At Home in the World

Joyce Maynard is a well-known journalist and broadcaster in the United States. She is the author of several books, including To Die For (which was made into a film by Gus Van Sant starring Nicole Kidman), Baby Love and her memoir Looking Back, which she wrote at the age of eighteen. Born and raised in New Hampshire, Joyce Maynard now lives in northern California with her three children.

About the Book

In 1972, Joyce Maynard, an undergraduate at Yale, wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine called ‘An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life’. Among the hundreds of letters she received as a result, one expressed deep affection for her writing, and concern at the exploitation that she might be subjected to. The writer was J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye and famous recluse.

Their correspondence led first to friendship, and then to love, and after a few months she dropped out of college to live with him. In spite of the thirty-five year difference in their ages, she believed they would be together always – but after a year, he sent her away.

Courageous, beautifully written and affecting, this book is destined to become a classic memoir of a modern woman’s life.

Chapter One

THE HOUSE WHERE I grew up, in Durham, New Hampshire, is the only one on the street with a fence surrounding it. That fit. Our family—my mother, my father, my older sister, Rona, and I—never belonged in that town. Or anywhere else, it seemed to me, but in that house, with one another, like a country unto ourselves, a tiny principality with a population of four. Arguably three, since my sister tried to remove herself as much as possible.

There was a phrase we used in our family: “one of us.” We didn’t use it often, but what it meant was that we’d encountered a person who might get inside the fence and enter the fortress of our family. No one ever did, fully. The only ones who were truly “one of us” were ourselves.

My father comes into my room just after six every morning and wakes me with the snap of my window blinds. “Time to get up, chum,” he says. Four decades since he lived there last, you can still hear England in his voice. Years later, when I’m in my thirties and beyond, and he’s long dead, I will sometimes be at a movie and Sir John Gielgud appears on the screen, and, though he looks nothing like my father, the sound of his voice will be enough to make me cry.

There’s no unkindness in the way my father wakes me. He simply believes it’s an unconscionable waste to stay in bed when the sun is shining. Or even if it’s not. My whole life, I have been unable to sleep late.

Every morning, my father brings my mother coffee in bed, then comes back down to make his breakfast. He’ll be eating it when I come down the stairs. Porridge, maybe, or an egg. He always reads while he eats breakfast. It might be the letters of Harold Nicolson, or the journals of Simone Weil. Although he knows Paradise Lost by heart—eighteenth-century literature is his field of specialty, and he teaches it at the University of New Hampshire—he may still read over a passage from Milton that he’ll be lecturing on today. Sometimes my father will read the Bible at breakfast—another book he knows well.

My father’s parents were British Fundamentalist missionaries who left the Salvation Army because of its excessively liberal teachings to join a sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. The second to last of their seven children, my father, Max Maynard, was born sometime around the year 1900, in India, where his parents had come to proselytize. Of the many mysteries that surround my father’s family, the first concerned the date of his birth. He claimed his parents told him they were so occupied with the Lord they hadn’t written it down. I never met my father’s parents, or any parents so consumed with God that they’d forget the year of their child’s birth. If nothing else, the story told me something about my father’s perception of them.

As a small child, my father had loved to act and sing, but his deepest passion was for painting. He had known for a long time that he wanted to make art, but hadn’t dared ask his parents for paints. When he was ten, he finally got himself a paintbox, which became his most treasured possession. He painted and read constantly, and with so much reckless abandon that he broke the inviolate rule of his household, to observe the Sabbath with no activity but reading of the scripture. His older brother saw him painting and reported the news to their parents.

“Bring me your paints,” he said, and when my father delivered them, his father placed them in his desk drawer and slammed it shut. “For one year, Max, you shall not paint,” he said.

My father broke with the Church and with most of his family when he was a young man, having emigrated from England by now and settled in British Columbia. While most of his brothers and sisters pursued a life within the Church—one, Theodore Maynard, becoming a moderately well-known Catholic theologian—my father took up with a group of early modern artists in Victoria who were regarded as a radical bunch. One, a much older woman painter named Emily Carr, would become the mentor and inspiration of a group of young modern artists in the twenties and thirties. Several among this group would later become celebrated in Canada, part of what was known as the Group of Seven.

From the little I’ve been able to gather of those early years of his—decades before I came on the scene—my father led a bohemian life: making art, making love, making poetry, and waking up with a terrible hangover the next morning. He was a handsome, dashing man—blue-eyed, blond-haired, compactly but athletically built, with the broad shoulders of a powerful swimmer. He had a cleft chin and a strong jaw, but what probably melted the hearts of women, more than his good looks, was his ability to draw and write for them. He could dash off light verse or a romantic sonnet in flawless iambic pentameter, illustrated with a funny or erotic drawing of a couple in mad embrace, or a caricature of himself, on bent knees, holding out an armload of flowers.

