Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (14 page)

On my way to bed that night, I remember walking slightly sideways through the hallway, then slowly up the stairs. The walls were covered with photos Daddy had taken over the years. Mommy surrounded by our dogs. Mommy, again, posed under the Arc de Triomphe. The three Simon sisters beside the pool in Stamford. Me, at the top of a swing, ready for my descent. I was very little; the grass was very big.

And some say he built his empire for wealth and fame

But if you ask him why, he’ll say he did it all for her,

All for her, all for her.

He said hello little woman, she said hello big man.

—“Hello Big Man,” 1983

Except for that one train ride, that summer of 1960, the summer he died, Daddy and I had always lacked the closeness my two older sisters took for granted. Still, Daddy made the largest and longest-lasting mark on my character. Our relationship may have been distant, but on a single train ride from New York to Stamford, I realized, as if for the first time, that I really loved him, and I have to believe that he loved me back. As time went on, and even though I only really knew him as a sick man, I felt as though I incorporated him into my identity. A lot of my own struggles, good and bad, were the same as his: self-centeredness, shame, inadequacy, ambition—depression. The songs I would someday write, the music I would someday sing, were always accompanied by an image, or an idea, of Daddy, one seemingly locked inside me forever. Not only that, but whatever stories I told in those songs circled back always to the same things: Love. Longing. Virtue. Crime. Secrecy. Vulnerability. Monsters. Beasts. The Underground. What happens when you go through your life carrying another person’s mantle?

Joey followed me upstairs. Bob, her boyfriend, who had been a rock through this whole thing, had made all the funeral arrangements. Joey was sleeping in a guest room with Bob, but she kissed me good night, and Lucy did, too. That night was just awful. Nothing was right. The next morning I called Nick, who promised he would come visit the next day.

The world, it appeared, could be a very cold place. The only exceptions were my siblings, our twin Labradors, Porgy and Bess, and Laurie, my dog, of course. I couldn’t help but remember a few summers before, and how, despite the presence of Billy, and Ronny, I was untroubled then. My parents’ dinner parties, one after another, like gold, shimmering beads strung on a necklace. Show people, and composers, new scores ringing through the rooms of our house:
What’s the use of wond’rin’ if the endin’ will be sad … you’re his girl and he’s your fella … and there’s nothin’ more to say.

Daddy: He walked straight—looking neither right nor left. 1960
.

BOOK TWO

Nick Delbanco, 1963.

CHAPTER NINE

the hardships of the mistral

I
t was 1961, and Daddy had been gone for a little over a year. His ashes were dropped from a small plane over the copper beech tree on our Stamford property. It was a rough period between my junior and senior years, and I barely got into college. Lucy was attending Bennington College in Vermont, so I thought I’d have a chance there, but Bennington put me on its waiting list. Joey had gone to Sarah Lawrence, so surely that was a slam dunk, but Sarah Lawrence accepted me only as an “off-campus” day student.

The reasons why weren’t terribly surprising. I hadn’t done as well as I might have in high school, mostly because of my stammer, but in retrospect I also had a few undiagnosed cognitive problems—a psychiatrist later told me my brain was like a wild tossed salad. My speech handicap froze me from participating in most classroom discussions—just finessing the guttural
r
’s in French class was hair-raising—and when it was my turn to read aloud in my other classes, I would come up with any number of excuses as to why I couldn’t. A tickle in my throat, indigestion, a terrible pain in my knee that I had to see the nurse about right away. Too mortified to discuss my condition with anybody, I would burst into frustrated tears instead, followed by even more excuses, including blaming my difficulties on allergies. Of course my stutter continued to affect my grades.

I’d also done abominably on my SATs. I was so worried about failing that I cheated, copying the marks of the girl seated beside me. Unfortunately, her test was different from mine, which meant that just about all of my answers came out wrong. Midtest, I also suffered a panic attack that caused me to flee to the bathroom, trailed by the proctor, whose high heels clacked against the floor of the gym and into the girls’ room, where I locked myself into the stall and sat frozen on the toilet seat, my head in my hands, my throat stopped up, my heart beating in my chest like a captured bird. I didn’t go back to finish. It was later arranged for me to retake the test at home, but my scores were still too low to entice any self-respecting college admissions department.

Fortunately for me, that year my beloved fourth-grade teacher from my school in Riverdale had joined the Sarah Lawrence admissions committee. Mr. Papaleo, or Pappy, as we called him, had eased me into his classroom once upon a time, thanks to his yo-yo tricks, his empathy, and his sweetness. Now, via the kind of excellent coincidence that has defined other areas of my life, Pappy put in a good word for me with the admissions committee, laying out the case that I was an “artistic” type—sensitive, yes, but a “special” girl who might in fact excel at a school like Sarah Lawrence. Half the girls in my freshman year English class at Sarah Lawrence, in fact, were “special” girls, with one kind of “sensitive” quality or another. Jessie, my best friend in my class, kept telling me how “interesting” I was, the same adjective Mommy used to describe my repertoire of “artistic” neuroses. In the face of all my various verbal anxieties, I should have considered attending Juilliard, as Mommy suggested. But I ended up at Sarah Lawrence, which was only seven miles away from our Riverdale house. Going there felt at once safe, hip, and normal.

