Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (12 page)

When he came back from Morocco, Dad brought more treasures: exotic objects, such as those that had filled St. Cleran’s. An old Moroccan door became the new coffee table. Rolled up in ropes of tissue paper were heavy Berber necklaces, of coral and amber. Mine had thin strands of tubular coral, strung in groups of three, separated by coins.

The coins were the reason he’d bought that one for me: and I hated them with silent fury. My necklace was the smallest of all of them, the thinnest, the crudest. The coins were set into rings of dark gray metal, like pull tabs from 7-Up cans. The rough ends of the coral beads showed the fraying black thread that held the whole thing together.

Where my necklace had coins, the others had beautiful amber beads, the color of honey, round like dull suns. Those went to Anjelica. I felt that Dad had an idea of me, which was partly true but not entirely. I was the egghead, but an “expert” type rather than the kind of creative thinker that Dad really admired. Tony held that slot, though I was aware that he wasn’t, in Dad’s eyes, quite living up to it. Anjelica, of course, was the beauty, the princess, the jewel: the one who deserved to be given the really special things—the things that I wanted too.

I felt furtive and guilty, as if it was I who was hiding some aspect of my true self from Dad—which I was, because I never told him that I didn’t want the coins, didn’t like them, wasn’t interested in them. Secretly I blamed him for not knowing it, for not being bothered or able to notice that I had other dimensions to me. I felt I’d been assigned a part, one that was important to the story but wasn’t a leading role. And if that was my part, I ought to accept it, and corral my emotions inside its limits.

“He’s not really your father,” said a girl at school. I’d been talking about how my dad was going off to Morocco.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“You’re adopted.”

“No I’m not!”

I’d never heard this, or thought it before, but I knew instantly it was possible. I felt a trapdoor fall open, and I was teetering on the edge.

“That’s what it says in the
Palisades View
. That’s what your stepmother said.”

I’d watched Cici curl her hair in rollers for the photo in the local paper, thought how beautiful she was, barefoot and relaxed, lit by the sunlight shining unbroken through the plate-glass windows of the living room. Why would she have said something like that if it wasn’t true?

I searched the house, but I couldn’t find a copy of the paper. The shops of Pacific Palisades were literally miles away, out of reach. Days later—or maybe it was only hours, or a day at most—I found the paper lying on the dining table, took it to my room, and closed the door.

The journalist wrote that Cici lived with her husband, the film director John Huston, her son Collin from a previous marriage, and John’s adopted daughter Allegra. I read the words over and over, wondering if the journalist could have confused the fact that I wasn’t Cici’s real daughter with my not being Dad’s. Was I Cici’s adopted daughter because I had given her maiden name at the bank? She usually referred to me simply as her daughter, without “step” or “adopted” or anything like that. Was “adopted” better than “step”? Was that what Cici had really said to this journalist, who was so stupid that she’d mixed it up? The explanation held water—sort of. Not wanting to tip it, I never asked Cici what she’d said.

It festered. I sensed there was some kind of truth in it: it explained that vivid memory of playing on a rug in a hotel room with the sharp corner of a coffee table near my cheek, and a voice saying, “This is your father.” If he was really my father, surely I wouldn’t
have had to be told. But if he was Tony and Anjelica’s father, which he obviously was—and I was sure they were really my brother and sister, and that Mum had been the mother of all three of us—why hadn’t I already known he was mine?

Mum
was
really my mother. It had to have been my real mother who died; otherwise the loss of her—the emptiness I’d felt my whole conscious life—meant nothing. “Adopted” stripped me of Mum and Dad both. I wouldn’t accept it; the journalist had obviously got it wrong. It was a local paper, after all, so any journalist who was any good wouldn’t be working for it, they’d be working for the
Los Angeles Times
.

I took my passport out of the shoe box in my closet where it lived. Etched into the soft surface of my photograph was Dad’s distinctive handwriting: a signature that read “John Huston (father).”

The letters canted forward with determination and certainty, the crosses of the “t”s fierce downstrokes that allowed no argument. It was a legal document. Dad couldn’t have lied.

I’d got that passport during the year I’d lived on Euclid. We’d had a number of meetings with a lawyer, which culminated in a white building with the tall, lone, slablike monumentality of a tombstone. This was the Federal Building at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard. We were there to make me an American citizen.

