Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  The publisher Victor Gollancz, who made more noises than words, said to Rachel Robinson, “So, you are a singer, yes?” Daddy laughed, cracked his knuckles, and warmly defused any confusion. In England, all beautiful black women in the U.S. were assumed to be either Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan. Benny was going on at length about melody, and his surprise at how well classical music and his own sound dovetailed, before the conversation moved on to Billie Holiday and how, in general, artists gravitated toward self-destructiveness. At one point Jackie asked Daddy about George Gershwin, and both Daddy and Benny chimed in. Daddy regaled the table with a story of the time in 1928 when he met Gershwin in his suite at the Bristol Hotel in Paris. “George had a ten-foot grand piano that just stood there, for him alone,” Daddy said. “Can you imagine? Then George said, ‘Do you mind if I play just a little something?’”

  “What kind of ridiculous question is that?” Daddy asked George. “Are you kidding me?” In response, Gershwin took a seat at the piano and played Daddy some of An American in Paris, which he described to Daddy as a “tone poem.” “George was using the honking of Paris taxis as horns in his huge orchestra, as well as all kinds of other sonically suitable traffic sounds,” Daddy added.

  Uncle Peter had been waiting patiently for his turn, and now he glanced over at Mommy. “Don’t you remember when you sang ‘Summertime’ for George and Ira?” he said, adding to Daddy, “And you accompanied her?”

  Mommy covered her mouth with her cloth napkin. Of course she remembered; it was the most embarrassing moment of her life. “There we were,” Mommy said, “George and Ira, sitting in front of Dick”—meaning Daddy—“as I sang ‘Summertime,’ since they had never heard it sung in a woman’s voice before. But then, what did he do? Your father?” Deliberately, with both eyebrows raised, Mommy’s eyes found Joey, Lucy, and me. “Your daddy stopped me halfway through the song and said, ‘No, Andrea, that’s not quite right, it goes like this—’” Mommy hesitated. “And then he sang the melody himself. Your daddy actually interrupted me to correct a note! I was so mortified, I was about to run out of the room when George stopped me and commented sweetly that my version might have been the better of the two melodies after all!”

  The table exploded with laughter, my mother leading the way, and once it had subsided, Mommy asked me whether I’d perform the tune I’d been singing all morning, the one that had gotten so stuck in my head from the recent movie starring Bill Haley, Rock Around the Clock. Singing for the table was nothing out of the ordinary; our entire house was an opera, with all of us singing and harmonizing day and night. Wrapping my shawl tightly and self-consciously around my top, I thought, Oh, to be Joey and Lucy, who would have sung a song in seconds, without even thinking about it. To my relief, Joey started off:

  One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock,

  Five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock rock

  Nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock rock

  We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight

  And a few moments later everyone at the table joined in, whether they knew the song or not, with Uncle Peter even kicking in the saxophone sound he liked making with his mouth, Satchmo style. Benny Goodman roared at Uncle Peter’s performance.

  Just then, our three dogs, Porgy, Bess, and Laurie, started barking, clambering out from under the dining room table and racing toward the kitchen. Had a doorbell rung and no one heard it? Was there somebody out there? Poised for any excuse to leave, I told the table I’d be right back, and tore off after the dogs through the pantry and into the kitchen.

  There was someone at the back door, knocking softly.

  The three women working in the kitchen that night—Sula, Bea, and Lena—puzzled aloud as to who it could be: Who would show up at the back door so late at night? They suspended putting the coffee cups on the trays. Excited, the dogs scrambled together, a mass of fur and tongues. It was then I heard Lena’s exclamation, hushed, shocked: “Well, well, my word. It can’t be. We weren’t expecting you. Not yet.”

  A tall, good-looking man wearing a tan army uniform stood on the doorstep, his brimmed hat slanted at an angle, shadowing his face. Ronny. When he gazed straight at me, in that instant, I forgot to breathe. Without even saying hello, I slid past everyone—the three women, the three dogs—into the back pantry, where the big freezer was, bolting on tiptoe up the narrow back stairs to the servants’ quarters. I stood there, extremely still, shaking.

