Out of Place: A Memoir (23 page)

I saw her only once as she bounced past me down a staircase, but we exchanged no greetings or even a gesture of recognition. My father often asked me about her, and this increased the distance between us. My sisters and I were barely conscious that our trip was really undertaken because my father was in need of medical attention; he never mentioned anything about any illness, although my mother, in her usual “this really isn’t something you ought to worry your little head with” manner, had made a mystifying allusion to some great American doctor whom they were planning to see. The reason for the journey was never brought up again on the
Saturnia
. My father played a great deal of bridge, joining us for dinner or lunch in the spacious first-class dining room, or much less frequently for consommé at eleven on the main deck. Once on board I alternated between moments of anxiety about my father’s health (which took me back to the troubling Ramallah days of the summer of 1942), compounded by his sudden jibes and lectures on the dangers of self-abuse, my worsening posture, and my habits as a spendthrift, and longer moments of self-forgetting delights in the luxury of shipboard life. I participated in shuffleboard, Ping-Pong, and almost nightly games of bingo, and allowed myself great long exploratory trips all over the generously endowed ship, which I experienced rather strangely as a welcoming, totally benign female presence.

To my delight I discovered that I was impervious to the ravages of heavy weather. While everyone else in my family was miserable and confined to their quarters as we crossed the straits of Messina pitching and heaving mercilessly, I luxuriated in the solitude of the empty lounges, bars, recreation areas, and decks. There were plenty of American magazines, nightly films, a miniature dance band playing to deserted ballrooms, and dozens of white-suited Italian attendants whose anonymity, I thought, matched mine perfectly as they kept me amused and very well fed.

The
Saturnia
made stops in Athens, Naples, Genoa, Marseilles, and
Gibralter. Except for Gibralter, we were driven around each drab, war-ravaged city for a few hours, followed by a nondescript lunch at a local restaurant, before returning to the ship and our voyage. Naples alone felt like a treat, because after a hasty visit to Pompeii, where we were forbidden to look at the “not-for-children” mosaics, we had a spaghetti lunch near the harbor; there we could see and hear a boatman sing “Santa Lucia,” Caruso’s recording of which was one of my father’s favorites. But what I most remember about all our day trips was the sense of us as a self-enclosed little group, a sort of dirigible suspended above new strange places, making our way through foreign cities but remaining untouched by them.

When we first arrived in New York the question of my mother’s status as a nonperson after the fall of Palestine once again became urgent. The main difficulty was that in order for her to have a more durable U.S. passport she would have to reside there, and this she refused to do. Every government or lawyer’s office we visited in New York told her that residency was required. Both my parents were understandably opposed to this, and for the next seven or eight years the search for some device to circumvent the two-year residency requirement was carried on with undiminished zeal.

The irony of my mother’s fruitless search for citizenship is that after 1956, through the intervention of the Lebanese ambassador in Egypt, she successfully applied for Lebanese citizenship, and until her death in 1990 traveled on a Lebanese passport, on which, mystifyingly, her birthplace was changed from Nazareth to Cairo. Even in the fifties, the seeds of the Lebanese Civil War having already been planted twenty years early, I speculated that it was apparently deemed less objectionable to be of Egyptian than of Palestinian origin. All was well until the late seventies, almost a decade after my father’s death, when being the holder of a Lebanese passport exposed her to great difficulties both in getting visas to Europe or the United States and in going through immigration lines: being Lebanese had suddenly become synonymous with having a potential for terrorism, and so, incongruously, my fastidiously proud mother felt herself to be re-stigmatized. Once again we made inquiries about citizenship—after all, as the widow of a First World War veteran and the mother of five citizens, she seemed roundly eligible for the honor—and once again she was told she had to reside
in the United States. And again she refused, preferring the rigors of life in Beirut without phones, electricity, and water to the comforts of New York or Washington. Then she was stricken with a recurrence of her breast cancer, originally operated on in January 1983 by a Beirut surgeon. She knew perhaps that the end was near, even though she also refused chemotherapy, for fear, she said to me, of the side effects. She bought herself a condominium in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 1987 and—with her visitor’s visa—stayed on for longer and longer periods of time, regularly seeing her doctor, whom she liked but whose counsel she stubbornly refused. One of those visas ran out as she lost consciousness in March 1990, and my sister Grace, who was living with and selflessly caring for her, found herself involved in deportation hearings as my mother approached her very last days. The case was ultimately thrown out of court by an irate judge who scolded the Immigration and Naturalization Service lawyer for trying to deport a comatose woman in her mid-seventies.

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 father 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.