I’d never seen Dad in a situation like this: supplicatory, uncertain, not in control. His knees and elbows seemed stiffer and more angular than usual, as if a giant hand had folded him up and wrapped him in a rubber band. A feeble half smile was fixed on his face, waiting to be switched off. I sat tensely beside him, dreading the questions I was sure would come at me. The federal man didn’t know that Dad and I didn’t live in the same house, and I figured he ought not to. He might say I couldn’t stay, couldn’t be American, and I’d have to go live somewhere else. Where? In London with Tony, whom I’d barely seen for years? St. Cleran’s was gone.

But the questions didn’t come. The federal man pulled a blank
passport out of a drawer. Gladys handed him a black-and-white photo of me that we’d just had taken. He glued it in, pushed my new passport across the desk to Dad, and handed him a pen.

I watched the pen dig into the thick surface of the photograph, the bones of Dad’s knuckles radiating out like the points of a star. Then the federal man stamped embossed letters into it with a tool that made the muscles in his hand bulge, as if a mole were tunneling under the skin.

My old passport had identified me as a two-foot-six-inch British subject, with no distinguishing characteristics. It was signed by my mother. My new one gave my address as that of Dad’s business manager’s office, and it didn’t ask for distinguishing characteristics. It was signed—it said so, straight out—by my father.

S
ometimes in the mornings, while I was brushing my teeth, I would hear Cici and Maricela, the maid, talking together in the kitchen about how they’d had to carry Dad to bed because he’d drunk himself unconscious. Their voices were low and giggly, like thieves who had pulled off a heist of Dad’s dignity. It made me uncomfortable. He was my father, after all. Maybe I ought to take his side, I thought. But how could I? It was shameful to drink so much you passed out. Besides, it was Cici I felt close to, Cici who had given me a normal life.

Maricela was Mexican, from a large family in Tijuana, most of whom were now in Los Angeles. She insisted that she didn’t know how old she was, which I found impossible to believe. Cici used to say that Maricela was like a daughter to her, since she’d been with her from the age of fourteen. That was six years before, putting her at about twenty.

She had long, almost Asian eyes and cropped hair like a boy’s. She never wore makeup or anything girly, just T-shirts and jeans. She had a way of hiding from people, like a feral cat.

She didn’t like me. I did my best to win her over—it scared me not to be liked—but it was no good. She told Cici that I hated Collin, which was so obviously untrue that Cici, fortunately, didn’t believe it. She also told her that I buried my food in the garden like a dog, a story she worked up from the time I hid some cookies in my room, for later. She had an introverted sense of humor, and her sudden curt laughs left me mystified. With Collin she shared a sense of being different from the ordinary world, and she was kind to him. Me, she ignored as thoroughly as she could. I attributed her disdain for everyone and everything to an unsentimental practicality forced on her by her poverty-stricken childhood, so I didn’t hold it against her. In fact, it fascinated me. I wished I could care as little as she did.

During one of Dad’s trips to Morocco, Maricela went into a depression. She had, she said, had an affair with an airline pilot named Juan, and she was pining for him. I heard some rustle in the air that she was pregnant, but there was no baby on the way. I wondered how, or where, she could possibly have met an airline pilot. She wasn’t the type to go to bars. It was weird to think of Maricela with any man at all.

Cici was worried about her, and decided she needed a vacation. She gave Maricela an airline ticket to wherever she wanted to go. That place turned out to be Morocco; Juan turned out to be John; the airline pilot was actually a film director. Tony, my brother, found Dad and Maricela entwined. After three years—one of which I’d shared with them—Dad and Cici’s marriage was over.

I typed the forms that Cici had to fill out for the divorce. It seemed natural, since I was good at typing and she wasn’t. I was proud that she trusted me, at age eleven, to do them correctly. I decided it wasn’t
disloyal to Dad, since he had left me with Cici; but I did think that it was better not to tell him about it.

If I was asked whether I wanted to stay with Cici, I would have answered that I did. I don’t remember being asked. Where else would I have gone? Not with Dad and Maricela to Mexico. Cici wanted to keep me. Either Dad recognized that she was a good mother to me and wanted me to stay with her—though the divorce turned vicious fast—or he just took the easy way out.

Cici had lists of objects that ran for pages and pages, more objects than it seemed possible for one house to hold, things with strange names, such as an Egyptian jade pectoral and Etruscan burial glass. These were the inventories from St. Cleran’s, annotated according to what had been kept, sold, stored, or given away. The remaining items were marked with initials to show which things would go with Dad and which would stay with Cici. Cici was furious that Dad took the silverware. I was sorry to see that the gold-embossed champagne glasses were going too.

Cici pointed to one item,
Night Image,
with “JH” next to it. “That’s Cousin Itt,” she said. “He should be yours.”

