Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (10 page)

Nurse hated Euclid Street too, though she never said so—she wouldn’t have thought it her place. But I could tell. She tiptoed around “Miss Hill,” as she always called Gladys, and we would have
taciturn dinners in the dining room, its windows barely penetrated by the dying rays of the sun, stagnant with the ghost smells of old food hanging in the curtains and trodden into the fibers of the carpet.

Since Nurse couldn’t drive, she was virtually marooned. She had one afternoon off a week, on which she would walk a mile or so to an English tea shop to meet a friend. I wondered how she had found that friend, but she clammed up when I probed her. She was, I think now, clinically depressed. My teeth and hair were always brushed, cookies and milk awaited me when I got back from school, but Nurse was always too tired to play games with me and her patience was short.

On Saturdays, we would walk to the bookstore and she would buy me five Nancy Drew books—my new obsession. Nancy Drew was a teenage detective with titian hair, two sidekicks, and a sky-blue convertible car. I enjoyed the implausible mysteries, but what fascinated me most was that Nancy (like the Famous Five) could have such adventures while still being part of an intensely ordinary world—and that her world could be so ordinary, when her mother was dead too. When we got home, I would lock myself in the bathroom and read one from cover to cover. The rest I would finish during the week after school, lying on one of the twin four-poster beds that Aunt Dorothy had contributed to the house.

For someone who disapproved of Enid Blyton—as Daddy did, or at least as Gladys said he did—Nancy Drew would have been beneath contempt. I felt an unspoken collusion with Nurse as she bought me books that “Mr. Huston” wouldn’t like. I don’t think Nurse ever said the words “your father.” I was starting to understand that people had taken sides when Mum and Daddy had split up. Nurse was—obviously—on Mum’s, Gladys—obviously—on Daddy’s. I wasn’t sure where I was. It would be loathsomely disloyal to abandon my dead mother’s memory, flimsy as it was; but then, how could I not be loyal to Daddy, since he was the center, and the puppet-master, of my world?

Gladys would never have directly defied Daddy’s wishes, but she
managed to seem blind to the blaze of yellow spines on my bookcase. Her gestures of friendship were so subtle it was easy to miss them. We were adopted by a Siamese cat, and Gladys suggested we call him Ignats, because she knew I’d find it funny. She gave me a typewriter and a book on teaching yourself to type, and when I had to write an essay for my history class at school, she suggested the subject of grottoes—someone had given me a book about them, which I could crib from—and helped me write it on the morning it was due, watching over me as I typed it. She drove me to school so that she could excuse my lateness herself.

Then Gladys’s mother came on an extended visit, and our flickering understanding was snuffed out. It was winter, and the thermostat in the house was turned up to eighty. I didn’t see why Mrs. Hill couldn’t put on a sweater over the thin cotton housedresses she wore, instead of stifling us all in this claustrophobic re-creation of what I imagined must be the torrid heat of West Virginia, where she was from. The heat made the house smell even more strongly of old dust and carpet backing, and the air was as limp as the air in a tomb.

Nurse moved out of her room into mine so that Mrs. Hill could have hers. The low murmur of the radio came from behind the closed door, underscoring the absence of live human sound. Gladys and Nurse spoke to each other only when necessary, their exchanges polite but minimal. I rattled between them, trying to be as quiet as I could.

I kept the door of my room shut too—to block out the embalming heat of the furnace. I shut off the heating vents and opened all the windows, not caring how many sweaters I had to wear. Though I hated the house, I considered it primarily mine. I thought it wouldn’t have been rented if not for me; without me it would, as far as the Huston family was concerned, not even exist. It didn’t occur to me that Gladys would have had to live somewhere, that without me there would have been some rented house or apartment, that in fact I was sharing her digs rather than she sharing mine. She let me
claim the master bedroom, with its own en suite bathroom, when we moved in. I saw the shock on Nurse’s face, but Gladys let my arrogance pass. Now, as Mrs. Hill’s visit wore on, I felt as if I was being isolated into a back corner while the rest of the house reverted to its true nature: smothering and lifeless.

