Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (15 page)

Nick and I were walking around the Stamford property one abundantly starry night in mid-July after my junior year of high school. I was showing him all my favorite spots, including the red barn with the Ping-Pong table and the apple orchard, the windmill and the greenhouse, the tennis court and the pool house, Stoneybroke. The two of us made our way down the stone steps to the pool. It was a warm night, with a strong breeze. I had on a pair of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, and Nick was in khakis and a loose white linen shirt. I’ve always liked longish hair on men, and Nick had the perfect head and good looks to get away with it. As his name, Delbanco, would suggest, he was Italian on his father’s side. “A pure product of the Italian soil,” Chibie said when she met him.

The moon made the air lustrous, as though it had been polished. Nick took my hand. It was the first time for both of us. He was awkward, and I compensated by moving like a gazelle (or so I thought at the time). He urged me toward him until our bodies touched, and he kissed me full on the lips. This was my romance. Only mine. Nobody intervened. There were no ghosts. No memories. Just Nicky and me.

We sat down on the cement surrounding the pool. Nicky pulled up the legs of his khakis, and we both submerged our legs, calf-deep, into the warm pool water. “You’re really beautiful,” Nick said, which made me glance the other way, as if to say, “Don’t look too close—you’ll find a problem.” He drew me to him again, and this time our embrace lasted longer and was more sensual. Nick made a sound in his throat that mingled with the sound of the wind, as he pulled me down on the cement, our ankles still in the water. We took our time, spending the next five minutes acting demure and hesitant, as opposed to being overtly, inexpertly, sexy. It paid off, too. We were naked by the time we were ready to have the kind of sex I’d never had before. It was surprisingly painful. It didn’t yet bring the pleasure it would with practice, but being with Nick seemed to erase all the heartbreakingly hollow confusion I’d had with Billy.

Nick was a prodigious reader and writer, and by far my intellectual superior. He was responsible for igniting my interest in philosophy, poetry, and literature. I had done all the required reading for high school English classes and not much more than that, but Nick turned me on to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
, Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
, and James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. Nick was patient, too, helping me with my papers and sending me long letters to improve my grasp of concepts ranging from existentialism to the life of the tragic hero. The tragic hero, Nick explained in a long letter to me, was a man (or woman) of an “essentially good character and an admirable dignity” whose fatal flaw, or crack, in an otherwise admirable personality, precipitates his downfall. The tragic hero, he went on, is very often a great man who defies evil, or who comes face to face with “an indifferent universe.”

All of which made me think of Daddy, and Nick himself pointed out the similarities. Why, Nick wrote in that same letter, should any man suffer out of all proportion to his sin? Why, indeed, unless the universe be evil and meaningless? “Tragedy depends on the notion of greatness, and a tragic fall can only be from the heights,” he wrote, adding that Aristotle demanded that his heroes be princes, and that King Lear becomes a true monarch only when he is deposed. “Only and out of this misery comes his godliness … out of his fall comes a rise.”

Who would ever write about my own father’s tragic heroism? Would anyone care about his legacy? A publishing house that bore his name, but an empire-in-the-making wrested from him by thieves.

*   *   *

Just as I’d done in high school, I spent the first two semesters of Sarah Lawrence answering teachers’ questions as rarely as I could get away with. During class, I would hide out in the bathroom, sometimes twice during the same class, to avoid being put on the spot. Did my professors suspect anything? Of course they did. Present or absent, I was the stuttering white elephant in the room.

By my second semester, I’d become a boarding student, enmeshed in the full Sarah Lawrence College experience.

Once I began living in a dorm, I brought my guitar from home—one Lucy had helped me pick out at Manny’s Music, the famous instrument store on Forty-eighth Street—and stowed it under my bed. For the next few months I played my guitar every chance I could get. Lucy would come home on the weekends, as would I, and I remember closely watching her every move. I imitated the clothes she wore, and the songs she sang, until I could develop a style of my own. Lucy was imitating Joan Baez in a time when Joan Baez’s first album was the dominating influence on an entire generation of girls. Bold, blond, blue-eyed Judy Collins was another great arrival on the music scene.

