Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

by J. D. Salinger

  Mrs. Silsburn laughed the kind of tinkling laugh that is, of course, death to the sensitive anecdotist, cold sober or otherwise. She had evidently been waiting for me to finish, so that she could make a single-minded appeal to the Lieutenant. “Who does she look like to you?” she said to him importunately. “Around the eyes and mouth especially. Who does she remind you of?”

  The Lieutenant looked at her, then up at the photograph. “You mean the way she is in this picture? As a kid?” he said. “Or now? The way she is in the movies? Which do you mean?”

  “Both, really, I think. But especially right here in this picture.”

  The Lieutenant scrutinized the photograph—rather severely, I thought, as though he by no means approved of the way Mrs. Silsburn, who after all was a civilian as well as a woman, had asked him to examine it. “Muriel,” he said shortly. “Looks like Muriel in this picture. The hair and all.”

  “But exactly!” said Mrs. Silsburn. She turned to me. “But exactly,” she repeated. “Have you ever met Muriel? I mean have you ever seen her when she’s had her hair tied in a lovely big—”

  “I’ve never seen Muriel at all until today,” I said.

  “Well, all right, just take my word.” Mrs. Silsburn tapped the photograph impressively with her index finger. “This child could double for Muriel at that age. But to a T.”

  The whiskey was steadily edging up on me, and I couldn’t quite take in this information whole, let alone consider its many possible ramifications. I walked back over—just a trifle straight-linishly, I think—to the coffee table and resumed stirring the pitcher of Collinses. The bride’s father’s uncle tried to get my attention as I came back into his vicinity, to greet me on my reappearance, but I was just abstracted enough by the alleged fact of Muriel’s resemblance to Charlotte not to respond to him. I was also feeling just a trifle dizzy. I had a strong impulse, which I didn’t indulge, to stir the pitcher from a seated position on the floor.

  A minute or two later, as I was just starting to pour out the drinks, Mrs. Silsburn had a question for me. It all but sang its way across the room to me, so melodiously was it pitched.

  “Would it be very awful if I asked about that accident Mrs. Burwick happened to mention before? I mean those nine stitches she spoke of. Did your brother accidentally push her or something like that, I mean?”

  I put down the pitcher, which seemed extraordinarily heavy and unwieldy, and looked over at her. Oddly, despite the mild dizziness I was feeling, distant images hadn’t begun to blur in the least. If anything, Mrs. Silsburn as a focal point across the room seemed rather obtrusively distinct. “Who’s Mrs. Burwick?” I said.

  “My wife,” the Lieutenant answered, a trifle shortly. He was looking over at me, too, if only as a committee of one to investigate what was taking me so long with the drinks.

  “Oh. Certainly she is,” I said.

  “Was it an accident?” Mrs. Silsburn pressed. “He didn’t mean to do it, did he?”

  “Oh, God, Mrs. Silsburn.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she said coldly.

  “I’m sorry. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m getting a little tight. I poured myself a great drink in the kitchen about five minutes—” I broke off, and turned abruptly around. I’d just heard a familiar heavy tread in the uncarpeted hall. It was coming toward us—at us—at a great rate, and in an instant the Matron of Honor jounced into the room.

  She had eyes for no one. “I finally got them,” she said. Her voice sounded strangely levelled off, stripped of even the ghost of italics. “After about an hour.” Her face looked tense and overheated to the bursting point. “Is that cold?” she said, and came without stopping, and unanswered, over to the coffee table. She picked up the one glass I’d half filled a minute or so before, and drank it off in one greedy tilt. “That’s the hottest room I’ve ever been in in my entire life,” she said—rather impersonally—and set down her empty glass. She picked up the pitcher and refilled the glass halfway, with much clinking and plopping of ice cubes.

  Mrs. Silsburn was already well in the vicinity of the coffee table. “What’d they say?” she asked impatiently. “Did you speak to Rhea?”

