A Writer Writes: A Memoir

By Stephen Birmingham and Carey Birmingham

A memoir by the New York Times–bestselling author and longtime chronicler of America’s wealthy elite.

Born in Connecticut in 1929 and educated at Williams College, Stephen Birmingham went on to create a literary niche with his numerous nonfiction works about New York’s—and the nation’s—upper class, particularly focusing on Jewish, African American, and Irish communities, as well as old-money WASPs. He also drew on his “intimate knowledge of the private lives of the rich and famous” to write bestselling works of fiction such as The Auerbach Will (The New York Times Book Review).

In this book, Birmingham’s attention is turned to his own life, both personal and professional, allowing us to learn about the man who created such compelling portraits of glittering parties, exclusive addresses, and, in some cases, rags-to-riches sagas that epitomize the American dream—and the American struggle. In the end, his story is as fascinating as those of the aristocrats he documented.

“When it comes to the folkways of the rich, the powerful, and the privileged, Stephen Birmingham knows what he’s talking about.” —Los Angeles Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781504079884

Stephen Birmingham

Stephen Birmingham (1929–2015) was an American author of more than thirty books. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he graduated from Williams College in 1953 and taught writing at the University of Cincinnati. Birmingham’s work focuses on the upper class in America. He’s written about the African American elite in Certain People and prominent Jewish society in Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, The Grandees: The Story of America’s Sephardic Elite, and The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews. His work also encompasses several novels including The Auerbach Will, The LeBaron Secret, Shades of Fortune, and The Rothman Scandal, and other non-fiction titles such as California Rich, The Grandes Dames, and Life at the Dakota: New York’s Most Unusual Address.

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A Writer Writes

A Memoir

Stephen Birmingham

Edited and Annotated by Carey G. Birmingham

For Caitlin

Introduction

My father, Stephen Gardner Birmingham, died in November 2015 at the age of eighty-six. At his side, in their apartment on Gramercy Park in New York City, was his partner of over thirty-eight years, Dr. Carroll Edward Lahniers, PhD (I call him Ed, and he has become a close friend and confidant, and, although my dad and Ed never married, I refer to him as my stepfather).

Although eminently unqualified as a writer, I was privileged to prepare and disseminate his obituary, which was widely distributed and printed in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, and Cincinnati Enquirer, among others.

My father was gay. Or to be more accurate in today’s complicated miasma of gender and sexuality, my father would be described as bisexual. He had to be, at least for a time, having been married to my mother and begetting three children.

Although we often had young men visiting our home during my father’s rising notoriety in the early sixties, the first indication that something was different was when my father showed up at my sister’s junior high school party at our house on Hidden Spring Lane, Rye, New York. The party, attended by several prepubescent boys and girls was a gala affair and, since I was the younger brother (I am the youngest of the three), I was ignored and only allowed to observe. Midway into the festivities, my father appeared in a skin-tight T-shirt (he was very fit), red bandana tied provocatively around his neck, pink socks with Gucci loafers, and yellow (yes, yellow) vinyl hot pants. It was a scene, man. Perhaps he was making an announcement or wanted desperately to come out, but the message I received in my prepubescent brain was confusion.

Prior to my father’s display, I had sheltered sexual experiences, which is to say none. My earliest recollection of sexuality per se was my fascination along with my best friend Kevin O’Keefe with our fourth-grade teacher, Miss Jones (her real name). Miss Jones was probably twenty-five years old and attractive. We, however, were not so concerned with her outward beauty but one specific part of her anatomy: her breastal region. For reasons we could not understand at the time, we became infatuated with Miss Jones and her, uh, attributes which were in fact quite spectacular (if memory serves fifty years later). We became so enamored, some might say obsessed, that we decided to give Miss Jones a not-so-thoroughly thought-through, but appropriate, secret name: Secret. As in Here comes Secret, which we would whisper to each other when Miss Jones entered the playground at recess. This was about as close to sexual harassment, as its defined today, as two fourth-grade boys could get. This was not a particularly fortuitous beginning to exposure to the fairer sex.

When my father died, he had amassed an impressive portfolio of not less than twenty-eight books, both novels and social histories, the latter of which required exhaustive research and interviews. He will be best known, perhaps, by his seminal work, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, published in 1968. He also published enumerable articles on a wide range of topics for Holiday magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post. His books alone resulted in over eight thousand pages and sold an estimated fifteen million copies worldwide since his first book, a novel called Young Mr. Keefe, was published in 1958. Assuming a hundred fifty thousand words per book, he produced well over four million words, all typed with two fingers on a Royal Model HH manual typewriter at approximately one hundred words per minute.

