Out of Place: A Memoir, Page 9

  It was through my mother that my awareness of my body as incredibly fraught and problematic developed, first because in her intimate knowledge of it she seemed better able to understand its capacity for wrongdoing, and second because she would never speak openly about it, but approached the subject either with indirect hints or, more troublingly, by means of my father and maternal uncles, through whom she spoke like a ventriloquist. When I was about fourteen I said something she thought was tremendously funny; I did not realize at the time how unknowingly astute I was. I had left the bathroom door unlocked (a telling inadvertence, since I had gained some privacy as an adolescent, but for some reason wanted it occasionally infringed upon), and she suddenly entered. For a second she didn’t close the door, but stood there surveying her naked son as he hastily dried himself with a small towel. “Please leave,” I said testily, “and stop trying to catch up where you left off.” This injunction carried the day, since she burst out laughing, quickly closed the door, and walked briskly away. Had she ever really left off?

  I knew much earlier that my body and my sisters’ were inexplicably taboo. My mother’s radical ambivalence expressed itself in her extraordinary physical embrace of her children—covering us with kisses, caresses, and hugs, cooing, making expostulations of delight about our beauty and physical endowments—and at the same time offering a great deal of devastating negative commentary on our appearance. Fatness became a dangerous and constant subject when I was nine and Rosy was seven. As my sister gained weight it became a point of discussion for us throughout childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Along with that went an amazingly detailed consciousness of “fattening” foods, plus endless prohibitions. I was quite skinny, tall, coordinated; Rosy didn’t seem to be, and this contrast between us, to which was added the contrast between her cleverness at school and my shabby performance there, my father’s special regard for her versus my mother’s for me (they always denied any favoritism), her greater savoir faire when it came to organizing her time, and her capacity for pacing herself, talents I did not at all possess—all this deepened the estrangement between us, and intensified my discomfort with our bodies.

  It was my father who gradually took the lead in trying to reform, perhaps even to remake, my body, but my mother rarely demurred, and regularly brought my body to a doctor’s attention. As I look back on my sense of my body from age eight on, I can see it locked in a demanding set of repeated corrections, all of them ordered by my parents, most of them having the effect of turning me against myself. “Edward” was enclosed in an ugly, recalcitrant shape with nearly everything wrong with it. Until the end of 1947, when we left Palestine for the last time, our pediatrician was a Dr. Grünfelder, like Madame Baer, the midwife, a German Jew, and known to be the finest in Palestine. His office was in a quiet, clean, orderly, and leafy area of the parched city that seemed distinctly foreign to my young eyes. He spoke to us in English, although there was a good deal of confidential whispering between him and my mother that I was rarely able to overhear. Three persistent problems were referred to him, for which he provided his own, idiosyncratic solutions; the problems themselves indicate the extent to which certain parts of my body came in for an almost microscopic, and needlessly intense, supervision.

  One concerned my feet, which were pronounced flat early in my life. Grünfelder prescribed the metal arches that I wore with my first pair of shoes; they were finally discarded in 1948, when an aggressive clerk in a Dr. Scholl’s store in Manhattan dissuaded my mother from their use. A second was my odd habit of shuddering convulsively for a brief moment every time I urinated. Of course I was asked to perform the shudder for the doctor, but just as certainly was unable either to urinate or to shudder. My mother observed me for a couple of weeks, then brought the case to the world-renowned “child specialist.” Grünfelder shrugged his shoulders. “It is nothing,” he pronounced, “probably psychological”—a phrase I didn’t understand but could see worried my mother just a little more, or was at least to worry me until I was well into my teens, after which the issue was dropped.

