Then there was Jennie G. herself. While I was passing through one of her soirées early that July, I ran into Milton Blackstone. Long rumored to be my grandmother’s paramour, he had just addled the Grossinger’s universe by marrying an outsider from Florida in his mid-fifties and was now chaperoning two girls my age: his stepdaughter and her friend, a blonde beauty-pageant winner from Miami Beach named Helene. In presenting her to Jennie, Milton explained that she had ambitions to be a singer and had come to Grossinger’s to be discovered. He ratcheted his voice up a notch to remind all within earshot that he had discovered Eddie Fisher not far from this spot as a singing busboy.
After introductions, the two girls chatted with me and, when Milton and his family said their goodbyes, Helene and I were left standing together.
She wasn’t a type I was beguiled by, though she was a striking young woman—a pin-up moll, short and curvy with an artificially vivacious personality. In conducting conversation, I was more comfortable treating her as an honorary adult, unconnected to my own adolescence, a luminary like actress Kim Novak, who was dating the Grossinger’s ski instructor. I did, however, ask one unavoidable question. And, yes, of course she knew Betsy—she knew both Betsy and Bob; Bob was “a real close friend” of her own boyfriend Spike. We gabbed through dinner at the family table, where she recounted the series of unlikely events that had led her to the Hotel. Unfortunately, Milton was no longer in the talent business, and the best that he could manage was a job as the G.’s assistant teen hostess, performing occasional stints with the band.
Helene didn’t seem to notice that I was a pariah with girls, for after she got a room in staff quarters she called me daily and we began to see each other in the evenings. I was surprised by our exclusive companionship, but I rationalized: she was ambitious, I was Jennie’s grandson, and since she had a boyfriend back home I was a good foil to keep other men away.
Helene dressed flashily—bright lipstick; flashy, loudly colored blouses; high heels; too much perfume. She was quite sexy in her low-cut dresses, throwing rehearsed smiles, so why wasn’t I more captivated?
I hadn’t yet set definitive parameters for girlfriends, but I had consistent passions and predilections. I liked mysterious, shadowy, wittily coy or nuanced girls, even ghostlike wraiths, girls who seemed to have come from Oz or Atlantis. Helene wasn’t magical or bewitching; there was no enigma or subtlety to her, she was just another brassy Jewish girl, ambition and fame written all over her. She equated my writing with her singing and considered us two talented teenagers waiting for our big breaks. Up in my room she sat on the bed, I on the chair, and I read her safe passages from both books, after which she sang rock ’n’ roll ballads.
I stared at this amazing-looking creature on my bed belting out love songs a cappella and flashing the most fulsome looks, thinking how she would have played on fourth-floor James. A decade or two down the road, she would have been Miss Thing.
Helene loved to review the precise parameters of our relationship: we were buddies, “platonic friends,” not romantic partners. All the while she encouraged me to have hope for Miss Sley; in fact, she told me one night that she was going to give me a present. She smiled coyly, then said, “Betsy and Bob are no longer going together.” I knew from Betsy that she was heading off to the University of Colorado in the fall. The news of her separation from Bob was a surprise, but I had no idea what to make of it.
That evening after dinner, as Helene and I were strolling to the Lake, she stopped and kissed me forcefully on the lips before I could even think. “Don’t you know what that is?” she said. “It’s a pedillo.”
I stared blankly.
A car wound around the crooked road and came toward us in the distance. “Only one headlight means—kiss your partner.”
It was my first kiss.
Grandma Jennie bought me a bike, so I raced along Hotel paths, back and forth between the mail room and home, the ballfield and rendezvous with Helene, as the summer found its merry pace and rhythm. I was happy again. I could finally savor my emancipation from the Towers household, for I was free of the teen tour and gauntlets of freshman year at Amherst too. Helene and I enacted our non-romance night after night: in the bar, at movies in town, sitting in chaises at the cabana by the deserted pool under stars, holding hands at the Lake. I played softball on the staff team, wrote new chapters of The Moon and, slipping into my father’s office at night, called Catherine Carver on his New York line.
