Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (6 page)

How could I have made that memory up? It was so detailed, so explicit. I could feel the grip of the vacuum as my thumb was held in the knothole, hear the pop and flinch with the pain when I yanked it out. My faith in myself, in my knowledge of what was real and what wasn’t, shattered. And yet another thread snapped that had connected me to the house on Maida Avenue, and my mother.

W
hen I was three, Mum took me to her father’s holiday house on Lago Maggiore, in northern Italy. I think we flew. A year and a half later, she decided to go by car, and she didn’t take me. That’s when she was killed.

Grampa’s house was tall and white-painted, with a terrace overlooking the lake’s edge. It was summer, and the tile floors felt cool and dry under the sweaty soles of my feet. Sometimes waves would lap against the rocks below the house, and excitedly I would trace the line of white foam out to the middle of the lake until my eyes landed on the speedboat that had caused them. Time moved slowly there; even at three, I felt it.

One day, as we lingered around the lunch table, the doors to the terrace half shut against the heat, there was a thud from upstairs. I jumped half off my chair.

I stared up at the chandelier, its glass diamonds jangling, tinkling, falling silent—waiting for the crash I was sure would come.

“Don’t worry, it’s fixed tight,” said Nana as she fished a fat drop of crystal out of the bowl of peaches on the table. She chuckled, like the sound of water rumbling when you turn on the hot-water tap. “It’s just Grampa coming down from standing on his head.”

Mum is only a shadow in that memory, though I know she was there.

I remembered Nana well when I saw her again in the summer of 1971, the summer I would turn seven: her broad smile, her short waves of gray hair swept back from her forehead as if she were facing into a brisk wind. She was standing outside the customs hall of JFK Airport, in a sleeveless dress which left her strong arms bare.

“Welcome to America!”

She hugged me, her large handbag bouncing against my back. Her laugh rang against the hard marble floor. Nana’s laugh burst like a mortar shell, shattering the membrane that separated me from the world. At first I felt assaulted by it—but I grew to love it for what it said about Nana: her lack of inhibition, her imperviousness to embarrassment, her devil-may-care willingness to have fun. I was dogged by shyness and second thoughts, and whenever Nana laughed—which was often—they lost a little of their power.

I found out later that Dad hated Nana’s laugh. He thought it manic and unladylike. I got the impression that somehow it scared him.

The air outside the terminal was thick and sticky in my nose as Nana led Nurse and me to a long blue Cadillac. I’d never known air like that, so heavy I could feel its weight on my skin. On top of the long flight from Ireland, it made me feel fuzzy-headed, and I struggled to focus as we drove east along the Long Island Expressway.
There were no roads that big and crowded in Ireland, and the Cadillac went fast, with a low growling roar.

My uncle Fraser drove. He wore black mirrored sunglasses, held by thin wire frames, which made him look casually sinister, like a villain in
Hawaii Five-O
—as I imagined one, never having seen it past the opening titles. He didn’t talk much, which I soon sensed was due not to dark intentions but to a kind of diminishment of spirit. He seemed to have no work other than to attend to Grampa, driving him back and forth from the city (as it was always referred to), doing whatever errand needed doing. He’d married a woman with six children—tiny Aunt Rose, who marched for women’s lib and burned her bra at the state capitol—and even in his own house he seemed overwhelmed. He was the youngest of Grampa’s five children, and I wondered if he’d spent his childhood being constantly told to shut up.

Finally we reached the town of Miller Place, and turned up a dirt driveway, bordered by long grass and high hedges of honeysuckle. We passed a house with a garden in front, then the road plunged into the shadows of a thickety wood. On the far side of the wood, up a little hill, stood Nana and Grampa’s house: flat-roofed, with an upper story like the pilot’s cabin of a ship surrounded by a wide skirt of roof. There on the roof was Grampa, on his head.

He was wearing shorts. I could see his bare, broad back and his legs, crossed at the ankles, confidently reaching into the sky. His face was turned away from the driveway, as if it didn’t matter to him when we arrived, or if we did at all. When the car stopped, I could hear him:

“There’s Grampa,” said Nana for my benefit, barely looking at him herself. He didn’t come down off his head, or show any sign that our arrival might be a reason to stop what he was doing and do something else, like say hello. That was pretty much how I
remembered him from the house on Lago Maggiore—self-contained and upside down. This time I was old enough to wonder why he was singing about the morning when it was already afternoon.