When I was sixteen I learned my father had been married once before his marriage to my mother. Although that news came as a terrible shock, the stories of my father’s many flamboyantly romantic escapades in Manitoba and British Columbia were almost a source of pride and legend in our household. I think my mother actually derived some pleasure out of the sense of my father’s romantic and rakish past. He used to say she had probably saved his life; it was all so reckless and undisciplined before she “whipped him into shape.”

He met her in Winnipeg, where he had fled, on the lam from some romantic disaster. He was hired by the University of Manitoba as a last-minute replacement for another professor—the only reason he could have gotten an academic job with no more in the way of credentials than a bachelor’s degree.

His lack of formal training in literature hardly kept him from establishing a reputation as a riveting lecturer. My mother—at nineteen, in her senior year as the English department’s top student—was assigned the job of being his assistant, with the task of reading student papers. Partly, it was supposed, she was serious and sensible enough to withstand his attempts at seduction. She had already earned a reputation as a single-mindedly driven young woman, headed for a brilliant academic career.

My mother labored over her first batch of essays with elaborate corrections and comments. After she’d delivered them, he stopped her outside his classroom to compliment her on the job she was doing.

“But you mustn’t trouble yourself with tracing plagiarisms as you have,” he told her.

Where my father’s story has tended to be murky (relatives we never meet; an ex-wife I learn of only well into my teens; vague talk of a former career as a cowboy, a radio announcer, a diving instructor), my mother’s is so well known to me, from her own rich retellings, it has taken on the aura of mythology.

She was born Freidele Bruser, the second daughter and last child of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia for Canada in the early part of the twentieth century. Her father was a shopkeeper and a dreamer—a tender-hearted, not particularly practical man who once opened every box of Cracker Jack in his store to give my mother the particular treat (a tin ring) she longed for. The store—a whole series of them, always named The OK Store—went bankrupt regularly.

My grandmother, a woman of fierce ambition and pride in her children, particularly my mother, launched Freidele in the study of elocution, the oral presentation of poetry, popular in rural areas during the Depression. From the age of four, my mother was hustled to the front of grange halls to recite verses—sometimes comic, sometimes sentimental and tragic—in a voice that was not simply loud but strikingly clear, and capable of bringing the crowd to great laughter or tears.

All through my growing up, my mother recited poetry to me. In the middle of dinner or driving to the store or hearing me describe an incident that happened on the playground at school, she plucked lines from her head—maybe Shakespeare, maybe Milton—that referred in some way to what was going on in our lives. For as long as she lived, whenever I needed a line of poetry for a paper, or a debate speech, and, one day, for my wedding, I only had to ask my mother.

There was more to my mother’s encyclopedic knowledge of literature than the fluke of her photographic memory. She loved poetry, most of all reciting it out loud. Even when she wasn’t quoting poetry, its rhythms were present in her speech, as they were in my father’s.

For both my parents, I think there was a sensual pleasure in shaping the words of Keats or Donne or Yeats or Dylan Thomas or Wordsworth. Neither one of my parents played a musical instrument. For them, language was music. They loved the sound of the human voice delivering the best the English language had to offer.

They loved rhythm, meter, timbre, inflection. They were performers who knew instinctively when to take the breath, when to lower the voice very slowly, or pause, or linger over a syllable—and they did it so well, even a person who didn’t speak a word of English would know, just listening to them, that this had to be poetry, and pay attention.

My mother won the golden Governor General’s Award at the age of sixteen for being the top graduating senior in all of Canada in the year 1938. That earned her a full scholarship to college at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. She’d lived in small prairie towns all her life.

My mother was eighteen (Fredelle now, not Freidele) when she met my father in Winnipeg. He called her Fredelka and courted her with sonnets he wrote her, sketched beautiful drawings of her, and the most elegantly humorous cartoons of himself on his knees, beseeching her to accept his suit. But she was Jewish; he was not. Her parents had told her she must never marry a Gentile, and she had never disobeyed her parents.

But the same qualities in my father that made him such an unacceptable candidate for a husband in her parents’ eyes were, no doubt, part of what drew my mother to him. He was a dark and dangerous character who distrusted conventions of every sort, and the most romantic man she’d ever met. He introduced her to modern art and classical music. All her life, she’d been the good daughter. He was the Bad Son. She fell wildly in love.

My mother was my grandmother’s favorite, and as the favorite, she carried the responsibility to heap honor and glory—the Yiddish word is naches—at her mother’s feet. Because her mother sacrificed everything for her—so she could have her elocution lessons, so she could go, as her older sister did not, to the university—it went without saying that my mother’s mother was entitled to complete loyalty and devotion in return. Her life, her accomplishments, her successes, belonged not to her alone, but also to her critical and hugely demanding mother.

Every summer she returned home to the prairies of Saskatchewan to work in her father’s store. My father began courting her by mail, but her parents withheld his letters to her. He got himself a radio show in Winnipeg, and read poetry to her over the airwaves, under the pseudonym of John Gregory. But his voice was unmistakable. On Valentine’s Day, 1943, he sent her this:

Not all the loveliest words will go

In rhyme with “dear Fredelle”

But all the fondest thoughts I know

Are subject to that spell.

