Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (21 page)

Jack was working long days on
The Shining,
and at the same time he was editing a movie he’d directed,
Goin’ South
. He went back and forth over a horse farting: taking out the sound effect and putting it back in, obsessively. Anjel was walking on eggshells around him. I remember only two flashes of the Jack who used to cannonball into the pool with Jen and me, the Jack who joked and played: his delight when he got a special suitcase just for his shoes, and a day when he slid into the chauffeur-driven Daimler, where Anjel and I were waiting for him, with the words, “Here I am, girls—a symphony of autumnal browns.”

When Jack was given a week off from filming, he decided he wanted to see Ireland. The three of us flew to Dublin, got into another Daimler limousine, and headed west. We stopped for lunch in pubs, we walked on the quay at Dingle and along the cliffs of Moher, but mostly we just drove. And near the end of the week, we reached St. Cleran’s.

We went up the back drive, where the lampposts still stood, and up to the Big House. The lions that had flanked the door were gone. Firewood was stacked high around the columns. It seemed deserted. We peered through the dining-room window. The Japanese wallpaper was still there, the birds swallowed up by the shadows.

“Stop!” called Anjel to the driver as we passed the Little House courtyard on the way out. The black iron gates were closed.

She got out of the car and stood in front of them, gazing into the courtyard. I followed her. Jack stayed in the car.

Inside, all was the same as I remembered it. The courtyard didn’t look mistreated, as the Big House did. The gray stone was warm, the grass in the center circle had been mowed, the white statue of Punch
was still there. But I’d never seen the gates closed before.

I hadn’t wanted to stop, hadn’t wanted to get out of the car. I did, because I felt I ought to do what Anjel had done. She wasn’t the only one who had lived there. I wanted to lay claim to St. Cleran’s. I was entitled to feel as anguished, as exiled, as she did. Suddenly I felt that even when I had lived in the Little House, I’d been her ghost.

Anjel put her hands on the iron bars and curled her fingers through them. So I did too. I wished she would just let go. I wanted to get back in the car, wanted to get away from this horrible feeling of being shut out. But I couldn’t, not as long as she stayed standing there, holding on to the gate.

A figure appeared from a side doorway, wearing a ragged green jumper. His shaggy, steel-gray curls looked familiar. It was Paddy Coyne. He stared—and started running toward us.

“Anjelica! Oh Jaysus. And Allegra, is it? Ye’re back. Ye’ve come back. How are ye?”

He was crying. He’d never spoken so many words together in all the time I’d known him. He told us he was the only one there; the people who owned the Little House were away, and nobody lived in the Lynches’ house on the other side of the courtyard. All the while, he was hauling the gate open.

Anjel was in tears, like Paddy. I should be also, I knew, if I had any heart, but I had felt my tears dry up, like a blast of dry hot air into the space just below my eyes, right at the moment Paddy reached us. When I walked through the gate onto the crunching gravel, I felt a spell break. The past was gone, lost. The unraveling yarn of Paddy’s sweater pinned me to the present like a captured moth. I felt like myself again: not caring much about anything, but so aware of how I was supposed to be that it stung.

In Dublin, we went to see Nurse in the little terraced house that Dad had bought for her. She was nervous as she welcomed us in—because Anjel and I had come into her world, or because of Jack’s fame, I didn’t know. She sat us in the living room and disappeared to
make tea. The sofa and chairs had plastic covers on them, as if they were still in the shop. I felt a disapproving snobbishness rise up, like a succubus taking me over, and I loathed myself for it. This was Nurse, who had looked after me so devotedly, who had gone anywhere I’d been sent without protest: to New York, to Cuernavaca, to Gloom Castle. Her stalwart, unchanging presence had made everything normal for me. How dare I judge her for something so trivial as a lapse of taste in how she kept her house?

But there it was. I couldn’t unthink the thought. I felt awkward hugging her. I had nothing to say. Anjel was talking, laughing, crying, appreciating the details of Nurse’s new life as she winkled them out of her. I had nothing to give: no interest, no appreciation. I could feel that Nurse was hurt that I was so cold, though of course she did her best to disguise it. Why couldn’t the part of me that was loyal and grateful get back inside that standoffish body and make it do what I wished it would: smile, make a fuss of her, show her that I knew how much I owed her and that I loved her still?

