A Story Lately Told (7 page)

My parents were quite formal with each other. Dad called my mother “Ricki,” or “dear,” and she responded, “Yes, John.” They both called a lot of other people “darling.” I don’t remember much touching between them, or many demonstrations of affection. Once in a while, my father’s long arm would drape loosely over my mother’s shoulders, and he might call her “honey.”

Later it became evident to me, through reading their letters, that my parents had achieved an understanding as early as when they were at Courtown House. Their somewhat unequal correspondence consisted of long, detailed, descriptive narratives on her part, mostly typed but sometimes handwritten in haste to meet Dad’s expectations of punctuality, and his terse replies, generally in telegrams or letters, dictated to Lorrie Sherwood, answering Mum’s queries regarding shipments from Mexico or Japan. Mum’s letters were updates on horses, gardens, the
locals, and us children—she often included our notes and drawings, adding her interpretations of their meaning or significance on the back. Her letters are like affidavits, as if she had made an oath to report dutifully, informing Dad constantly about all undertakings at St. Clerans, from importing cherry bonsai trees from Kyoto at six hundred dollars apiece, as per his request—he joked about the possibility: “The idea is for Lorrie to accompany them, say about a dozen to Ireland by boat, watering can in hand”—to the laying of bets at the Leopardstown races.

In the rare event of a full reply to one of her letters, Dad complimented her on her writing skills and suggested that maybe she could write a screenplay. She answered excitedly, recommending Colette’s
The Vagabond
and a book of essays. She suggested that it “could be considered two ways—big, colored and cinema-scoped, with an actress like Audrey Hepburn, or smaller and Jean Renoir-ish, with Micheline Presle, or your friend, forgive the indiscretion.” She was undoubtedly referring to Suzanne Flon. She made this suggestion without malice or irony.

When we visited Paris, there was always Suzanne Flon, small with big eyes and a smoky voice that purred like a cat. I remember going to the airport at Orly with Mum and Tony to meet Dad when I was five or six. The doors were open to the customs hall, and Mum said, “Look at him in that suit!” Dad was dressed all in black leather, an African gray parrot with a scarlet head balanced on his shoulder. The next time Tony and I saw the bird, his name was Jaco, and he was riding around on the back of Suzanne’s dog, making trills like a telephone ringing. Suzanne also had a daughter of Kitty Cat, our St. Clerans cat. It was quite a menagerie in her pretty little apartment.

•  •  •

Mum went to Spain with Nora Fitzgerald and wrote to Dad from the Castellana Hilton, where it was “holy week in Madrid, with penitents, floats, the Virgin of Macareña, flamenco, cheers, screams, and handclapping along with Gypsies and Roman soldiers from the 16th century.” She loved to travel. It seemed that Mum was spending more and more time abroad.

I was six when we went to Klosters, in Switzerland, for our winter holiday. I vaguely remember that Dad came with us and then it was Mum and Nurse and Tony and me. Later Dad considered taking Tony with him to the “heart and gizzard of the dark continent,” Chad, Africa, where he would be making
The Roots of Heaven,
but decided against it. Tony was playing with Dinky cars quite obsessively and sleepwalking. He’d stroll into the kitchen of our rented chalet, sound asleep, drink a cup of Ovomaltine that Nurse would prepare for him, and go back to bed. He was diagnosed with scarlet fever.

Around this time, I recall lying on a cot in the corner of the living room, sucking on a metal brace—the kind of thing that you bolt onto the back of furniture—when suddenly I swallowed it. A visit to the doctor, and several days later his suggested remedy of sauerkraut had worked wonders. During a summer visit, Tony and I saved hundreds of frogs from certain suffocation when we dug them out from the dried riverweed on the bottom of a pond that was being drained and put them in a horse trough full of water.

Klosters was full of friends of my parents. I remember a “do not disturb” sign on the door to the movie star Jennifer Jones’s room at the grandest hotel in town when we went for lunch, and wondering what she could possibly be doing in there that was such a big secret. The Hollywood literary agent Swifty Lazar stayed there too, and there was talk of how the staff had to lay
down sheets on the floors throughout his suite because he was deadly afraid of germs. He skied in a powder-blue parka, with a pair of goggles bigger than his face and a hat with a matching blue pom-pom like an egg cozy on his little bald head.

