My father’s knees make peaks under the dust-colored twill of his trousers. His shoes curve elegantly around his feet, the color of the hard round chestnuts I pick up in the park. Fine socks cover the knobbly bones of his ankles like shiny skin. I think I can even see the bones on the corners of his shoulders sticking up under his white turtleneck. He has a wide mouth and an open face that looks soft, as if the bones are made of sponge. With his long arms, he reminds me of a monkey at the zoo. I can imagine him hanging from branches, except that he seems so dignified and important. There are other people in the room, and they wait for him to speak and laugh at his jokes.
He’s talking with them, but I feel him watching me.
I’m not sure what to do. I don’t know how you’re supposed to behave when you meet your father. So I play warily until it’s time to go.
When I leave, I have no sense that I will ever see this imposing, disconnected father again. I don’t understand that he is Tony and Anjelica’s father too.
I’m pretty sure I hadn’t felt the lack of a father before this. Fathers were remote beings in upper-middle-class London in the 1960s. I think the only one of my friends’ fathers I even met was Pat and Kate O’Toole’s father, Peter, a smoke-swathed, glittering presence in the middle part of the house, between their rooms upstairs and the basement kitchen where their Welsh grandmother, Mamgu, with her bony witch’s nose, held long, low-voiced, deliciously sinister conversations with Nurse, a teapot smothered in a knitted cozy steaming between them.
I didn’t ask about this man with his cigar like a king’s scepter, his tall knees and voice like dark treacle. I was shy—by nature, or because Mum’s death arrested me in the shy phase of a four-year-old. And I was afraid—of lively dogs, of falling off swings, of missing trains, of doing the wrong thing. The only questions I asked were play ones, like any small child. “Why is the sky blue, Nurse?” And when she came up with some answer, I’d ask “Why?” again, and “Why?” until she tired of the game.
The man was John Huston, the husband my mother had left. She had asked Leslie to take me because she didn’t want me to grow up in the Huston world. Did Mum know, somehow, that she was going to die? The question haunts me. Perhaps it was every single mother’s fear; I think it was some omen that settled with brutal certainty in her heart. She didn’t make a will, as if she didn’t want to admit to it publicly. But when her safe-deposit box was opened, there were small tags tied to her best pieces of jewelry with red string, each one labeled in her sloping print with one of three names: Tony, Anjelica, Allegra.
This father I met at the age of four was a man who pulled everything into orbit around him. Mum, with great force of will, had put a small sea between them; now that she was gone, he pulled me in. Even though, as Mum had wished, I was to live with Leslie—whom he knew, since Leslie had been Tony and Anjelica’s tutor for a season—I spent that first summer after she died in Ireland.
At Shannon Airport, Nurse and I were met by a weather-beaten man named, she told me, Paddy Lynch. They talked all through the long drive about people I’d never heard of, and half of Paddy’s words I couldn’t understand. Silently, I looked out at the patchwork of small fields stitched together by walls made of lacy gray stones. The green saturated my eyes so that they almost hurt. I thought I’d never seen anything so green, not even in Kent or Cornwall, where Mum had taken me for weekends and holidays.
I was amazed by how much Nurse and Paddy had to say to each other. Until this moment, I’d seen Nurse as a kind of extension of me, and myself as an extension of her. Even when Mum was alive, Nurse had tended to all my needs, and it was Nurse whom I was with if I wasn’t with somebody else. I knew Nurse was Irish, but I was shocked, and a bit affronted, that she knew this place and I did not. I felt as if we’d been cut into two people. I was different, and alone.
At last we went over a crossroads into a long drive through a wood, lined with lanterns on high black poles, like streetlights. It was daytime, so they weren’t lit, but still they were friendly. I learned later that my mother had set them there.
We drove through a pair of tall iron gates into a courtyard. The car lurched as its wheels sank into deep gravel. When I got out, I found myself standing in front of a house exactly like the houses I drew: a door in the middle with a window on either side, three windows across the top, a sloping roof, and a chimney in the middle with smoke curling out. The front door was open, and waiting outside it was a man with wild black hair. He almost ran to Nurse. They took each other’s hands.
