What falls away : a memoir (7 page)

My father was drinking heavily. One evening, in an awful rage, he began shouting, and he chased my mother with a long knife through the ground-floor rooms of the house. I froze at the foot of the stairs until at last, knife in hand, he careened out into the night. My mother and I watched the door and after a time we made hot chocolate. But still I was shaking, so she put me into her own big bed saying that when Dad returned he'd find me there and surely then he'd soften because he loved me so. Then she

climbed the stairs to the safety of my little attic room, while I propped myself up in bed, with my face right under the light, and waited.

Oh dear God, please take care of my mother, I understand something of her grief but I cannot comfort her however much I long to. Stay close to my father tonight, make him put dov^m his knife, or throve it into the dark river hut please don't let him come hack here to plunge it into his sleeping child; and Lord God, be merciful, don't let him put it into himself, out there in the dark, for he is a good man and You have given him an awful lot to bear. Please, Jesus please, take care of this family, and if it be Thy will, let Dad get a movie job, I don't know what will happen to us if he doesn't, and God, one last thing, I won't ask more — if I should fall asleep, please don't let my face turn away from this light.

Winter held the Surrey countryside in gray, glassy light and the cold penetrated everything. There was no central heating in the sleeping quarters for the fifty or so girls at my convent school. I didn't much like jockeying for a place in front of the single fireplace downstairs, but after someone mentioned that wet hair would freeze in the night and break to bits, I elbowed my way to the fireside when I washed my hair to get it bone dry.

I can't remember ever being so cold. A glass of water beside the bed had a crust of \ct by morning. Chilblains swelled our finger joints sore and stiff, with angry, itchy crimson lumps that didn't subside until June. Hot-water bottles were lifesavers, and although it was against the rules, beneath my navy blue woolen uniform I kept my pajama bottoms on all day. The cold, and the modesty of the convent, motivated me to perfect a technique for changing clothes with lightning speed without revealing an inch of skin.

Most of the nuns were even more severe than the sisters in California. I thought of them as not exactly human but as some sort of hybrid, short on compassion, humor, pa-

tience, and any capacity to give or receive affection. We were children without parents in an isolated and harsh environment, where the most basic kindness was unusual.

There were exceptions. Mother Lillian taught piano and art. In chapel she played the organ stirringly, and from our meager, shivering ranks she pulled together a choir that transported us beyond our capabilities and circumstances. When word of our choir spread through Surrey, we were asked to sing in local churches and hospitals and homes for the elderly. With her fine, chiseled features and long, graceful hands. Mother Lillian was as beautiful as her gentle world of music and art.

Mother Frederick had white-blond eyelashes and a round face that became flushed when she was upset. She was tall and very young. Sometimes she looked as if she had been crying. Not long out of childhood herself, it was Mother Frederick who extended a much-needed touch of humanity. When she and Mother Lillian both left the Order of the Sacred Heart of Mary, it took me twenty years to find them.

The Dickensian atmosphere of our school proved fertile ground for friendships and spiritual values. My roommates and best friends were Nancy Newton, with Spanish eyes, runaway thoughts, and a probing, promising mind; and Leslie Mullin, who had a pale, haunted, angel's face set in a short fuzz of yellow hair; at night, while everyone slept, Leslie knelt on the bare floor in her long flannel nightgown and prayed with outstretched arms. Ann Casey was a grade older than me, and I was drawn to her because she was fun and one of the most generous people I have ever met. I could always count on Casey.

Daily attendance at Mass was not compulsory, but I liked the half-mile walk through frigid winter mornings silent with nuns along dark, country roads, past the overgrown graveyard to the main school building near the chapel. At the lonely predawn Mass I took Communion

and said the book prayers and made up the rest, and after school I slipped again into the quiet chapel to kneel with my arms outstretched like Leslie.

It was during the first of my two years in Surrey that I decided to become a Carmelite. The nuns at my school laughed and said I'd have to do a load of improving before the Carmelites would take me. But I yearned for the contemplative existence, to become one with the mind of God. It seemed the most pure, powerful, and significant way I could possibly spend my life.

