Try as I could, I didn’t much thrive as a sportsman. I made the swimming and tennis teams and won events and matches, but the actual competition often made me physically ill. At lunch in the spring of my first year a senior boy (the student council president and soccer captain Dale Conley) was going from table to table slipping small bits of paper underneath each plate. Mine read simply, “14 out of 157”; it was my class ranking, a much higher one than I had imagined possible. During the senior year my rank was to alternate between 1 and 2, yet at the end of the summer I spent the night before I was due to return in a hastily installed bed in my parents’ Dhour el Shweir bedroom begging not to be sent back. The inevitable departure took place at dawn, and we drove to Beirut in total silence. Once back I was given the odious job of pressing shirts in the laundry, but after a fuss and partly due to my academic success, I was mercifully moved to a sinecure in the library.
By the middle of that second year, with college applications on our minds, I had consciously grasped that there would be no imminent return to Cairo. I envied my sisters at Cairo’s English School, the comfort of being together and at home, the solidity, as I imagined it, of well-furnished certainty, all of which were going to be denied me except during brief returns for the summer. The Free Officers’ Revolution had occurred in July 1952, but with the avuncular, pipe-smoking General Mohammed Naguib in charge—the king having been sent off to Italy—I had the impression, as did my parents and their friends, that this new situation wasn’t so different from the old, except that now there would be younger, more serious men in charge, and corruption would end. Little more than that. Our little community—Dirliks, Ghorras, Mirshaks, Fahoums—Shawam all, making money handsomely, living incredibly well, continued their lives as if nothing had happened. And after a few weeks in Cairo during June and the first half of July, we moved off as usual for the long dreary period in Dhour. I experienced the Egyptian part of my life in an unreflecting, almost sham, way during the summer, slipping into it the moment I arrived in Cairo, whereas my American life was acquiring a more durable, more independent reality, unrelated to Cairo, my family, and the familiar old habits and creature comforts that my mother kept in readiness for me.
It was on a bright spring afternoon in 1953 during tennis practice that Bob Salisbury, passing the courts on his way back to Crossley from the post office, shouted to me that he had heard college acceptances were in. Rushing quickly to the post office, I discovered that both Princeton and Harvard had accepted me, though I had never visited the latter and had little idea what it represented other than the smoothly genteel impression made on me by Skiddy von Stade, the visiting Harvard admissions gentleman, whom L’Hommy had identified further as a “Long Island polo player.” When I returned to the court with my letters, the coach, Ned Alexander, said, “Good. Now you’ll play on the freshman team at Harvard,” but for the strangest and, as I look back on them now, the flimsiest of reasons I quickly made up my mind to go to Princeton, which I had visited once with my parents the summer before entering Mount Hermon. We had gone there from New York to visit relatives of Dhour el Shweir neighbors of ours, and their presence there, although I had never returned to see them again, the leafy pleasant afternoon of tabbouleh and stuffed grape leaves in their house, drew me to Princeton for entirely fictitious reasons. In my serene and superficial fantasy it seemed to be Mount Hermon’s opposite: non–New England, comfortable, unaustere, idyll-like, a projection of Cairo life in the United States.
A month later I learned that my father was going to come from Cairo, at enormous expense, for my graduation, and that afterward he and I and my cousins Abie and Charlie would go on a tour of New England in their 1951 Ford. This trip was a graduation present for me.
During my last weeks at Hermon I reflected that though in all my activities I had distinguished myself I remained a kind of lusus naturae, a peculiar odd boy out. I had won letters and important matches both in swimming and tennis, I had done brilliantly in my academic work, I had become a pianist of distinction, yet I seemed incapable of achieving the moral stature—I can think of no other phrase to describe it—that the school’s general approval could bestow on one. I was known as someone with a powerful brain and an unusual past, but I was not fully a part of the school’s corporate life. Something was missing. Something, I was to discover, that was called “the right attitude.”
