Americans have always been drawn to figures of spiritual power. Revival preachers, family patriarchs, cultural icons, presidents. So often, we mistake confidence for capability, narcissism for strength, repetition for truth. The false prophet employs a performative brand of certainty that outlasts objective, empirical reality—the child who reports the abuse or the woman who saw it happen or the person who witnessed it and refuses to believe the lie doesn’t matter because everyone else has already agreed to accept the systemic ease of deception. The lie becomes the truth and they who wield it best become a sort of prophet, the moral authority, because the lie is the story that will come true, regardless.
The Catcher in the Rye celebrated its 75th birthday this year. I am curious about J. D. Salinger’s character, Holden Caulfield, a quintessential reflection of American infatuation with dishonesty: “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful.” What I also find curious are the ways that Salinger and my hometown Marietta, Ohio, intersect.
Like Holden, my life has been a search for moral clarity through the lies that began in Marietta. When I finally landed in Murray Hill, I thought Manhattan would be an entirely new chapter, an exclamation point leaving behind girlish origins and trading one version of America for another. What I found was quite the opposite. I found a connected origin story with many threads.
1970s Marietta was fishing on the river and Woolworths, where we sat at the soda counter with ice-cream floats. It was the Marietta Beer Barn, a funny little beer and soda store in a building made of concrete block with a giant cooler on one side and a drive-thru middle. The men took your money and filled your trunk with Budweiser and you never had to get out of your car. Marietta was summer afternoons walking over the bridge for a new pair of Levis at my Uncle Wayne’s Working Man’s Store. Marietta was also the Betsey Mills Club, where I learned to swim and plié from a one-time New York City ballerina who wielded a yard stick similar to Debbie Allen’s cane in Fame. The Betsey Mills was central to Marietta social life, a club devoted to young women transitioning from rural life to town living with rows of Victorian mansions along the river. The Victorian mansions were glorious, some built by the Ivy League magnates who established the city of Marietta, some by river boat captains. With all its small town grandeur, Marietta was most importantly family and church every Sunday, without fail, with Sunday dresses and Sunday hats and change to put in the offering plate. What I didn’t know, growing up, was Marietta’s dark past…. READ THE FULL ESSAY
Essay originally published at Eckleburg.