Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (17 page)

Nick caught up with me. I was too out of breath to fight him off. He denied everything:
No, no, no … there was nothing I could do about her … it didn’t happen … you’ve got to believe me! I could never be that person. I love you. I love you! Carly, Carly … it’s not what it seems … I swear …
And like so many blind, determined fools, I took his version to be the truth—or maybe, I should say, my character did. In the movie plot coursing through my head, I desperately needed to maintain Nicky’s and my status quo. I had chosen to be blind so many times already, a choice I would find myself making again and again, for the rest of my life, in other forms, with other people. But on the beach on the Vineyard that day, I told myself that I had to believe Nick, that Nini was crazy, and that Nick didn’t love or even like her all that much. I wondered how long Daddy had believed Mommy.

*   *   *

During my time at Sarah Lawrence, I continued commuting to Greenwich Village, meeting up with Lucy in front of Cornell Nursing School on East Sixty-ninth Street, the two of us taking a cab down to the Bitter End or to the other venue we played, the Gaslight. The Simon Sisters were the warm-up act for major up-and-coming performers like Bill Cosby, Dick Cavett, Woody Allen, Johnny Carson, and Joan Rivers, all rising stars on the downtown comedy circuit. As for us, we were two sisters who could harmonize like the Everly Brothers, with major-seventh chords thrown in just to be weird. We stood there, unmoving, onstage, in our matching dresses. Fred Weintraub, the owner of the Bitter End, introduced us—“The Angelic Voices of the Simon Sisters”—and then we’d break nervously into song.

Who doesn’t react to being loved by a mass of appreciative people? I was no exception. All my college friends came down to see us, and my mother and other family members were in the audience sometimes, too. People told me I had a commanding stage presence and that I sang naturally. Mommy loved our songs, but always offered one small criticism or another along the lines of “Your voices weren’t loud enough.” Typically, the Simon Sisters played short sets, five songs in all, closing with “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.” We opened for some seriously talented music acts, rising successes like the Tarriers, Judy Henske, Judy Collins, Randy Newman, and other solo folk musicians and groups. One night, when Woody Allen asked us both to critique his nightly stand-up routines, we did, handing him actual notes! By now, Lucy and I had started taking ourselves quite seriously.

At some point, we recorded “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” which became a hit in San Francisco—records have to break out
somewhere
, and some northern California deejay clearly loved our record—and it began climbing the national charts. If Lucy and I had been around to promote it, we were assured that with enough live performances, we could end up with a Top 20 record. But I couldn’t leave Sarah Lawrence in the middle of my freshman year, and Lucy was already at nursing school. I was also daunted by the idea of being away from Nick for a year. For me, at least, romance mattered more than fame and fortune in the costume of a “sister act.”

By the fall of 1964, Nick had graduated from Harvard and was preparing to go to Greece and England on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship. Lucy and I were on the road touring East Coast clubs and college campuses. I was attempting to keep up with my classes at Sarah Lawrence while getting more and more entrenched in music. It took us less than a week to record our first album,
The Simon Sisters: Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod
. I can credit the fact that our pitch was so good, and our total accompaniment was ourselves, one guitarist and one bass player. Our budget was less than five thousand dollars.

I remember waiting impatiently for the record to come out. I met Lucy at nursing school, and together we raced downtown. First we went to Harold Leventhal’s office, where he gave us good news: the first album review had come in and it was actually good. Next, we ran over to the Doubleday record store—the three big record stores back then were Doubleday, Hudson Records, and Sam Goody’s—and the first time we saw our record, Lucy and I jumped up and down and hugged each other. Then we each went into a different listening booth, put on headphones, took them off, then screamed and started jumping up and down again. I couldn’t have been more excited by the idea of the Simon Sisters’ first record (would Daddy be proud?). My excitement would always turn, to be replaced by a fear of appearing onstage and having to talk in between songs.

