Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  Mommy, Ronny, Nora, and I sat around the dining room table, which was not set. It was what Mother called “buffet.” The cooks had made dinner before they left, but there were no place settings, just a stack of plates for us to help ourselves. Those were the most fun and casual of times. Music was always playing from the living room. That night Carousel was on. I hadn’t seen the Broadway play yet, but all bodies in the house (as Mommy called us) were going around singing and harmonizing to “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’?” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Ronny was singing in his most self-conscious baritone: Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain, though your dreams be tossed and blown, walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart … He stopped just before the climax of the highest part—well, not really stopped, but carefully dipped down to a harmony a third below. Then I joined in on the repeat: “You’ll never walk … alone.” Mommy clapped, and in walked Peter and Jackie with yo-yos and freshly dirty hands.

  Nora and I served ourselves. The volume of the music was often a contest of wills. Daddy liked it very soft. Mommy liked it quite loud. If it was Elvis or Sinatra, I liked it loud.

  Mommy said, “Your dad is staying in the city tonight.” I could have told her that just by the volume of the music. And the fact that Ronny was singing at the top of his quite well-trained but thoroughly irritating voice. There was competition coming from the storm outside as well. It was the kind of sonic hysteria that contemporary rock ’n’ roll bands hope to achieve. So, dinner was quite noisy, with half of us singing while we were eating. Nora looked at me sideways. She was hearing me sing for the first time. I was pretty good at singing, but it was more for the love of the act. It was so freeing and fun to sing when I was beyond stuttering. Nora thought maybe she should sing, but my mother laughed and put her hand on Nora’s head and said, “Darling, don’t let us Simons bother you, this is just something we always do.”

  Later that night, we watched a TV movie about someone with a drinking problem, probably with Jack Lemmon or Susan Hayward. When it was over we went upstairs and played “Magical Hand” with Peter and Jackie. It’s a game where we scared the hell out of the boys by entering their darkened room just a jot, holding a flashlight over our hand positioned to look like a claw. They’d scream, we’d scream, and we’d enter their room and tickle their bellies until they laughed with a combination of terror and merriment. Then we’d go out of the door, turn off the flashlight, and wait for them to be really quiet to begin again. We wore them out, and after an hour of fun and games, we closed the door to Peter’s room. It was just across the hall from Joey’s and my room. What Mommy and Ronny were doing was anybody’s guess. I think there was a soundtrack of something playing. Probably Guys and Dolls or Kiss Me, Kate. Between the pulses of rain, I could hear the music swelling and dropping from above, on the third floor.

  The storm was rearranging itself between the twigs and among the branches. Acorns were snapping against the screens and the glass-paned windows and the sides of the house. It was the Indian summer dance of the sycamores, oaks, maples, and the big tall elm right outside the window by my bed. I hoped Daddy was all right. It was unusual for him not to come home. Probably because of the storm. I put “Moonglow” on the turntable of my portable phonograph and as I got undressed into my nightie, Nora was in the bathroom with the door closed. I turned on the music and danced in front of the full-length mirror, appreciating how pretty I looked. I rocked. I turned up the volume so the music could be heard over the storm outside. I rocked some more and put the 78 on again. The toilet flushed and Nora came out of the bathroom. She was wearing a loose, shimmery white pair of shorty pajamas. She saw me in front of the mirror, so I toned my dancing down so it looked less like a performance and more casual, just as Mommy had said about singing at dinner, it’s just something we do here.

  Nora was stunning, and something in her was a little too sinful to know what to do with. She said, “Look at this, watch me dance. Eric and I danced at the cookout on the beach the last night of camp. We did this fox-trot to the slow dances, but the rumba and samba and the lindy to the faster ones. He picked me up like this.” Nora was smaller than I, but she raised me just slightly off the floor. “Then he let me fall, but his arms were there to catch me and we did this dip. It was so neat. I love him and I’ll bet we’re going to go all the way pretty soon.” I was horrified but didn’t let it show. Even I had my limits!