I hadn’t fully understood that Nurse had once lived in the place where we were going—my father’s house. It looked like she was coming home.
Two girls my own age came out of a house on the far side of the courtyard, and some older boys, followed by a heavy woman who embraced Nurse. These were the Lynches, Paddy’s family, come out to see this new daughter of Mr. Huston’s. It was a whole world I’d come into, and suddenly I was grateful that Nurse knew it even though I didn’t. She led me into a stone-floored kitchen and sat me at a round table in front of the window. I watched while she made me a sandwich and got me a glass of black-currant Ribena, my favorite drink. She knew exactly where everything was.
“This is the Little House,” she told me. “Mr. Huston lives in the Big House.”
She didn’t say any more about it. And she didn’t call him “your father.”
She led me upstairs to a bedroom that looked out over the courtyard. “This used to be Anjelica’s room,” she said. “Now it’ll be yours.”
The whole house felt familiar, and I sank into its embrace, not wondering why. The Little House had been my mother’s house, though I didn’t know it then. The soft gray-blues and greens were like those in Mum’s house on Maida Avenue. Even though Mum had not wanted me to be here, her spirit remained to cradle me. I understood that this house was ours: just for Nurse and me.
The next day, Nurse took my hand. “I’ll take you up to the Big House,” she said.
We walked out of the courtyard and farther up the drive. We crossed a bridge, with a little waterfall on the upstream side and on the downstream side a wide pool thick with watercress, and in it an island, and on the island a little hut, like a picture in a storybook.
Beyond the bridge, we met someone coming toward us: the woman with the moonlike hair. She crouched down beside me.
“You should call him Daddy,” she said.
We rounded a corner. Looming ahead of us was the back of a tall gray stone house. The drive turned to gravel and curved around the house, the side of which was rounded into a semicircle. We didn’t follow it. Instead we crossed a flagstone courtyard and entered through a back door.
Inside was a big space, with a ping-pong table. I’d never seen one before. We skirted it, and climbed a narrow staircase. At the top of the staircase was a door. Nurse opened it and pushed me gently through.
We were in a big, wood-floored hall, underneath a high curving staircase. The ceiling was higher than any I’d ever seen. Beyond, I could see another hall, that one floored in black marble, and in the far wall the inside of what was obviously the front door. It was strange to have come in from the back and up through the bowels of the house, as if I was sneaking into a world where I might or might not be welcome. I reached for Nurse’s hand.
She led me through another door, into a huge, high-ceilinged kitchen, with pots hanging down, little niches lined with bright blue-patterned tiles, and, between two tall windows, a shadowy painting of a lady pulling aside her dress to show her heart pierced with arrows. At a table in the center was a woman in a white uniform, her hands floury with baking. Her face was soft and round like the dough.
“This is Allegra,” said Nurse.
Mrs. Creagh wiped her hands and bent down to me. I felt like crying. I was overwhelmed: too many people, too many houses, too many rooms. I wanted to run and hide. But I held myself together, too proud to cling to Nurse’s skirts.
“You’ll be looking for Miss O’Kelly,
” said Mrs. Creagh to Nurse.
Another woman came in, with masklike makeup and firmly set hair. “You may call me Betty,” she said to me. “Your father is in the study. Come.” Nurse didn’t follow.
On the far side of the hall, Betty opened a door. Inside it was another door; the walls were so thick all the doors came in pairs. Suddenly the house wasn’t scary anymore. Those double doors pocked it with deliciously secret spaces.
The inner door stood open. Betty led me through.
On a green sofa sat the man I’d met in the hotel room at Claridge’s. The long arms and legs were the same, the bony knees and elbows, the cigar, whose ash he tipped into a stone bowl a foot high. He put down the pages he was reading.
“Come over here, honey,” he said to me. I had stopped just inside the door, next to Betty. Behind him, on shelves, sat three big stone men, cross-legged, with square-cut headdresses over blank, frightening faces. The low fire in the grate gave off thin wisps of smoke, but no flames. It smelled sweet, like grass. Through the windows I could see horses in a field.
