by Linda Wolfe
Still, Robert didn’t complain. He wasn’t one of those whiny, difficult kids. He kept most things to himself. Even pain.
One day he was climbing on the back of a wing chair. “Don’t do that,” Cynthia warned him. “It’s dangerous.” He didn’t listen, just went on climbing. A second later he tumbled to the floor.
“Are you all right?” Cynthia asked.
“Yes.” But then he retreated into his room.
Cynthia waited for him to emerge. But when after twenty minutes he still hadn’t appeared, she went inside to check on him. She found him curled up on his bed, straining to hold back sobs. Which took some doing, because the injury turned out to be no small affair. He’d broken his collarbone.
Sequins. Ribbons. Her mother’s high heels. In Merrick, four-year-old Jennifer was displaying a passion for dress-up and, once in costume, would strut and sing and spin around like a whirling human top.
Sometimes she was a bit too lively. The mothers of playmates found her hyperactive and difficult to control. One mother mentioned this to Jennifer’s father, and he suggested that when Jennifer visited she be given diet soda instead of Pepsi or Coke, because sugar overstimulated her.
But Jennifer’s frivolity served her well. It brought her attention, friends. One afternoon when she and her sister were visiting two boys, the elder of whom considered Jennifer a baby and ignored her, she took the younger brother aside, dressed him and herself up in makeup and funny costumes, and began cavorting around the room. The older boy, eager to reject her, nevertheless cracked up, laughed till he thought his sides would split. “You can be our court jester,” he said, and explained how kings kept attendants just to make them laugh.
In the summer of 1972, just before Robert turned six, Cynthia traveled to Ireland with him and his mother on a visit to Phyllis’s parents. The three Americans flew to Shannon, then took a trip deep into the Irish countryside, to the town of Bournacoula in County Leitrim, where the Shanleys lived and Phyllis had grown up. Leitrim is one of Ireland’s poorest counties, a long narrow spade of land that has a remote, forgotten feel to it. The Shanleys’ farm also, to Cynthia at least, seemed forgotten, a thing of the past. The farmhouse was a rambling four-bedroom affair. There was a paved road in front of it, but behind were pens for chickens and ducks, and beyond that, fields in which cows and horses grazed. Further still in the distance were desolate peat bogs. Phyllis’s father drove by wagon to the bogs and brought back the peat, and Phyllis’s mother cooked with it on a big blackened stove. She stewed and simmered on the stove’s surface, and baked loaves of delicious bread inside its ancient oven. She baked daily, telling Cynthia, “The bread’s not the same if you eat it when it’s old. Even a day old.”
The babysitter was awed by the amount of labor the aging Shanleys had to expend on tasks that took no time at all back home, where the flick of a knob brought fuel and bread could keep as fresh as new in the freezer. “Life is so hard here,” she said.
“It’s nothing, nothing at all,” Mrs. Shanley replied. “Why, just a few months ago we had to go upstairs to the bathroom to get water for doing the dishes. That or draw the water from the kitchen pump.”
It’s no wonder, Cynthia thought after the trip to Bournacoula, that Mrs. Chambers wants Robert at St. David’s, even though it means his having to travel so long every day, and his having no one his own age to play with after school. She wants him to make up for what she lacked. She has the American Dream.
By 1973 the Levins’ marriage was foundering. To some extent the trouble lay in their temperaments. Both were excitable and tempestuous. But they also had different priorities. Ellen Levin liked pursuing artistic and bohemian pleasures—she was “a leftover flower child from the sixties,” one of her friends recalled. Steve was sterner and more pragmatic, and increasingly he was focusing on his real estate business.
Eventually, the pair separated. Steve moved into Manhattan, and Ellen remained behind in Merrick with the two little girls. Jennifer was five.
Seven-year-old Robert was starting his religious instruction at St. David’s, studying under an energetic and thoughtful priest named Father Thomas Leonard. Leonard’s classes were crowded with shy, attentive, well-scrubbed faces. Robert was just one of the crowd. But the boy’s mother was another story. She always spoke up at parents’ meetings and made her presence felt.
