Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (51 page)

Recently, in one of the compartments in the guitar closet, I found a little assemblage of James’s. Guitar strings, bits of twine, two or three burned-out matches, a pair of grandpa glasses with one lens missing, and a Polaroid snapshot of me. Except for the picture, it was a fairly typical pile of James’s. Probably the detritus of a pocket that got too full. He emptied his pockets almost at random, anywhere he happened to be, when they became too crammed. Their contents now reveal to me the pain he was in. Not so much the individual items, but more how the piles themselves were so unrelated to each other. James was never like those men who empty their pockets each day onto the same bureau top until their wives come along to sweep or tidy everything up. No, James’s assemblages would materialize on top of the fridge, beside a bed, at rest on a window ledge. What I once saw as a sort of hectic masculine jubilee, I now see as something terribly poignant. Maybe he wanted me to make some sense out of these offerings, to decipher a puzzle piece in the bigger jigsaw.

The Polaroid I recognized as one James took the year after we got married, the summer we went to Vienna. I was sitting across from him outdoors at the hotel café, eating Sacher torte and drinking café au lait, my pregnancy making me ravenous: Sally on her way. “Come to me my melon-bellied baby,” James would sing, looking to see if he could detect the minute progress every day of our ripening fruit. I never liked it when James took the camera from me. He’d take too long to focus or frame, and I got self-conscious waiting for the snap. He put that Polaroid snapshot in our scrapbook, and then one day it was no longer there. He must have removed it like a kidnapper with no obvious motive.

It always amazes me that we can look right past something that finally smacks us in the face. That blind spot. How could I for years have overlooked the chaos—the spidery string-ends and ash-clumps James accumulated; little bits of hope he thought he could piece together. But damn, if it didn’t move me something fierce to see that old Polaroid of me in the pile. Me wearing that attempted mirror grin, unsure without the mirror. Why did he add
that
to his pile of pain? That clutter and confusion. The tribulations of our remorse. He never really criticized me, he just grew cold. The heartbeat went out of our house, the rhythm went out of our romance, but so what? In life that happens, doesn’t it? You just have to remember to breathe. But our breathing became irregular and strained, and instead of managing a peaceful farmyard, we found that we had corralled a wild animal. When it broke loose, it jumped the fence and got out the gate.

*   *   *

When we made our parting official, neither of us thought we could stay in this house. But Sally and Ben had attachments that went beyond the ends of the land here in these hills and valleys and wooded trails, pools and ponds and circle gardens, trees where they began to climb and collect the apples in August.

I tried to create a new bedroom out of the space Kate had been using as her bedroom when I first arrived in December 1971. In the following years, it had turned into a playroom. Moving to the new wing seemed to make good sense. The room was like a great big barn, with a peaked roof, a hexagonal bright red stained-glass window and a circular staircase leading to the loft where James and I slept for at least the first two years. This was the same room where James recorded his album
One Man Dog
, with my favorite song of his, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.” The band and gear lay just a few feet below the bed. All those Orpheus-like men making that jazz, those beats, the melodies, and words, just underneath my head. It wasn’t all that different from Daddy playing the piano below the floorboards of Joey’s and my bedroom in Stamford. Times, periods, decades that feel like no more than a few seconds ago in the appalling span of years.

Out of that music room I tried to make myself a new bedroom. Something a little more feminine, with my old dolls playing house with Sally’s new ones. Attempting to create a soft-toned ambience, I treated the hexagonal window to new violet-colored glass and installed flowered chintz to frame the French doors. I brought in a lilac-colored carpet, wicker lamps, and a brass bed with a deep purple embossed velvet bedspread.

This all fit as uniquely as a powdered, sweet-scented seventeenth-century courtesan’s wig on the head of a stable boy. The experiment failed, and I let the guests have it, moving back down the long bridge over the courtyard to the old bedroom, which still leads up two flights to the top of the tower. A different division of the museum. This is the very tower where the kids and their friends wandered around nooks, angles, and dark-stained beams, up the two staircases to that peak of six angular glass windows that fracture six spaces of our sky. Now just as we did when the trees were all still short and spiky, we come to its zenith to watch shooting stars zipper through the blackness. The shack is still a work in progress.

*   *   *

Since our divorce in 1983, James and I both have lives that we work at in our own ways. Many relationships have come and gone, with most remaining solidly entrenched in the glad, grateful part of my memory. Over the years, I’ve learned something that has made my life easier, more honest and satisfying: I’ve stopped trying to stop loving. If the rules decree that you are allowed to love only if that love is reciprocated, then whoever made up those rules is cutting an important part of their authenticity away. The commonly accepted belief that once you begin a new life, or move on, you must stop loving someone, has nothing to do with your own private heart. That heart might have been broken, but brokenness doesn’t stop it from loving. It has nothing to do with masochism, and it’s not a conscious decision either. How can you not love a person whose genes are in the two people, your children, you love most in the world?

Looking back, I made lots of mistakes. I remember and have made peace with each one, just as I forgive James for anything he may have done or not done. I replace any unhappy, hurtful memories with those of music and joy and the perfect fourths and the shared genes and this house on the hill and the things scattered around the house that remind me that we are all ever
only
stewards of something larger than ourselves. I am deeply lucky to have continued to build a family home on this land.

