I never thought anyone would see or hear of either one, but I’m grateful now to be able to share them with people—especially young people, who may feel as if they’ll never be heard. Being heard has nothing to do with notoriety; it’s about feeling like you’ve a right to exist. And if you’re asking, “What’s the big deal?” then I congratulate your privilege.
I have two questions for you, reader: Are you free? And what would you do for the freedom to be anyone? Unless your answer is anything, try again.
NANCY
1988: FOUR YEARS OLD
In the early morning, in my footie pajamas, I cracked open the door to my mother’s bedroom. I couldn’t see anything except the orangey-red tip of her cigarette levitating over her bed as she took long, dramatic pulls in the pitch-blackness of the Connecticut morning. I often visited her before sunrise, as I never really slept and she frequently awoke in the night to smoke cigarettes in complete and utter darkness, the cigarette’s ember seemingly the only light in the whole universe.
I silently shuffled into the room and climbed up her four-poster bed, which was so high it required a small staircase to scale it. Exhaling a whole atmosphere of smoke, she whispered, “My Sweet Baby James,” as I wriggled my way under her layers upon layers of plush blankets and down comforters. I nestled my head onto her lap and she absently drew her long, bright-red nails over my back until I fell asleep, all the while puffing away consecutively on long Benson & Hedges cigarettes and blinking silently into the pensive darkness.
I loved these mornings, when I could snuggle with my mother and believe that she was always going to be my savior. That she alone, in a world that wouldn’t let me rest, would be the one to lull me to peaceful, innocent sleep. That she would always be the fire-breathing dragon who had raised a little human boy named James.
CHAPTER 1
In 1948, a Sephardi Jewish man and a British woman had an affair in Spain that resulted in a secret daughter. They decided it was best to put her up for adoption. The daughter was sent to live with a wealthy Protestant couple, Robert and Cora, at their estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Robert and Cora named her Nancy Elizabeth White. The family had a large house staff: gardeners, cooks, valets, and maids, the most notable of which was Yeti, a maid who became Nancy’s confidante.
Cora was a raging alcoholic who was said to have attempted suicide in front of Nancy on two occasions. It was much like the game of Clue: Mrs. White, in the kitchen, with the knife. Yeti the maid had stopped her before she could cut her wrists right in front of her daughter. Cora would play the role of perfect fifties housewife to guests and strangers, and then drink herself into a depressed oblivion.
Thankfully Nancy had her brother, Bruce, who was also adopted, for support. They forged a lifelong bond, vowing to protect each other from Cora’s wallops, emotional or otherwise. When things got really bad, Nancy fled to her neighbors, the Bradburys. She spent many of her childhood afternoons learning to cook American cuisine with Mrs. Bradbury. This is where her love of cooking began. It certainly wasn’t from seeing her mother cook, what with all the chefs and maids and such. Wealth can breed ineptitude.
As a teenager in the beautiful, ostentatious town of Greenwich, Nancy blossomed into a vision of 1960s beauty. She had long black hair that hung down to her waist and a thin, petite frame, accessorized with a pair of enormous breasts. Her eyes shone a bright hazel green. She was the American Dream. She wore frilly blouses and kept her fingernails long and filed, with a scandalous red shellac highlighting her fine, delicate hands. When she listened to music she’d close her eyes, twisting and turning her graceful hands in the air and rocking her hips gently side to side. Her joy was so easy at this time that she smiled wide and laughed loud for every photo taken. Her large teeth gleamed in the suburban sunshine as she gossiped with her best friends—the Boss Chicks, as they named themselves. They smoked cigarettes in profusion and freely passed around bottles of beer. They were the queens of the town, the envy of every American girl, and the lust of every 1960s American boy.
One summer, Nancy and the Boss Chicks met a group of older gentlemen at a bar. Among them was one Patrick Gil—“Pat,” everyone called him. He was a tall, rakish man seven years Nancy’s senior. He was happy and quick to laugh, with joyful almond eyes. Nancy and Pat began seeing each other regularly, going on civilized, mid-twentieth-century dates. They fell in love listening to Bob Dylan records on a portable record player in her family’s driveway. Fresh, innocent romance.