There were students like Dale Conley or, in my class, Gordie Robb and Fred Fisher (unlike, say, Brieger and me) who seemed to have no rough edges: they offended no one, they were well liked, they had a remarkable capacity never to say anything that might be wrong or offensive, and they gave me the impression of fitting in perfectly. In short, they were natural choices for various honorific jobs and titles—captains, student council members, floor officers, or table heads (in the dining room). All of this had nothing to do either with their evident intelligence or with academic performance, which though above average was not distinguished. Still, there was a certain chosenness about them, an aura, that I clearly lacked. Yet one couldn’t describe these students as being teacher’s favorites nor ascribe their status to something resembling hereditary nobility or wealth, as might have been the case in the world I came from.
Just a week before graduation, a knock on the door announced Fred Fisher, a student council member, fellow swim-team member, floor officer in Crossley, and one of the most visibly successful boys in the school. Salisbury and I were, I recall, finishing our term papers. Although I was about to graduate, I was still imprisoned in my room for our nightly penance, but Fisher as floor officer could roam the dormitory at will. “Hey woz,” he said, using a friendly appellation much in use then, “haven’t you been first or second in the class? Academically, I mean.”
I replied, “Yes, it’s alternated between Ray Byrne and myself. He’s first now I think, but I’m not absolutely sure. Why?”
Here Fisher, seated on my bed, seemed plainly uncomfortable. “I’ve never been higher than six or seven, but they’ve just told me I’m going to be salutatorian and Byrne’s valedictorian. I can’t figure it out. What happened?” Fisher’s puzzlement at his unexpected elevation was genuine, but I was thunderstruck. I could make no reply to the just anointed Fred, who left our room a moment later with what seemed to me a troubled, even mystified, look on his face. I felt I was entitled to such a graduation honor and had been denied it, but in some strange yet peculiarly fitting way I knew I should not have been given it. So I was hurt, unable to accept the injustice, or to contest or understand what may after all have been a justified decision against me. Unlike Fisher, I was not a leader, nor a good citizen, nor pious, nor just all-round acceptable. I realized I was to remain the outsider, no matter what I did.
It was also at this point that I felt that coming from a part of the world that seemed to be in a state of chaotic transformation became the symbol of what was out of place about me. Mount Hermon School was primarily white: there were a handful of black students, mostly gifted athletes and one rather brilliant musician and intellect, Randy Peyton, but the faculty was entirely white (or white-masked, as in Alexander’s case). Until the Fisher-graduation episode I felt myself to be colorless, but that forced me to see myself as marginal, non-American, alienated, marked, just when the politics of the Arab world began to play a greater and greater role in American life. I sat through the tedious graduation ceremonies in my cap and gown with an indifference that bordered on hostility: this was their event, not mine, even though I was unexpectedly given a biology prize for, I firmly believe, consolation. My father, having come from Cairo for what I thought would be a disappointment, was both elated and jocular. Without my mother (who had to stay home with my sisters) he was unusually talkative and engaging; far from needing her social expertise, he seemed to thrive without it, spending some amusing moments with the very German Brieger père, a Hahneman Medical School professor.
The key to my father’s mood seemed to be his cheery satisfaction with a school that had at last
turned me into a citizen with a cap on my head. At the postgraduation garden party he carried a large, circular package wrapped in brown paper. He was especially effusive with Rubendall, whose extraordinary charm carried everything before it. Towering over my father, he beamed at us both. “How wonderful of you to come all the way from Cairo. I’m so sorry that Mrs. Said couldn’t make it. Isn’t it great how Ed has done?” At this point my father gave me his fruit punch cup to hold and in his characteristically impetuous and untidy way started to tear at the wrapping paper to reveal an immense embossed silver plate, the kind that he and my mother must have commissioned from a Cairo bazaar silversmith. In his best presentational style he handed it rather pompously to the overjoyed Rubendall. “My wife and I wanted to give you this in grateful gratitude for what you’ve done for Edward.” Pause. “In grateful gratitude.” I was embarrassed at how lavish and eccentric both his gift and accompanying words were, especially considering how unfit I must have seemed to Rubendall and his colleagues for the position of either class valedictorian or salutatorian.