Weekends were my release. I would go for the day, or sometimes overnight, to Cici’s house. Or I would stay with my godmother Gina, the painter, whom I remembered clearly as Mum’s closest friend. She was living in L.A. because her husband, a Bulgarian fencing master, wanted to be an actor. (After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he came second in the election for president of Bulgaria.) Best of all, Anjelica would pick me up and we’d drive along beautiful San Vicente Boulevard, its wide grassy median lined with gnarled, red-barked coral trees, toward Hollywood, where she was sharing a house with her old friend from London, Jeremy Railton. She had just got her driver’s license, and she joked about how hard it had been for Jeremy, when he taught her to drive, to keep her under sixty miles an hour. The radio was always on. When Bob Dylan came on, singing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Anjel turned up the volume and sang along. That was how I wanted to be: carefree, knowledgeable about music, in control of the wheel, speeding ahead. I sang too, grateful to Dylan for writing a chorus that was the same line repeated four times over. The sameness of the boulevard, the sameness of the song: if only this sunlit cocoon of a drive could never end.

Anjel told me about the first time she had met Gladys. It was Christmastime, and Gladys came to St. Cleran’s without any presents for Anjelica and Tony.

“I don’t give presents to people I don’t know,” Gladys had told them. “I will give you presents when I know you better.”

“Can you believe it!” said Anjel as we drove. She looked over at me, smiling. She didn’t even need to keep her eyes on the road. “Outrageous! I hated her instantly.” She was laughing at her greedy eight-year-old self, but some of the outrage had stuck.

“I would have too.”

It was a lie. I didn’t want to admit that I wouldn’t have expected a present—or, if I had, I would have quickly and silently revised my incorrect views. I wished I had Anjelica’s sense of entitlement. It seemed to sum up everything that made her more interesting, more confident, more truly special than I was.

In New York, being with Anjelica had been rather like being with Dad: stepping into a world where I didn’t belong, unsure if I was measuring up. I didn’t know then that the man she lived with there, a fashion photographer, was depressive and prone to rages, so she had been constantly on edge. Here she was full of enthusiasm and energy, and it flooded into me. She wanted me for her sister; that was all that mattered to me. We were allies: Mum’s daughters, the Soma girls.

Jeremy had a truck, and we usually went to the garden center or the hardware store, me sandwiched between them on the bench seat, to buy supplies for his projects: cement to make ponds for turtles and frogs, jungly plants to attract wild birds, wood and wire to build cages for coveys of baby quail. Once, Anjel pulled an old dress out of a trunk, and they insisted I put it on. It was long and white, with tiny pleats and lace; it had belonged, she told me, to our grandmother Angelica. I hated all dresses—and worst of all was the frilly bonnet. Anjel had always loved dressing up, and couldn’t accept that I didn’t. The dress made me feel silly; it erased
me.
But I couldn’t explain that, even to myself, and I didn’t dare refuse outright in case they decided they didn’t want me in their enchanted, artistic world. So I put it on, the bonnet too, and curled in the hammock like a surly hamster while they took a photograph of me.

I have memories of Anjel and Cici laughing together—and none of Anjel with Daddy. Anjel didn’t spend Christmas Day with us, and I didn’t think to wonder why not. My family was made up of individual people who shared an accident of circumstance; we weren’t any kind of whole. Tony wrote to me, but I hadn’t seen him since Ireland.
I doubted I’d ever see Danny again. Neither he nor Zoë wrote, and on the rare occasions when Cici mentioned Zoë’s name, it was with such acid hostility that it was obvious that she and Danny couldn’t be a part of Daddy’s new life.