  The Matron of Honor drank first. “I spoke to everybody,” she said, putting down her glass, and with a grim but, for her, peculiarly un-dramatic emphasis on “everybody.” She looked first at Mrs. Silsburn, then at me, then at the Lieutenant. “You can all relax,” she said. “Everything’s just fine and dandy.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?” Mrs. Silsburn said sharply.

  “Just what I said. The groom’s no longer indisposed by happiness.” A familiar style of inflection was tack in the Matron of Honor’s voice.

  “How come? Who’d you talk to?” the Lieutenant said to her. “Did you talk to Mrs. Fedder?”

  “I said I talked to everybody. Everybody but the blushing bride. She and the groom’ve eloped.” She turned to me. “How much sugar did you put in this thing, anyway?” she asked irritably. “It tastes like absolute—”

  “Eloped?” said Mrs. Silsburn, and put her hand to her throat.

  The Matron of Honor looked at her. “All right, just relax now,” she advised. “You’ll live longer.”

  Mrs. Silsburn sat down inertly on the couch—right beside me, as a matter of fact. I was staring up at the Matron of Honor, and I’m sure Mrs. Silsburn immediately followed suit.

  “Apparently he was at the apartment when they got back. So Muriel just ups and packs her bag, and off the two of them go, just like that.” The Matron of Honor shrugged her shoulders elaborately. She picked up her glass again and finished her drink. “Anyway, we’re all invited to the reception. Or whatever you call it when the bride and groom have already left. From what I gathered, there’s a whole mob of people over there already. Everybody sounded so gay on the phone.”

  “You said you talked to Mrs. Fedder. What’d she say?” the Lieutenant said.

  The Matron of Honor shook her head, rather cryptically. “She was wonderful. My God, what a woman. She sounded absolutely normal. From what I gathered—I mean from what she said—this Seymour’s promised to start going to an analyst and get himself straightened out.” She shrugged her shoulders again. “Who knows? Maybe everything’s gonna be hunky-dory. I’m too pooped to think any more.” She looked at her husband. “Let’s go. Where’s your little hat?”

  The next thing I knew, the Matron of Honor, the Lieutenant, and Mrs. Silsburn were all filing toward the front door, with me, as their host, following behind them. I was weaving now very obviously, but since no one turned around, I think my condition went unnoticed.

  I heard Mrs. Silsburn say to the Matron of Honor, “Are you going to stop by there, or what?”

  “I don’t know,” came the reply. “If we do, it’ll just be for a minute.”

  The Lieutenant rang the elevator bell, and the three stood leadenly watching the indicator dial. No one seemed to have any further use for speech. I stood in the doorway of the apartment, a few feet away, dimly looking on. When the elevator door opened, I said goodbye, aloud, and their three heads turned in unison toward me. “Oh, goodbye,” they called over, and I heard the Matron of Honor shout “Thanks for the drink!” as the elevator door closed behind them.

  I WENT back into the apartment, very unsteadily, trying to unbutton my tunic as I wandered along, or to yank it open.

