Chapter Twenty-Four
Memories often appear in my mind in the form of snapshots. It’s almost as if I’m looking through a stack of photos, placing each in turn under the pile to keep them in order. The beauty of such images is that they evoke not just the visual but all my senses. My memory snapshots of the Goffin family in West Orange in the early sixties reawaken emotions I thought I had safely tucked away.
· Our Siberian husky, Lika (pronounced LIKE-uh), curled up in the only sunny spot on the floor of the family room. She sits up suddenly with ears alert in response to our doorbell that we had pretentiously and expensively modified to play “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” The ring is out of rhythm, with all the notes incorrectly timed as quarter notes: do do mi mi re re re do.
· Gerry shooting pool with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He’s barefoot on the indigo carpet in our damp, cool basement trying to find a place to line up a shot without being crowded by the river rock walls or the dark walnut door leading to our rarely used sauna.
· Willa Mae folding laundry in the family room on our midcentury modern brown-yellow-black-and-white couch while watching her soaps on a big-screen television in the walnut-paneled entertainment center.
· Louise in the family room holding my hand on a rainy day as we look through the sliding glass doors leading to the backyard. After identifying some familiar shapes in the patterns formed by the raindrops on the green plastic fence around the pool, we stand quietly together, enveloped in a feeling of peace.
· Willa Mae standing, ironing, and listening to soul and gospel music on her favorite radio station, WNJR.
· Sherry in her playpen mimicking the phrasing of the singers on WNJR while she explores the array of primary-colored Fisher-Price toys around her.
· Louise, Sherry, and me out for a walk on a crisp autumn day. We wave to the Salovich children next door as they clamber excitedly into their mother’s car, then we continue walking toward the Trix-colored forest at the end of our street.
Our subdivision had been part of that forest until the developers cut down all the trees. Then homeowners like us who wanted trees had to pay a landscaper to bring new ones in.
· Louise and Sherry on the patio in the summer performing in plays with wildly imaginative plots written by Louise and Sherry and starring the authors.
· An exuberant Gerry carrying his radiantly happy wife around our backyard on his shoulders. After he puts me down we share a warm, loving hug.
· Sherry flying dangerously down the hill of our driveway on her bicycle to catch the Good Humor man. In addition to ice cream I buy some punks that I hope will generate enough smoke to keep insects away. Sherry licks her drippy cone and tries to stay ahead of the melt.
· Louise and Sherry bursting through the door of our writing room at a crucial moment in the writing process. Without missing a beat I continue to play our black Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano and say, “Not now! Mommy and Daddy are working!” The girls get the message and withdraw.
Working on a song is a situation around which I’ve never had trouble perceiving a clear boundary or conveying it in a way that brooks no interruption or argument.
· Gerry sitting on one of the two sofas in our writing room, scrawling lyrics on a yellow legal pad with a ballpoint pen. The ash grows long on his cigarette as it rests on the edge of a curved red-glass ashtray. The sofas, arranged in an L shape, are upholstered in an ornate black-and-white fabric. Matching drapes, red velvet wallpaper, large lamps with elaborate finials, black end tables, and a red carpet create an atmosphere reminiscent of Al Nevins’s office.
My daughters’ word for the décor in the red room was “hideous.” I didn’t take it personally. Gerry and I had delegated such decisions to a professional interior decorator who, with our attention focused on our children and our songwriting, had little difficulty obtaining our cursory approval of her selections. Lady Fortune must have liked the décor of our writing room because so many of the songs we composed in that room were recorded by leading producers with top artists and then flew up the charts.
Gerry and I were able to keep enough hits flowing out of our Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano to feel confident about being able to pay our mortgage. As our income rose, we employed a professional accountant. Depending on whether he reported good or bad news, Gerry’s reaction was either to buy something extravagant such as a new car, or to say, “We gotta tighten our belts!” For Gerry, that meant cutting back on movies, theater, and lobster dinners at Rod’s Restaurant on Northfield Avenue. For me it meant accommodating Gerry.
On the whole, I thought we were doing well. But Gerry did not enjoy living in the suburbs, an opinion he vigorously documented in a song called “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” Sometimes we stayed in the city for dinner and a movie with Barry and Cynthia. Their Upper East Side apartment was within walking distance of a first-rate selection of movie theaters and restaurants. After the movie the four of us exercised our collective intellect over coffee by analyzing the film we’d just seen, for example, David and Lisa, The Manchurian Candidate, or To Kill a Mockingbird.
At the end of the evening, the Manns walked home while Gerry and I retrieved our car from a parking lot, drove west across Manhattan, traversed the Hudson River through the Lincoln Tunnel, then took Route 3 to the Garden State Parkway. Taking the exit for the Oranges, we drove west some more, until finally we arrived home. I say “we drove,” but it was Gerry who drove while I slept. Gerry did not relish the drive for two reasons: he was making it effectively alone, and he would vastly have preferred going home to an apartment in the city.
One of the things that had sustained my parents and grandparents through two world wars and the Great Depression was the dream that someday their children and grandchildren would have a better life. Gerry and I were barely in our twenties when we achieved that dream. We were homeowners. We lived in a safe, attractive neighborhood in which we enjoyed the freedom to work, play, and raise our beautiful, healthy daughters in relative affluence. We didn’t have to worry about a midnight knock on the door by soldiers in a tyrannical regime. We should have been deliriously happy, and indeed, I was happy. In my bubble of contentment, I thought my husband was happy, too. But Gerry was beginning to feel the winds of the societal storm brewing on both coasts. That storm would become a tempest with enough momentum to polarize families across America and around the world.