Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (7 page)

As Ronny stood beside her, I picked up subtle changes in my mother. Her eyelids fluttered and her lips puckered: “Ron will be staying with us upstairs, in the back bedroom,” Mommy said, adding that he was from Pittsburgh and studying to be a teacher. Mommy was forty-two at the time, Ronny only nineteen.

The first time I laid eyes on Ronny, I felt an immediate, electric dislike, followed by an inexplicable disgust. The world felt suddenly unstable, as though it had gone from solid to liquid, but rather than confront what was going on—and really, I had no clue at the time—I focused on something else: Ronny’s sandaled bare left foot, specifically his toe. I just couldn’t ignore it. The explanation was simple—Ronny had an ingrown toenail—but all I could think of was that his nail was alive, an aquatic horror-movie creature pushing and burrowing further inside his body. I turned away, but it was too late: Ronny’s toe had already registered in my brain. Already there was a wrongness about him, building connections inside me on a cellular level. Or maybe I was already responding to the invisible currents between him and my mother.

In the weeks and days before we packed up to go to Stamford that summer, Ronny was officially hired by the Simon family. It made perfect sense for Peter to have a male babysitter. Along with writing and putting on plays, Helen Gaspard, now the nanny for our whole family, had taught us girls to sew, make up plays for our dolls, and put on stage makeup. In contrast, Peter and his friends collected baseball cards, played with wooden soldiers and train sets, and shook down the adults for spare change in exchange for elaborate card tricks. Ronny seemed custom-made for the job.

He was awkward and uncomfortable around the adults, but no matter—Ronny was also custom-made for Mommy. The connection between them was instantaneous, and they must have found private solace in their shared vulnerability. An orphan, Ronny certainly must have told Mommy his backstory—how he’d watched the airplane that held his mother and father explode as it took off from the airport in Pittsburgh, crashing to the earth, leaving him parentless and alone. No doubt Mommy could match him sorrow by sorrow, as she told him about sitting in her drunken father’s lap or sleeping out on the fire escape in summers, with the intermittent swish of the passing train the only thing that cooled her off on hot black nights. Had Mommy never felt good enough, appreciated enough, loved enough, until Ronny came along?

Whenever I heard Mommy and Ronny in conversation, their words flew around like big, beautiful, dumb birds. Clearly it came as a relief to Mommy not to have to pit herself against Daddy’s fast-witted authors and friends. Having felt pressured to be publicly funny, like our occasional dinner guests S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, and George S. Kaufman, Mommy was now free to wallow and laze in the relief of easy agreements and dozing silences,
ahhh
s and
oooh
s and other cries of delighted seagulls on the wings of easy flight.

*   *   *

The appearance of Ronny in our lives signaled the end of my family’s before, the beginning of our after. As soon as she and Ronny became attached, Mommy’s apparent dedication to her husband and children began to fall away. Her lifelong mission—to be the superlative hostess of two elegant households, the cheerful, organized overseer of children, dogs, and assorted houseguests—turned cloudy and sloppy. She seemed to lose interest. In our private relationship, she drifted away too. Without warning, the closeness between us was bashed in the heart. There was something new and unfamiliar between us. Our tenderness, which I’d always taken for granted, seemed suddenly forced. When we hugged, I felt self-conscious for the first time ever about our bodies making contact, as if hugging her was some old, remembered ritual, both of us just going through the motions. It wasn’t just that I was getting older and gaining on her in height, but more that her hugs seemed to lack their familiar warmth. Did Mommy know, or suspect, that I was picking up a new current of sexuality in her? I knew only that I no longer made a beeline for her lap whenever I was afraid to go to school. Later on, I would realize that it was Ronny who had stolen her away, but back then all I knew was that if Daddy had never been mine, Mommy wasn’t mine anymore, either.

With no alternative than to put up with what was taking place in secret in his own house, Daddy withdrew into his work, his misery, and himself. His relationship with Ronny was always glancing, odd. Whenever the two of them crossed paths on the stairs, their eyes never met. Nonetheless, Ronny regularly sat down for family lunches and dinners. He was a mostly silent presence. When Daddy was around he acted in an intentionally servile way—clearing the table, taking out the garbage—but if Daddy wasn’t there, he acted like just another person at the dinner table. As for my little brother, whose physical and academic advancement Ronny was supposed to be overseeing, Peter’s role from that point on was to serve as a beard for Mommy. They stole off to Coney Island at midday, attended nonexistent school picnics, and drove up to Stamford in midwinter to check on pipes that were running perfectly well and basement leaks that were causing no imminent threats. Naturally, Mommy began spending far more observable time with Peter.

No longer able to confide in Mommy, and with my stutter preventing me from talking easily, I began confessing everything to my diary, making up a new slew of code words to prevent anyone else from knowing what was really going on in my life at school, or with Billy.
Stammer
evolved from
famul
into
stanform
, the word close enough to Stamford, the town, that any diligent trespasser would get confused. Ronny was
Disk
, and then
Hark
, the name of a mysterious character I’d taken from my favorite James Thurber book,
The Thirteen Clocks
.

In page after page, I penciled out my dislike and resentment of Ronny—“an intruder,” I called him. I wrote that he smelled, adding, “I won’t even tell you how much I hate him.” Once I wrote in code about the night Joey, Lucy, and I caught Ronny spying on us as we were in our bathroom. Posing as if for a French Impressionist painter, the three of us were combing out our long hair and rubbing our naked bodies with oils and lotions when Joey suddenly whispered, “Sshhh!” and tiptoed to the bathroom door where she found Ronny hunched, with one eye peering through the doorjamb crack. Thinking quickly, Joey went out the other bathroom door to Lucy’s room and circled around, coming towards Ronny from the other direction. Ronny pretended he’d been practicing a random football move, grunting out an unpersuasive “Hike!” as he sprinted down the hallway without looking back. This was really quite amusing, and we didn’t know what to make of it. Then there was this diary entry: “Oh God, please make them happy, and please God, try to make Mommy love Daddy as much as he loves her. Most of all, please make Daddy be happy. Make Hark go.”

