Having refused a short period of residency, my mother ended up dying and ultimately being buried in the America she had always tried to avoid, had always basically disliked, but to which, first through her husband, then through her children, and through her last illness, she was ineluctably bound. All this had begun when we entered New York harbor on the Saturnia in early July 1948. Palestine had fallen, unbeknownst to us our lives were turning us toward the United States, and both my mother and I were starting the process of life and cancer that would end our lives in the New World. I have no clear picture at all of our arrival at the Italian Line pier in New York, nor any idea what I first felt about the skyline of the totally foreign new space we were entering for the first time. I recall only the wistful sadness of the vast first-class lounge turned into a shabby space for desks and chairs for customs inspectors and the quite sizable group of passengers—now seen bunched together for the first and last time—making entry there.
By contrast, I retain a strong impression of how unforecast and, I gathered from something my father said, how anticlimactic our first view of North America was, owing to the wind and fog that pushed us unexpectedly far north: it was early in the morning two or three days before the New York landfall that the two of us went up on deck as we entered Halifax harbor. The fog was very dense, we could barely see a few yards ahead of the ship’s prow, and a bell was tolling mournfully in the distance. A map of our crossing route had been pinned up near the bridge. There I could see our curving line into Nova Scotia, which appeared at a considerable tangent to our original southward course. We were entering the West, something I had dreamed about, although it was neither Hollywood nor the mythic canyons of New York City: a small, utterly silent and unpopulated little town whose character it was impossible that morning to make out from the Saturnia‘s deck.
Our address in the city was to be the well-run and modern Commodore Hotel on East Forty-second Street. My father had stayed there in 1946, since it was close to the Royal Typewriter offices at 2 Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. We were all struck by the white gloves worn by the elevator operators, and of course by the tremendous speed at which we hurtled up and down to and from the thirty-fifth floor. The ice-water tap came in for a lot of marveling. (“Wadie,” my mother said, “why can’t we put those in in Cairo? They make life so much easier.” As was his life-long custom with my mother and me, he didn’t answer if he felt that the question was a stupid one.) The line-straight streets, the forest of tall buildings, the noisy but speedy subways, the general indifference and sometimes rude quality of New York pedestrians: all this contrasted starkly with Cairo’s meandering, leisurely, much more disorganized and yet unthreatening style. In New York no one paid any attention to us, or, if they did, my mother said that they patronized us as somewhat handicapped by our accents and generally overdressed appearance. I felt this when, on our fifth visit to the Forty-second Street Horn and Hardart Automat, I made repeated trips to the milk spigot, twice forgot to put a glass underneath (making a spectacle of myself as I watched the milk pour itself into the trough), twice mistook “buttermilk” for ordinary milk, and twice left the glass I had paid for sitting rather pointlessly on the counter.
For a week we made the tourist rounds: Metropolitan Museum, Hayden Planetarium, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Central Park. Only Radio City Music Hall made an impression on me, less because of the overwhelming stage show than because of the film A Date with Judy, starring Jane Powell, George Brent, Carmen Miranda, and Lauritz Melchior. This lush Technicolor world was what I had expected from America; as it rushed by, me on my deep velvet seat buried in a seductive darkness, I quickly forgot the America outside, now made problematic by news of my father’s need of an operation in September and by the impending necessity of doing something with the children during the intervening month or five weeks. I remember a long visit to the Parents magazine office on Vanderbilt Avenue during which my mother looked through two sets of camp catalogues, one for boys, the other girls: two were chosen (Maranacook in Maine for me, Moymadayo, also in Maine, for Rosy and Jean), phone applications were quickly made, a shopping visit to Best and Co. outfitted us with the requisite camping essentials, and a day later we took the Boston & Maine sleeper from Grand Central bound for Portland.
My memory of our arrival there early the next morning is a muted one: all I recall is a certain numbness, a feeling of dull powerlessness. This was the first time in my life I was to be separated from both my parents for any length of time. I compared their reassuring dress, accent, and gesture with the jovial but wholly alienating A. B. Dole (known as A.B., the camp’s second in command) and Mr. Heilman, both wearing seersuckers and white shoes, who met us in Portland to take me away toward the town of Winthrop, a few miles from the camp. I was handed over with dispatch—a kiss from my mother, a brief hug, my father’s bearlike embrace accompanying his “Good luck, son”—and the exchange was complete. We drove off in total silence, me in the backseat of the station wagon, the two of them in front.
I was at Maranacook for a month with perhaps two letters and a postcard (from Chicago) from my parents. Housed in a cabin with six other twelve-year-olds and a counselor, Jim Murray, seventeen, I found myself carried along pleasantly by the daily routine of crafts, riding, swimming, horseshoes, softball, canoeing—the unceasing succession of events seeming to replicate my pell-mell life in Cairo. As I was bigger and stronger than most of the other “middle” campers, I quickly acquired a reputation as a force on the swimming and softball teams. I was “Ed Said, the Cairo wonder.” Of my cabin mates only two, a kindly New Yorker named John Page and the histrionic, nervous, and voluble Tom Messer, who wet his bed every night and accordingly had a special sheet service, made any long-term impression on me. There was a kind of flatness to the experience until one brief exchange reminded me of my alien, insecure, and highly provisional identity once again.
