Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (50 page)

The three of us took the elevator up to a high floor. It was hard not to remember another elevator ride I’d taken in another building, in another decade, to meet up with Daddy alone in his exile on the twenty-ninth floor. But that was twenty-five years ago. In contrast to the old Rockefeller Center elevator, this new and improved one was smooth, faceless, frictionless. It made a delicate
ping
as it came to a stop at Simon & Schuster’s executive floors. When the doors opened, I was momentarily jolted, frozen almost in my tracks. My eyes fixed immediately on the names etched on frosted-glass double doors:
SIMON & SCHUSTER
. That same moment, as Sally’s gaze met mine, I sensed she’d just come to a new, slow-dawning awareness of who her grandfather had been.

As we waited for Dick Snyder, the three of us sat on navy blue leather seats arrayed around an ultramodern, magazine-strewn table. Ben, wearing his Lawrence of Arabia headdress, immediately began sketching an action figure on a notepad. Sally began making a cat’s cradle. Still fidgety, she began to unwrap a piece of gum before my eyes threw her a gentle
Not the right time.

At that time, I was in a career downswing in the volatile, up-and-down weather pattern that was show business. When you’re hot you’re hot, when you’re not you’re not, and I was no longer as good as I’d been once at maintaining my indifference. Married to James, I’d been moated off by the Camelot status of our marriage. People loved us, hated us, feared us, denigrated us, and circled us with their jealousy and desire and longing. They opened doors for us when we wanted them opened (which was practically never), anxious to find their way somehow inside this tall, strapping, lanky duo. A near-mystical allure of power had protected, surrounded, and trailed behind us for years, but with James and me no longer two against the world, I was in temporary stasis.

Naturally, I wanted to be on top again—to feel connected, wanted, admired. Knowing the fakery of show business all too well, I should have been above status seeking, but I wasn’t. At the end of the day, the illusion of glamour and fame is as potent and insidious as any other drug. You’re suckered into thinking you desire something you know very well is shoddy, phony, and fleeting. The problem is, it also makes you feel good, gives you a voice and an identity, fools you into believing you belong to a higher tier of people who are more fun, more sparkly, more worthwhile to be around. Most of all, showbiz makes you feel wanted, but with my marriage over and my career in a lull, I felt doubly unwelcome.

*   *   *

Thirty minutes passed. Then forty-five. Michael Korda, Simon & Schuster’s editor in chief, appeared in the hallway, and we chatted for a while before Korda was called into a meeting. As I kept on waiting for Dick Snyder, I told my children stories about how brilliant and risk-taking their grandfather had been. Like mercury, which made Daddy, by definition,
mercurial
, an adjective that joined the word-of-the-day grammar list on our fridge, which that week alone included
defenestration
(the act of throwing someone or something out a window),
lucubration
(laborious, intensive study by lamplight), and
pusillanimous
(cowardly). Daddy wasn’t only brilliant and charismatic, I told Ben and Sally, but his reputation for grooming and tending his writers was legendary. He never used false praise, either. He genuinely
meant
it when he greeted one of his stable of authors with an enthusiastic grin or a generous pat or clap on the back.

The longer I sat there, the tenser I got, my wallflower instincts receding, replaced by anger. Dick Snyder was an hour and a half late. I was beginning to feel affronted and disrespected. My reasons for coming here were simple: to show Sally and Ben the company my father had founded at the impossibly young age of twenty-five, in the hope they’d be as proud of Daddy as I was. Just then a receptionist shepherded us from the reception area into another large room, this one bereft of objects other than a streamlined modern desk the size of a lap pool. With a Diet Coke can before him, Dick Snyder stood up and sauntered over no farther than the front of his desk, looking down his Pinocchio-pointy nose at us.

I introduced Ben and Sally, adding, as an aside, that Ben’s middle name was “Simon.” At this, Dick Snyder deigned to make eye contact and even shook Ben’s small, sturdy hand. Retreating behind his desk, he seemed finally to notice Sally, too. He spat a little cough into one hand before murmuring, “Sally, you said, yes—nice of you to come,” and indicating we should all sit, make ourselves at home.

“Either of you kids top students?” he asked Ben and Sally. “You want to come here and work some day?” Both kids responded politely, with “ums,” Ben even adding, “Yes, sir, I’d say so.” Simon & Schuster was a pretty darn nice place to work, Snyder said. He took one last slug of his Diet Coke and pulverized it in one hand. Pulling his arm back, he fired it into the wastebasket across the room. He made the shot with practiced ease. A hard man in a soft profession. Along with Sally, I couldn’t have cared less, but Ben was obviously impressed. Then, with the confidence of any number of white boys in pin-striped suits, Dick Snyder gazed down at Ben and Sally, leveling one final, booming admonition:
“Well, if your grandfather had been smart, this could have been yours.”

*   *   *

Was history repeating itself? Was my own life, like Daddy’s, a gleaming surface under which the most degenerate forces simmered and fumed? Had I spent my life trying to save my father, to avenge the losses he suffered, while also doing everything possible never, ever to end up like him?

Like everyone, I had losses of my own, starting with minor and ending with big. The biggest loss of all over the past twenty years has been the togetherness of our family. Some core things stay the same. My stammer still comes and goes, unpredictably, as does my stage fright. I still believe wildly, wholeheartedly, in the power of love. I might add that losses aren’t entirely negative, either. Just as night follows day, sadness follows joy, and the underworld sometimes takes aim at innocence, a lifelong nemesis like my stammering turned out to be the very thing that made my music crucial to me in the first place.

