Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (8 page)

“Look, Allegra. Come and see this.”

Nana held up a magazine:
Vogue.
She flattened it open on the dining table. Underneath her strong, weathered fingers was a photo of a dark-haired girl with her hand to her cheek, gazing soulfully out at me.

“That’s your sister. That’s Anjelica.”

I knew I had a sister and her name was Anjelica, but that was about all. I hadn’t seen her since the turbulent, forgotten months after Mum died. She was, by now, nearly as lost to me as Mum was.

As I looked at her picture, a sense of recognition came to me, dimmed by strangeness. Was I really remembering Anjelica’s own face? The dark coloring and arched eyebrows were Mum’s.

In the three years I’d lived at St. Cleran’s, Anjelica had never come there. Though I knew Daddy was her father, and though Tony came to visit, I didn’t expect her to. She was the goddesslike creature who had inhabited St. Cleran’s—and my room—before me, in the golden age when Mum was still alive, and who had left a mark so deep and lasting it would survive for all the decades of Angelica Healy’s life. A visit from her would have been very nearly supernatural.

She was living in New York now, Nana told me, and working as a model. Soon she would come out to Miller Place to see me.

Anjelica was tall—taller than anyone else—and thin, with the bony angles of someone who was important in the world. Her clothes—I don’t remember what they were—seemed dramatically casual, like nothing anyone in Miller Place would wear. We were either sloppy, or self-consciously dressed up like my teacher, Miss Burdi, a tiny woman whose long fingernails always matched her outfit, changing daily from green to blue to black to yellow. I was probably wearing my favorite outfit, which came from Kmart: a shocking-pink polyester T-shirt and matching stretchy pants.

Anjelica seemed distracted and distant, an exotic bird in a chicken run. My imagination strained to connect her to my earth. We were ordinary and suburban in Miller Place, despite half-naked Grampa on his head on the roof. I wasn’t quite sure why she came to see me. What interest could I possibly hold for her? Neither of us knew what to say to the other. I showed off my bicycle-riding skills, waving with one hand. She didn’t look impressed, which made me feel better about my half-cracked courage. I didn’t think she’d have been any more impressed if I had let go with two hands, like Martine and Nancy did.

Because she was my sister, it made sense to me that she wanted to see me again, and brought me into the city to stay with her. Even
so, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had disappeared without another word. Because, like Daddy, she existed on a more exalted plane, that would have made perfect sense too.

She took me with her on a modeling assignment. I watched her being dressed and made up, seemingly oblivious to the people fussing around her. Then she stretched out on the floor, on a giant sheet of white paper. The lights were so bright that I had to squint, but she seemed not to notice them. She knotted her fingers in her hair—which I’d watched being rolled and sprayed into the kind of curls my hair would never hold (my Irish ringlets had always fallen out by lunchtime). As the photographer jumped about, clicking his camera, she moved in slow motion, making constant tiny alterations to her pose, like a creature lifted and curled by the gentle swell of waves.

She looked comfortable, at rest in herself. This was, in my eyes, the real Anjelica; she’d been awkward in Miller Place because there she was in disguise, a goddess who’d had to put on human form. Here, in a secret studio suspended in the midst of a blindly bustling New York City, the handmaidens—who had seemed to be dressing her up—were actually removing the disguise. I was an outsider who had been allowed into this sacred space only because I was her sister: a sister with feet of clay, but her sister nonetheless. I felt favored. I realized that everyone I knew in Miller Place would live their whole lives without ever seeing anything like this.

When the seasons turned, Anjelica took me shopping for a coat. I knew what I wanted: one like a girl at school had, red with white fur trim. And there it was, in Bonwit Teller, hovering like an apparition. I think it even had a hood.

“There,” I said timidly. “That’s the one I want.”

I saw the look cross Anjelica’s face, and knew I should have expected it. My taste was small-town and childish: of course what appealed to me would be wrong. Still, she let me try it on.

“It looks like Santa Claus.”

She picked out a coat of fawn-colored suede with fox-colored fur edging and embroidered swirls around the hem. I didn’t like it at all, but she insisted I put it on. The color was dull, and the embroidery was exotic and hippie-ish. It was a New York coat, not a Miller Place one. I could imagine myself wearing it in the city, though I wouldn’t actually like it, but in Miller Place it would be embarrassing. I sent one last, longing gaze over to the Santa Claus coat, now back on its hanger. I saw, through Anjelica’s eyes, how tacky and garish it was. I still preferred it, though I knew I shouldn’t.