I remembered how cavalier I’d been when, at Cici’s house, I didn’t even realize she’d been sent away. Since then I’d lived in places that Nurse, I thought, would barely be able to imagine. I wasn’t, anymore, the little motherless girl whom she had looked after and loved. I could look after myself now; I didn’t need anybody. But how could she know that? I was recognizably me: bigger and spottier, but my long blond hair was the same, my blue eyes, my stolid body.

I felt like a pretense, a walking shell: the shape and shadow of me, the brain of me, but a blank space where the heart should be. I wondered, suddenly, if I’d ever really had one. Who would I cry never to see again? No one. I could outlast any loss now. It scared me—mildly, as much as I could be scared by anything less than a raging beast or a plane crash—that I was so empty.

I saw Nurse one more time, two months later, when she came to
England for Tony’s wedding to Lady Margot Cholmondeley.

I remembered Margot—Nurse always called her Lady Margot—from the times she’d come to stay at St. Cleran’s. I was rather in awe of her, with her soft voice and her cloud of coppery hair, like a woman in a Vermeer painting. She was beautiful in a way totally unlike any of the women I knew. She didn’t wear makeup or fashionable clothes; she wore flat boots instead of high heels. She seemed not to care what people thought of her, and she was never at a loss for something to do. I envied her ability to interest herself as much as I admired her talent for creating beautiful things. Her pencil drawings were delicate, perfect likenesses; and at St. Cleran’s she had made a group of puppets. I had watched her as she worked on them for days in the Little House: building skeletons of wire, forming the papier-mâché into perfectly pointed noses and curvy mouths, painting them with vivid expressions. When the trunk from Ireland arrived at Gloom Castle, I had hoped to find them as much as I hoped for my treasure chest. But they weren’t there.

The wedding took place in the chapel at Margot’s family home, Cholmondeley Castle. Anjel and I went, without Jack; Zoë came from Rome, and Danny from his boarding school somewhere in the English countryside; Dad flew in from Mexico, without Maricela. Tony arranged it so that Danny and I stayed at Cholmondeley with Dad, while Anjel and Zoë were billeted at a neighboring house. Dad was given the bedroom the Queen used when she came to stay.

I played backgammon with Dad on a clattery Turkish board, sat in while he and Buckminster Fuller discussed philosophy, and listened to Margot’s brother, David—who had the absurdly glamorous title of the Earl of Rocksavage—play the piano, very well. My piano lessons had finished when I left Cici’s house, and I knew that I would never, never have been as good as David. This was the standard, I thought, by which John Julius must have judged me: an aristocratic English standard. I had been even more of a disappointment than I thought.

Nurse stayed on the top floor—the servants’ floor—along with Margot’s old nanny. For the two days that we were both at Cholmondeley, I didn’t go in search of her, didn’t sit and talk with her. It was as if she were someone I’d met once or twice, no more. That selfishness and ingratitude that I’d blamed myself for when she was sent back to Ireland—blamed myself a little unfairly, I had decided—I showed it all, truly, that weekend. I barely gave her a thought. As if I owed her nothing.

Except for the wedding itself, she stayed upstairs. She never came to find me; I’m sure she felt it wasn’t her place. She was as substantial as a ghost: less, maybe. I couldn’t comprehend, anymore, what she’d once meant to me.

After the ceremony, we sat for a photograph: Dad and his four children. It was the first time the five of us had ever all been in the same place at the same time. This is my family, I thought: the Hustons. Zoë wasn’t in the photograph, which meant, to me, that John Julius mattered as much as she did, or as little. Despite our odd histories, Danny and I were part of the core. The Irish band De Dannan played, and Tony had chosen songs in honor of each of us: “The Kerry Dance,” for Anjel and me, and “Danny Boy” for Danny. We were brothers and sisters, and Dad was our father. I never felt I was second best to him. I was as much his child as any of us.

“A
llegra doesn’t want to go back to L.A.,” Anjelica said to Helena on the phone—at least, as Helena remembers it. “She won’t come out of the room. Her hairbrush is full of hair. And Jack’s gone crazy. You’ve got to come.”