For a week my father and I, with Abie and Charlie (who did most of the driving) went to places like Keene, New Hampshire, and Boston, my father footing the bill for everything, his way of paying the two young men for their time and effort. I was anxious to get back to Cairo and home. I had had my fill of motels and dormitories, and even after two more weeks in New York at the well-appointed Stanhope Hotel, the desire to return to the Cairo I had left two years ago was overwhelmingly powerful.
X
RETURNING TO CAIRO IN THE SUMMER ALSO MEANT GOING back to Dhour. And, by the time I had become a Princeton undergraduate, Dhour had come pretty exclusively to mean Eva Emad, whose presence there I could count on. Given what happened to Lebanon a few years later—the 1958 civil war, the Palestinian decades of the seventies and eighties, the catastrophic seventeen-year civil war that erupted in 1975, the Israeli invasion of 1982—it was as if our uninterrupted summers in Dhour prior to the upheavals were a kind of prolonged daydream whose center after I met Eva became the infinitesimally slow growth of our romance. Nothing else I did then seemed to interdict or interrupt my concentration on seeing and being with her for most of the day, Sundays excepted.
We were drawn imperceptibly to each other: always playing doubles together, sitting next to each other, partnering each other in games of trump, a primitive genre of bridge, sharing small confidences. As a young woman from a conservative Arab family, Eva was reserved and correct, as women her age were supposed to be in the mid-1950s. Her education had ended after secondary school, and, although I did not realize it at the time, she was waiting for marriage, with no other career offered or contemplated. While I knew that I was more attracted and attached to her than I had been to any woman before, our future had no place at all in my reflections or daydreams. Over three or four summers I found myself increasingly attracted to her, unable to do or say more than what one said in informal, daily banter.
There was an illicit thrill in being close to her without anything physically or even verbally overt passing between us. I felt I had to see her every day, and spent every moment in her company searching for some sign, however faint, that she cared for me as I did for her. But if our attachment to each other remained unspoken, it became evident to others, if only in the most casual way. “Have Eva and Edward already played their doubles?” Nelly might ask; “You and Eva will sit there,” someone might say at the movies; “Has Eva seen your new racquet?” Neither of our parents had any knowledge of our friendship. Although we would be apart for nine months of the year—she in Tanta while I was in Princeton—when we were in Dhour our relationship resumed as if we had seen each other the day before. We wrote, infrequently, cordial and correct letters, and I carried hers in one of my pockets for weeks on end, imagining myself to be closer to her by doing so.
It was inevitable that my mother would hear about Eva. I can remember my father mentioning Eva’s age—“When you’re in your prime she’ll be a sixty-year-old woman. Do you know what that will be like?”—and then adding one of those prepackaged phrases that served the purpose of a minatory adage: “If you’re single everyone will invite you, but once you get married no one will look at you.” At least I knew where I stood with him, unlike with my mother. At first her behavior was quite circumspect, suggesting little more than a sort of neutral curiosity about Eva and my attitude toward her. Gradually her tone hardened, becoming faintly challenging as she’d ask, “And I suppose Eva was there too?” Then Eva seemed to her to have overstepped certain limits of propriety and decency as she remarked, “What do her parents think that she is up to, spending all her time with young people like you. Don’t they realize that she’s compromising her chances to find a husband?”
By the time Eva and I had settled on each other in our glacierlike progress, over about three years, I was subliminally aware that talking to my mother about Eva, responding (however laconically) to her unsolicited observations was to be avoided. Eva’s age, her different, largely idle, style of life, her religion (Greek Orthodox), and her francophony clearly made my mother fearful, but I didn’t suspect that she was determinedly set against my continuing liaison.
