Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (8 page)

Adolescence springs upon me.

CHAPTER FIVE

splinter-happy steps

I
could hear the buoys as clearly as if they came through the radio next to my ear. It was thrilling to come back to the Vineyard. The return was more and more thrilling each time. Those years that spanned the late forties and most of the fifties we rented or borrowed a house on the North Shore, a short walk away from the village and beach of Menemsha. The whole family (not always Joey) went up together. Lucy and I shared a bedroom and clothes and books of chord sheets for folk songs.

In the summer of 1956, Martha’s Vineyard was still, as we used to say, in “the olden days.” There were dune buggies and woodies and Jeeps, and filling up water buckets at the local well. For the most part there was electricity, but still, not everywhere. There were Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, Bill and Rose Styron, John and Barbara Hersey, Kingman Brewster, Katharine Cornell, James Cagney, Thomas Hart Benton (and his beautiful daughter Jessie, who was my idol), Yip Harburg, Roger and Evelyn Baldwin, Paul McGhee, Felix Frankfurter, and a whole slew of impressive radical thinkers and educators ready and waiting with their run-down porches and their gin and tonics to welcome you to the island and maybe turn you into a “Commie.” Mostly they lived below the radar.

The Vineyard is famously lovely, compared often to sections of Scotland and Ireland. Plots of land are casually separated by stone walls, like a sentence that doesn’t take the turn you think it will take, but takes another way around. Sagging barns on ponds look over fields and marshland. The island gets a bit flatter on its south side, as the interior ponds and streams advance to the ocean. Turn around and then a path or an inlet leads you to a dock and a pint-size rowboat with a single oar. Scruffy fishing vessels nearly disappear under the large coils of rope used for hauling pails and other traps that bring lobsters in from the deep.

My parents went there almost every summer between 1938 and the late fifties, when my father was less able to travel for a variety of health and business reasons. In the early, halcyon days, my mother was still in love with my father. And during the summer of 1956, the sound that the buoys made against the dock was still the “Daddy and Mommy are in love” sound.

She still idolized him, as far as I could see. Mother was proud of her husband and his aristocratic and romantic sway. She still gave forth a natural and appreciative throaty laugh in response to his famously dry humor. His narrow but shining blue eyes, when they focused on you, were almost too much to take. His tan against his white shirt rolled to the elbow, showing only his Bulova watch, and his smile from the land of the leaders, seemed to keep her happy. Mommy loved to entertain Vineyard style. Just lobsters or clams, corn on the cob, baked potatoes steamed in seaweed in a trash can out on the lawn or the beach, and simple wine. Simple neighbors (or fancy ones acting simple) came for a sunset dinner. They laughed and sang songs and wobbled their way home under the stars.

“Dickie, can I make you a gin and tonic?” Mommy called into the bedroom of the Leventhals’ Menemsha house, which we were borrowing for two weeks. The one that had that long flight of splinter-happy steps leading down to the beach on the North Shore.

“Oh, that would be perfect!” (Oh good, time for cocktails. We would send down to Seward’s soon to get dips and carrots and to Larsen’s to get some shrimp.)

Needing to make a local call, Daddy then called out, “What’s ‘Information’?”

“Just call the operator and ask her to get you whoever you want.” (That was the old Vineyard way.)

Daddy dialed 0.

An operator picked up, and Daddy said, “Would you put me through to the McGhees?”

The operator said, “You’ve reached the operator.”

Daddy asked in a polite, quizzical way, “Can you tell me what Information is, please?”

And the operator sweetly answered, “Well, sir, Information is when you don’t know a telephone number and you have to ask for help.”

Well, times
had
changed. But just a little.

