The Linda Wolfe Collection Read online

  Robert’s teachers didn’t know he was using cocaine, or so they later maintained. But they were worried about his absences from class. They alerted Tom Yankus, the vice principal, who called Robert into his office. “You’ve been cutting classes,” Yankus told him. “You’re heading for disaster.”

  “I’m keeping up with the work,” Robert said sincerely. “My grades’ll turn out fine.”

  “I have a favor to ask of you,” Phyllis wrote to Yankus early in December 1980. “Your student, my son Robert Chambers, enjoyed many years of active participation in the Knickerbocker Greys. On December 12, the group will hold its 100th Christmas Review. Robert, and a goodly number of other ‘old boys,’ have shown an enthusiastic interest in putting on their dress uniforms and participating in the review.”

  For close to two years she had been working on the great event, and now it appeared that her son might not be able to witness her triumph. Choate seemed reluctant to give him time off in the middle of the term. She would have Bob with her, of course. Several weeks after she and Dermont had tried to get him to go to Roosevelt Hospital, Bob had returned home. But she wanted Robert present, too. So she described the event to the vice principal. And she invited him, too, using language that might remind him of his own patriotic past. “I believe that you saw naval service,” she wrote, “and our ceremonies may be evocative of that period of your life.”

  Yankus did not accept the personal invitation, but he did grant permission for Robert to attend. Phyllis sent a limousine up to the school to bring her boy home. She always seemed to have money for treats like that for him.

  On the night of the ceremony she was in her glory. She dressed in a pink Nipon frock and made her way prettily to the armory, which had been decorated for the Christmas season in a wealth of tinsel and poinsettias. Scores of important guests—among them Major General Robert Arter, commander of the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, D.C., and the Old Guard, the troops that paraded before visiting heads of state—had congregated in the cavernous halls. Phyllis greeted them, proudly eyed her ranks of meticulously attired junior soldiers, and gave an interview to a Town & Country reporter. “Discipline is still the main theme,” she said. “The teaching that is given in the Greys trains a boy how to walk properly, tall and straight. How to have respect for people both older and younger than himself, and how to accept responsibility.”

  Robert, standing nearby, wanted to be in the magazine story, too. “The best part,” he spoke up, “is becoming an officer. Then you get to boss other people around. That’s a whole lot better than taking orders.”

  Phyllis was not amused. “It’s a very tough world out there,” she said, cutting him off. “A boy who receives this training is less likely to fall by the wayside later on.”

  The review was highly successful. The Old Guard’s fife and drum corps provided rousing music, and the boys paraded majestically. But afterward, when the guests made their way upstairs for dinner in the armory’s baronial dining hall, Phyllis’s triumph lost some of its gloss. Bob decided not to stay for the meal. Just as people were sitting down to eat, he disappeared for the evening.

  At Christmas, when Robert came down for his school vacation, his father was once again not living at home. “He’s traveling on business,” Robert told a friend.

  The holiday whirled forward. Robert went to numerous parties, and in the process caught up with numerous old acquaintances. One was a girl on whom he’d had a serious crush the year before. She was younger than he, still in grade school, and perhaps that made him feel secure, for he started seeing a great deal of her and confiding to her that he had problems. But although whenever he was with her he told her she was everything he’d ever wanted in a girl, he didn’t—like other fourteen-year-old boys she knew—get physical with her.

  She didn’t mind. It shows he respects me, she thought.

  Sometime that spring, Tom Yankus decided that Robert didn’t belong at Choate. He wasn’t taking school seriously. His room was a clubhouse. He hadn’t made up his missing work. Writing to Phyllis, Yankus informed her that the venerable institution didn’t want her son back for the next semester.

  Phyllis was dismayed. She looked into other boarding schools. But eventually she decided to let Robert live at home and go to a private high school in the city next year. It was what he wanted.

  That summer, bumping along twisting Spanish roads, Riply Buckner, an American prep school student, sat in a tour bus and stared enviously at Robert Chambers. Robert was two years younger than Riply, yet he was surrounded by girls. Some of them were even older girls. Riply wished he knew the younger kid’s secret.

