Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  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.

  Descending from the tropically humid Forty-second Street afternoon down the elegant marble stairway into Grand Central Terminal, I held on tightly to his arm through the triangle formed by his elbow and his shoulder. I felt less like his daughter than an aide, or a nurse. My other hand gripped the shopping bag containing the four-pack of steaks, surrounded by their frozen blue ice packs. He carried his briefcase in his left hand, his jacket slipped over one shoulder.

  We boarded the Stamford local and found seats, making ourselves at home in a compartment designed for four. I stowed the shopping bag in the overhead luggage bin, and in an attempt to be ladylike, I crossed my legs under my light blue flower-print dress with the full skirt.

  “Lucy, darling”—Daddy frequently called me by my sister’s name, just as he often confused the names of his other children, his dogs, and his household staff—“do you know that I have a new book idea. It would revolutionize the way people see things in nature,” he went on, before he suddenly changed the subject. “What’s the name of that new boy you’re going out with, is it Paul?”

  No. Paul, I told him gently, was the boy Lucy was seeing. “I’m going out—at least sort of—with Paul’s friend Nick.”

  Daddy was silent, and then he told me he’d heard from Mommy that I had been kissing—who was it? Was it Marty? I tried to clarify things, though I was beginning to get annoyed that no matter what I said, my father persisted in confusing me with Lucy. Mostly, though, I was worried about how confused he seemed in general. He was acting almost drunk. He said things that didn’t connect with each other, skipped over parts of sentences, the expression on his face isolated from the words coming from his mouth.

  “I brought home a book for you, Carly,” Daddy said suddenly, “which I’ll give to you when we get to Stamfie. It’s called Try Giving Yourself Away. It’s got a good message to it.”

  Try Giving Yourself Away: It was the first time ever Daddy had ever given me a book recommendation. “If you want me to get the message,” I said coolly, “why don’t you just tell me what the message is?”

  Even as I said this, I couldn’t bear the words coming out of my mouth. Why was I acting so snippety, so mean? Old habit? Hadn’t I just pledged to myself to be on his side forever? Obviously noticing the sardonic, faintly disrespectful tone in my voice, Daddy now addressed me more directly, lest I treat anyone else that way.

  “The message,” he said, “is simply this: You will feel wealthy by giving. Giving to others without expecting them to give back to you is the most fully loving way a person can act.”

  Now I felt nothing but shame. Daddy’s hand was trembling, as it had been doing for a while now. It shook when he drank his morning cup of coffee and whenever he sat down to write letters. As the train slowed to a stop in New Rochelle, he gazed out the window blankly. Whom did he have to love? I wondered. Mommy? Time and again Lucy and Joey had both assured me that Mommy’s and Ronny’s relationship was “platonic.” I wouldn’t, in fact, find out the truth until after Daddy died. At that point I still needed to believe that there was sanity and peace in our house, however fragile. Mommy is in love with you, Daddy, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t look my father in the eye and say those words because I knew, the way a child knows, that Mommy hadn’t been in love with Daddy for many, many years.

  As the train pulled away from the New Rochelle station and picked up speed, Daddy squinted, and a few seconds later, tipped his head back against the seat, his eyes closed. Why am I being so withholding? I asked myself. Why don’t I go and sit next to him? Why don’t I rest my head against his chest, or wipe his forehead? What if Daddy dies here and now, right before my eyes? I automatically knocked on the wooden handle of the seat. To keep the conversation, and him, alive, I said, “I wish Ronny would leave and go live somewhere else.”

  One eye flashed open. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  “I hate him,” I added fiercely.

  Both of Daddy’s eyes were now open. “Well, then,” he said. “Then Ronny is the one to whom you must give yourself selflessly. By that I mean being good to him, and loving him in the Christian definition of the word.” Then his mouth formed a position that I recognized as his “This is bullshit” expression.

  Nothing made sense. Nothing at all.

  “Do you?” I tried to lighten things up, to make Daddy laugh. “Does ‘Christian’ mean ‘platonic’?” I asked. “Did Plato have all those people living in his house?”

  “Yes,” Daddy said simply nodding. “I think Plato was just a fella, too.”