Next morning, Lucy, my brother Peter, and I made our second little peregrination via a different route to the Menemsha market (Seward’s) to get
The New York Times
as well as muffins for breakfast. We went down Dutcher Dock, then up a hill, and passed the five little houses sitting prominently on a bluff overlooking Vineyard Sound. Our parents had explained to us that those houses constituted “Socialist Hill,” because the heads of labor groups either met or lived in those houses during the forties. It seemed very romantic, all the stories about people who rebelled against capitalism. Max Eastman, our great friend who had originally introduced us to the island, had written about Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin. He made them seem like romantic outlaws. I couldn’t picture outlaws. What did they say? What did they wear? I ended up owning one of those five houses up on the hill many years later, in the eighties. For ten years I spent time there living with ghosts of the Bolsheviks as I cooked clam chowder.

That radiant day walking over Socialist Hill and admiring the tender little waves as they lapped on the shore of Menemsha Beach, Lucy, Peter, and I were aware that we were trespassing as we picked a few sprigs of this and that. Mostly, though, we followed the path, and as we approached Seward’s, I could see a reflection of myself in a car window that was parked in front of the market. I wore a white, off-the-shoulder elastic top that left my tummy bare. My hair was medium length, half blond, half brown, half short, half long, and therefore, in the end, a tousled, compromised mess, though just in the last three days I’d gotten a tan. Certain that I looked good enough to be seen, I edged in front of my siblings.

As I was rounding the store porch, I caught sight of an extremely cute boy who, from what I could tell, was a few years younger than I. He was sitting on the steps of the porch next to Davy Gude, another Vineyard boy, whose parents and mine were friends. Lucy called out a casual “Hey” to Davy. The two of them, Lucy and Davy, had once been the subjects of a series of photographs taken by Daddy, holding hands as they ran through fields of daisies. As far back as kindergarten, Lucy, poised and charming, had already been claimed by the class’s youngest male deity, in this case Davy Gude, who was devastatingly good-looking even as a four-year-old boy.

Davy said “Hey” back, favoring Lucy with his curvy, one-sided smile, lifting his head up from the guitar he was balancing on one knee. As he sang his song, “Didn’t Old John Cross the Water,” he demonstrated a chord, or a picking technique, to his younger friend, virtually covering an entire octave as he sang the word
Galilee
. He then introduced the other boy: “This is Jamie.” Jamie could have been Davy’s younger brother. We were all tall and lanky, but even sitting down, Jamie was the lankiest. Both boys had a stringy, androgynous allure, a bony teenage elegance, early out of the gate.

Telling everyone I had to get the mail, I disappeared into Seward’s, swinging my hips as I opened the door. This was a brand-new trick, and I had to sneak a peek over my shoulder to see if either of the two young gods, Davy or Jamie, had followed my stride with their gaze.

No such luck.

Inside the store, I bought what I needed to get for Mom, and then gave Bill (Seward) a dime for a vanilla ice cream Popsicle, deciding that Lucy could have half. As I left, the screen door slammed with a sound that traveled on the breeze right into the center of Davy’s note. He sang the word
roll
perfectly in pitch with the squeak of the door. Jamie was playing the guitar now. I pulled down just a little on my white elastic top, which had ridden up my left shoulder. All of them, including my little brother, who didn’t know the song, were singing a chorus of “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,” as I sat down on the step next to Jamie and removed the paper from the Popsicle. I started to eat it. Jamie turned his head to the left and there I was, sitting right beside him. He was playing the chords to the song perfectly while indicating to me, by pointing his long chin in the direction of my ice cream, that a bite might be a good thing, but … he didn’t even look at me. He just took a nice bite right off the top. Then another one. He had consumed half of the pop when he began singing with Davy again, never looking at me once. He just had great ice cream aim.

“Jamie.” That’s what everybody called him. His whole name was James Taylor. On the Vineyard the next summer, Daddy and I went to a “sing” at the Chilmark Community Center. Davy was going to be singing with Jessie Benton (Thomas Hart Benton’s brilliant daughter). I sang along with them on “Dr. Freud, how I wish that you were differently employed.” The whole audience was sitting on the floor, and almost everyone sang with them on the chorus. Jamie Taylor was there, sitting not too far away. His brother was with him, whose name I learned was Alex. Alex was very blond and a little chubby, in contrast to Jamie’s dark lankiness. Daddy was just staring at Jessie Benton. “She’s a knockout,” he said. He was right.