  She started to get into the right rhythm of the song and she pulled away from me, doing a dance she might have learned from Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai. Then she took the scarf that was on the end of the bed and waved it through the air and around my head as though it was a feather. She had been so quiet, and now she had come to life. I followed her lead in what I supposed was a reenactment of her dances with Eric. She was looking directly at me and smiling with a reassuring look I’d never experienced with any boy I had ever danced with. It was heady, and as the song was coming to an end, I imitated Kim Novak’s move with her hips and arms in Picnic. Oh, wasn’t it fun to be a movie star? I put my palms together and crisscrossed them, brushing them up and down as the strings soared. My arms partly extended and my neck leaned back, allowing my head to move seductively. Nora watched me and tried to copy me. She and I led each other and, as in a perfect dance, communicated viscerally.

  The light went out on a large thunderclap, and the lightning was so close to the thunder that it must have struck the house or maybe the elm, the tallest tree on the property. The music that seemed to have brought the storm on slowed and then stopped, and there was only howling. The storm said: Come dance with me. Nora and I bumped into each other, but not by chance. We fell back on the bed. Her hand moved explicitly under my nightie, and she startlingly, with the finesse of an animal but the beauty of a young goddess, put her hand right at the heart of my desire. A hot white wind blew. It came tapping through the andromeda against the side of the house. And then the breathtaking whipping sound of the elm made me open my thighs. Somewhere a door slammed, one of the outside doors, stopping us for a minute, but we were both so otherworldly hot, and anyone coming in the room to check on us would have seen, by candle or flashlight, just a tangle of white sheets and two young girls hiding in each other’s arms from the thunder and lightning. Nora said, “This is how he does it to me.”

  The blackness around me held my shyness at bay, and Nora was over my body, kissing my breasts. The hissing of smaller, higher winds into the larger gusts reassured us of our privacy, and we moved to the unpredictable sound-and-light show.

  “You touch me now,” Nora whispered.

  I knew this was the future. This was the way I would writhe in the future. But for now I passed my hand over her thighs and felt for her. I was boiling for all the future times, not quite able to be in the moment. She hula-hooped her hips in a circle as I touched her. Then another gust of wind as the elm right out my window shook and whipped like someone being spanked. She asked me not to stop. Her hard breathing became a cry of an animal. I was worried that she was hurting, but more worried that Mommy would hear us and come running through the closed but unlocked door. Nora still didn’t know how excited I was. She was the one needing and asking. I was only complying with her requests.

  Now the rain slanted so heavily against the glass of the window right next to the bed that I was sure something would break. “This is just what Eric does. Please do it some more.” I smelled the sweetness of her. There was nothing like it ever before. She reached with her head down the length of my torso and her hair was thick with sweat. We got into an awkward position with each other, but I imagined we were like two smaller branches of the elm, twisting and tossing and making room so that they could move against each other without breaking.

  I heard footsteps running down the hall right outside the room. Nora and I quickly disentangled our bodies as Peter opened the door.

  “Are you scared?” He was so thrilled. “It’s a hurricane!”

  Did I want to be E
uridice or Orpheus or Al Jolson?

  “Go chase the wild and nighttime streets, sang Daddy.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  the twenty-ninth floor

  At night in bed I heard God whisper lullabies

  While Daddy next door whistled whiskey tunes

  And sometimes when I wanted, they would harmonize

  There was nothing those two couldn’t do

  Embrace me you child, you’re a child of mine

  And I’m leaving everything I am to you

  Go chase the wild and nighttime streets, sang Daddy

  And God sang, Pray the devil doesn’t get to you

  —“Embrace Me, You Child,” 1972

  Some things you pick up early, but there are no words for them yet. They’re simply fragments of a puzzle created by other people doing things, thinking things, deciding things, forgetting things, and not least, lying about things.