In the early 1960s, Sarah Lawrence’s student body seemed to be made up entirely of two all-pervasive types of young women. The first was the beautiful beatnik with pierced ears and straight, defiantly dirty hair to her waist, wearing a peasant blouse, tight, cut-off jeans, and sandals made by Fred Braun. Those girls could have been models on a Sarah Lawrence runway, and I hated them all instantly. The second group was lesbians, Sarah Lawrence being one of the most liberal, gay-friendly campuses in the country. It may sound hard to believe, but at the time I had no idea what being a lesbian meant, though someone advised me to be on the lookout for girls who resembled the famous painting of Louis XIV in his red tights. Overall, college in general, and Sarah Lawrence in particular, seemed to be all about which female body could summon the most admiring glances, with all females’ eyes trained on one another. To hell with philosophy or art history—even though Sarah Lawrence had the finest professors of those subjects—we still wanted husbands, like college students in the fifties.

I was still going out with Nick Delbanco, and every swan I spied crossing the lawn, seated in class, or waiting in line at the dining hall made me think, If Nicky sees her, I’m doomed. But what else had I expected as the daughter of parents whose behaviors elicited more questions than answers on matters of sex, love, and loyalty? As a girl who’d been introduced to male-female intimacy with Billy in the darkness of my family’s pool house, it would have been semimiraculous if I’d begun my college years with any confidence at all.

I didn’t even have the questionable self-assurance that comes from having money. At Sarah Lawrence, no one considered me a rich girl, and except for one or two moments, I’d never grown up feeling privileged. Once, at school in Riverdale, a group of my classmates was talking about who had the biggest house in town, and mine, I remember, tied with another student’s as the biggest. Another time, the kids found out that Daddy was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the name on the spine of any number of library books. But true to the ethos of the Simon family, having money meant that you never spoke about money, and surrounded as I was in college by so many daughters of “name” families, I felt like the opposite of a big fish and lived happily on the twenty-five dollars a week Mommy put in my bank account. The big secret was that there wasn’t much of Daddy’s money left.

It was around this time that the dark force I’d soon identify as the Beast was forming inside me. It began when I started comparing myself to every girl I saw, feeling perennially “less than” them. My waist wasn’t narrow enough. I wasn’t as graceful as other girls were in dance class. I couldn’t read aloud in the classroom. When I compared myself to other girls, my “not-good-enough” thinking came into play, gaining in force. This is a kind of Beast, I remember thinking.

The Beast was hardly a foreign presence, but it wasn’t until Sarah Lawrence that I gave it a formal name. To me, the Beast was so many things. It began in my childhood, with my stutter, and intensified with trauma, thanks to Billy, a flourishing of a dark self-hatred inside an all-too-sad little girl who was not at fault, but vulnerable enough to allow underground spirits to infect and invade her thinking. The Beast was the feeling that I was never good enough, or loved enough—the persistent fear that I would forever end up a trivial second-best to my beautiful sisters Lucy and Joey. The Beast was self-consciousness, fear, and loneliness inside a house run by a mother and a father who only occasionally took their roles as parents seriously. Then and forever, the Beast was my envious feelings about everything I worried about not being. The Beast was, and is, whatever feels insurmountable in the moment. Its key words are
enough
, and
you should
, and
why can’t you
, with me falling short, and feeling ashamed and exposed, every single time.

*   *   *

Nick and I had fallen in love in the little town of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, where Joey, Ronny, and I were appearing in a summer-stock production of
Kiss Me, Kate
. It was the end of my junior year of high school and, with Uncle Peter’s help, I got a summer job working as a makeup girl at the same theater company that had offered Joey and Ronny leading roles. I knew how to apply mascara, but I have no recollection of how I ended up onstage in the role of a butler, wearing blackface, singing “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” or as the understudy for Bianca, the second female lead, which I was given with the assurance that I could sing my dialogue if I couldn’t speak it.

One night, Nick drove to Pennsylvania to visit me, and the hint of romance that both of us had felt other times reached a new plateau. One day it escalated, when Nick and I went canoeing on a lake, the energy between us passing back and forth. The lake was lined with weekend houses, and Nick and I took turns rating their attractiveness, earning silent points with each other as we slowly paddled. “I hope they reconsider that roof,” Nick said about a house in mid-construction that didn’t even have a roof, a remark that made me like him even more. When we got out of the canoe, my dress caught on the seat, and he gripped my knee, steadying my step. “Tell me, have I ever seen such a knee?” Nick inquired, a flattering quip accompanied by a toothy half smile. A few minutes later, we were embracing, me standing below him on a gentle rise, making sure I positioned myself so that we were approximately the same height. I was completely enthralled. Hugging Nick was a lot sexier than I’d imagined it would be.

I later realized that I’d been initiated into sex countless times over the course of my life. I had been exposed to it, one way or another, ever since I was eight years old. Billy. Nora. Mommy and Ronny. A serious high school boyfriend named Timmy with whom I practiced the age-old concepts of first base, second base, and third base. But with Nick, I officially lost my virginity. Strangely enough, my deflowering took place on the very same cement bordering the swimming pool in Stamford where the majority of my summer encounters with Billy had taken place. Where to place Billy in my context of the sex/love duet, I still don’t know.