“Exciting stuff,” she said in praise.
I remember the evening Helene came to cheer for me at a game against Brown’s Hotel. She was wearing an enormous panama hat with a pineapple on top of it and a dancer on top of the pineapple. Everyone stared, and some players whistled. Caught between secret pleasure and blushing, I dove for a grounder down the line, trapped it in the webbing, and threw from my knees with all my might to first. This one time (though always in my iterated fantasies) I got the out.
People were talking about the play the next morning, and a few staff tried to convince PG to come to our next game. He said he would, but it didn’t happen. In his whole life he never once saw me in a game. We never threw a baseball back and forth either. We weren’t that kind of father and son.
Late in July I got my grades in the mail: A’s in English and humanities, which, combined with my complete failure of math and physics, pulled me barely up into the high D’s. The University of California wrote that my grade point average did not allow admission as a transfer student. Meanwhile, Amherst wasn’t giving up. A letter from Dean Esty indicated that I could enroll for sophomore year, as long as I made up the lost credits; I didn’t have to repeat the math and physics courses. I resigned myself—even looked forward to—returning.
Aunt Bunny went to visit her parents in Atlantic City for a stretch of early August, and late one afternoon I came home to what appeared to be an empty house except for Emma watching the Mets upstairs. I was startled when my father shouted for me from the back porch, a place used mostly for storage. I opened the door to see his substantial bulk draped over a very young woman on the wicker couch. As she raised herself I noticed she was short, busty, and very made up. He had a broad guilty smile. “I just wanted you to know,” he remarked disingenuously, “where I was,”
Later that week he chose to pursue the topic. He asked if I had slept with Helene. His vicarious interest repelled me, and I said that she was just a friend.
“Let me tell you something, Richard; they’re always your girlfriend when they hang around you. It doesn’t matter why. Maybe she thinks you’ll get her a break in show business; maybe she thinks she’ll marry into this Hotel. You know you’re not going to marry her. So why not get some experience. Just don’t get her pregnant. And if you do, tell me, and I’ll pay for an abortion.” It was the whole father-son service in one brusque speech. I guess he thought it was his job and, from my growing up with my mother, long overdue.
I tried to set him right: “I don’t think any of that is going to happen.”
He wasn’t listening. He recounted how many different girls he had screwed in college. Then he added abruptly: “I think you need to get laid. I know some models, real high-class Rheingold girls.” His mouth vacillated between a smirk and a leer as he referred to the playgirl hostesses for a brand of beer popular then. “You tell me when you’re ready, and I’ll make the arrangements.”
“How could you think I’d want that?”
“What are you—different from everyone else?”
We stood there in mutual intransigence. He wasn’t that far removed from the guys who locked me in my room. When I was a child I could look up to him and enjoy his bounty and company. Now, although he wouldn’t have put it that way, he wanted my soul.
My rejection set a wall between us. His routine glances became disapproving. I wondered if he knew about my truancy from the mailroom.
Perhaps, years ago in their warnings about him, my mother and Bob had not been so wrong! Once again, I was an en
emy in the native household.
In past vacations I made friends with Gene Kaye, a disc jockey at WHOL in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who hosted Grossinger’s events. When he arrived to deejay a summer dance, I told him about Helene.
“So the kid wants an audition, right?”
I nodded.
“No big deal. Out of friendship for you, my man, and out of respect for your family who has done so many fine things for me, say no more.”
The following weekend I sat in the back of the Terrace Room with Gene and his “buddy from the business” while Helene went through her set with a makeshift band. The guy thought she was fantastic and arranged for her to go to New York to cut a demo; he even gave her a new name: Aileen Frances. “You found me my own Catherine Carver,” she declared. Then she hugged me with unabashed delight.