My hairbrush probably was full of hair; and my bed wasn’t made; and some days I didn’t even open the curtains. For Anjelica—as it would have been for Mum—it was evidence of an unhealthy mind.

Going back to L.A. meant going back to Gloom Castle. I had been giving my address as 1315 Angelo Drive when I filled out immigration forms, but it had been a kind of holding zone for those times when Anjel’s life was too unsettled, or she was out of town. Now I realized that that was where I would come to rest.

I had loved running through the house with Collin, taking the
three steps at each end of the minstrels’ gallery in one leap down and then up again, chasing him down the spiral staircase in the back, doing cannonballs off the high retaining wall into the pool. Without him, it was entirely different: a cavernous, echoing house, dark and tired from not having enough people in it. I felt trapped. The road down the mountain was miles long, and steep, and most of the neighbors were over seventy.

I no longer slept in the room next to Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Myron’s room, the room that had been Cici’s. I had my own room, at the farthest end of the house. I think it used to be Stephan’s. Mostly I sat on my bed watching TV or reading.

The previous spring, in the interlude between Ryan and Jack, I had decided to get thin, so I’d read books while pedaling furiously on Aunt Dorothy’s abandoned exercise bike in the back attic. I used to play canasta with Uncle Myron, but his Parkinson’s disease was getting so bad that cards were hard for him (though he still drove himself to his rental-car office every day). When Aunt Dorothy had friends from the Beverly Hills Women’s Club over to play bridge I sat at her elbow at a folding table in the cavernous living room, the ceiling twenty feet above, the vast picture window half a basketball court’s length away. The ladies all had perfect lipstick and motionless hair, and they didn’t talk much except to bid and score. Their painted nails clicked on the cards; the ice clicked in their glasses; the glasses clicked on the laminated coasters. Occasionally the silver end of one of Aunt Dorothy’s special bridge pencils clicked against the engraved silver binding of the score pad. “It’s one of the great games,” Dad had once said about bridge. “Every intelligent woman should know it.” I couldn’t imagine myself ever being one of those women.

I hated my room, with its hairy grass wallpaper and furniture inset with mud-green leather. I hated our dinners at six-thirty, with stringy meat and soggy vegetables, and Aunt Dorothy squirming minutely as she tried to get her toe on the buzzer under the carpet to summon the maid to clear the plates, and Uncle Myron turtlelike
opposite her, silent except when he suddenly came out with incomprehensible strings of letters, which were the initials of some phrase that I was supposed to be able to figure out.

I’d become sullen. I was tired of being nice and acting the perfect granddaughter. I almost resented Aunt Dorothy for having opened her house to me; I didn’t like having to feel grateful to be living in someone’s house. I hated the way she was rich but behaved like she was poor: buying cheap cuts of meat, Scotch-taping a rip in a Japanese screen, jamming a fake jewel into her antique Chinese necklace and twisting the filigree around it with a screwdriver. And hating it made me feel mean-spirited and ungrateful.

One morning, she came into my room. I was still in bed, reading.

“I had a terrible dream last night, Allegra,” she said. “I dreamed you’d stolen my diamond ring.”

This was a gigantic marquise-cut diamond set in platinum, which she kept in a hollowed-out shoe tree in her shoe closet.

“I didn’t,” I said. I couldn’t take this seriously.

Aunt Dorothy clicked her tongue against the back of her top teeth. It was one of her habits that drove me crazy, just like her way of answering the phone with “Hay-lo-oh”; and saying “ah-hah-uh” deep in her throat as if she were gargling and practicing opera singing at the same time; and never asking a direct question but always saying “I wonder if…”

“Well,” she said, “it would set my mind at rest if you’d open that closet so I can see it’s not there.”

“That closet” was a door I kept locked, mostly to hide my little shrine of John Travolta pictures. I also kept my coin cabinet in there, with its few little disks of gold—wanting to feel that it was valuable enough to be locked up, even though I knew it wasn’t. Hanging on the rail were some old clothes of mine that had come in the trunk from Ireland.

“Why don’t you just look where you keep it,” I said. “You’ll see it’s there.”

“That’s not it, Allegra,” she said firmly. “I need to see inside that closet to put my mind at rest.”

