Out of Place: A Memoir (42 page)

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.

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.

Separated by enormous distances, differences in the kinds of life we were each leading, I as a graduate student at Harvard the next year, she as her family’s last unmarried daughter in Tanta or Alexandria, we saw each other less and less. My happiness diminished the more I realized how seriously Eva’s life would be affected if we did not marry. Her family was making her life intolerable, only very grudgingly allowing her some months’ respite in Rome, where she studied art history and Italian. On one of her trips back to Egypt, Eva told me, she had finally if rather desperately resolved to go to see my mother in Cairo and get her approval. This, Eva believed, was the only way to cure my irresolution on the question of marriage. I was away at Harvard when Eva arrived; she was cordially greeted by my mother, but from what Eva, my mother, and one of my sisters later told me, I was able to appreciate, not to say marvel at, my mother’s virtuosity.

Averring her love for me, Eva opened by saying that she wished to know what the objections to her might be. An understated, typically modest Eva put her case in credible and convincing terms. My mother listened patiently and, in her view, she later told me, sympathetically. Then she proceeded to respond: “Let me be perfectly honest with you. You’re a wonderful person with a great deal to offer. The problem isn’t you, it’s Edward. You’re much better than he is: he barely has a university degree, he’s very uncertain about what he’s going to do, and given his inclination to go in either for years of further study or simple dilly-dallying he has no way of supporting himself, much less a wife and family.” Eva quickly interjected that she had more than enough money for us both, but my mother chose to ignore this point. “You’re a mature, extremely accomplished woman with a very full life ahead of you. Edward is of course my son, whom I love a great deal, but I am also objective about him. I know him extremely well. He is unformed, and given his record of inattentiveness and lack of concentration I must
say that I am very concerned and even worried what will become of him. I can’t in good conscience advise you to put much hope in him, although naturally I think he has great potential. Why throw away your future on someone as unstable as he? Take my advice, Eva, you can do much better than that.”

When I reproached my mother for all this I could scarcely sort out which of her observations had injured, relieved, or upset me the most. Tactically, my mother had taken the wind out of Eva’s sails, who, having come to defend herself, found instead that she was trying to convince my mother of her own son’s virtues. My mother’s maddening insistence that because she loved me, she alone knew what I was, what I had been, and would always remain infuriated me. “I know my own son,” she would say sanctimoniously, pinning me down with her disapproval and insistence that she knew what I would always be—a disappointment in the long run. Any attempts to dislodge her sense of deterministic certitude about me was impossible. It was not so much her clemency I wanted, but for her to admit that I might have changed, and to modify her views held with such a dispiriting combination of serene confidence and unassailable cheerfulness, as if her son were fixed forever in his inventory of vices and virtues of whom she had been the first, and certainly the most authoritative, chronicler.

And at the same time I also felt a niggling and barely perceptible sense of relief that she had deflected Eva’s marriage plans. My mother’s unstated achievement was to have nudged me back into her orbit, to allow me to bask in her love, however peculiar and unsatisfying, and at the same time to get me to see my relationship with Eva in a new, unflattering light. Why should I assume the responsibilities of a family now (marriage being portrayed by my mother as essentially a sober, funless activity expected to endure “forever”) and why couldn’t Eva and I maintain a relationship as friends? Hidden in my mother’s warnings to Eva was an implied endorsement of irresponsible liaisons for me that did not have the awful seriousness of marriage and that would allow
her
relationship with me to remain predominant.

A few years later in Dhour, my mother handed me an item from
al-Ahram
, the Egyptian daily, announcing Eva’s engagement to her cousin. It struck me that Eva had probably heard that I too was with someone else and was planning to marry her—which I did during the
very week that I read about Eva’s engagement. That my own first marriage was a short-lived and unhappy one only added to the depressing feeling that I was unworthy of Eva, whom I have not seen again in the nearly forty years that have ensued.

Eva and I had stopped seeing each other by the summer of 1961, when in mid-July my father had to have a small operation to remove an oozing mole just above his ankle. Over several years he had shown it to various doctors in Egypt, the United States, and Lebanon, but only Farid Haddad cautioned him about it early on, urging him at least twice to have it excised. Loath to do anything at all, my father kept seeing other doctors, until the wound became festering and quite painful, and he went to Beirut to have it taken out at the American University Hospital. I was twenty-five at the time, late in my career as a Harvard graduate student. Later in the week of his little operation, my father received news from the dermatologist that the biopsy had revealed a malignant melanoma already in a state of advanced metastatic transformation. The following week Sami Ebeid, a young but well-known general surgeon whose parents we knew from Dhour, performed a massive excision on his leg, carving out a deep trough that was to give my father a permanent limp, as well as removing a great chunk of infiltrated lymph nodes farther up on his body.