Like honey dripping from the comb

In streams of amorous sweet they come.

My lily flower, my luscious peach

My pretty octupus, my leech

My swordfish whose sharp-pointed dart

Runs precious panic through my heart

My biblio-vandal whose least look

Rips all the pages of my book,

My dazzling jewel by whose glare

The very sun is in despair,

My arching sky, my curving earth,

My death, my life, my second birth,

My sun-warmed field, my shady tree,

My time and my eternity,

My cigarette, my nicotine

My coffee, tea, and whole cuisine

My loaf of bread, my jug of wine

All this and more, sweet valentine!

Knowing she had to find a Jewish husband, she went to graduate school in Toronto to put some distance between herself and my father. A young Jewish man, recently back from a distinguished career in the army, courted her. He was intelligent, kind, deeply in love—a man who had all the signs of becoming an excellent husband and a good father. But there was none of the romantic excitement with Harold Taubman that my mother felt for Max Maynard. Every day came a new letter from him, in his exquisite artist’s hand, on nearly transparent onionskin, sometimes decorated with drawings.

Reading these letters now, from a distance of more than fifty years, I am struck by the wit and extravagance of my father’s expression to my mother. But I see something else too. These are not so much the letters of a man who burns for a flesh-and-blood connection to a woman as they are the words of a man in love with the idea of such a romance. There’s an unreality to his fervor. My father has made himself into a character who might have been created by the romantic poets. He is drawn relentlessly to the impossible, the tragic, the unattainable. The vision of life without Fredelka inspires him with nearly suicidal despair. But never in all the hundreds of pages he writes does he realistically envision a life with her.

Hearing of Harold Taubman’s proposal of marriage and my mother’s anguish over the decision, my father sent her another poem:

I simply can’t make a decision

On the one hand the talk’s circumcision

And all it implies

On the other: revise,

Change outlook, have faith and some vision!

She held him off for five more years. In 1946, she left Toronto for Ph.D. studies at Radcliffe, where she earned a doctorate, summa cum laude. She wrote her dissertation on the concept of chastity in English literature. She liked to say she was the world’s foremost authority on the chastity belt.

My father sought a job as close to Cambridge as he could to be near her. The job he found was at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Weekends he traveled to Cambridge, begging her to marry him. Seven years after he’d begun courting her, she said yes. Her parents were broken-hearted. It was the first time in my mother’s life that she had failed to please her mother.

This is as much of my parents’ story as I hear growing up. The next part I learn only later.

Although my parents had written hundreds of pages of letters to each other, they had lived in different cities, separated by hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles for most of that time. They knew each other largely through words on a page.

The day my mother moved into my father’s bachelor apartment, she found empty vodka bottles hidden in a third-floor closet—an experience she describes with comparisons to the story of Bluebeard’s bride opening the door to the forbidden room and finding her life destroyed forever by the discovery of what lay inside. That very day, she also came upon a letter he’d written his ex-wife—no doubt while drunk. “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he wrote. “I’ve married a clever little Jewish girl.”

Until she moved in with my father, my mother knew almost nothing about liquor, coming from a family where wine was touched once a year at most. But having flown in the face of her family to marry my father, my mother could not tell her parents the truth—that the marriage was in trouble from the beginning. She kept the fact of my father’s drinking hidden not just from her family but from everyone she knew—and, as much as she could, from herself.

By the time my sister was born, in 1949, my mother’s once-boundless hopefulness about her own bright future was vastly diminished. By my birth, in 1953, her marriage was in many ways already finished.

“You were conceived the last time we made love,” my mother eventually tells me, years later. Her words strike me with something close to physical pain.

I have a photograph of my mother when she must have been a new bride in Durham. She is sitting on the porch of the little apartment my parents rented. She’s not yet thirty. My mother had always said she was simply smart, that her older sister Celia was the beauty. But the young woman in this photograph is, like the older woman she will become, exotically beautiful. She wears a simple cotton dress, pushed down over her shoulders. Her body—which she always worried about, and tried to slim down—is not heavy so much as ripe. (In an era when women were encouraged to bottle-feed their babies with formula, she insisted on breast-feeding.) She has curly black hair and dark eyes of unmistakable intelligence, and her skin is so brown that when she was younger, she was more than once denied entrance someplace when she was thought to be, in the word of the time, colored.

It isn’t just my mother’s romantic hopes that are dashed early. Wife of the fifties, she can’t get a job. The University of New Hampshire has a strict policy against hiring faculty wives. When she applies for high school teaching jobs, they tell her she doesn’t have the right credentials; she needs education credits. She could go back to school, but she sees no way to study, pay for school, and care for her children.

