Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (16 page)

Cici tells a great story of the scene. She got it mostly—though obviously not all—from Dad.

Dad is in the study in the Big House, entertaining the local
priest to after-lunch drinks. (First unlikely event.) Mr. Creagh comes in and announces that Mrs. Huston has arrived.

“Mrs. Huston,” says Dad to the priest. “How wonderful. I haven’t seen my wife in more than a year.” (Not true. She was there for Christmas.)

Mum walks in, wearing a cloak. When she takes it off, the bump is only too evident. Dad is scarlet with embarrassment. Later, in his bedroom, he breaks her wrist with the poker from the fireplace.

He didn’t break Mum’s wrist. But Cici believes he was capable of it. She describes him in a fury as the Red Devil—the most terrifying creature she’d ever faced. And this, from a woman who rode a lion.

Mum had hoped for reason and understanding, but she knew it was unlikely. She had done nothing that Dad hadn’t done two years previously. She felt she was due some generosity of spirit, some recognition of the partnership they had developed, some recompense for her own understanding. Even simple kindness. Instead, she was hauled over the coals.

Mum stayed silent as Dad flung vicious remarks at her, asking nothing of him, avoiding blame and all mention of Danny. He asked her if she wanted him to pretend to be the child’s father. No, she said; all she wanted was silence, the space of a few years, until Tony and Anjelica were old enough to understand the truth. Until then, she thought they would accept simply that the child was hers. It would, she reassured him, be racially no different from them.

If she had said yes, she told John Julius, she thought that Dad would have “figuratively, at least, kicked my face in.”

So ended the first scene. But Dad brooded on that one sentence. He decided to take it as a slight to Danny and his multiracial mother.

For the first time in years—and not jokingly—Mum calls him a monster. Did he hit her? I can’t tell. He didn’t the first day—though, as Mum tells John Julius, he had in the past. I’m pretty sure he called her a whore, and probably worse. She is deeply wounded
that Dad would think her capable of a racial insult against Danny or his mother, when all she had tried to do was reassure him about Tony and Anjelica. He is, she thinks, willfully misunderstanding her to fan his own fury. “Why,” she writes, “is it only he has pride to be hurt, feelings to be considered, good nature to be taken advantage of, patience to be taxed? Don’t I as well? Why is all equality out of the question?”

Without excusing him, she questions herself. Was it her own tongue-tied silence, her lack of confidence, that provoked him to be so cruel? She is sure she could have handled it better—but how? She feels hate rising in her, and she begs John Julius to help her understand Dad so that she will not hate him. She hopes never to see him again.

He wanted, she wrote, for her to throw herself on his mercy, to come to him saying, “John, I’m in a fix,” so that he could say something to the effect of “Well, honey, let me help you.” She wouldn’t do that. “My dear John Julius,” she wrote, “I am not in a fix, am I?” Her contentment—which surprised me so, and makes me so happy—was what drove Dad crazy.

The day after these scenes, Mum wrote John Julius a second letter, this one on canary-yellow paper—which she apologizes for, it being so inelegant. But it’s appropriate. Dad has left St. Cleran’s; the storms are over. The sun shines through the balsam poplars outside the window of Mum’s bedroom, and the viburnum is coming into bloom. Though she still loves her little house, and her blue room, she feels as if she is getting out of jail.

“My blue room.” The room at the top of the stairs, whose door was closed. The room I barely dared enter until Danny came to stay. Its walls and bedspread were beige.

When Mum was gone, Dad erased her from the Little House. Anjelica’s room was left alone, and the guest room, the garden room, the kitchen. He turned his anger on two rooms: her bedroom and her sitting room. That sitting room was, says Tony, the coziest room
he’d ever known, with music playing and sweet-scented flowers and oversize art books which they’d pore over in the dark evenings. Its walls, as Mum described them, were the color of tomato soup. Dad had the walls repainted dark green, and ordered the furniture packed up and sent to Zoë and Danny in Rome.

It became the Yeats Room, a little museum of Jack Yeats paintings in frames with lights on top. There was no sofa; maybe not even a chair. Just tables against the walls. No one ever went inside. It was a dead room.