The circle of people who had loved Mum was more powerfully magnetic than this amoebic Huston family. Some mysterious force drew us together, seemingly coincidentally, in certain places at certain times: Anjelica and I and Gina and Jeremy and Anjel’s friend, Joan Buck, in London and New York and Los Angeles, and later in New Mexico. They had known me since I was a baby, when Mum had been there. They were more important than family: they were the witnesses to the reality that my own memory couldn’t prove was real.

One night Anjelica took me to Chinatown. It was my first visit to a film set, and the sense of occasion was exciting: a street blocked off to traffic, black vintage cars gleaming under the megawattage of huge round lights on high poles. But mostly it was boring. Lots of people stood around, muttering to one another with bent heads, while others ran about purposefully, making me afraid of getting in their way. When the camera rolled and everyone fell silent, I was too far away to hear what the actors were saying.

Daddy was on the set that night, though I barely saw him. Possibly, as he was playing an incestuous villain, he preferred not to see his daughters. Anyway, it was Anjelica’s new boyfriend we had come to visit. We waited in his trailer for him to finish a scene. Finally, the door swung open.

“Hey, Toot!” Not as in
toot-toot,
the noise of a train. More like “tuht,” the singular of “Toots.” Sometimes he lengthened it to “Tootman.”

“This is Jack,” said Anjelica to me. At age nine, I hadn’t heard of Jack Nicholson, or seen any of his movies. I’d seen very few movies,
in fact. Nurse didn’t take me, since there wasn’t a cinema in walking distance of Euclid Street.

“Allegra. Pleased to meet you.”

He shook my hand, then sat down in front of a big mirror surrounded by lights. A woman bent over his nose, where a line of black threads was sewn in knots, like a butchered centipede.

“It’s just makeup, darling,” Anjel reassured me. It made me queasy, especially when the woman’s fingers fiddled with it. I could barely look at him.

A few weeks later, a fever suddenly hit me while I was at Anjelica and Jeremy’s house. She put me in her bed, and sleepiness furred my senses. I heard footsteps on the stairs. A man appeared in the doorway. Jack.

“Leggsie!”

He drew out the name across seconds of time, like someone savoring toffee. I loved it suddenly; it was mine, it was me. The beam of Jack’s attention made me feel like a minor deity evilly laid low.

“I brought Scatman to see you,” he said. “The Scatman will make you feel better.”

Beside him was a black man with a lined face like leather that cracked into a wide grin. He perched on my bed and started to sing, his voice gravelly, the tune wild and rollicking, every word balanced on the brink of laughter. It was the title song from
The Aristocats,
a Disney movie which Anjel had taken me to see. My fever made the room dreamy and fantastical, and misted Scatman into a sweet, gnomish Rumpelstiltskin. This was the L.A. I’d been seduced by: a place out of time, where flowers were permanent, where sickness didn’t mean boredom and misery but instead brought Scat Cat himself to my bedside, singing just for me.

W
hen summer came, my weekend visits to Cici and Daddy grew longer. Most days we’d head up the Pacific Coast Highway to the Malibu Colony, where they had rented a beach house. Cici’s car was a Citroën Maserati—there weren’t many of them, she said—and when she turned the key in the ignition, the back end rose up hydraulically, like a robotic baboon in heat. She called it the Brown Mound, or just the Mound. I sat in the front seat, a leather bucket tipped backward as if by g-forces. Her son, Collin, pretzeled himself into the stunted back seat, his double-jointed elbows and knees sticking out at odd angles, a sheepish grin on his face.

Cici rested her right hand on the gear stick as she drove, tapping it so that the underside of her ring pinged against the chrome. It was a long slab of jade, a green as soft as wool, the stone shaped across
her index finger like a snippet of armor. Sometimes she also wore an emerald-cut diamond the size of my thumbnail, which she told me had been an engagement ring from a man she hadn’t married. She’d tried to return it and he’d refused to take it back—but should she still be wearing it? I was a bit shocked, but I felt a thrill too. Cici didn’t feel the obligation that I felt: to do what other people thought I should. She did exactly what she wanted.

