Out of Place: A Memoir (47 page)

It is difficult to describe the tremendous power of her attraction, the romance of her body, which was for a time just beyond sexual reach, the overwhelming pleasure of intimacy with her, the utter unpredictability of her wanting and rejecting me, the irreducible joy of seeing her after an absence. These were what tied me to her for so many years. At times, she represented that aspect of an ideal America that I could never gain admission to, but which held me enthralled at the
gate. She had a moralistic “don’t-say-bad-things” side to her, which sometimes made me feel even more alien, and put me resentfully on my best behavior. There was also (and later centrally) her family, which was represented to me as blue-blooded, and more or less impecunious because her dashing lawyer-father quixotically took on gigantic opponents like the defense department for purely idealistic reasons, bankrupting himself in the process. But there was taste and breeding, elegance, and a sort of literary refinement about her family, whom I was not to meet for a considerable time, that sometimes induced in me an almost subservient attitude. Her closest attachment in life was to her eldest brother, a famous athlete and exact contemporary of mine, though he was at Harvard. I think I saw them together only twice, but in what she said about him over the years I sensed a more-than-usual combination of love, awe, respect, and, yes, passion that for years I dimly felt prevented us from the fulfillment I quite desperately wanted and which seemed impossible. In this, it now seems to me, I must have been complaisant.

It is difficult now to reconstruct the feelings of terrifying abandonment she induced when she was about to, as she so often did, leave me. “I love you,” she would say, “but I am not
in love
with you,” as she announced her decision never to see me again. This happened in the late spring of 1959, on the eve of my departure for Cairo and the long summer vacation. I was at Harvard graduate school, and still dependent on my father’s business, which by now was hemmed in by Nasser’s socialist laws, nationalizations, and the illegality of foreign accounts, on which our business was built. Entering the city from the airport I felt a direct sense of being threatened, an insecurity so profound that it could only come, I thought, from the sense of our being torn up by the roots, such roots as we had in Egypt. Where would our family go?

A few days later the city’s eternal rhythms—the people, the river, my Gezira Club acquaintances, even the traffic, certainly the Pyramids, which I could see from my bedroom window—had calmed my spirit. This was the East, I remember a friend of my parents saying, and things happen slowly. No abrupt changes. No surprises, although there were, ironically enough, new “Arab socialist” laws being promulgated daily. Contradictions and anxieties notwithstanding, I was lulled into the routine of going to my father’s business every day, still, as ever, with very
little actual work to do there. Then a postcard arrived from Chartres. It was from her, and two weeks later she asked if she could visit me in Cairo. It was bliss for me but after a week the Diana impulse asserted itself. “I must leave,” she said, and would not be deterred. A few weeks later we were together again, and then we weren’t, and so it continued.

When she went to Africa some months later, she had to come rushing back almost immediately because her brother had been taken ill. Three weeks later he was to die in her arms—of leukemia, a disease for which there was no effective therapy thirty years ago. It was the worst blow of her life, and although she returned to Africa for two more years I was not able to gauge accurately the profound extent and depth of her loss. Later we drifted apart, as I finished my graduate career, started work at Columbia, and married my first wife. When my marriage began to fall apart I returned to her, but my feelings for her had changed. All the years of waiting for my Diana had suddenly come to an end. She had been so intimate a part of my life, so necessary to my starved and repressed hidden self, that life without her, I had felt, was unimaginable. She seemed to speak directly to that underground part of my identity I had long held for myself, not the “Ed” or “Edward” I had been assigned, but the other self I was always aware of but was unable easily or immediately to reach. She seemed to have access to that part of me when I was with her, and then suddenly (actually, over a period of a few restful weeks in Lebanon) my becalmed spirit recognized that she and I could no longer go on. Our time was over. And so we did not continue.

