Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  Whenever I heard Mommy and Ronny in conversation, their words flew around like big, beautiful, dumb birds. Clearly it came as a relief to Mommy not to have to pit herself against Daddy’s fast-witted authors and friends. Having felt pressured to be publicly funny, like our occasional dinner guests S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, and George S. Kaufman, Mommy was now free to wallow and laze in the relief of easy agreements and dozing silences, ahhhs and ooohs and other cries of delighted seagulls on the wings of easy flight.

  * * *

  The appearance of Ronny in our lives signaled the end of my family’s before, the beginning of our after. As soon as she and Ronny became attached, Mommy’s apparent dedication to her husband and children began to fall away. Her lifelong mission—to be the superlative hostess of two elegant households, the cheerful, organized overseer of children, dogs, and assorted houseguests—turned cloudy and sloppy. She seemed to lose interest. In our private relationship, she drifted away too. Without warning, the closeness between us was bashed in the heart. There was something new and unfamiliar between us. Our tenderness, which I’d always taken for granted, seemed suddenly forced. When we hugged, I felt self-conscious for the first time ever about our bodies making contact, as if hugging her was some old, remembered ritual, both of us just going through the motions. It wasn’t just that I was getting older and gaining on her in height, but more that her hugs seemed to lack their familiar warmth. Did Mommy know, or suspect, that I was picking up a new current of sexuality in her? I knew only that I no longer made a beeline for her lap whenever I was afraid to go to school. Later on, I would realize that it was Ronny who had stolen her away, but back then all I knew was that if Daddy had never been mine, Mommy wasn’t mine anymore, either.

  With no alternative than to put up with what was taking place in secret in his own house, Daddy withdrew into his work, his misery, and himself. His relationship with Ronny was always glancing, odd. Whenever the two of them crossed paths on the stairs, their eyes never met. Nonetheless, Ronny regularly sat down for family lunches and dinners. He was a mostly silent presence. When Daddy was around he acted in an intentionally servile way—clearing the table, taking out the garbage—but if Daddy wasn’t there, he acted like just another person at the dinner table. As for my little brother, whose physical and academic advancement Ronny was supposed to be overseeing, Peter’s role from that point on was to serve as a beard for Mommy. They stole off to Coney Island at midday, attended nonexistent school picnics, and drove up to Stamford in midwinter to check on pipes that were running perfectly well and basement leaks that were causing no imminent threats. Naturally, Mommy began spending far more observable time with Peter.

  No longer able to confide in Mommy, and with my stutter preventing me from talking easily, I began confessing everything to my diary, making up a new slew of code words to prevent anyone else from knowing what was really going on in my life at school, or with Billy. Stammer evolved from famul into stanform, the word close enough to Stamford, the town, that any diligent trespasser would get confused. Ronny was Disk, and then Hark, the name of a mysterious character I’d taken from my favorite James Thurber book, The Thirteen Clocks.

  In page after page, I penciled out my dislike and resentment of Ronny—“an intruder,” I called him. I wrote that he smelled, adding, “I won’t even tell you how much I hate him.” Once I wrote in code about the night Joey, Lucy, and I caught Ronny spying on us as we were in our bathroom. Posing as if for a French Impressionist painter, the three of us were combing out our long hair and rubbing our naked bodies with oils and lotions when Joey suddenly whispered, “Sshhh!” and tiptoed to the bathroom door where she found Ronny hunched, with one eye peering through the doorjamb crack. Thinking quickly, Joey went out the other bathroom door to Lucy’s room and circled around, coming towards Ronny from the other direction. Ronny pretended he’d been practicing a random football move, grunting out an unpersuasive “Hike!” as he sprinted down the hallway without looking back. This was really quite amusing, and we didn’t know what to make of it. Then there was this diary entry: “Oh God, please make them happy, and please God, try to make Mommy love Daddy as much as he loves her. Most of all, please make Daddy be happy. Make Hark go.”

  None of my wishes came true. Still, it came as a huge relief to me when a year or so after he moved into our house, Ronny was drafted into the army in the fall of 1955, and stationed in Germany. By that point I had started to act out around Ronny, to the point where I told him to his face that I hated him, and invited my more tomboyish friends over to the house to gang up on him and punch him—often in the crotch—though looking back, my behavior was less play than misguided sexual attraction mixed with confused revulsion.