Over the next few days, Dave Kapp, the president of Kapp Records, our label, showered us with grilled-cheese sandwiches and Trailways bus tickets, and sent Lucy and me touring all over the East Coast and as far south as Knoxville, Tennessee. This was challenging, considering that both of us were in school, so our touring took place exclusively on the weekends. Wherever we went, we wore matching red dresses created by a Lexington Avenue tailor. Most of the time, Lucy and I served as the opening act for one boy group or another, typically attired in dark matching jackets and khaki pants—the Bitchin’ Banjo Brothers or something like that—though occasionally the Simon Sisters were the main act. Better yet, our repertoire was growing. We were writing some songs of our own, and harmonizing new arrangements of classic folk tunes, as both Lucy and I had, and still have, a spooky ability to harmonize to melodies we didn’t yet know. Lucy, I knew, would always travel to a fourth or a fifth above me, and I would adjust my voice until it landed in the right place. She and I spent hours with our guitars, with whatever new albums we’d just bought and some sheet music. Occasionally I would remember I was still a college student, but it was always a battle to return to Sarah Lawrence.

One night, Odetta came to see us sing. Lucy and I were performing in western Massachusetts, at the smaller of the two venues inside the Lenox Inn, with Odetta herself performing at the larger one. We had met after her show, and she told us, “Maybe I’ll come see you tonight.” It probably goes without saying that I worked myself into a tizzy. Lucy and I went onstage that night only to see Odetta sitting in the front, and I proceeded to lose control onstage, fainting—quite literally—onto her table. When I finally came to, I looked up to find Odetta fanning me backstage, me supine on the floor.

It took a lot of shows, and a lot of positive feedback, for me to feel at all comfortable. But with Lucy beside me, I knew that if fear overwhelmed me, I could always rely on her to step in until the panic skittered past. I worried less about stammering onstage. I was able to introduce songs, and even tell stories, with a fluidity that always surprised me. I had no explanation for my stop-start eloquence, and remember telling myself that if I ran into any problems, I could always take a long pause. My fear was unpredictable, too. One night, Lucy and I were singing in a college gymnasium when someone called in a bomb scare, and never in my life did I feel more peaceful or self-contained, more capable of reassuring other people. Which isn’t to say that being onstage wouldn’t be a tricky business for the rest of my life. I was always on the verge of implosion, of humiliating myself, of awakening the Beast.

The question was: What was next?

*   *   *

Back and forth to Sarah Lawrence, I was frankly enjoying my newfound status on campus, thanks to an appearance that Lucy and I made on the TV show
Hootenanny
. Kids now looked up to me. Professors gave me new leeway and accepted essays that were two days late. I got a lot of good feedback, and was a bit dazzled by it, too. Nick had already left for Europe, and I missed him terribly. During my Thanksgiving break, my family confronted me. Mommy insisted, rightly, that it was a waste of money for me to treat Sarah Lawrence as a “drop-in” part of my life. For her part, Lucy wanted to keep on playing the clubs, get the applause, make some money, and record a second album. In spite of my intermittent fear of performing, I was all too happy to follow her lead. As for the idea of me returning to Sarah Lawrence for the post-Christmas winter semester, the fact of the matter was that from kindergarten on up, I’d never wanted to go to school—ever. Now it was just more inconvenient.

So when Nick invited me to join him in Europe, it was the right idea at the right time. Plus, could anything be more romantic?

First, though, I had to get through the holidays, which I spent in Riverdale with my family. After Daddy died, Mommy had sold the Stamford property—a whisking, sudden packing-up of cartons and round trips to the Salvation Army. Gone was the white-columned Georgian Tara-like house. Gone was the childhood of midnight whispers and games beneath the apple trees. How that fantastic house in Stamford could be someone else’s home was unbelievable to me. Who would find those secret notes tucked behind a shutter or in between pine floorboards? Who, I wondered, would stumble on the clue that would reveal the hiding place of the next note, which would lead to the key that opened the mysterious box, inside which a stranger would find a diary with its index of code names with, just perhaps, a tiny arrow pointing to a disheveled strip of wallpaper that read “I hate Hark” or “Please God, make Hark go to war”?