As a young faculty wife in a small New Hampshire town in the late forties and fifties, my mother doesn’t know what to do. Bursting with ambition and energy, the lone Jew in a world of blue-blooded WASPs, far away from her family, inhabiting a lonely and difficult marriage, my mother pours her prodigious energies into the too-narrow space of domestic life: baking, sewing, entertaining, shopping for bargains, growing flowers, canning vegetables, and raising her two daughters to have what she had not: fame, fortune, career success, access to the big and glittering world of the city.

My mother has always been a wonderful writer and storyteller, but these days the only writing she does takes the form of letters home to her parents in Manitoba, and to a couple of old friends from her Radcliffe days, Marion and Phyllis. Recognizing, as she must at this point, that these letters may be her truest forms of expression, she keeps carbons of the hundreds of pages she writes: funny stories about her husband and children and life as a faculty wife in a small New Hampshire town, tirelessly looking for an outlet that might give more direction to her life.

A letter she writes to the Sunbeam Appliance Company, in 1959, remains, as they all do, in her correspondence file:

I want to express my total disenchantment with Sunbeam vacuum cleaners and with the kind of repair service provided under your one-year warranty.

In May of this year, after carefully studying the analyses in Consumer Reports, I purchased a Sunbeam canister cleaner, Model No. 635, confident that I was acquiring a top-quality machine and a “best buy.” From the first, the vacuum seemed long on noise and short on suction, but I tried to persuade myself I must be mistaken. In October, the cleaner developed a roar like that of a jet plane; it smelled and felt hot when operating, had lost suction almost completely. I took the machine to the place of purchase, for repair under the warranty. My vacuum departed and was gone ten weeks—a long time for a housewife to be without a cleaner.

Last week my Sunbeam returned, with cord neatly folded and a fresh new bag inside. Happy, I plugged it in. Imagine my surprise. The machine roars like a jet plane, it smells and feels hot when operating, it has no suction at all. Pins and fluff on the carpet before vacuuming are not disturbed by the mighty assaults of the 635.

There seems no point in returning this ruin for further “repairs.” Evidently—after five months’ use—I must purchase another vacuum cleaner. It will not, I think, be a Sunbeam. Since I clean my house once a week, I figure it cost me something over $4.00 for every whirl with my magical Touch ’n’ Lock A more appropriate motto might be Touch At Your Own Risk.

Money is a theme of my mother’s letters. Our family is always coming up short and searching out new avenues for earning it. Even more, my mother keeps looking for ways to make use of her inexhaustible energies.

“You know I’ve always said I wouldn’t sell if I were starving,” she writes to her parents, in the summer of 1954. “But I am now engaged as a salesperson of the Book of Knowledge encyclopedia. Who knows, I may discover I have capacities I haven’t explored. If nothing else, the whole thing should provide me with invaluable literary material. . . .”

My mother works hard selling the Book of Knowledge, and earns a set for our family. But the huge commission checks elude her. In another letter, written a few months later, she mentions to her parents that she’s applying for a Guggenheim grant to work in England and Wales on research concerning Dylan Thomas, who has recently died.

“It is unlikely that Guggenheim will greet my application with cries of joy (and large checks),” she writes. “Chief against it is the unlikelihood of any committee viewing seriously a researcher who comes accompanied by two small girls and a diaper pail. . . .”

She doesn’t get the grant. In the years that follow, my mother’s letters to her parents no longer mention academic and scholarly aspirations. They are breezy, chatty, and lighthearted—reports on my sister’s activities and mine, mostly, and English department gossip.

A single letter to an old Radcliffe friend, Phyllis, comes closest to offering a glimpse of the frustrations my mother must have felt during her years as a New Hampshire housewife:

You asked if I were happy. Ten years ago I would have had a definite yes or no. Yes, I think I am; but I am a different person, and I no longer think of happiness in terms of either utter serenity or perfect ecstasy. . . . I would say that I understand the Ode to Melancholy and Wordsworth’s Intimations much better than I did ten years ago. I think I am in some ways a “better” person, and yet less a person. . . . I am afraid that you will find me not at all the girl you remember. Overweening personal ambition is no virtue; but while I had it, I could have danced on a bed of nails.

Though our family’s resources are modest, my mother makes it possible for me to have adventures she could only have dreamed of in the tiny prairie towns of Saskatchewan where she grew up. With her loathing of Walt Disney (who, in her view, bastardized so many of her favorite books) she would never have taken us to my dream destination, Disneyland, even if money hadn’t been an issue. But she brings my sister and me, by bus, to operas and the ballet in Boston. She enrolls us in dancing classes and French lessons. She seldom takes us to children’s movies—I see Old Yeller and Pollyanna with friends and their families—but she does take us to Death of a Salesman, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and many Bergman films. Afterward, she spends an hour or two critiquing the actors’ performances, the direction, the script.

Our family is always short of money, and though my father seems oblivious, my mother worries constantly about bills. She tutors French and Latin for a dollar an hour. She takes substitute teaching jobs and teaches English composition at a nearby air force base, where I am sure she enjoys the attentions of her students, all men. She gets a job teaching high school English.

