Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (2 page)

My mother made introductions, oldest to youngest. “This is Joey…” Making perfect eye contact, Joey took three steps forward to shake Helen’s hand. “And this is our darling Lucy,” my mother went on. Lucy approached shyly, before hurrying back to her starting position and Joey’s protective hand. At last it was my turn.

“Carly, sweetheart, this is Helen. Can you say hello?”

I still remember that moment, that night, when I tapped into a new, unfamiliar part of my personality: I wanted to be noticed.

My uncle Peter had recently taken me to see the old 1927 film
The Jazz Singer
, starring Al Jolson. At that second, the only image that came to my mind was of a man in blackface, folded down on one knee, arms outstretched. Barely thinking, I jumped onto the nearby coffee table. With all eyes on me as I bent down onto one knee, my toes curled under to position my weight and steady my balance, I extended both arms, waving my hands and calling out, with as much volume as possible, a single cheery, brassy:

“HI!”

*   *   *

The town house at 133 West Eleventh Street, between Sixth Avenue and Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village, was my first home, the building where I, during the winter season, spent my first six years. There were six floors in all, with two apartments on each, and my parents had combined the two highest units to create a rambling penthouse. The style, if any, was eclectic, the rooms furnished in Simon-family Victoriana, books mashed and sprawling from cases and shelves barely able to contain them. Everything crowded together; nothing fit or matched. The children’s rooms were divided by plywood partitions that didn’t quite reach the ceiling, with single beds, off a hallway lined on both sides with little slots housing our shoes, sneakers, and boots. Dresses and coats drooped from little hangers off a pole. It wasn’t a matter of money, although my parents did like to think of themselves as being thrifty.

As the owner of 133 West Eleventh, Daddy populated our building with family members, extended relatives, friends of friends, people who worked for us, and even his colleagues, creating a close-knit boardinghouse of sorts. Among the residents was my mother’s mother, Chibie, who lived in a third-floor apartment with our Irish-born cook and nanny, Allie, and one floor below were my father’s sister Aunty Betty and Uncle Arthur and their two daughters, Jeanie and Mary (Jeanie was my best friend). Below them lived my father’s younger brother Uncle Henry and his wife, Roz, and close by, too, was Daddy’s lawyer and friend, René Wormser, who would later play a part in my father’s professional unraveling. Old friends of Chibie, assorted nurses and caretakers, as well as the building’s superintendent, Mr. Porter, filled out the other apartments. Some paid rent; Daddy took care of the rest. The residents of 133 moved up and down, from floor to floor, thanks to Jimmy, our elevator man, who opened and closed the iron doors with an accordion flourish. When I was little, Jimmy would always ask me, “Which floor, little lady?” That exchange never got tired.

It was Chibie, above all, who fascinated me. Who was Chibie? Where had she come from? No one knew for sure, and Chibie’s origins were complicated. One story went that she was the illegitimate daughter of King Alphonso XIII of Spain and a Moorish slave he had gotten pregnant. When Chibie’s mother visited the king, infant in hand, he promptly dismissed them. Eventually, Chibie was handed off to another slave girl planning passage from Valencia to Cuba, who concealed the infant under her clothes. Arriving in Havana, Chibie was handed over to the Del Rio family, Asuncione and Raymond, who, after rechristening her Alma, dispatched her to a convent in England where she was raised by nuns until the age of sixteen.

While her dramatic origins were never fully verified, I was able to confirm that until her mid-teens, Chibie lived in England, and that when she left the convent, she could read in eight languages. She was brainy, brilliant, and an utter original. She had dark olive skin and spent the rest of her life bleaching it in order to “pass” in a Caucasian world. Chibie entered into an arranged marriage with a German-speaking Swiss man named Frederick Heinemann. Three children, two boys and a girl, followed—Dutch, Peter, and my mother, Andrea. Mr. Heinemann’s alcoholism and physical abuse led to brutal fights and his eventual abandonment of the family.

There was another story, too: that when my own mother was sixteen and dating an older man named Steve, who played football for the New York Giants, Steve was enchanted by the then-thirty-four-year-old Chibie. For the next four years, Steve lived with Chibie, my mother, Uncle Peter, and Uncle Dutch in their hot, cramped, downtown apartment beneath the El train until my mother finally left home. True? Not true? It’s hard to know. Certainly a lot of it is verified by my mother’s diary.

