Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (4 page)

The first mention of lawyers comes in 1954, the first clear mention of a lover in 1956, though later letters show that he was not the first. When Mum and Dad were together, as Ray Bradbury recalls in
Green Shadows, White Whale,
their fights approached violence. One letter from Nana to Mum mentions casually that “Daddy still knocks me around a little”—and it makes me sick to realize that this is an expression of sympathy for Mum telling her that she is suffering the same.

Mum wrote to her parents—in letters I don’t have—of her despair at the vast commitment St. Cleran’s represented. Both Nana and Grampa firmly referred to it as “John’s fantasy castle.” Mum and Dad had been renting a huge pile of a house called Courttown, outside
Dublin; with Dad away making movies, Mum had a reasonable life there, hunting to hounds, going to the races and parties and balls. Galway was in the crude west, the width of Ireland away from her friends, and St. Cleran’s, ruinous as it was, required a vast expense of energy and imagination. All this, for a house she doubted she’d ever live in.

She seems lost—and worse, not to know what she is searching for. In one scrap of diary she writes of her “squirrel-cage brain.” I can see her in that cage, running in circles, trapped by comfortless wire, cold and exposed, frantic to escape, her tormented and tormenting brain holding her in a small squirrel body which her spirit yearns to transcend. She has been raised to be one of two things, or perhaps both of them, one leading to the next: a performer, or the mate and muse of a great man. Both hopes have turned to ash—one in failure, the other in poisoned success—but still she spends her breath on them, trying to restart the fire.

In 1956, as work on St. Cleran’s was starting, Mum wrote to Otto Preminger asking to be considered for the lead role in
Saint Joan
. She had fallen in love that winter, while skiing in Klosters, but the man was young and still struggling to make his place in the world. Though Mum had been cherishing fantasies of leaving Dad, she couldn’t conceive of it without some other ready-made identity to slip on. The young man could not provide it; perhaps she could make it for herself. Preminger’s politely uninterested reply must have hit her like the slam of a door.

Two years before, Dad had shown no sign of wanting to cast her in
Moulin Rouge,
despite the fact that, as a dancer, she was a natural for the part. Obviously, he too thought she couldn’t act—and his new mistress, Suzanne Flon, could. What did she have to offer him, now that the first flush of enthusiasm for her beauty was past and motherhood and marriage had grounded the adventure? I am sure she longed for respect. Ballet was ten years in her past. She had talent as a writer, correspondents less partisan than her father told her
so—but how could she dare set herself up as a serious writer when men such as Ray Bradbury, Jean-Paul Sartre, Truman Capote, and Arthur Miller paraded regularly through Dad’s doors?

She knew that she had an intoxicating effect on men, and she used it, probably less cynically than she accused herself of, for ego boosts in her darker times. She congratulated herself sarcastically for captivating a party. But much as she craved it, she couldn’t convince herself that love alone was enough.

Dad, meanwhile, had the best of both worlds: a beautiful wife to show off, to keep his house and bring up his children, and freedom to cavort openly with other women as he pleased. “Dad didn’t like to let go of anything,” my brother Tony says when we talk about why Mum didn’t leave Dad earlier. He controlled the money, and he could be delicately seductive in pursuit of his own wishes. In the midst of Mum’s turmoil, he wrote from location in Tobago suggesting that she and the children come and visit, or—the silken rope, this—just send the children with Nurse so that she can take some time for herself. She is, in the scrap of diary, virtually bewitched by this throwaway offer—which I had barely noticed when I read Dad’s telegram. I can hear her convincing herself that life as Dad’s wife isn’t so bad after all. “No
reason
for divorce,” she writes. “A pit I am sure, a reluctance for the big irrevocable, a shrinking from decision. I am so warmed by John’s letter…” Twice she circles back to how kind his letter is, how thoughtful. Dad’s shadow may be cold and lonely, but it is safe.

She did go to Tobago. However enticing the thought of a month or more of freedom, she refused to be away from Tony and Anjelica for so long again. She rented a separate cottage on the beach for the three of them. According to Tony, they barely saw Dad at all.

For three decades, since I started to understand something of Mum’s history, I felt like a traitor to her for having been happy at St. Cleran’s. I knew she hadn’t wanted me to live there. To me, it was Dad’s
world, printed everywhere with the marks of his travels and obsessions. But reading the letters, I came to see that it was Mum who created the St. Cleran’s I loved, the serene world sheltered by walls and open gates. She polished the surface, ready for the stamp of Dad’s hand—and even then she held the hand so that its placement would be right.

