The Catcher's Glove

Holden speaks fondly of his deceased younger brother, Allie. He says that Allie was extremely smart for a kid his age, as well as his younger sister Phoebe, but is innocent at the same time. He writes an English composition for Stradlater focusing on an old, left-handed, catcher glove of Allie's. The glove is covered in poems scribbled in green ink. Holden muses that it was to keep Allie from getting bored when playing outfield. When Holden is describing Allie's glove is the first time the reader sees anything other than anger from him. Allie is a very emotional subject for Holden and the loss of his brother might just be what fuels most of his anger towards the world.


"So what I did, I wrote about my brother Allie's baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It really was. My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him."


"God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair."