Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  Maybe I was dreaming him. I was amazed that he had remembered me, amazed that he had left the laughing and drinking to come upstairs and sit on my bed again, draw a hand across my clammy forehead and make sure there was a glass of juice beside me. We were in a cocoon, just the two of us: in this high, dark, quiet space. Did they notice, downstairs, that he wasn’t there? Of course they must. But no one would guess that he was here in the Bhutan Room, with me.

  A few months later, just as suddenly, Nurse and I were moved back into the Little House. Talk of selling vanished. All was back to normal. When school finished, I packed my blue suitcase again—the one that went with me everywhere, which had my initials, A.H., stenciled on it in white—and we went back to Nana and Grampa’s house for the summer. I left my treasure chest behind.

  6

  Grampa’s restaurant was in a brownstone at 150 East Fifty-fifth Street, with an awning over the sidewalk reading, in cursive script, Tony and Tony’s Wife. I thought it was insulting—but characteristic of Grampa—that he had a name and Nana didn’t. I’ve since learned that it was originally just called Tony’s Wife, and was a spin-off of Grampa’s first restaurant, Tony’s. When they closed the first one, they merged the names.

  I imagine Nana at the time she married Grampa. It was during Prohibition, and the restaurant was a speakeasy; he had two motherless children, officials to charm, policemen to bribe, and liquor to hide. Scottish as she was, Nana was swept off her feet by Grampa’s swashbuckling canniness, along with her own maternal instincts. It was a strange marriage; not devoid of affection, but marked by emotional and physical cruelty.

  In his letters to Mum, Grampa swings between contempt for Nana and dependence on her. In his eyes, she existed either to enable his glory or as a drag on it. She, not surprisingly, was prone to depression, and turned to Mum as an ally. She told Mum about going in front of some city board for a liquor license and being asked if she’d ever been convicted of a crime. “Marrying Tony Soma,” she answered, which made the liquor-board guys laugh. It made me laugh too—until I sensed Mum’s silently pleading misery at being caught in the battle between her father and her stepmother: on one side, blood, the man to whom she owed everything, and on the other, no blood, but the only mother love she’d consciously known.

  There was never any question of Nana leaving her life with Grampa, and by the time I knew her, she’d carved out her own space. I liked seeing her in the city, being served a solitary, queenly dinner at the round table in “Nana’s sitting room” on the first floor above the restaurant by a waiter in formal jacket and bow tie. It was only when I saw the waiter bowing slightly as he set the plate in front of her, shaking out her napkin for her, that I realized that I didn’t like how Grampa treated her. Grampa saw himself as an unusually wise and spiritually evolved being, and, so very pleased with himself, he considered himself above the demands of common kindness. I didn’t buy it.

  No one said it, but I got the idea that Grampa hated Daddy. I picture the two of them as chimpanzees tussling over Mum, with Grampa thrashing in fury as he, the old alpha, was toppled by the new. As Daddy’s daughter, I took it personally. I was loyal to him. I couldn’t help comparing him to Grampa: each was a king in his own realm, surrounded by a court. But Daddy’s world had been run for everybody’s happiness, while Grampa’s had one transcendent purpose, which was himself. Grampa set himself above the world; Daddy enthusiastically took part in it. When Daddy looked at me, sketched me, I was a person, flesh and blood in front of him. I was real.

  On one trip to the city sometime in August, Martine and I were dressed up in our best clothes and taken to Radio City Music Hall for the premiere of Daddy’s latest movie, Fat City. It was a story of down-and-out boxers, and way over the heads of two little girls (though later Martine excitedly told me she knew what it meant when one of the characters said, “He threw me down on that bed and he raped me!”). Afterward, there was a party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Martine and I ran around among the tall statues. The white marble floor was pale and cold, hard beneath our feet. Everything glittered: the marble, the lights, the beaded dresses and jewels. Daddy was at the center of it; it was like seeing his power source, flashes of electricity whizzing around him. It energized him; it made the kingdom of St. Cleran’s possible.

  Standing beside Daddy was a woman unlike anyone I’d ever met. Her hair fell back from her face in waves, like a lion’s mane. Her shoulders were bare, and her skin was tanned and freckled by the sun. She was much younger than him—and younger than the grand women who had visited St. Cleran’s and stayed in the Gray Room, those ladies with thick lipstick, pale skin, and patronizing hands. She didn’t wear that slashing lipstick, and she was wearing a dress that none of those women would have worn: covered all over in pale lavender sequins and held up only at the back of her neck, like a bathing suit. Those women had carried hard, invisible shells around themselves, like display cases; she gave the impression of hiding nothing.

  “This is Cici,” said Daddy. She sank down so that our faces were level, and took both my hands for a moment, as if to see whether I was prepared to be hugged. I wasn’t—she’d taken me completely by surprise. Even Zoë hadn’t done anything like that.

  Cici’s smile was square, seeming to turn down at the corners because it didn’t turn up. There was something wonderfully casual and self-possessed about it, as if she were smiling for nobody’s pleasure but her own. If you shared it, you were sharing a joke, or a secret. I didn’t know what the secret was, but I loved the complicity of her smile.

  When we said good-bye, Cici embraced me. This time I let her, willingly. I couldn’t understand why she was genuinely pleased to meet me, but I accepted wholeheartedly that she was. I had no idea what connection she had to Daddy—or might have to me. My universe had fixed points: Daddy, Nurse, Betty, Gladys, Nana and Grampa. It didn’t occur to me that the stars might shift their courses, or that the very shape of my universe might change out of recognition. I’m not sure I even wondered whether I would see Cici again.