Let us put this into perspective, both in the context of the times and my father’s productivity.

First, during my father’s writing career over a thirty-year period, my father wrote twelve novels (not including one unpublished novel written in 2003) and sixteen researched histories; each history called for at least twelve months of research. Comparing numbers only, some contemporaries of my father produced far less; Hemingway wrote twenty-four books, Kurt Vonnegut, twelve, J. D. Salinger, seven and Mario Puzo, eleven. I don’t mean to compare my father with these icons, but he certainly deserves recognition for volume if not for producing the great American novel.

Second, one must remember the times. Granted, we are not talking the era of Dickens or Poe, but writing in the late fifties into the eighties was done prior to the advent of the Wang Word Processor or Microsoft Word. Pages were inserted into the Royal with carbon paper between, and the writer, well, wrote—without the benefit (as I fortunately have) of advanced word-processing capabilities. The pages were written and edited with pencil or pen and then, laboriously by today’s standards, retyped, again and again until the writer got it right. This is the process we witnessed growing up with my father.

Amid all his work, my father had to deal additionally with the creative sides of his progeny: my brother, Mark, my sister, Harriet, and me. While we tried to behave as good children should, the creative sides of our personalities, in particular with my brother and me, came forth and manifested themselves as what one would call stressors today. I don’t know how much effect such stressors had on my father’s decision to leave the family in 1974 (and perhaps make the final move toward becoming exclusively gay), but I can’t imagine it helped. I’ve provided some anecdotes elsewhere in this memoir which, in their totality, could have driven anyone to drink (not to mention question whether having such children was a good idea in the first place) and finally conclude I’ve had it, and give a call to Ed.

For example:

Stressor 1.0—The Furniture Incident

Our earliest rendition of a stressor provided to our parents occurred when I was young, perhaps four, so my memories are vague. Both parents, however, independently verified this story as true.

Shortly after my father’s book, Young Mr. Keefe, was released, my parents’ social star was on the rise and they were constantly entertaining, with my mother always the consummate hostess. Our job, as The Children, was to fill the cigarette holders prior to a party, make pleasant (and short) introductions and be relegated to the upstairs bedroom, and make no noise; children were to be seen and not heard.

This plan apparently did not sit well with us, The Children.

Our house on Hidden Spring Lane had three stories, with Mark’s and my bedroom on the second floor. It was a corner room, directly over the main dining room on the first floor, with one of our windows directly above the dining room window, facing west.

At one such gathering of scotch and cigarettes, a guest happened to glance out the dining room window. Nan, he mentioned to my mother, I think I just saw something fall outside the window. My mother, incredulous, watched for a moment and, sure enough, another object whizzed by, landing with a dull thud on the driveway. As discretely as possible, my mother approached my father and asked him to go upstairs to The Children’s room and see what is going on.

Upon entering the room, my father witnessed me sitting on the base-end of our 101 Dalmatians–themed coatrack with my brother guiding the business end of it out the aforementioned second-floor window (this window was to play a significant part in our lives in the future), presumably with the intention of sending it to the tarmac below.

Already gone from the room were a myriad of smaller items, like clothes, hampers, stools, and toys. We had been going at it for a while, evidenced by the resultant pile outside.

Stressor 2.0—A Christmas Story

In the earliest years of our family, we always had Christmas at grandmother’s house in Andover, Connecticut. In 1960, however, my father decided we would have Christmas at home in Rye, and he devised a plan for a Christmas Day to beat the band. Unfortunately, he failed to consult the band—that is, The Children, and without the band’s consent, things can go dangerously wrong.

At 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Mark, Harriet, and I were awake and downstairs. There was no evidence of Christmas in our house, not even a tree, and certainly no presents. We, The Children, were confused. Didn’t we always have stockings hung with care at grandmother’s? Where’s the tree, whose bounteous boughs had brought forth gifts galore? In short, where’s Christmas, this Christmas Eve? Finally, in resigned despair that Santa had indeed skipped us over (probably because of something like the Furniture Incident), we three went to bed; and our parents got to work.

Unbeknownst to us, our parents had planned A Great Surprise, no doubt a creation of my father’s furtive mind, and had hidden all the presents and Christmas accoutrements in our garage determining only to begin assembly and placement after we were snoozing. They worked until 5 a.m. The patently unachievable goal of The Great Surprise was to greet The Children at the top of the stairs and, with wild anticipation in their young, properly behaved eyes, we as a family would gracefully go down the stairs only to open the doors of the dining room to find … the unimaginable! Santa had not forgotten us! All would be forgiven, and the family, as a loving cohesive unit would celebrate the birth of Christ! My father had even purchased a handmade gingerbread house, almost identical to our own home! That was the Plan.