  The third problem was my stomach, the source of numerous ills and pains all my life. It began with Grünfelder’s skepticism about my mother’s habit of wrapping and tightly pinning a small blanket around my midsection in both summer and winter. She thought this protected me against illness, the night air, perhaps even the evil eye; later, hearing about it from different friends, I realized it was common practice in Palestine and Syria. She once told Grünfelder about this strange prophylactic in my presence, his response to which I distinctly remember was a knitted, skeptical brow. “I don’t see the need,” he said, whereupon she pressed on with a rehearsal of all sorts of advantages (most of them preventive) that accrued to me. I was nine or ten at the time. The issue was also debated with Wadie Baz Haddad, our family GP in Cairo, and he too tried to dissuade her. It took another year for the silly thing to be removed once and for all; Hilda later told me that still another doctor had warned her against sensitizing my midsection so much, since it then became vulnerable to all sorts of other problems.

  My eyes had grown weaker because I had spring catarrh and a bout with trachoma; for two years I wore dark glasses at a time when no one else did. At age six or seven, I had to lie in a darkened room every day with compresses on my eyes for an hour. As my shortsightedness developed I saw less and less well, but my parents took the position that glasses were not “good” for you, and were positively bad if you “got used” to them. In December of 1949 at the age of fourteen, I went to see Arms and the Man at the American University of Cairo’s Ewart Hall, and was unable to see anything taking place on stage, until my friend Mostapha Hamdollah loaned me his glasses. Six months later, after a teacher’s complaint, I did get glasses with express parental instructions not to wear them all the time: my eyes were already bad enough, I was told, and would get worse.

  At the age of twelve I was informed that the pubic hair sprouting between my legs was not “normal,” increasing my already overdeveloped embarrassment about myself. The greatest critique, however, was reserved for my face and tongue, back, chest, hands, and abdomen. I did not know I was being attacked, nor did I experience the reforms and strictures as the campaigns they were. I assumed they were all elements of the discipline that one went through as part of growing up. The net effect of these reforms, however, was to make me deeply self-conscious and ashamed.

  The longest running and most unsuccessful reform—my father’s near obsession—was my posture, which became a major issue for him just as I reached puberty. In June of 1957, when I graduated from Princeton, it culminated in my father’s insisting on taking me to a brace and corset maker in New York in order to buy me a harness to wear underneath my shirt. What distresses me about the experience is that at age twenty-one I uncomplainingly let my father feel entitled to truss me up like a naughty child whose bad posture symbolized some objectionable character trait that required scientific punishment. The clerk who sold us the truss remained expressionless as my father amiably declared, “See, it works perfectly. You’ll have no problems.”

  The white cotton and latex truss with straps across my chest and over the shoulders was the consequence of years of my father trying to get me to “stand up straight.” “Shoulders back,” he would say, “shoulders back,” and my mother—whose own posture, like her mother’s, was poor—would add in Arabic, “Don’t slump.” As the offense persisted she resigned herself to the notion that my posture came from the Badrs, her mother’s family, and would routinely emit a desultory sigh, fatalistic and disapproving at the same time, followed by the phrase “Herdabit beit Badr,” or “the Badr family humpback,” addressed to no one in particular, but clearly intended to fix the blame on my ancestry, if not also on her.

  The Badrs’ or not, my father persisted in his efforts. These later included “exercises,” one of which was to slip one of his canes through both my armpits and make me keep it there for two hours at a stretch. Another was to make
me stand in front of him and for half an hour respond to his order, “One,” by thrusting my elbows back as hard and as quickly as possible, supposedly straightening my back in the process. Whenever I wandered across his line of vision he would call out, “Shoulders back”; this of course embarrassed me when others were around, but it took me weeks to ask him to please not call out to me so loudly on the street, in the club, or even walking into church. He was reasonable about my objection. “Here’s what I’ll do,” he said reassuringly. “I’ll just say ‘Back,’ and only you and I will know what it means.” And so “Back” I endured for years and years until the truss.