  What should I do? Should I stroll back downstairs into the dining room and announce, as any grown-up hostess would, that Ronny had dropped by unexpectedly, and could we pull up an extra chair at the dining table? Ronny, in fact, was the last person in the world I ever wanted to see again. I had thought maybe I wouldn’t. From the dining room, I could make out the charged, adult hum of raised voices and laughter. Ronny was still chattering with Lena and Sula in the kitchen, and as I stood there on the steps, all I could do was hope and pray that this whole thing was a giant mix-up that could be reversed with the touch of a button, that Ronny would simply retrace his steps to a car that would scoot him back to the airport that would in turn bring him back to the war. The wonderful, wonderful war that had removed him. A ragged memory of the ingrown toenail in his foot flashed in my mind, and repulsed me. I wondered if that nail was still there. Perhaps the war had removed it.…

  It didn’t happen that way. Three days later, Ronny had moved back into our house and into our lives. My feelings for Ronny hadn’t changed, but this time around I told my diary I would keep them to myself. Looking back, it was almost as if I’d realized how handsome he’d become, that I couldn’t put a name to what I was feeling, but I knew, too, how dangerous that feeling was to my own composure. “He really is a sweet boy,” I wrote at one point, “and not bad looking at all.” I knew, in that way a child knows, that Ronny and Mommy had simply picked up where they had left off. I was also uncomfortably aware of feeling jealous, since Ronny was paying more attention to Lucy and Joey than he was to me.

  Ever since Ronny had infiltrated our house, I had no idea what to do with my feelings: Feeling unloved. Feeling I was plainer and less desirable, somehow, than my two bird-of-paradise sisters. Feeling jealous of the attention Lucy and Joey got from Daddy, and from boy after boy, too. Upset, even, by the idea of Mommy looking sideways, with a flirtatious smile, at Ronny. The secrets, subversions, and dark spirits inside the Simon household were extremely real. Billy. My mother. Ronny. I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness. Music to dance to, music to sing, music to play with Uncle Peter, music to listen to my father play. I remembered reading about Orpheus. I started wanting to find him. To meet him.

  Three Simon girls on the lawn in Stamford, Connecticut. It was so easy.

  “Darling, don’t let us Simons bother you, this is just something we always do.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  moonglow

  I never got to witness the arrival of Ronny into the dining room. I don’t think Mommy was expecting him that night; why did he come in the back door? Maybe he did disappear again out through the screen door and falling into his own dark history. But only three days later, he was back in his civilian clothes and incorporated back into the household. He was too tall and handsome and bulky and muscular to fade into the woodwork. I didn’t know where he would be sleeping. Soon enough I found out that he was on the third floor of the house, where Mommy had also taken up residence. “Daddy’s snoring is really bad now,” she’d said.

  As you ascended the flight of stairs to the third floor, there were two rooms on either side of the landing. The one to the left was the guest room: the grandest room of the house. It was decorated in pale greens, not unlike Joey’s and my room, which was directly below it. It had two Early American twin beds that were neither single nor double. They were that indeterminate size for which you can no longer find mattresses
to fit. Consequently, the mattresses on those beds felt as if they had been there since the Revolutionary War. There was a sitting area that faced toward the front of the house, and it was furnished with my father’s mother’s Victorian couch and chairs. They had been upholstered in a print with apple red as its primary color. The mahogany wood surrounding the tufted loveliness was sculpted into the usual cherubs and palm leaves.

  The bathroom to that kingly suite was was all violet-, lavender-, and rose-colored tiles.

  On the other side of the landing as you arrived on the third floor was a cedar closet: a nice big one that had a heavy door that we imagined you could have hidden slaves behind when the Confederate Army came. It smelled of camphor and was filled with hatboxes and old suitcases from the twenties and thirties. Both sides of the large closet were taken up with rows of hanging clothes. Hand-me-downs, we called them. When we were little, Jeanie and I loved to go up to the cedar closet and play with our dolls there. Lots of fantasies could be enacted and clothes tried on from the poles that were within our reach. To the right of the closet was another door. It led to the room that Mommy had slept in before Ronny had gone off to war.