They should have cleared this Plan with us.

At 6 a.m. Christmas Day, while our parents were asleep after their all-night toil (and probably cocktails), my brother, the oldest, woke Harriet and me up and we three made our way ever-so-quietly downstairs to the dining room. The entry doors were, perplexingly, closed. Not to worry. Opening the doors, a crack, our eyes were visited upon by nothing short of a miracle. Whereas the night before there had been nothing, now there was a cornucopia of wrapped presents, a tree, lights sparkling, stuffed stocking and even a gingerbread house! Santa had indeed arrived! (In the after-action report delivered later during debriefing, our mother contended, It was all too much for them. It overstimulated their senses.)

Overstimulated or not, we got to work. Barely being able to read at the time, I can’t really be blamed for what happened next. We rushed into the dining room with abandon, like a hoard of hungry locusts during an African drought. With little coordination, my brother would hand me a wrapped present and instruct me to open it, notwithstanding that I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) read the tag identifying its intended recipient. Once I realized the opened present was not for me, or us, it was summarily cast aside; a punch bowl for my grandmother here, a set of wine glasses for our aunt there; it made no difference. There were so many presents! We had a lot to do.

After a few hours of culling, we finally opened all the gifts, eliminated anything extraneous that was not within our purview and settled down to play or rest, as the case may be. The room was a shamble, with wrapping paper and useless (read: not-for-us) gifts strewn about.

Then our parents awoke, maybe a little hungover around 8 a.m., and upon descending the stairs found us amid a disaster. If it had occurred to my father at the time, he would have called the Rye Police, but instead he went on a rampage. Peacefully asleep under a mountain of gift wrap, I was aroused by my father who, enraged, kicked the gingerbread house across the room and to smithereens. Our parents’ perfect plan crumbled under the weight of three creative children out, seemingly, to destroy the family.

Stressor 3.0—A Brilliant Gag

A few years after The Christmas Incident (TCI) and The Furniture Incident (TFI), on a wintry night, I invented a Brilliant Gag to play upon my unsuspecting parents. On such an evening, with a light snow covering the ground and mom & dad downstairs sharing a cocktail and the days’ news, I decided to climb out my second-story bedroom window (yes, that window) on a rope.

The idea was to tie the rope from my bedstead out the window to the driveway below, climb down and come nonchalantly through the front door past my parents lounging on the couch, and go back up to my room. The gag was obvious: my parents would see me come into the house from outdoors, but they did not see me leave. How could this be? After two or three times, my parents would stop me and ask, What’s going on? They’d quickly see how innovative and funny I was (not to mention brave, climbing out a second-story window) and we’d all have a good laugh. That was the plan, and the Gag.

The first attempt went off without a hitch (I don’t think my parents even noticed, but that too was part of the plan and process; initial complacency). However, as I began to make my second descent, as if right on cue, my sister, Harriet, popped into my room (we all had our own rooms by this time, the better to prevent conspiracies, my father thought) and began asking unfortunate questions like, What are you doing? Anyone with a sister knows that they are nothing but trouble and under these circumstances should just go away. Go away, I said. She did not go away, but persisted with the added threat, If you don’t tell me, I’m telling [Dad]. I explained the Brilliant Gag and swore her to secrecy. Only if I can do it, too she said, adding, for no good purpose, or I’m telling [Dad]. Everyone knew then, and should know now, that sisters should not be allowed to do certain things and climbing out of a second-story window based on instructions from an eight-year-old is one of those things.

Leaving me no choice, I explained carefully how this Gag worked, saying to Harriet, Lower yourself slowly out the window, grab the rope and climb down. Whatever you do, don’t panic. Simple enough a monkey could do it, but not my sister. As soon as she grabbed the windowsill, she hung by the full length of her arms—and panicked. While she was screaming her head off, I bent out the window begging in a whisper, Don’t panic! Just grab the rope and climb down! My entreaties fell on deaf ears. There was nothing but more screaming.

Eventually, Harriet’s clamoring made its way down to the living room and my parents came running. Upon entering my room, they could hear screaming but couldn’t see anything, my sister’s fingers clinging to the sill being the only exposed part of her body. Finally, noticing the open window (a clear giveaway), my father stuck his head out to see what the ruckus was, and Harriet immediately released from the sill—and grabbed my father around his neck. My father was fit. But even he could not gain leverage, and gravity was slowly pulling him out the window along with Harriet. My mom rushed in, grabbed my father from behind and around his chest and she started pulling, the three looking like some strange, bent-over conga line.