  When Ronny left for Europe, not to return at least until the following summer, our house seemed to exhale. Life resumed a mood of normalcy I could barely remember. Despite harder and harder days in the office, once again Daddy had Mommy to talk to when he came home from work at night. The smells of Daddy’s favorite dishes wafted in at night, and Mommy seemed more attentive, sitting in the evenings and listening to him play the piano—and I may be mistaken, but I believe there was some smiling at each other.

  Which is why a degree of mystery surrounded Mommy’s decision to take a trip to Europe in late October that same year. She would travel by herself, without Daddy. Of course, in retrospect, her trip had everything to do with Ronny. I was ten when Mommy left for England by boat a few days before Halloween. Ten days later, Daddy suffered his first heart attack. Even when she was told that her husband had been rushed to the hospital, Mommy didn’t come home. Instead, Aunty Jo, a warm, zaftig Swiss woman who had taken care of Daddy and his siblings when they were growing up, picked up the slack, moving into the house for nearly two months to oversee Daddy’s physical and psychological care. (She explained that he’d had a “muscle spasm,” like the ones people sometimes get in their eyebrows, or eyelids.) Daddy went back and forth from home to the hospital several times, suffering from one tiny ministroke after another, the ambulance racing and blinking up our street in Riverdale in the middle of the night. Every day Joey, Lucy, and I confronted the fear that Daddy might die, and then what would happen? Every time the phone rang, my heart shook. Aunty Jo always made it a point to reassure us that Daddy was slowly getting better, and that he was going to be all right, but none of us ever quite believed her. How could she know for sure? Why wasn’t Mommy coming home to be by his side?

  During her nearly two-month stay in Europe, I grew to hate some part of my mother, her absence a dark stain that lingered long after she returned home in mid-December and proceeded, as if nothing at all had happened, to deck the house with boughs of holly for Christmas. By then, with Daddy going back and forth to the hospital, I’d begun a new, nightly ritual of knocking on wood exactly five hundred times before I fell asleep—a compulsive superstition that would keep Daddy from dying, or so I convinced myself.

  Later, I found the letters that Mommy and Ronny wrote to each other in the months before she went to Europe to visit him, and the love between them was obvious. It was also clear that Mommy had no wish to flaunt their relationship in public. As ever, Andrea Simon, wife of the cofounder of Simon & Schuster, was eager to avoid notoriety or scandal, for everything to be as dignified as possible. Mommy wrote to Ronny that she had no intention of hurting my father, or “starting tongues wagging,” and that she would “be very happy to give Dick a divorce if he wants one.” Regarding Daddy, Mommy wrote, “I have seen very little of him, but that’s just as well. Mostly he’s more of a nuisance than a help,” adding that she was actively encouraging my father to ignite a romance with tennis champion Don Budge’s wife, Deirdre (possibly because it would make her feel less guilty about what she was doing with Ronny, or maybe because she’d have more obvious grounds for divorce). She and Ronny were both decent, honorable people, Mommy wrote in another letter, going so far as to liken the two of them to Romeo and Juliet—“They too had a miserable time of
it, darling,” adding that even if he, Ronny, wasn’t in her life, she would feel the exact same way. “Money,” she concluded, “never justifies misery and loneliness, with which I have lived many years.”

  Ronny loved her back. “Darling,” he wrote Mommy at one point, “[it has been] twelve days since I have said ‘goodbye’ to my beautiful and darling one. And you were beautiful that night, darling, as you had been every single moment I have been and I had been—or have ever been or had ever been with you. You are radiantly beautiful. In forty years you will not have changed and I bet I will love you more with a terrible passion and I’m sure the old man that I will be, you will be young and beautiful.”

  Once Mommy returned home from Europe, Daddy, officially the third man in his marriage, did everything he could to show his forgiveness, and to be a better husband. By 1956, once he’d recovered from his heart attack, Daddy felt well enough to travel to Europe himself on business, and his letters home to my mother at that time were filled with sentiments like “I love you, my Cosa.” Then there was this passage:

  “I suggest … that both you and I forget completely any gripes that we may ever have had about one another. We have both been living ‘with our own blessedness of strife’ (Wordsworth) and it’s about time to cut that dead-end kind of relationship. Given my physical condition, I am not allowed to do the kinds of things that would make me the most wonderful husband in the world. But soon I’ll be able to do those things. The way to begin, is to begin … Lovingly yours, Dick.”

