Out of Place: A Memoir (4 page)

She represented herself to me as an uncomplicated, gifted, loving, and beautiful young woman, and until I was twenty—when she was only forty—I saw her that way; if she abruptly turned into something else, I blamed myself. Later our relationship darkened a good deal. But for my early life I was in an enraptured state of precarious, highly provisional rapport with my mother, so much so that I really had no friends of my age, and my relationships with my younger sisters, Rosemarie, Jean, Joyce, and Grace, were attenuated and, to me at least, not very satisfactory. It was exclusively to my mother that I turned for intellectual and emotional companionship. She used to say that since her first child died in the hospital shortly after she gave birth to him, I was given extra doses of care and attention. But this excess could not disguise her strong underlying pessimism, which often neutralized her radiant affirmation of me.

Though for very different reasons, my mother, like my father, revealed very little about her origins and her past as I was growing up. Born in 1914, she was the middle child of five, the others being four boys, with all of whom I had highly problematic ties as my maternal uncles. Everyone who knew my mother in Nazareth concurs in her claim that she was her father’s favorite; though she described him as a “good” man, he sounded to me unappealing, a fundamentalist Baptist minister who was both a harsh patriarch and a repressive husband. Hilda, my mother, was sent to boarding school in Beirut, to the American School for Girls, or ASG, a missionary institution that tied her to Beirut first and last, with Cairo as a long interlude between. Undoubtedly a star there and at the Junior College (now Lebanese American
University), she was popular and brilliant—first in her class—in most things. There were no men in her life, though, so thoroughly virginal was her existence in those two basically religious schools. Unlike my father, who seemed independent of all early attachments except for those of family, she maintained close friendships with classmates and contemporaries until her death: being a student in Beirut for five years was the happiest part of her life and stamped everyone and everything she knew or did then with a sense of lasting pleasure. Of someone whose company she enjoyed in the years after she was widowed she would say disappointedly and, to me, maddeningly, “Wadad is not really my friend, since she wasn’t in school with me.”

In 1932 she was plucked from what was—or was retrospectively embellished as—a wonderful life and the successes of Beirut and returned to dour, old Nazareth, where she was deposited into an arranged marriage with my father. No one of us today can have a full grasp of what that marriage was or how it came about, but I was trained by her—my father generally being silent on that point—to see it as something difficult at first, to which she gradually adjusted over the course of nearly forty years, and which she transformed into the main event in her life. She never worked or really studied again, except for taking French lessons in Cairo and, years later, a humanities course at her old Beirut college. There were stories of her anemia and seasickness on the honeymoon voyage, all of them interspersed with comments on my father’s patience and kindness to her, the young, very vulnerable and naïve maiden-bride. She never spoke about sex without shuddering dislike and discomfort, although my father’s frequent remarks about the man being a skilled horseman, the woman a subdued mare, suggested to me a basically reluctant, if also exceptionally fruitful, sexual partnership that produced six (five surviving) children.

But I also never doubted that at the time of her marriage to this silent and peculiarly strong middle-aged man she suffered a terrible blow. She was wrenched from a happy life in Beirut. She was given to a much older spouse—perhaps in return for some sort of payment to her mother—who promptly took her off to strange parts and then set her down in Cairo, a gigantic and confusing city in an unfamiliar Arab country with her maiden aunt, Emelia (“Melia”) Badr. Melia had come to Egypt early in the century and, as my mother was to do in her own
way, had hewn out a life in essentially foreign territory. Melia’s father (my great-grandfather), Yousif Badr, was the first native Evangelical minister in Lebanon, and through him perhaps, Melia had been hired by the American College for Girls in Cairo, an essentially missionary establishment, as local staff to teach Arabic.

She was a tiny woman but had the strongest will of anyone I knew. She made the Americans call her
Miss
Badr (as opposed to a patronizing title reserved for the natives, Teacher Melia), and early on demonstrated her radical independence by boycotting the church services, an integral part of school and mission life. “Is there a god?” I asked her in 1956 a short while before her death. “I very much doubt it,” she said wearily and even dismissively, with that strange finality she switched on when she no longer wished to be exercised by the topic at hand.

Melia’s presence in the Said family life, before and after my birth, was of central importance. We did not live next to or with our relatives. We were alone as a family in Cairo, except for Melia, and later in the forties her sister, my grandmother, Munira, who lived with us. Melia helped my mother understand the complicated Cairo social system, which was so tumultuously different from anything Hilda had ever experienced as a sheltered girl in Nazareth and Beirut. And Melia introduced the couple to various friends of hers, mostly Copts and Syrians (“Shawam,” plural of “Shami”) whose daughters were her students. Melia didn’t seem overly attentive to my sisters, but she doted on me, although she never really let herself go as was normally the case with female family members: no effusions, extended embraces, or exaggerated declarations of ritual concern. I was uniquely conceded the right to ask her questions like “Are you married to Saleh?” the driver who seemed to practically live with her, and occasionally I was even allowed to look through her complicated little handbag.