None of my wishes came true. Still, it came as a huge relief to me when a year or so after he moved into our house, Ronny was drafted into the army in the fall of 1955, and stationed in Germany. By that point I had started to act out around Ronny, to the point where I told him to his face that I hated him, and invited my more tomboyish friends over to the house to gang up on him and punch him—often in the crotch—though looking back, my behavior was less play than misguided sexual attraction mixed with confused revulsion.

When Ronny left for Europe, not to return at least until the following summer, our house seemed to exhale. Life resumed a mood of normalcy I could barely remember. Despite harder and harder days in the office, once again Daddy had Mommy to talk to when he came home from work at night. The smells of Daddy’s favorite dishes wafted in at night, and Mommy seemed more attentive, sitting in the evenings and listening to him play the piano—and I may be mistaken, but I believe there was some smiling at each other.

Which is why a degree of mystery surrounded Mommy’s decision to take a trip to Europe in late October that same year. She would travel by herself, without Daddy. Of course, in retrospect, her trip had everything to do with Ronny. I was ten when Mommy left for England by boat a few days before Halloween. Ten days later, Daddy suffered his first heart attack. Even when she was told that her husband had been rushed to the hospital, Mommy didn’t come home. Instead, Aunty Jo, a warm, zaftig Swiss woman who had taken care of Daddy and his siblings when they were growing up, picked up the slack, moving into the house for nearly two months to oversee Daddy’s physical and psychological care. (She explained that he’d had a “muscle spasm,” like the ones people sometimes get in their eyebrows, or eyelids.) Daddy went back and forth from home to the hospital several times, suffering from one tiny ministroke after another, the ambulance racing and blinking up our street in Riverdale in the middle of the night. Every day Joey, Lucy, and I confronted the fear that Daddy might die, and then what would happen? Every time the phone rang, my heart shook. Aunty Jo always made it a point to reassure us that Daddy was slowly getting better, and that he was going to be all right, but none of us ever quite believed her. How could she know for sure? Why wasn’t Mommy coming home to be by his side?

During her nearly two-month stay in Europe, I grew to hate some part of my mother, her absence a dark stain that lingered long after she returned home in mid-December and proceeded, as if nothing at all had happened, to deck the house with boughs of holly for Christmas. By then, with Daddy going back and forth to the hospital, I’d begun a new, nightly ritual of knocking on wood exactly five hundred times before I fell asleep—a compulsive superstition that would keep Daddy from dying, or so I convinced myself.

Later, I found the letters that Mommy and Ronny wrote to each other in the months before she went to Europe to visit him, and the love between them was obvious. It was also clear that Mommy had no wish to flaunt their relationship in public. As ever, Andrea Simon, wife of the cofounder of Simon & Schuster, was eager to avoid notoriety or scandal, for everything to be as dignified as possible. Mommy wrote to Ronny that she had no intention of hurting my father, or “starting tongues wagging,” and that she would “be very happy to give Dick a divorce if he wants one.” Regarding Daddy, Mommy wrote, “I have seen very little of him, but that’s just as well. Mostly he’s more of a nuisance than a help,” adding that she was actively encouraging my father to ignite a romance with tennis champion Don Budge’s wife, Deirdre (possibly because it would make her feel less guilty about what she was doing with Ronny, or maybe because she’d have more obvious grounds for divorce). She and Ronny were both decent, honorable people, Mommy wrote in another letter, going so far as to liken the two of them to Romeo and Juliet—“They too had a miserable time of it, darling,” adding that even if he, Ronny, wasn’t in her life, she would feel the exact same way. “Money,” she concluded, “never justifies misery and loneliness, with which I have lived many years.”

Ronny loved her back. “Darling,” he wrote Mommy at one point, “[it has been] twelve days since I have said ‘goodbye’ to my beautiful and darling one. And you were beautiful that night, darling, as you had been every single moment I have been and I had been—or have ever been or had ever been with you. You are radiantly beautiful. In forty years you will not have changed and I bet I will love you more with a terrible passion and I’m sure the old man that I will be, you will be young and beautiful.”

Once Mommy returned home from Europe, Daddy, officially the third man in his marriage, did everything he could to show his forgiveness, and to be a better husband. By 1956, once he’d recovered from his heart attack, Daddy felt well enough to travel to Europe himself on business, and his letters home to my mother at that time were filled with sentiments like “I love you, my Cosa.” Then there was this passage:

“I suggest … that both you and I forget completely any gripes that we may ever have had about one another. We have both been living ‘with our own blessedness of strife’ (Wordsworth) and it’s about time to cut that dead-end kind of relationship. Given my physical condition, I am not allowed to do the kinds of things that would make me the most wonderful husband in the world. But soon I’ll be able to do those things. The way to begin, is to begin … Lovingly yours, Dick.”

It wasn’t until I read those letters later on that I became swept up in my mother’s other, more secret-filled life; saw her, for the first time, from the perspective of my own life and years; realized, as if I needed to be reminded, that what happens in a marriage can never be understood by anyone but the people inside it.

Still, by Christmas 1955, my ten-year-old self was mostly relieved: Ronny was gone, out of the country, out of our lives. He wouldn’t be coming back for an eternity, and even when he did my parents would have fallen back in love again, Daddy would be well, and Mommy would be everybody’s Mommy again, especially mine. My parents were intact, golden, or so I wanted to believe.

My mother and father; then, left to right: Joey, me, Peter, and Lucy, 1952.