The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  “What this really is,” a successful alumnus said, “is a tunnel leading into the old boy network.”

  Ellen Levin had friends in the film community, and sometimes she took Jennifer and Danielle with her to parties at which they met Hollywood’s aristocrats. Producers and movie stars. The party Jennifer liked best was the one where she met Chevy Chase. He was so handsome. So funny.

  One night some friends of Ellen’s who were sleeping over told Jennifer they’d take her to Disneyland the next day. In the morning she ran into their room and excitedly tried to rouse them. But they wouldn’t get up, wouldn’t move from the bed. They were stoned, she later complained to a friend.

  For Bob Chambers, who was working now in the credit department of MCA, the period of his wife’s ascendancy in the Greys was a melancholy one. Although he had several times attempted to give up alcohol, and had even attended the acclaimed Hazelden Foundation clinic in Minnesota for a while, he had fallen off the wagon and begun spending his evenings making the rounds of neighborhood bars. One of his favorite bars was Sheehan’s, on Third Avenue.

  Mike Sheehan, the proprietor’s son, was a detective with the New York City Police Department. He often dropped by the bar when he was on his way home from work, and one night—it was around the time Phyllis started heading up the Greys—he popped in and saw Bob Chambers there. He liked Bob. Liked the way he was a well-behaved drinker who didn’t get sloppy or pissed off but just quietly downed his scotch and watched the games on TV, or did crossword puzzles with a friend. Bob wore big muttonchop whiskers and looked so smart and did so many puzzles that Sheehan had dubbed him “the intelligentsia.” I’m gonna see how the intelligentsia is, Sheehan decided this night and, strolling over to Bob, said, “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Well, you know,” Bob said. “Okay.” Then he said something about his wife. Something about how he was having problems with her.

  “Yeah, well, I guess the best thing is, you never get married,” Sheehan said.

  Bob nodded, laughed.

  He’s a really sweet guy, Sheehan thought. Most of the regulars are. And they follow my career as if they’re my fan club.

  Sheehan had made the regulars real proud this year. He’d gone after a black kid over on Columbus Avenue and 108th who’d looked like he was up to no good, and when he’d pulled up alongside him, he’d seen the kid had a long-barreled .38 in his hand. Sheehan had pulled out his own gun, shoved it at the kid’s face and screamed, “You pull the trigger, I’m gonna blow your fucking head off! You wanna be a tough guy, go ahead and shoot me, but I’m gonna take you out, too, I’m gonna take your face right off.” He’d never been so tough in his life. Things like that just started pouring out of his mouth. And the kid had backed off, begun running. Sheehan had run after him and later, his heart pounding, tackled him, cuffed him, and brought him in. Then, lucky him, it turned out the kid was a guy the whole police force had been trying to catch for weeks, a guy who’d shot the city’s first female police officer.

  Tonight Sheehan told Bob Chambers and the rest of the crew a few more of his adventures, and some of the guys told his parents, the way they always did, that they wished they had a son like him.

  Bob Chambers didn’t say that. He never says anything like that, Sheehan thought. Maybe he doesn’t have a son.

  “Go ahead and play,” Bob Chambers said to eight-year-old Chip Jones one afternoon that fall. Bob had agreed to babysit for the boy because Phyllis, who’d promised his parents that she’d do the job, was too busy. Bob had taken Chip to the local video arcade, where he’d changed several dollars into quarters, and now he offered the silver to the boy.

  Chip got going. The machine lit up and he made his moves and shot down a bunch of space ships. Then he looked around for Mr. Chambers, so he could show him his score. He wasn’t there. “He went outside for a minute,” the video arcade’s change-maker said.

  Chip went on playing, but after a while he ran out of money. He stood around wishing Mr. Chambers would come back. After about an hour, when Mr. Chambers still hadn’t returned, he got a little scared. But then, there was Mr. Chambers. Big and kindly. “Let’s go down to the South Street Seaport now,” he suggested.

  Chip thought it was a great idea.