Chibie herself was adept at covering her tracks and her heritage, repeatedly telling my sisters in a theatrical English accent, “When I die you shall find
nothing
! But
nothing
!”

I spent my early childhood in the company of Chibie and Allie, our nanny and cook, who always made time for me. I’d show up at their apartment on the third floor with a satchel filled with shiny jewels raided from my mother’s jewelry box—her tourmaline engagement ring, her pearls, and her Jensen necklaces—and gave them with a flourish to Allie, who had many fewer bracelets, necklaces, and earrings than my mother did. I knew instinctively that there was a socioeconomic gap between Allie and our family. Still, as my friend, why shouldn’t Allie have the same jewelry as Mommy? My Robin Hood–like jewelry-filching became so habitual that a routine of sorts developed: I would pirate the jewelry to Allie, who would then drag it all back upstairs to my parents’ apartment, and by dinnertime, my mother would be back wearing her pearls and rings, no fingers pointed, no harm done.

But my two favorite adults, the ones who made me laugh the most, were Uncle Peter and Uncle Dutch, who lived in the basement apartment. Uncle Peter was my first crush. During the summers in Stamford, Connecticut, I was his Robin Hood, too, sneaking across the lawn at night and dropping off desserts from my parents’ elegant dinner table at the doorstep of his little coffee-drip cabin. Uncle Peter loved me as much as I loved him. He told me jokes. He spoke in funny voices. He made scrunchy faces behind everyone’s backs. He did a dance I can only liken to an eggbeater churning, his torso twirling, rubber-boned, as he made strange, ecstatic, spasming hand, leg, and facial movements. He also taught me how to play the ukulele, on which I learned the precursors to my first guitar chords.

Growing up, I assumed every family in the world sang, harmonized, and played the piano together. Half of the residents of 133 West Eleventh Street were musical, including Mr. Porter, the super who sang “Silent Night” all year round. My mother had a light, gentle soprano familiar to me from the Brahms lullabies she almost whispered as she was putting us to sleep.

It was Uncle Henry, my father’s younger brother, who came up with the idea to start an orchestra and chorus, holding rehearsals every Wednesday night in his neat, overly beige apartment. Like the rest of the refined, upper-middle-class, Upper West Simons—Daddy and his five siblings were all named after British monarchs—Uncle Henry had developed his highbrow taste in prep school, in his case, the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan. Our orchestra, at least as Uncle Henry imagined it, would devote itself exclusively to church hymns and liturgical pieces. At first, everybody was excited to play together, though Uncle Peter and Uncle Dutch would have been much happier playing show tunes, blues, and jazz. Dutch played a mean mouth bass, and Peter could play anything that Louis Armstrong played, the difference being that instead of a cornet or trumpet, all the sounds came razzing, tooting, and spilling directly from Uncle Peter’s mouth.

I soon grew to dread those Wednesday night chorus rehearsals—I hated classical music, hated hymns, hated the seriousness of it all—and was relieved when Joey, Lucy, and I were kicked out of the chorus for mugging too much. (In fact, we deliberately sang out of tune in hopes of being expelled.) Uncle Henry
often
complained about the uneven tonality of the three Simon sisters, our seeming inability to hold a tune due to our “kidding around” and the bad habit we had of laughing “like predatory goons” behind our hands.

To me, the best part of those rehearsals was when they ended and I migrated downstairs to the basement apartment, where Uncle Peter picked up the ukulele and together we sang “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” with Peter harmonizing and me singing melody. Over time I would collect different sounds in my head, ways of hearing notes together—a fourth here, a dominant seventh there, though back then certainly nothing had a name!—and harmonizing would come almost as easily to me as singing melody.

Daddy’s family was well-roundedly musical. His youngest brother, George, was a drummer who helped found
Downbeat
magazine. Another brother, Alfie, was the program director for a music radio station, WQXR. Henry was a classical music lover and conductor, as well as a Shakespearean scholar. Daddy, though, was the most talented of them all, a nonprofessional pianist who played as well as the professionals.