Meanwhile, seeing my Brilliant Gag deteriorate before my eyes, I realized the end result would not be a laugh was heard ‘round! but rather this belt’ll make a sound. Exit stage right.

Unbeknownst to me, all three of the conga line eventually pulled back thru the window, my sister no worse for wear, but crying (as she was wont to do) uncontrollably. By that time, I had already been hiding under a bush across the street, in the snow, with my life ebbing away. They will miss me, I thought, as I planned to slowly succumb to the snow and cold. Fate would not have me that night, however, as my father, knowing I had run away, (fifty feet and under a bush constitutes running away in the Book of Kids) called from the front porch to inform me that I was not, in fact, in trouble and could come home. All was forgiven and in the coming years we would all have a good laugh about the Brilliant Gag Incident.

Stressor 4.0—Dancing School

At twelve, that last thing I was interested in was girls (excepting my adoration of Miss Jones), and the only thing worse than girls was Dancing School.

My sister, Harriet, however, desperately wanted to attend dancing school, as I can only assume so many young girls want to. Conveniently, Management at the Apawamis Country Club Dancing School was experiencing a dearth of young boys to pair with the young girls, and a void in the Birmingham Dancing School Agenda was thereupon created, a void I was destined to fill against my wishes. In my mom’s rationalization, I was sacrificed to the fourth graders’ season of dancing school so my sister could attend the sixth graders’. A sacrifice it would be, but who would be placed on the altar of Apawamis Club? Not I, if I had anything to say about it.

A lot of planning had to go into my first night of DS, including obtaining a dark suit, which I didn’t own and for which I refused to get fitted. The answer: Mom would get my brother’s old blue suit, hem the pants and sleeves and, Bob’s Your Uncle, we’re good to go.

Finally, the big night arrived, and I was to attend my first session of dancing school, learn proper etiquette, and understand how to treat young women properly and with respect.

My mother came up to my room with less than thirty minutes until school started (Apawamis was conveniently five minutes away) and I was in my shorts and T-shirt.

Why aren’t you dressed? she asked My response, I can’t find my suit.

Not buying it, my mother called out, Steve! We’ve got a Code Red! (my mother’s message was clear: we have breach and attempted escape of an inmate. Close all the exits and secure the perimeter.) My father appeared—in a homemade bikini comprised of three bandanas tied together, barely, and a paint-dabbled and torn T-shirt.

They two were going to make sure I got to that school, and the first step was to find the suit. To do so, they had to toss my cell, quickly discovering the contrabanded blue suit, now hopelessly wrinkled, under my mattress fortunately sans a shiv or soap-gun. Ten minutes to go, and both mom and dad tried to corral me like BLM wranglers meeting a mustang in Wyoming. I wasn’t going down without a fight. Holding me down, they both managed, after twenty minutes, to get me in the suit, outfit me with a cockeyed tie, and throw me in the car. All the way to Apawamis Club I was festooning them with expletives as if I’d become possessed by the devil himself.

By the time we got to the Apawamis Club, one of the most exclusive and Brahmin-esque clubs in Westchester County (and one of the oldest, founded in 1890), I was thirty minutes late. My father, still in his bikini, yanked me from the back seat and pushed me forward toward the grand entrance, thinking naively that my better manners would prevail once I was in public. The obligatory retired Rye Police officer who provided security looked askance, not only at this wrinkled kid coming in a half hour late, but also at the strangely dressed man who dropped him off.

Once inside, I was greeted by the hostess, an elderly, bejeweled woman with a substantial bosom and obvious patrician heritage. She smiled.

What a sweet young man! Welcome. Although you’re a little late, I’m sure you’ll enjoy our Dancing School!

I looked around her rather large frame to witness dozens of boys my age dancing with girls who wore white gloves. The boys looked like the undead, moving rhythmically to right step, one, two; left step, one, two. I looked up at the hostess (I was short at the time). I looked around at the dancing. I looked back up at the hostess, who, despite my clear reticence to enter the premises continued to smile politely. Staring up, I said, Fuck you! turned on my heels and ran.

As the matron gasped and clutched her chest (Why, I never!), the security guard started laughing hysterically, giving me time to make my break. I hadn’t counted on my father waiting at the bottom of the steps like some crazily dressed goal-keep. As I leapt, he caught me and dragged me, struggling, back into the club, while the hostess sat in a chair provided by the security guard and fanned herself.