She drove fast, changing lanes constantly to weave through the traffic. It was like an arcade game: the other cars were there only to make our journey more exciting. My job was to watch for cops. Cici showed me how to lower the visor and watch behind us in the makeup mirror—because, she said, a face looking out the back window would be suspicious. We didn’t want to let the cops know we were onto them. When I yelled “Cop!” she’d slam on the brakes, smiling a fake-innocent smile to amuse Collin and me. “Nasty little piglets,” she’d say with a kind of hiss as we drove past the cop car at exactly the speed limit, or as the cop whizzed past us on the tail of someone else.

I’d never swum in real surf before. Collin showed me how to get out past the breakers, jumping and diving through the incoming walls of water, and paddling to catch the wave. All I had to do was close my eyes and hold my breath, and let the wave pick me up and throw me onto the shore. The graze of sand on my skin was just this side of painful. It was the present scraping against me, letting me know I was there, part of the real world, as long as my breath held out.

Collin was two years younger than I, and I felt protective of him. Gladys had warned me that he had learning disabilities. It was true that he couldn’t read or write well, though he was eight. But he was a very long way from “slow.” He called Cici’s brother David—a classic seventies swinging bachelor, with shoulder-length curly hair, shirt unbuttoned to the navel, and gold chains nestling in the chest hair—the Chicksweeper. I wished my brain was quick enough to come up with a name like that.

Collin was obsessive about his enthusiasms, and his sense of the
border between reality and fantasy wasn’t strong. But then, neither was mine—though mine was the mirror image of his. For him, fantasy was real; for me, reality was as unreliable as fantasy. He wasn’t “normal”; he didn’t operate on the ordinary wavelength. I wasn’t “normal” either. A cloudy sense of foreignness enveloped me. I felt it like a veil between me and the girls at school, and it was hard to make friends. Collin took me on my own terms, and I took him on his. With him I was in the present, or in a fantasy; either way, future and past fell away. It was a relief.

Daddy always said the same thing to prove that Collin wasn’t stupid: “He can name all the prehistoric reptiles.” It was the tone you’d use to tell someone about a memory freak or a circus act: “Just imagine that,” I could hear him saying. “He can juggle jellyfish.” He said it with exaggerated seriousness, as if this feat of Collin’s was so extraordinary that one could only gape in wonder. It drove me nuts. He sounded so pleased with himself for being able to appreciate Collin’s particular intelligence—as if he felt the need to demonstrate that Collin wasn’t an idiot, which only showed that he entertained the possibility. And why “prehistoric reptiles”? Was he afraid that if he said “dinosaurs” people would think he was ignorant?

Besides, what made Collin’s intelligence remarkable was his sharp wit, which Daddy seemed unable to hear. Collin knew as much, and as little, about dinosaurs as any boy. I knew that, at least as far as dinosaurs were concerned, Collin was totally normal—and Daddy obviously didn’t. It nagged at me too that the dinosaurs might not all have been reptiles. So many seemed to be between one thing and another, like the fishy ichthyosaurus or the feathered archaeopteryx. Because I actually talked with Collin, rather than making pronouncements about him, I soon knew more about “prehistoric reptiles” than Daddy knew—or, it occurred to me, pretended to know.

I’m not sure when it happened: that Daddy became fallible. Perhaps during that dreary summer in Cuernavaca. Perhaps when he parked me in the house on Euclid with Nurse and Gladys, and
I felt banished to the murky outskirts of his world. My heart had been readied to see faults in him—and that obnoxious, patronizing, pseudo-admiring evaluation of Collin was the first.

I didn’t like the enclosed, sullen person I’d become in the dark house on Euclid, and I couldn’t be that person in Cici’s house. Almost every room had a door to the outside. I liked to lie in bed and count them in my head—there were eight. Some were huge sliding doors that stood open all day long.

