Chanel Bonfire (7 page)

These were her words of comfort to my sister, and then, as if to soften the blow even further, she added, “And Wendy wasn’t.” This information didn’t reassure Robbie and she fled from the room, sobbing. Stinging from the cruelty of Mother’s remark, my cheeks reddened with humiliation. I stood rooted to the carpet, unable to move, like a character in a cartoon who can’t run away from the monster.

“If he really loved you girls, he never would have let me go.” With that, Mother went to take her bath.

I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t. I felt that all the air had
been punched out of me. I was outside of my body, floating, pressed up against the ceiling and looking down at myself—trapped between the faint sounds of my sister crying her ten-year-old heart out and my mother splashing in the bath. I don’t know how long it lasted, but I felt I was filling up with something, an idea, a realization that Robbie and I were completely on our own.

I turned and ran. When I got to our room, I found Robbie weeping on the bed. I went over to my sister and put my arms around her and told her it wasn’t true—we were real sisters and it wasn’t true. I was lying; I knew it was true. She looked just like the smiling man in the photo.

LONDON, 1971

chapter five

AMERICAN DIVORCÉE IN LONDON

The wind whipped our hair and stung our faces as we stood on the gleaming deck of the
Queen Elizabeth 2
, sailing out of New York harbor. A welcoming face to so many, the Statue of Liberty with her spearlike crown and stern expression looked, to Robbie and me, as though she might whack us with her big torch or step on us with her giant sandal.

Our excitement at the novelty of being on an ocean liner was tempered by a melancholy we both felt over all the people and places we were leaving behind. I hadn’t gotten to say good-bye to my best friend, Linda Miller, and her two miniature collies we used to take for walks around her block. Robbie had wanted to visit the merry-go-round in Central Park one last time and had forgotten to bid farewell to Morey, the old gentleman who gave us free candy at the newsstand in our old lobby. Most of all, Robbie and I missed
Daddy and ached for the summer we would not have with him. In the taxi on our way to the boat, in an effort to beat back our building emotions and trembling lips, Mother had reiterated the hard facts: our father didn’t care about us, and we had been replaced by his new family. We did not want to believe it, but had no evidence to the contrary. No letter, no phone call, no bon voyage.

And so the specter of our father traveled with us, like a ghost whose presence you sense, but never see.

Since the awful revelation of Robbie’s mystery father, we had tacitly agreed that it was never to be spoken of. I had assured her that it wasn’t true and told her that I didn’t believe it. The most important thing was that we were sisters, a team, and we needed to stick together.

To steel ourselves against the sadness we felt about leaving, we turned the voyage into a game. The
QE2
was like a small, shiny city, and we capered all over her looking for fun and adventure. We stuffed notes into bottles and tossed them overboard, wondering if they would float all the way to China. We pretended to be spies and eavesdropped on other passengers lounging in their deck chairs or drinking in the cocktail lounge. We went to see
Fiddler on the Roof
in the ship cinema so many times, we could act out all the songs complete with choreography in our stateroom, jumping back and forth on the twin beds, singing, before collapsing in heaps of breathless laughter.

We were traveling in first class (“Thank God,” Mother pointed out more than once). We dined in the grand
Britannica Room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the Atlantic, and were waited on by young black men in starched coats and white gloves, the white bright against their dark skin.

On the last night of our voyage there was a fancy buffet dinner for the guests. It was a smorgasbord of golden roast ducks and turkeys, whole suckling pigs with apples in their mouths, and rows of long, poached salmons with cucumber scales and green cocktail olives for eyes. Pink lobsters lay on rafts of jiggly aspic, and mounds of shrimp all stared blankly through black bead eyes. Each cooked beast was manned by a server wearing a puffy chef hat and wielding a carving knife that he sharpened dramatically in the air, making it look like the beginning of some strange sword dance or offering ceremony to the gods of the sea. Vegetables steamed in silver chafing dishes—asparagus as thin as soda straws, haricots verts glistening with butter and spotted with slivered almonds, and crusty broiled tomatoes served alongside four different kinds of potatoes. I had never seen so much food in one place. A separate table was just for the desserts. In the center, surrounded by mounds of profiteroles, Bavarian creams, and babas au rhum, stood a two-foot-tall, all-white cake in the shape of a swan.

My sister and I gasped, being careful not to point—a punishable offense. If we were to be less than perfect and behave rudely, it would reflect poorly upon Mother and there would be a price to pay—maybe not here, in the fancy dining
room in front of other first-class travelers, but when we returned to our stateroom.

Since our parents’ divorce, Mother had occasionally spanked us with a hairbrush, which, according to the way she had been raised, was a mild form of punishment. She had also sent us to bed without supper. But refusing to speak to us for extended periods was her most effective tactic. It made us feel small, almost like we’d disappeared. The threat of being abandoned by the only parent left in our lives was far more frightening than anything else. It was this fear that kept us in check.

All during dinner we stared at the cake, which looked as if it had just flown in from the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy. After we had eaten, we excused ourselves from the table and held hands as we walked over to gaze upon its sweet loveliness. The swan was gliding across a lake of spun sugar, its iced wings raised as if it had just landed there. Its wings were adorned with baby pink roses made of sugar. Robin and I stood in front of it mesmerized and asked the young man behind the table if we could have some.