Late one afternoon that week I got a phone call from the highway outside the Hotel. Jay and Barry were passing through. I tore down the hill to greet them. They pummelled me in delight as I slid into the back of their car. Proud of his recent license, Jay drove us on dirt roads past Chipinaw and around Silver Lake. “You realize this is it,” he warned. “Our families are at war. We probably won’t see each other for a while. But I want you to know you’re still my cousin and I love you.”
I shifted awkwardly and said, with what dubious sincerity I could marshal, that I loved him too.
“It’s terrible to have to tell you this, but your grandparents and your father and aunt are schmucks and common crooks. Do you think it’s fair that they make all the decisions when we own shares?”
“No. They imagine they built the place and that your family is just taking advantage of the way the will was written.”
“Do you agree?”
I shook my head.
“My grandparents were their partners; they put up the money; they always acted in good faith.” After a pause, he moderated his tone, “I feel sorry for you. Your grandparents are stupid and greedy. My mother and father want to preserve the fortune; they care about their kids. And your parents, if you don’t mind the expression”—he looked at me with a probing grin—“are idiots.” We all burst out laughing, though mine was a contact high. They left me back at the bottom of the hill. The next time I saw Jay was fourteen years later, surrounded by “gofers” and secretaries, huddled over a Wall Street screen.
On the evening of Betsy’s birthday, Helene and I dialed her on my father’s speaker phone. “Hello, guess who? I’m at Grossinger’s. You know me, still trying to become a star. And guess who got me the big audition?” Before Betsy could answer I said hello.
“It’s so nice to hear your voice after all those great letters,” she replied. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she was a paragon of empathic grace.
I told her I had decided to stay at Amherst, and she thought that was the right decision. Then she said excitedly that she had pledged a sorority at Boulder before entering. I didn’t have any reference point to comment, so I told her I was sorry to hear about Bob. She said, yes, she was terribly sad and hoped someday they would get back together because they had something special. My sentiments were duplicitous, but our exchange wasn’t.
Afterwards Helene, full of excitement, was telling dumb stories about Miami Beach, ostensibly because they involved Betsy in some manner. I was preoccupied and dour, which bothered her. We climbed the stairs to my room. I set myself against the backboard of the bed, and she surprised me by getting on the bed too, then leaning against me.
“I want you to hug me the way Spike does,” she announced, arranging herself at an angle so that her head fell back against my chin, my arm around her belly. We sat there quietly like that for a long time. I kissed her neck and moved my arm, but she stilled me.
“I saw the way you lit up when you talked to Betsy. I’m jealous even though you’re not my boyfriend. I’m used to thinking I’m the one boys chase, certainly not Betsy. But I don’t want to go any further with you because of Spike.”
Still from that evening our relationship was closer, almost boyfriend and girlfriend. We danced in the nightclub and kissed on her doorstep, as I shifted more into daily camaraderie. After my father noticed me dancing with her one evening, he called me into his room past midnight and asked if I had gotten anywhere.
“We’re still just friends.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s double-dating you.” I had never heard the term. “Don’t you know? She’s slipping out at night with other guys after you take her home.” I shook my head defiantly. “Richard, don’t be naïve. What she’s not giving you she’s giving to someone else. She’s not the innocent you think.”
The next morning I arranged a ride for Helene to cut her demo in New York in the Hotel car. Back in the evening she was still flying from the rush of it, but she indicated she had to talk to me. We moved out of anyone else’s earshot. “Your father was in the car, and he said, ‘Give my son a break.’ What did he mean?”
“Goddamn it!”
“What?”
“It’s not you. It’s him. He meant what it sounds like.”
“To sleep with you? Who does he think I am?”
“He’s a jerk. Just forget him.”
But one night that week I sneaked back to the Hotel in dungarees and a T-shirt—tie and jacket the required evening attire—to pick up milkshakes for Emma and me from the canteen as the Mets went into extra innings. As I shortcut through the back of the Terrace Room, I spotted Helene dancing with an older guy from the athletic staff. After that I avoided her until she came looking for me.