  A corollary to the struggle over my posture was how it affected my chest, whose disproportionately large size and prominence I inherited from my father. Very early in my teens I was given a metal chest expander with instructions to use it to develop the size and disposition of the front of my body, sorely affected by my posture’s continuing misdemeanor. I was never able to master the gadget’s crazy springs, which leapt out at you threateningly if you did not have the strength to keep them taut. The real trouble, as I once explained to my mother who listened sympathetically, was that my chest was already too large; thrusting it forward aggressively, making it even bigger, turned me into a grotesque, barrel-chested caricature of a well-developed man. I seemed to be caught between the hump and the barrel. My mother understood and tried to persuade my father of this without any observable result. When he was in the United States before World War I, my father had been influenced by Gregory Sandow, the legendary strongman who even turns up in Ulysses, and Sandow featured an overdeveloped chest and erect back. What was good for Sandow, my father once told me, ought to do “for you too.”

  Yet on several occasions my resistance exasperated my father enough for him to pummel me painfully around my shoulders, and once even to deliver a solid fist into my back. He could be physically violent, and threw heavy slaps across my face and neck, while I cringed and dodged in what I felt was a most shameful way. I regretted his strength and my weakness beyond words, but I never responded or called out in protest, not even when, as a Harvard graduate student in my early twenties, I was bashed by him humiliatingly for being rude, he said, to my mother. I learned how to sense that a cuff was on its way by the odd fashion he drew his top lip into his mouth and the heavy breath he suddenly took in. I much preferred the studied care he took with my canings—using a riding crop—to the frightening, angry, and impulsive violence of his slaps and swinging blows to my face. When she suddenly lost her temper, my mother also flailed at my face and head, but less frequently and with considerably less force.

  As I write this now it gives me a chance, very late in life, to record the experiences as a coherent whole that very strangely have left no anger, some sorrow, and a surprisingly strong residual love for my parents. All the reforming things my father did to me coexisted with an amazing willingness to let me go my own way later on; he was strikingly generous to me at Princeton and Harvard, always encouraging me to travel, continue piano studies, live well, always willing to foot the bill (in his own special way, of course), even though that took me further from him as an only son and the only likely successor in the family business, which he quietly sold the year I got my Ph.D. in literature. What I cannot completely forgive, though, is that the contest over my body, and his administering of reforms and physical punishment, instilled a deep sense of generalized fear in me, which I have spent most of my life trying to overcome. I still sometimes think of myself as a coward, with some gigantic lurking disaster waiting to overtake me for sins I have committed and will soon be punished for.

  My parents’ fear of my body as imperfect and morally flawed extended to my appearance. When I was about five, my long curly hair was chopped down into a no-nonsense very short haircut. Because I had a decent soprano voice and was considered “pretty” by my doting mother, I felt my father’s disapproval, even anxiety, that I might be a “sissy,” a word that hovered around me until I was ten. A strange motif of my early teens was an assault on the “weakness” of my face, particularly my mouth. My mother used to tell two favorite stories; the first was about how Leonardo da Vinci used the same man as a model for Jesus and, after years of the man’s dissipation, for Judas. The other had her quoting Lincoln, who, after condemning a man for his awful looks and being challenged by a friend that no one is responsible for being ugly, was reported to have responded, “Everyone is responsible for his face.” When I was being upbraided for delinquency against my sisters, or lying about having eaten all the candy, or having spent all the money, my father would swiftly thrust his hand out, put his thumb and second finger on either side of my mouth, press in, and hold the area with a number of energetic short jerks to the left and right, all the while producing a nasty, buzzing sound like “mmmmmm,” quickly followed by “that weak mouth of yours.” I can recall staring at myself disgustedly in the mirror well past my twentieth birthday, doing exercises (pursing my mouth, clenching my teeth, raising my chin twenty or thirty times) in an effort to bring “strength” to my weak droop. Glenn Ford’s way of flexing his jaw muscles to signify moral fortitude and the travails of being “strong” was an early model, which I tried to imitate when responding to my parents’ accusation. And it was as a subsidiary aspect of my weak face and mouth that my parents disapproved of my wearing glasses; my mother, ever ready to condemn and praise at the same time, stipulated that glasses obscured “that beautiful face of yours.”