Realizing I had no choice, I entered the dance hall proper and sat sullenly in a chair by myself, conquered, at least for the time being. I determined that I would not dance, no matter what. Finally, I succumbed to the social pressure of forty or so of my fellow doomed boys, who encouraged me to buck-up and make it through, if for no other reason than to survive. The downside of my stubbornness was that, when I finally did hit the floor, the only dance partner left was the homely girl with the limp.

I never reconciled with Dancing School and managed, despite my father’s best efforts, to avoid better than 70 percent of the sessions, using guile, obfuscation, and disinformation (I transposed School Dates with no School Dates on the family calendar). The Apawamis Club probably never recovered from that awful, awful Birmingham boy.

Stressors Nos. 5 and 6: It’s All Fun and Games Until Somebody Gets Hurt

I was eight when I almost died the first time.

The backyard of our house was a children’s paradise, with a small play yard containing a slide, sandbox, and a playhouse of about one hundred square feet. The playhouse had functioning windows and a front door with six glass panes, which when closed gave the little residence a weatherproof place for us to hide when needed. We had a large yard and a swimming pool about one hundred feet down from the playhouse/yard.

On this occasion, my parents were sitting by the pool on a sunny summer afternoon where my father, taking a break from his constant writing, was once again lounging in his signature bandana bikini.

Harriet and her best friend, Laura, were in the playhouse and would not let me join them. I was frustrated. Amid my yelling and the girls’ mocking, I was determined to enter the playhouse by any means, even if it meant knocking down the door (unlikely, given my small stature at the time). With that in mind, I ran toward the closing front door with my right arm stretched out in front of me like a running back plunging into the line, aiming for the perimeter of the door. I missed.

My hand and arm crashed through one of the glass panes of the door and sliced a huge swath of muscle and tissue on my upper right bicep. Looking down at this severe wound, I think I immediately went into shock, while my sister and Laura started screaming. I recall that there was, surprisingly, not a lot of blood.

Running from the pool, my mother wrapped my injured arm with a towel while my father drove us to United Hospital Emergency which was only minutes away. My father had managed to put on a T-shirt, but otherwise was barefoot and in his bikini as he carried me into the hospital.

I was rushed into surgery, and twenty-two stitches later, the doctors were able to save my arm (I remember having a dream under the anesthesia in which I woke up and saw my arm in a jar of formaldehyde!) The surgeon explained how close I’d come to severing the main artery in my arm and bleeding out. Nevertheless, the surgery was a success, and other than a conversation scar, I have complete use of my arm to this day.

My father accused my sister of trying kill me.

Two years later, having fully recovered, my brother had his turn. Our parents had gone into New York City for a dinner party and left Mark and me alone; never a good idea.

While outside, on a sunny spring evening, Mark constructed a crude bow and arrow from a sapling bough and some string (you can see where this is going—you’ll shoot your eye out!), aimed at me and gave me the count of ten to run. To this day, I don’t know what prompted him to threaten me like that or, for that matter, not to wait until ten. At the count of three, he fired from about ten feet away. He shot my eye out. Well, not completely. The arrow struck the outside of my left eye, broke the retina, and caused other damage to the eye. I fell to the ground, now blind in that eye, but again with little blood loss.

In an age before cell phones, there was no way for us to contact our parents, so my brother helpfully walked me across to the Simmonses, our neighbors, whereupon Mrs. Simmons drove me to, where else, United Hospital. Good to see you again, Carey!

While I was in the emergency room waiting for surgery (again), somehow, someone was able to contact my parents and they arrived at the hospital, this time with my father properly attired and my mother in a fur coat. With their signature on the consent, I then spent three hours in surgery and the next five years in and out of New York Eye and Ear (East Fourteenth street) having several complications and attendant surgeries. In the end, the doctors saved my eye, but my vision is 20/500 and it can never be completely corrected.

My father accused my brother of trying to kill me.

I’ve never blamed my brother nor held animosity toward him for his moment of directed violence, despite never knowing his motivation. On the contrary, I am extremely close to Mark even today, and, as you’ll see, we had many misadventures scheduled for our future together after he let loose that arrow.¹

I imagine that all these stressors, in addition to the others I’ve added to this memoir, helped my father call Ed in Cincinnati in 1974 and say, I’ve had enough! I’m on my way!

When my father died, he left a sizable estate, a result of his hard work, a creative mind, and generational parsimony. A large part of his assets, including a co-op in Gramercy Park and the house in Cincinnati (described later in this memoir) were bequeathed to Ed, and I can’t imagine a more worthy beneficiary. An additional large amount of his estate was willed to a trust, the beneficiaries of which were scholarship funds set up at Williams College in Massachusetts and Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, both schools that my father attended in his youth.