  He started talking to him after that, got to know him a little. The kid had been kicked out of Choate, which was sponsoring the trip, but they’d let him come to Spain anyway because he’d already paid his deposit.

  Riply liked him. It’s not his fault all the girls have the hots for him, he decided. He just has this cool air about him, like he’s slightly superior to everyone else, and girls go for that. I do, too. It makes you think when you’re with the guy that it’s something of a privilege.

  One night he went drinking with Robert at a noisy little tapas bar, where they downed beer by the liter. Then he and Robert sat talking on the roof of their hotel. From the roof they could see a moonlit panorama of red-tiled houses and vaulting church spires. Below was the deserted courtyard of the hotel. Robert was in an expansive mood. Words poured out of him. Riply tried to keep up, hoping he sounded witty and wise. But after a while he got the feeling that Robert wasn’t listening to him, was just asking him to be his audience. Still, he was pleased to be up on the roof with him.

  While they were sitting there, Robert had an idea. There were big chunks of marble lying on the rooftop. “Let’s throw one into the courtyard,” he said. “Watch it explode.”

  Riply got uneasy. But there was no one in the courtyard. Everyone was asleep. “Okay,” he said, “sure.” And he helped Robert heft a wedge of marble, poise it on the roof’s edge, and heave it down. It hit the stones below with a terrific noise and sounded, just as Robert had suggested it might, like an explosion.

  “Let’s get another one,” Robert said.

  Riply was frightened of throwing down another block of marble. Someone might hear. Come after them. But he was even more afraid of seeming less than daring. So he helped Robert heft another wedge and cast it over the roof edge. Then he helped him heft another. And another.

  He and Robert hurled stones into the desolate night for a half hour. No one heard them. No one came. Then at last, manic energy spent, they left the roof and retreated to an exhausted slumber.

  Trips abroad. Private schools for Robert. The occasional limousine. How did Phyllis manage? her friends wondered. They assumed that Bob’s family helped out. But they didn’t think they helped out to any great degree. If they had, Phyllis wouldn’t have had to work as hard as she did. She was always working. She put in twelve-hour shifts. Night shifts mostly.

  In the fall of 1981, after his return from Europe, Robert began his sophomore year at Browning, an all-male prep school on Manhattan’s East Side that was less renowned than Choate but nevertheless prestigious. The reasons that Choate had asked him to leave were apparently not on his school records, for Browning’s assistant headmaster, Dr. Gilbert Smith, had no reservations about the new student, except for not being certain he believed the boy’s explanation of his departure from Choate—he’d said he simply wanted to be back in the city. Still, he seemed like a fine young man, his demeanor uncommonly pleasant. Smith decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  Jennifer re-enrolled at Sousa. But she seemed to some of her teachers to be distinctly unhappy that term. Her schoolwork was poor. And while she wasn’t officially classified as a slow reader, she read less swiftly than many of her classmates and showed little interest in what she did read. More, she was on the outs with her clique.

  One teacher, worried about her, took it upon herself
to introduce Jennifer to her own daughter, who went to the town’s other junior high, Weber.

  “I wish I could go to Weber,” Jennifer told her new friend. “The girls at Sousa suck.”

  “What’s the matter with them?”

  “They’ve been spreading stories about me.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  Jennifer wouldn’t say.

  “My mother’s a doctor,” Robert told a friend that year. “My father’s the president of a record company,” he said to other friends. He was hanging out with a well-heeled group of city prep school students; and power, position, and money were important to them. He had friends who had been promised Porsches for their eighteenth birthdays, friends who lived in twelve-room apartments and weekended in the cold weather at their vacation homes in Florida’s Palm Beach, in the warm weather at their homes in Long Island’s luxury towns of Southampton and East Hampton. They were a sophisticated, a glittering set. They partied a lot, traveled by limousine to fashionable discos, and wore gold Rolexes with their jeans and T-shirts.