With the Stamford house gone, what was “home” for me anymore if not Nick? My fantasy, which would become a reality, was that my guitar and I would hop on an ocean liner and disembark in France or England, and Nick would be there to greet me. We would pick up a sports car and drive south to the Alpes-Maritimes, stopping along the way for some wine and a loaf of French bread, and I would play my guitar and sing songs for Nick and Nick alone. Adrift in those daydreams, I went ahead and took a formal leave from Sarah Lawrence, not knowing if I would ever return to college again. Instead, I would spend the next four months abroad, looking for signs. Nini was in the past. Once again Nick was my darling, my safe person. Moreover, going to Europe would give me the perspective on whether I should finish college in the first place. In Europe, I could take a leave from singing while glancing at road signs, exotic graffiti, messages in bottles, and tea leaves in Gypsies’ cups.

*   *   *

When I arrived in Southampton to find Nick waiting for me under a doorway arch, the two of us literally buckled in each other’s arms, each of us secretly primed to imitate the finer details of the American expatriate life. No Michelin Guides for us! I had it in mind to buy my first tape recorder to capture new songs, as well as writing the melodies to the lyrics Nick would write. Having just finished Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night
, and before that Edna O’Brien’s
The Country Girls
, I already felt well acquainted with one of the best-known, most glamorous landscapes in the world as well as the Irish voice that would influence my folk songs. Nick and I were, I felt, a romantic-looking pair, ready to be invited to any dinner party that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas could dream up. Europe would be the setting where Nick would write his novel and I would write my songs.

On a late February afternoon, Nick and I boarded the train from London to Milan, where I bought a crude Phillips tape recorder roughly the size of a shoebox. Eventually we were on our way, driving blindly into France in Nick’s new Alfa Romeo, up the windy, narrow roads of the Alpes-Maritimes, in the extreme southeast corner of France. By the time we finally arrived in the tiny village of Châteauneuf de Grasse, it was so dark I could barely make out the stone from the stucco, and the terra-cotta from an olive tree.

As Nick unpacked the car, I glimpsed the far-off lights of Cannes and savored the prospect that when morning came, the Mediterranean would be visible. It was cold, but a new kind of cold, with a wet, throaty wind blowing in from unseen hills and waters. The trees made a French whistling,
sssss
, a single note modulating and cresting in volume. Nick’s and my new home, at least for the rest of the winter and into the spring, was, in fact, a caretaker’s house on a much larger property. The second floor had two bedrooms, with ours opening out to the ocean via wide ceiling-to-floor French windows. The bathroom had no shower, only a deep Japanese bathtub. The real drawback was there was no hot water. To draw a bath, first you had to heat pots on all four stove burners, and once the water was hot, lug the pots upstairs to the tub. “Prince Charles! Prince Charles! Courage!” I would call out, to remind Nick and myself that ice-cold showers and general discomfort were character-building strategies that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip used on their poor, freezing only son and heir. Still, nothing could induce either of us to linger in the tub any longer than to scrub each other’s backs before disappearing naked and goose-bumpy into a waiting towel.

For a few days, the absence of hot water was romantic, but the romance fast soured once I developed a raging combination of three unwanted venereal complaints ranging from the uncomfortable to the ridiculous. Only a week after we arrived, just as the mimosa trees and anemones outside our window were beginning to burst and bloom, I found myself uncomfortably preoccupied with my own body.

Dr. Mouchotte, the doctor we found in nearby Nice, was a large man with big hands and a habit of bunching up his lips whenever he tried to pronounce anything in English. He had a distinct smell about him—an aroma both sour and unfamiliar. Ultimately, he prescribed what I supposed was a “douche bag,” into which I was supposed to pour equal amounts of around twenty-five ingredients, most of which I suspected, but could never prove, came directly from an Italian restaurant, so vividly did they resemble the herbal seasoning atop a lasagna.

For the next two weeks, I heated up the water on the stove and poured it into the douche bag, along with a dropperful of tincture of Turkish mushroom cap and powders distilled from gnome-filled forests, all of which smelled unsettlingly like Dr. Mouchotte. The physical contortions that followed were unthinkable. Preparing the cure took up so much of the day. When I wasn’t doubled up in pain and discomfort, I was writing letters to friends and family members, describing what Nick’s and my new romantic life was like in our farmhouse high in the Alpes-Maritimes.