I tried to make myself nun material. But the cards seemed to be unfairly stacked against me: I was driven by the itchy kind of curiosity that eclipsed good sense and continually got me into hot water, I tended to be forgetftil or preoccupied, I found things fionny when other people didn't, and in the face of wall-to-wall rules that were trivial and pointless, my instinct was to rebel.

In March 1959, my roommate Nancy made this entry in her diary: "Mia in trouble again"; and in May, "Mia—the drainpipe." I did dimb out the third-floor window down the rotting drainpipe into the dewy, deery grass behind the dorm and I did, on a dare, set my alarm clock off during the Rosary, and it's true that I cut myself opening sardine tins by flashlight. It has always taken me a while to get to sleep, so when they turned out the lights, I'd wait until the coast was clear and the halls were nun-free, and then I'd get up and roam around the building, just visiting friends, having some laughs, catching up on news, and checking whether anyone had anything good to eat.

"Mia Farrow!" (Scary voice.) "What are you doing here! You have one colossal nerve!" She was crazy-eyed, but she'd said this so many times it had no meaning.

So I just said, "Yes, Mother Finbar." My thoughts were with the bag of Oreo cookies behind my back.

"Unless it is to go to the bathroom, you do not leave

your bed for any reason after lights-out- Can you get that into your head?"

"Yes, Mother Finbar, but I had to go to the bathroom." (Not true.)

"On the second floorPr She was getting shrill. "What were you doing on the second jloor?"

"I don't know, just looking around. I made it up about the bathroom. I'm sorry." (I really was.)

Back in Beverly Hills, when everyone in the house was sleeping I used to wander around and look at my family, sound asleep, and every once in a while, with my thumb, I'd very carefully open up somebody's eye, just for a second, to look at the eyeball in there.

The nuns who weren't stationed in our dormitories slept (that they slept at all was itself an odd notion) in cloistered quarters behind a thick green curtain at the end of a long hallway. One evening, while they were in the chapel, I sneaked down the corridor and with my heart doing double time I slipped behind the curtain and continued down the hall. The first doorway on the left revealed an absolutely bare room, with just a bed and a dresser. Something caught my eye that froze me in my tracks: on the white bedspread lay a crown of thorns. Underneath that, I found a black satin bag, and inside the bag was a small whip. You don't forget a thing like that. I was out of there in a split second. I was careful whom I told. It took me a few days to organize guided tours, for the fee of one shilling a head. There was plenty of interest, but people were wary, and finally I only got one expedition off the ground. I was all business on that second trip behind the green door. Carme-lina and Barbara were scared but it was going well. The crown and whip naturally were a great success, and soon I was feeling loose and confident enough to expand the tour a little: we were just opening the first dresser drawer when

from way down the corridor came the umnistakable clud of nun's shoes on the wooden floor, and the terrible swoosh and snap of long skirts and stiff, starched habits heading our way at a good clip. I dragged the girls behind the long drapes and slammed them flat against the window.

"Feet!" I hissed. Three pairs of black shoes flipped sideways. We didn't breathe as the nun went about some errand of her own and left. When her sounds faded we scuttled out of there and I never went back.

Despite our ambivalent feelings toward some of the nuns, we remained genuinely committed to our religion and intrigued by the lives of the saints. For penance, Nancy, Leslie, and I rubbed stinging nettles on our arms. We made rosary beads out of acorns, and our fingers bled with the effort, then I buried mine in the school garden because I thought it was impure to be so proud of them.

It was no secret that I didn't want to be in the May Day ballet. The costumes were immodest, I felt, and the entire event would be mortifying. So when I twisted my ankle and a swelling the size of a ripe plum popped out, the Reverend Mother (crediting me with more than I deserved) decided I had done myself this injury to avoid being in the ballet. Although she was mistaken, the idea entranced me: it would have taken such courage, such conviction, it would have been almost heroic. I denied it of course, but not too vigorously, and when I was placed in solitary confinement for a week, even girls I didn't know all that well risked coming to see me; a couple of nuns visited too, and people brought me chocolate. The Reverend Mother refused to take me to a doctor despite the size and color of my foot and the fact that I couldn't put any weight on it for about a month. And she didn't get me a bandage or a crutch, and hopping hurt so I either had to crawl or Casey piggybacked me— but I got so much respect, it was worth it.

In the summer of 1959, after the first year at boarding school, my family returned to County Wicklow. In the fall.