  Drugs made their nights go round, their parties soar, their lively cliques click and keep clicking throughout the hours. They had no trouble getting drugs. One girl’s housekeeper sold cocaine. So did the tutor from whom some of them took private lessons. All that was necessary was money, and that most of the set, except for Robert, had in abundance.

  At a party that winter, a girl saw Robert rifling through the guests’ coat pockets. At another, the hostess came upon him opening drawers in her parents’ bedroom. Neither of the two girls challenged Robert. But they gossiped about the incidents.

  “I’m not inviting Robert to my party,” a third girl told her best friend one night.

  “You can’t do that,” her friend said. “He’s one of us. We go way back. Just tell people to be careful where they put their stuff.”

  Early in 1982, Jennifer transferred to Weber for her last semester of junior high. Ellen Levin had taken a different, somewhat larger house on a street that was in the Weber district. It was a white stucco two-story house with an attic on top. The shingles on the roof were chipped and cracked. The lawn was small.

  The Chamberses moved in 1982, too. Or at least Phyllis and Robert did, for at the time of the move, Bob Chambers was away. He’d at last decided to enter a rehabilitation clinic, this one out of town.

  The Chamberses’ new apartment bore one of the most prestigious addresses in the city. It was on East 90th Street off Fifth Avenue, a few doors away from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. They’d been able to afford the move because the modest building on Park Avenue in which they’d raised Robert had gone co-op, and they’d bought their apartment at the advantageous insiders’ price, then sold it at a profit.

  The building Phyllis chose this time was elegant, its lobby tiled with black and white marble and ornamented with Italianate murals and glistening bronze sconces and chandeliers. The apartment itself was equally imposing. Once the library of the mansion, it had paneled walls and a fireplace. Phyllis took the apartment’s front bedroom and gave Robert its back one, a quiet private area that looked down upon the playground of an elite girls’ school.

  Decorating, Phyllis concentrated not just on her apartment but on the public areas of the building as well. She wanted, she told her new neighbors, to make the lobby even prettier and to have the patch of earth in front of the house cleaned out and planted into a proper flower bed. The neighbors were slow to become involved, but Phyllis moved ahead, installing a luxuriant ficus tree in the lobby and hiring someone to plant impatiens in the sidewalk plot.

  Having a good address and a beautiful place to live may have held unusual importance for her that winter, for, her presidency of the Greys over, she was devoting her fund-raising skills to a new cause. It was the Gold & Silver Ball, a major East Side charity event that raised money for emotionally disturbed and disadvantaged young people. On the strength of her Greys experience, she had been made a member of the ball’s executive committee and was serving on it side by side with dazzlingly rich men and women. Gloria Vanderbilt was on the committee. So was Donald Trump.

  Dr. Smith had his hands full. All autumn, Browning had been plagued by a rash of vandalism and robberies. Graffiti had appeared on pristine walls. Lockers had been broken into and students’ wallets emptied. The losses and disturbances were minor, but they were the kind of thing that could drive a headmaster crazy, and Smith worried about them. He determined to locate the culprit or culprits forthwith and mete out swift punishment.

  He didn’t think Robert Chambers was involved. Robert didn’t strike him as a troublemaker, though he hung around with some who were. No, Robert was weak, a follower. Not the fellow he was looking for. One of his good friends was. He called Robert’s friend into his office and, certain he had found the wrongdoer, expelled him.

  He also alerted Phyllis Chambers to Robert’s unfortunate choice of companions. She responded well. Unlike other mothers to whom the headmaster had sometimes had to break unpleasant news about their children, she didn’t just pooh-pooh what he was saying but promised she’d keep an eye on her son. She must have her share of problems with him, Smith thought.

  He was one of the few people to whom Phyllis communicated this impression. At around the same time the headmaster spoke to her about Robert, Phyllis was using her influence with the organizers of the Gold & Silver Ball to escalate her son’s social connections. She was urging them to put him on the charity’s junior committee, which helped plan the Ball, and where he could meet and share responsibilities with a von Bülow, a Uzielli, a Rockefeller. She said nothing to suggest that Robert would be less than an exemplary committee member, and her request was granted.