The house was tucked away in a dead-end canyon off the rural, western end of Sunset Boulevard. Just to start with, that address was a huge improvement on Euclid. The house was perched on a ledge halfway up a steep hill, with a semicircle of lawn fringed with rosebushes, which Cici fed with the manure from her horses. They lived in corrals across the creek at the foot of the hill. She watered constantly, wearing a bikini and floaty chiffon tunics, barefoot on the paving stones. I loved how permeable the house was: the smells of wet flowers and distant horses drifting inside, the purring rumble of Teddy Pendergrass and Isaac Hayes drifting out.

Cici’s feet had high curved insteps, with long second toes that, to me, looked exotically deformed. She’d tuck her feet up beside her on the sofa, or rest them against the coffee table, and when she talked she flexed them, like a cat arching its back in the sun. She even flexed them when she walked, as if each step gave her a jolt of physical pleasure. The tendons of her toes made ridges under her brown skin, and she put her feet down almost flat, as if she were stamping her footprint into the ground. I imagined the elegant shock waves cannoning through the wood and tile and concrete and imprinting her tracks in the earth’s crust below. The sound made a mark on the air too, and set the paper-thin leaves of the Etruscan gold diadem on a table in the living room shivering.

The diadem had been on a table outside Daddy’s bedroom at
St. Cleran’s. In Cuernavaca, or during the year on Euclid, I was told that St. Cleran’s had been sold.

In secret, I imitated Cici’s walk, turning my toes in, pressing on the ball of my foot, holding the big toe taut so that the inner part of its crease touched the ground. I stretched my ankles, trying to get my insteps to curve as hers did, but they wouldn’t rise above a frustratingly straight diagonal line. Within a minute, my feet got tired.

The house was filled with things from St. Cleran’s. Collin slept in the brass bed that had been Betty’s. The black table with playing cards painted on it, which had been in the Red Sitting Room upstairs, was the coffee table; and the living room was staked out by the Mexican tables from the study and the two giant mermaids from the inner hall. The three narwhal tusks from the dining room—unicorn horns of spiraling ivory—made a kind of triple axis at the heart of the house. The tallest had had to be sunk below floor level to fit under the ceiling, and Daddy had had a pond built around it, lined in black marble, with three low, Brancusi-shaped fountains gurgling in it. We all loved that pond: it was wonderfully ridiculous in the middle of a living room, and best of all visitors sometimes fell in.

I slept under the headboard from the Gray Room, where the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild had slept. It was knobbly and uncomfortable to lean against, if you wanted to sit up in bed and read a book, which gave me a sudden rush of sympathy for the Baroness Pauline, who had always seemed so grand and remote. (Her eyelids blinked constantly, and very fast. I used to stare at her in fascination across the dining table during lunch.) However beautiful the headboard was, I didn’t think Daddy would ever have had it in his own room.

I felt at home among these familiar objects, though they were mixed up higgledy-piggledy. I slept in the bed that Daddy’s most important friends had slept in; but looking down on me was the dark, sad-faced Madonna from the kitchen, her heart pierced with arrows and Latin words surrounding her like ribbons of ectoplasm. It threw
my sense of order out of joint; it was a rearrangement of the cosmos. Everything—everyone—was equal here. There was no upstairs and downstairs, master’s domain and servants’. I liked that.

I was so happy, day after day, not to be told that it was time to return to the house on Euclid that I almost forgot about it. Cici and Daddy seemed to have forgotten about it too. Finally, I asked when I’d be going back there.

“You won’t,” said Cici. “This is your home now.” I could see how pleased she was to be saying it.

“What about Nurse? Where will she sleep?”

I didn’t want to share a room with her again, and the only spare room was mine.

“She went back to Ireland a couple of weeks ago.” Cici made it sound like it had been Nurse’s idea.

My stomach shriveled up. I knew Nurse would never have left me unless she was told to go. If I protested, it would sound like I didn’t want to stay with Cici; if I didn’t protest, I would be faithless to Nurse. Instantly I chose the latter. The deed was done. I was here with Cici, and Nurse was gone.