She was, by then, daily leaving County Leitrim behind. She still spoke with a brogue and clung to the stern religious beliefs of her childhood, but she was rapidly becoming ever more Americanized—and in all outward manifestations an American of high social class. Shopping carefully and cleverly, often in thrift shops to which women like those she worked for donated their wardrobes when they were but a season old, she dressed with sophisticated East Side flair. When she entertained at home, she set her table with fine linens and china, just as the women she worked for did, differing from them only in that she purchased her wares in out-of-the-way secondhand shops.
In 1974, when Robert was eight, Phyllis enrolled him in the Knickerbocker Greys, an after-school military drill group that taught discipline and patriotism to well-to-do boys and had come to be nicknamed the Social Register’s Private Little Army. She knew that the Greys weren’t what they had been. Once they were so elite that even some of New York’s richest boys could not join. Once they were a training ground for the city’s princes. Frederick Warburg and Cornelius Vanderbilt had been Greys. So had Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, and Thomas Hoving. But things had changed. The most socially eminent families in the city had turned away from the group, and their defection, combined with the antimilitaristic sentiment that had swept the country during the Vietnam war, had made the Greys easier to join. Nevertheless the corps still drew its members primarily from Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools. Phyllis was aware of this, and she was eager to see Robert enter the ranks and make the right sort of friends.
Robert was nervous the first time he passed through the massive wrought-iron gates and majestic wooden doors of the fortresslike armory on Park Avenue in which the Greys met. For years he had seen older boys at his school wearing the Greys uniform to class, and he had dreamed of wearing one, too. But he had heard he would have to take part in a competition on the first day, and he was fearful he wouldn’t pass muster. He needn’t have worried. His first day went off without a hitch, he was accepted into the corps, and his parents bought him the coveted uniform. He began dreaming right after that, he wrote in a school essay, of becoming a sergeant. Sergeants got to carry swords.
Separation had hung heavy on Ellen Levin. She’d been stuck in the suburbs with their emphasis on nuclear family solidarity, and all the drudgery of child care had fallen on her shoulders alone. When Jennifer was around six, she decided to move to California. She’d heard that people lived differently out West. There were whole complexes inhabited by single people, or by divorced people living with their children. There were communes and colonies and carefree styles of life. She went to Los Angeles with her two little girls.
In L.A. she rented an apartment on a sprawling estate that was rumored to have belonged at one time to Rudolph Valentino. The estate was filled with separated parents, many of them writers, singers, and actors. They understood one another’s hardships and assisted each other with child care and domestic chores. Their companionship alleviated Ellen’s loneliness and maternal burdens. Soon she went to work, getting herself a job in an advertising agency.
The Greys met for drill twice a week, and throughout the year for dress reviews and outings to ballgames and army bases. Robert, at eight and a half, attended Greys functions regularly, and soon became an exemplary cadet. He learned to pivot and parade, march and maneuver. He learned to handle the sword he had dreamed of wearing. And, joining the group’s Saturday rifle club, he even learned to fire a rifle.
At the end of his second year in the organization, his parents decided—perhaps because they were spending so much time ferrying Robert to Greys events—to move
to Manhattan. Phyllis found an apartment in a redbrick high-rise right on Park Avenue itself—just blocks from the armory. It was small, with low ceilings and few architectural details, and it was located in the least fashionable section of the fashionable boulevard—the mid-nineties, only a few streets south of Spanish Harlem. But Phyllis told friends her new address with a quiet but unmistakable pride.
She was still working as a nurse, but she was taking short-term assignments. Mrs. Hearst, for whom she’d worked exclusively for several years, had died. Phyllis’s hours were long and stressful. But the move to the city gave her more time to invest in her outside interests. She had always enjoyed organizational and charitable work, had been active when she lived in Queens in the County Leitrim Society, a group which raised money for immigrants from her home county. Now she began raising money for St. David’s, and she joined the Altar Society of the Church of St. Thomas More, which was near her new apartment.