I wore the hippie coat all winter, as I had to for warmth. Every time I put it on, I felt chic and fashionable—an alien. And, to a degree, a fraud: this fashionable person wasn’t me. I felt torn, in a way I wouldn’t have been able to describe: ordinary in myself, but made different by the accident of my birth. I understood that it was good to be attuned to art and beautiful things, to have high and exacting standards, to float above the ordinary as Anjelica and Daddy did. It was just that I doubted I could, and didn’t know how.

That Christmas of 1972, Nurse and I went to California, where Daddy was living now, with Cici. Uncle Fraser drove us to the airport, late as always. It was, I guessed, his silent rebellion against doing Grampa’s bidding. Just as we had done the previous summer, on our way back to Ireland, Nurse and I had to run to the gate.

Gladys met us at the airport. It was the first time I’d seen her since leaving St. Cleran’s. She was wearing sandals with low heels; it seemed slightly indecent to see her in public in warm-weather clothes. The warm weather was odd in itself. This was Christmastime; I hadn’t quite understood that it wasn’t cold everywhere (except Australia, of course, where everything was the opposite of how it was supposed to be). Flowers didn’t bloom in December—but suddenly, as we turned out of LAX, my eyes were dazzled by a cascade of blazing magenta: a waterfall whose element was transfigured
into soft, flaming petals, with not a shred of green among them to crack the illusion.

I had loved the lilac at St. Cleran’s—even more so because someone told me that Mum had planted it. There were three different colors: a pale, dawny mauve, a mid-purple which was my least favorite, and a darker purple the color of a summer sky just before night. I would watch the buds, waiting for them to burst out in little droplets; then the blossoms would blow about like skirts in the wind before they finally snowed to the ground. This bougainvillea seemed as indomitably permanent as the lilac was delicate: blooming bizarrely in midwinter, its color vivid and unearthly. It had no visible connection to the earth; it erupted from the stony innards of a high concrete wall. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and craned my neck as we drove past.

We left the flat streets lined with low, gap-faced buildings—not like any city I’d seen before—and began to climb a winding road. Around hairpin curves, along the side of sheer drops with only a flimsy guardrail, up a mountain so high and steep it didn’t belong in a city. Here and there bougainvillea covered the guardrail, like padding; it comforted my fear.

“You’ll be staying with Celeste’s parents, Allegra.”

When Gladys said Cici’s name she pronounced it “sissy,” as if she couldn’t hear how everyone else said it. More often, she called her Celeste. It was her name—but from the way Gladys said it, with her lips tightening slightly like someone sucking a lemon, I knew she didn’t like her.

“That is their house.”

On the far side of a wide, deep canyon was a huge gingerbread house, with pointed gables and dark half-timbering. This mountain, unlike the cliff in Long Island, was not falling away. With its thick pelt of trees it made a vast pedestal for the house, which looked monumentally solid and phantasmagorical at the same time—being so English in this very un-English place.

“You may call me Aunt Dorothy,” said Cici’s mother when we arrived. She was a small woman in her sixties, strikingly beautiful, with perfectly painted nails and a large, dangerous-looking diamond on her right hand.

“And this is Uncle Myron.” Cici’s father shuffled forward and solemnly shook my hand. He was bent over at the neck, and his voice was hardly louder than a whisper. The glint in his eye made him look like a mischievous turtle.

I followed my blue suitcase—which, I noticed sadly, was starting to look a bit battered—as it was carried up the stairs by Aunt Dorothy’s man-of-all-work, and deposited in a back bedroom. I was glad to see twin beds: one for Nurse, one for me. I would be fine here, I thought—and had no conception that I ought to be, or could have been, anywhere else. Nurse was with me, and I wouldn’t have to sleep alone.

I was awed by the house, with its minstrels’ gallery high above the vast living room, and an enormous plate-glass window looking out across Los Angeles to the glittering ocean beyond. Aunt Dorothy pointed out Catalina Island, rising in a long hump like the back of a whale. She took personal pride in the fact that the air was clear enough to see it. Even so, I could see the layer of brown below us, sunken as if it were heavier than the blue.