Mum was beyond insult. It was Tony and Anjelica who felt the cruelty, as—without comment, or any indication that they might be hurt by it—Dad dispatched the last vestiges of her warmth to his other family. I felt the chill that was left.

John Julius was away, leading a tour group through the eastern Mediterranean, during much of Mum’s late pregnancy. She missed him terribly, of course, in the way any woman would miss a man away on business. She was distracted with longing for him, but—as at the start—filled with joy. She felt me kicking inside her. She thought I was a boy.

He returned a few weeks before I was born, at the end of August, so the letters stop. They start up again when I am less than ten days old. Now John Julius is in France, having a family holiday with his wife and children. The letters fly almost daily to a poste restante address in a country village. They don’t show the serenity of the summer letters. There is a cold anger in Mum’s longing that wasn’t there before. The intense love she feels for him torments her now.

He excuses his absence with good reasons: his family has missed him too during his long absence, and this is their last chance for a holiday together before school starts. I know Mum was generous-hearted enough to see justice in this. She says she does not blame him. But she will not let him flit away from the consequences. “I
don’t want to embark on myself,” she writes, “but I do want you to digest something: Allegra is an entity in herself, for all the joy and pleasure, and they are enormous, inherent in her presence, the wonderful new richness and dimension she adds to my life. She is not your understudy, a substitute for your presence. Thank heavens for her, these days, my endless gratitude for the mainstaying love of these last three years that have led to her, but never forget about these days, that I needed
you
.” She ends with no sign-off: just “R.”

She has never sounded so brutal, so dully certain. The words on the page, in her half print, half script, thud on my eyes like blows: like the blows of each hour of his absence. I feel a blast of loneliness freezing her in the spaces between her bones.

I spent most of my life believing that I am strong, that Nietzsche was right: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Not long ago, I decided that Nietzsche was wrong. An arm that has broken and knit is not as strong as one that never broke. Some hurts never heal.

Mum accepted a great deal: secrecy, other commitments, sporadic and stolen time together. She called them “the impossible facts.” It was the bargain she made for love. But that week, a steely truth sliced through it: when it came to the crux, she was alone.

In October, when I was nearly two months old, Mum went to the Marylebone registry office to register my birth. Probably she left me at home with Nurse; documents from the hospital would have been enough.

I imagine her standing at the counter in one of those musty, pen-pushing rooms that still dot London. The varnish on the wood is worn through and peeling. In the corners, the linoleum tiles are curling up. The chairs that line the walls, for waiting on, are hard and scratched and randomly set about. The strip lighting hanging from the ceiling flickers in a futile effort to dispel the gloom of the autumn day outside.

“Christian name?” says the registrar.

“Allegra,” says my mother.

“Any middle name?”

“No.”

Mother’s name is next. Then father’s.

It had been agreed between Mum and John Julius that she would not name him. She hated the thought of scandal as much as he did; it was what had infuriated her about Zoë’s pregnancy and Danny’s birth. John Julius was well known as a writer and television personality, and he had a title, Viscount Norwich, so the gossip columnists would have seized on it. Many people in their circle must have known that John Julius was my father, but in fine English fashion it could remain unsaid.

In that last, awful scene between them, Dad gave Mum permission to name him as my father. He also banished her from St. Cleran’s and insulted her by cautioning her not to intrigue with the servants. Worst of all, he made out that she was the one who had insulted him: that she was intolerant, prejudiced, ungenerous, unkind.

I doubt she paused for a moment. She had had weeks to make up her mind. Her armor was on.

None, she said. Unknown.

I imagine the registrar staring up at her: a remarkably beautiful, well-dressed, self-possessed woman with an American accent and the bearing of a ballerina. Not the kind you’d think didn’t know who was the father of her child.

And I imagine Mum staring her down.

The registrar typed two dashes in that column. Father: unknown.

“M
y other children call me Papa, pronounced roughly to rhyme with ‘supper,’” John Julius wrote to me not long after our strange, disconnected meeting. That flummoxed me for a bit. The way I said “supper” didn’t sound like any pronunciation of “Papa” I could come up with. I was an American now.