Monsignor James Wilders, the priest of St. Thomas’s, came to know Phyllis well. He felt they had a great deal in common. He, too, had invested himself in the care of the sick and dying. Before coming to St. Thomas’s, he’d been the director of hospital chaplains for the Archdiocese of New York, a job that had put him in charge of Catholic priests at hundreds of local hospitals and nursing homes, and for years he’d immersed himself in helping patients and their families bear the prospect of death. The worst thing was the youngsters dying of leukemia. He always said to their mothers and fathers, You know, this isn’t easy, it’s a trauma, but the little one is going straight home to heaven without ever having done anyone any harm. The worst cross, you know, is for a child to grow up and bring disgrace and dishonor on the family.
At first in the city ten-year-old Robert was timid. Leaving the apartment, he stayed close to his mother’s side, often clutching her hand or a corner of her skirt. But in time he got used to his new environment and began going out on his own to meet boys he knew from St. David’s. When he was with them, he was sometimes shy, speaking softly and waiting till other boys addressed him first. But he wanted to be liked, and he made an effort to go where the other kids went, do what the other kids did.
After a while, Phyllis noticed with pleasure that he had made a sizable circle of friends in the neighborhood. He was popular, she told friends.
Billy Markey, a new student at St. David’s, also saw that Robert was popular, and hoping to be popular too, he considered inviting Robert and his friends to his tenth birthday party. He wanted to have them, but he wasn’t sure they’d come. They were different from him. He was a scholarship student and lived on the West Side. They were rich and lived on the East. He had just come to New York from a small provincial town. They had lived in the city for years. More, they smoked marijuana already. He’d seen them doing it in school bathrooms. It frightened him. But still he took the plunge and asked them. And to his surprise and pleasure, they came.
The party made Billy feel wonderful. He and his guests listened to records, played with his birthday gifts, gobbled cake and ice cream until they felt ready to burst. There was a lot of laughing and joking, and for the first time in months Billy didn’t miss his old school and his old friends. But afterward, when the party was over and he was straightening up his room, he noticed that his piggy bank had been emptied of its contents—twenty dollars’ worth of coins he had scrupulously saved from his allowance. He wasn’t sure who had taken the money, but he thought it was Robby Chambers or one of his close friends. He’d seen the group eyeing the bank.
One afternoon that year, Andy Lockheart, a ten-year-old who went to a different East Side private school from the one Robert and Billy attended, telephoned a friend of his. He’d gotten lucky, he said excitedly: he’d persuaded a man on his way into a liquor store to take his money and bring him out a bottle.
Andy and his friend had been drinking since they were eight, nicking shots from their parents’ liquor cabinets. But recently they’d started feeling that a shot here and a shot there was no fun at all. They’d wanted a whole bottle of hard liquor, but had been afraid to swipe one from their parents, so they’d taken to hanging around outside liquor stores wearing their neat little brass-buttoned blue blazers and politely asking customers to help them out. Everyone had turned them down, but today Andy had at last been successful. “I knew it would happen sooner or later,” he exulted to his friend.
“It figures,” Andy’s friend said, “this being New York.” Then he asked Andy what store he’d gotten lucky at. Andy told him it was a shop he’d heard about from some St. David’s boys, one of whom was a kid named Robby Chambers.
Billy Markey kept his distance from the boys he thought had robbed his piggy bank. But he couldn’t avoid them altogether. He was in some classes with them. He did sports with them. He was even in a school pageant with them. Robert Chambers has the best part, Billy sulked. He’s a Civil War general, all decked out in a uniform.