My mother’s a born teacher, also a born performer—funny, confident, genuinely interested in her students, prodigiously energetic. She counsels them on their writing, also their relationships with their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their parents. There must be at least a dozen students who stop by our house on a regular basis. I know all their names and also their stories.

She likes to hold classes in our living room. Wearing one of the full-length silk or wool caftans she has designed and sewn for herself, she serves homemade cookies while students read their writing out loud, and everyone—but especially my mother—offers comments and criticisms.

I never miss the chance to sit in on these sessions. I’m so proud of my glorious, brilliant, funny, outrageous mother. I take in every word she tells her students about writing. In between these classes, I sit beside my mother on our couch when she’s marking student papers, and read all her comments in the margins. Her comments are often longer than the student’s original paper.

To a student who comes out with an unfortunate cliché, she will be funny but ruthless. “Are you sure, Cynthia, that you want to say your heart soared like a piece of popcorn on the stove? Let’s think this through. . . .”

“Linda, Linda, Linda,” she begins. “Would you really like me to tell you how many papers I read, every year, that begin with ‘Webster’s Dictionary defines. . . .’ I don’t think you would, as a matter of fact.”

“No need to go on like this, Rick. You’re taking the reader to the bathroom!” she says.

By the time I’m twelve or thirteen, I’ve heard enough of my mother’s comments that when one of her students reads a paper, I know just what she’ll say. Everytime I sit down to write, I hear her voice.

As my sister and I grow older, our mother creates an unexpected new career for herself as a writer for women’s magazines. She starts out writing articles for My Baby magazine and Baby Talk—chatty, helpful stories about toilet training and sibling rivalry. She sends Good Housekeeping a story called “A Jewish Girl’s Christmas,” about her experience as the lone Jewish child at a Christmas celebration of Gentiles in her little prairie town, at which she, alone, received no present. A few weeks later comes the letter: The magazine is publishing her story in its Christmas issue. I have seldom seen my mother happier.

With her first magazine check, my mother buys our family a Danish modern teak table. Her choice is telling. Mealtimes in our family are the most important event in our day.

In all the years of my growing up, we never once go to a restaurant. At least once a week my mother points out how much better and more cheaply we could eat at home. “I bet this meal would have cost ten dollars if we’d gone out,” she says, setting out the brisket. “Eleven, with tip.”

She loves the ritual of a family meal, and sees to it that we eat together every night. She’s a good cook—a “peasant cook,” she calls herself. Everyone who’s tasted her pie says it’s the best they’ve ever had. But the real attraction of meals at our house is the conversation. Recounted by my mother, a trip to the grocery store or a conversation with the paper boy becomes a three-act comedy or drama, with my mother in the starring role. If she has less than total reverence for strict veracity, she maintains complete respect for the rules of good storytelling and comic timing. I so love the sound of my mother’s voice regaling us with her adventures over dinner, I can hardly imagine taking in food without it.

My mother’s next purchase with Good Housekeeping money is a Danish modern desk. Up until now, she has worked on our living-room couch or spread her papers on the dining-room table. Now she sets up an office in her bedroom. She gets an electric typewriter and a file cabinet. In manners similar to the way my father purchases art supplies, my mother stocks up on notebooks and pencil sharpeners and stamp dispensers and brightly colored file folders. She gets stationery printed with her name, FREDELLE BRUSER MAYNARD.

Until now, the only places I’ve ever been are Manchester, New Hampshire, for our annual back-to-school shopping trip; Ogunquit, Maine, two times a summer, to the ocean; Boston, to the ballet or the opera with my mother; and Winnipeg, Canada, to visit my mother’s parents for six weeks every summer—a trip on which my father never accompanies us.

My grandmother’s one-bedroom apartment is very hot and stuffy, and my grandmother seems to take all my mother’s attention, and not to have much interest in my sister or me. I don’t know kids my age in Winnipeg. Every day, we have to take a city bus to the nursing home to visit my grandfather, who doesn’t even recognize my mother anymore. My mother’s cousin Ernie and his wife, Naomi, always bring my sister and me to the Canadian Exhibition and take us on the rides, which is something we don’t do in our family. Otherwise, these trips are spent doing little besides visiting relatives, most of whom are very old. Because of this, for a long time I actually suppose Canada is a Jewish country, like Israel.

In the summer of 1964, my mother announces that she’s taking us to New York City for the World’s Fair. I’m thrilled and amazed, since we never visit the kinds of places other families do. We’ll stay with our old friends, Joe and Joan McElroy, and my mother will visit her editor at Good Housekeeping.

I’m craning my neck to catch every sight as our bus pulls into the Port Authority Terminal. It’s nighttime when we arrive in New York, and my mother wants my sister and me to go straight to bed when we get to Joe and Joan’s, on East Thirtieth Street, but I can’t sleep. I love the sound of traffic and the lights blinking out the window.