Grampa spent most of his waking hours on the throne of his own triangled arms. Like an obsessive, crazy version of Dad, he expected his world to shape itself to him.

“We’re having a real American barbecue for your first day here,” Nana said to me as we went inside. “Have you ever had a hamburger?”

I had, the kind that Nurse made in the kitchen of the Little House, ground beef with diced onions and parsley, held together with egg, and I liked them a lot. I wondered how an American hamburger could be different, but I was shy of asking. Besides, I had an Irish accent now and Nana was barely able to understand me.

“Have a rest, then we’ll go down to your uncle Nappy’s house.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. In England and Ireland, a nappy was what babies peed and pooped in. I’d never be able to call him that. I settled on “Uncle Nap,” but it never felt quite right, so I tried not to call him anything.

He had actually been christened Anthony, after Grampa, but when he was a baby Grampa decided he looked like Napoleon. Of course, a lot of babies look like Napoleon. But nothing could argue Grampa out of a conviction once he got it into his head, and here was visible evidence of his own grandfather’s Bonaparte heritage. I’m sure, if he was alive, he’d look at a photo of my own son as a baby with his hand stuck between the buttons of his shirt and see only further proof of the impressive strength of the Bona-Peppa-Soma strain.

Uncle Nap was in the garden in front of his house, wearing shorts and a shirt unbuttoned all the way, a big spiky fork in one hand. Smoke leaked out of a shiny contraption in front of him. His French wife, Aunt Dani, was laying out platters of coleslaw and other salady things in the kitchen. I was handed a plate made of paper. Its floppiness worried me.

“This,” said Uncle Nap, forking it off the grill and onto the bun that Nana had laid open on my plate, “is a real American hamburger.”

It was weirdly flat and compacted, as if an elephant had sat on it. I wasn’t at all sure how to handle it.

“Put the top on and pick it up! Wait a minute, don’t you want some ketchup?”

My cousin Martine, two years older than me, was staring in amazement, as if she couldn’t believe that anyone could never have seen a hamburger bun before. Self-consciously I bit into it. The bun was cottony and cardboardy at the same time, how a box of Q-tips would taste if it had been ground up and baked. I could barely swallow it. I saw Nana’s face as she watched me pick at the hamburger patty with a fork, and I knew I’d disappointed her.

I’d never been in a house as informal as Uncle Nap’s. The kitchen bled into the living room (no “drawing room,” no “study”), and my cousins had the run of it, getting their own food when they wanted it and eating with the grown-ups as if that were normal. The Lynches’ house at St. Cleran’s was the closest to it that I’d known, but that was different: the Lynches worked for us and they had seven children, which I realized was, in Mum’s and Daddy’s world, unseemly. In the houses I knew, the children had their separate spaces and separate routines—and it was the same in the books I read, like
Peter Pan
and
The Secret Garden.
I’d always felt peripheral: not unwanted or unloved, but I knew my place. I was drawn to my cousins’ freedom, but I knew it wasn’t mine.

I felt like a freak. My voice, my clothes, the food I was familiar with: nothing fit in here. This was my family, I knew, but I was a stranger. I’d never get the hang of being American, I thought, and I decided I didn’t want to. I was only there for the summer, anyway.

On Sunday mornings, all the cousins would come up to Nana and Grampa’s house. Grampa would kneel in the middle of the living
room, lace his fingers tightly together with his forearms flat on the floor, nestle his head into the cradle of his hands, curl into an upside-down fetal position, and finally, methodically, power up into a headstand. Six or seven or eight pairs of legs would fling themselves up into the air next to him, in a raggedy line. Grampa would kick it off with the enthusiasm that was his almost delusional spiritual practice:

As Grampa blasted it out, the tempo thudding like a battering ram, the cousins droned along dutifully: “Oh what a beautiful day…”

One verse was all that was required. I’m not sure I ever heard Grampa sing beyond that, even by himself. Then seven or eight or nine pairs of feet would hit the floor, and Grampa would dole out a quarter to each cousin in pocket money. It seemed measly, even to a little girl who had never had pocket money before.

Nana tried to teach me to stand on my head so that I could join in this family scene. I could barely put my head on the floor. When I finally built up the courage to kick up my legs, with Nana holding my ankles, it was the worst combination of feeling lost in space and on the verge of crashing to the earth. I was afraid of Grampa’s contempt, so after that first Sunday I made sure I wasn’t in the living room when my cousins arrived.