Once she began work on this huge project, Mum found herself ambushed by happiness. The Little House was completed first. It was entirely hers; when Dad came, he slept in his studio on the far side of the courtyard. Then she turned her energy to the Big House, which would be his. With the deadening plaster knocked off the facade, the gray stone glowed in the intermittent blazes of Galway sun. She traveled to estate sales around Ireland and combed antique shops in Dublin, London, and Paris in search of treasures. Dad’s letters to her, from film sets around the world, consist entirely of requests for news of the children and ideas for the house.

Suddenly, maybe surprisingly, she became for the first time Dad’s equal and his partner. She loves the romance of the tumbling stones of the stableyard, and with Dad’s enthusiastic agreement she leaves them in a tumble and plants roses to climb over them. She has found the perfect fireplace for his room; he is having hand-blocked Japanese wallpaper made for the dining room (he is in Japan making a film, but it’s obviously St. Cleran’s that excites his imagination). He sends bonsai trees for the hall, which will travel by ship with their own nursemaid; he asks Mum to pull strings at the Ministry of Agriculture to get an entry permit for them. Specifications arrive for the Japanese bath to be excavated in a room in the basement.

Dad urged Mum to buy the best, whatever it cost. He trusted her taste. He believed in her power to effect a transformation. Perhaps she no longer needed his respect. She could see the evidence of her hard work and her unerring aesthetic judgment for herself, as first the Little House, then the courtyard and stableyard, then the Big House, blossomed into striking and comfortable beauty.

She had, I think for the first time in her life, found real creative expression. I suspect that ballet never gave it to her: hypercritical, perfectionist, regimented, and prescriptive—and she was, then, too young and protected to feel the longing for her own creative identity. (Though she continued to love ballet and later served on the board of Sadler’s Wells ballet company in London, she didn’t send me to ballet class—in an era when that’s what well-brought-up little English girls did.) Suddenly, in the letters from the trunk, there is talk of her opening an interiors shop in Dublin, of selling Irish tweeds to Chanel and Aran sweaters and shawls to the chic boutiques of Paris. Taste has become her currency, and she feels herself rich.

The search for perfect pieces for St. Cleran’s gave her excuses to go to Paris. There, she spent as much time as possible with an Argentinian diplomat, with whom she had fallen cataclysmically in love.

Mum wrote in her scrap of diary that she hated to sleep alone. It was true, if cruel. She longed for loving arms not just in bed, but in the daily pursuits of life. A year and a half had passed since the relationship with the struggling young man had withered into an uncertain friendship.

Lucio Garcia del Solar was a member of the Argentinian delegation to UNESCO in Paris. She met him in Klosters too. His letters are charming, intelligent, mischievous. I’m not surprised Mum fell in love with him; I am drawn to him across the decades. He refers to her as “the soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. Huston” and talks about consulting lawyers himself, but I can’t tell if the consultations were about his own possible divorce. He echoes words that must come from her own self-critical confessions: “those years of café society dizziness and superficial love affairs,” in contrast to the “deep feelings” that she has for him.

She seems to be less needy than she was with the struggling young man. She is more confident, more sure of herself—able to fall
in love fearlessly, for the sake of it. There has been a sea change in her—and she has St. Cleran’s, “John’s fantasy castle,” to thank for it.

It’s strange to read the evidence of this double life. It wasn’t dishonest. She and Dad were married in name only; much was agreed, and unspoken, between them. Deception was not part of her nature. In fact, the struggling young man wrote that he wished she were more able to disguise her feelings; her openness about her connection with him embarrassed him and made him nervous. Still, it must have been a fierce emotional strain. I wonder how she rationalized it to herself, and I long for her missing words to tell me. I sense that she was, somehow, paying a debt to Dad, which, once paid, would release her.

In 1959, Mum is in hospital terminating the life of an unformed, minuscule creature who would have been her third child—who might have been me.

The love affair with Lucio fizzled. Mum had obviously hoped to marry him, but it became clear that he was not going to leave his wife. She wrote him an anguished letter, which she never sent. I found it where she kept it, among his letters to her. She tells him, almost defiantly, that being in love is “a painful malady, for me…a sickness which I shall get over, as indeed, I have before.” She longed to be in love, ached from the lack of love; but never yet had love brought her peace. In the earlier scrap of diary, which she wrote upon returning to Ireland after two weeks with the struggling young man, she describes seeing a sweater which reminds her of him, and writes that being in love is “in a way…a state of blessedness—all the anguish worthwhile for the heightened sensitivity.” The desperate bravery of this makes me want to fold her in my arms and stroke her hair—as, in the throes of my own anguished love affairs in my twenties, I longed for someone to hold me and stroke mine.