The next day my mother takes us to Flushing, Queens, for the World’s Fair. But it will be Manhattan I love, not the fair. We go to Chinatown and Little Italy and the Museum of Modern Art, so I can tell my father I saw the Picassos. Joan introduces me to two friends of hers, and my mother tells me they’re lovers. She has told me about homosexuality before this, but I’ve never actually met someone who’s openly homosexual. What interests me most about Don and Phil is that they don’t seem embarrassed. So much embarrasses me. I can’t imagine how it could be that they wouldn’t feel the need to keep their story secret.

The next day my sister goes to Greenwich Village, and my mother brings me with her to meet Betty Frank, her editor at Good Housekeeping. I have only ridden in an elevator a handful of times on our annual Boston trip. My mother is wearing a suit, and I’m wearing my best dress. Betty shows us the test kitchens and a room full of free products that have come in the mail. “Maybe someday you’ll come and work here,” she says to me.

The world opens again. The summer I’m twelve and my sister sixteen, our mother takes the two of us and my cousin Gail to Mexico—after spending a full year not simply saving the money, but studying Spanish. “Never go anywhere you can’t at least make an honest attempt at speaking the language,” says my mother.

We don’t take a tour. We cross the border in a train known as the Aztec Eagle, and stop in towns where few Americans venture—certainly no women traveling alone with three young girls. We ride Mexican buses and tromp through the dusty streets of villages where we never see another American, in search of some artisan my mother’s read about in one of her books on Mexico. As usual, my father is not part of our trip, but my mother has brought along a drawing of his—the doodle of a horse, done in red pen at an English department meeting. In the tiny village of Teotitlán del Valle, she locates a weaver who will take my father’s design, made on a three-by-five card, and weave a woolen rug from it. A year later, the rug arrives: a perfectly rendered, three-foot-by-five-foot woven version of my father’s design. One day, years from now, it will hang on the church wall at his memorial service.

Good Housekeeping gives my mother her first regular writing job: ghost-writing a monthly advice column by a famous psychologist. My mother has no training in psychology, but the psychologist doesn’t seem that knowledgeable herself, from the looks of the background material she sends my mother—clippings from old articles in Reader’s Digest and Coronet magazine, usually.

Around this same time Good Housekeeping gives my mother a second job: writing first-person stories for a monthly feature called “My Problem and How I Solved It.” One month she adopts the persona of a woman who discovers that her husband is a compulsive gambler, or homosexual, or unfaithful, or impotent. Another month, her son has been discovered to be taking drugs, or her teenage daughter announces she’s pregnant, or her mother has cancer, or she does herself.

The one problem my mother never tackles in the pages of Good Housekeeping is Alcoholic Husband. She never touches that subject with my sister and me, either. For all the years I live in that household, with two dazzlingly articulate parents who can talk in fully formed paragraphs about any aspect of English literature, religion, art, or politics, my mother never discusses my father’s drinking. Never a mention of liquor. Never the word vodka spoken. Never drunk, drinking, hangover.

Intuitively, I recognize the irony of living in a household in which my mother is dispensing psychological wisdom to families about relationships, marriage, child-raising, even as our own family continues to skirt the terrible, unmentionable issue of my father’s drinking. In our family, where so much apparent freedom of expression exists that I knew, at age five, the meaning of words like “sodomy” and “misogynist” and “anti-Semite,” I am in my teens before I know what an alcoholic is. The only other person I’ve ever observed drunk is a character on The Jackie Gleason Show, Crazy Googenham. Kids I know at school think he’s very funny, and like to imitate his slurring speech and staggering gait. He never makes me laugh.

I know my father’s been drinking when I open our front door and hear Mozart horn concertos. The particular recording he favors is an old LP of Dennis Brain on the French horn. The record is very scratchy, probably because my father is so often drunk when he puts it on. More often than not the needle skids over the grooves a couple of times before he gets it right. Then he sits in a Danish modern chair we have, with his back to the hi-fi and his arms raised, conducting an imaginary orchestra in our living room. “Killed in his thirties. Car accident,” he tells me of Dennis Brain. “But the music! Jesus Christ, the music he made. What this man accomplished!”

Then he may sigh and stand in front of the painting of his that hangs over our fireplace, The Woman in the Red Hat.

“He who hath wife and child have given hostages to fortune,” he says. It’s a line he quotes to me regularly. Oddly, though I understand the quotation refers to the sacrifice of art for parenthood, I never suppose my father resents or regrets my existence. I know he adores me and delights in everything I do. Now, as he says this, I show him a drawing I’ve been working on.

“Wait here, Daddy,” I say, though I know he’s going nowhere. I run and get a couple of my mother’s silk scarves and put on my leotard. Then I’m back. In our living room, to the music of those horn concertos, I whirl around the room, dancing for him.