I took it personally—not as an insult, but as my failing. Nurse, whose only role in life was to look after me, had been sent packing. And I hadn’t even noticed. I had let
weeks
go by without asking after her, without caring that I hadn’t even spoken to her. I had let her be bundled off in secret after twenty years with the Huston family, with no more than a thank-you and a plane ticket. How must she have felt, knowing that I’d moved on so quickly without even a backward glance? She had given me love my whole life, been there with me always, and all I had given her back was forgetting. She was being thrown out into a hostile world. With me, she’d been protected under the shelter of Daddy’s influence. I would be fine without her, but what would she do without me?

The truth was that without her there, I felt freer and stronger. If she wasn’t there to protect and look after me, that meant I didn’t
need to be looked after and protected. Anyway, she couldn’t protect me from the things that made me feel really vulnerable—being tossed about from this house to that one, not knowing where I’d be when the next month came. All she could do was share them, and the farther we went from Ireland and London, the more miserable I knew she was. I figured they hadn’t told me Nurse was leaving because they were afraid I’d protest or make a scene; if they waited until I asked, maybe I’d accept it more easily. And I did. Had they all been winking at one another, Cici and Gladys and Daddy, thinking how wonderful it was that Allegra
still
hadn’t asked about Nurse? I couldn’t blame them. It had been up to me to ask, to remember, and I hadn’t. It showed what kind of person I was.

Once again, the pattern had been played on me: wait for the end of the school year, send me somewhere that seemed temporary and see how I liked it, then fix things behind my back and tell me it’s permanent. I was happy with the outcome this time, but the technique wasn’t hidden anymore. I resented being the subject of an experiment that nobody admitted was being conducted on me.

At the airport, while Dad walked up to the Mexicana desk, Collin and I stood to one side with Cici. She was wearing her usual summer outfit of bikini top—my favorite one, with a tropical sun setting on each breast, which I had encouraged her to buy—and jeans. Her stomach was bare and brown and her light-filled hair tumbled onto her shoulders.

It was just like an ordinary (though still rather special) family going on vacation—but it seemed all wrong to me. Daddy didn’t deal with things like tickets and passports; it was Gladys’s job to be his intermediary with the everyday world. Gladys wasn’t here (that seemed right—it was a family vacation), so perhaps it should be Cici’s job; but she seemed so calm and sure of her place, waiting while her husband took charge, that it didn’t seem like it should be
her job either. Her job was to be beautiful and patient, and hold the children’s hands.

A slim, rectangular, zippered, chestnut-colored leather bag dangled on a thin strap from Daddy’s right shoulder. Men like Uncle Nap and Uncle Fraser didn’t carry bags; they had pockets. Daddy’s safari shirt was covered in perfectly pressed pockets; I wished he’d use them. I hated that feminine bag. It diminished him. Fumbling in it, he looked incompetent and pretentious. As the father of a regular, two-plus-two family going on vacation, I realized, without quite knowing it, that he was miscast. It just wasn’t us; it was a pretense, it couldn’t last. From that day on, I noticed every sign that Daddy and Cici’s relationship was coming apart. When it finally happened, I couldn’t have been less surprised.

I wasn’t thrilled about going back to Mexico, but at least I had Cici and Collin, and we weren’t going to the low-security prison of the Kohners’ house in Cuernavaca. We were going to Puerto Vallarta, where there was a beach.

This was a Cici kind of Mexico. We tooled around in a jeeplike Volkswagen Safari with plain metal sides and no windows, full of her friends, with me and Collin stuffed into the space behind the back seat. We were part of the gang. Her friends were loud and laughed a lot, and had romances, and smooched in the ocean. Dad was rarely with us. Often we’d meet him for lunch at the beachfront El Dorado—don’t eat the tomatoes or the watermelon, Cici told me, they water the fields with sewage; always order drinks
sin hielo,
without ice. After lunch, Daddy and I would play backgammon. Under the table I dug my toes in and squelched them in the sand.