I
was standing next to Betty as she made herself a drink in the hall of the Big House. The smooth marble top of the desk that served as a bar was level with my chin. The footwell was filled with bottles, colorful labels with bright liquids inside. Betty’s black cigarette holder, its gold tip stained with lipstick, rested on a glass ashtray.

Betty ran her fingers along the dark wood, where it came out past the marble. “When your father comes home he’ll be this color,” she said. “Mahogany. He’s been in Mexico.”

When the day came, she lined us up on the front steps of the Big House: Mr. and Mrs. Creagh and their daughter, Karen; the maids, Mary and Mary Margaret, in their pink uniforms; Jackie and Caroline Lynch, and me. Betty stood on the top step beside the open door. Faithful subjects forming a processional route to welcome the king home.

I was nervous. I was “Mr. Huston’s daughter” now, in second position next to Betty, but I felt like a fraud. I barely knew him. Should I run to him, the way daughters did in books? It didn’t feel right, and I didn’t think I ought to break up the ceremonial symmetry. But what if he expected me to, and I didn’t?

It seemed like we waited on the steps for hours, until wheels scrunched on the gravel. The car, with Paddy Lynch driving, came around the side of the house and drew to a halt perfectly centered between the stone lions at the foot of the steps. The passenger door opened. Long legs unfolded themselves. I saw the same soft, chestnut-colored shoes. Like a jointed puppet Daddy stood up—far taller than I remembered him. I felt scared suddenly, of this looming stranger. But Betty was wrong: he wasn’t as dark as the wood of the bar.

He greeted everyone individually as he came up the steps, a nod or a shake of the hand to one side and then the other. My greeting was no different: just “Hello, Allegra,” before Betty ushered him inside. She beckoned to me, so I followed.

He went straight into the study while Betty fixed him a drink. I hung around her. “Go in to your father,” she said.

He asked me questions, and I answered in monosyllables, shy and uncertain. Yes, I was happy in the Little House; yes, Nurse was well; yes, school was fine; yes, Jackie and Caroline and Karen were my friends.

“Very good, honey,” he said. The words, like everything he said, came out slowly and deliberately, as if he’d thought them over carefully before speaking them.

In the shadowy depths of the archway leading to the stableyard were identical openings with staircases winding up through the thick walls. In the mornings when I didn’t have school, I would climb the left-hand one, knock on the door at the top of the stairs, and wait for that rich, singsong voice, which awed and thrilled me, to call, “Come in.”

Daddy’s studio had skylights and small round windows at knee height that peeped down onto the courtyard and the Little House on the far side. Its air was sweet with oil paint and turpentine, and grassy with the scent of the matting on the floor. Every color I could imagine was there, splashed softly on the matting and in wet, wormy clumps on the palettes. I watched, almost holding my breath, as Daddy swirled the colors together with his brush. I loved to see them combine, and tried to catch with my eyes the exact moment of alchemy, when the two colors became one. Sometimes it never happened: my eyes burned with not blinking, and still the colors threaded through each other, each still itself, held at the exact moment before it was lost—as if Daddy’s brush, like a magician’s wand, had stopped time.

On the easel was Saint George, his face corpse-pale and green-tinged, faceted like a diamond. His gold halo made a perfect circle around his head. He rode a horse broken into planes like he was, which reared up on thin, angular legs. They reminded me of Daddy’s pointy elbows and knees. His left hand held a spear, which stabbed a lizardlike dragon through the throat. A fish curled near his feet, a hanging circle in the orange-red air. I could sit on the floor for hours and watch him work on that painting, adding brushstrokes so tiny that I could barely see what difference they made, or picking up cans of spray paint to make little squirts into the fiery background.

When he reached a stopping place we played pelmanism. I laid the cards out on the floor at his feet, a full pack in orderly rows facedown, and when it was his turn, he would lean down between the wings of his folded knees to choose two cards, turn them over, and turn them back again if they didn’t match. Talking to me was a duty he performed gracefully; but he seemed to actually enjoy playing a game which pitted my wits against his—even such a simple one. Usually I won, and he liked that. He wasn’t the kind of man who played child’s games.

Intelligence was my currency now. I felt I had to earn Daddy’s interest, and I was pleased that I could. I asked nothing of him but
to let me watch him paint, and play pelmanism with me. I was doing well at having a father.