  They took the subway downtown, and Mr. Chambers bought him lunch in a restaurant. Then Mr. Chambers said he knew a bar in the area that had a model of the Titanic in it, and if Chip would just be patient and wait a bit, he’d go out, find just where it was, and take him to see the model ocean liner.

  Chip sat in the resturant and played with the remains of his lunch. Mr. Chambers didn’t come back. Chip waited and waited. And then after a while, even though he was ashamed of himself, he started getting scared again. If anything happens to Mr. Chambers, he worried, I won’t be able to get home. I don’t know the way. But then at last there was Mr. Chambers. He looked a little flushed and he was perspiring heavily, but he was cheerful and as kindly as ever. “I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “I’ve been into all the bars, but I couldn’t find the Titanic anywhere.”

  If Phyllis was dismayed by Bob’s drinking, she didn’t let it interfere with her life. She continued going to her nursing jobs and continued to throw herself into her Greys presidential duties, organizing outings for the cadets to the Columbia-Dartmouth football game, and to West Point, where they met a brigadier general and ate their lunch in the military academy’s mess hall.

  She was well liked by the boys now officially under her command, but she could be very stern when they disappointed her, paraded poorly, or behaved boisterously. With Robert, she was sternest of all. When he failed to carry out an order, she would chew him out royally, criticize and humiliate him even in front of other people. One afternoon in the armory the mother of another Greys cadet witnessed one of these dressing-downs. Phyllis was scolding Robert about a purchase he’d failed to make. Her voice was icy, her words cutting. Robert, towering over her, listened silently.

  Isn’t he going to defend himself? the observer wondered. My son certainly would.

  But Robert merely eyed his mother blankly and kept on saying nothing.

  Pressure. Demands. His mother’s expectations were grinding him down, thirteen-year-old Robert told a friend that year.

  He had lots of friends by then, many of them girls. Girls liked his looks, his military bearing, and the mischievous, playful way in which he teased them.

  One day a girl teased him back. She made fun of him verbally and then turned physical, prankishly kicking at his rear end. Robert responded to the humiliation with sudden explosive anger. He whirled around and grabbed the girl’s arm, twisting it so hard she felt it was about to break.

  That fall—it was 1979—Jennifer, a gangly eleven-year-old with crooked teeth and limp hair that she tucked impatiently behind prominent ears, moved back East. Ellen had soured on California and decided to rent a small house in Manorhaven, a somewhat shabby enclave in the posh Long Island suburb of Port Washington. She enrolled Jennifer in the sixth grade of Manorhaven’s public elementary school.

  Jennifer barely remembered Long Island, and she wasn’t happy about being a new girl at a new school. But she tried to find friends, flinging herself into the chore by making the first gestures. “I’m Jennifer Levin,” she would say, scribbling her phone number on a sheet of looseleaf paper. In a short while her efforts bore fruit and she was invited for sleep-overs and backyard swimming pool parties.

  At the Greys, Robert’s proud record was showing signs of deterioration. By that autumn, he was a steady if secret drinker, accustomed to meeting his thirteen-year-old friends at an East Side bar where the proprietor allowed them to order drinks, or turning up at parties and dances with a flask of cheap whiskey in his pocket. Perhaps as a result of drinking, he had frequent bouts of vertigo at the armory. And one afternoon, while carrying the Greys’ cross at a patriotic service at the Presbyterian Brick Church, he passed out.

  Parents who witnessed the event whispered among them
selves that alcohol or marijuana might have caused Robert’s fainting spell, and hinted as much to Phyllis.

  She said no, there’s nothing wrong with Robert except a touch of flu. And if she was angry at him, she readily forgave him when at Christmas he performed exceptionally well at the 99th Annual Review. She even wrote him a formal letter of congratulation. “You exemplify and demonstrate the fine values which make fine and good men,” the note said. “There is no greater compliment to apply to any man other than to say that he is a good man.”

  One day that semester, Leilia Van Baker, a leggy butterscotch-blond twelve-year-old who went to a private school across the street from Robert’s home, visited him at his apartment. In the living room she saw a mammoth gloriously framed three-quarter-length portrait of him. The painting depicted Robert in a blazer, a snowy white dress shirt, and a striped tie. His brown hair was filled with highlights, his smile was radiant, his tapered fingers rested lightly on a chair back, and his tailored torso leaned gracefully forward. He looks, Leilia thought, exalted, like a young duke.