My father wants to spend his days painting and considering the nature of art, the definition of beauty, the existence of God. He spends every Wednesday afternoon in the English department meeting instead, discussing fine points of grading systems, the pros and cons of requesting new chairs for the department office. The doodles he draws on three-by-five note cards during these meetings tell the story: exquisite drawings in red ballpoint pen of mountains, horses, trees, beaches—beautiful, unpopulated landscapes or angry abstract scratchings. One drawing from those department meetings I remember with particular clarity. It’s a rooster, head thrown back, eyes burning, with an arrow piercing its breast. My father.

A group of students have circulated a petition demanding that courses like Eighteenth-Century Literature be replaced with others featuring the work of minorities, dissidents, rock poets, and political activists. A member of the English department my father likes and respects has been denied a promotion for failure to publish. (That my father himself does not receive promotions is a fact we all learned long ago.) On days like these, my father goes straight up to his attic studio when he gets home from the university and pours himself a glass of vodka. If we can keep him from having that first drink, the night will go all right. If he has that one, we all know, he will have others.

His temper can be ferocious and his words to others, when drunk, are often brutal. But my father is never anything but tender and melancholy toward me when drinking. When he’s drinking he talks about his family, his younger sister Joyce in particular, who died young, of diabetes, and whose many letters, in the years before her death, he had left unanswered. “Joyce, Joyce, Joyce,” he sighs. I am never sure, when he does, which one of us he’s talking to.

My father would never raise a hand to me, sober or drunk. I cannot remember a time when I was so young I didn’t know it was my job to take care of him. I have friends, growing up, but my chief companion is my father.

We pretend nothing’s wrong. There are two stories: the way life really is in our family, and the way we make it look to the world. We have a day life and a nighttime life. In our day life there is a father who puts on his Oxford shoes and tweed jacket and corduroy pants and fedora hat every morning and mounts his ancient three-speed bicycle to ride to his office at the university, where he has been passed over every year for promotion for lack of an advanced degree. My daytime father is trim, handsome, fastidious, funny, brilliant, and courtly. His clothes are old, even shabby, but there’s enormous stylishness and grace about him. This father can hold a room transfixed, and often does, with his withering assessment of Dwight Eisenhower (“a second-rater”) or Norman Vincent Peale (“a vulgarian”), his analysis of a poem by Eliot, a drawing by Rembrandt, his thoughts on the Epistles of Paul, or his unexpected affection for Gilligan’s Island. My daytime father is formidable to the point of inspiring fear in those who don’t meet his standards of excellence. But for one who does—and I fall in that category, and my sister too, though she has little use for it—he is the most thrillingly appreciative audience and supporter.

But there’s the other father, Nighttime Daddy, whose behavior, especially in my later years at home, spills out with growing frequency into the daytime hours. This father is unshaven, unkempt, red-eyed, and ranting. My nighttime father sleeps in a separate room from my mother, in a single bed surrounded by clothes in piles on the floor, library books that have been overdue for years, student exams, half-marked, with pages flung in all directions, half-finished letters to old friends in British Columbia he hasn’t seen for fifteen years. My nighttime father is rageful and depressed—a man who might become convinced, at ten o’clock one night, that his problems at the university all stem from our not owning a better car, or his not having a particular kind of raincoat (which will result in his riding the bus to Boston the next day to buy it. Though he leaves the coat on the bus. And forever after my mother regales friends with the story.)

My nighttime father once thrashes around for hours trying to catch a bat that has gotten into my sister’s bedroom, and when he finally gets it, but accidentally kills it in the process, he plunges in such despair he buries his head in his hands. Nighttime Daddy often brings me to the attic past my bedtime to look at half-finished paintings. There are always bits of construction paper taped on these paintings, representing elements of the landscape he’s still shifting around. Now, at close to midnight, I stand barefoot and shivering in the attic as he moves the bits of construction paper from one spot in the landscape to another. What do I think about this rock? That branch? That cloud? “It’s good there,” I say. “Don’t you think this might be better, old chum?” he says, moving the rock again. I agree, then go back to bed.

Although we never discuss the specific exploits of Nighttime Daddy, Rona and I are well acquainted with the circumstances most likely to bring on his emergence, and we do what we can to avoid them. We tell friends not to call the house after eight o’clock for fear they’ll wake our father, who goes to bed very early, unless he goes to bed very late. When he’s awakened by a phone call, he may deliver a terrifying lecture. “Jesus Christ! What in God’s name are you doing calling at this hour?” It’s eight-thirty.

My own behavior never sets my father off, but certainly my sister’s does, if she’s ill mannered, or dismissive of his criticisms, or if she ignores him altogether, which is her approach wherever possible. If we play our music loud, or bring home an English paper with a teacher’s comments that reveal the mediocrity of the instruction we’re receiving at our school, that will be enough to send our father to the vodka. Rona adopts the strategy, early, of staying in her room, away from trouble, as much as possible—reading mostly, and playing her guitar. I do the opposite. If I stay close by, keeping an eye out for danger, maybe things will be all right. I will tell Daddy anything to keep him happy. If I am pleasing and lovable enough and keep my father entertained, as he seems to be in my company—sketching and working on reports and taking walks—he won’t need to climb the stairs to the attic.