I graduated from Princeton in June of 1957 with a pronounced case of German measles. My parents were there to watch the Phi Beta Kappa ceremony, and later to meet with some of my professors. Though I had done very well, my father persisted in asking my teachers whether in fact I had done my best, with a tone suggesting that I hadn’t. My mother tried unsuccessfully to reassure me later how proud he was of my achievement (among them a fat fellowship to Harvard, which I deferred for a year). Most of the professors (as is their lamentable wont) mumbled something polite, whereas only Szathmary literally assaulted my nonplussed parents with a short diatribe on the philosophical nonsense contained in the logical (or rather illogical) form of the question “Did he do his best?” What a champion of critical
thought he was, I thought glowingly, and how I wished I would be able to be one too.

So torn was I by differing impulses that I finally decided with my parents that I should have a year off to return to and sample the Cairo life I would lead if—there was always an “if” in my life then—I decided to take over the business. But the year (1957–58) turned out to end with a number of closed doors. No, I
could
not work in something my father owned and had created: it was his terrain and the dependency I felt was hateful to me. Money and property were two things I knew instinctively I could not win from him in a contest. During my Princeton and even graduate years at Harvard when he was still generously providing me with money, a disagreeable ordeal for me was the day of my return home. He would act agitated and uncomfortable around me until, to end his restlessness, he would say, “Edward, could we have our little talk?” For at least ten years “our talk” took the same form, duplicated exactly year after year. He would pull a piece of paper out of his pocket and read a figure, a sum in dollars, from it. “This year I sent you $4,356. How much do you have left?” Since I knew that I would have to answer the question once I got home, and since also I never kept records of what I spent, I would employ several anxious hours during the long plane journey back to the Middle East trying to make a list of my expenses, among which were tuition, room rent, and board. This sum always fell very far short of the total, so when I faced him I was left with a terrible sense of culpability and guilt, and felt relatively speechless, or silly. “You say you spent fifty dollars on haircuts. That still leaves fifteen hundred you haven’t accounted for. Do you realize how hard I have to work to earn that money? How much do you have left in the bank?” he would then say, as if giving me an opportunity to redeem myself. Before leaving for the summer I had drawn out all but about ten dollars. He remonstrated irritatingly. And again and again until I was in my mid-twenties.

I could never reconcile this with his extraordinary generosity—paying for expensive piano lessons in Boston, letting me buy a car in Italy for a long European summer tour in 1958, including weeks spent at Bayreuth, Salzburg, Lucerne, and on and on. I felt that only by asking my mother to intercede could I get him to say yes, since his rapid-fire answer to any request I made was invariably negative; besides, I
should confess that most of the time I was too timid, intimidated, embarrassed, to ask him myself. The fact is that he financed my education and my extracurricular undertakings and still I couldn’t talk to him about money, nor did he like me to have too much of it.

It must also be said that my father clearly possessed an owner’s sense, something I never acquired nor in a subtle, silent way, I believe, was ever allowed to acquire. Until the fall of Palestine he and his cousin Boulos’s family (Boulos had died in 1939 or 1940) co-owned the businesses in Egypt and Palestine. During that time none of us, least of all my father, ever took anything from the showroom, not even a pencil, without signing for it. He was scrupulous about protecting
their
interests. Along with that scrupulosity went an unbridled anger at any sign of extravagance or heedless expenditure in us. For years and years—during which time his profits were based on enormous machine and furniture sales to the Egyptian government, the British army, and large corporations like Shell and Mobil Oil—he would fire at us, saying, “Do you realize how many pencils I have to sell before I can make the fifty piasters you squandered on cakes at the club?” I really believed this amazing fiction until I was about twenty-one; I clearly remember challenging him with “What pencils are you talking about? You don’t sell pencils; you sell Monroe calculators and make thousands of pounds in one sale.” That stopped him, although the sly smile on his face suggested to me that in spite of himself he enjoyed being bested that once.