  The most outrageous things in the world can be brushed off, blocked out, wiped away. You just have to want them gone badly enough. Like the space behind the bureau in Ronny’s room, like the image of Mommy crawling back and forth through that dark, airless corridor, a prisoner of love. What was Daddy doing about that? Why hadn’t he insisted that Ronny leave the house? Obviously my vision had been obscured by a combination of wishes and hopes, things I’d read about in books, things I’d seen in my friends’ families and their parents’ marriages, conversations with my cousin Jeanie, who wasn’t just one of my closest friends but a family member. I’ve puzzled over the whole situation in the years since then, but the pieces never fit. The only thing I knew for sure, the only thing I believed, as Mommy had told me again and again, was this: Sex and love were synonymous. They were one and the same thing. And I was becoming less and less sure that the numbers were adding up.

  Daddy rambled on for a while. He talked about the small office he now inhabited at work, and about how hard he was trying to look at the positive side of things. Just then the train curved sharply, and a colorful bead appeared on his forehead. Leaning in to wipe it off before it reached his eye, I was alarmed to see that it was blood. But where was he bleeding? Another drop of blood
appeared, then another. Across the aisle, a child yelled out, “Hey, that man is bleedin’ from his head!”

  Alarmed, Daddy touched his forehead. We both looked up to realize it was blood from the thawing steaks. I was so relieved. Hurriedly I brought down the red-soaked shopping bag from the open shelf above Daddy’s head, setting it on the seat beside me, saturated side up. Dinner, I was guessing, was spoiled. Spoiled: the operative word. The steaks. The day. The twenty-ninth floor. My father. His shirt. His world. The heavens had slipped away from his hands.

  As we neared the Stamford train station, I wondered who would pick us up. Usually it was Mommy or Joey. Daddy retrieved his Italian leather manuscript bag, with me behind him holding the now-blood-drowned steak bag as delicately as if I were cradling an injured pet. It was hard to keep the juice from permeating everything. Daddy gripped the railing tightly as we took the stairs down to the parking lot, where Mommy awaited us in her convertible Cadillac, the top down. In a quietly hysterical voice, I told her I’d brought dinner home. When Mommy burst out laughing, the tension dissolved, and the bleeding steak bag ended up in the nearest Dumpster. As I climbed into the backseat, Mommy gave Daddy a dispassionate welcome-home kiss on the cheek.

  Had Mommy heard anything about the outbreak of encephalitis in New Jersey? Daddy wanted to know. No, she hadn’t, but even if she had, what was she or anybody supposed to do about it? Daddy paused. “Get comfortable with the idea that there’s a menace out there.” He added, “Don’t worry, though, they’re a long way away.”

  Speaking loud enough to comfort me, Mommy said, “That’s right, they’re all the way across the Hudson. They can’t get over here.”

  “Yes,” Daddy said, “but they could always take the Holland Tunnel.”

  Mommy laughed, which relieved me. Daddy could still make her laugh, even if sometimes she appeared to be fighting the impulse. Was Ronny capable of saying such funny things? No: he didn’t even come close. If, then, Ronny’s presence signaled the demise of wit and laughter in her life, why did Mommy persist in loving him?

  On the way home, we drove past poster after poster for the Broadway production of Camelot, with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews as King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. They were like that once, I thought.

  Now, from the backseat, I thought, for the second time that day, I love you, Daddy. Nobody will ever hurt you again. He had spiraled so rapidly. Physically and mentally, he was a wreck. His wife had been carrying on an affair under his nose. His colleagues had betrayed him. He was in a weakened state, unable to act or retaliate. Recently, he and Mommy, on their way to dinner with friends in the city, had been driving past the Fifty-ninth Street exit when Daddy suffered a hallucination that he was supposed to be onstage at Carnegie Hall at eight. He became so disoriented and upset he began to cry. Was this just Mother’s anecdote?

  That night, long after I went to bed, the piano started up again from downstairs, right beneath my bedroom. Debussy nocturnes, Daddy’s anger and loneliness, his love, all drifting together, casting up through the floorboards to my room.

  * * *

  A month later, at home, early in the morning of July 29, my mother and Joey woke me up around dawn. Mommy told me she had some sad news to tell me. Daddy had died the night before. Mommy’s voice was sober, and she couldn’t seem to decide whether or not to reach down and touch me. Standing beside her, Joey was stone-faced, and the two of us avoided eye contact. Then Mommy left the room. I went into the green-tiled bathroom, where I sat for a long time on the rim of the tub. It wasn’t even 6:30 a.m. It was already bright outside, sunny, hot, with a breeze coming in through the French doors. I’d wanted Mommy to put her arms around me and scream. Instead, life was spinning—just like that—into spirit.