Whether Daddy ever dreamed of being recognized for his musicianship is something I’d guess yes to. He began studying the piano seriously at age six, and every night spent three or four hours playing Liszt, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven. Mommy used to say that though Daddy’s playing didn’t have the technical perfection of Rubinstein or Horowitz, he played with more emotion and originality, subtlety and abandon. He seemed to relish the position of his hands on the keys, and to this day I can still picture the dramatic curve and sweep of his wrists and fingers. Before Daddy founded his publishing company, his first job out of college was working as a salesman for Steinway & Sons. In time, the piano would become his only refuge from the hurt and damage of his life, but in those days, Mommy told us only that Daddy could have been a concert pianist if he’d wanted, and that his playing was so nuanced and moving that George Gershwin and Vladimir Horowitz had told him they would rather sit it out than follow his playing. Although his playing was sensitive, there was no question he could be imposing. Mommy was proud. It reflected well on her.

As the youngest of the three Simon girls, I remember how many times Daddy made me leave the dinner table as punishment. I also remember kissing him hello and good night, but never getting much affection in return. “Darling, remember to kiss Carly, too,” I heard my mother say more than once at bedtime, as if without her reminder and gentle diplomacy, he might have forgotten all about me. During the day, with Daddy at work, I turned to my two slapstick-loving uncles, Peter and Dutch. They were my private version of the Marx Brothers, making up songs the three of us sang together, teaching me risqué language, and taking me on double-decker bus jaunts up Fifth Avenue, at an age when my childhood, and my family, seemed as though they would last forever.

*   *   *

In those days, when Mommy was still in love with Daddy, our two houses, the building in Greenwich Village and our summer place in Stamford, Connecticut, were a medley of sounds and images: the tinkling of ice in cocktail glasses, the tiny gold violins and birdcages of the women’s charm bracelets, slingshot repartee, muffled downstairs laughter, glasses tipped against lips, dips and martinis, shrimp suspended in tomato aspic—bell peals and light flashes that made up the percussion section of the orchestra that was my growing up. In his role as the Simon half of Simon & Schuster, Daddy surrounded himself with his own Bloomsbury group of the beautiful, the clever, the neurotic, the talented, and the sporty, among them some of the best-known artists, writers, musicians, athletes, painters, and cartoonists of the time, including Benny Goodman, Bennett Cerf, Vladimir Horowitz, Jackie Robinson, Arthur Schwartz, Richard Rodgers, James Thurber, Oscar Hammerstein, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Sloan Wilson—an author my father had discovered and nurtured, who wrote the 1955 bestseller
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—
as well as whatever artist-in-residence happened to be staying on our third floor in Stamford that summer, whether it was a Hungarian émigré pianist just passing through or an exchange student from Mississippi. By the end of the 1950s, Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt had both come for lunch, and Daddy had also struck up a letter-writing correspondence with President Eisenhower on the topic of nuclear disarmament. Daddy and Ike had become bridge and golfing buddies, with Ike eventually becoming a Simon & Schuster author. Asked once why he had so many famous friends, Daddy replied, “They’re more interesting!” He was not ashamed of feeling that.

My parents entertained all year round, in Manhattan or at the Georgian mansion in Connecticut. On nights they went out on the town, Mommy would sweep into my room to kiss me good night. Her smile was warm and dazzling. Her mink stole cuddled her shoulders, her hair swept upward in front, in a French style held in place by tortoiseshell combs. At five foot four, she was buxom and tiny, especially in contrast to my six-foot-five father—Mommy and Daddy had tiny and tall all wrapped up—and so beautiful that when she picked me up from school, I’d sometimes pretend I’d left my homework in my locker—
I’ll be there in just a second!
—so I could show her off a minute longer to my friends and their mothers. Mommy never wore any makeup other than the reddest possible lipstick, which she pooled lightly and dabbed with one fingertip onto her Hepburn cheekbones, and always that pompadour, the French up-do. In fact, if Joey, Lucy, or I happened to catch her in the bathroom after a bath or shower, with her hair flat and damp, Mommy would cover our eyes to make sure we never imagined her that way ever again. Among Daddy’s soaring social set, Mommy must have often felt out of place—she had first met Daddy while working as a low-paid Simon & Schuster switchboard operator—though her personality was bright, generous, animated, interested, tailor-made for the glamour and drumbeat wit that surrounded her. She often didn’t feel up to the conversation that tried to involve her.