The copyrights to all his written works were also part of the assets included in the trust, including any royalties and any theatrical rights that might accrue. I discussed this with the Trust’s administrator and ended up purchasing all the copyrights to all my father’s works in 2017. Shortly thereafter, Ed delivered this memoir, an unpublished but typewritten piece, along with another complete novel and half of an unfinished third work of anecdotal history (this history, Unguarded Moments, is included in the appendix), all apparently written between 2000 and 2013.

My siblings and I received nothing from my father’s estate. His will, which we had to acknowledge with respective signatures, stated, "I, Stephen Gardner Birmingham, specifically make no provision in this will for my children, Mark, Harriet and Carey." While some might consider this ignominious, or even cruel, I did not; I had expected it, since my father’s and my reconciliation in the early 1980s. My brother and sister were not so understanding and remain bitter today. This is particularly true in the case of my sister, who has been, and remains, on public assistance after years of alcohol and drug abuse and periods of homelessness; she expected a payday. I like to think my father was, in a sense, getting even with us for all the stressors we put him through, which, as you’ll see, often included the police.

Whatever my father’s reasons for leaving the family so precipitously in 1974, the result was a long period of disruption, pain, and anger in Rye, New York, where we grew up. My mother, who adored my father, notwithstanding his proclivities, never remarried or, for that matter, had any serious relationships. She would never, however, forgive my father, even up until she died on my birthday in 2007. Although I was always close to my mom, I was the only one of us who really reconciled with my father after he left, recognizing him both as the man and talent he’d become. He, on the other hand, never exuded much warmth, and I always had the feeling he was holding back, perhaps to avoid any true intimacy with his children.

Harriet would call our father on occasion (most times inebriated), lugubrious and often seeking money. My brother did not contact our father for over forty years, and on that occasion only to ask for money to help in Mark’s cancer treatment; my father gave him $10,000.

Throughout my reconciliation, I also managed to find a place in my heart for the man who took care of my father for thirty-eight years and who was at his side when dad died: Ed Lahniers.

It’s interesting to note that, despite our reconciliation, my father never mentions me or my sister in this book but devotes an entire (if not all together flattering) chapter to my brother, Mark. Perhaps, as you’ll see, this was because my brother was the instigator of so many of our hijinks and, being the first child, the cause of so much of my father’s angst.

While I’ve taken the liberty of peppering this memoir with my own personal recollections and anecdotes, this work is, in the end, my father’s memoir, not mine. Nonetheless, I hope readers will enjoy my father’s stories and my own and will gain some context into an author’s life.

Carey Gardner Birmingham

San Antonio, TX

August 2019

---

1 Among other things, I was with Mark when (1) I became hypothermic and almost froze on the side of a New Hampshire cliff three hundred feet off the ground in 1973, (2) fell five stories to the ground off a cliff in the Adirondacks in 1976, and (3) almost drowned when I got caught underneath a rock while navigating a Class 4 rapid on the Colorado River in 1979.

Part I

The Early Days

Chapter One

Buffy

Steve:

Her name was Jennifer Boyington, and how she acquired the nickname I’ve no idea, but everyone called her Buffy. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, and at the age of nine I was madly in love with her. Her image, as they say, filled my waking thoughts.

Buffy was an orphan, some sort of foundling, and as a child I imagine she had been raised in a series of Depression-era foster homes. But since she never talked about her past, and it never occurred to me to ask, I have no idea whether she knew who her parents were. I had heard my own parents say that Buffy was illegitimate, which I gathered was not a desirable thing to be, though I’m not sure I even understood the meaning of the term. All I knew was that I loved her unbearably. She was seventeen years old.

She had dark, naturally curly hair, fair skin, wide-spaced dark eyes, and a band of pale freckles across the bridge of her small, perfectly formed nose. She had three dimples—one on each cheek, and one in the center of her chin. She had lived with friends of my parents in the little town of Andover, Connecticut, while their own children were growing up, and these friends had grown fond of Buffy. With their children grown and off to school and college, these friends felt that Buffy, who was fond of small children, needed a more stimulating home life. During 1941, it was decided that Buffy should come to live with us. She adapted beautifully to the change of address. My sister, Susan, was two and a half years younger than I. My mother explained that Buffy was to be what she called our nursemaid.

