Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (3 page)

Physically and personally, Daddy dwarfed her, as he did practically everyone. Handsome, glamorous, wryly funny, he was a passionate lover of people, conversation, art, and culture, all wreathed in a constant corona of cigarette smoke. Dick Simon had charisma, everyone said—he made everyone around him better. His business partner, Max Schuster, was quiet and dogged, but Daddy, everyone agreed, had “twirl”—a certain kind of sexy flourish. He gave spur-of-the-moment parties—to celebrate a book’s publication date, a sale to a book club, someone’s birthday, or just for the sake of Why-the-Hell-Don’t-We-Throw-a-Party-Tonight? Daddy was also famously absentminded, elsewhere in his head, setting down and losing manuscripts, papers, and letters so frequently it was said that every Simon & Schuster employee had memorized the phone numbers of all the city’s major lost-and-found offices.

Daddy and his old Columbia College classmate had founded their company in 1924 out of a one-room office, their first publication a crossword-puzzle book with a pencil attached to it (Daddy’s stroke of marketing genius). The book was a runaway bestseller, the first of a series that’s still sold today, creating the foundation of what would eventually become a publishing empire. From the mid-1920s on, Daddy and Max published books that went on to sell millions of copies, everything from Dale Carnegie’s
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, to
Bambi
, to the Little Golden Books—
Dr. Dan the Bandage Man
(sold with an actual Band-Aid inside the cover), and others—to groundbreaking works of history and politics like Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven-volume
The Story of Civilization
.

When I was a little girl, I thought my father was a hero, a king. Although I noted the lack of attention he paid to me, it made me think less of me, not him. On my visits to Simon & Schuster’s offices in Rockefeller Center, I naturally assumed the enormous bronze-cast statue of Atlas sitting in front of his building was Daddy, supporting the celestial spheres on his shoulders. Inside the lobby, I’d board the mirrored, gilt-edged elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, where Louise, Daddy’s executive secretary, would greet me with a smile before escorting me down the hall to Daddy’s office, offering me a ginger ale with a cherry as well as any snacks I wanted. Midtown Manhattan was a grown-up, chaotic world, and my father the most formidable man inside it, just as he set the elegant tone of the cocktail parties and dinners Mommy and he hosted in New York, Stamford, or, for two or three weeks every August, Martha’s Vineyard.

If Mommy seemed to idolize my father back then, Daddy, in turn, showed her a lot of affection, as well as adoring my two older sisters, Joey and Lucy. Early on I convinced myself that Lucy and Joey were Daddy’s darlings, leaving me … who or what exactly? The little girl who’d introduced herself to the new nanny with a big, barreling
Hi
? Growing up, Joey and Lucy were both beautiful, a pair of queens-in-waiting to my father’s dashing chessboard king. By the time they were in their late teens, they were going places, too. Joey was set on becoming a famous opera singer, and Lucy planned to study nursing (to which Chibie, I remember, responded, “Uggh”).

Me, I wanted to be a baseball player, a pitcher, the first-ever girl to break into the major leagues. Growing up, I was a tomboy, with irregular-length hair, Dodgers baseball cap, jeans rolled up just below the knees, punching my baseball mitt, trying to break it in. Outside of my baseball fantasies, I had no idea where I was going, and for reasons I didn’t quite understand, my relationship with Daddy was always remote, uneasy. One Father’s Day in kindergarten, I vividly recall holding one hand in Daddy’s and the other in Uncle Peter’s. I preferred the feel and texture of Uncle Peter’s hand. Why? I don’t know. I knew only that Daddy had smooth, dry, unfamiliar skin, as if he belonged to a different family, or tribe. It was Peter, after all, who had taught me to play baseball and tennis, and, best of all, music. If for some reason Daddy loved Joey and Lucy the best, then Uncle Peter was mine, and I was his, too. I doted on Peter whenever the opportunity arose. I handed him clean white towels as he came off the tennis court in the summer, as well as milk shakes made of fresh strawberries and vanilla ice cream, with freshly picked four-leaf clovers on top. I never felt the same impulse with Daddy. I felt a strange detachment whenever we were together, though more and more I knew that I was mirroring back what he felt for me. My inability to get and keep Daddy’s attention, and the suspicion that of his four children I was the one he cared for least, was a problem I’d spend my life questioning and compensating for. Not an unfamiliar scenario.

From the outside, Mommy and Daddy’s marriage was iridescent, like a pearl under radiant light, especially on nights when they put on a show for an audience of dinner guests. Alone, once the guests left, they were never quite as shimmering. Professionally and personally, Daddy would rise, and by the mid-1950s, when I was only ten, begin his slow-motion fall. The rising part, when Daddy was a publishing entrepreneur, innovator, and magnate at ease with high society and the New York City intelligentsia, is mostly a legend to me, hard to square with the pained, remote, brittle father I remember much later, whose company and wife had both been wrested from him, and who roamed the floors of our house as if he were already a half-vanished man.

“Hi.”

Jeanie and me communicating with Mr. Hicks, Meany, and the reasonable one: Ha Ha Ginsberg.