“I went dancing with a friend,” she retorted. “No big deal, huh?”
That’s right; no big deal. Betsy was the issue, not Helene. My friend Sandy, the portrait artist in the lobby, was creating a lifelike pastel of her from a photograph I took in New Orleans, and I went every day to check on his progress, which was sluggish because he preferred paying guests. Yet I remembered the feel of Helene’s body against mine, the charge of her presence, and I was trapped. I surely couldn’t wait for Betsy, but I also couldn’t imagine pursuing Helene. Go an inch more one way and I saw my grotesque father grinning at me; an inch the other, and I had this abstract love for a girl I might never see again.
When Aunt Bunny returned in mid-August I meant only to tell her about my dilemma, but our conversations were never constrained. Soon the incorrigible story-teller in me was recreating the entire string of events since she left. She evinced surprisingly little concern about Paul’s “escort.”
“What’s one more tramp with him,” she sniffed. “It’s my kids I care about. I won’t permit him to destroy my children. What was he going to do when he took you to the whorehouse anyway, wait outside or go in with you? No, don’t tell me, I already know. Well, sex with him is a crock of shit.”
Spike arrived the next morning—a surprisingly timid, gawky chap—to retrieve his girl. They packed his car with her suitcases and drove off together, back to Miami Beach.
Then one afternoon, just before Labor Day, I walked into my father’s room as he was emerging from his cavernous clothes closet. Out of nowhere he slapped me across the face, knocking me to the floor. Then he took a belt and began lashing me with it. I lay there, my head cradled in my arms. The pain was incredible, but the shock of it frightened me more. I couldn’t believe this was happening—not Uncle Paul from the Penny Arcade, Dr. Fabian’s ally! Only when he stopped did I get up. He stood there, breathing heavily, glaring at me with venom, a stranger. He was a brute of a man, barely in control. “You don’t ever go to Aunt Bunny again with stories of me.”
As I left the room he shouted after me: “I won’t make that offer again, you fag.”
Michael and James were just home from camp, and at dinner that night my father was telling silly jokes and playing riddle games with us. We were guessing fruits. He had picked an egg—no wonder no one got it. When we protested it was unfair he said, “Richard shoul
d know that one. An egg is the fruit of a hen.” Then he gave me a hug as he headed for the living room. “Come watch the Mets try to win one,” he said.
As we sat there silently, they did.
I made a copy of my revised Salty and Sandy and mailed it off to Catherine Carver. Then, my bike in the trunk, Sandy’s portrait of Betsy mounted in non-glare glass on the back seat, Ray and I headed out in the Hotel car—Route 52, the Taconic, the Mass Pike, back to Amherst for sophomore year.
2
PHI PSI
In the spring, when I was intending to transfer, I went through Amherst’s rushing ritual anyway. Every freshman visited and was shown around each of the thirteen fraternities; it was how the system worked, was made fair and egalitarian, at least to appearances. Amherst 1963 provided no social dorms for upperclassmen—no living quarters in which women were permitted after curfew. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors who did not live in fraternities got spartan rooms in North and South Hall under the same parietals as freshmen—and there weren’t even enough of those cubicles to go around. Although independent national organizations, the fraternities served as necessary housing for much of the student body.
Construction had already begun on so-called social dorms that would transform Amherst forever but, before that, most guys disappeared into the fraternity system, essentially not to be seen again in civilian life except for classrooms and, occasionally, the dining hall—a central grouse of Leo Marx and his colleagues.
The fraternities at Amherst were ranked by status, at least in the minds of students. The top two or three had most of the campus leaders: those who were to become congressmen, astronauts, chairs of academic departments, doctors, corporate executives. Two of the fraternities were nominally “animal houses” (some of the guys from my wing of James ended up in them). The others were individualized by temperament and styles of social life.
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