I knew perfectly well the dream was a fiction. I couldn’t be angry; it was too transparent. I pitied her for letting her curiosity humiliate her. I could see her making up her own certainty as she went. The further I pushed her, the further she’d go. I didn’t have the stomach for it.

I fished my keys out of my bag, unlocked the closet, and dropped to my knees to fold up the magazines with the John Travolta photographs. I felt her behind me, not quite wanting to crane her neck into the closet and not prepared to push me aside to move closer. I thought I could actually feel the wave of anticlimax crash against the back of my neck.

I pulled open the drawers of my coin cabinet one by one. Most were empty.

“Okay?” I said. “It’s not here.”

I could have hidden twenty rings in the rest of the closet and she’d never have known.

“Thank you, Allegra,” she said, and went out.

Two years later, when she gave my things away in my absence—some clothes, the portfolio of Halsman photographs of my mother—I realized that she felt that as long as my things were in her house, they were actually hers.

Helena came to London for Christmas and made a deal with me. If I agreed to go back to Gloom Castle, I could stay with her on weekends and help her run her new roller-skating club, Skataway.

Skataway had started when I was in London and Helena had had a birthday party at a roller rink in Reseda, in the depths of the San Fernando Valley. She had, she told me, been a champion skater as a teenager. The first friends she invited protested, so she just told people to meet her on a street corner and bring socks. When
it was over, so many people begged her to do it again that it turned into a regular Monday-night event. Many of Helena’s friends were actors, singers, and musicians, so the paparazzi staked it out. That was where the roller-disco craze of the 1980s began.

Helena was fierce about her rules. No cameras; no alcohol or drugs, because they were dangerous if you were on skates. Nobody was allowed in uninvited, and if you were there, you had to wear skates. There was usually a knot of fans outside the door, and I’d see the flashes pop when Cher, or Don Henley, or Jack arrived or left. For most of my life, I’d felt peripheral; now here I was at the center of the in crowd, at Helena’s right hand. I had the run of the DJ booth and the area marked private and felt second in importance only to Helena herself. Plus, I could skate. I wasn’t brilliant at it, but I didn’t fall and I could dance. Finally my body felt integrated with my head and my spirit. I wasn’t uncoordinated and incompetent anymore; I was smooth.

Someone brought the football star Jim Brown one night. Helena didn’t know who he was, but she was told that he was bad news. When he asked if he could become a member, Helena came straight out with it.

“They told me you threw a woman out the window,” she said. I would never have had the guts to say something like that to anyone.

“That was the past,” said Jim.

Helena made up her own mind about people. She was very clear about who she thought was a good person, and who wasn’t. I watched her at the door of the Reseda Roller Rink and thought of Saint Peter: letting the good people in, and consigning the rest to the outer darkness of a parking lot in the San Fernando Valley.

“Okay,” she said to Jim, “you can become a member.”

“I’ll be your door guard,” he said. “You get any trouble, I’ll be there.”

If anyone tried to crash the door, Jim would materialize out of nowhere, huge and intimidating. The longest conversation I had
with him was when I sold him a Skataway T-shirt—size small—but every week when they called a pairs skate, Jim would glide up beside me and link his arm in mine.

I loved telling Aunt Dorothy about this, and about my friend Miguele Norwood, a teacher from Detroit who taught me to skate, because both Jim and Miguele were black, and I knew she didn’t approve and she couldn’t say it because then she’d be admitting she was prejudiced. Best of all were the nights when Miguele or the dancer Charles Valentino gave me a lift home. Now she had to think of me alone with black men in cars—beat-up cars at that, because neither Miguele nor Valentino had money. I knew she worried that I’d be found dead in a canyon, or knocked up with a black baby, and what would she tell Dad then? I had no sympathy. That was my revenge. If she didn’t want secrecy, fine; I’d be honest.

I knew too that by any standards other than mine and Helena’s, all this was very unsuitable for a fourteen-year-old. I was out skating with celebrities till midnight on a school night; and after that, often as not, I’d go on to Carlos ’n Charlie’s nightclub, where we’d have the private VIP area. If I ordered a frozen strawberry margarita, they served me. We danced till two, which meant I didn’t get back to Gloom Castle until two-thirty. Valentino would lift me above his head and spin me around, and I’d try to point my toes and arch my neck to look graceful. If Anjelica was there he’d lift her up and spin her around too. I couldn’t quite identify, or allow myself, the hurt I felt as I watched them. I knew I didn’t look as graceful as she did.

