Boys and Girls Together: A Novel Read online

  Boys & Girls Together

  A Novel

  William Goldman

  FOR

  My

  Father

  East Side, West Side, all around the town,

  The tots sang “Ring-a-rosie,” “London Bridge is falling down”;

  Boys and girls together, me and Marnie Rorke,

  Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.

  JAMES W. BLAKE (1894)

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  Part I

  I. AARON

  II. WALT

  III. SID & ESTHER

  IV. JENNY

  V. BRANCH & ROSE

  Part II

  VI. SID & ESTHER & RUDY

  VII. AARON

  VIII. WALT

  IX. RUDY

  X. AARON & BRANCH

  Part III

  XI. JENNY

  XII. RUDY

  XIII. BRANCH

  XIV. JENNY & CHARLEY

  XV. WALT

  XVI. AARON

  Part IV

  XVII. JENNY & CHARLEY

  XVIII. AARON

  XIX. WALT & TONY

  XX. JENNY & CHARLEY

  XXI. AARON & BRANCH

  Part V

  XXII-XXVI. BOYS & GIRLS TOGETHER

  A Biography of William Goldman

  Foreword to Boys & Girls Together

  IN 1938 I WAS SEVEN, and my family had recently moved to the then very small town of Highland Park, outside of Chicago, and why I cannot tell you, but for either one week or several, we got the Sunday New York Times.

  I was already a movie nut, had been to the theater more than a little and right now, as I write this, sitting in 2000 at a machine undreamed of then, I can still see the seven-year-old child, turning page after page of Times movie ads and theater ads and thinking, “I must try and live there someday.”

  I remember where I was in the room, the pattern of the yellow rug, the light coming in from the bay window at the far end. And as anyone who knows me will tell you, I don’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, much less rug patterns.

  But the kid of that moment and that wish have been inside ever since.

  I think the original working title was Magic Town. I think I had this much: a bunch of young people come to New York. I know I knew it went badly for them.

  That’s it, folks.

  Oops, sorry, one more thing: I knew more than anything that the novel had to be long. If it ran over a thousand typed pages, fine. Ask me now where that lunatic notion came from, I know not. But long novels, I have survived to tell you, are the worst to write.

  I’ve always been good at guilt, but I think when I began Boys & Girls Together, I must have had Olympic records in mind. You see, I had come to the city. When I was twenty-two. And I had miraculously become a writer. And the first three novels, though short, had also been successful. I was going great, no question.

  But all around me, my friends were falling to earth.

  And so, around thirty, I set out to write my book of atonement.

  Because I was programmed all my life to fail, to finish, if I got to the line at all, at the back of the pack. When I was maybe six or seven, I went to playgroup and at the end, they had parents’ day and there was a running race, I was in it, and it started and I took off—

  —entering a nightmare—

  —I looked around—no one was near me—I had gone in the wrong direction—

  —can you imagine the humiliation? I could. I did.

  —and then blessedly came Minnie’s voice, Minnie, who had worked for my family close to half a century was shouting now, “run Billy run”—

  —so I ran, and I won—because I had not been going in the wrong direction at all, I was simply out in front, far out in front, winning if you will—and I simply could not conceive it.

  Hiram Haydn, my beloved editor for fifteen years, was a novelist himself and quick to understand the problems of fellow fumblers. Usually I presented him with a completed novel and we would then go to work.

  Since I had no idea what Boys & Girls Together would be, he pretty much directed the way the book might go. Take the five characters and write a chapter about each of their childhoods, he’d say. So I would. Then we’d go on to the next period of their lives. The process of writing the book took three years—I stopped in the middle to do a play and a musical on Broadway, both of which stiffed, you will be thrilled to learn—and he was essential all the way. He might say “What’s happening to Walt, how’s Walt doing, that’s what I’d like to know,” and off I’d go, trying to figure for myself how Walt was, in point of fact, doing, and I’d come up with a Walt chapter, write it down.

