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

lifetime of my father’s and his characters’ likes and dislikes, their struggles to connect and their increasingly dreamlike, disconnected, abracadabra, otherworldly solutions to suffering are etched, indelibly, with an artist’s alchemy whereby stone takes life, and life turns to stone. It is in this story that I saw “as through a glass darkly” the makings of our inverted forest.
    The young man in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is an artist who has just returned to New York after living in Paris for most of his life thus far. He is not adjusting well to being back and, like Babe, feels like “The Stranger.” The young man’s mother, with whom he was very close, has died, and he is sharing a hotel room with his stepfather, who is also bereft and floundering. He spends the fall doing a series of eighteen oil paintings, seventeen of which are self-portraits. When he comes across an ad in the paper for an art instructor at a Montreal correspondence school of the “Draw Binky” type, on impulse he applies and is accepted. As with Sergeant X, we never learnhis name, only his pseudonym—de Daumier-Smith—which he takes on when he applies for the art school job, claiming to be a nephew of Daumier. He is accepted, assigned three students, and given their application packets.
    The first two students are an embodiment, almost a caricature, of what Sri Ramakrishna, whose work my father was studying deeply at the time, referred to as the excreta of “woman and gold.” The first is a young housewife who has given herself the professional name “Bambi.” She includes in her application a large pinup-style photo of herself in a bathing suit. Her sample drawings, desperately bad both in choice of subject and workmanship, are attached “rather subordinately” to her photo. She writes that her favorite artists are Rembrandt and Walt Disney.
    The second student is a society photographer, R. Howard Ridgefield, who said that his wife thought he should get “into the painting racket.” 6 His painting, obscene in subject and rendering, depicts a young woman with “udder-size breasts” being sexually assaulted in church.
    Nearly overcome with despair, he opens the third envelope. It is from a nun named Sister Irma. She teaches cooking and drawing at a convent elementary school. Instead of a photograph of herself, she sends a snapshot of her convent. Her hobbies are “loving her Lord and the Word of her Lord” and “collecting leaves but only when they are laying right on the ground.” She was assigned to teach the children to draw when another sister died. The children, she writes, like to draw people when they are running and she asks his help because she doesn’t know how to do that. She wants to work hard to improve and sends some paintings—unsigned. Her work is described as that of a “true artist.” He stashes Sister Irma’s envelope in his breast pocket where “neither thieves [nor his employers] could break in. . . . I didn’t care to risk having Sister Irma taken away from me. . . . That evening, however, with Sister Irma’s envelope warm against my chest, I had never felt more relaxed.” 7
    That night, he stays up working on Sister Irma’s sketches and writing to her a long, “almost endless” letter, which he describes as both passionate and chaste. The next day he wonders “in a real panic” how he’ll manage to keep his sanity until her next envelope arrives. He doesn’t. As he stands outside the window of an orthopedic-appliance shop,
    something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss.
    He somehow makes his way back to his room, where he lies in bed shivering for hours, sleep eluding him, until he forces himself to