Nancy’s parents, the Whites, were not pleased with this new union. Pat’s father was a Portuguese housepainter and his mother had once been the nanny to George Bush Sr. But Nancy had a way of making people see things her way. She was always the boss. She was smart, wily, unstoppable. She used her vulnerability to connect with people and draw them to her side. And she was undeniably cool, the very definition of charismatic.
When she discovered she was pregnant, she knew she might be pushing her freedom. She was eighteen and unwed, and it was the 1960s. So she and Patrick were wed immediately, and she gave birth to her first of five children, Peter. The happy couple built a house from the ground up on Hillcrest Lane in Old Greenwich. It was the envy of the town and as chic as they come. Patrick began law school, while Nancy stayed home. They were young, beautiful, and rich: on track to becoming the perfect American family.
For years, Nancy and Patrick were invincible. They decided to open a bar in Port Chester, New York, as the drinking age was eighteen there and twenty-one in Connecticut, and they wanted a place to party with all their friends. They named the bar the Stumble Inn, and it became the good-time place. Every rich teenager from Greenwich brought their parents’ cash to the bar and danced and drank themselves into a stupor to the tunes of the Doors and the Rolling Stones. Nancy and Patrick were making money hand over fist and reveling in their good fortune. They had two more children, Melissa and Robert, rounding out their perfect nuclear family. Nancy was a child mother navigating the elusive maze of growing up. Like Cora before her, she played the part of the consummate Greenwich housewife: white Christmases, crystalline dinners, precious Easters, and polished silver.
1989: FIVE YEARS OLD
One of my favorite gifts that my mother bought me was a small watercolor painting of a little boy and his teddy bear. She said it looked just like her Sweet Baby James. Like the boy in the painting, I, too, had a teddy bear, which I had named Magic Bear. He was cream colored with a fat white tummy and an upturned nose, and I loved him as much as I loved any of my siblings.
On the watercolor painting, beautiful calligraphic writing spelled out, “Follow your dreams, for they hold endless possibilities.” My mother took me by the shoulders and shook me gently, with a wistful gleam in her eye. “You listen to me, Jimbo. This. This is what it’s all about,” she said, tapping her painted finger on the word “dreams,” which I could not yet read. She went on, almost ruefully, “Follow your dreams, for they hold endless possibilities.” And she hugged me close, resting her chin atop my tawny head.
CHAPTER 2
In 1980, Nancy gave birth to another baby boy, whom she and Pat named Andrew. It had been eight years since Robbie, the next-youngest child, had been born, and this was obviously an accidental pregnancy. They had even talked about abortion.
Shortly after Andrew’s birth, Nancy lost both her parents to alcoholism and cancer. Cora and Robert left her with a whopping $500,000 in a trust fund that was managed by Robert’s brother, Warren White. In her trust fund was a significant number of shares in an oil stock called Occidental Petroleum, where Nancy’s grandfather had worked. He had bought shares and created trust funds for his grandkids. Per her grandparents’ and parents’ wishes, Nancy would receive $150,000 per year, making her a millionaire by the mid-1980s. Pete, Nancy’s eldest child, recalls her tearing open the mail voraciously, holding up the oil check, and kissing it with glistening eyes.
She and Pat bought a six-b
edroom house of Gatsbyesque proportions located in the Shorelands gated community and situated on a private beach on the Long Island Sound. This incredible Manhattan satellite truly was the home of a millionaire and it reeked of old money.
That August, Nancy and Pat returned to the family’s country club to show off their adorable baby boy. Every upstanding family in Greenwich was a member of the Innis Arden country club, home to a golf course and a swimming pool. The Gils hired the head swim coach and pool director, a twenty-two-year-old man named Stuart who had just graduated from college, to teach their children how to swim while they drank themselves silly and partied with their friends. Pete, Missy, and Robbie, as they were known, were real country club rats, getting into all sorts of mischief with their friends. They were independent little hooligans with a penchant for tricks and fun.
Stuart was the up-and-comer, the local hero, the all-star. He held every swimming record imaginable at Greenwich High and was the All-American heartthrob that only the 1980s could produce. Six foot three, with luminous blue eyes, a heroic nose, a trim, russet beard, and a broad-shouldered swimmer’s build, Stuart was the embodiment of that era’s prime macho energy. A feted jock, with wit to boot.