  She stared at the painting. Robert began to blush. His mother had commissioned it.

  Could he work with Robert on his prep school applications, Phyllis asked a friend that spring. Robert had his heart set on boarding school, she told the friend, particularly Choate, where a number of boys he knew were hoping to go. But the boarding schools had elaborate application procedures, and she felt the boy needed some manly guidance if he was to get his in on time and in the proper fashion.

  Why me, why not Bob? the friend, John Dermont, asked himself. But he knew the answer. Bob was hardly ever at home, and when he was, he was less than alert. Dermont agreed to oversee Robert’s applications. Under his guidance Robert filled out questionnaires, obtained recommendations from teachers, and wrote an essay about why he might be an asset to a boarding school community. In the essay he concentrated on his participation in the Greys. “The lessons I have learned,” he asserted, “the development of good character, and the responsibilities of assuming command, will benefit me in boarding school and throughout the rest of my life.”

  The application procedure went so smoothly that Phyllis asked Dermont to help Robert with an eighth-grade history essay as well.

  Up at Choate, in Wallingford, Connecticut, the admissions staff was hesitant about Robert at first. The school, nearly a hundred years old, was one of the country’s most eminent college preparatory institutions and prided itself on being able to attract to its 500-acre campus the best and the brightest students. Robert had received enthusiastic recommendations from several of his lower school teachers, but his grades weren’t particularly good. Nor were his scores on the required Secondary School Aptitude Tests.

  Still, the staff reasoned, the boy had been a member of the Greys, which had supplied Choate with a number of its finest alumni, and during his interview he’d come across as exceptionally well-mannered and charming. They decided to accept him.

  The news stirred him. Made him proud. He was going on “to other things bigger and better than New York,” he wrote in the yearbook of a girl he liked. She had nicknamed him Romeo, and he signed with the nickname. Then he scrawled another goodbye on another page, and this time boastfully appended to his signature, “Romeo, The Great! The Sacred! The Fantastic! Forever Great! Nice Guy!”

  Representative Geraldine Ferraro, whose son John Zaccaro, Jr., had gone to St. David’s, gave the commencement address on the day of Robert’s graduation. From a podium at the Church of St. Thomas More, she reminded Robert and his classmates of all the advantages they had received and urged them always to remember how fortunate they were and give something back to society.

  John Dermont and his wife, Barbara, were at the ceremony. They sat in a pew listening dutifully to the speeches and award presentations. Dermont grew drowsy. Then suddenly he heard that the next award would be for the eighth-grade history essay competition. He sat up straight. “Phyllis didn’t tell me when she asked me to help Robert with his history essay,” he whispered to Barbara, “that it was for a competition.”

  “Sssh,” Barbara said.

  Dermont didn’t quiet down. “If she’d told me, I’d never have agreed to help.”

  “You only helped,” Barbara said. “You didn’t write it.”

  “That’s not the point. I made research suggestions. Contributed ideas. If Robert wins, I’m going to have to tell the school.”

  A moment later the winner was announced. Dermont was relieved to hear another boy’s name. “I guess I shouldn’t have worried,” he whispered to Barbara. “Because even with help, Robert probably didn’t write an organized essay. His porch light is off.”

  In the fall Jennifer began at John Philip Sousa, a public junior high in Port Washington.

  She wasn’t happy about the school. Port Washington had two junior highs, Sousa and Weber, and many of the friends she had arduously made in sixth grade were at Weber, because they lived in its district. She complained about being parted from her old companions, and complained too that Sousa was cliquish. “I don’t fit in,” she wailed to a friend. “I’ll never fit in.” But her social anxiety made her push herself forward, and soon she was hanging out with girls in the school’s most powerful clique.

  One Sunday morning that fall, John Dermont’s breakfast was interrupted by an urgent telephone call. It was from Phyllis Chambers, who sounded on the verge of hysteria. “Robert’s down from Choate,” she said. “And Bob’s been drinking the whole weekend. He’s upset the boy.” She rattled on for a few minutes, and Dermont tried to calm her down. But she didn’t calm down. And after a while she said, “I want you to come over and put Bob out of the apartment.”