  My first three novels—The Temple of Gold, Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow and Soldier in the Rain had not been well received critically. Except by Dorothy Parker who, bless her, could not have been kinder.

  Hiram thought Boys & Girls Together would establish me as one of the serious American novelists of my generation.

  Wrong. It was ... how shall I put it ...

  Slaughtered.

  The most crucifying reviews up and down the line. I was truly on the verge of tears for weeks. But out of that came a wonderful decision—

  —fuck ’em!

  I have not read reviews for over thirty-five years now, good or bad. I remember being sent an entire package of raves for the film of All the President’s Men.

  —fuck ’em!

  Never opened it. I don’t want to read what those assholes have to say. And if any of you want to write, I cannot give you better advice. Don’t read anybody.

  Just fuck ’em!

  And go write some more.

  Two final Boys & Girls Together stories, both involving Princeton.

  The first involves finishing the book. It was 1963 and I was not in great shape. I’d rented a house in Princeton for the summer to complete the writing and I was, of course, exhausted from finally almost getting it done but more this: I had a bad back then and it had chosen to go out. So I lived on red wine and pain pills to force sleep, caffeine to get me going.

  Plus this: I had to wear a girdle to get through the day.

  Didn’t do a lot for my good old masculine sense of self-esteem.

  Anyway, the day I was done I was alone in the house and stared at “the end” when I wrote those blessed words, got up, went outside to the backyard, where we had a child’s swing set up for daughter Jenny, then all of a year. I sat in it, smoking, and suddenly I had this realization:

  I had told all my stories.

  Every one.

  I sat there thinking it couldn’t be true, because that would mean the end for me as a writer, then luckily I remembered the story of the mother who dressed her son in her clothes ...

  No, I’d put that in the novel, given it to Branch.

  I went through them all and I’d given them all away. That’s my chief memory of that afternoon. Knowing what I’d done, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life. (I did not realize at the time that two years down the line, in that same university town, over Christmas vacation, these two outlaws named Butch and Sundance would ride up from South America to save me.)

  We moved permanently to Princeton in early 1965, when Susanna, Daughter Number Two, was born.

  Shortly after, the regular writing teacher came to me and said he had gotten a sudden shot at sabbatical and needed a quick replacement. Would I do it?

  I had always wanted to teach. Easy yes answer.

  I had a bunch of kids for creative writing, wanted them to remember me kindly, so I stopped writing for the year and just taught. I must have done well because the visiting writing professor
(there were two at Princeton in those days) came to me on a Spring afternoon and asked if I would like to be the permanent professor of writing there.

  My decision was that if I did not have any heavier a workload than I’d already had, yes. Any more, and I would never be able to get back to my own work.

  He said he would get back to me.

  Now you must know this—that summer, Boys & Girls Together was the beach book in paperback. Huge success. A very sexy cover for those days. And was the book salacious? Sure, the gay characters I guess were more shocking then. But no more than that.

  Days kept going, as they do, by.

  No answer about becoming a writing professor.

  Finally (we are well into May) I ran into the visiting teacher and asked what was going on. “I’ve been avoiding you,” he said. “I’m just dreading this.”

  What he was dreading was that one of the top professors in the English department, old and gray and gay, had heard about Boys & Girls Together, and rejected me with these words:

  I WILL NOT HAVE OUR CHILDRENWORSHIPING AT THE SHRINE OFA PORNOGRAPHER.

  I took my family and left Princeton that week. Back to Magic Town where I belonged. Been to Princeton one time since. As someone must have said: fuck ’em!

  Part I

  AARON WOULD NOT COME out.

  Nestled inside his mother, blind and wrinkled and warm, he defied the doctors. Charlotte’s screams skimmed along the hospital corridors, but Aaron, lodged at his peculiar angle, was mindless of them. Charlotte vomited and shrieked and wanted to die. As that possibility became less and less remote, the doctors hurriedly decided to operate and, deftly cutting through the wall of Charlotte’s abdomen, they slit the uterus and reached inside.