As such, her duties were somewhat loosely defined. She helped my mother in the kitchen, fixing dinner, and with the clean-up afterward, but she ate her meals with us. She was expected to keep her bedroom tidy and to do a little light housework, but she was always given time to do her high school homework, and she was never required to pick up after us children, although she sometimes did. Today, I suppose she would be called an au pair girl, and for this, in addition to room and board, my mother paid her a small allowance, enough for Saturday-afternoon movies, the Mounds bars she liked to nibble on, the Lucky Strikes she smoked, her cosmetics, and other incidentals. Mainly, she was to be a surrogate for my mother, while she was off and about, busily running the little town.

It is important to remember that my mother was an alumna of Wellesley College, as was my grandmother before her. The Wellesley Woman, I was given to understand, was a special breed indeed. Once, on an alumnae questionnaire that my mother was filling out, I saw this question asked: What was the most important thing you gained from the Wellesley experience? My mother had answered this in three words: Poise, I suppose. At Wellesley (at least in Mother’s day, and I don’t imagine it has changed that much), a young woman was required to master not just academic skills but social ones as well. If your posture was poor, Wellesley would correct it. If your speech was less than cultivated, Wellesley would fix that, too, with emphasis on proper vowel sounds. (One exercise was to repeat the phrase: Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prisms.) In order to receive her diploma a Wellesley woman had to be able to swim at least two lengths of the college pool.

Not that scholarship was overlooked at Wellesley. At Wellesley, my mother once offhandedly remarked, they teach you just about everything there is to know about everything. I remember one morning, when we were children, hearing that an atomic bomb had been exploded over Hiroshima, and my mother explaining to us how an atomic bomb worked, based on something called nuclear fission. In fact, she said, if she had the money to purchase the necessary parts and ingredients, she could have built an atomic bomb based on what she had learned in chemistry class at Wellesley. In my mother’s mind, there was no doubt that my sister would also go to Wellesley, as indeed she did. And I know that it was a deep disappointment to her that her only granddaughter—my daughter—did not pass Wellesley’s rigid muster and become the fourth generation in her family at the college.

Wellesley women were expected then—and this of course has changed—to marry, and have, on the average 2.5 children and then to throw themselves vigorously into community service. My mother took all this very seriously. She founded the local chapter—and naturally became chairperson of—the Parent-Teachers Association (PTA), and later served on the Connecticut State Board of Education. She headed the Andover Mother’s Club, which was sort of an adjunct to the PTA. She was also on the Area Board of Education and was its chairperson for several terms. As an ardent New Deal Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican village, she ran for and was elected to—Andover’s Board of Selectmen, where one of her duties was seeing to it, on snowy nights that the town’s one snowplow was called into service so that roads would be cleared by morning. She played the piano well and, though she had never played the organ, when the First Congregational Church (the only Episcopal house of worship in town) needed an organist, she volunteered for that, and was the church’s choir director as well. She wrote a regular column of Andover news, also without pay, for the Hartford Courant. And there was a great deal more. As a result of all this activity, she was out virtually every evening of the week at some committee meeting or another. My sister and I might have resented this—in fact, we did, until Buffy came.

At some political gathering a former governor of Connecticut, Wilbur Cross, had referred to Editha Birmingham as the smartest woman in the state. My mother took this seriously, too; it confirmed and made official what she had already suspected. But, naturally, a woman with that high an opinion of herself, and who undertook the running of such a little town—correcting its shortcomings and pointing it in what she knew to be the right direction—made her share of enemies. It used to embarrass us, as children, to hear our friends’ parents inveigh against our mother as that Birmingham woman. We knew that, at the regular Town Meetings, there were other townsfolk who engaged her in angry shouting matches and called her ugly names. In the three-room schoolhouse we attended (yes, it was painted red), we knew that we received special attention. After all, our mother was chair of the School Board. But being teachers’ pets did not endear us to our peers.

In fact, we both grew up supposing that Mother was one of the most disliked women in town, though it was obvious Mother didn’t care. When she died in 1976, Susan and I decided, rather than a funeral, to have a memorial service for her at the church where she’d played for so many years. As we were leaving the house, Sue looked at me with panic in her eyes, and said, My God—what if nobody comes to this? The church was filled to capacity, with standees in the back. ²

Meanwhile, it was more or less made clear to us that Buffy wasn’t very bright; simple was the term my mother sometimes used for her, but a good soul. It was not that she was feebleminded. Her IQ was probably in the low-average range. But at the regional high school she attended, she was not considered college material, and the courses she took were in something called Home Economics. She also took courses in typing and shorthand, and I can see her at the small desk in her bedroom, practicing her typing, with a chart of the keyboard propped up in front of her portable typewriter and the letters on the keys themselves covered with adhesive tape. Later, I would watch her endlessly copying the hieroglyphics from Gregg’s Shorthand Book into a spiral notebook. The school’s theory, I suppose, was that if Buffy did not marry and have children, she could always find employment as a secretary or clerk-typist. She was conscientious about her homework, though her grades, I understood, were generally poor.

