Out of Place: A Memoir (10 page)

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.

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!”

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.