How does a person—me, or anyone else?—move ahead, push forward through life? The answer is that none of us does, not entirely. I have simply found a way of loving through whatever absences or dejections have fallen like tree branches in my path. I move forward by incorporating whoever or whatever is missing or vanished into my very being, my body, my breath. The psychologists call this introjection, but I call it surviving. I lost Daddy, and incorporated him inside me. I lost my marriage, and James became a part of how I look at life. I let go of Orpheus, not realizing, perhaps, that I just had to get to know him before I could become him.

The shack, 1970, Martha’s Vineyard.
“I’ve lived in all the houses he’s built
The one in the air
The one underground
The one on the water
The one in the sand.”
—“We’re So Close,” 1979

Hidden Star Hill, 2015.

epilogue

I used to have a whole other life. Very little has changed in the surroundings where I live today on Martha’s Vineyard. I live in the same house, even sleep in the same bed, where James and I once slept. It’s been years since this was our house together, and I still haven’t taken down his fishing rod from where he placed it above the sliding doors in the living room. In fact, the living room is pretty much the same as when he and I lived here. The Plexiglas that James nailed into the window frames is still there keeping out the cold. It stays far too warm in the summer, for as original as his idea was, it makes opening the windows a major event. Still, I never wanted to change anything in the living room because it was the part of the house he built before we met. Before I came into the life of this house so many Thanksgivings ago and the two of us began adding bathroom doors, closets, odd-shaped windows, towers, eaves, catwalks, and circular staircases.

Everyone says the house is uniquely beautiful, like a Russian cathedral, a fairy tale castle. Only James and I knew it was a folly: a testament to our romantic brainstorming. We pretended to be practical. He gave in to me, I gave in to him. He said the bathroom for the children should be small and neat, functional, like a ship’s head. When it was finally completed, it looked more like a bathroom for the criminally insane, with a door that opened
in
, taking up most of what was already a cramped space lined with dull, gray tile. It sported a miniature toilet which the children outgrew almost immediately. The toilet remains, and now you have to crouch down to the size of a small child to use it. It should have been padded, that bathroom. You can’t help knocking yourself silly even when brushing your hair in the mirror: an elbow collides with a cabinet, a knee with a drawer.

Then there was the matter of the kitchen. I wanted a large family kitchen that I could go bustling about in, feeling all earthy with flour powdering down my long apron. With the builders hired to recognize our dream, we built that kitchen, the only problem being that we forgot to extend the plumbing beyond two feet of one corner of the room before all the walls were plastered and painted. The finished effect was not unlike the bathroom for the criminally insane, though this was the “kitchen for the cook confined to a wheelchair.” You didn’t have to move more than a few inches to get from the sink to the stove to the refrigerator, but you had to make sure the dishwasher door was closed in order to open the refrigerator.

James and I were like two maniacs posted at the gates of domesticity, feverishly going about preventing anything really comfortable from happening. I wanted a circular garden, he wanted a forty-five-foot hexagonal tower. I wanted a cobblestone driveway, he wanted individual houses for the pig, the tractor, and the dog. I wanted a pool, James wanted a pond and a windmill.

So we spent lavishly and lived with carpenters, landscapers, painters, and sawdust for most of our summers together as Sally and Ben, three years apart, were growing up. When the most ambitious addition—the flying bridge over the courtyard leading to the kids’ rooms—was completed, James and I gradually moved farther and farther apart and finally resigned from building any future life together. Still, and with many alterations over the years, I live in this flamboyant white elephant, and as I go around its many curvy steps and corners, as I move through new times and claim new and further spaces, I add up past and present and this house becomes more and more a home that steers its own course and knows its masters, the echoes of its songs, the barks of its dogs. Every reconciliation of a roofline adds to its personality, the latest overflow of books calling for a new shelf (and I’m home alone with a hammer), every flowerbed that takes off,
finally
, changes the shape of the lawn, every touch-up of a wall that has required a coat of paint, the new speaker in the tower, the hammock on the deck, the brick walkway to the guest cottage, the curved door to my bedroom getting three coats of warm-toned varnish. Ben’s fire pit down the road, the sheep shed, the deepening cracks in the beams. Each room is my life. This sky, this hot summer eve, is a new room. This is a home where I am so much more welcome than in the first twenty years, when I didn’t quite understand what a home could or might be.

I am not the type of person to let go of my past easily. My memory is too good. That’s why it doesn’t seem to make much difference if I take down James’s fishing rod or not. Leaving things as they were is a relief. It takes less energy to glimpse that fishing rod than to conjure it up. Fact is, I am still partly living in the imagination of the man who made the life I lead in this damnably difficult, audaciously original house. But how to erase him? I wouldn’t know just who to erase. Everyone identifies with being two people. One who he very naturally allows himself to be, the one who surrounds his soul. The other, the one he pretends to be, has gotten into his system and is fixed in place like a mask. He is the visiting man. The vanishing man. Always on the verge of moving away. If I were trying to erase all traces of James, then I could never look at Ben, so similar to his father in many ways; brilliant and charming, with a sweetness beneath the cutting edge of a wit, already devastating, even as a child of five. And Sally, the golden, beautiful daughter of her father’s dreams, the Sarah Maria of his song.