  My return to the living room was unreservedly hailed by my one remaining guest—whom I’d forgotten. He raised a well-filled glass at me as I came into the room. In fact, he literally waved it at me, wagging his head up and down and grinning, as though the supreme, jubilant moment we had both been long awaiting had finally arrived. I found I couldn’t quite match grins with him at this particular reunion. I remember patting him on the shoulder, though. Then I went over and sat down heavily on the couch, directly opposite him, and finished yanking open my coat. “Don’t you have a home to go to?” I asked him. “Who looks after
you? The pigeons in the park?” In response to these provocative questions, my guest toasted me with increased gusto, wielding his Tom Collins at me as though it were a beer stein. I closed my eyes and lay back on the couch, putting my feet up and stretching out flat. But this made the room spin. I sat up and swung my feet around to the floor—doing it so suddenly and with such poor coördination that I had to put my hand on the coffee table to keep my balance. I sat slumped forward for a minute or two, with my eyes closed. Then, without having to get up, I reached for the Tom Collins pitcher and poured myself out a drink, spilling any amount of liquid and ice cubes onto the table and floor. I sat with the filled glass in my hands for some more minutes, without drinking, and then I put it down in a shallow puddle on the coffee table. “Would you like to know how Charlotte got those nine stitches?” I asked suddenly, in a tone of voice that sounded perfectly normal to me. “We were up at the Lake. Seymour had written to Charlotte, inviting her to come up and visit us, and her mother finally let her. What happened was, she sat down in the middle of our driveway one morning to pet Boo Boo’s cat, and Seymour threw a stone at her. He was twelve. That’s all there was to it. He threw it at her because she looked so beautiful sitting there in the middle of the driveway with Boo Boo’s cat. Everybody knew that, for God’s sake—me, Charlotte, Boo Boo, Waker, Walt, the whole family.” I stared at the pewter ashtray on the coffee table. “Charlotte never said a word to him about it. Not a word.” I looked up at my guest, rather expecting him to dispute me, to call me a liar. I am a liar, of course. Charlotte never did understand why Seymour threw that stone at her. My guest didn’t dispute me, though. The contrary. He grinned at me encouragingly, as though anything further I had to say on the subject could go down only as the absolute truth with him. I got up, though, and left the room. I remember considering, halfway across the room, going back and picking up two ice cubes that were on the floor, but it seemed too arduous an undertaking, and I continued along to the hall. As I passed the kitchen door, I took off my tunic—peeled it off—and dropped it on the floor. It seemed, at the time, like the place where I always left my coat.

  In the bathroom, I stood for several minutes over the laundry hamper, debating whether I should or shouldn’t take out Seymour’s diary and look at it again. I don’t remember any more what arguments I advanced on the subject, either pro or con, but I did finally open the hamper and pick out the diary. I sat down with it, on the side of the bathtub again, and riffled the pages till I came to the very last entry Seymour had made:

  “One of the men just called the flight line again. If the ceiling keeps lifting, apparently we can get off before morning. Oppenheim says not to hold our breaths. I phoned Muriel to tell her. It was very strange. She answered the phone and kept saying hello. My voice wouldn’t work. She very nearly hung up. If only I could calm down a little. Oppenheim is going to hit the sack till the flight line calls us back. I should, too, but I’m too keyed up. I really called to ask her, to beg her for the last time to just go off alone with me and get married. I’m too keyed up to be with people. I feel as though I’m about to be born. Sacred, sacred day. The connection was so bad, and I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?’ I’ve been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected—never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life. Oppenheim is already in the sack. I should be, too, but I can’t. Someone must sit up with the happy man.”

  I read the entry through just once, then closed the diary and brought it back to the bedroom with me. I dropped it into Seymour’s canvas bag, on the window seat. Then I fell, more or less deliberately, on the nearer of the two beds. I was asleep—or, possibly, out cold—before I landed, or so it seemed.

  When I wakened, about an hour and a half later, I had a splitting headache and a parched mouth. The room was all but dark. I remember sitting for rather a long time on the edge of the bed. Then, in the cause of a great thirst, I got up and gravitated slowly toward the living room, hoping there were still some cold and wet remnants in the pitcher on the coffee table.

  My last guest had evidently let himself out of the apartment. Only his empty glass, and his cigar end in the pewter ashtray, indicated that he had ever existed. I still rather think his cigar end should have been forwarded on to Seymour, the usual run of wedding gifts being what it is. Just the cigar, in a small, nice box. Possibly with a blank sheet of paper enclosed, by way of explanation.

  THE ACTORS by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I’ve written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself.