In the summer of 1956, when I was twenty and Eva was almost twenty-seven, the Tabbarah Club embarked on a group beach outing to Beirut. This was very different from our family excursions the decade before—there were no parents and no hours to be carefully observed. Our group destinations that year had been the Eden Roc pool, a California-style kidney-shaped basin attached to a restaurant-nightclub on a cliff overlooking the sea, and “Pigeon Rock” next to it; and Sporting Club, a new beach club just below Eden Roc, built on the rocks with a spirited café, numerous sunbathing areas, and a bar. “Sporting,” as it was known, had several inlets into which the sea flowed, and where when the water was not too rough, one could hire a rowboat and go out toward Pigeon Rock and the cool caverns just beyond. I suggested to Eva that we do just that, the sea being wonderfully placid, the sunlight piercingly luminous, the whole scene suffused with a sense of marvelous, calming stillness. She sat on the seat facing me as I rowed out of the Sporting’s precincts and then diagonally back into the huge rocks whose shelter from inquisitive eyes we both seemed to want.
In her one-piece bathing suit, Eva had never looked more desirable. She had smooth brown skin, perfectly rounded shoulders, elegantly shaped legs, and a face that, while not conventionally beautiful, had a lively responsiveness that I found irresistible. Beneath a craggy promontory we embraced for the first time. The embrace released all my suppressed emotion: we declared our love and, in the manner of suddenly illuminated narrators, retold the story to each other of our years of distance and unspoken longings. I was stunned by the strength of my passion. We returned to Dhour that afternoon and in the evening, with the rest of the group, met at the City Cinema, where sitting next to each other in the dark we whispered, passionately declaring our love for each other again and again.
Outside the cinema, aware that everyone was looking at us, we said good-bye rather casually and Eva went off with Nelly. The next day I would be gone, and would not see her again for nine months. As I got into the car with my sister Rosy I was seized with terrible stomach pain. When our doctor examined me the following day he found my stomach tender but with no other symptoms. A certificate was produced for Princeton explaining that as a result of illness I would be returning a week later. Whether love was responsible I don’t know, but I certainly didn’t want to be separated from Eva so soon.
After dropping off Eva on my real last evening with her, I found my mother waiting up for me in the living room. The room’s former bleakness was mitigated now by a few decent armchairs, Persian rugs on the floor, and landscapes of Lebanon that she had purchased from a Beirut art dealer. She claimed that she was worried about my being on Dhour’s deserted and poorly lit streets, and concerned that I was so late when I had to get up early the next day for my twenty-hour journey to New York. There was
an unexpectedly unsympathetic edge to her voice as she quizzed me about where I had been. Normally more than happy to share my comings and goings with her, I found myself responding grudgingly, monosyllabically, trying to protect both myself and Eva. My old vulnerability returned as if from another unwelcome life. “And I suppose you kissed her also?” she demanded, turning excitement at first love to guilt and discomfort.
She spoke with distaste in a tone I’d noticed whenever the subject of sex or sexuality came up in conversation. Reacting angrily to her question I said that it was none of her business while trying to ignore the nagging feeling that somehow it was. My mother’s tightly coiled ambivalence was unleashed. Her love for me meant that she saw any other emotional attachment as a diminishment of her hold over me. And yet she was also highly conventional in her belief that people should marry despite her abhorrence of sex.
I remained in love with Eva for two more years, all the while refusing in an almost childlike way to acknowledge that for her marriage was the logical outcome of our liaison. When I graduated from Princeton in 1957, at least two of her friends tried to persuade me to think seriously about marriage. I was to spend the next year (1957–58) in Egypt before going to Harvard for graduate study. Eva lived in Alexandria with a recently widowed sister, and I went there, ostensibly on my father’s business, to see her. Our physical relationship remained passionate but unconsummated because we both had the notion that once we had crossed that line we would to all intents be a married couple; and out of what I have always considered to be her profound sensitivity and love, Eva deterred me, saying that she did not want me to bear the responsibility. As our passion and our discreet meetings in Alexandria continued, my admiration for Eva’s strength, her intelligence, and her physical attractiveness grew. She was not intellectual but showed a wonderful patience and interest in listening to me talk about what I was reading and discovering. Eva was my new interlocutor, replacing my mother, who had already sensed the diversion of my attention and closeness from her to this other woman.
Out of Place: A Memoir Page 32