  As for my torso, there wasn’t much said about it until I was thirteen, a year before I went to Victoria College in 1949. My father met a gentleman at the Gezira Club called Mr. Mourad who had just opened a gymnasium in an apartment on Fuad al-Awwal Street in Zamalek, about half a mile from where we lived. Soon thereafter I found myself enrolled in three exercise classes a week, along with half a dozen Kuwaitis who had come to Egypt to attend the university. These classes included knee bends, medicine-ball raises and lifts, sit-ups, jogging, and jumping (all inside a tiny square room). I was soon the butt of our wiry instructor, Mr. Ragab. “More effort,” he would call out hectoringly at me in English—“Up, down, up, down,” etc. Then, a few weeks into the course, came the bombshell. “Come on Edward,” he said contemptuously of my sit-ups, “we must get that stomach of yours into shape.” When I said that I thought the purpose of my being at the gym was my back, he said that it was, but my midsection was not firm enough. “Anyway, it’s what your parents want us to do.” I was too embarrassed knowing what they thought about my midsection ever to raise the matter with my parents. Another tear opened in the relationship to my body. And as I accepted the verdict I internalized the criticism, and became even more awkward about and uncertain of my physical identity.

  My problematic hands became my mother’s special province of critical attention. Although I was only dimly aware that physically I noticeably resembled neither the Saids (short, stocky, very dark) nor her family, the Musas (white-skinned, of medium height and build, with longer than average fingers and limbs), it was clear to me that I had endowments of strength and athletic ability denied anyone else. By the age of twelve I was a good deal taller than everyone else in my family, and, thanks to my father’s curious persistence, I had amassed knowledge and practice of numerous sports, including tennis, swimming, football (despite my noted failure at it), riding, track and field, cricket, Ping-Pong, sailing, boxing. I was never outstanding in any of them, being too timid to be able to dominate an opponent, but I had developed an already considerable natural competence. This allowed me over time to develop my strength, certain muscles, and—something I still possess—a very unusual stamina and wind. My hands in particular were large, exceptionally sinewy, and agile. And to my mother, they represented objects both of adoring admiration (the long, tapered fingers, the perfect proportions, the superb agility) and of often quite hysterical denunciation (“Those hands of yours are deadly instruments”; “They’re going to get you into trouble later”; “Be very careful”).


  To my mother they were almost everything except a pair of hands: they were hammers, pliers, clubs, steel wires, nails, scissors, and when she wasn’t angry or agitated, instruments of the most refined and gentle kind. For my father my hands were noteworthy for the fingernails, which I chewed on and which for decades he tried to get me not to chew, even to the point of having them painted with a vile-tasting medicine and to promising me a fancy manicure at Chez Georges, the plush barbershop he frequented on Kasr el Nil Street. All to no avail, though I often found myself hiding my hands in my pockets, as I tried not to expose myself to my father’s gaze so that my “back” would not obtrusively draw his, and everyone else’s, attention.

  The moral and the physical shaded into each other most imperceptibly of all when it came to my tongue, which was the object of a dense series of metaphorical associations in Arabic, most of which were negative and, in my particular case, recurred with great frequency. In English one hears mainly of a “biting” or “sharp” tongue, in contrast with a “smooth” one. Whenever I blurted out something that seemed untoward, it was my “long” tongue that was to blame: aggressive, unpleasant, uncontrolled. The description was a common one in Arabic and signified someone who did not have the required politeness and verbal savoir faire, important qualities in most Arab societies. It was my state of being repressed that caused my occasional outbursts as I compensated too much in the wrong direction. In addition, I violated all sorts of codes for the proper way to address parents, relatives, elders, teachers, brothers and sisters. This was noted by my mother, who would escalate my offense into a portent of truly dire things to come. Added to that, I was also singularly unable to keep secrets or to do what everyone else did by way of choosing what not to say. In the context of Arabic, therefore, I was regarded as outside the range of normal behavior, a rogue creature of whom other people should be wary.