When I ask Daytime Daddy to help me with a report on dinosaurs, he drives with me to the library to assemble research materials—never simply an entry or two from the encyclopedia either, but stacks of books. Home again, we set to work executing the most magnificent posters and pencil renderings of a triceratops the fourth grade at Oyster River School has ever seen. But if the project extends past the hour of six o’clock, and he has his first drink, Nighttime Daddy takes over. Midnight finds me barely able to keep my head up while my father redoes the chart depicting the span of the Mesozoic and Jurassic periods.

“I can’t keep up this sort of thing,” he says, his head in his hands. “I’ll be destroyed in the morning.” Suddenly he flings the stack of file cards we’ve assembled for my oral presentation across the room. “Jesus Christ!” he rails. “We need more time to do this properly! We haven’t even got to the pterodactyl.”

My sister makes the choice, very young, to disappear into a world of books. Even as a small child, she sits for hours reading and thinking. I read my Beverly Cleary books and Nancy Drews. But I am never a reader. Oddly, for the child of two people whose house is filled with books and who seem to have a substantial portion of English literature committed to memory, I find my solace in television.

From the moment we get our set—in 1960, when I’m not quite seven—the life I observe on the screen becomes a crucial part of every day. Except for times I’m playing with my dolls or drawing, I live in our TV room.

I watch everything: Romper Room (though I’m too old) and Truth or Consequences, Art Linkletter, and Bozo. I will watch Bowling for Dollars or Jack LaLanne, if I have to. I watch Death Valley Days and Highway Patrol. But what I really love are the family situation comedies: Ozzie and Harriet. Pete and Gladys. Make Room for Daddy. Donna Reed Leave It to Beaver. Over the years, the list will grow to include My Three Sons and The Dick Van Dyke Show and my particular favorite, The Andy Griffith Show.

I Love Lucy, though I watch it, actually interests me less than the others. Lucy and Desi are, like my parents, an unconventional couple. What I mostly look for from television—situation comedies especially—are the glimpses it gives me of what I imagine to be normal, all-American life.

This is why I love the Anderson family on Father Knows Best. The father on that show seems so wonderfully ordinary. I love it when the husbands go off to work in their suits, and come home at dinnertime, give their wife a peck on the cheek, and go in the den to read the paper. I love the mothers in their shirtwaist dresses with aprons on, their tidy kitchens, their preoccupation with their children and the bridge club.

In these families, if anybody’s behavior gets out of line, it’s the children. Beaver Cleaver gets into scrapes all the time. So does Opie on Andy Griffith, and Kitten on Father Knows Best, and Rusty on Make Room for Daddy. When the kids make mistakes, though, the parents are nearly always wise and sensible—stern, maybe, and even angry. But you always know what to expect from them.

I never get tired of watching these shows. I don’t care if I turn one on and it’s a rerun. In fact, I like it when the episodes become familiar.

There is a little ritual I perform, watching these programs. I tell nobody this, but I have memorized not just the names of the cast members, but every single name that appears on the credits. I whisper them under my breath as the last bars of the music play, ending with “Glenn Glenn Sound.”

The one thing that’s guaranteed to get my father drinking is my mother’s absence. She doesn’t take trips often. But every year, the week between Christmas and New Year’s (the week of my father’s birthday, though how old he will be no one can say), my mother takes the bus to Princeton, New Jersey, to spend a week in the company of several hundred English teachers from around the country, marking the essay question on the college board exams. My mother experiences her annual trip to Princeton as the one week out of fifty-two when she gets to live anything close to the academic and scholarly life for which she’s been trained.

It isn’t Florida or Hawaii, but this is also the closest my mother ever comes to taking a holiday, the only time she gets to stay in a hotel, or eat in a restaurant, or function not as a faculty wife but as a teacher. Where in Durham my mother has never had much success making friendships with the stay-at-home faculty wives, in Princeton she is much admired among the other teachers, having earned a reputation for regaling the group with comical readings from her favorite examples of terrible student writings.

My mother loves her college board trips and looks forward to them all year. All year, I dread them. Christmas is a hard time for my father anyway with the memories it evokes of his dead younger sister and his abandonment of the Church. He endures my mother’s and my sister’s and my celebration of December 25, with our Santa decorations and piles of presents and flashing lights, but he is horribly depressed by the spectacle. “I am living with vulgarians,” he explodes, having spent the last hour stuck in the traffic caused by crazed holiday shoppers. “Jesus Christ! The world’s gone mad!”

From the moment my mother gets on the bus headed for Princeton to the moment she walks in our door again five days later, Daddy will be drinking. All around us, happy-looking families continue to celebrate the holidays. Our house sparkles with lights. But the cheer of the season is out of keeping with what’s going on at our house. Christmas carols and a recording of the Messiah

At Home in the World

A Life With J D Salinger

Joyce Maynard

By the same author

About the Author

About the Book

Chapter One