An abstract sculpture covered in differently colored segments of string and thread, about four feet high,
Night Image
looked exactly like the character in
The Addams Family,
without the sunglasses. We all loved
The Addams Family,
and watched it most afternoons. Cici did a brilliant imitation of Thing, the hand in the box, and was always doing Lurch voices, sometimes in the character of Gladys. The sculpture had stood on the table in the upstairs hall of the Big House, looking alien and slightly forbidding. At Cici’s house, renamed, he became my pet. I loved to groom him, untangling his threads with my fingers and brushing him with a soft, silver-backed brush that Aunt Dorothy gave me.

Nervously I wrote to ask Dad if I could keep him. I would never have dared ask for anything without Cici’s urging, and I worried that I was letting her push me into a big mistake. What if it made Dad
mad at me? Worse, what if he decided that Cici was a bad influence and took me away?

Dad wrote back to say that of course
Night Image
should be mine; it was only fitting, since the sculpture was the last thing my mother had given him. The formality of Dad’s words—a sort of official presentation to me of this piece of art—seemed to be taking credit for his thoughtfulness in giving Itt to me. So why did I have to ask? I thought at once. If I hadn’t asked, if Cici hadn’t made me, Cousin Itt would have been swept off without a thought for me or Mum and who knows where he would have ended up. In storage, somewhere, in a box in a dark warehouse.

Also, why not call him by the name we always called him? The words
Night Image
had never passed our lips, at St. Cleran’s or at Cici’s house. The whole letter rubbed me the wrong way. Sides were being taken, and I knew whose side I was on.

When the moving van came, Cici and I were waiting. It was summer, so I wasn’t in school. Collin was.

The moving men set up a packing station on the lawn. Cici didn’t want them galumphing around the house, so she and I carried Dad’s things outside.

It was impersonal, like cleaning up the ash after a fire. Dad was gone, I wasn’t sure where he was. These things, if they had any meaning left for me after their years in Cici’s house, meant St. Cleran’s, the place, not Dad, the person; and St. Cleran’s had been lost for years.

We picked up the life-size crucifix from the living room, Cici at the top, me at the foot. We had to swing around awkwardly so that we wouldn’t fall into the pond in the middle of the floor, or hit Cousin Itt where he stood on his table, safe now with me.

“Onward Christian soldiers,” Cici started singing. She gave the words a sarcastic twist. Though I could only see the back of her head, I knew the corners of her mouth were turning down.

I thought it was funny too.

“Marching off to war!” We belted it out—wrong. Then we got stuck. Neither of us knew the next line.

Cici started at the top again. “Onward Christian soldiers,” we sang as we marched in step with the cross on our shoulders out the wide front door. “Onward Christian soldiers,” over and over, as we collected up the various saints and Christs. Hypnotized, I started to feel like a Christian soldier myself—fighting the good fight. Ridding the house of Dad’s relics felt more and more like ridding it of devils.

Cici had started the singing to cheer me up, because she was afraid that I’d mourn the loss of these things as a symbol of losing Dad. Now each object that left the house was an enemy slain. I was almost disappointed when we came to the last thing on the list: the dark Madonna that loomed over my room.

I used to stare at her before I fell asleep, with the arrows in her heart and her tender wrists extended. The Latin words floated around her like horseflies ready to sting her; yet her face was calm. I felt a kinship with her but I hated her too: hated her for being so serenely shameless in her anguish, so ready to be hurt even more, so proud of her throne of sorrow. She kept wounds open, for to her they were badges of honor. Mine were well scarred over, and I didn’t like the thought of her probing them as I slept.

Cici and I lifted her up between us and carried her directly outside. Framing my door were beds of pansies, then the lawn with its ring of flowers. The Madonna lay on the grass, waiting for the men to pack her up: a node of darkness in the bright day. I was glad to see her out of my room. I hadn’t realized how much she had oppressed me. Now that she was going, she pulled all the darkness out of my room with her. Liquid sunlight flowed in through the open door in her wake.

The next morning I came back up the hill from doing turds, as Cici called it—cleaning Blanca’s corral—to find Cici on top of a
ladder in the middle of my room, leaning over backward with a staple gun in her hand. Four wide streamers of cheesecloth in ice-cream colors—pink, yellow, blue, and green—trailed from a board on the ceiling to fat bolts on the floor.

“You like?” she said.

She’d already done one side of the room. The four colors draped in stripes across the ceiling like a circus tent and fell all the way down to the floor.