Peter Viertel was married to the actress Deborah Kerr, our “Mrs. Boogum” from Tobago, and now they were living in Klosters. Peter had been a guest at Courtown House in the early days. He had written a book loosely based on Dad’s adventures while making
The African Queen.
Its title was
White Hunter, Black Heart,
and a copy of it was kept on the bookshelf in the downstairs bathroom at St. Clerans. Peter liked to take guns out on the yellow bog near Loughrea with Tony. Peter was very sportive, if a little brazen, in the wilderness. There was the writer Irwin Shaw and his wife, Marian; and the Berensons, with their beautiful, fascinating daughters, Marisa and Berry, who were older than I was by a few years and at the ice-skating rink wore hats with long pom-poms and flesh-colored nylon tights and skirts in matching colors that barely skimmed their bottoms. I was forced to wear the same outfit every day—a cutoff black corduroy dress, wrinkly red wool tights, and a yellow angora hat. I resented this costume, but I loved skating—the speed and grace and freedom of it. Mum had a friend who was giddy and funny, who wore bright cashmere sweaters tied around his neck and matching socks, and who was obviously her confidant—his name was Georgey Hayim. They spent a lot of time chatting in confidential tones and laughing together. I liked him, but I was jealous of their relationship. They often went out at night, which I didn’t care for, although Nurse was always with us.

Then there was another man—charismatic, sophisticated, a pipe smoker—called Lucio García del Solar, who was later to become the Argentine ambassador to France. My mother
changed when he was around. She laughed more often and went skiing with him and then out to dinner at the Chesa Grischuna. The restaurant made the best club sandwiches in the world, and we children would have marvelous birthday parties there, in which we formed a line and danced in serpentine from room to room.

When we went back to St. Clerans, my mother seemed diminished, paler, more hard-edged. I remember her dressing down one of the maids for not changing the water in the flower arrangement she had made at the Little House, and the girl in floods of tears. Mum’s whippet, Pippin, when not out on illicit hunting excursions with the family beagle, Frodo Baggins, would cower by the heater in the kitchen in the Little House, awaiting Mum’s return from Paris or London. I sympathized with Pippin. One day a neighbor brought Frodo’s and Pippin’s collars to give to Mum. The dogs had been found side by side, shot down by a farmer.

•  •  •

When Dad was in residence, Tony and I would go up to his room at the Big House for breakfast. The maids—Josie, with fair hair and cheeks like roses, and Mary Margaret, timid as a field mouse—would carry up the heavy wicker trays from the kitchen, with the spaces on either side for
The Irish Times
and the
New York Herald Tribune,
the expat newspaper. Dad liked to read the
Trib
column written by his friend Art Buchwald. When Josie walked into the room, Dad would declare that seeing her face in the morning was like watching the sun come up. Sitting on the floor, I would top off my customary boiled egg and dip fingers of toasted bread into the deep-orange yolk. The tea was hot and brown in the cup, like sweet bog water. Once, Tony and I had a shooting match out the window with our BB guns,
at a Morton’s salt box floating in the fountain. Dad supervised. Surprisingly, I won.

Dad would be idly sketching on a drawing pad. “What news?” he would ask. It was generally a good idea to have an anecdote at hand, even though it was often hard to come up with one, given that we were all living in the same compound and had seen him at dinner the night before. If you didn’t have an item of interest to report, more likely than not, a lecture would begin.

At some point, he would toss the sketch pad aside and make his way slowly out of bed, casting off his pajamas and standing fully naked before us. We watched, mesmerized. I was fascinated by his body—his wide shoulders, high ribs, and long arms, his potbelly and legs thin as toothpicks. He was extremely well endowed, but I tried not to stare or betray any interest in what I was observing.

Eventually, he would wander into the sanctuary of his bathroom, locking the door behind him, and sometime later would reappear, showered and shaved and smelling of fresh lime. Creagh would come upstairs to help him dress, and the ritual would begin. He had a gleaming mahogany dressing room full of kimonos and cowboy boots and Navajo Indian belts, and robes from India, Morocco, and Afghanistan. Dad would ask my advice on which necktie to wear, take it into consideration, and arrive at his own decision. Then, dressed and ready for the day, he would proceed down to the study.

•  •  •

Every six months we were taken up to Dublin for our polio shots. Tony and I were among the first children in Ireland to receive the vaccination. The train left Athenry at ten in the morning; we would settle into the red leather banquettes and order a full fry-up breakfast from the white-jacketed waiter,
who laid the table with linen and cutlery, and poured the black tea into sturdy ceramic cups rattling in their saucers. The trip took about three and a half hours. The green pastures and hedgerows, the flocks of sheep and cows, the horses grazing on the hillsides all passing by to the leisurely rhythm of wheels rolling on the tracks and the smell of sausages, eggs, and bacon.

