Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (12 page)

Did I want to be Euridice or Orpheus or Al Jolson?

“Go chase the wild and nighttime streets, sang Daddy.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

the twenty-ninth floor

At night in bed I heard God whisper lullabies

While Daddy next door whistled whiskey tunes

And sometimes when I wanted, they would harmonize

There was nothing those two couldn’t do

Embrace me you child, you’re a child of mine

And I’m leaving everything I am to you

Go chase the wild and nighttime streets, sang Daddy

And God sang, Pray the devil doesn’t get to you

—“Embrace Me, You Child,” 1972

S
ome things you pick up early, but there are no words for them yet. They’re simply fragments of a puzzle created by other people doing things, thinking things, deciding things, forgetting things, and not least, lying about things.

My whole life I’d never been able to put a name to the feelings I’d had for my father. I had spent my childhood craving his love and never getting it. As time went on, I drew away from him, losing myself in a sky full of many different kinds of clouds. I’d never been good at any of the things I believed mattered to Daddy. I had no innate talents to speak of. I couldn’t play the piano, and I wasn’t as pretty as my sisters. I couldn’t help but think back on the night he scrawled in my autograph book,
Roses are red / Violets are pink / I love you with your darling fat nose / I’ve just had a drink.
In Daddy’s eyes—despite my mother telling me not to take what he wrote seriously—I wasn’t even good at my nose.

There was more. I wasn’t funny in front of him. I stammered and stuttered, and then I cried about it afterward. At school I learned slowly, and aside from swimming, I wasn’t good at sports. Once, when I was three or four, and Daddy was recovering from the nervous breakdown after Peter was born—an expression in vogue at the time, which I believed meant a person got so nervous he fell down the stairs—Mommy asked if I would mind putting on my tutu and going upstairs to dance for him. It didn’t work. Nothing seemed to work. As ever, the tall man in the house whose long legs I had inherited never seemed to want to have much to do with me. Instead, he looked past me. He seemed to be seeking something he’d lost, Mommy maybe, or even his old self.

No: my only halfway decent talent was for loving people—Daddy, Mommy, Joey, Lucy, Chibie, Allie, Uncle Peter, Uncle Dutch, my dogs, and, no matter how damaging and wrong our interludes were, Billy.

I’d study the people around me for clues. Clues to figure out whom to emulate, how to dress, how to speak, how to act, how to dance. I’d grown up feeling unworthy and underloved. I wanted nothing more than to feel secure in myself—to feel that I was really good at something. Instead, I was shy, scared, wounded, frozen, a scratchy bundle of nerves, a walking pile of needs and conflicts. But my desire to hide met its match in an equally strong desire to be noticed, to be on top, to be wanted, connected, asked, begged, loved, admired.

Depression ran in the Simon family, and of his five siblings, Daddy was probably the one hit the hardest. He’d had his first depressive episode when he was a child, and over the years he’d managed to keep his demons at bay, but by the late 1940s, his mood swings and bad health had caught up with him. Like some time-bent sailor, he did what he could to steer a course through his own sadness, but the wheel escaped him and the waves began filling the boat, and by then he had lost the will, or ability, to bail water. Daddy was no longer the man he had once been—the brilliant, innovative publisher, the jovial participant in bridge, golf, and tennis matches, the host of glittering late-night dinner parties. Instead, following any number of heart attacks and ministrokes, Daddy had grown seriously ill, and despondent, the changes in him obvious to everybody and terrifying to me. But it still didn’t occur to me it could be in me too.

He seemed to recede. It was as if a sheet of glass now stood between him and the rest of the world. His illness disoriented him. Night turned into day turned into night again. He would pad around the house in his bathrobe, occasionally groaning, “Oh, how I suffer,” or “I hope you children won’t end up like me.” He would kiss me good night sometimes with the muffled words “Good morning.” Once, when I was doing my homework after school, Daddy appeared in my doorway in his by-now-familiar dressing gown. What was I doing up so late? he asked. On the way out, he turned off the overhead light to save electricity, not realizing I couldn’t do my homework in the dark.

By the late 1950s, Joey, Lucy, Peter, and I had become inured to this new Daddy, and knowing his odd behavior would embarrass my friends, I stopped inviting them over to the house. Fearing Daddy could disappear any second, I became frightened to love him, creating, once again, a perfect circuit of mutual rejection. Rather than sitting down and talking, we watched baseball games together on television, him beside me in his dressing gown, sighing, absently cracking his knuckles, his breath smelling of stale cigarette smoke. But instead of welcoming his attention, I was almost scared of him, as if I were breathing in a mixture of measles, pirates, and imminent death, all blended into one musky, terrifying presence named “Daddy.”

After dinner, as usual, he would retreat to his piano. Once music had been his joy, but by late ’58 or ’59, it was his only shelter. Joey, Lucy, and I would be upstairs in our rooms, gossiping with friends, playing with our always fascinating hair, or writing science papers, when below, like a coastal storm spinning in off the sea, the sad thundering would begin. It was Daddy, alone downstairs, hands and feet meting out his frustrations and anger in bursts and waves of Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Beethoven. Notes heard but unheard, absorbed into the floorboards and ceilings. His playing was an angry serenade to his family, to his wife and colleagues and their disloyalty, all those things that were destroying him inside and out.