  It wasn’t until I read those letters later on that I became swept up in my mother’s other, more secret-filled life; saw her, for the first time, from the perspective of my own life and years; realized, as if I needed to be reminded, that what happens in a marriage can never be understood by anyone but the people inside it.

  Still, by Christmas 1955, my ten-year-old self was mostly relieved: Ronny was gone, out of the country, out of our lives. He wouldn’t be coming back for an eternity, and even when he did my parents would have fallen back in love again, Daddy would be well, and Mommy would be everybody’s Mommy again, especially mine. My parents were intact, golden, or so I wanted to believe.

  My mother and father; then, left to right: Joey, me, Peter, and Lucy, 1952.

  Adolescence springs upon me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  splinter-happy steps

  I could hear the buoys as clearly as if they came through the radio next to my ear. It was thrilling to come back to the Vineyard. The return was more and more thrilling each time. Those years that spanned the late forties and most of the fifties we rented or borrowed a house on the North Shore, a short walk away from the village and beach of Menemsha. The whole family (not always Joey) went up together. Lucy and I shared a bedroom and clothes and books of chord sheets for folk songs.

  In the summer of 1956, Martha’s Vineyard was still, as we used to say, in “the olden days.” There were dune buggies and woodies and Jeeps, and filling up water buckets at the local well. For the most part there was electricity, but still, not everywhere. There were Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, Bill and Rose Styron, John and Barbara Hersey, Kingman Brewster, Katharine Cornell, James Cagney, Thomas Hart Benton (and his beautiful daughter Jessie, who was my idol), Yip Harburg, Roger and Evelyn Baldwin, Paul McGhee, Felix Frankfurter, and a whole slew of impressive radical thinkers and educators ready and waiting with their run-down porches and their gin and tonics to welcome you to the island and maybe turn you into a “Commie.” Mostly they lived below the radar.

  The Vineyard is famously lovely, compared often to sections of Scotland and Ireland. Plots of land are casually separated by stone walls, like a sentence that doesn’t take the turn you think it will take, but takes another way around. Sagging barns on ponds look over fields and marshland. The island gets a bit flatter on its south side, as the interior ponds and streams advance to the ocean. Turn around and then a path or an inlet leads you to a dock and a pint-size rowboat with a single oar. Scruffy fishing vessels nearly disappear under the large coils of rope used for hauling pails and other traps that bring lobsters in from the deep.

  My parents went there almost every summer between 1938 and the late fifties, when my father was less able to travel for a variety of health and business reasons. In the early, halcyon days, my mother was still in love with my father. And during the summer of 1956, the sound that the buoys made against the dock was still the “Daddy and Mommy are in love” sound.

  She still idolized him, as far as I could see. Mother was proud of her husband and his aristocratic and romantic sway. She still gave forth a natural and appreciative throaty laugh in response to his famously dry humor. His narrow but shining blue eyes, when they focused on you, were almost too much to take. His tan against his white shirt rolled to the elbow, showing only his Bulova watch, and his smile from the land of the leaders, seemed to keep her happy. Mommy loved to entertain Vineyard style. Just lobsters or clams, corn on the cob, baked potatoes steamed in seaweed in a trash can out on the lawn or the beach, and simple wine. Simple neighbors (or fancy ones acting simple) came for a sunset dinner. They laughed and sang songs and wobbled their way home under the stars.

  “Dickie, can I make you a gin and tonic?” Mommy called into the bedroom of the Leventhals’ Menemsha house, which we were borrowing for two weeks. The one that had that long flight of splinter-happy steps leading down to the beach on the North Shore.

  “Oh, that would be perfect!” (Oh good, time for cocktails. We would send down to Seward’s soon to get dips and carrots and to Larsen’s to get some shrimp.)

  Needing to make a local call, Daddy then called out, “What’s ‘Information’?”

  “Just call the operator and ask her to get you whoever you want.” (That was the old Vineyard way.)