I walked over to him. Betty stayed by the door. He took my hands and kissed me on the forehead. “Welcome to St. Cleran’s, Allegra,” he said. “I hope you’ll be happy here.”
He went away soon after that, and I found myself living one of those stories where there aren’t any parents, and the children run free. I played with the Lynch girls, Jackie and Caroline, in the big walled garden behind the Little House, thick with climbing roses and lilacs. We swung on the trailing branches of a weeping willow, and jumped in the piles of new-cut grass. We snuck into the kitchen garden and ate peas fresh from the vine, cracking the pods like eggs under our fingernails and pulling out the peas slowly enough to hear the tendon snap.
It was light way past my bedtime. For months I never saw night.
Betty—Betts, as I was soon calling her—was the estate manager, and the spinner of the tale. She took us into the woods to look for fairy rings, faint circles in the mossy ground where the fairies’ dancing feet had trod, surrounded by mushrooms which they used for chairs when they got tired. If it was raining, she set up one of Daddy’s giant stone ashtrays at the foot of the stairs for staircase golf. She led us on walks with the dogs, straight out across the fields, climbing over the low stone walls to special places where we searched for lucky four-leafed clovers among the shamrocks. She showed us how to soothe nettle stings with dock leaves. She insisted that the ha-ha—a wide trench in front of the Big House that kept the cows in their field—had been dug all the way through the earth to China. I used to imagine hordes of little yellow men with swords emerging from it, come to conquer us.
One warm day she piled us into the car. “We’re going to the beach,” she said.
We drove for hours. There were few cars on the roads. Mostly we saw tinkers, their horse-drawn wagons parked by the side of the road, sometimes a woman cooking on a fire and lots of red-haired, dirty-faced children staring stonily as we passed by. In Connemara, wild ponies leaped across the craggy outcrops, and the few fields were as small as rooms, dug in among the rocks. Betty drove fast around the corners, and we girls flung ourselves from side to side on the back seat, in fits of hysterical giggles.
We drove down a lane so narrow that a car could barely fit through, and stopped at a thatched cottage. An old couple were waiting for us, with a pot of tea and fresh bread. They spoke only Irish, a craggy language that matched their faces, so lined and weathered and toothless that I could only tell which was the woman and which was the man by their clothes.
We put on our bathing suits and walked on down the lane—and there, hidden in an inlet of the rocky shore, was a perfect little beach of yellow sand. Seaweed-shrouded rocks shielded it from the waves. The water was icy cold but we got in anyway, and Betty put her hands under my stomach and taught me to swim. I have a photo of myself from that day, sitting on a rock, pointing at something far in the distance.
There were no family photographs at St. Cleran’s, nothing tangible to recall Mum, just the half-understood relics of her presence here sometime in the past. Nobody at St. Cleran’s spoke of her: not the Lynches nor Paddy Coyne with the wild black hair, not Betty O’Kelly, not Mrs. Creagh. Even Nurse rarely mentioned her. Nurse knew the sadness that had dogged Mum when she lived here, and she knew that Mum hadn’t wanted this for me. She was, I know now, privately angry at Betty for enchanting me, for taking my mother’s place. Old-fashioned as she was, she thought it wasn’t her place to say anything, so she fumed silently and avoided the subject.
In the long slanting light of that Irish summer, Mum became a kind of ghost to me. Not a real ghost like the one that paced the Big House at night, which Betty told tales of to scare us; nothing so definite as a warmth or a presence nearby—more like a whisper that you’re not sure you’ve heard. She became my secret. I knew that the back bedroom in the Little House, at the top of the stairs, had been hers. The door was always closed. Every time I passed it—every time I went to my room—the sensation of her washed through me. Sometimes, if Nurse wasn’t there, I put my hand on the doorknob and pretended to turn it. One day I did turn it, and opened the door. My heart pounded as if I was doing something forbidden, even though I knew I was not.
Inside was a sunny room overlooking the beautiful garden I loved; a bed with a beige bedspread, impersonal and, if anything, masculine; and shelves of books. I felt silly for fearing, or hoping for, something that I couldn’t even name.