My sister and I hadn’t started playing music together yet, but by the time she’d left for Bennington, she was getting comfortable on the guitar, and bought her first really good one during her freshman year. She learned a few chords, enough to play every song on Joan Baez’s debut album. She had the same register as Joan Baez, a high, pure soprano with a strong vibrato. I had bought my first guitar sometime during my senior year of high school, and soon my friend Jessie Hoffman and I began writing and playing songs together. The first one’s title was a combination of our names, the “Si-hoff Blues.” Lucy would teach me chords on weekends and then over the summer, which reinforced my interest in both playing and singing. I bought a few albums and began imitating different singers. My voice didn’t travel very far up the scale, but it had a deep, resonant quality. My reigning musical heroine at the time was Odetta. Hers was everything a woman’s voice could be, its power deep, sonorous, almost demanding. Alone in my room at home, I sang along to her albums on my cheap little machine, whose needle scratched every LP I owned, tapping into my own lower register. Hollowing out my throat, shaping my mouth into a long-columned O, I trained myself to control my breathing in order to extend words with vowels like
home
and
alone
, stretching that
o
out comfortably in my lungs. I had a naturally strong, even vibrato, and various rooms with high ceilings and natural acoustics—like gyms, bathrooms, or any tiled room, for that matter—provided good settings for me to learn how to appreciate my own voice.

Sarah Lawrence required every freshman to learn a foreign language, and I picked Italian. My classmates and I were assigned to memorize a long poem, and mine, two pages in length, would have been a difficult task even if I spoke without hesitation. That night, I had an idea. When I got back to my room, I took out my guitar and immediately, as if the poem had been written as a song, I fell into the wide field and endless sky, the free and easy space, of music. My speech barriers—its doors, windows, bars—lifted away, and I wrote a melody to the song in less than an hour. More and more, week by week, it seemed, I was coming out of my “singer’s closet” by remembering that the melody and rhythm were always there when I needed them.

When word got back to my Italian professor that I was composing music to the poems she’d assigned us, she urged me to sing one of them in class. Galloping back to the dorm, I grabbed my guitar, returned to the Foreign Language building, tuned up in the hallway, and began the song, trusting that the music would override my stutter, which it did. When I finished, the class’s response was ridiculously effusive, which gave me a boy-oh-boy kind of thrill.

After that, one friend and then another asked if I’d be willing to visit the student lounge, or someone’s dorm room, to play my guitar and sing. I was flattered, even excited. Rather than typing out a big paper on fourteenth-century painting in the Balkans, it was much more inspiring to write and sing a few songs for my friends. My roommate and other girls in my dorm would flop on beds, lean against bureau tops, stand in corners, and crowd the already-messy floors as I led them through evenings when text and numbers, books and typewriters, were all left behind, and music was the only thing that mattered. “Let me tell you something,” I wrote to Nick around that time. “I may be famous!! I gave a concert at school (in my bedroom) and sang a combination of religious and folk songs like ‘St. James Infirmary’ and ‘Darlin’ Corey’ and ‘Motherless Child.’ The girls looked to be taken into a very definite spiritual rapture.… Oh, Nick, we’re going to grow together and make lots of money and kind of take the world over, you and me!”

Sarah Lawrence was a three-and-a-half-hour drive away from Harvard, but nonetheless I was spending as much time as possible in Cambridge with Nick, taking the train or getting a lift with a friend on Thursday afternoon and returning Sunday night. During my visits, Nick was eager to show off his “lady’s” new singer persona and voice, along with my meager guitar playing, which he’d always said he loved. Gradually I was finding my voice through imitation, by hearing my own pipes overlaid on the voices of other women, not just Odetta, but also Peggy Lee, Judy Collins, Annie Ross, Mary Travers, Billie Holiday, and even Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte. My Odetta imitations included “Bald Headed Woman,” “All the Pretty Little Horses,” “John Henry,” “Circle Round the Sun,” and a few more songs that I belted out in the rooms of Harvard’s Kirkland House and Claverly Hall. But one day I sang “Bald Headed Woman” and my voice no longer sounded like Odetta’s, it sounded like mine. Not on purpose. It just happened.

Another benefit of spending more time with Nick was that I could avoid school and therefore any additional classroom embarrassments. Nevertheless, my time at Sarah Lawrence, and especially my visits to Cambridge, amounted to a series of unofficial out-of-town auditions. I continued to feel the release and freedom that singing gave me, and the relief of not having to talk (I hadn’t yet made the transfer from “talking is scary” to “singing is scary,” which I would later). Many elements of my singing would need to be corrected or even erased before I was ready to sing for “real” people, but those months were an unofficial dress rehearsal for the rest of my life.