We often stayed at Luggala, the ravishing home of Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne, one of the “golden Guinness girls.” Dad always described the sisters—Oonagh, Aileen, and Maureen—as beautiful witches. Luggala was nestled in a dell called Sally Gap, below a steep, rugged rise in the otherwise gentle Wicklow Mountains. The Coptic windows reflected moody skies above a mahogany lake with a beach of translucent mica that sparkled like jewels when the sun came out. Originally an eighteenth-century hunting lodge, Luggala, after burning to the ground, was re-created as a Gothic Victorian folly. The woods were stocked with pheasants, and flocks of Asian spotted deer moved cautiously through the dappled light, clustering on the marsh grass and heather by the lake’s edge.

It was a scene from Avalon. In fact, the director John Boorman filmed much of
Excalibur
there in the eighties. Luggala was the seat of a golden circle of painters, writers, actors, scholars; unlike other grand homes in Ireland, the Guinness household tolerated no snobbery. It was not unusual for a visiting taxi driver to drop off his customer and then stay on for lunch.

Born in 1910, Oonagh was not young, but she had the aspect of a little bird—fragile and eccentric, a tiny figure in white stockings, with the feet of a child. She wore a hairband in her white-blond hair and was often carried down to breakfast in the strong arms of her butler, Patrick Cummins. When we stayed at Luggala, we would have to pass through the bedroom of her
eldest son, Garech, to use the bathroom. He was considerably older than I was, and had long hair to his shoulders, so it was a little scary. Oonagh’s latest husband was a dress designer, a Cuban called Miguel Ferreras. He too had a son, but the boy was unwell, resting upstairs. He had survived polio. I remember feeling that this was what might happen to you if you didn’t get your inoculation. Tony made the mistake of telling the boy that he walked like Charlie Chaplin. I recall that this caused something of a furor with Miguel, and Tony was asked to apologize. I knew that he meant no harm.

Sometimes we stayed at the Shelbourne Hotel on St. Stephen’s Green, one of the grandest hotels in Dublin. I loved to eat breakfast facing the park in the yellow dining room with its soft carpets and high ceilings, or to have tea in the long green lounge. Lunch was usually at the Russell or the Hibernian, another gracious Georgian hotel, with a water tank full of angry-looking trout that would show up steamed blue on the plate within minutes. Dublin bay prawns were my favorite. Tony always ordered the vichyssoise, shrimp scampi, and lemon sorbet for dessert.

We’d go with Mum to Louis Wine’s antique shop, or to Brown Thomas, a department store on Grafton Street. She was always matching up fabric, or looking at furniture, or paying a visit to Cleo, who made Aran sweaters with a modern twist, or to Donald Davies for woolen, hand-dyed, collarless shirts, but cut long, for women. Somewhere in all of this, the visit to the doctor’s office—the cold smell of medicine and camphor and then the inevitable polio shot, with all the accompanying terror of its long silver needle and the dull pain in the cheek of your ass. Then on to Woolworth’s for a Carvel ice cream topped with a Cadbury chocolate flake before the train ride home. I can still
recall the satisfaction of a pair of plastic high-heeled sandals, flecked with gold—Cinderella shoes, in a brand-new cardboard box with one clear side so I could gaze at them all the way back to St. Clerans.

•  •  •

Dad couldn’t bear cowardice. Acts of bravery came high on his register. He expected us to take informed chances. If you had balance and followed the rules of safety, such as learning how to roll with the punches, the chances were that you would survive. Risks were fun: that jolt of fear and then the sudden thrill of having it behind you.

At St. Clerans there was the slide I’d attempted down my pony’s neck as she drank at the water trough, which, unsurprisingly, led to my being tossed into a nettle patch. There was a fall off a fast-moving cart while attempting to grab a handful of the low green branches extending overhead; I was swept from the flatbed and shockingly slammed to the earth. I ran into barbed wire and tore my eyelid. Dad bought us a trampoline, and after a backward somersault, I landed with my head between the springs. The horse falls were taken as part of the riding experience and didn’t really count, but there was no end to the small nicks and cuts, scratches and bruising of life as a child in the country.