Back in London when the summer ended, I climbed the stairs of Leslie’s house to the room that was to be mine. There was my pink-striped bed, the paint nubbly on the iron rods. The blue-striped bed was in Nurse’s room, as it had been in Maida Avenue. Instantly I felt resentful. I didn’t want to live here. I wanted the blue bed, and nobody had cared enough to know that and give it to me. I had lost my mother. I deserved the blue bed, but I wouldn’t expose my hurt by asking for it. Anyway, nothing would make me feel better enough.
Aged five now, I was one of the big girls at Stepping Stones, in the Dolphins class upstairs. When I was younger, I had gazed up those right-angled stairs to the heights where the Dolphins and the Eagles were, and longed for the day when I would be important enough to climb them. Now that I had made it, I didn’t care. Aside from the blue-striped bed, I didn’t care about anything.
I can’t blame Leslie for writing to Ireland to say he couldn’t keep me. Ferriel had a new baby, and my sullen gloom must have strained her nerves. I was the child of a woman with whom, she probably knew, her husband had been at least half in love—a woman adored by many for her beauty, wit, and intelligence, now haloed by a sudden and gruesome death. In Ferriel’s place, I would have felt obscurely judged and found wanting.
Mum had wanted me to grow up a little English girl. She chose Leslie to look after me instead of her own parents, who lived outside New York City. Leslie tried his best, and the guilt of his failure scorched him. He disappeared from my life for twenty years, until finally, out of the blue, he found the courage to call me and ask, tentatively, if I would let him back in.
3
High in a tower of Houghton Hall, in the low eastern hump of England, my mother’s letters lay locked in a trunk. Tony took charge of them when she died and stored them there, in his brother-in-law’s house, when he left England. On a midsummer day in 2006, I went to find them.
Houghton is probably a hundred years older than St. Cleran’s, and was built by the first prime minister of England. It has a tower at each corner, with a fat, pointy roof like the tents you see in old paintings of tournaments. I took an elevator, then stairs, to climb up into one of the tower attic rooms. It was octagonal, its high pointed ceiling ribbed like the inside of a strange fish. The plaster was bare and finely cracked, softened by centuries and yellowed by smoke. An arc of low, square-paned windows looked out onto the pillowy tops of old trees and, far below, smooth grass glittering in the sun.
There were angular piles draped in heavy canvas dust sheets and, in a
corner opposite the windows, a cluster of tin trunks and leather suitcases. I found a bunch of keys in a chest of metal drawers, but they fit only some of the locks. A paper clip sprang the locks of others. Trunk after trunk contained sweaters, falconry equipment, children’s report cards and letters, random odds and ends.
The last trunk was navy-blue tin, with steel corners and a tarnished brass lock. It had to be the one. No key opened it; not the paper clip; not a corkscrew. I went downstairs and asked for a screwdriver.
The trunk breathed out the air it had held since 1969, the year Mum died. The dusty sweet smell of old paper flooded up into my face, stopping my hands where they rested on the manila folders that topped the pile inside. That smell had followed me from Ireland through all the houses I lived in, buried deep in the gutter of an old paperback of Alice in Wonderland, which I believed had once been Mum’s. As a child, as a teenager, I opened the book and pressed it against my face so that its pages blotted out the light, and inhaled, along with the delicious weirdness of the story, the melancholy of my old, accustomed loss.
I didn’t read the letters there, in that beautiful, octagonal, sun-washed room. They came back with me to New Mexico, where they sat in a suitcase at the foot of my bed for almost a year. Finally, in another big, sunlit house—this one built by my husband that I’m not married to, as they say in Taos—surrounded by the snowy fields of a bitterly cold winter, I laid them out, and explored, very gently, the hinterlands of my mother’s life.
Almost all the letters from the trunk were written to her. There is a box of girlish back-and-forth with her ballerina schoolmate Tanaquil LeClercq, a card “from the desk of Jean-Paul Sartre,” a thank-you note from Lauren Bacall for Mum’s condolences on Bogie’s death, picture postcards from Truman Capote, a mountain of rambling scrawls from her father, terse telegrams from Dad…and some names I’d never heard of before, letter after letter mounting into high piles of passionate longing. Relics of her shadow life.
Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Page 2