At the same time, Nick provided camouflage. I slid and hid beneath his eloquence, his charisma, his good looks, his generosity, and the jealousy I felt from senior Sarah Lawrence girls that I, and not one of them, was hanging off his arm. I was obviously, precociously, in love. Nick and I broke all the rules by making love in his Harvard dorm room. I was under the spell of the romantic poets back then, and Nick was always quoting some poetry to me, elevating romance and sex into something unworldly.

Outside the bedroom, Nick was just as compelling in his wide-legged, slouchy corduroys and handmade shoes, his long black hair falling in a shiny blade over one eye. As a director at the Loeb Drama Center on Brattle Street—how Nick had learned to direct plays like Lorca’s
Blood Wedding
and Sartre’s
The Flies
was a mystery to me—he dressed the part in his long scarves and berets, his soft, measured voice, and his seductive, almond-shaped, dark brown eyes. I wondered sometimes if Nick was aware of the impression he made on other people. My guess is that he counted on it.

Lacking any deep knowledge of what the words actually meant, I knew enough to reject the “bourgeoisie” by looking and acting “bohemian,” a distinction Nick made it his responsibility to teach me about, considering that I was obviously wrestling with being a bourgeois girl living through bohemian times, and trying my best to look and act the part. Following Lucy’s lead, I got my own ears pierced, and wore my by-now extremely long hair in a light brown, lightweight mane down my back, even though it was always so thin and wispy it escaped any attempted braid. At home and at school, every young woman of my acquaintance was swapping clothes, songs, and jewelry. With Brigitte Bardot as our style icon, at least as far as heels were concerned, we spent our free time hunting down the lowest-cut shoes possible, imports from France and Italy, which we found on Lexington and Third Avenues, near Bloomingdale’s. When my classmates and I weren’t working the bohemian style, we switched over to the Audrey Hepburn look: black tights or extremely white sheer stockings with Capezios.

With my long earrings and pale pink lipstick, I was starting to become known around Sarah Lawrence not just as a singer but, for the first time ever, as a “hip” girl, an “in” girl—“cool,” at least by the standards of the mid-1960s. Nicky’s father sent him an article about the French singer Françoise Hardy, believing the two of us looked alike, and at one point my friend Lani informed me solemnly that she and I were the only two people on campus who had “shvank.” It was a close cousin of
twirl
, the word people had once used to describe my father’s style.

*   *   *

When I wasn’t hanging out on campus or visiting Nick in Cambridge, I’d begun spending time below Eighth Street, taking the train from Bronxville and switching to the Fifth Avenue bus down to Greenwich Village. The Village in those days was a kaleidoscopic blur of sandal sellers, guitar makers, Indian drum stores, Spanish restaurants on Charles Street, and outdoor markets on MacDougal and Bleecker that sold tie-dye T-shirts, flared skirts, and cheap jewelry. My friends and I would return to campus wearing long, dangling Thai earrings, headbands, and pocketbooks with fringe around the borders. Music stores sold classical and folk albums stuffed in crates, all mixed and merged and spilling onto the sidewalks. Bookstores overflowing with photography books, sheaves of imported paper, books for class, books to impress, books that had called out to me for soulful reasons, like Arthur Schnitzler’s
Dream Story
, a book my father published in America by an author Daddy had visited in Vienna, whose descriptions of sex and fantasy I found titillating, yeah, soulful! (The book was later adapted into the Stanley Kubrick film
Eyes Wide Shut
.) Not to mention books by D. H. Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, and assorted volumes of secondhand poetry and plays, everything from Rupert Brooke to Shakespeare, with pen-drawn illustrations of Ophelia floating lifeless in the water with a garland balanced between her breasts. The older, rattier, and more deliciously fragrant the book, the more in demand it seemed to be. Crowded around the book and music stores were even more storefronts selling beads, bell-bottoms, patchouli oil, hand-woven baskets, gongs, old postcards from Prague street fairs, baskets overflowing with astrological cards, and Nehru shirts whose vivid, blaring colors shone through the gunning exhaust and fading light of the city day.