By the front door was a grandfather clock which Aunt Dorothy allowed me to wind, and the dining-room wallpaper showed the seven wonders of America. Aunt Dorothy told me that Mrs. Kennedy had chosen the same wallpaper for the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House; I understood that Aunt Dorothy had found the wallpaper first. She told me that Greta Garbo had once lived in the house, and—she chuckled in her throat, as if it was something that shouldn’t be said—that the servants from the houses nearby would hide in the woods to watch Garbo swim naked in the pool.

The next day Aunt Dorothy took me to visit Cici, who was in
the hospital for some minor operation. She lay in her bed doing needlepoint: a hunting scene of men in red coats on horseback. It was to be a belt, Daddy’s Christmas present. In the lead was a miniature Daddy, top-hatted as master of the hunt, flourishing a riding crop. I was impressed not just by the tininess of the stitches but by the detail of the scene: dogs baying, stone walls being jumped, streaming manes, the rusty tail of the fox. She had drawn it herself, and transferred it to the canvas. But I was also silently, secretly upset, because this was a scene from the Irish life Daddy had left behind. I didn’t know that Cici had even been to Ireland. Was she trying to take possession of that world, which she didn’t have a right to? Or was it just that she was somehow—despite her beauty, her knowing drawl, and her sardonic smile—more naive than I was? I settled on the latter, and felt protective of her from that moment on.

I knew she was setting herself up for disappointment, pouring such meticulous work and loving anticipation into this belt. Daddy would never wear it—and why did I know him better than she did? It made me sad. I sensed the gulf between the two of them—maybe before they sensed it themselves. I wasn’t present when Cici gave Daddy the belt, and I never saw it or heard it spoken of again.

I had worked hard on two Christmas presents that year: one for Anjelica and one for Daddy. I had already given Anjelica her macramé shoulder bag, and she had liked it as much as I’d hoped she would. I was eight years old: still young enough to make all my Christmas presents, but old enough to know that childish drawings weren’t enough. I liked knitting and crocheting and hooking rugs; they always came with a pattern to follow. Macramé was hippie-ish, like the coat Anjelica had bought me, so I thought she would like it better. I was surprised and frustrated by how hard it was to get the tension of the knots and the distance between them just right; once I finished that bag, I never tried macramé again. I lined the bag—it was about eight inches by six—with pale purple material, the color of the lilacs at St. Cleran’s.

But what would I do for Daddy? I’d knitted him a scarf the year before, so I couldn’t do that again. He’d have no use for a rug. Crochet was too girly. Finally Nana suggested I make a picture out of beach glass.

I balked. My collection of beach glass was precious. Still, I couldn’t think of anything else. But what kind of picture? I couldn’t create one of my own. I wasn’t an artist.

Nana showed me a book of paintings by Winslow Homer. They were seascapes, and their misty greens and grays had just the shimmery quality of the beach glass. I chose a picture of a lighthouse flying a small red flag—a showpiece for my rare, tiny piece of red. I wasn’t thrilled about giving it up, and certainly I wouldn’t have given it up for anyone other than Daddy, but it was the one thing I had that was worthy of him. Briefly I considered substituting a different color or choosing a different painting, but it was too late. I’d thought of using it, and I couldn’t back out. What if my refusal to give up that prize red piece somehow got back to him, and he—rightly—held it against me?

Nana got me a small sheet of glass and we laid it over the page in the book. Carefully I made a mosaic. I had to give up most of my blue beach glass, too, the second rarest color; it was painful, but necessary. The beach glass wasn’t flat, and sometimes the glue didn’t hold, so I searched for flatter pieces, ones that fit into a tighter jigsaw, to make the picture as perfect a replica as I could. I was a bit disappointed with it all the same. I worried that it was childish and clumsy—maybe even silly. I’d never heard of a beach-glass picture before.

On Christmas Day, Aunt Dorothy drove us to Cici’s house in Pacific Palisades, on the west side of Los Angeles near the ocean. Cici was back home, looking a bit pale because she’d had an allergic reaction to the hypoallergenic equipment they’d used on her. That impressed me: she, too, was special. I’d been a bit worried that, because she wasn’t remote, she might be too ordinary to belong in Daddy’s world.