Between the years of 1945 and 1950, I saw her in action several times at the college. Slight and barely five feet tall, she always dressed in black, her head covered with a black turban, and she never wore anything on her feet except for delicate black patent leather pumps. Her gestures were economical in the extreme, and she never raised her voice nor expressed the slightest hesitation or uncertainty. She had a distinct method for every social class and subclass, but underlying each was a sense of formality that could not be violated, as well as a carefully
and coldly sustained distance that allowed no one to pass beyond a point of familiarity that only she determined. She terrified maids and students; she forced even distinguished parents—including at least two prime ministers—to accept her strictures and judgments as unappealable and final; by her perseverance, longevity, and air of infallibility she compelled the American teachers (also spinsters) to conform to her way, rather than she to theirs. Through half a century at the college—she lived there as well, ruling her floor like a queen—no one ever got the better of her. She stopped teaching before I was born and became “director” of the college, a position created in deference to her ability to rule Egyptian students and staff as no American could.

Auntie Melia took Hilda in hand, showed her where to shop, where to send her children to school, whom to talk to when she needed something. She supplied her with maids, piano teachers, tutors, names of ballet schools, dressmakers, and, of course, endless, very quietly stated advice. She always appeared for lunch on Tuesday, a habit begun before I was born and continued until she left Egypt in 1953 for her brief period of retirement in Lebanon, where she died in 1956. I was particularly fascinated by two things about her. One was her way of eating. Perhaps because of defects in her molars, tiny morsels of food were carefully deposited between her gums and her front teeth; they did not make their way back to where they could be chewed and then swallowed. Instead she worked on the food in the front part of her mouth by pressing it down with her tongue and then sucking from it a minuscule portion of juice and, say, a grain of rice, or a tiny chunk of meat, which she abruptly and almost imperceptibly gulped down. Then with her fork she extracted what was left—which always looked pretty intact to me—and laid it down precisely on the plate’s far corner. By the end of the meal, which she was always the last to finish, her plate contained seven or eight little mounds of food, neatly ringing the surface, as if they had been put there by a guileful chef.

The second thing that transfixed me were her hands, always encased in black or white lace gloves, depending on the season. She wore bracelets but not rings. Her left hand always held a small rolled-up handkerchief in the palm next to the thumb, where she could open and reroll it all day. Whenever she offered me candy
—bastilia
, she called it—it always emerged from the hankie, always smelling of lavender cologne, always covered in cellophane, always of some gentle, unassertive
flavor like quince or tamarind. Her right hand either carried her bag or rested on it.

Auntie Melia’s relationship with my father was very correct, respectful, even at times cordial; it was quite unlike his attitude toward her sister, the kind and patient and hopelessly good Munira, whom he called
mart
mmi
, mother-in-law (literally, “my paternal uncle’s wife”), and whom he always treated with a sort of playful condescension. As for his four brothers-in-law, he seemed to have qualified affection, and a great deal of criticism, for them. Hilda’s brothers—Munir, Alif, Rayik, and Emile—lived in Palestine, and we would visit them there with some regularity; after 1948 they flowed in and out of Cairo, refugees mostly, variously “hard up,” as my father would say, in need of help. They were more numerous than my father’s relatives, especially if to their Palestinian number were added a whole host of Hilda’s Lebanese relatives. One of my father’s ironclad rules was never to discuss the Said family at all; he often told me that a man’s family is his honor. But he had no qualms about discussing his wife’s family, for whom (this must have greatly complicated my mother’s life) he seemed to be, according to him, an unending source of loans. He was always wealthy, whereas Hilda’s brothers were not. One of them borrowed money from my father to get married. The others borrowed sums for various unsuccessful business enterprises, and I was led to believe that these sums were never returned. My father told me all these things with distaste, and because of that information I must have subliminally developed a sense of discomfort and mild disapproval that made my adolescent interaction with them awkward and just short of pleasant.

But his main objection to them over the years started with his marriage to Hilda. I never had all the details, but it had something to do with the fact that my mother’s oldest brother, Munira’s favorite, had sold off the small plot of family land in order to get married. This left the widowed Munira, plus Hilda and her other three brothers, without adequate means to live. I have long (perhaps inaccurately) supposed that part of the marriage arrangements made with my father by Hilda’s family included stipulations for Munira’s subsistence. She ended up spending many years with us, but it was quite routine for us to hear stories of her mistreatment at her oldest son’s house, or of her other sons’ inability—my father always called it unwillingness—to contribute to her upkeep. My father had a righteous sense of achievement after he had
persuaded one of her sons to take my grandmother out to Groppi’s for ice cream once a week.

For my father all this represented a classic, not to say definitive, example of how sons should
not
treat their mother—and, he began after 1948 regularly to say, “their sister.” This kind of talk, expressed in my father’s laconic style, pervaded the family ambience for me in both a general and acutely personal way. Not only did it seem to put my mother’s family under a permanent cloud of disapproval and fundamental disqualification, but as a brother and son I felt acute discomfort. The implicit syllogism, according to which I grew up, ran as follows: “Edward” resembles his maternal uncles (
tali
mikhwil
is the Arabic expression for the process; it also suggests that the older one got, the more strong the resemblance); his uncles are irrecusably bad sons and brothers; therefore “Edward” is far too likely to end up like them, and must thus be broken in his course, reeducated, re-formed to be less like them.