Nancy and Stuart saw each other every day at the pool. Soon, they began to find ways to spend more and more time together. The hometown hero and Greenwich’s number one housewife were walking a thin line. Whispers followed Stuart wherever he went. “She’s so much older.” “Isn’t he the kids’ swim coach?” “He just got back from college.” “She just had another baby with Pat and lives at Shorelands.” “She’s throwing away her life.” But Nancy and Stuart didn’t care, not one bit. They fell in love like only the forbidden can.
Nancy and Stuart would go on drinking benders together, disappearing into the weekend and leaving little Andrew with the nanny. When Nancy would return, completely inebriated, she’d knock on Missy’s door and want to chat. Nancy confessed the whole affair with Stuart to Missy one evening. Missy, who was ten, started locking her door at night. Nancy was on a quick path to becoming her mother, an alcoholic.
The summer turned to fall, and the fall turned to winter. Pat could ignore the affair no longer. There was too much talk among the high society. He confronted Nancy and said calmly, “It stops now. I’ll let it all go if it stops now, then we can move on.”
She cried, “Let’s go to counseling. Let’s talk about it. Please.”
“No. It stops now.”
“But I love him.”
She was head over heels. There was fire, passion, and intrigue. She couldn’t stay away. Even in asking for counseling, she was prolonging the inevitable. The whole town was ablaze with the news. To this day, the older residents of Greenwich speak of the Nancy scandal, calling it “the local news of the decade.”
1989: FIVE YEARS OLD
My mother often locked me in my bedroom for hours upon hours. I was not allowed to come out until I had taken a nap. But I never slept, not even at night. I was a nocturnal little child insomniac. “Where’s the fun in sleeping? Can I color while I’m asleep? Can I play with my Ninja Turtles? No? Then why would I go to sleep?”
My mother would say, “You’re tired. Little boys need rest. Go to bed or I’ll sell you to the gypsies.” And then she’d lock me in my room. I would lie down on the floor, press my lips into the crack under the door, and scream at the top of my lungs, an eardrum-rupturing din indeed.
I got so fed up with being locked in my bedroom that I once grabbed the Pac-Man-branded wastebasket, pulled down my pants, and pooped in it. “That’ll show her!” I thought. But all it did was leave me trapped in a small room with a waste bin of human poop for the foreseeable future.
Another time, I opened the window, climbed out, and shinnied up two stories along the gutter. My brother Robbie spotted me from the pool deck and raced up the stairs to my room. He reached out the window and calmly told me he’d give me ice cream if I would come back inside. Clearly, it was the only thing I could do.
One day, I was locked in my room, but I couldn’t find Magic Bear, who was my best friend. I looked everywhere. I ran, crazed, shouting for him. He never responded or showed his little upturned snout around a corner. I sat on my little bed and cried and cried. Had he left? Was I alone? I felt a despair that made every cell in my body tingle and vibrate. Torrents of tears flowed down my plump, asymmetrical cheeks. My mouth pulled down at the corners in a wailing frown.
Wiping my eyes, I looked out the window of my bedroom, only to be greeted by a cheerful blue sky. A sky that had no right being so beautiful when I was feeling so sad. “I bet he’s out there,” I thought between sobs. “I just know it. He needs my help.” So I stood up on my bed, closed my eyes, and began to levitate a few inches off my L.L.Bean bedspread. I floated over to the window, undid the latch—which I had become very good at undoing—and zipped out into the cozy blue sky.
I flew at such a speed! I flew past the park by our house and found myself over my elementary school. My schoolmates were all there and enjoying recess on the playground. Principal Walsh stood stoically at the edge of the schoolyard, and as I flew by, I reached into my pockets and threw little pebbles at his shining bald head, laughing hysterically as I flashed to and fro.