The Vineyard will always be home for me. Even on charcoal-colored, dismal days, what do you do when where you live is home? How can I possibly pretend anyplace else would come close to looking or feeling the same? I’ve always especially loved the trees here in the middle of the forest. Some have grown extremely tall, and are home to thousands of birds that nestle and hide in high branches, singing songs I try to learn and communicate back to them. Whether they think I’m a bird myself is in question, but either way we have a close relationship. The Vineyard and Hidden Star Hill in particular are part of my family’s history and rootedness, from fainting at the fair as a baby, the smell of the honeysuckle on the path to the North Road, to meeting Davy Gude, Jamie Taylor eating half of my vanilla pop, running down the splinter-happy steps away from Nick, living and loving and writing songs in this house. So many of them. Maybe a hundred songs. Some of them anyone might be proud of.

*   *   *

Orpheus, that lifelong boy, comes and goes, darting from star to twig to beam, landing lightly, taking up no space at all, as is his habit, with his bony, delicate ways, his starry beauty, his hands absorbed in melodies forged from skin and bone and strings. Sometimes he shows up with a rustle, a little jump, so graceful and soft I can barely believe there’s anyone in the orchard. Other times he heaves a single brown leg over an outstretched branch and settles in for a while, until the days and the notes in my head jumble together long enough to find one song, or ten songs, or twenty. Then he’s gone again, his speed dreams lighting the way, pouring himself through the warm night like my old childhood friends, Mr. Hicks, Meany, and Ha Ha Ginsberg. He’s not the only one. On this property, especially in the summer, there are still boys in the trees—Ben, or my grandson, or the thick-trousered man who’s kind enough to saw off the top branches of the nearby wisteria that winds itself up the perfectly well-established oak. Together the two tangle, to veil the view of the stars from my bedroom window. But I don’t wait for Orpheus to come anymore. What would be the sense in that? Wait long enough for anyone to show up and you forget that all the things you ever longed for, all those impossible gods, were inside you the whole time. Give me a sound, give me an ocean, maybe even a large pond. Give me just enough forgetfulness as my opium. I can’t think of a nicer state of mind in which to begin anew.

Give me a sound, give me an ocean …

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A special thank-you to Ken Burns.

In my memoir I have focused in on my childhood and my early life. Let’s say age five until thirty-five. In reading and re-reading my old diaries and letters, I discovered certain patterns having to do with love, family, lies, and commitments. As I came out of childhood and into becoming a responsible adult, I looked to my parents and siblings as role models, wanting to find the truth, and to see who I was in this family of mine and in the greater world at large. But as my parents drifted further and further onto their own paths, still pretending it was the “same” path, I watched them leave what once was a healthy place to raise a family, and begin the lie that closed in on all of us. The way it closed in on me and made me so preoccupied with my “lack of,” so unsure of my strengths, is the subject of this book.

Just as fascinating was how what went on revealed to me a “new” way of looking at stories. I had experienced the truth, but didn’t know it at the time. In re-reading these diaries, I saw so many roads out, so many possible courses of action. One nurse, one teacher might have made all the difference. What if they had read the signs differently and steered me in a new direction?

Revisiting that most vulnerable time in my life when I was trying to understand more than I was prepared to understand, I was helped immeasurably by my agent, Betsy Lerner, who read every single diary and assured me there
was
something of value in the material. She continued to be unsparingly “there” and not only edited me at first, bringing things into focus, but also acted as the great defender.

She also introduced me to the editor who brought his talents to this large, overwhelming table and formed a circle outside of which he wouldn’t let me step unguided. He, Peter Smith, is one of the best writers I have ever read or talked to, and it was intimidating to live up to his intellectual expectations. He made me, as any good teacher will do, better than before, by which I mean, more honest, more explicit, more literate. In addition, he and I laughed at my life. Doing more of that is one of my goals.

Before the actual writing came the research. I read letters and sleuthed out my father’s fallout with Simon & Schuster, and the keenly destructive forces that came together in a perfect triangle to smoke him out. If there had been nothing else to prove it, one of Daddy’s last ventures said it all. My father came up with the title,
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
and with typical savvy, he cross-promoted it with another one of his books,
The Organization Man.
It was the beginning of Big Business, and Daddy knew it. As one company was consuming another and bosses were busy one-upping bosses, my father’s partners were acting out their own version of
King Lear,
with lawyers on the sideline lying to get in on the take—a gruesome and confusing sight for me, a young girl who saw nothing but the shadowy outline.

I want to thank Evan Brier and acknowledge his excellent book
A Novel Marketplace
, which helped explain more than I had ever known about what went on at Simon & Schuster in the late 1950s. In addition, Evan also went to the archives at Columbia University in New York—my father’s alma mater and also where his papers ended up after his death in 1960—to take photos of the most important documents, which added crucial detail to the story of Daddy’s demoralizing professional demise.

Speaking of Daddy, all the photos in the first part of the book were taken by my father, who, in addition to his other talents, was a brilliant photographer. Most of the others were taken by my brother, Peter Simon. Peter’s quality and sense of style came naturally to him, as photography closely bound him and my father. Peter took over the darkrooms in Stamford and Riverdale, with their chemicals and giant vats. Growing up, my sisters and I spent hours watching the images emerge from the limp pieces of white paper Peter had just dipped in the solution. (In the tradition of men in hats with pom-poms on them!) Thank you, Peter, for taking up the baton so brilliantly and sharing your negatives with me.

Thank you to Meghan La Roque, my personal assistant, who not only knows where all the keys are but knows where the
keys
to the keys are. Meghan is generous and smart and has the kind of mind most people wish they had—not forgetting things and keeping what she remembers in strict order of importance. She makes everything work when it really shouldn’t and takes as good care of the sheep as she does of all things digital.