  It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, “No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”

  AT TIMES, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, but at the age of forty I look on my old fair-weather friend the general reader as my last deeply contemporary confidant, and I was rather strenuously requested, long before I was out of my teens, by at once the most exciting and the least fundamentally bumptious public craftsman I’ve ever personally known, to try to keep a steady and sober regard for the amenities of such a relationship, be it ever so peculiar or terrible; in my case, he saw it coming on from the first. The question is, how can a writer observe the amenities if he has no idea what his general reader is like? The reverse is common enough, most certainly, but just when is the author of a story ever asked what he thinks the reader is like? Very luckily, to push on and make my point here—and I don’t think it’s the kind of point that will survive an interminable buildup—I found out a good many years back practically all I need to know about my general reader; that is to say, you, I’m afraid. You’ll deny it up and down, I fear, but I’m really in no position to take your word for it. You’re a great bird-lover. Much like a man in a short story called “Skule Skerry,” by John Buchan, which Arnold L. Sugarman, Jr., once pressed me to read during a very poorly supervised study-hall period, you’re someone who took up birds in the first place because they fired your imagination; they fascinated you because “they seemed of all created beings the nearest to pure spirit—those little creatures with a normal temperature of 125°.” Probably just like this John Buchan man, you thought many thrilling related thoughts; you reminded yourself, I don’t doubt, that: “The gold crest, with a stomach no bigger than a bean, flies across the North Sea! The curlew sandpiper, which breeds so far north that only about three people have ever seen its nest, goes to Tasmania for its holidays!” It would be too much of a good thing to hope, of course, that my very own general reader should turn out to be one of the three people who have actually seen the curlew sandpiper’s nest, but I feel, at least, that I know him—you—quite well enough to guess what kind of well-meant gesture might be welcomed from me right now. In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I’m sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for
thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn’t do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don’t shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped—before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: ( ( ( ( ) ) ) ). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bowlegged—buckle-legged—omens of my state of mind and body at this writing. Professionally speaking, which is the only way I’ve ever really enjoyed speaking up (and, just to ingratiate myself still less, I speak nine languages, incessantly, four of them stone-dead)—professionally speaking, I repeat I’m an ecstatically happy man. I’ve never been before. Oh, once, perhaps, when I was fourteen and wrote a story in which all the characters had Heidelberg dueling scars—the hero, the villain, the heroine, her old nanny, all the horses and dogs. I was reasonably happy then, you might say, but not ecstatically, not like this. To the point: I happen to know, possibly none better, that an ecstatically happy writing person is often a totally draining type to have around. Of course, the poets in this state are by far the most “difficult,” but even the prose writer similarly seized hasn’t any real choice of behavior in decent company; divine or not, a seizure’s a seizure. And while I think an ecstatically happy prose writer can do many good things on the printed page—the best things, I’m frankly hoping—it’s also true, and infinitely more self-evident, I suspect, that he can’t be moderate or temperate or brief; he loses very nearly all his short paragraphs. He can’t be detached—or only very rarely and suspiciously, on down-waves. In the wake of anything as large and consuming as happiness, he necessarily forfeits the much smaller but, for a writer, always rather exquisite pleasure of appearing on the page serenely sitting on a fence. Worst of all, I think, he’s no longer in a position to look after the reader’s most immediate want; namely, to see the author get the hell on with his story. Hence, in part, that ominous offering of parentheses a few sentences back. I’m aware that a good many perfectly intelligent people can’t stand parenthetical comments while a story’s purportedly being told. (We’re advised of these things by mail—mostly, granted, by thesis preparers with very natural, oaty urges to write us under the table in their off-campus time. But we read, and usually we believe; good, bad, or indifferent, any string of English words holds our attention as if it came from Prospero himself.) I’m here to advise that not only will my asides run rampant from this point on (I’m not sure, in fact, that there won’t be a footnote or two) but I fully intend, from time to time, to jump up personally on the reader’s back when I see something off the beaten plot line that looks exciting or interesting and worth steering toward. Speed, here, God save my American hide, means nothing whatever to me. There are, however, readers who seriously require only the most restrained, most classical, and possibly deftest method of having their attention drawn, and I suggest—as honestly as a writer can suggest this sort of thing—that they leave now, while, I can imagine, the leaving’s good and easy. I’ll probably continue to point out available exits as we move along, but I’m not sure I’ll pretend to put my heart into it again.