On a few evenings we boated over to an island in the middle of Lake Maranacook for picnics, storytelling, and campfire singing. That particular night was a gloomy, overcast one, chilly and humid, unwelcoming. We stood around waiting for fires to be lit and the marshmallows and hot dogs to be prepared for roasting, and for me there was a sense of lonely purposelessness. Where was I? What was I doing here in an American setting that had no connection at all to what I was, or even with what I had become after three years at an American school in Cairo? The meal was a meager one: one hot dog, four marshmallows, a dollop of potato salad. After the food had been doled out, the group wandered off closer to the shore; there was some desultory singing, then one of the older counselors—a bulky middle-aged man with streaks of silver running through his hair, which reminded me of villainous American Indians in Hollywood Westerns—began to tell a story about a colony of red ants first entering a sleeping man’s ear, then destroying his brain.
I restlessly wandered away from the unpleasantly eerie confines of the circle gathered around the storyteller, toward the quietly glimmering coals of the dinner fire. There were still a few hot dogs left on the table, I was hungry, and couldn’t see the harm in quickly wolfing down one of them, although I did so furtively, not wishing to be seen. When we had rowed back across to camp, Murray beckoned to me to follow him outside the cabin toward the lake. “Look, I saw you take that hot dog,” he began, as I stood transfixed in shame and wordless embarrassment. “That was very sneaky. All of us only had one hot dog. What makes you think you can get away with stealing one like that?” He paused for a few seconds. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I was sure that it was angry, disapproving, perhaps even full of hate. “If you don’t shape up, and act like the rest of the fellows, I’m going to tell Dole and Heilman to send you home. We don’t want any of this sort of thing here.”
I found myself figuratively teetering over the edge, and therefore blubbering apologies, idiotic excuses, pleas not to be sent away, as it would land me in awful trouble. I imagined my mother’s tears and, typically, her cutting anger; I saw my fat
her beckon me into his room for a beating. At that moment I had no idea where my parents were, but imagined several days of terrible anguish as they made their way back to Portland to take me away, more disgrace, stricter punishment, greater feelings of guilt and anxiety.
But that was the last I heard of it from Murray, who turned away into the night, leaving me to make my way back to my damp, uncomfortable bed. It was only years later, when I read Stendhal, that I recognized much the same kind of deformation in Julien Sorel, who when he is suddenly confronted with a priest’s direct gaze swoons away. I felt myself to be a shameful outsider to the world that Miss Clark and Murray wished to exclude me from. Nationality, background, real origins, and past actions all seemed to be sources of my problem; I could not in any convenient way lay the ghosts that continued to haunt me from school to school, group to group, situation to situation.
So beginning in America I resolved to live as if I were a simple, transparent soul and not to speak about my family or origins except as required, and then very sparingly. To become, in other words, like the others, as anonymous as possible. The split between “Edward” (or, as I was soon to become, “Said”), my public, outer self, and the loose, irresponsible fantasy-ridden churning metamorphoses of my private, inner life was very marked. Later the eruptions from my inner self grew not only more frequent but also less possible to control.
The rest of the time in Maranacook was quite routine, as I had stopped deriving any pleasure from the place, and none at all from my fellow-campers. Murray hardly spoke to me again, nor I to him. One later experience emblematized the peculiarity of a camp summer that had lost its pleasure or point for me and had become either empty or onerous. There was an overnight canoe trip laid on for my age group that involved portage from one lake to another in the blank Maine forests, as well as long trajectories when we rowed across vast blazing hot tracts of brown-water lakes. My canoe was manned by me in the stern and another camper in the bow. Comfortably stretched out in the space between us was a counselor, Andy, with a long Czech name, who in his shiny red bathing suit, moccasins, and smoking pipe sat for hours reading a book whose title and contents I could not decipher. The odd thing was that after quickly going down a page with his left index finger he would methodically detach the page from the book, roll it up into a ball, and toss it casually into the lake. For one moment I looked back at the line of bobbing paper casualties of Andy’s destructive reading habit, wondering what it all could mean. Discovering no sensible or at least plausible answer (except that he did not want anyone to read the book after him), I put it down to an aspect of American life that was inscrutable. In any event I remember reflecting afterward that the experience took its significance from the desire to leave no traces, to live without history or the possibility of return. Twenty-two years later I drove to where the camp I thought had once been: all that was left of any habitation were the deserted cabins, which had become a motel, then a retirement colony of some sort, then nothing, as the elderly Down East caretaker told me. He had never heard of Camp Maranacook.
