them or otherwise fritter the time away until my mother returned home to a cacophony of charges and countercharges buttressed by real bruises to show and real bites to be cried over.

  There was never complete estrangement though, since the three of us did at some level enjoy the interaction of competing, but rarely totally hostile, siblings. My sisters could display their quickness or specialized skill in hopscotch, and I could try to emulate them; in memorable games of blind man’s buff, ring-around-the-rosy, or clumsy football in a very confined space, I might exploit my height or relative strength. After we attended the Circo Togni, whose lion tamer especially impressed me with his authoritative presence and braggadoccio, I replicated his act in the girls’ room, shouting commands like “A posto, Camelia” at them while waving an imaginary whip and grandly thrusting a chair in their direction. They seemed quite pleased at the charade, and even managed a dainty roar as they clambered onto bed or dresser with not quite feline grace.

  But we never embraced each other, as brothers and sisters might ordinarily have: for it was exactly at this subliminal level that I felt a withdrawal on all sides, of me from them, and them from me. The physical distance is still there between us, I feel, perhaps deepened over the years by my mother. When she returned from her afternoons at the Cairo Women’s Club she invariably interjected herself between us. With greater and greater frequency my delinquency exposed me to her angry reprobation: “Can’t I ever leave you with your sisters without your making trouble?” was the refrain, often succeeded by the dreaded appendix, “Wait till your father gets home.” Precisely because there was an unstated prohibition on physical contact between us, my infractions took the form of attacks that included punching, hair-pulling, pushing, and the occasional vicious pinch. Invariably I was “reported” and then “disgraced”—in English—and some stringent punishment (a further prohibition on going to the movies, being sent to bed without dinner, a steep reduction in my allowance and, at the limit, a beating from my father) was administered.

  All this heightened our sense of the body’s peculiar, and problematic, status. There was an abyss—never discussed, nor examined, nor even mentioned during the crucial period of puberty—separating a boy’s body from a girl’s. Until I was twelve I had no idea at all what sex between men and women entailed, nor did I know very much at all about the relevant anatomy. Suddenly, however, words like “pants” and “panties” became italicized: “I can see your pants,” said my sisters tauntingly to me, and I responded, heady with danger, “I can see your panties.” I quite clearly recall that bathroom doors had to be bolted shut against marauders of the opposite sex, although my mother was present for both my dressing and undressing, as well as for theirs. I think she must have understood sibling rivalry very well and the temptations of polymorphous perversity all around us. But I also suspect that she played and worked on these impulses and drives: she kept us apart by highlighting our differences, she dramatized our shortcomings to each other, she made us feel that she alone was our reference point, our most trusted friend, our most precious love—as, paradoxically, I still believe she was. Everything between me and my sisters had to pass through her, and everything I said to them was steeped in her ideas, her feelings, her sense of what was right or wrong.

  None of us of course ever knew what she really thought of us, except fleetingly, enigmatically, alienatingly (as when she told me about our all being a disappointment). It was only much later in my life that I understood how unfulfilled and angry she must have felt about our life in Cairo and, retrospectively, its busy conventionality, its forced rigors and the absence (in her and in her children) of openness, its limitless manipulations, and its peculiar lack of authenticity. A lot of this had to do with her fabulous capacity for letting you trust and believe in her, even though you knew that a moment later she could either turn on you with incomparable anger and scorn or draw you in with her radiant charm. “Come and sit next to me, Edward,” she would say, thereby letting you into her confidence, and allowing you an amazing sense of assurance; of course you also felt that by doing this she was also keeping out Rosy and Jean, even my father. There was a kind of demonic possessiveness and, at the same time, an infinitely modulated responsiveness that accepted you not just as a son but as a prince. I once confessed to her my belief in myself as someone both gifted and unusual, despite the almost comic lineup of failures and endless troubles I found myself in
at school, and everywhere else. It was a very timidly volunteered affirmation of a force, perhaps even another identity underneath “Edward.” “I know,” she said softly to me, in the most confidential and reassuring of fugitive sotto voces.

  But who was she really? Unlike my father, whose general solidity and lapidary pronouncements were a known and stable quantity, my mother was energy itself, in everything, all over the house and our lives, ceaselessly probing, judging, sweeping all of us, plus our clothes, rooms, hidden vices, achievements, and problems into her always expanding orbit. But there was no common emotional space. Instead there were bilateral relationships with my mother, as colony to metropole, a constellation only she could see as a whole. What she said to me about herself, for instance, she also said to my sisters, and this characterization formed the basis of her operating persona: she was simple, she was a good person who always did the right things, she loved us all unconditionally, she wanted us to tell her everything, which only she could keep hidden from everyone else. I believed this unquestioningly. There was nothing so satisfying in the outside world, a merry-go-round of changing schools (and hence friends and acquaintances), numerous lives, being a non-Egyptian of uncertain, not to say suspicious, composite identity habitually out of place, and representing a person with no recognizable profile and no particular direction. My mother seemed to take in and sympathize with my general predicament. And that was enough for me. It worked as a provisional support, which I cherished tremendously.