  This was significant, I knew. This was bigger than anything that had happened to me before. For years, the prospect of Daddy dying had terrified me, and I’d done everything I could to knock it away. Now, alone in the bathroom, I felt nothing at all. What was I supposed to feel? What was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to cry? Was Mommy sad? It was hard to tell. Instead, I thought of irrelevant things: if I cast thirty-eight stitches on my medium-wide knitting needles, how big would the sweater I wanted to knit turn out to be? Were my nails too short for the new pink nail polish I’d bought recently? If Daddy was gone, would my brother Peter even know the difference? I started getting dizzy.

  A few moments later, Joey came in, dull-eyed, and began brushing her teeth. By now I was sitting on the bathroom floor fingering the twisty edges of the rug, when Arleka, an Israeli singer who was boarding at our house that summer, told us that Daddy had come into her room in the middle of the night complaining of chest pains. Daddy had knocked on my mother’s third-floor bedroom door, but no one answered. Meaning that Mommy was probably asleep beside Ronny, in his bedroom. I barely knew her, but Arleka was the one who told Joey and me how my father had died.

  Later that same morning, Joey and her boyfriend, Bob, met with the funeral parlor staffers, who had wrapped up and carted away the dead so often they themselves seemed to have taken on the carriage of corpses. I watched them take away Daddy’s body before running back upstairs to my bedroom. Still unable to shake my own emotional flatness, I put on some makeup. If I’d had some wool, I would have started fiddling with the needles. Just for something to do with my hands.

  That night, Joey, Lucy, Mother, and I stood around listlessly in the living room beside the little bar with the wheels on it, none of us knowing what expressions to put on our faces. Joey suggested a round of Bloody Marys. “Two olives and one onion,” Joey said, and drank hers in a single gulp. None of us looked at one another, but under my lids I was constantly sneaking glances at Mommy’s face for evidence of genuine sadness. Lucy, who had just come back from Tanglewood, the music festival in the Berkshires, was still crying when Arleka appeared in the dining room. As if acting out the denouement of a Verdi opera, Arleka confronted my mother, screaming, “You killed him, you killed him, you killed your husband! You’re a whore!”

  Mommy slapped Arleka across the face, hard, though it took less than a moment for my mother to pull herself together and recover her usual composure. As Arleka stalked out of the room, Mommy even let out a laugh. It was a shallow, quivering, unmusical sound, one designed to brush over what had just happened. Gazing at her three confused daughters, Mommy explained that Arleka, as if it wasn’t already obvious to everyone, was insane, and not only that, that she’d always been in love with Daddy, and bullshit and bullshit and bullshit.

  Going to the kitchen, Joey, Lucy, and I poured Rice Krispies into bowls. I had no idea where Mommy had gone, but before long the Carousel soundtrack began serenading the rest of the house from Ronny’s third-floor room. Ronny was up there. Ronny was still in the house. The three of us sat around the kitchen table eating our cereal, the clink of our spoons competing with the strains of Ronny’s distant, respectfully soft yet still abrasive baritone singing along with “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’?”

  We were all crying, sobbing, but in between, I managed to gasp out a few words. “Is there any more milk?” I asked Lucy and Joey.

  No answer. “It feels chilly in here,” Lucy said. She, or Joey, asked whether she should close the window, and then didn’t. An oversized moth was banging against the screen. Every sound, every sensation, felt exaggerated, overvivid, overloud, as if I were seeing and hearing things through a new set of senses. After a few more minutes of stilted, pointless politesse through our crying, one of us—I can’t remember which one—let out a laugh, and then all three of us did. We laughed and howled until we were clutching our stomachs. We were crazed. We were sad. We were freaked out. We were in hysterics. We had no idea what, if anything, we should think about laughing fifteen hours after we’d been told Daddy was dead. Did we have any rights? Could we demand that Ronny leave our just deceased father’s house? Of course not. Lucy, who was studying to become a psychiatric nurse, told us that after so much pent-up tension, laughing
was normal, and that we shouldn’t feel at all ashamed or embarrassed. But Lucy was the one who cried hardest. Finally, in an attempt to reassert some control, Joey thought to start a hymn, “The Lord Bless You and Keep You.” Though our crying never stopped, it was now joined by words and music, and the three of us were determined to sing it through to its end, mostly to obliterate the sounds of Ronny coming from the third floor.

  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?