We spent the last half of August and the first two weeks of September in New York. During the time my father was in the Harkness Pavilion at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, my mother and I were in a nearby rented bed and breakfast establishment. My two sisters were quartered with my uncle Al’s widow, Emily, and her three children, Abe (Abie), Charlie, and Dorothy, all of them several years older than I, all of them commuters from Queens to various jobs in Manhattan, Abie at a bank, Charlie at Foster’s Forty-second Street pen shop, and Dorothy at the Donnelley Company (phone-book printers) in the Wall Street area. My father’s kidney operation was what our entire U.S. trip was built around, though it was not until the evening before it took place that the risk of what was being embarked upon began terrifyingly to dawn on me. This was the second crisis in his health during my early life, yet it was the first time I sensed the likelihood of his death and a life without him. The third crisis thirteen years later was by far the worst, but this one in 1948 disoriented me greatly, filled me with apprehension and vicarious pain, gripped me with its potential for future despair and loneliness.
My parents had invited Fouad Sabra, then a gifted young Lebanese resident specializing in neurology at Columbia-Presbyterian, to dinner at the Cedars of Lebanon Restaurant on Twenty-ninth Street. It was two nights before the operation, so after dinner Fouad had arranged for my parents to meet a fellow resident, an Australian called Fred, as I remember, who was working in urology under the celebrated John Latimer, who was to perform the surgery. With the zeal of the fledgling expert, Fred took it upon himself to lay before us all the things that could go wrong—infections, heart complications, blood deficiencies, the lot. This had a terrifying effect on my father, who, true to his character, saw the coming ordeal as something to be very worried about but necessary, whereas my mother and I believed it to be something to be avoided or postponed at all costs. Poor Fouad tried desperately to turn his friend off, or at least to temper and deflect the man’s unstoppable wish to make an impression, but to no avail. For years later, after Fouad came back to Lebanon, married Ellen Badr, my mother’s young cousin, and himself became an important professor and neurological expert at the American University of Beirut, the evening with Fred became a proverbial instance of what not to do just before an operation, an incident referred to by my father and Fouad together with uproarious laughter and insouciant banter.
Yet the operation was a success. There was only a cyst and no tumor in the kidney, but the whole organ had to come out leaving an enormous wound running back to front across my father’s midsection. For the two weeks he was at the Harkness Pavilion, my mother hired a little English male nurse; I would accompany him and my father on their wheelchair walks. Otherwise I was reduced to silent observation, spending long hours in an adjoining waiting room as my mother sat next to my father’s bed. What had briefly been for me a dramatic approach to something really serious was deferred and, like the fall of Palestine, transmuted into the new postoperative circumstances of great attention paid to my father’s health and healing, then within a short time absorbed in the rhythms of our lives. I soon became a marginal spectator to the nurse and my father, walking alongside the wheelchair while the two of them chatted monosyllabically; then later when we moved for a month into a suite at the luxurious Essex House for Wadie’s “recuperation” (a new word for me: my father seemed to me to say it with considerable relish) and he began to receive his Monroe, Royal Typewriter, and Sheaffer Pen visitors, insisting that I should be “there,” even though I had nothing to contribute to his meetings, I found myself to be daydreaming and distracted, with little that was interesting or profitable to do.
A solicitous doorman warned us against strolling in Central Park, so when I could escape parental requirements, I took refuge on the orderly and yet (after Maranacook) lively New York streets, among the pedestrians, the enormous proliferation of shops everywhere, the theaters and cinema marquees, the tiny newsreel theaters, the overwhelming number of new cars and buses, the remarkable hustle of subways, the steam pouring through manhole covers, the efficient and helpful policemen (in Cairo they were farm boys, my parents said, which explained why they didn’t know the names of the streets on which they were stationed). And New York’s tremendous scale, its toweringly silent, anonymous buildings reduced one to an inconsequential atom, making me question what I was to all this, my totally unimportant existence giving me an eerie but momentary sense of liberation for the first time in my life.
Allusively, almost imperceptibly, Palestine would appear and then quickly disappear in our New York lives. I first heard about President Truman’s support for Zionism that summer, as my father rifled through the newspapers early one morning in the Essex House. From then on Truman’s name took on an evil talismanic force, which I still feel today, since I, like every Palestinian for the last three generations, blames him for his crucial part in handing Palestine over to the Zionists. Within an hour after
we had returned to Cairo, one of my older refugee relatives told me with a hint of accusation trembling in his voice, “How do you like that Torman of yours? How can you stand him? He destroyed us!” (In Arabic, tor is the word for “bull,” used to derogate a person as both obdurate and malign.) One of my uncles recounted to me that teenagers at the Rockefeller Center collected money under signs that proclaimed: “Give a dollar and kill an Arab.” He had never been to New York, but wanted me to confirm the story, which I couldn’t.
Out of Place: A Memoir Page 18