  One wintry weekend when the remains of a long-forgotten snowstorm lay gray and greasy at the edges of the city’s streets, Robert went skiing at Gore Mountain in Vermont, The trip had been organized by Browning, but students from other private high schools had been invited to participate. Leilia Van Baker, the girl who had some years earlier marveled at the large romantic portrait of Robert that hung in his living room, was fourteen now and in the ninth grade at Miss Hewitt’s. She came on the expedition, along with a friend of hers from the fashionable academy. They and the rest of the group traveled by bus and stayed in a pretty hotel.

  The trip was a voyage to freedom. The very air, smog-free and tinglingly cold, made the students look back on life in New York as a kind of prison, a place that had been suffocating them. They soared down the mountain, which glistened with powdery snow, and felt themselves to be almost magical creatures, capable of flight. The ecstasy of skiing continued on into the night, when they gathered around a fire to listen to music and talk. Robert and several of his friends had brought along bags of pot and huge bong pipes with which to smoke it. They’d also brought cases of beer and bottles of whiskey.

  Leilia had a wonderful time at the impromptu party. So did her schoolmate. But after a while Leilia’s schoolmate disappeared. So did one of the boys. Leilia waited for her friend to reappear, but when after a long while she didn’t, Leilia went looking for her. Tiptoeing along a bedroom corridor, she opened doors. No sign of her friend. Then, in the dim light of one room, she saw a familiar figure. It was her friend, lying alone on a rumpled bed.

  Leilia hurried toward her. Her friend didn’t move. She was dead still, her neck covered with hickeys and her face covered with vomit. “Help!” Leilia screamed. Afraid that her friend might have choked on her vomit, she turned her over.

  In a moment other girls and boys poured into the room. “Call an ambulance!” someone shouted. Someone else did, and Leilia’s friend, comatose, was taken to a hospital.

  The next day the group boarded a bus for New York. Leilia was gloomy. Her friend was all right. She hadn’t choked. But she’d lost her virginity, still felt sick from passing out, and was being kept at the hospital. As the bus started rolling, Leilia kept brooding about what had happened. Kept thinking that she, too, could have gotten so wasted t
hat she might have had her first sexual experience in a stupor. Had it with a partner so stoned that when it was over he’d wander away, leave her practically at death’s door. She was furious with the boy who had seduced and abandoned her schoolmate. But she was angry at Robert, too. He and his friends had supplied the drugs and the booze.

  Still, in the middle of the bus ride, Robert came and sat with her, and he was nice and comforting. Sexy, too. He made a pass at her. She didn’t respond to it, but she talked to him a good part of the way. And in the end she decided that what had happened to her friend hadn’t really been Robert’s fault but the fault of the group at large.

  She forgave Robert and went on being his friend.

  Jennifer went on a ski trip that winter, too. Her friends—as soon as she’d transferred to Weber, she’d made many—tried the trails at Plattekill in upstate New York. It was one of her first attempts at skiing, and she ended up spending a good part of the time tumbling into snowbanks.

  Her friends weren’t sure how much of her performance was lack of skill, how much of it a show designed to amuse them. She was always fooling around, always trying to make them laugh. One day she doused a slice of pizza pie with Parmesan, took a bite, then grabbed another girl and, holding her tight, breathed a mighty breath of strong cheese on her. The girl struggled to escape, and the rest of the crew broke into peals of laughter. Another time, a group of girls at her heels, she burst into a neighborhood fruit store and shouted at the surprised owner, “Your peaches suck!” The girls behind her fled, afraid of the owner’s wrath, but when Jennifer, panting, caught up with them, they hugged and kissed her and shrieked with amusement.

  Her crowd consisted chiefly of girls from her junior high and a handful of older boys, high school students already. She didn’t think the boys found her attractive. She worried about her skin, which was freckled and sometimes blemished, about her height, which was greater than that of her girlfriends, and about her weight and her figure, stooping her shoulders to minimize her inches and dressing in loose baggy shirts to conceal her burgeoning breasts. But in fact boys in the crowd did find her appealing, and on occasion she went on dates with two of the best-looking.