I had avoided calling him anything that day. It was impossible to think of calling him “Papa.” It sounded so intimate and easygoing, as if everything were normal father/daughter stuff between us. He didn’t sound too sure of it either: something behind his words made me feel that he was trying it on. This whole relationship was so new as to be experimental. I wasn’t at all sure that the experiment would succeed, or whether I wanted it to.

I didn’t need a new father. I already had one. True, he wasn’t around on a daily basis, but I was used to that. Sharing a house with
him had been unusual: when he left for Mexico, he took on his true kingliness again. He was more himself when he wasn’t living with Cici; I must have felt his unhappiness without understanding what it was.

I saw Dad every month or so when he came to L.A. It never occurred to me that he might not be “Dad” anymore; John Julius’s arrival in my life didn’t change my image of Dad in the slightest. Our relationship had never been based on the primal bond: its pillars were respect and gratitude on my side, generosity and affection on his. The love between us had grown from those. It didn’t depend on biology or habit.

Dad never mentioned John Julius, though Cici must have told him that we’d met. He continued as if nothing had changed between us. So nothing did.

What could this new father give me? Not much that I wanted. He sent me books about his family—my family, in theory only—which I didn’t read. I had enough people in my life who were family but nowhere near: Dad, Tony, Nurse, Nana and Grampa, my cousin Martine—and Danny, my lost brother whom I found again in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I saw him with Dad for the first time since I’d left St. Cleran’s. He gave me a ring of gold and turquoise, which sent Cici off on a fantasy about how he and I would marry, which we could since we weren’t blood relations. It was a similar fantasy to the one I’d had, for a moment, when John Julius and Cici sat together on the sofa: that the far-flung ends of my family might come together and close the circle.

For as long as I could remember, I’d spent time with someone and behaved as I thought a daughter or a sister or a granddaughter should; then I’d been whirled away. I couldn’t just abandon those daughterly, sisterly, granddaughterly feelings; so I was stretched thin, holding on to them all so many thousands of miles apart. My family bonds were like wires stretched around the curved surface of the earth, pulled so very tight they were liable to snap at any
moment—and me with them. John Julius was yet another claim on me, someone else I had to write to, another hook in my flesh.

He’d disappeared from my life once before. Maybe after this first flush of rather lukewarm enthusiasm, he would again.

I was solitary; I had little emotional strength left for friendships. I had friends at school that I ate lunch with, but I rarely invited them home with me, and I rarely went home with them. All I wanted to do was read and play backgammon. Much of it was the vagueness of being twelve. The rest was exhaustion of spirit.

Cici got the idea of sending me to boarding school at Ojai Valley, where she had gone. Kids could have their own horses there, she told me; there were all kinds of great things to do. I think she hoped it would energize me, help me find a focus, some kind of passion for life.

I didn’t want to go. Half of my favorite Enid Blyton books were set in boarding schools, but I knew they were fantasy—and besides, they were English. Nothing about Ojai appealed to me. And one thing terrified me: that if I was sent to boarding school, I’d get marooned there. When the next upheaval came, I’d be forgotten about. I’d have no home left.

I was sent to an educational psychologist, who had me do logic puzzles and asked me if I felt academically challenged at Paul Revere Junior High public school. Earnestly I lied and told him I did. When his report came through, Cici let me read it. I took pride in having pulled the wool over his eyes. Reading it later, I see that he was smarter than I thought he was. Partly disguising his reasons, he delivered the verdict that he knew I needed: he recommended that I stay where I was.

By this time Collin and I had Sue, from New Zealand, to look after us. I liked her at once, with her uneven teeth and unglamorous body: she seemed steadier, more reliable, than Lisa and tall, gay, handsome Rock. Cici’s friends had made good companions for Collin and me, and they’d let us have Tuna Helper and Kraft macaroni and
cheese for dinner as much as we wanted, but when something went wrong, I felt put on the spot. Rock had once taken a corner too fast when Collin was riding in the back of the pickup truck (usually we both did, sitting up on the wheel arches like Mexican gardeners): the truck went up on two wheels, and the road swam in front of my eyes. I was sure that Collin must have fallen out. Rock drove on as if nothing had happened. I’d have to stop him, I thought, and we’d go back to find Collin with his head smashed open on the asphalt. When I looked back, I saw only empty wheel arches—until I spotted Collin up close to the cab in a heap, eyes wide, his tanned face gone the dead color of sand. He gave me a crooked smile through the glass.