I was feeling sick about Billy. These gods of music, these gorgeous tan boys who were singing and smiling, were my age. As I thought about Billy, I almost had to leave the community center. It was such a terrible feeling. But I forgot about it soon, and I learned to think of it as something completely “other.” Maybe it had never happened. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I kept thinking I saw Jamie on his bike everywhere. I found out the Taylors lived on South Road right near Stonewall Pond, where the ocean almost connects to Menemsha Pond. Up-island.

Before that summer was over, my diary revealed that I wanted nothing more than for Davy Gude to fall in love with me, but that wasn’t going to happen. The real, live, beautiful couple that summer was Davy and Jessie. But Davy did lots of good things for me. At his house one afternoon, he brought out his second guitar. He taught Lucy and me a new strumming technique for “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” Lucy’s song that she had written based on a Eugene Field poem, but which Davy was going to record for a record label!!! Lucy and I began to sing that wonderful song at my parents’ parties, and eventually
we
recorded it. It was our “starting point,” our “break.”

In addition to learning a lot of music, listening to it, and listening to other people play and sing, I came across a book at the house we had rented that summer about the Greek gods. I spent an hour reading about Orpheus and Eurydice. I savored every tragic detail: how Orpheus, the magical musician and poet, falls deeply in love with Eurydice. As he strums his lyre and sings to her, they fall more and more in love, and eventually they marry. Bitten by a snake, Eurydice dies in Orpheus’s arms and descends to the Underworld. Desperate to bring her back, Orpheus follows her, begging the Lord of the Underworld for his assistance. Overwhelmed, as everyone is, by the beauty and the magic of Orpheus’s singing and playing, Pluto agrees to allow Eurydice to return to the surface of the earth, but with one condition: during their ascent, Orpheus is forbidden even to glance at her. Not once, not even for a second. If he does look, Eurydice will disappear forever.

Orpheus agrees, but as the two of them are making their way out of the Underworld and Orpheus catches a glimpse of the first welcoming light, he loses his faith. Unsure that Eurydice is really still there, he looks behind him, and the moment he does, she, the woman he loves more than anything in the world and knows he will love forever, vanishes slowly backward into the hazy, twilit nothingness of the Underworld. “The story isn’t real, it’s a myth,” I remember Daddy trying to reassure me. Was it? I thought. Is it? Why did I feel so connected to its power at such an early age?

For me, the wind-and-water-swept romantic, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was all about everlasting love, about a beautiful musical god so in love with a woman that he couldn’t stand not to look back at her. It was about the cool, cleansing air of music, whether it was exhalations of relief and anger I heard coming from my father at the piano while I was in my bed at night, or the sounds of Davy Gude’s guitar as I gazed at the lost, mystical, beautiful expression on his face. Music brought me closer to the idea of God. Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief. I have always known it would rescue me, as it had bandaged Daddy, bypassed my stammer, brought my families together. Both of them: my family of origin, and the children I would eventually give birth to. There was always an Orpheus in my orbit.

Orpheus was a boy who could quiet the wind, charm the rocks, silence the trees, the stones, the fish, the animals, who could divert the course of rivers and even take up arms against the Underworld, his lyre eventually transported to heaven by the Muses to take its permanent place among the stars. A boy who sang the sun up to red-orange, who played the guitar with such delicacy it made every girl swoon and every boy want to be him, in whatever form it took, Orpheus was a teacher. Whatever he knew the rest of us would borrow, add on to as we would. Eventually I would come up with my own sound, my own voice. I hoped and prayed, and still do, that Orpheus will always find me when I dip into my own private underworlds, and that when my soul loses direction—as it has so many times since my discovery—I will be able to find it again. That I will remember: