The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Hazelden treats its youthful addicts in an attractive sprawling building called Pioneer House, which seems more like a ski lodge than an institution. Outside are acres of verdant lawn; inside, a massive fireplace, multileveled carpeted public rooms, and small attractive collegelike dormitories with beds, bureaus, and desks.

  A structured schedule, counseling, peer-group support, and the self-help principles of Alcoholics Anonymous are the pinions of Pioneer House’s program. Robert settled in and began to follow the program, rising early in the morning, attending lectures and meetings all day, and going to bed just a few hours after dark. But he felt sorry for himself. He complained bitterly about the rules and regulations. And one evening when he discovered that someone had stolen a gift his family had mailed him, he broke down and cried at having to live among thieves.

  Jennifer was trying to decide where to go to school. She was interested in a career in fashion, but she didn’t want to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Not yet. Not now. She might go there later, she told one of her teachers. But for the present she wanted an out-of-town school. High on her list was Boston’s Chamberlayne Junior College, a two-year institution that gave courses in fashion design and illustration. One weekend she went up to Boston again, this time with her friend Betsy Shankin, and looked the school over. She and Betsy stayed in John Flanagan’s apartment near Harvard, and Jennifer fell in love with Harvard Yard and the collegiate atmosphere that pervaded both Cambridge and Boston. Yes, she’d go to Chamberlayne in the fall, she decided.

  Late in April, Robert, having completed Hazelden’s program, flew home from Minnesota and went to see a New York lawyer, Henry Putzel III. Phyllis went with him. While Robert had been at Hazelden, Detective Enterlin had called her to say that Robert would have to participate in a line-up on the burglary matter. Phyllis had asked friends to recommend a lawyer.

  Putzel was a serious, gentle Yale man, with two teenagers of his own. As soon as Phyllis and Robert walked into his modest Midtown office, he recognized that he’d met Phyllis before. It had been at the home of a wealthy former client of his. Phyllis had been his client’s nurse, a dedicated caretaker who had worried over every detail. She’s a wonderful woman, Putzel thought. And after he talked to her, he felt the same. Her boy had had some problems, he realized. But she’d attended to them, sent him to rehab, and now he was straightening out.

  He agreed without hesitation to take Robert’s case.

  Robert remained in New York after his appointment with Putzel. Hazelden had recommended that he not consider himself cured of drugs, and that for a time he live in a halfway house where he could avoid old temptations and bad companions. But he didn’t want to go to a halfway house, Robert told his mother. Couldn’t he live at home? He’d be all right, he promised. He’d get a job, he’d attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings regularly, and he’d manage on his own, without the support of a halfway house, to stay clean.

  Phyllis yielded to his entreaties. But soon after he settled into his old room, with its night-long silence while she was away at work, and its view of the private school playground that even when empty must have seemed haunted by the figures of girls he had once known, he started going out to bars and discos. One night he made his way downtown to the Palladium, the East 14th Street rock club that had replaced Studio 54 and Area as his friends’ favorite nightspot.

  The club was swinging that night, its undulating entrance walls and dizzying translucent staircase crowded with young people. On the dance floor, mammoth and dark, more crowds gyrated to the sounds of explosive music, and overhead banks of video screens rotated, descended, climbed high again. Robert took in the sights and sounds, then made his way into one of the smaller rooms where there was a private party. There he ran into Leilia Van Baker.

  “Got any dope?” he asked her.

  She was surprised to see him, but even more surprised at the question. She knew he’d just returned from rehab.

  “I don’t,” she told him. Then she said, “Anyway, getting baked is so boring.”

  He looked at her as if he didn’t believe what she was saying.

  “No, I mean it,” she said. “Sure it’s okay once a month. Or once every two months. But that’s it. I just don’t get baked.”

  He took her remark for a put-down. “Look, Leilia,” he said, “don’t give me a guilt trip. I’ve been dry for seven weeks!”

  “I’m not giving you a guilt trip. I don’t care what you do. You can do whatever you like.”

  “Good.”

  He wandered away toward the crowds and the music, and Leilia forgot about him. But fifteen minutes later he was back. “I got some Ecstasy,” he said. Then, “I hear you’re going up to Vermont to live.”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiled seductively. “I’d like to live with you up there.”

  Leilia shrugged. She wasn’t interested in him.

  Still, they were old friends, and at the end of the party she said goodbye to him pleasantly.

  “Call you soon,” he promised.

  But he didn’t call, and when a few weeks later she ran into him again at a friend’s house party, she snubbed him. She didn’t need friends who didn’t keep their promises, and besides, he was acting real weird. Wasted.

  Jennifer was still keeping up the diary she had started in Southampton. It was a small black spiral date book, and in it in a childish handwriting she scrawled fervent descriptions of sexual encounters she had had or wanted to have. She alluded to using cocaine. And, writing in superlatives, she caroled the charms of various young men, terming this one or that the greatest lover. The diary was graphic and feverish, and she didn’t like to leave it lying around in her room at home, where it might be found by her father and stepmother. So instead she carried it with her to school. But she didn’t mind sharing its contents with friends, and at times read them choice passages.

  She had always shared her secrets with friends, and now as graduation approached, she poured out her love for some of them in a torrent of impassioned yearbook inscriptions. “I love you so focken much it would scare you,” she wrote to one old friend. “You mean more to me than anyone else in my life! I dearly cherish all we’ve shared from driving to boys to DRUGS. From laughter to complete tears (Area)… . You are a huge part of my life and a person too dear to me to ever forget.”

  To Leilia Van Baker she wrote, “You have a heart the size of any mountain and the intelligence and beauty every girl envies. I can’t really explain the feeling of closeness I feel toward you. If we don’t speak for a month, a year, a century, the feeling and specialness between you and I will never fade. I’ll always be in your footsteps, and you’ll always be in my heart.”

  But despite her ardent, cheery yearbook inscriptions, Jennifer was not happy as the school year drew to a close. She had contracted vaginal herpes, and the virus made her feel loathsome and blue. “Why are our bodies so disgusting?” she cried out to a friend over Memorial Day weekend. “Why am I caught up in all this unhappiness?”

  She brooded about her condition throughout the holiday, but the following week got good news. Visiting her gynecologist, she learned that the disease was in remission.

  Two weeks later she graduated. Her class had voted her “best-looking,” and on the eve of graduation she repaid the honor by distributing woven friendship bracelets to many of her fellow graduates. The ceremony was held in an auditorium at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Wearing a white cap and gown, she listened solemnly to a handful of speakers exhorting her class to go out into the world and make something of themselves. At last her name was called. She rose triumphantly, did a little dance as she crossed the platform. Then, just before she took possession of her diploma, she raised her arms and thrust high the fingers of both her hands in a victory sign.

  That night she celebrated. She went to the class prom, a dress-up dinner at a Village restaurant, then changed into casual clothes and headed in an entourage of eight cars to Jones Beach, out
on Long Island. It took the group hours to find the beach, and when they finally did, they were disappointed to be told by a ranger that they couldn’t stay. “You’ll have to leave,” he said coldly. But Jennifer felt she could get around him. “Leave it to me,” she told her friends, and, jumping out of the car, explained to the man that this was graduation night. The ranger, moved by her eagerness and persistence, said he’d escort the group to another beach, and Jennifer’s friends praised her for saving the night.

  It was still dark when they got to the second beach. They lit a fire and cooked some food. Then two cops came by and told them they couldn’t have a fire. They put it out and set up a volleyball net instead and, when the dawn came up, played volleyball and splashed in the cold ocean. Some of the group left after that and went home, but Jennifer stayed and sunned and swam until about three in the afternoon.

  She looked beautiful that night, her dark eyes brighter than usual amid the flush of color in her cheeks. Tired, but still high on her new status as a graduate, she met up with Betsy and the two of them went to Dorrian’s. There after a while they split up. She wandered around talking to friends while Betsy sat down at a table with Robert Chambers.

  Jennifer was startled when a few moments later Betsy came over to her and reported what Robert had just said. “I want you to know,” he’d said, “that your friend Jennifer is the most. The best-looking girl in the world.”

  He’d never even spoken to her since that night at Kitty’s Valentine’s party when they’d first met. She listened to Betsy with amazement.

  “He said he really would like to talk to you,” Betsy was going on. “But not inside the bar, because his girlfriend’s friends are here. He says to meet him outside in twenty minutes.”

  The best-looking girl in the world? His lavish praise made her heart leap. In twenty minutes, just as he had bidden, she went outside and talked with him; and when she came back in, she was glowing.

  4.

  The Summer of ’86

  She had made love with Robert Chambers! Jennifer couldn’t keep the news to herself. She got on the phone and in a flush of excitement related the details to a whole cotillion of girlfriends. It was their first date, she said. They’d gone to the apartment he lived in with his mother. She was out working that night, so it was okay to go there. Robert was great. Gentle and agreeable. And wonder of wonders, he’d kept on complimenting her. Saying how beautiful she was. She couldn’t believe how well things were going. It was the second week of July and she’d graduated and she was seeing Robert Chambers!

  “You’ve reached Hot Choice. This week we featchuh a fabulous assortment of lovelies. Press Numbuh One fuh Amy and huh incredible, uh, pussonality. Press Numbuh Two fuh a waitress with ger-reat specials. Press Numbuh Three fuh Magical Maggie’s haht oil treatment.”

  From his bedroom late at night, Robert sometimes dialed a porno hot line and listened to the soft Southern-accented female voices on the other end of the line mouthing possibilities. He liked the disembodied panting voices that were stimulating without being demanding. A couple of times he finished listening to the tape, waited awhile, dialed again, and listened all over again.

  He was spending a lot of time in his bedroom. He had everything he needed in there. Hi-fi. TV. A rolltop desk. He had his history there, too. The mirror whose frame he’d decorated with dozens of pairs of sunglasses. The stuffed animals he’d played with as a child, their vacant button-eyes staring familiarly down at him. He preferred lying on his bed and looking at his old playthings, or just listening to music and thinking about his future, to going out and looking for a job, even though his mother was pressing him to do so. And when she complained that he was lazy, he no longer held his tongue the way he used to when he was a little boy. He cursed her to her face.

  Marilei, coming to visit, heard him damning Phyllis and decided that part of his anger had to do with the fact that Phyllis was trying to push him into getting a job, and that some of the job possibilities she’d come up with were beneath his dignity. Things like being a porter in the Trump Tower, or an elevator man on Fifth Avenue. Marilei, nutritionist turned maid, knew how unpleasant it could be to work beneath one’s dignity, but she also knew there were advantages to work—any sort of work. She tried to communicate this to Robert, tried to help him understand that if he took a job, any job, he could be his own man. “Hrobert, this is your best time of life,” she said. “Why you miss your time? Why you don’t change, go, move, make money, have your own apartment, have your mother off your back. You can do this. You can be somebody. Because you are an American.”

  Robert ignored Marilei, just as he ignored Phyllis. But eventually Marilei heard from Phyllis that Robert had taken a job. He’d be doing some painting, she said. In the apartment of a neighbor, Mrs. Murphy.

  Marilei stopped by the Chamberses’ building the day Robert was supposed to start his job. She found Robert still asleep and Phyllis in Mrs. Murphy’s apartment. Phyllis was wearing work clothes and moving the furniture into the middle of the room so that when Robert woke up he would find it easy to start the job.

  Jennifer was having a wonderful summer. Keeping her weight off—she was down to 135 pounds—by taking over-the-counter diet pills. Working as a hostess down at Fluties in the South Street Seaport. Making good money. Each week she put her paycheck into a drawer. She wouldn’t cash the checks now, she decided. Better to save them and have a nest egg when she went off to college in September.