I didn’t tell Cici. I didn’t know what would happen if I did. Maybe it would destroy her friendship with Rock, put an end to the mad laughter of our evenings. Or she might just think I was exaggerating—after all, Rock hadn’t acted as if anything awful had happened. Which was worse: to be the wet blanket tattletale, or to be disbelieved again? Best to say nothing, and take care of it myself. Make Collin ride in the cab, or ride in the back with him and demand that he sit down low and hold on tight.

Sue took me bowling with her English friends. I felt we shared some kind of Commonwealth bond. Even though I tried not to think about my new English father, something crept into my spirit beneath my consciousness: a rootedness derived from that long line of aristocratic ancestry. My father wasn’t a random someone I met in a hotel room. He was someone who had truly loved my mother; who had been there when I was little; who was separated from me by social convention and by tragedy. This was the kind of story I read in books. I was the only person in the world with this history: arrows of circumstance had flown on a converging trajectory to produce nobody other than me. That sense of difference I’d felt for as long as I could remember: on bad days it still left me feeling fraudulent and alien, but now, on good days, it became a sense of specialness.

When Cici and Collin went out of town, Sue’s English friends
came over for dinner and Scrabble. Suddenly she keeled over backward, as if an invisible force had grabbed her chair and flung it flat. Scrabble tiles erupted off the table. Sue thrashed in spasms on the floor, her eyes rolling like a crazed horse. I screamed, and the only sound was the banging of her head on the floor. I wanted to run, but my muscles wouldn’t move.

Her friends jammed a spoon between her teeth and cradled her head till the fit passed. They told me it was epilepsy. I’d heard of it; I knew it was a normal, maybe even common disease. I knew people used to think epileptics were possessed by the devil, and that “those who knew,” as Dad would say, could look down on their ignorance.

“Please don’t tell Cici.” It was the first thing she said—lying on the floor still, looking up at me.

I felt a power seep into me, and I didn’t like it. I knew Sue should have told Cici she had epilepsy before she got the job; and I knew that meant she probably wouldn’t have got it. This time I knew well I should tell. But I wanted someone to look after me—Sue, the way she had been before this happened. I wanted her to tell me what to do. I didn’t want the choice to be mine.

“I’ll lose my job.” Her eyes were wet and pleading.

I hated this. She was Sue again, but my heart was still pounding. I didn’t want to go near her. I’d never imagined epilepsy could be as terrifying as this.

I felt the easy way out unrolling in front of me, like a carpet. I inched down it. Sue hadn’t had a fit before now, I told myself. Maybe she wouldn’t have one again.

“But what if you’re driving?”

The words crept out of my mouth. I hated her to see that I was afraid. I didn’t want her to think I was ignorant, or prejudiced against her for having a disease that wasn’t her fault. I felt it was wrong to sound like I didn’t trust her.

“I feel it coming on, and I can pull over,” she insisted. “It doesn’t happen very often. Please, Allegra. She’ll send me away.”

I tried not to think it: Hadn’t she felt it coming on just then? Couldn’t she have done something to stop it, or at least have run to her room and had the fit in private? If that was all the warning she got, it wouldn’t be much use on the freeway.

We had already got Cici’s permission to go on a road trip once school let out for summer, to the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and Yosemite. If I told Cici about the fit, Sue would probably be told to pack her bags at once.

“I won’t tell,” I said. I could watch Sue extra closely when she was driving. Now that I understood, I could grab the wheel if I had to.

“Do you want to go to the beach?” Anjel asked me. She was still living in Dad’s studio on the hillside above Cici’s house.

“Sure.” She was my sister: I would have gone anywhere with her.