  My whole life I’d never been able to put a name to the feelings I’d had for my father. I had spent my childhood craving his love and never getting it. As time went on, I drew away from him, losing myself in a sky full of many different kinds of clouds. I’d never been good at any of the things I believed mattered to Daddy. I had no innate talents to speak of. I couldn’t play the piano, and I wasn’t as pretty as my sisters. I couldn’t help but think back on the night he scrawled in my autograph book, Roses are red / Violets are pink / I love you with your darling fat nose / I’ve just had a drink. In Daddy’s eyes—despite my mother telling me not to take what he wrote seriously—I wasn’t even good at my nose.

  There was more. I wasn’t funny in front of him. I stammered and stuttered, and then I cried about it afterward. At school I learned slowly, and aside from swimming, I wasn’t good at sports. Once, when I was three or four, and Daddy was recovering from the nervous breakdown after Peter was born—an expression in vogue at the time, which I believed meant a person got so nervous he fell down the stairs—Mommy asked if I would mind putting on my tutu and going upstairs to dance for him. It didn’t work. Nothing seemed to work. As ever, the tall man in the house whose long legs I had inherited never seemed to want to have much to do with me. Instead, he looked past me. He seemed to be seeking something he’d lost, Mommy maybe, or even his old self.

  No: my only halfway decent talent was for loving people—Daddy, Mommy, Joey, Lucy, Chibie, Allie, Uncle Peter, Uncle Dutch, my dogs, and, no matter how damaging and wrong our interludes were, Billy.

  I’d study the people around me for clues. Clues to figure out whom to emulate, how to dress, how to speak, how to act, how to dance. I’d grown up feeling unworthy and underloved. I wanted nothing more than to feel secure in myself—to feel that I was really good at something. Instead, I was shy, scared, wounded, frozen, a scratchy bundle of nerves, a walking pile of needs and conflicts. But my desire to hide met its match in an equally strong desire to be noticed, to be on top, to be wanted, connected, asked, begged, loved, admired.

  Depression ran in the Simon family, and of his five siblings, Daddy was probably the one hit the hardest. He’d had his first depressive episode when he was a child, and over the years he’d managed to keep his demons at bay, but by the late 1940s, his mood swings and bad health had caught up with him. Like some time-bent sailor, he did what he could to steer a course through his own sadness, but the wheel escaped him and the waves began filling the boat, and by then he had lost the will, or ability, to bail water. Daddy was no longer the man he had once been—the brilliant, innovative publisher, the jovial participant in bridge, golf, and tennis matches, the host of glittering late-night dinner parties. Instead, following any number of heart attacks and ministrokes, Daddy had grown seriously ill, and despondent, the changes in him obvious to everybody and terrifying to me. But it still didn’t occur to me it could be in me too.

  He seemed to recede. It was as if a sheet of glass now stood between him and the rest of the world. His illness disoriented him. Night turned into day turned into night again. He would pad around the house in his bathrobe, occasionally groaning, “Oh, how I suffer,” or “I hope you children won’t end up like me.” He would kiss me good night sometimes with the muffled words “Good morning.” Once, when I was doing my homework after school, Daddy appeared in my doorway in his by-now-familiar dressing gown. What was I doing up so late? he asked. On the way out, he turned off the overhead light to save electricity, not realizing I couldn’t do my homework in the dark.

  By the late 1950s, Joey, Lucy, Peter, and I had become inured to this new Daddy, and knowing his odd behavior would embarrass my friends, I stopped inviting them over to the house. Fearing Daddy could disappear any second, I became frightened to love him, creating, once again, a perfect circuit of mutual rejection. Rather than sitting down and talking, we watched baseball games together on television, him beside me in his dressing gown, sighing, absently cracking his knuckles, his breath smelling of stale cigarette smoke. But instead of welcoming his attention, I was almost scared of him, as if I were breathing in a mixture of measles, pirates, and imminent death, all blended into one musky, terrifying presence named “Daddy.”