  Daddy dialed 0.

  An operator picked up, and Daddy said, “Would you put me through to the McGhees?”

  The operator said, “You’ve reached the operator.”

  Daddy asked in a polite, quizzical way, “Can you tell me what Information is, please?”

  And the operator sweetly answered, “Well, sir, Information is when you don’t know a telephone number and you have to ask for help.”

  Well, times had changed. But just a little.

  Next morning, Lucy, my brother Peter, and I made our second little peregrination via a different route to the Menemsha market (Seward’s) to get The New York Times as well as muffins for breakfast. We went down Dutcher Dock, then up a hill, and passed the five little houses sitting prominently on a bluff overlooking Vineyard Sound. Our parents had explained to us that those houses constituted “Socialist Hill,” because the heads of labor groups either met or lived in those houses during the forties. It seemed very romantic, all the stories about people who rebelled against capitalism. Max Eastman, our great friend who had originally introduced us to the island, had written about Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin. He made them seem like romantic outlaws. I couldn’t picture outlaws. What did they say? What did they wear? I ended up owning one of those five houses up on the hill many years later, in the eighties. For ten years I spent time there living with ghosts of the Bolsheviks as I cooked clam chowder.

  That radiant day walking over Socialist Hill and admiring the tender little waves as they lapped on the shore of Menemsha Beach, Lucy, Peter, and I were aware that we were trespassing as we picked a few sprigs of this and that. Mostly, though, we followed the path, and as we approached Seward’s, I could see a reflection of myself in a car window that was parked in front of the market. I wore a white, off-the-shoulder elastic top that left my tummy bare. My hair was medium length, half blond, half brown, half short, half long, and therefore, in the end, a tousled, compromised mess, though just in the last three days I’d gotten a tan. Certain that I looked good enough to be seen, I edged in front of my siblings.

  As I was rounding the store porch, I caught sight of an extremely cute boy who, from what I could tell, was a few years younger than I
. He was sitting on the steps of the porch next to Davy Gude, another Vineyard boy, whose parents and mine were friends. Lucy called out a casual “Hey” to Davy. The two of them, Lucy and Davy, had once been the subjects of a series of photographs taken by Daddy, holding hands as they ran through fields of daisies. As far back as kindergarten, Lucy, poised and charming, had already been claimed by the class’s youngest male deity, in this case Davy Gude, who was devastatingly good-looking even as a four-year-old boy.

  Davy said “Hey” back, favoring Lucy with his curvy, one-sided smile, lifting his head up from the guitar he was balancing on one knee. As he sang his song, “Didn’t Old John Cross the Water,” he demonstrated a chord, or a picking technique, to his younger friend, virtually covering an entire octave as he sang the word Galilee. He then introduced the other boy: “This is Jamie.” Jamie could have been Davy’s younger brother. We were all tall and lanky, but even sitting down, Jamie was the lankiest. Both boys had a stringy, androgynous allure, a bony teenage elegance, early out of the gate.

  Telling everyone I had to get the mail, I disappeared into Seward’s, swinging my hips as I opened the door. This was a brand-new trick, and I had to sneak a peek over my shoulder to see if either of the two young gods, Davy or Jamie, had followed my stride with their gaze.

  No such luck.

  Inside the store, I bought what I needed to get for Mom, and then gave Bill (Seward) a dime for a vanilla ice cream Popsicle, deciding that Lucy could have half. As I left, the screen door slammed with a sound that traveled on the breeze right into the center of Davy’s note. He sang the word roll perfectly in pitch with the squeak of the door. Jamie was playing the guitar now. I pulled down just a little on my white elastic top, which had ridden up my left shoulder. All of them, including my little brother, who didn’t know the song, were singing a chorus of “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,” as I sat down on the step next to Jamie and removed the paper from the Popsicle. I started to eat it. Jamie turned his head to the left and there I was, sitting right beside him. He was playing the chords to the song perfectly while indicating to me, by pointing his long chin in the direction of my ice cream, that a bite might be a good thing, but … he didn’t even look at me. He just took a nice bite right off the top. Then another one. He had consumed half of the pop when he began singing with Davy again, never looking at me once. He just had great ice cream aim.