What REALLY happened to Holden

In the book The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, at the end of chapter 25, Phoebe gets on a carrousel while his brother Holden, who is the book’s main character, watches her, crying and feeling extremely happy at the same time.

After that, chapter 26, the last one of the book, starts. Around six months have passed and Holden finds himself in an undetermined space that can be a psychiatric clinic or a hospital or somewhere else. The reader is disoriented and tries to find out how Holden got in there.

I wanted to give that information, to reconstruct what happened during that gap of time. I do it, not from Holden’s point of view, but from his mother’s. Therefore, my text has not the same style or structure as the original book. For example, it is based on dialogues, not on descriptions.

I present Mrs. Caulfield as an anxious woman who lies to herself about her son’s situation, because she does not want to accept it. My whole text is about the way she reacts when she is confronted with reality.

What really happened to Holden

‘Is he already in?’ Mrs. Caulfield asked, tears running down her face.

‘Yeah, Mum. And it’s all going to be alright’, Phoebe answered.

Holden Caulfield had just entered the Intensive Care Unit at New York’s Central Hospital, and, through their worried faces, one could notice his family was concerned about his situation. He had attempted suicide after he had been kicked out of his fourth school, Pencey Prep.

‘Can somebody please tell me exactly what happened? No one has been able to tell me what happened to my son yet’, Mrs. Caulfield kept shouting.

‘Calm down, dear. Holden was expelled from school again. I think this time it sort of depressed him or something, affected him in some way... The thing is, he knew we wouldn’t get any letters from Pencey ‘til Wednesday, so he just decided to leave school on Saturday and spend those days here in New York. I really believe this time wasn’t like the others, maybe he realized he wasn’t going anywhere in life so… Or maybe he was afraid we would punish him too harshly…’, Mr. Caulfield started saying in an extremely relaxed voice, the kind that gets on your nerves, as though he was calmly psychoanalyzing his son or something.

‘Yeah, but you’re still not telling me what HAPPENED to him! Leaving school doesn’t get you to the Intensive Care Unit!’, Mrs. Caulfield was progressively starting to despair.

‘Today, he took me to the zoo, and to the park, and he let me go for a ride on the carrousel. He seemed happy. But all of a sudden he got… I don’t know… crazy… He made me get off the carrousel, and he said we had to get home. He told me he had to look for something there, I think. I tried to find out what he was talking about, but you know how he can be sometimes’, Phoebe said.

‘Oh, sweetie! But tell me, he wasn’t aggressive to you or anything, was he?’

‘No, Mum. I don’t think he would ever hurt me.’

‘Okay, good. But what happened then?’

‘Well, I was supposed to wait for him on the street. He would go, pick whatever he was looking for, and then we would continue our walk. But I stood at the corner for half an hour and he wasn’t coming back!’ Phoebe’s mature little voice made a pause here. ‘I don’t quite remember what happened then. I just know when I got home, I found Holden lying on the floor’.

‘Oh! I’m sorry you had to see that. Then you called an ambulance, right? How is he now? I hope he’s fine. I already lost Allie; I don’t think I could stand health problems with another son. What are we going to do?’

At that moment one of the hospital psychoanalysts asked to have a private conversation with Mrs. Caulfield, so they both went into an empty room.

‘I am glad to tell you your son is much better now. The next thing we have to do is determine the causes for his suicide attempt. As you might know, neglecting your own health is also a form of suicide. Did someone inform you that your son hardly ate anything for three days? He spent them smoking and drinking alcohol in excess, and he didn’t wear anything like a jacket or coat. That can have severe consequences on the body, specially if you are just a teenager. In your son’s case, it produced a coma.’

‘Are you completely sure it was a… suicide… attempt? I mean… maybe he didn’t notice how bad everything he was doing was… right?’

‘It’s highly improbable. Sixteen-year-olds already know the effects of tobacco and alcohol. Did your son have any kind of self-destructive behavior before?’

‘Not at all. He was a very… No! He didn’t have any kind of self-destructive behavior!’

‘Did he have clear goals in his life? Did he apply himself at school?’

‘Well, he didn’t exactly APPLY himself at school. That’s at least what the teachers said. But he DID have other types of motivation. For instance, he was in the school’s fencing team this year, and he seemed pretty excited about it… What I mean is, he’s a totally normal boy, with no social disabilities and no big psychological problems, besides his brother Allie’s death when he was a kid. But THAT is something that affected the whole family, not just him. What I want to say is that I really don’t think it was a suicide attempt.’

‘Madam, he suffered from chronic depression, and he stopped looking after himself. We psychoanalysts consider it a passive form of suicide. You may call it whatever you want’

‘Tomorrow my eldest son, D.B., is coming. Maybe Holden will be willing to give his own version of what happened if D.B. spoke with him. What do you suggest, doctor?’

‘Sure. It would be nice.’

When Holden woke up, D.B. was sitting next to him.

‘Come on, will you tell me what happened?’ D.B. asked.

‘Not now. The whole story’s way too long. I don’t feel like going into that kind of crap right now’, a still sleepy Holden answered.

‘Come on, it would be really important to Mum.’

‘Okay… if you really want to hear about it… where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep.’

Author: Valentina Pastore