  Pink and white like a candy stick, Aaron entered the world.

  It seemed to be a great place to visit. His father could not have been gladder to see him. Henry Firestone, universally known as Hank, was a big man, confident, with a quick smile and a loud, rough voice. Aaron never forgot that voice; years later he would still spin suddenly around—on the street, in a restaurant, a theater lobby—whenever he heard a voice remotely similar.

  Hank was a lawyer, for Simmons and Sloane, the Wall Street firm, and when he was thirty-one Mr. Sloane himself made Hank a full partner, Mr. Simmons being bed-ridden that day with gout, a disease to which he noisily succumbed some months later. The week he became a partner, Hank was sent to Roanoke, Virginia, for a three-day business trip.

  He stayed two weeks and came back married.

  Her name was Charlotte Crowell, of the Roanoke Crowells, or what once had been the Roanoke Crowells, the family having been comfortably poor since shortly before the turn of the century. Charlotte was tiny, barely five feet tall, with a sweet face and a voice as soft as her husband’s was harsh. Her hair was black and she wore it long and straight, down her back; even when it began turning cruelly white (she was not yet thirty) she wore it that way.

  Hank and Charlotte lived in New York for a few months but then, the summer after they were married, they moved to a large white colonial on Library Place, a gently curving tree-lined street in the best section of Princeton, New Jersey. Mr. Sloane himself lived in Princeton, on Battle Road, of course, and when he saw that the house on Library Place was up for sale he mentioned it casually to Hank, who immediately took Charlotte for a look-see. Charlotte loved it—it reminded her so of Roanoke—so Hank bought it for her. He couldn’t afford it but he bought it anyway, partially because Charlotte loved it and partially because she was pregnant and everybody told them New York was no place to bring up children. They moved into the house the week after Deborah was born, all waxy and red, the only time she was ever unattractive. The wax soon washed away, the red softened into pink, and she became a beautiful baby, fat, spoiled and sassy. Charlotte adored her and Hank liked her well enough—he cooed at her and carried her around on his big shoulders and gently poked her soft flesh till she giggled—Hank liked her fine, but he was waiting for his son.

  The wait took over two years. Hank worked hard at the office, making more money than he ever had before in spite of the depression, and Charlotte hired a full-time maid and then a gardener to tend the lawn on summer mornings. They entertained a good deal and they entertained well; Charlotte had the gift. Hank gave up tennis for golf, which bored him, but it was better for business. A lot of things bored Hank until the evening Aaron emerged.

  Before the boy was a month old his room was crammed with toys and dolls and music boxes, and a menagerie of stuffed animals pyramided against the foot of his canopied bed. Almost every afternoon Hank journeyed north to F. A. O. Schwarz’s for more and more presents, and when Charlotte warned he was in danger of buying out the store he only nodded happily and told her she had guessed exactly his last remaining ambition. Nights Hank spent in the boy’s room, rocking him to sleep, singing soft lullabies in his big rough voice. Whenever the boy was sick—and he was sick a good deal—Hank would go to work late and return early, calling in constantly from New York, always asking the same question: “Aaron? How is Aaron? How is my son?”

  Hank loved Aaron; Charlotte loved Deborah. There were no troubles on Library Place.

  For Aaron’s third birthday Hank bought him a jungle gym. They set it up together, the two of them, in the back yard. It was a marvelous structure, more than six feet high, and Hank used to take Aaron and lift him, setting him on the very top rung. “Hold tight now,” Hank would say. “Hold tight and stay up there all by yourself.” So Aaron would hold tight, sitting on the top rung, his tiny fists gripping the bars for balance. Hank would back away from him then, calling out “Scared?” and Aaron would yell “No, no,” even though he was.