I then found myself floating into the park, only to discover an enormous triceratops hot on my trail. I launched myself up and perched on the highest branch of the tallest, leafiest tree in the park. The triceratops was coming directly for me. “But I thought they only ate plants!” I shrieked aloud, hoping someone would hear me and be duly impressed by my encyclopedic knowledge of dinosaurs. The triceratops rammed its tricorne head into the base of the tree, but I had jumped off just in time. I hovered above the tree as countless boughs rained down on the dinosaur, who happily crunched and munched the fallen foliage. Smug, I said to myself, “He just wanted the leaves,” and rocketed up into the troposphere.
I could feel Magic Bear’s presence. I knew he was up in the sky. I looked in every direction and was greeted by adorable, fluffy white clouds. They looked just like cartoon clouds. I bounded to countless pillowy fluffs, searching for Magic Bear in vain until, on the highest, most remote cloud, I spied a log cabin. Great plumes of ashy smoke rose from the chimney and were whisked away by the breeze. I shot up higher and higher until I finally arrived at the log cabin in the clouds.
I walked up to the front door and knocked, but there was no answer. I trepidatiously turned the doorknob and entered. “Hello?” No answer. “Is anyone home? I’m James. I’ve lost my best friend. My Magic Bear.” No answer. I looked around and was greeted by warm colors and cozy decor. It smelled of a happy hearth and fresh air, but there was no one home. I traipsed through each snug room until I found a child’s bedroom, much like my own. I walked in, sat on the edge of the bed, and put my head in my hands. “I’ll never find Magic Bear,” I said aloud. As my eyes welled up with the tears of a woebegone child, I felt a tickle at my feet on the floor. Terrified, I snatched my little feet up onto the bedspread. “Monster!!!” I screamed. But then, silence. Trembling, I rolled onto my tummy and steeled myself, gathering all the courage I had displayed in terrorizing Principal Walsh and facing the not-so-carnivorous triceratops. “I can do this,” I told myself. Propping myself up with my hands on the side of the mattress, I slowly and steadily lowered my face past the ledge. “OK, I’m going to look on the count of three . . . two . . .”
I awoke from my nap with a violent start. I was sweating lightly and a cool wind licked at my face from the open window, blowing the gauzy white curtains into the room. My eyes drifted from window to wall and fixed on the small watercolor painting. “Follow your dreams, for they hold endless possibilities.”
I hopped down onto the floor and looked under my bed. There was Magic Bear, face down, smooshed on his cute little snout, with one eye peering out at me as if to say, “Took you long enough!” I reached in, rescued him, and gave him a hug as big
as the world had ever seen and might ever see again. Happily, I thought to myself, “Some hugs you have to earn.”
Mother was right. I was going to follow my dreams. I would learn to fly for real.
CHAPTER 3
The real drama began when Stuart’s parents discovered the truth about his and Nancy’s affair. His mother, Rose Mary Maunsell, was an austere, stern Englishwoman, not to be crossed. She had come of age in London during the World War II blitzkrieg. On her way to volunteer at the local hospitals, which is what young ladies were meant to do at that time, she walked past smoldering ruins. After completing two years of college, which was quite revolutionary for a woman in the 1940s, she decided to board a ship for the United States—New York City, of course. She was ready to escape the horrors of World War II London and seek adventure in America. Upon disembarking, she found a tiny apartment and applied for a job as an office secretary to earn some pocket money. There, she met George Walter Whiteside Jr., a kind divorcé twenty years her senior. He wooed and wooed her, but to no avail. Rose Mary was staunch in her solitude.
Weeks turned to months. George finally wore Rose Mary down, and the stoic Englishwoman and the genteel American fell in love. They married, settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, and had five children, including Stuart. George and Rose Mary thought of their family as English nobles settled in America. They were proper, haughty, and wealthy, but not terribly social. George’s father was the American lawyer for Winston Churchill, for Pete’s sake! So upon discovering that their youngest, star-athlete son was fraternizing with a married woman, Rose Mary nearly fell off her high horse. She kicked Stuart out of the house so swiftly he barely had time to gather a set of clothes. That was how an Englishwoman traumatized by World War II handled a tough situation in 1980: sweep it under the rug, or else chuck the whole damn rug out the window. George and Rose Mary shipped Stuart off to Dallas, Texas, to work for Exxon selling typewriters, effectively ending the affair between Stuart and Nancy . . . or so they thought.
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