  Dermont was startled. “That’s a pretty drastic thing to do to a man, to put him out of his home.”

  “I don’t care. I want him out.”

  Dermont hesitated. Bob Chambers was a big man. Not aggressive, but nevertheless big. If Bob was drunk, and he tried to get him to leave, there could be trouble. “What’s Bob doing now?” he asked Phyllis. “Is he intoxicated now?”

  “No. But you’d better come right away.”

  Dermont was moved by the distress in her voice and said he’d be right over. But as he was scrambling into his coat, he was as worried that Bob might agree to leave his home as that he might resist. “You can’t just throw a guy out of his house,” he said to his wife. “You’ve got to offer him an alternative.”

  “Of course,” Barbara said. “But what?”

  “Roosevelt Hospital,” Dermont remembered. “Call them and see if they’ve got a free bed in their detoxification unit. If they do, tell them to hold it.” Then he raced out of his apartment.

  At the Chamberses’, he was let in by Phyllis and Robert, who quickly retreated to a bedroom, leaving him alone with Bob in the dining room. “I’ve got to use the phone,” he said to Bob, and dialed Barbara.

  “Did you reach Roosevelt?” he asked when she picked up. “Do they have a bed?”

  “Yes. I said you’d be right over.”

  “Good.” Dermont hung up and began trying to explain to Bob why he was here. “Phyllis asked me to come,” he said. “She and Robert don’t want you here anymore.”

  Bob stared at him with a face full of sorrow and incomprehension. “Who doesn’t want me here?” he asked.

  “Your family,” Dermont said. “They want you to go. For your own good.”

  Bob put his head in his hands.

  “Don’t worry,” Dermont said. “We’re going to go over to Roosevelt Hospital. You can stay there a week, and then you can get into Smithers.”

  “I don’t know,” Bob said. And he looked so uncertain that Dermont decided that Phyllis and Robert ought to talk to him now, too. Tell him that even though they wanted him gone, they still cared for him. He called Phyllis out of the bedroom, explained his plan about Roosevelt to her, and stood quietly as she told Bob what a good idea it was and that she only wanted him to leave because it would help him. The
n he called Robert out. “Tell your father how much you love him,” he said.

  The boy didn’t speak. Wouldn’t speak.

  “You do love him, don’t you?” Dermont prompted. But still the boy remained silent. Was he angry with his father? Embarrassed? Probably a bit of both, Dermont thought, and remembered that Phyllis had said something earlier about how last night Bob had stumbled and fallen on Robert. “Come on, Robert,” Dermont coaxed the boy, still hoping he’d say something supportive to his father. But Robert just shrugged. Then, “All this fuss is taking too long,” he muttered. “I’ve got to be back up at school in a few hours.”

  At that, Bob Chambers stood up. And a moment later he slammed the front door and was gone.

  Fifteen minutes afterward, while Phyllis and Dermont were considering what to do, Robert skittered out of the apartment and began looking for his father. He searched for him in all his favorite bars. He tore through the neighborhood, going up and down the streets. But he didn’t find Bob, and a few hours later he returned to Choate.

  The glitter of gold on red leaves when the first demure bursts of sun light on them, the silver foil of frost that wraps each sheath of grass. Autumn mornings in Connecticut were breathtaking. But after that weekend in New York, Robert rarely woke up in time to see them anymore. He had begun using cocaine and, enjoying the rush, was staying up late, only to drowse away his mornings. Years later, he would tell his parents that he’d never have used coke except for what he’d gone through that terrible weekend when his father had slammed out of the apartment. He’d wanted to blot out the experience, the memory, he said. But his initial explorations of cocaine may have had nothing to do with that painful weekend, may have been the result of cocaine’s new and widespread availability. Once a rare drug, it had become in the early 1980s easy to get, even at boarding school, even at Choate. Some Choate students would soon be financing the smuggling of the drug direct to the campus from Caracas.