My schoolwork didn’t suffer. I was taking classes one or two years ahead of my grade level anyway. I wasn’t getting into any trouble. Nobody was offering me drugs, older men weren’t taking advantage of me, and I knew that if anyone did try to, Helena would throw them out on their ear. The rest of the week, I sat in my room reading and watching TV. Without Skataway, I’d have gone so far into my shell that I might never have come out again.

I even arranged to get school credit for roller skating. Since
seventh grade I’d been getting doctor’s notes to excuse me from PE on the grounds of “arthralgia of the lower extremities exacerbated by exertion”—in other words, growing pains. Helena knew I needed exercise, and she made sure I got it. Whenever she saw me sitting and chatting, she’d scold me: “Stop socializing! You gotta skate. It’s schoolwork!”

I spent Friday and Saturday nights in the Father O’Sullivan Suite, as the maid’s room of Helena’s house was called, after Jack’s family priest from New Jersey. Usually Roberto would drive me to her house, but I loved it when Helena picked me up at Gloom Castle in her microscopic shorts and strappy high heels and leotards, because she was a creature totally outside Aunt Dorothy’s frame of reference. It amused me to see Aunt Dorothy have to swallow her prejudices: about class, about clothing, about what I’m sure she thought were Helena’s dubious morals. I knew how wrong she was. I knew that if there was anyone in my life I could rely on, anyone who was completely upright and true of heart, that person was Helena.

She was so discreet that, though I spent almost half the week with her, I never knew anything about her private life. She listed people by first name in her address book, and if their last name was famous—like “Dylan”—she put only an initial. (It was Anjelica who told me who “Bobby D” was.) To me, with my tangled ego in relation to the famous people I knew, it was amazing to understand how, for Helena, despite her starry circle of friends, her own self was enough.

Once she picked me up from school, and I was furious. I hated her to see me in my uniform with its drooping polyester pleats, knee socks, and horrible crepe-soled shoes.

“Allegra,” she said severely. “Who cares about the outfit.”

I did. I felt like a pretender now when I was wearing that uniform: the good Catholic schoolgirl, the levelheaded misfit in my sister’s life. We were all pretenders there. One girl, who was fifteen—with braces, I couldn’t get over that—used to meet her flying instructor in motel rooms.

When I was with Helena, I felt like myself. She took me everywhere with her: to casting auditions, to Jack’s business manager’s office, to her electrolysis appointments, to the garment district where she was having T-shirts and satin bomber jackets made for Skataway, up to Marlon’s house, where I sat on his bed and played chess with him. I was her prodigy. She loved that I was smart, but I never felt that I had to be. All she expected of me was loyalty, honesty, good sense, and high standards. For the next year and a half, when without her I would have slowly twisted into craziness alone in my room in Gloom Castle, she kept me sane.

Marlon had a way of arriving unannounced just as we were getting ready to leave for the roller rink, on a little electric scooter. His body, when he sat, was an equilateral triangle, with his beautiful head and falcon’s nose at the apex, and his spreading bulk below. It looked funny perched on the scooter. The scooter was silent, and Marlon moved as silently as a prowling panther, so I never knew he was there until he materialized a few feet from me, near the photo of him in his youth that hung on the wall: black-and-white, in profile, staring through a rain-drenched window. His voice was so quiet you had to lean into the sound waves to hear it, and tune out the rest of space and time. It was a game of his, to make us late. He awed me; but Helena awed me more, by being stronger than him and shooing him out.

I knew we made a strange pair: Helena with her street smarts and her clothes falling off her, and reserved, bookish me. I typed up lists of members’ names, in three categories: those who were allowed to bring one guest, those who could bring three, and the special few, with red membership cards, who could bring as many people as they liked. I cut the necks out of my T-shirts so that they slipped off my shoulders, the way she did. I tucked up long skirts into my underwear to make miniskirts with bustles on the hips, the way she did. I slept in silky negligees—castoffs from Helena and from Cici—and on weekends wore them all morning, the way she did.