Prudy and the rest of the family went back to California, while I stayed in Surrey. That second year I won the gymnastics badge, which gave me as big a thrill as any I'd ever known. When they announced my name, I remembered trembling on my feet, and the bored face of the doctor, way back in the polio wards.

With some students and nuns I traveled to Cairo, Jerusalem, Paris, Geneva, and Rome; I got blessed by the Pope, went to Mass in the catacombs, and to the baths in Lourdes. I visited Pisa and Pompeii, where the jolt of seeing the twisted figures preserved in ash made me swallow my ring. But the most vivid memory of my travels that year was of a man who sat opposite me in the third-class compartment of an Italian train, trying to open a cheap bottle of wine bare-handed, tearing at the cap, and the bottle was covered slippery with blood.

My school in England was a world I had come to understand and make my peace with. I'd made friends and had countless laughs, and I was grateful not to be home, where there were so many problems. I hoped my parents would let me stay until my graduation, two more years, but they felt it was time for me to return to California. I was grief-stricken at the prospect of losing so much, and panicked as I braced myself for yet another life—one for which I was completely unprepared.

My brother Mike had been dead for two years when the family moved back to California into a smaller, less appealing house with no garden at all, at a much more modest address in Beverly Hills. My father had become morose, difficult, and demanding. He had not worked in over two years. He read the obituaries scrupulously, mournfully commenting "gone" at the passage of each acquaintance. He spoke often of his own death and stayed in his bedroom on the ground floor. My mother kept up a better front in the

daytime—she even spoke of taking up painting, and set up an easel in a sunny alcove of her upstairs bedroom. But invariably after dinner she went to her room and the lights were out, but I knew she was not sleeping.

There were no parties now. Only the Jesuits still came. I poured two fingers of straight scotch into flat glasses and brought one to my father and each priest, officially launching their evening. Then I sat unnoticed on the stairs outside the living room, listening to the philosophical dissertations that continued well into the night. The Jesuits are the intellectuals, the core and conscience of the Catholic Church. Those long nights of theological debates and raised voices triggered in me some early questions and conclusions about the difficulty of being: responsibility, God, love, loss, and my own place in the universe. When I grew tired I crept upstairs past my mother's dark room, where she lay weep-

. It was impossible for me to communicate in any important sense with either of my parents, however much I longed to. A feeling of failure slowly settled around me. My brothers and sisters were now in trouble too. We had been through too much, too separately; and now in the isolation our grief had imposed on us, we could not reach one another.

In California my contemporaries were driving cars, dating boys, drinking beer, wearing makeup, and they had obviously thought about their hair. They were smoking Marlboros, humming hits of the day, and they could probably find the right radio station blindfolded. I was lost. My old chums Sheila, Tisha, and Kristin were now beautiful, confident, and popular. I was none of these things. I tried to copy them, even their breezy American, slangy way of talking, but I didn't fool the boys from Stanford who were understandably put off by my anguished silences and pa-

thetic attempts to communicate, and I could not successfully conceal my awful intensity. I missed my deeply rooted boardmg-school friendships, the mist-shrouded hills of Surrey, the stiU chapel, the spartan, spiritual, predictable life at my school. I missed the seriousness of that place. I immersed myself in books and confessed to my parents that I hoped to enter the convent. When they seemed disturbed by the idea, I resolved not to mention it again until after high school.

In an effort to develop my social skills, and to help me meet some "nice boys," they sent me to Elisa Ryan's Dance Class. These were agonizing affairs—I knew no one, had no idea what to talk about, my accent seemed out of place, and even the right dress looked wrong on me. In one memorably cruel exercise, the girls were lined up against one long wall of the auditorium, while the aged Miss Ryan, attached to her microphone, moved around goading the boys into choosing a partner. In a state near paralysis, I watched my worst-case scenario unfold until I was one of the two unchosen girls facing a short, fat, stubborn-faced boy in a military uniform. At that point I fled the room, shot under the coat-check counter, dug out my white cardigan with the melancholy orchid still attached, and in a broken run got myself home. In our garage I sat on a gasoline can until 10:45 P.M.—coming-home time. My mother told me again how pretty I looked and asked if I'd had fun. I told her yes, and nothing more.