At the time I had no idea what was happening with Daddy professionally, or the degree to which his morale, and his position inside his own company, was being torn out from under him. In 1944, Marshall Field III, the Chicago department store heir, had bought Simon & Schuster for $3 million, the equivalent of around $40 million today, with the understanding that upon Field’s death, Dick Simon and Max Schuster had the right of first refusal to repurchase their company. When he died in 1956, both Max and the company’s business manager, along with the lawyer René Wormser—who lived in our building at 133 West Eleventh Street and whom Daddy had always considered to be his best friend—urged my father to cash out.

Daddy didn’t want to, but it was two against one, and in the end Max and Leon Shimkin, Simon & Schuster’s accountant, prevailed. Daddy’s health was an ongoing concern, Leon told him, and selling his shares would save him lots of stress. Their betrayal was further poisoned by subtle threats that unless my father signed his name to the buyout, he, Leon, might be forced to divulge publicly my mother’s ongoing romance with Ronny, and what a field day the press would have with that. If René had truly been Daddy’s best friend, he would have made everyone aware of the conflict of interest and recused himself, instead of advising Daddy to sell off 100 percent of his Simon & Schuster stock.

I know only that my father’s life was slowly collapsing in four packs a day of cigarettes, cholesterol, a cuckolding wife, two more dollops of whipped cream than were necessary floating in his morning coffee, and double-dealing work colleagues. The arteriosclerosis had confused his wiring, cut short his attention span, and blocked his ability to recall things that had happened only an hour earlier. No wonder he was so ripe to be betrayed by his Simon & Schuster colleagues, and even by his own lawyer. Thanks to a devious decision by a bunch of pinstripe-suited double-crossers, Daddy was left out in the cold.

*   *   *

Whenever I asked why Daddy wasn’t going into the office anymore, everyone had a different story, and I never pressed the issue. By early 1960, the official explanation was that Daddy was “semiretired.” He still went to work now and again, chauffeured down the West Side Highway in a green Lincoln Town Car. Junius, his driver, would drop him off on West Fifty-second Street, wait there, then drive him home a few hours later. The names of the projects Daddy was still involved in floated through the house—
The Jump Book
by Philippe Halsman, another volume of Will and Ariel Durant’s
The Story of Civilization
, a follow-up book with the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—but the truth of the matter was that his place in the company he had founded was slipping away at a frightening pace, and Daddy knew it, too, in the same way he knew that his wife was in love with an embarrassing opponent. These things together were too much for any man to take.

That summer, when I turned fifteen, was the last summer I thought of myself as a child. One day in mid-June, I accompanied Daddy into the city, dropped him off in front of the Atlas building, and spent the morning at Saks, where I was looking for a pair of low heels. Having recently been introduced to Nick Delbanco, I was concerned about the slight difference in our heights. I was five foot ten in my bare feet to Nick’s five foot eight and a half, and I remembered Mommy always telling me that men prefer small women—both raiding my department of self-worth and elevating her own—which is why I was on the lookout for flats and low heels.

New shoes in hand, I made my way back to Daddy’s office in the Atlas building at 630 Fifth Avenue, across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the pigeons flocked and hovered over pieces of popcorn, breadcrumbs, and other obscure summer treats. Once inside the lobby, I took the elevator up to the twenty-eighth floor. But Louise, my father’s longtime secretary, wasn’t anywhere to be found. Instead, a receptionist I’d never seen before told me that Dick Simon’s office was now one flight up, on the twenty-ninth floor. “It’s a shame,” she added. When I asked her what she meant, she said again, “He’s gone up to the twenty-ninth floor now, dear. He’s got a nice big office up there.”

The twenty-ninth floor was less plush and altogether less impressive than the one directly below. There was no secretary to greet me once I got off the elevator. No one offered me a ginger ale with a cherry in it. When Daddy appeared, it was obvious that the receptionist on the floor below had called him to tell him I was on my way up.

He was loping down the hall, long-legged, his tailored trouser cuffs hanging, as ever, slightly lower than his shoe tops. His chest caved in, his back hunched, he looked like a man who had been on an all-nighter at the tables in Harlem and had come out the big loser. His right hand was gripping a shopping bag—dinner, he told me, a four-pack of frozen steaks, a gift from a colleague. Would I mind carrying it for him?

I didn’t want to feel the sadness I was feeling. Daddy looked so much smaller than I ever remembered, as if every fiber in him was shrinking, as if one of them could snap at any moment, placing too much strain on all the others, and he would collapse onto the floor. At that moment I felt as if it was too much responsibility for Daddy even to breathe, and that it was my duty as a daughter to do all his breathing for him. Yet I couldn’t. Nobody could.

As we waited for the elevator, Daddy gave me the sweetest smile. I could see his nicotine-stained teeth peeking out dolefully like slow-down lights on the way to his next sentence. “Do me a favor, sweetie, and don’t tell Mom about my being on the twenty-ninth floor.”

My mouth couldn’t find a comfortable position, so instead I nodded overeagerly. I worried we would bump into various employees from the floor below. Would it be awkward? Would they want to avoid Daddy? From now on, I thought, I wouldn’t be one of them; I would never, ever, avoid my father. A few seconds later, I placed my hand inside his big daddy one. He and I were now allies. On the twenty-eighth floor, the elevator doors parted. The old floor where he had been king. He had been Atlas, holding up the heavens. Daddy’s eyes suddenly came to life and he looked as if he could yet be the conqueror. With those crystal blue eyes, he bore holes through the backs of the heads of the men who had so recently called him “boss.” They turned their heads at awkward angles, talked nonsense, or stared at the walls—anything to avoid eye contact with Richard L. Simon.