“I have something to tell you, honey,” he said one morning, his eyes resting on the canvas as he touched it with his paintbrush, as softly as you’d touch an eyelash with your finger. “Your brother Danny is coming to visit. He’s a couple of years older than you. I’m sure you’ll love him, as I do.”

I didn’t know I had a brother besides Tony. For a moment, I didn’t know what to think. I wasn’t clear, yet, about how children came into being, but I had an obscure sense that I should be shocked. This was, somehow, a clue to the mystery of why my mother and father hadn’t lived together—why I’d met him recently, without her.

Daddy presented it so calmly, though, so casually, that it seemed the most natural thing in the world. And I felt a glimmer of excitement. I was an only child now, with Tony still in London and Anjelica off somewhere far away. There were seven Lynches; I liked the thought of a brother to play with. Additions were fine. What I dreaded, never quite consciously, was something—or someone—being taken away.

Anjelica was becoming mythical to me: the princess of St. Cleran’s, who had had my room before me. I barely remembered her. She was a distant, not quite real ideal. She had inherited our mother’s beauty, I knew, and was modeling in Paris and New York. More real was Angelica Healy, whose parents owned the shop next to Carrabanne, the local school. Betty sneered at the Healys’ presumption in giving a common Irish girl such a fancy, borrowed name.

When Tony came to visit, he taught me to riffle cards when I shuffled them. But he called me Fattypuff, relentlessly. I hated him for it. I wasn’t really fat, but I was pudgy, not tall and long-limbed as he and Anjelica were. When he gave me a book called
Fattypuffs and Thinifers
for my birthday, it was more than I could forgive. Birthday presents were supposed to be things that the birthday person liked, not mean jokes.

Every evening as I sat at the kitchen table eating my supper or memorizing the catechism (I went to the convent school in Loughrea), Tony strode in, a blast of energy like the wind crashing open a window. A falcon sat on a bloodstained leather gauntlet on his left hand, blinded by a little leather hood with a silly topknot, which bothered me because it robbed the bird of its dignity. He parked the falcon on a perch—the back of a chair, sometimes—and pulled a bloody carcass out of the satchel slung across his chest: a rabbit, or a smaller bird. He slit it open in the kitchen sink and gave the falcon tidbits of innards to eat. It turned my stomach, but the ease with which he carried out the ritual, his sense of comfort in the kitchen with Nurse and me, made me feel like I was part of his life, not an only child. Sometimes he’d start plucking the dead bird and feathers would drift around the kitchen, and then Nurse would shoo him outside.

He didn’t come during the holidays. That’s when Danny was there.

It was Easter time, gray-skied and rainy. Danny arrived like the sun. He had skin the color of honey, dark curls tinged with gold, and a constant smile. He had a slight Italian accent too, since he lived in Rome. He slept in the bedroom at the top of the stairs—the one that held the empty space where Mum ought to be—and filled it with life. Every morning I ran into Danny’s room, as I now thought of it, and jumped on his bed.

His mother, Zoë, was young and beautiful and exotic: half Indian and a quarter Persian, she told me, though her accent was English like Danny’s, flavored with Italian. I loved that she had two dots over the “e” in her name. Her last name wasn’t Huston, as I somehow understood that it couldn’t be, but Danny’s was. We, the Hustons, were so different from everyone around us that I didn’t expect us to follow the mother-father-children pattern of the Lynches and the Creaghs or even the O’Tooles. I didn’t ask. If everyone else was content with the way things were, so was I.

Zoë had met Dad before he started filming
Freud,
but pregnancy prevented her from playing the part he cast her in (two years later, she played Hagar in his film of
The Bible
). She slept in the Napoleon Room at the Big House. It was called that after the spectacular gilded bed that Napoleon was supposed to have slept in. (I always thought it was so like Dad to have such a bed. In fact it was Mum, the scion of the Bona-Soma-Peppa strain, who found it. A letter from Dad expresses his worry that it may be too short.) I had never gone upstairs at the Big House much before, since I was intimidated by Daddy’s majestic suite and the art-filled rooms for important guests. Unlike other women who came to stay—Marietta Tree, Baroness Pauline de Rothschild—Zoë didn’t give off the air that she should be approached with care. She laughed easily, and her clothes were floaty and strange, glittering with metallic threads. She let me play with her jewelry. The fact that the Napoleon Room was on the half landing, not all the way up the stairs, somehow fit her. I was in and out of the Napoleon Room, which delighted me because it had a washbasin hidden behind a door that was papered to match the wall, and because I could run circles through the bathroom that it shared with the Bhutan Room just above, and back down the stairs.