  After dinner, as usual, he would retreat to his piano. Once music had been his joy, but by late ’58 or ’59, it was his only shelter. Joey, Lucy, and I would be upstairs in our rooms, gossiping with friends, playing with our always fascinating hair, or writing science papers, when below, like a coastal storm spinning in off the sea, the sad thundering would begin. It was Daddy, alone downstairs, hands and feet meting out his frustrations and anger in bursts and waves of Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Beethoven. Notes heard but unheard, absorbed into the floorboards and ceilings. His playing was an angry serenade to his family, to his wife and colleagues and their disloyalty, all those things that were destroying him inside and out.

  At the time I had no idea what was happening with Daddy professionally, or the degree to which his morale, and his position inside his own company, was being torn out from under him. In 1944, Marshall Field III, the Chicago department store heir, had bought Simon & Schuster for $3 million, the equivalent of around $40 million today, with the understanding that upon Field’s death, Dick Simon and Max Schuster had the right of first refusal to repurchase their company. When he died in 1956, both Max and the company’s business manager, along with the lawyer René Wormser—who lived in our building at 133 West Eleventh Street and whom Daddy had always considered to be his best friend—urged my father to cash out.

  Daddy didn’t want to, but it was two against one, and in the end Max and Leon Shimkin, Simon & Schuster’s accountant, prevailed. Daddy’s health was an ongoing concern, Leon told him, and selling his shares would save him lots of stress. Their betrayal was further poisoned by subtle threats that unless my father signed his name to the buyout, he, Leon, might be forced to divulge publicly my mother’s ongoing romance with Ronny, and what a field day the press would have with that. If René had truly been Daddy’s best friend, he would have made everyone aware of the conflict of interest and recused himself, instead of advising Daddy to sell off 100 percent of his Simon & Schuster stock.

  I know only that my father’s life was slowly collapsing in four packs a day of cigarettes, cholesterol, a cuckolding wife, two more dollops of whipped cream than were necessary floating in his morning coffee, and double-dealing work colleagues. The arteriosclerosis had confused his wiring, cut short his attention span, and blocked his ability to recall things that had happened only an hour earlier. No wonder he was so ripe to be betrayed by his Simon & Schuster colleagues, and even by his own lawyer. Thanks to a devious decision by a bunch of pinstripe-suited double-crossers, Daddy was left out in the cold.

  * * *

  Whenever I asked why Daddy wasn’t going into the office anymore, everyone had a different story, and I never pressed the issue. By early 1960, the official explanation was that Daddy was “semiretired.” He still went to work now and again, chauffeured down the West Side Highway in a green Lincoln Town Car. Junius, his driver, woul
d drop him off on West Fifty-second Street, wait there, then drive him home a few hours later. The names of the projects Daddy was still involved in floated through the house—The Jump Book by Philippe Halsman, another volume of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, a follow-up book with the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—but the truth of the matter was that his place in the company he had founded was slipping away at a frightening pace, and Daddy knew it, too, in the same way he knew that his wife was in love with an embarrassing opponent. These things together were too much for any man to take.

  That summer, when I turned fifteen, was the last summer I thought of myself as a child. One day in mid-June, I accompanied Daddy into the city, dropped him off in front of the Atlas building, and spent the morning at Saks, where I was looking for a pair of low heels. Having recently been introduced to Nick Delbanco, I was concerned about the slight difference in our heights. I was five foot ten in my bare feet to Nick’s five foot eight and a half, and I remembered Mommy always telling me that men prefer small women—both raiding my department of self-worth and elevating her own—which is why I was on the lookout for flats and low heels.

  New shoes in hand, I made my way back to Daddy’s office in the Atlas building at 630 Fifth Avenue, across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the pigeons flocked and hovered over pieces of popcorn, breadcrumbs, and other obscure summer treats. Once inside the lobby, I took the elevator up to the twenty-eighth floor. But Louise, my father’s longtime secretary, wasn’t anywhere to be found. Instead, a receptionist I’d never seen before told me that Dick Simon’s office was now one flight up, on the twenty-ninth floor. “It’s a shame,” she added. When I asked her what she meant, she said again, “He’s gone up to the twenty-ninth floor now, dear. He’s got a nice big office up there.”