  One Saturday afternoon the maid was out and Charlotte was watching Deborah perform at ballet class, so Hank and Aaron played cops and robbers for a while, shooting each other, falling, suddenly up again, running pell-mell across the lawn. After that it was time to play on the jungle gym. Hank lifted Aaron, carried him on his big shoulders, carefully placed him on the very top rung. Hank started backing away. “Hold tight now,” he said. Aaron held tight. “Are you scared?” he said. “No,” Aaron cried, “no.” Hank stood a distance from the jungle gym and smiled his quick smile. Then, thoughtlessly, he paled, falling to his knees. He gasped for a moment, then slipped to the grass. Gasping louder, he crawled forward, crawled toward the jungle gym, saying, “Aaron. Aaron.” He raised one big arm, then dropped it. Reaching for his son, he died, sprawled full length, white on the green lawn.

  Aaron giggled. “That was good, Daddy,” he said. He did not know the name of the game, but whatever it was it was obviously still on—his father, after all, had not answered—so he giggled again and stared down at the dead man. It was a fine summer day, windy and warm, and Aaron stared up at the clouds a moment, watching them skid across the sky. Grabbing on to the bars with all his strength, he looked down again—it frightened him to look down, it was so far—but his father still had not moved. “That’s good, Daddy,” Aaron said. He giggled once more, lifting his head, staring at the clouds. His fists were beginning to get sore from holding the bars, but he did not dare loosen his grip. “Down, Daddy,” Aaron said, looking up. “I wanna come down.” The game was still on; his father did not move. Aaron gazed at the clouds and started to sing. “How sweet to be a cloud floating in the blue. It makes you very proud to be a little cloud.” It was a song from Winnie the Pooh—Aaron knew all the songs from Winnie the Pooh—and Pooh sang it when he was floating up after the honey on the tail of the balloon. But he never got the honey because the bees found him out and Pooh fell all the way down. Pooh fell. Aaron’s hands ached terribly. “Daddy,” he said louder. “Take me down, Daddy. Please take me down.”

  His father made no move to do so.

  “Daddy,” Aaron said, frightened now. “I’ll drink my milk I will I will I promise but take me down.” He hated to cry—his father never cried—but suddenly he was crying, the tears stinging his eyes. “Ta
ke me down, Daddy.” He began to shake and his hands were numb and the tears would not stop. “TAKE ME DOWN DAH-DEE.” His chest burned and the clouds were monsters diving at him so he closed his eyes but he thought he might fall so he opened them, alternating his stare, up to the diving monsters, down to the still figure, up and down, up and down. Aaron began to scream. “DAH-DEE DAH-DEE DAH-DEE TAKE ME DOWN DAH-DEE TAKE ME DOWN TAKE ME DOWN DAH-DEE DAH-DEE DAH-DEE TAKE ME DOWN.”

  He was still screaming when Charlotte found him an hour later. She ran across the lawn, took him down. Then she dropped to her knees beside the still white figure on the grass.

  Soon she was screaming too.

  For a short period after the funeral there were no changes in the life at Library Place. Then one morning the gardener didn’t come; a high-school boy was hired to mow the lawn. Two months later Charlotte let the maid go. There was no money coming in now, no money coming in. They had always lived beyond Hank’s income and probably Charlotte should have given up the big house sooner, but she determined to keep it, working desperately, cutting corners, cleaning and patching and cooking until finally, eight months after the death, Charlotte, exhausted, found a new place to live, the first floor of a yellow frame house on Nassau Street, close to the center of town.

  Deborah wept as her mother packed her clothes. “Now, Deborah Crowell Firestone, you stop that, hear?” Charlotte said in her soft Southern voice. Aaron stood silently in the doorway of Deborah’s room, watching. “Oh, baby,” Charlotte sighed, opening her arms. “You come to me.” Deborah ran into her mother’s arms. Charlotte rocked her gently, back and forth. “It’s all right, baby, hear? Mother’s going to make it all all right. Everything’s going to be wonderful, baby. Mother promises. Mother loves you and she swears it’s going to be all right. Mother loves—”

  Aaron crept into the room.

  “Get out,” Deborah said.

  Charlotte said, “Now, Deborah, you stop talking that way.”

  “Get out,” Deborah repeated.