Free Dream Catcher: A Memoir by Margaret A. Salinger

months later. Aunt Doris said, “Mother didn’t like her.”
    I knew my father had a war bride whom he jokingly referred to as “Saliva,” instead of Sylvia, but otherwise he was pretty untalkative about his homecoming, scattering a few details such as the hell of his hay fever at the time, as he held a handkerchief to his maddeninglyitchy nose and eyes during allergy season each summer. “It was like this only worse over there,” he’d tell me, blowing his nose and digging at his reddened eyes. More of the feelings, rather than the details, emerge in his story “The Stranger” ( Collier’s, December 1, 1945) in which he tells us about Babe’s homecoming. Babe is suffering acutely from hay fever and battle fatigue. He is home physically, but can’t make the transition back to civilian life in his mind and emotions.
    You don’t need to be the Regis Professor of Poetry for the poetry of this story to hit you squarely between the eyes. He uses language, here, like Basho’s frog 2 —a few words, and an image unfurls in the mind and the five senses, like the little clamshells we had when we were kids and you’d drop them, plop, into a glass of water, and the shell would open and a colored paper flower, hidden inside, would unfold and rise blooming, filling the glass.
    Babe’s friend Vincent Caulfield has been killed in action. Babe, unlike Vincent, has made it home alive, and he decides to visit Vincent’s girl, bring her a poem Vincent wrote for her, and to tell her how he died. His sister Mattie, who is still ten years old, as she was in the story “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” set several years before when Babe left for war, accompanies him. He stands at Vincent’s girl’s door thinking that he shouldn’t have come at all.
    The maid answers the door and goes to get Vincent’s girl. While they wait for her in the living room, Babe looks through a pile of records beside the phonograph.
    His mind began to hear the old Bakewell Howard’s rough, fine horn playing. Then he began to hear the music of the unrecoverable years . . . when all the dead boys in the 12th Regiment had been living and cutting in on other dead boys on lost dancefloors: the years when no one who could dance worth a damn had ever heard of Cherbourg or Saint-Lô or Hürtgen Forest or Luxembourg.
    Isn’t that just brilliant? She comes in the room and Babe introduces himself. They all go into her bedroom where the light is better. Vincent’s girl and Mattie sit on her bed, Babe in a chair facing them.
    Babe crossed his long legs as most tall men do, laying the ankle on the knee. “I’m out. I got out,” he said. He looked at the clock in his sock, one of the most unfamiliar things in the new, combat-bootless world, then up at Vincent’s girl. Was she real? “I got out last week,” he said.
    He starts to tell her about Vincent’s death, feeling the same urge that Philly Burns did in trying to explain to his wife, Juanita, that guys don’t really die all handsome and Hollywood, the way they do in the movies: it’s a lie, it wasn’t like that, and the lie isn’t fair to the men who suffered. Babe was there when Vincent was blown to pieces by mortar fire. When Vincent’s girl asks Babe what a mortar is, he’s torn between wanting to tell civilians the truth and keeping quiet about the whole damn thing. He gives up and hands her the poem Vincent wrote about her. He starts to apologize, but she tells him she’s glad he came anyway. Babe heads for the door quickly because he, too, is crying. He calms down in the elevator with Mattie, but outside on the street things are worse again:
    The three long blocks between Lexington and Fifth were dull and noonish, as only that stretch can be in late August. A fat, apartment-house doorman, cupping a cigarette in his hand, was walking a wire-haired along the curb between Park and Madison.
    Babe figured that during the whole time of the Bulge, the guy had walked that dog on this street