It was fantastic: girly and dramatic, but bohemian too, with light misting through the open weave of the cloth. Cici had been planning it for months, she told me, bringing back the fabric secretly on our trips to Puerto Vallarta. I knew she couldn’t have done it if the Madonna were still there. It had been the Madonna’s room and I a guest in it, as I had been in the Bhutan Room. But yesterday the Madonna, with all her masochistic sorrows, had been vanquished.

I helped Cici put up the rest of the fabric, holding it high above my head so she could reach out, her long toes curled over the edge of the ladder step, and staple it into the angle where wall met ceiling. She cut neat edges above the doors and closets, but let the fabric fall over the windows like curtains. I could push it back if I wanted and hook it behind nails.

In the center of the ceiling, over the board where the ends of fabric were stapled, she hung a little mirror rimmed in pink Venetian glass. It shot a thrill through me. I knew there was something shocking about a mirror on the ceiling, though I didn’t quite know why. The Chicksweeper had a giant one, the kind you’d put on a closet, reflecting his king-size bed and white shag rug. Collin and I thought it was hilarious. Mine was beautiful.

It wasn’t really me, this fantasy bedroom—it was more like the room Cici had had when she was a girl, but even more extreme, more amazing. But since I didn’t know what was me, that didn’t really matter. It was mine, and best of all Cici made it specifically for me. The amount of effort she put into it announced that I was staying put.
The billowing cloth covered every inch of wall, which meant there was no question of paintings, photographs, posters—no pressure to come up with a visible expression of who I was, or to make aesthetic choices that might be found wanting by Anjelica or Dad (even in his absence, I felt the shadow of his judgment). I was tired of things being serious and tasteful. The knobbly headboard that I couldn’t lean against was gone, and I had the twin beds that Aunt Dorothy had contributed to the house on Euclid. Here, in my beautiful tent, I might actually invite a friend to sleep over in the other one.

In the meantime, our kittens loved to play with the loose ends of fabric that trailed on the floor under the beds. Mine was called Jinx, Collin’s was D’Artagnan Porthos Athos Aramis Rochefort Richelieu Louis XIV Green. (Green was Collin’s last name.) We’d brought them home from our neighbors’ house in the pockets of our jackets when they were tiny—too young to have been separated from their mother. As a result, they sucked their tails. Cici wanted to put hydrogen peroxide or quinine on them to stop the sucking but I refused, even though the tails looked revoltingly nipply. I didn’t feel guilty about having taken Jinx away from his mother, but I didn’t want to punish him for missing her.

Anjelica had been living with Jack for as long as I’d been living with Cici. His daughter, Jennifer, was a year older than me, blond and pudgy like me, so that we could have been sisters. We found it funny that if Anjel and Jack married, I’d be Jen’s aunt.

They took us to Aspen for two weeks, to ski. We made a perfect family: Jen and I sharing a bedroom, Anjelica cooking roast chicken and spaghetti Bolognese in the evenings, and Jack the ringmaster, the source of all excitement. Anjel mothered us, taking us shopping for ski clothes and putting sunscreen on our faces. Every day our ski instructor would bring us to a restaurant to meet them for lunch.

“She’s a phenom!” Jack boasted to anyone who asked Jen how
she liked skiing. I was happy for her, shining in her father’s eyes, even though I was far from being a phenom myself.

I loved Jack’s voice. Like Daddy’s, it had a way of soaking into all the air in a room. But Jack’s voice was slangier than Daddy’s and had a dangerous edge. Everything he said seemed to hold a hidden joke; a joke that you were in on if you heard the grin behind the words. Dad’s voice made you his disciple; Jack’s made you his accomplice.

I loved the way he called me Leggsington, and Jen Bimbooreen, and had nicknames for everybody: Curly and Whitey and Red Dog and Blackie and Beaner. Arthur Garfunkel was the G, or the Big G, or the New G. Warren Beatty was the Pro. When he called Anjel Toot, or Tootman, I felt I could actually see the bond between them. She
was
Toot, and he had christened her; she was singular and special, the way she was meant to be.

The first time Anjelica took me to Jack’s house, she parked her little Mercedes in the open garage next to Jack’s big maroon Mercedes—called Bing, because it was the color of a bing cherry—and we went into the house through the kitchen. Jack was sitting on a sofa, in an area off the kitchen that wasn’t quite living room, leaning forward into the phone, as if telling a secret. He wore jeans and a white shirt, whiter than any shirt I’d ever seen. Near him was a hat rack covered in baseball caps—more than I’d ever imagined one person could own.

“Toot,” Jack said as he hung up the phone, stringing out the word. He stood up to kiss her. It was the first time I noticed that Anjel was taller than he was.