Billy himself was just a foot soldier. He was supposed to horse around and ruin the orderly march of a column of soldiers, and the general was supposed to give him a push to make him get in line and behave. When the cue came, Billy did the horsing around, and Robert did the pushing. But it wasn’t like a playacting push. It was a real hard shove. Robert’s trying to hurt me, Billy worried for a second. Then he thought, No, it’s more like he’s been drinking or smoking grass and he doesn’t know how hard he’s pushing.
In California, Jennifer was attending public school. She was as extroverted and irrepressible as she had been as a toddler, a little girl who loved attention and had no qualms about reaching out for it. One day she paraded down Hollywood Boulevard in a big hat and her mother’s high heels. Another day, visiting a restaurant owned by a friend of her mother’s, she played waitress, clearing tables and, not yet comprehending the principles of tipping, amusingly telling guests she hoped they’d return soon while at the same time handing them quarters.
She saw her father from time to time. She and Danielle went east to visit him during their Christmas and summer vacations, and he flew out to the coast three or four times a year.
He was doing well. His real estate business was flourishing. He was living in the East Sixties between Madison and Park avenues. And he had a girlfriend.
She was Arlene Voorhust, a young Catholic woman who had been widowed and had no children. Jennifer thought her beautiful. Not that her mother wasn’t beautiful, too. In fact, Arlene and Ellen Levin looked something alike. But Arlene was darker, slimmer, more glamorous. Jennifer admired her. But like many little girls who imagine when their fathers divorce their mothers that they have won the Oedipal battle only to discover they have a new rival for their father’s love, she also resented her.
When she was eight, Steve and Arlene married. The wedding took place at New York’s City Hall. Whether it was because Ellen Levin didn’t want her daughters to attend the ceremony, or because Steve and Arlene didn’t want them to, or because they themselves preferred to stay away, Jennifer and Danielle were not present at the wedding.
Robert grew tall and broad in the next year or two—taller and broader than most of his agemates at St. David’s or in the Greys. His face took on a new, almost mannish handsomeness, and his body, firmed up by marching in the armory, became strong.
He brought his parents great joy. He became an altar boy at St. Thomas’s and was confirmed there under the sponsorship of Father Theodore McCarrick, an up-and-coming priest who had been an adviser to Mrs. Hearst and with whom Phyllis had stayed in contact after the old woman died. He won a public speaking contest at St. David’s, earned several medals for marksmanship at the Greys, and was made a member of the group’s elite Honor Guard. The Guard, dressed in sparkling white trousers and braid-bedecked tunics, carried the troop’s colors at parades and public ceremonies. One day Ronald and Nancy Reagan were escorted by the Guard to a Woman’s Republican Committee luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria. The presidential hopeful shook Robert’s hand.
Phyllis talke
d about her son obsessively. He was becoming in her eyes everything she had once dreamed a child of hers could become.
She herself was also becoming the kind of person she had once only imagined she might be. She had been invited to join the Greys’ fabled board of directors, a group that was, historically, composed of society women, even acquaintances of governors and presidents. But for years she had turned up regularly on drill days to take attendance and on review days to make sure the cadets’ shoes were shined and their purple sashes tied just so. And always she’d worked hard at using the wealthy contacts she made through work to get donations for the organization. She was an extraordinary fund-raiser, and the Greys had recognized this and wanted her on the board.
In the spring of 1979, a few months before Robert turned thirteen, the Greys went further, elected her their president. It was a dubious time to have won the title, for the group was suffering recruiting problems. But it was also an exciting time, as the organization would soon be a hundred years old. Elevated, Phyllis began working immediately on getting publicity for the group and on arranging the centennial.
In the fall, she opened her first presidential season with a luncheon at the “21” Club. It was a festive day. The cadet officers, Robert among them, wore medals and carried plumed headgear. Distinguished guests—Phyllis’s old friend Father McCarrick, who had recently been named a bishop, was one of them—made toasts, and board members and supporters of the organization gave inspiring or droll speeches. “The point is not to train these boys for social leadership,” a former president said, “but leadership for life.”