We headed up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu: past Patrick’s hamburger stand and the beach where Cici went; past Lou Adler’s house with its rock-studded wall, where I’d been with Anjel and Jack. The beach was hidden by shoulder-to-shoulder houses, which parted only when a rocky outcrop, that couldn’t be built on, broke into the waves.

We pulled out of the streaming traffic into the center lane. On the far side, a garage door swung up. We pulled into the cavern beside a burgundy, new-model Rolls-Royce Corniche.

Aunt Dorothy drove a vintage Rolls-Royce: 1964, the year I was born. Beside it in the triple garage at Gloom Castle was a James Young touring Rolls-Royce limousine, 1966, one of only two ever made. Both were a blue so dark they were nearly black. Those Rolls-Royces were elegant and streamlined. Corniches, on the other hand, looked fat to me, like the blood-gorged ticks Cici and I burned off the dogs with cigarettes. I looked down my nose at people who drove Corniches. They were showing off how rich they were.

This one even had a personalized license plate:
PRO
3. But I was with Anjelica, at her new boyfriend’s house, so I said nothing.

She led me along a tiled hallway, nondescript, with a door on either side, into a room whose huge windows were filled with beach and ocean and sky—nothing else, nothing between. The room itself seemed to disappear, irrelevant in the face of this vista. The wide beach was like golden suede: beautifully, serenely empty of people. The gray ocean rolled onto it in a rhythm so close to perfect, so minutely irregular, that it stroked smooth the knotty ridges of my mind.

I was prepared to dislike the owner of the Corniche, especially since he wasn’t Jack. But I thought I could never dislike someone who lived in the embrace of these waves.

We changed into bathing suits and went out onto the small wooden deck that perched above the dry upper reaches of the sand.

The beach wasn’t deserted, after all. Near the ocean, where the sand was hard with water but not soggy with too much, were three men, so far apart that I had seen, through the windows, only the space between them. There were two to my right, one to my left. Frisbees flew between them, flat and straight like precision missiles. Not one Frisbee, but lots: a bombardment fired back and forth, sometimes two together coming apart in midflight, a capsule birthing out of a mothership. A dog chased any Frisbees that landed in the water. I’d never seen Frisbee played like this. I’d thought it was a kids’ game.

Anjel ran to the lone man and kissed him. I followed.

“This is Ryan,” she said to me. O’Neal: I knew. He was big and broad-chested, with wavy blond hair and lips the same color as his skin. He’d starred in
Love Story
. When I was in fourth grade in Long Island, a boy in class was reading the book, and the rest of us were shocked.

The men at the other end were, I found out later, his brother and his coke dealer. They sloped off northward up the beach—playmates on call, no longer required—when they saw Anjel and me arrive.

We took up position closer to Ryan than where they had been, and the incoming fire started. I wasn’t any better at Frisbee—even Frisbee as I knew it—than I was at any other physical activity. I could catch them if they didn’t hit my hand too hard—which most of Ryan’s did, except the baby of the mother-and-baby pairs. My dives after low-flying shots were almost always too late. When I threw, the Frisbee either went flinging off wildly or ran out of steam no more than halfway to where Ryan stood.

He loped up the beach. “Let’s see you throw.”

I wound up my wrist. Before I could let go, Ryan took my hand and flipped it over. My fingertips were flat against the underside, the way you’d carry a plate.

Ryan put his fingers over mine and curled them into a fist with the rim of the Frisbee inside. My fingernails were too long to get a grip, even though most of them were already broken. I bit off the ragged points.

With his arm still around me, holding the Frisbee with his fingers over mine, he moved me so that I stood with my back to the ocean, sideways on to where I wanted the Frisbee to go. He curled his arm, and mine, across my body, and tucked our wrists into the space beside my waist. Without letting go, he demonstrated a few times: the whip of the wrist that launched it into flight.

He didn’t say much, and he didn’t criticize. He took the attitude that nobody except him knew how to throw a Frisbee, and it was his mission to teach the underprivileged. So he was patient and precise. This one movement was the axis on which he turned. It was the secret of strength, grace, power—if only I could get it right.