In the mornings I went up to the Big House with Danny—first to the Napoleon Room to say good morning to Zoë, then on up the stairs to Daddy’s room in the far corner above the drawing room. Daddy would be sitting in his kingly bed, with a red velvet canopy, having breakfast and reading the newspaper. It was a long way across the room from the door. Danny ran straight across the vast distance to kiss Dada, as he called him—which I thought was babyish—while I lingered at the door, running my fingers against the forest-green cut-velvet wallpaper and onto the polished brass of the light switch. Through the curved window near me I could see Daddy’s favorite horse, Frisco, grazing in the field. If I looked the other way, beyond the bed, I could just see the armchair in the bathroom upholstered in white terry cloth, as if the chair itself were a towel. I loved the
opulence of that room, and though I was welcome, I always tiptoed into it: Daddy’s private preserve, with no quarter for anyone to share it. It never occurred to me that Mum might once have slept in it too. In fact, she never did.

I envied Danny his fearlessness, and how bright the world was for him. He loved to ride, even though he fell off his pony, Sixpence, and had to have his arm in a sling. Nothing fazed him. When he stuck his hand in a wasps’ nest and got stung all over, he was laughing about it by dinnertime.

I wasn’t like that. I knew Daddy wanted me to learn to ride, but when Paddy Lynch put me on the donkey, I clung to its mane and my knees couldn’t squeeze the saddle tight enough to hold the sixpences that Paddy put there. I was terrified of falling. When I ran through the woods with Jackie and Caroline, I’d come to a halt at the stream that had carved a little chasm in the damp ground. The earth of the path sloped down on either side, where years of jumping feet had packed it firm, and the stream was probably only a foot or so below. Jackie and Caroline jumped it without breaking stride—then one of them would have to come back and hold out a hand for me. I wasn’t just afraid of hurting myself. It was a metaphysical fear. It would break my spirit if I fell.

Danny’s presence made me braver. He and Jerry Lynch led us girls into the ruined castle: a thirteenth-century tower which loomed stark and ragged against the sky. We weren’t allowed in there; the loose stones were dangerous, and even though its enclosure was surrounded by St. Cleran’s, it didn’t actually belong to Daddy. We had to climb a tree to get over the wall. I clung to the tree, edging along on my hands and knees, while the others just leaped from branch to wall and down to the forbidden ground. Even though I knew how feeble I was in comparison, once I reached that ground—with Danny helping me—I felt adventurous and strong.

The castle was smothered by dark green ivy. Inside, steps led up in a mossy spiral to a slit with a sloping lower edge, which the boys
said was for pouring boiling oil on the enemy attacking below. It was damp and slippery underfoot, and dark. The only light came through arrow slits, until the steps ran out and the walls caved away, leaving the rubble open to the sky.

I felt like I was in one of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, my favorites. Nurse always bought me a new Enid Blyton at the station bookstall when we took the train to Dublin for the dentist. Daddy disapproved of Enid Blyton, as was the fashion among intellectual parents. It was Gladys—his secretary, the low-voiced woman with the moonlike hair—who told me this, and told me not to tell him about them. I knew he would never see them for himself, as he never set foot in the Little House. Even when he came to play tennis on the court beside the kitchen garden, he always used the garden gate.

Gladys was, in her quiet way, my ally. She had been assigned to tell me, at Claridge’s, that Daddy was my father; but when she bent down in the drive and told me to call him “Daddy,” I felt it not as a task but as a kindness. She understood my fears. She didn’t live at the Big House, as Betty did, but in a studio on the opposite side of the archway from Daddy’s. There, in her private space, she wore loose caftans, and sometimes her hair was untied. She was too Anglo-Saxon to look foreign, but she seemed to come from a slower, softer world. I would knock on her door and wait for the calm, deliberate “Come in.” Her voice was strangely musical, like a cello idly stroked. She never called me pet names like “darling” or “honey,” and had a way of treating me like neither a child nor a grown-up, but simply as a being whom she took on its own terms. Like Daddy, she collected pre-Columbian art, but her pieces were small and friendly, dogs and funny creatures, not like the fearsome idols in the study at the Big House or the museum-quality antiquities immured behind glass. She let me touch them where they stood on shelves in front of her books, and she let me use her typewriter, which was surrounded by high stacks of paper. She seemed to type all day long. I, who traded on cleverness, admired her for it.