  Shortly after Ronny returned, there are some significant entries in my diary:

  July 30th:

  This evening Daddy got sick and had pains in his chest and arms. The doctor came and said he was all right. I’m rather relieved.

  Aug 3rd:

  I got home from the Wilsons and Ronny was there. Tonight I got such an inferiority complex from Lucy cause Ronny kept looking at her and not me.

  Aug 4th:

  Ronny is kind of rejecting me. He seems not to think anything of me and to not think I’m pretty, but to think Lucy and Joey are beautiful and fair.

  Aug 5th:

  Mommy seems to say things that aren’t true. Tonight she said “I wish I looked like you” and of course she only said that to make me feel good. She just isn’t sincere. She must have told Ronny I had an inferiority complex because he looked at me on purpose. Tonight we all sang songs and played records. Daddy joined in too. It was so much fun.

  Aug 6th:

  Daddy didn’t feel well and didn’t go to the office.

  In early September, Mother came down to the tennis court where I was practicing alone, hitting balls against the backboard; she was hiding something in back of her. It turned out to be my friend Nora, whom I hadn’t seen all summer. She was a good friend from school, although not really in the clan of girls I was best friends with. Nora was a little older and lived in Westchester. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure Mother arranged the visit with Nora’s father for her own purposes. She didn’t want distractions from her time with Ronny. Daddy was back at the office full time, and Peter was preoccupied with Jackie Jr. and his friend Michael Crosby and being taken care of by the babysitter of one of the other kids.

  Lucy was off with Marty and Joey was in New York. I believe Mother wanted those days between nine and six pretty much to herself and Ronny. It must have been chaotic, this juggling by my mother.

  I was surprised but pretty happy to see Nora. She had gone to camp over the summer and had a boyfriend. I think she may have been the first in our class to really have an actual boyfriend. Nora had turned a corner that I hadn’t yet turned. We watched a lot of TV. I could tell Nora had outgrown dolls. And since Joey was away, she slept in Joey’s bed. We pushed the two beds together, sprawling on them to play cards. The next day Mommy and Ronny went to Jones Beach. Nora and I were allowed to stay behind with Lena as long as she was on duty in the house. We were feeling the thrill of having the house to ourselves. There were things to be discovered. We snuck up to the third floor and went into the room to the right of the landing, where Ronny had left his unpacked suitcases from his long trip away. We tiptoed around. We opened his bureau drawers and ignored the mundane things like shirts and pants, but when we opened the top drawer and saw what Nora identified as a jockstrap, she pulled it out and tried to determine the size of what would fit inside it. I was repulsed but excited. I said that we’d better put it back. Nora wanted to keep looking. It was then I noticed the dresser was pulled a little away from the wall.

  Was there a plug back there? Nora was an intrepid explorer. She pulled the not-so-very-heavy bureau farther away from the wall, and we saw what looked like a very small door in the wall.

  If we hadn’t discovered that door, maybe my life would have unfolded in a different order. If a piece of paper blows against your leg in the street and you pause just long enough to reach for it, and a car smacks into you while it’s backing up, everything instantly changes. That’s what this was like. What we discovered was profound. My first thoughts had to do with feeling exposed: Nora was seeing this. What if there were family treasures hidden there with certain notes or instructions? Or very, very private things? Then I imagined fairy tale small people who might fit through this door, for it was fit for a gnome or a troll, an elf or a witch. Rumpelstiltskin or one of his cohorts could turn the darkness that we faced into gold. Darkness to gold. Yes. I had to think fearlessly. Nora didn’t know the geography of the house, therefore it wasn’t a surprise to her. She was just waiting for me to explain my shock. I told her that it was the first time I had ever seen this little door. I guessed that it could have been a closet that I never knew was there. Maybe it was a closet for Ronny to put his guns in. It could fit guns. We peered into the closet as if anything was possible. There was no light coming from anywhere, and the space turned left at a forty-five-degree angle, leading to—Where? My mother’s bathroom?