  The work at Fluties was fun. She didn’t mind the crowds, the heavy trays she had to carry when she helped clear the tables, the way her feet hurt at night when she took her shoes off. Besides, she liked her fellow waiters, and sometimes went out with a group of them.

  She saw her old friends, too. And when she was with them, she’d cut up. Drink, and then do dopey things and make them laugh. There was the time she raced along the streets of SoHo banging a stick on the cast-iron buildings to see if any rats would scurry out. The time she went to a pool and smeared pats of butter from the pool’s cafe onto her legs to protect them from sunburn. That time, her friends told her she reeked of rancid butter and chased her away from them to the far end of the pool, the whole bunch of them wet and slippery and convulsed with laughter.

  The best thing about the summer was guys. There were a bunch of guys from Fluties who were always after her. And there was a gorgeous blond preppie from Dorrian’s with whom she’d made love a couple of times. She hadn’t used birth control. She rarely did. The pills made her nauseous, and a diaphragm was so inconvenient. She hadn’t used anything with Robert Chambers either. He was the one, out of all the guys who were interested in her, that she found the most exciting. She’d feared her thing with him might prove just a one-time fling, but in the middle of July she’d gone up to Boston to attend an orientation weekend at Chamberlayne; and when she’d gotten back, he’d left messages on her tape. It was terribly flattering. She couldn’t remember when she hadn’t known his name, hadn’t heard about how he could have his pick of any of the classy Upper East Side girls he wanted. But he’d called her. Listening to the tape, she’d felt so happy that she’d phoned her friend Margaret, who was up in Boston for the month, and played the messages back to her. “Jennifer, why haven’t you called me,” he said on one. “Jennifer, please call me,” he said on another. So she called him.

  Nora Bray, a friend of Jennifer and Robert’s, let them sleep together in her apartment on the West Side shortly after Jennifer received Robert’s messages. She gave them the master bedroom, her parents’ room, and in the morning went in to talk to them. Robert was sitting on the bed, and Jennifer was on the phone. She was rating him, telling someone that she’d just spent a fantastic night with the most fantastic lover. It’s her mother she’s talking to, Nora thought, and was amazed at how open Jennifer could be with a parent.

  All right already, Robert told his mother, he’d accompany her to New Jersey. Her friend Father McCarrick had been named archbishop of Newark, and there wa
s going to be a gala installation ceremony. McCarrick was like a member of the family. He’d even given Robert an autographed picture of himself and signed it “Uncle Ted.” Still, Robert didn’t feel that close to Father McCarrick, hadn’t seen him for several years. But to get Phyllis off his case, he adopted the mask of compliance he’d worn as a little boy and promised her he’d go to the ceremony with her.

  It was like old times. He sat alongside her in the chauffeured limousine she hired for the drive, and again at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, where the installation took place; and when the ceremony was over, he stood at her side during the crowded formal reception and shook hands with all her friends. He even exchanged a few polite words with McCarrick.

  That night, however, he dropped the mask. Back in the city, he went to Dorrian’s, stayed late, and then walked with friends out onto the avenue, where he shouted happy obscenities at the top of his lungs. Two policemen cruising the neighborhood heard the racket and, parking their car, gave Robert and another young man a summons for disorderly conduct. Robert didn’t care. Throwing the day’s restraints to the winds, he shouted at the cops, “You fucking cowards, you should stick to niggers!”

  They ignored him, walking away.

  When he saw that they were gone, he ripped up the summons. Then in a swirling storm of defiance he shoved the torn bits of paper under the windshield wipers of their car.

  “Robert Chambers is so cute,” Jennifer said over the telephone to Leilia Van Baker a couple of weeks later. Leilia was in New York, but Jennifer had quit her job and taken off for California to spend a week visiting friends. The night before she left, she’d slept with Robert again, this time at the home of another girl she knew. “It was so much fun being with him,” she told Leilia. Then she said, “He’s the best person I ever slept with in my entire life.”