He laughed at us, his white teeth smiling. “Oh, you don’t want to eat that, misses.” His West Indian accent reminded me of our nanny Catherine’s.

“Pleeeease,” we begged, holding plates from the buffet table up to him for our pieces of cake.

“No, you don’t want that.” He waved us away with his gloved hand. “It’s just for show. It is not . . . real.”

We looked at him confused. It sure looked like cake.

“What’s it made out of?” Robin asked, flashing her most
innocent smile. I followed suit, hoping we could kill him with cuteness.

“Chicken fat, miss.” Our smiles vanished. “I’m afraid it’s only to look at, miss.”

Disappointed, we took some chocolate mousse and returned to our table, where Mother was in mid-dazzle, explaining to a handsome man in an expensive suit that we’d all grown tired of dreary New York and were moving to London for a change of pace. “Isn’t that right, darlings?” she said, turning to us, her well-turned-out daughters. We nodded and smiled as required, a smear of chocolate mousse on Robbie’s upper lip the only piece of the picture out of place. The handsome man grinned at us and returned his gaze to Mother. She worked her smoke-and-mirrors magic, presenting a sleek image to the world, but the truth was that we were just as fake as that swan.

At night before bed, my sister and I would watch the dolphins, shiny in the moonlight, swimming alongside the ship outside our porthole. Unlike us, they seemed to know where they were going.

Our first flat in London was a posh town house on Cadogan Place, near Sloane Square—the future stomping ground of Princess Diana and the other Sloane Rangers. It was a short taxi ride from Harrods or, if Mother was interested in some hip slumming, the King’s Road. Glitter rock was all over the radio, and
Monty Python
had just started playing on the BBC.

Once ensconced, Mother immersed herself in the glam life. In the same way she had reinvented herself in New York as a trophy wife and divorcée, in London she stepped into the role of the madcap American with two ex-husbands. She was thirty-three, looked twenty-five, and had a small fortune to spend—compensation, of course, for her suffering.

We’d see Mother fleetingly at breakfast and then again when she’d blow a kiss good-bye to us over our supper plates on her way out the door. Out front, a big black cab or a hired Bentley, depending on her destination, waited to take her to another marvelous party.

While she was gone, we were left with Serena, a smoky Irish stunner Mother had found at an agency. She was gorgeous, with long black hair, Barbra Streisand fingernails, and green eyes. As soon as Mother would leave, Serena would ring her boyfriend, and he would come ’round with the fancy Rolls-Royce that he drove for a living. His name was Fergus. He would sit on the sofa in his black uniform with his cap perched on his knee and drink whiskey from a flask and smoke. Serena would sit on his lap filing her claws, and he’d tell us funny stories about something called the Irish Republican Army. Fergus told us it was an independence movement that was fighting to free the Irish from British rule. He had quite a few friends and family members in the IRA and explained to us what they did to the people who betrayed them. From Fergus we learned how to recognize people who’d been kneecapped (they limped), what happened to men on a hunger strike in prison (they had tubes
shoved down their throats), and, by the way, did we know how horses were gelded?

Over breakfast one morning, Mother discovered all the interesting facts we were learning from Fergus while in the company of Serena, and she was, of course, let go. It wasn’t the breaking of knees or the gruesome prison force-feeding stories that concerned her, it was all the talk of Ireland. Mother blamed the whole country of Ireland for her two marriages to men of Irish descent not having worked out. “Never marry an Irishman” and “Never marry an actor” were oft-repeated bits of advice, punctuated for emphasis by a jab of the tortoiseshell-and-gold cigarette holder she’d taken to using.

Our days of babysitters finally came to a halt when we told Mother that Serena’s replacement, Alice—we called her Ashtray Alice—liked to put on fashion shows with us.

“How nice,” said Mother, envisioning the good clean fun we were having with Alice, who was an elderly lady with white hair and glasses on a chain around her neck.

Then we told her that during the fashion show Alice took off her top and paraded up and down the room in her bra on an imaginary runway, describing her outfit while using a heavy glass ashtray as her microphone. She always held the ashtray right up to her lips, which made her voice sound all breathy. Then Robbie and I would do the same—walk up and down the runway with our tops off as Alice continued the fashion commentary with her ashtray.

“How disgusting,” said Mother. Instead of hiring a
granny to watch us, Mother had engaged a kinky lesbian. No more babysitters after that; we were to be latchkey kids. Mother reasoned that London was a much safer city than New York anyway and that we were old enough to take care of ourselves.

Being the seasoned city kids we were, Robbie and I came up with our own safety techniques. When we were out and about, saying “Wooden button” was code for when someone potentially creepy or perverted was following us. That was the signal to change trains, cross the street, or go in the opposite direction. “Hippie hair spray” meant we smelled a person wearing patchouli, which we perceived as something drug addicts wore to identify themselves to each other. Whispering “Eighty-six” meant it was time to go. Of course, sometimes there were no words, like when, at the bottom of the long, clacking escalator in the South Kensington tube station, a man flashed us. He opened his raincoat. We looked. He smiled. We screamed and ran for the train to school.

While Mother was partying and simultaneously dating a dashing Romanian polo player and a fey English solicitor who wore an ascot and a monocle, Robin and I attended the American School in London, in St. John’s Wood, with the children of oil executives, diplomats, and even a few movie stars.