  It was then I heard a sound, which I guessed was a human being or an animal about to attack us. Nora was staying safely behind me. I looked back at her for a comfort that wasn’t going to be given. The room was darker, or was it my imagination? It wasn’t that late in the afternoon. Maybe three or four. But it felt as if it were much later. I looked out the window above the double bed, and the sky looked dark, too. The trees were blowing, and so I knew a storm was coming.

  “Maybe we should close the door and push the bureau back against the wall.” Scary movies filled my mind.

  “You’ve never seen this door before?”

  Then, all of a sudden, someone was very close.

  “What are you girls doing?” It was Ronny. He wasn’t angry, but he didn’t seem like himself.

  “What are you doing up here?” he asked again.

  “I just noticed the bureau was stuck out from the wall and wanted to push it back.” I didn’t breathe and I didn’t look at him, though I could feel him. Ronny was very tan. Even tanner than when he had gotten back from the war. I knew he and Mommy had been at Jones Beach. They went there a lot, sometimes with Peter, the Beach Beard. Ronny looked like Rock Hudson, darker than the dark room, and if you want to be polite and scary at the same time, ask him how he did it.

  There was a thunder strike. I looked down at my feet, and without any excuses, I moved toward the stairs. Nora followed me out of the room. The two of us were like secret agents whose cover has just been compromised. We deliberately didn’t run down the stairs, but held on to the banister tightly, hurrying down the steep steps. Nora was right behind me, and soon we were in my room flopping on the bed, exhaling as if we had been holding our breath since Ronny first caught us. I couldn’t believe we had said nothing at all. No excuses, no little screams.

  It was now raining. I didn’t know what to say. We couldn’t go out. I felt constrained to my room, as if some revelation was going on beyond my range of hearing. I imagined Mommy would soon barge into my room in her German-tank mode. When she wasn’t sure of herself, she used her eyes, which were narrow and went light instead of darker when she squinted. They could terrify me. But she didn’t come in.

  We settled down, and I suggested we write letters, since I had four or five to answer. I had some extra postcards of the fishing boats that lined the Menemsha harbor from our time on the Vineyard. We started to write, but neither of us could get it out of our minds that the
re might be some punishment coming. I also thought of the little door, the dark hole of the nightmare. What was all that about? Did I expect an explanation, or would I be preempted by an explosion from the grown-ups? Instead, an hour passed, and the rain came and got harder and disappeared completely, and then came back again.

  * * *

  Around six thirty, Mother, trying to arrange her attitude, came in my room. I could read the discomfort on her face. I was already into the letter I was writing to my friend Jessie, telling her how annoyed I was that Nora was there, using a code name for Nora, of course. Another little lie. I wanted to erase the whole impression of what had happened in the last four hours. Then my mother said, “Dinner in five minutes! Mac and cheese!” as if everything was normal.

  Nora and I changed out of our Bermuda shorts and put on skirts with matching tops. She wore a red-and-white plaid short-sleeved shirt, and probably a bra under that. The dress rules were flexible on nights when it was just family. This was an in-between night. Nora was a guest, but not one who required formality. She took a lipstick out of her suitcase, which was inside its own little pouch. She opened it up and it was fire-engine red, like her shirt. She went to the mirror over the dresser and carefully applied it to her ridiculously Cupid’s-bow-shaped lips. I say ridiculously because I had never seen lips like that in person, only in movie magazines. I too put on lipstick, and we both—though we could have spent hours on the details of our burgeoning beauty—quickly fixed our hair. I put mine into a ponytail. Nora turned upside down from the waist and brushed her long, shiny, chestnut brown hair, which had the unique ability to shape itself into a perfect wedge when she turned upright. We generated the kind of energy that adolescent girls have a premium on.