Out of Place: A Memoir (41 page)

I still marvel at his almost superhuman recovery. I never heard him speak regretfully about the prefire days or about how much he lost or about what a catastrophe it had been for him. And the twice-monthly typed letters kept arriving on precisely the same day, as if nothing had changed, except news of arriving “goods” as he called them, supplied to SSCo with emergency speed by his European and American suppliers. Trying perhaps to penetrate the mystery of his overwhelming strength, I wrote my mother complaining that his formal, typed, obviously dictated letters signed “Yours truly, W. A. Said” were perplexing and that “I couldn’t understand” why he never wrote me a truly personal letter. I was concerned about the pressures on him and wanted some human indication of his continued and assured presence in my life. “Dear Edward,” ran a one-page letter that arrived two weeks later, written in his untidy scrawl, “Your mother tells me that you don’t like my typed letters to you, but I am very busy as you can imagine. Anyway, here is a hand-written letter for you. Yours truly, W. A. Said.” I kept the letter for at least twenty years, since it seemed to symbolize perfectly my father and his attitude to me. It was as if he believed that expression and feeling could never be equal or interchangeable, and that if they were there was something clearly wrong with either or both. So he kept his council, reserving his efforts for what he did, which he protected with the silence or lapidary style that so maddened me.

All his life my father was deliberately circumspect about what property or wealth he possessed, and now that he had to rebuild a business with a large load of debt he became uncharacteristically voluble on the subject of his obligations. “Can’t you see,” he would say exasperatedly to us dozens and dozens of times “how heavily I am in debts?” using the plural “s” as an emphatic reminder that this was no ordinary amount of debt. “Debts” in fact plagued us (as a family) for three or four years, until once, while I was in his office, taking over for him during a summer afternoon, I started idly leafing through his accountant’s report for the recently concluded fiscal year. I was astounded at the many many thousands of pounds he was making on a quarterly basis. When I raised
this with him, he looked at me with great contempt. “Stop talking nonsense, Edward. Perhaps one day you’ll learn to read a balance sheet. In the meantime concentrate on your studies, and let me take care of the business.” But it was difficult not to notice that during the mid-fifties my parents had more frequent and larger parties, acquired handsome objects, and had moved out of the Sharia Aziz Osman apartment and into a larger and luxuriously appointed one in a building next door that housed embassy residences. Nonetheless, his protests about being “in debts” never stopped.

By the early spring of 1952 I had suspended my feelings of paralyzed solitude—missing my mother, my room, the familiar sounds and objects that embodied Cairo’s grace—and allowed another less sentimental, less incapacitated self to take over. Forty years later a similar process occurred, when I had been diagnosed with leukemia and discovered myself for a while almost completely gripped by the grimmest thoughts of imminent suffering and death. My principal concern was how terrible it was to have to separate from my family and indeed from the whole edifice of my life, which in thinking about it I realized I loved very much. Only when I saw that this dire scenario constituted a paralyzing block at the center of my consciousness could I begin to see its outlines, which helped me first to divine and then make out its limits. Soon I became conscious of being able to move this debilitating block off center, and then to focus, sometimes only very briefly, on other, much more concrete things, including enjoyment of an accomplishment, music, or a particular encounter with a friend. I have not lost the acute sense of vulnerability to illness and death I felt on discovering my condition, but it has become possible—as with my early exile—to regard all the day’s hours and activities (including my obsession with my illness) as altogether provisional. Within that perspective I can evaluate which activities to hold on to, perform, and enjoy. I never lost my sense of dislike and discomfort at Mount Hermon, but I did learn to minimize its effect on me, and in a kind of self-forgetting way I plunged into the things I found it possible to enjoy.

Most, if not all, were intellectual. During my first year we were all required to take a simple-minded class (doubtless an idea of Dr. Moody’s) designed to make us pious. This not only repeated the material I had already gone through for my confirmation, but went further
in literalistic and, I must say, fundamentalist Old Testament interpretation than I would have thought was humanly possible. Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, stick in my mind: we not only read over the texts, student by student, but no less relentlessly paraphrased what they said, literally, unimaginatively, repetitiously. Were it not that my record was so good I’d have had the same Bible teacher (Chester something) in senior year, with the New Testament as our text, but instead I was allowed to take the alternate Bible IV given by the school chaplain and co-swimming coach Reverend Whyte, known to all as Friar Tuck for his portliness, red hair, and all-around good humor. I was seventeen, but thanks to his openness and total absence of dogmatism we had a superb reading course in classical philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle, through the Enlightenment to Kierkegaard.

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.