My father, who was a practicing lawyer in Hartford, had his jolly side. On Sunday mornings my sister and I would cuddle in bed with him while he read us the funnies from the Courant. Or he would tell us stories that he made up as he went along—usually about a pair of twins: Ike and Mike, they look alike. He composed limericks: There once was a schoolmarm named Little, who had no control o’er her spittle. She’d drip and she’d drool, while teaching her school, but she cared not a jot nor a tittle. But he could also be a stern and harsh disciplinarian. I had certain chores that I was required to do. Our house had been originally built in the middle of an apple orchard (the Great Hurricane of 1938 blew down all the trees), and one of my tasks was to pick up apples on the lawn as they began to fall, so they would not jam the blades of Father’s lawn mower. I didn’t mind picking up apples. I was paid ten cents a bushel for the job. What I didn’t like doing was getting the eggs.

Our eggs were bought from a farm across the road, where the farmer’s wife, Mrs. Gilchrist, kept chickens. To this day, I have no idea why I hated going to Mrs. Gilchrist’s once or twice a week to buy a dozen eggs. It had nothing to do with Mrs. Gilchrist herself, who was always kind to me, and the walk from our front door to hers was no more than three hundred yards. But I considered my egg chore an enormous imposition on my time—eggs always seemed to be needed at inconvenient moments—and I finally hit upon a strategy that would rid me of this onerous duty forever. The next time my father told me to get eggs, I would simply say no. I remember my father stepping into my room with coins jingling in his hand. Time to run over and get a dozen eggs, he said.

No. I said, looking him bravely in the eye.

I was thereupon paddled so severely that I never dared to say no to him again.

My mother, meanwhile, was all Wellesley seriousness. She loved explaining things. If you asked her what made the wind blow, she would tell you in terms of temperature fluctuations, atmospheric pressure and shifting currents in the stratosphere, and this might lead to an explanation of different cloud formations—cirrus, cumulus, and so on. She also had a quick temper, and a habit of bursting into hysterical tears when things seemed not to go exactly as she thought they should. And so, it seemed a wondrous thing to have someone like Buffy living with us, whose mood was always sunny. She never moped, never sulked, never seemed to feel angry or misused or disappointed. My life, at the time, seemed nothing but a series of disappointments and frustrations. It was as though disappointments were contagious, like measles or whooping cough, and I had caught them all. I was disappointed that I couldn’t seem to run as fast as other boys my age, that I couldn’t seem to catch or throw a ball, that I was secretly afraid of water, and couldn’t seem to learn to swim.

The thing that impressed me most about Buffy was her perpetual cheerfulness. She could not have had a happy childhood—I knew that—and yet she was always happy, always smiling; Buffy seemed immune to disappointment. She seemed to skip through life, untouched, uncaught. I longed to be just like her. I wanted to inhabit her body, her mind, her soul, and to learn the secret of her merry spirit. Because everybody, it seemed, loved Buffy. And nobody, it seemed, loved me—except Buffy, whose love was huge and unquestioning and enfolding, and took in all the world.

At right about the time Buffy came to live with us, I had begun developing a peculiar fascination—a fetish, even—involving female breasts. I know exactly how it started. It started with Miss Litwin, my third-grade teacher. Miss Litwin was a pretty young woman who fancied loose-knit dresses and skirt-and-sweater sets, which showed off her shapely bosoms to good advantage. I took to making secret pencil drawings of women, always in profile, with enormous breasts, sometimes long and pendulous, sometimes pert and upturned, but always with little round nipples, like Miss Litwin’s in her knits.³ Somehow, Buffy seemed to have sensed that I had this secret vice. At seventeen, she had a fully developed figure, with traces of baby fat still lingering beneath her chin, around her armpits, and just below her buttocks, and she clearly enjoyed dancing and prancing around her room in her bra and panties (never anything less), and letting me watch her get dressed. And of course, I loved watching her. If there was a zipper to be run up the back of a skirt or blouse, she let me do this for her. This was one of our secrets kept from my mother.

I also loved watching her apply her makeup. In retrospect, I suppose she used much too much makeup for a high school freshman, but, as it was, preparing her face before she caught her bus