The singing was for the benefit of
prana
, because it encouraged deep, regular breathing. When Grampa was right way up, he hawked up mucus from his throat every few minutes and spat it with great force and satisfaction. Old newspapers were spread out all around him—changed daily by Nana, I suppose, as I can’t imagine Grampa doing anything so menial for himself. They covered great swathes of his room, which took up the whole of the upstairs. (Nana slept in a room off the kitchen, as far as possible from Grampa.) When he
came down to watch television, the coffee table and the floor around it, along with half the sofa, disappeared under drifts of yellowing newsprint.

This was, for Grampa, pretty much what yoga amounted to: standing on your head and singing, and sitting in lotus position and spitting. It was, as far as I could see, more or less what his days amounted to; and he was as contented as a cat. Uncle Nap ran the restaurant in the city. Nana cooked his meals and did his laundry, and aside from that, she more or less ignored him.

Every day, in late morning, Nana packed us all into her wood-paneled station wagon to go to the Beach Club. The house actually had its own beach, at the base of the cliff on which it sat: but it was a long way down—and up. It was solitary, too, and—though he never went down there—part of Grampa’s domain. The Beach Club was Nana’s. She would sit under a big umbrella in a folding chair, or wade into the calm water and float on her back. Nurse didn’t swim, just sat under the umbrella looking hot, with
Reader’s Digest
on her lap. Aunt Dani lay on a lounge chair in the sun, with the straps of her bikini top undone and pebbles wedged between her toes. There was something intensely feminine about Aunt Dani’s routine, as if she were doing something in public that ought to be private. I put it down to her being French.

I’d been to the beach a few times in Ireland, at the cottage in Connemara and at the O’Tooles’ house in Clifden, but the water was so cold it made my teeth chatter. The Long Island Sound was a bath in comparison. There were no waves, except on stormy days. I could see Connecticut on the far side.

Martine and Nancy—Uncle Fraser’s stepdaughter, the only girl among Aunt Rose’s seven children—taught me to swim out to the raft moored offshore. We jumped off in cannonballs, and caught little stingless transparent jellyfish and stuffed them down one another’s bathing suit. We did the dead man’s float, facedown, and pulled our bathing suits aside to compare our tans.
Both Martine and Nancy had dark Italian skin, and I roasted myself trying to be like them. Every night I sprayed on Solarcaine to soothe the burn.

When we were tired of swimming, or in the hour after lunch during which we were forbidden to go into the water, we’d walk up and down the pebbly shore looking for beach glass. It came from bottles thrown overboard from boats, we figured, but it was transformed by the gentle, relentless action of the ocean into something mystical and strange: the hard surfaces sandblasted into a translucent fog of color, all jagged edges worn away so that the shards were rounded like cabochons. The pieces lay everywhere among the ordinary stones, the way you’d find jewels in an Enid Blyton story. Any pieces that weren’t perfectly smooth and misted over we threw back into the water as far as we could.

Most of the beach glass was white, green, or brown. Occasionally we’d find a piece of blue, always tiny, as bright as a sapphire. We decided the blue had to come from Milk of Magnesia bottles, though it was hard to believe that something so rare and precious came from such lowly beginnings. Once I found a piece of red, about the size of my pinkie fingernail. I thought it was more beautiful than the ruby in the ring Martine wore sometimes, which had been found on the sink in the ladies’ room at the restaurant in the city.

On August 26, I told everyone at the Beach Club that it was my birthday. One man replied that it was his birthday too, and he was seventy-seven—exactly seventy years older than me. I was amazed, almost, that it could be possible for the two of us to be there, in the same place; I felt the hand of destiny. Two days later, the seventy-seven-year-old man appeared with a present for me: a jewelry chest about the size of a shoe box, with dovetailed joints and three drawers lined with red felt. He’d made it himself, like a woodcarver in a fairy tale. It came back to Ireland with me and sat on the windowsill, where the early sun, slanting across the courtyard, made the wood glow. I had little to keep in it, but that didn’t matter; the chest itself
was the treasure, since it had been made especially for me. Fingering its tiny knobs, pulling open the smooth-sliding drawers, I was the princess. I sat beside my little chest every morning, practicing my knitting—casting on, unraveling, casting on, unraveling—while Nurse brushed my hair.