BOBBY AND CAROLYN | Kirkus Reviews

Drury’s memoir recalls his life with his mother and the “glamorous soprano” who became a second maternal figure to him.

The author spent his early years in Cambridge, Maryland. His father, Phil Drury, was a bank teller and parttime tenor in the church choir. His mother, Carolyn (aka Bobby) Bayly Drury gave up her bank teller job when her son was born and became a full-time homemaker, supplementing the family income with her dwindling inheritance. Drury was in grade school when he first met Carolyn Creighton Long, the woman who would come between his parents. She was an opera singer who had just moved back to Cambridge after studying grand opera in Italy for two years. She returned to great acclaim, but she was emotionally broken—according to Drury’s mother, Carolyn suffered a nervous breakdown while abroad. No longer able or willing to pursue her musical career through touring with musical production companies, Carolyn began offering voice lessons in Cambridge. Phil approached her for singing lessons in 1956. It is not clear just when a relationship began between the two Carolyns, but by 1958 Bobby was smitten and Carolyn Long had become a fixture in the Drurys’ lives. After Labor Day of that year, Phil Drury left home in the middle of the night, moving to a small Greenwich Village apartment in New York City where he hoped to find a better job and pursue a career in singing. Carolyn moved into the Drury house, effectively becoming the author’s second parent. Drury summarizes the turbulent events in one of his many “Disclosures,” intermittent entries in the narrative that review and interpret events as he remembers them: “My father was the odd man out in this trio, matched up against two Carolyns, ultimately a bit player. By leaving, he left them with each other, now a duo, and he left them with me.”

Drury’s account makes for a complex, tempestuous, and, at the time, socially unacceptable love story. It is a tale of passion that alternated between great expressions of love and devotion and screaming fighting matches, especially after heavy drinking. The relationship lasted, on and off, for 30 years, until Carolyn Long’s death. Indeed, it lingered on after her demise—in one especially poignant vignette, the author describes visiting Carolyn Long’s grave for a memorial a year after she died; he walked behind the headstone and discovered that his mother had had her own name engraved on the back of the stone. The two women would be forever united. A published poet, Drury has a keen ear for the tempo and cadence of engrossing prose. There is one exception, when he dwells on lengthy recitations of Carolyn’s numerous performances during the 1940s and early 1950s. These may be of interest to fans of classical music, but they are not described with any musical texture and, notwithstanding the inclusion of well-known luminaries with whom she sang, readers unfamiliar with the specific pieces listed will likely become disengaged during these passages.

An intriguing, tender, and elegantly written tribute to the author’s two mothers.