The red hunting hat
For half a year now, atop my browser at home, there's sat this link to an article, "Caulfield Preparatory Brings Us Back to School for Fall." The story is a New York magazine brief about a pricey clothing line's debut.
"Three years ago, when designer Vincent Flumiani began his new line, Caulfield Preparatory [pics], it was under the influence of J.D. Salinger and a longing to write his own story of self-discovery. The first men’s collection, for fall 2009, is based on a story Flumiani wrote about a young man who runs away on various adventures around the world."
Essentially, Caulfield Prep is a clothing line for phonies. There are fake nautical touches, distressed fabrics, worn-in tees, and even removable crest patches. You can proclaim or hide your brand affiliation each day. The line would be a deliciously ironic statement were it not so serious.
I bookmarked the page to mention the clothes some day but then to talk more about my mom's old hunting hat. The hat is orange-red and has its shape somewhere between a newsboy cap and a hunting hat. I don't know where the hat is now. My guess would be in a box full of hats, stuffed animals and mini-sporting goods my brother and I liked as kids. But I do know the hat was my mom's Holden Caulfield hat.
The red hat is the first thing to leap to mind when I think of Salinger. Before the ducks, before the Glass family, before a first love's love of Esme, before the white-cover paperback that's my first and only copy of Catcher, since leaving me repulsed over any less minimalist cover of the book, when I think of Salinger, I think of pulling down the red hat.
I loved the hat as a kid and played in it. Reaching a high school class, I began to read the book, and my mom told me the hat was her Holden Caulfield hat. At fourteen years, I was stunned. My mom loved a book!
Yes, my mother was a writer. Yes, she and my dad read to me and my brother all the time growing up. Yes, she had quizzed me on spelling words while cooking dinner, let me loose at the library in summer and encouraged the wild storytelling I did then and wish I could recapture now. But this time with the hat was different. Here was a book she'd loved so much she worn it on her head. Now I got to read that book.
Read it, found it thrilling, understood it a little then and so much more later. "Kids tend to hold onto it," a high school English teacher of mine, Mr. L'Etoile, told NPR late today. "This is a book they don't sell." Friend Karen heard this as she drove in Chicago tonight and called to tell me.
In Catcher, another English teacher reminds us, the hat shows up, truly shows up, in chapters three, four, 20 and 25. "What I did was," go the first lines about the thing, "I pulled the old of my hunting hat around to the front, then pulled it way down over my eyes. That way, I couldn't see a goddam thing." On the next page, the hat isn't a deer-shooting hat, Holden jokes, it's a people-shooting hat. Far later in the story, the checkroom girl at the bar gives him his coat. "I showed her my goddam red hunting hat, and she liked it. She made me put it on before I went out, because my hair was still pretty wet. She was all right." To care…
Chapter 25, two pages from the end, I read it tonight and broke down. Holden and Phoebe rode the carousel in Central Park, and it started to rain. "Then what she did — it damn near killed me — she reached in my coat pocket and took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head."
