Free Dream Catcher: A Memoir by Margaret A. Salinger Page A

every day. He couldn’t believe it. He could believe it, but it was still impossible. He felt Mattie put her hand in his. . . .
    “Babe,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Are you glad to be home?”
    “Yes, baby.”
    “Ow! You’re hurting my hand.”
    He relaxes his grip. The story ends, once again, with a hand stretched toward him helping him out of his private hell. He watches his little sister Mattie. “With her feet together she made the little jump from the curb to the street surface, then back again. Why was it such a beautiful thing to see?” 3
    Why indeed? Just as the rage expressed by my father—both in his fiction and in real life—at WASP “Society,” country clubs, Ivy League schools, debutantes, and the like, becomes less a personal, private Salinger idiosyncrasy when looked at in the context of his life as a Jew or half-Jew growing up in New York in the twenties and thirties, so, too, I think, his wartime experiences and stories of Staff Sergeant Babe Gladwaller and Staff Sergeant X provide a context for The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not saying that the reader needs to know the background of the story to appreciate the book, I’m saying something much smaller, that I needed to understand the context and the connections to begin to make sense of the frightening, life-or-death emotional intensity evoked in both my dad and his character Holden by things that seem like minor aesthetic issues. I needed to understand how logic and proportion could go so awry sometimes in my relationship with him.
    After reading the war stories, what had once seemed like foreign territory in The Catcher became, in many ways, a familiar story. While the traumas of war and death and dislocation are displaced in The Catcher —Nazis are replaced by “phonies” as the enemy—their ability to destroy lives and to wreak emotional havoc upon the survivors diminishes not a whit when storm troopers’ black uniforms are exchanged for professors’ tweeds. 4 The battlefield is gone, but when Holden calls out to his dead brother, Allie (who died at ten from leukemia), “Save me, Allie, save me!” as he feels himself “sinking down, down, down” into an abyss, terrified he won’t live to reach the curb at the far side of the street, he is in as desperate a fight for his life as was the boy in France. The ways in which Holden seeks to re-establish connection, to find a port in the storm, are familiar as well. When he decides to run away, like the “Little Indian” story of Sonny and like Lionel in “Down at the Dinghy,” he waits to say good-bye to his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe; and she, like Mattie for Babe, Esmé for X, and perhaps Sylvia for my father, gives him something to love, a way to reattach and go home again—“a beautiful thing to see.”

    D URING THE TIME MY FATHER was finishing The Catcher in the Rye and working on “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” a story about an artist on the verge of a breakdown, he was, like his character, in a dark place, with his faculties only loosely intact. He was living in the apartment my mother described as dark and underwater-feeling, with black sheets and black furniture that, she said, seemed to match his depression. My mother said that, at the time, Jerry sank into “black holes where he could hardly move, hardly talk.” 5
    Leila Hadley said that when she read “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” she was sure he had based the hero on himself. To say that my father based the hero on himself is a bit too straightforward, too linear and logical for the way this story is a reflection or refraction of my father’s life in the mirror world of his fiction; but I know what Ms. Hadley means. When I read this story, it rang so true, so much like my father, that it had the uncanny feeling of being real, a story about an uncle of mine or something, rather than a piece of fiction.
    This story, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” is a veritable template upon which a