CHAPTER TWO

summer in the trees

T
here was a certain summer—I think it was 1951—when I spent a lot of time in the fruit trees in the orchard near our play barn in Stamford, just beyond a sprawling copper beech tree. The orchard was randomly dotted with apple trees, mostly Cortlands, McIntoshes, and a few more exotic, hard-to-name varieties. Nearby, too, was a pair of cherry trees, large ones, whose trunks were thicker, their barks darker, grayer, and tougher on your skin. Cherry trees were harder to scale than apple trees—they took twistier turns—though once you reached the top, the rewards were thrilling: spotting the first sweet, dark purple cherry, twisting off its stem, chomping around the pit, savoring the meat, and then—the best part—fingering the small wet stone like a bead and hurling it gleefully at a human target below. Then, with hardly a breath in between, biting into another, sometimes not as ripe as the first, and after a sour sample bite, hurling it with disdain at the ground, or at the sister or brother or cousin you’d missed the first time around. By the end of the summer, I’d become adept at the art and science of pit-marksmanship.

The Stamford property was enormous, around a hundred acres in all, anchored by the main house with its tall columns, pediments, eaves, dormers, balustrades, and French doors. We all referred to the place as Stamford—as if we owned the entire city—though the heart of the property was the pool house, known as Stoneybroke, a word Daddy had carved with a broken twig on the steps while the cement was still wet, a declaration of how much more the pool house had cost than he anticipated. The house was only a forty-five-minute drive north in Daddy’s old woody, or my mother’s Cadillac convertible, from the big brick colonial house in Riverdale, just north of Manhattan, that my parents had bought once Joey began middle school and we left 133 West Eleventh Street behind for good.

Helen Gaspard had been with our family for a few years, and with Helen acting as the resident scriptwriter and theater director, Joey, Lucy, and I spent that summer memorizing lines for the plays that we performed for the adults. We practiced dialogue while dangling from the trees, shouting down lines to one another, crook to crook, branch to branch, chewing on apples and cherries as we waited our turn, sipping from milk bottles we’d poured out and refilled with orange juice. As the only boy in this overhanging female tribe, my baby brother Peter tore around under the branches in light blue overalls, singsonging and babbling, toddler-yelling up to us to toss him down a cherry.

As always, my two first cousins, Jeanie and Mary Seligman, lived with us that summer. As the youngest, Jeanie and I always had lesser parts in our family plays. My sister Joey, the ringleader, flattered us into taking inconsequential roles. Jeanie and I were still young enough to believe, as spear-carriers all over the world are told, that although we had only two lines, our dialogue was crucial to the success of the performance. In the play
The Monkey’s Paw
, for example, my entire role consisted of knocking three times on a barn door. It didn’t matter. Joey had led me to think I was the star of the show, and during curtain calls, the audience, in on the joke, rose to applaud me as though I were Sarah Bernhardt.

When I wasn’t busy practicing my lines, I sprawled alongside Jeanie on the grassy circle beneath the apple trees, engaging in make-believe conversations among the imaginary friends we invented, including Mr. Hicks, Meany, and Bypress Fongton. The latter two made their home atop the pool house weather vane, whereas Mr. Hicks, lacking a permanent home, roamed between the orchard and the deep end of the pool, stirring up conflicts and making trouble for another of Jeanie’s imaginary friends, Ha Ha Ginsberg, a character who over time got to be so famous for unknown reasons that her name later showed up in a
New Yorker
story. When her father gave her this news, Jeanie, I remember, called upstairs, “Ha Ha, guess what, you were in
The New Yorker
!”

Our made-up characters were us, and we were them; they gave us life, and in return we gave them desires and destinies. They fended off moths and bees, stumbled on forbidden gardens, judged singing, dancing, and somersaulting contests, peered in family drawers, and reigned over the acres of fruit trees extending to the giant copper beech, the sycamores, the maples, and the elms. We were the children of the orchard—the future actors of the Connecticut night. Fongton, Meany, and Ha Ha rang the bells of mischief as they choreographed their flight between the trees and the stars and back again, taking good care of us as we did our nighttime dreaming.

*   *   *

That was also the summer I began turning in on myself. I had always been an anxious child, jittery, insecure. I was scared to be alone, scared of the dark, scared of the arrival in winter of Jack Frost. Going to sleep at night had always been an ordeal. Around 8 or 9 p.m., my mother or Allie would flock close by me at the bathroom sink as I brushed my teeth and faced the nightly torment of what to do about my hair. I was born not with hair but, rather, feathers, so fluffy and hard to brush that I often slept with braids, closed within plain red rubber bands. Joey and Lucy had grown weary of the nightly drama surrounding my hair—the twisting, the turning, the yelling. A year later, Joey even set up a mock salon in my parents’ bathroom, and with Lucy as her accomplice, set about scissoring away all my hair with a pair of enormous chicken shears. Joey managed to get only the left half chopped off before I broke down in tears and fled outdoors. It took six months of uneven pigtails for my hair to grow back.

Getting to bed was one problem, insomnia another. From early on, I would make up strange games in my head to force myself to fall back asleep. One of my most fun fantasies had as its setting a naval warship on a black, cold, rough sea. On board, life was pure hardship, and it was my fate to share a bunk with a bunch of other sailors—“me maties,” as I called them. I was a deckhand, though not nearly as lowly as the others. Me maties snored and sweated, exhaled coughs, chokes, wheezes, and smoker’s breath, had dirty feet and teeth, hairy legs and armpits. As the boat lurched and tipped, they flopped and fell from side to side, threatening to hurl one another off the bow or gunwale—
Drown, you dirty swab … no more vittles for you … you want your Froghog? That’s all yer worth.

As I put in my time on board, scrubbing the toilets and decks, I would permit myself another inch of space on my actual bed—an edge of blanket, a corner of the pillow.
Good swab!
called out the boat’s admiral, who regularly showed up to inspect things, and every time I heard those approving words, I pulled in a few more inches of bedding.