Because he literally made the business and came to be its exclusive owner, my father was, and in every sense acted the part of, the sole proprietor. As a result, nothing escaped his scrutiny, no detail was too small for him to know about, no corner of his office, showrooms, factories, workshops was exempt from critical examination. Business started at eight a.m., ended for lunch at one, reopened at four (in summer, in winter at three-thirty) and shut at seven-thirty; Saturday was half-day, and Sunday the weekly holiday. My father always appeared at nine-thirty, never in the afternoon. On feast days he always had the American flag hoisted, a habit that infuriated a visiting American Orientalist whom I knew from Princeton, who lectured me (I don’t think he was ever able to get past the various obstacles to actually see, much less meet, my father) on how inappropriate this was: “This is Egypt,” he said tautologically. “Flying that flag is an insult to Egyptians.” To his
many Egyptian employees, however, my father seemed like a natural presence. He knew all his clients and in a pinch would appear and take over from a flagging salesman. But it was his powerfully impressive frame standing anywhere on the premises on Sharia Abdel Khalek Sarwat, or in his offices at Sharia Sherif, that communicated something I never ever possessed, a sense of deep, unchallengeable ownership.

I was the outsider, the passing stranger. Of course, all the staff, even the most senior, referred to me as “Mister Edward,” but I always found the title both ludicrous and embarrassing. I could not refer to the SSCo with proprietary adjectives like “us” and “our,” and I was never given any specific thing to do there. I felt that my father wanted me to work with him as his son, but it is extraordinary that during that entire year I would drive my car alone to the place at eight, spend the whole day in the shop and office, be there alone in the afternoon, and do all this without any specific assignment to fill, no job to get done, no department or service to be responsible for. I’d ask him for something to do on a regular basis and he would always say, “It’s enough for me that you’re there.” Even my mother would once in a while remonstrate with this extraordinarily vague, even in a sense dismissive, idea of a mission—after all I
did
already have a Princeton B.A. and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa—but to no avail. “It’s enough for me that you’re there!”

By Christmas I started coming in to “work” in the morning later and later. I would spend my afternoons alone in his office while he was playing bridge at the club; I would either read—I remember I spent a week reading all through Auden, another leafing through the Pléiade edition of Alain, still another puzzling through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, yet another reading Freud—or I would write poetry (some of which I published in Beirut), music criticism, or letters to various friends. By late January I started to stay home to practice the piano. My father, however, remained serenely unperturbed. I was far too uncertain to challenge him, and for reasons I still have not fully come to terms with, I didn’t feel like the oldest, indeed the only, son, actually entitled to property from him. SSCo was never mine. He paid me what was then the considerable monthly salary of two hundred Egyptian pounds during that year and insisted that on the last day of each month I should stand in line with the other employees, sign the book (for tax
purposes I was called “Edward Wadie”), and get my salary in cash. Invariably when I came home he would very courteously ask me for the money back, saying that it was a matter of “cash flow,” and that I could have whatever money I needed. “Just ask,” he said. And of course I dutifully did, ever in bondage to him.

It was his money, after all, his business, his work. Those facts made such an impression on me that I could only feel like a useless appendage to him, “the son,” as I imagined his employees to be calling me. What came in and out of the business had nothing to do with me at all: I just happened to be there when I was, but the commerce continued as it had all along, without me. I was useful to him on occasion, most notably in the summer of 1960 when Nasser’s “Arab socialism” meant that foreign hard-currency transactions and the imports that they were intended for were forbidden, and my father had to resort to complicated triple or quadruple barter export agreements, involving, say, Egyptian peanuts sold to Rumania, which in turn bought locomotives from France, which in turn allowed the additional export of franking machines to my father in Egypt. I tried to follow these arrangements, but could not: my father could do all the figuring in his head (plus conversion rates, commissions, fluctuating dollar prices) while his favorite middleman, Albert Daniel, would sit across from him with a pocket calculator. They would make the deal, and I would just watch, wondering how legal all this was, since it was clearly designed to circumvent the inconvenience and obstacles placed in the way of importers like my father. He had already made the switch to locally produced steel office furniture, for instance, but still needed to get hold of the raw material from abroad: for this, even more complicated machinations were necessary, but he was up to the task, and the materials were soon to be had.