  Not long afterward, Daddy wrote to tell me that he and Cici had been married. I think the letter said that he hoped we would become close. He didn’t use the word “stepmother”—and I didn’t think of her as a replacement for Mum since I had no conception of Mum as Daddy’s wife. In any case, Daddy was virtually a different species from the husbands-and-wives-and-children whom I knew. Theirs was not a pattern that I expected Daddy—or Daddy and me—to follow.

  He also told me that I wouldn’t be going back to St. Cleran’s. Nana and Grampa’s house was my home now.

  I didn’t ask him, or anyone else, why I’d been exiled from St. Cleran’s. His marriage to Cici obviously had something to do with it, but I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t picture her at St. Cleran’s, with its rainy skies and headscarf-wearing women and a butler banging a gong to announce lunch. I didn’t know much about her, other than that she was from Los Angeles, and she was clearly at home in Daddy’s world of money and famous friends. She wasn’t an actress; it didn’t occur to me that she might “be” anything other than herself. I understood why Daddy was entranced by her. I was. Somehow I had the sense that she knew who I was, too. Maybe she had convinced Daddy that I was better off in Long Island with my cousins than as a solitary Irish princess with the groom’s children for friends. Fleetingly I wondered whether I should have put more effort into becoming friends with the other girls at the convent school in Loughrea.

  Still, after a second summer collecting beach glass with my cousins, I wasn’t unhappy with the change. I sensed that Daddy was starting off on a new life and leaving the old one behind. It seemed natural that I would be left in his wake. Other people had been found to look after me, and nobody seemed to think I would have any feelings about it at all—so, conveniently, I didn’t. If Daddy and I weren’t both living at St. Cleran’s—which had happened only in short bursts, anyway—I had no conception of what life with Daddy could possibly be.

  Great chasms s
hivered the cliff below Nana and Grampa’s house, scoring its surface into deep wrinkles like tissue paper that’s been used too many times. It was, visibly, falling away. When Grampa had built the house—when Mum was a girl and first living on her own in California—he’d built a bocce court between the house and the cliff edge: a long narrow rectangle of sand rimmed with boards. Now it was half gone, and the cliff edge crept closer to the house every day. The wooden staircase that led down to the beach ended in midair.

  The certainty that one day the house itself would tumble too fascinated me, the way disasters do in a country you’ve barely heard of. It was neither sad nor frightening, just inevitable and satisfyingly dramatic. I didn’t like the house much. Despite all its windows, it felt dark, and it was flimsy after the thick stone of St. Cleran’s. The Irish windows that I loved were set deep, so that looking through them felt like looking through a telescope or a peephole, and the golden-gray light ran liquid through the old, swirling glass. The Long Island glass was as flat and featureless as plastic, and marred by ugly screens. I was offended by the miserly shallowness of the windowsills.

  Nurse and I slept in the guest bedroom—she in the double bed, which I soon joined her in, and I, theoretically, in the single one beside it. The white candlewick bedspreads were thin, like the windows: worn and saggy by nature, they pulled my spirit down. I’d grown accustomed to rooms Mum had furnished with deep colors and strange objects enriched by the marks of age. Here, old things were just old: tired and visibly ready for their end.

  And here too there was talk of selling up. The place was too big; Grampa couldn’t support all these households. I bridled inwardly, on everyone’s behalf but my own. Uncle Nap worked hard running the restaurant in the city, and I didn’t see how it could be his fault that its heyday was past. Uncle Fraser didn’t have a real job—but Grampa required a flunky, and if it wasn’t Uncle Fraser, who would it be?

  I didn’t miss St. Cleran’s, in the sense of longing to be back there. There was no point. That temporary move to the Big House had shut me down. I was to be housed where convenience dictated; I had felt, in the heart of my family, like a guest. I would always stay in other people’s rooms, so I might as well get used to it. I’d just been moved on again—and somewhere in my mind I knew it wouldn’t be the last time. I didn’t think of asking for a poster or a bright bedspread, or color on the walls. I had a nomad’s indifference. But I didn’t have a nomad’s soul.

  A few of my things from Ireland caught up with me five or six years later. I never saw my treasure chest again.

  Grampa descended from his upstairs realm every night for dinner, and to watch the news on TV. It was 1972: every night, flag-draped coffins came home from Vietnam, families cried over MIAs and POWs, angry people marched against the war. Then, during the Olympics—which Nana and I watched fervently—the Israeli athletes were murdered. The world outside was full of death, mourning, hijacked planes and cruise ships—and I was comforted. I wasn’t the only one who had seen someone they loved disappear into nothingness; my mother wasn’t the only one who died. What had happened to me was important enough to be on the news—but multiplied so many times that it was normal. It cheered me that there were protests: people who wouldn’t accept it and wanted it changed. Still, I felt wiser than they were. I knew that death was unjust, and didn’t care.

  Mum was visible in the house, but never spoken of. On the wall near the fireplace was a vertical row of oval black silhouettes of Grampa’s five children, as children. On the mantelpiece rested a big, unframed print of Philippe Halsman’s famous photograph The Act of Creation: Mum’s face and bare shoulders framed by a carved picture frame held in the crook of a naked man’s arm as he lies on his side, his elaborately muscled back to the camera, while the artist Jean Cocteau reaches through the frame to draw a paintbrush along Mum’s eyebrow. It is, in its way, everything Grampa wished for his beautiful daughter to be: a muse, an object of art. A three-dimensional human as the punch line of an artist’s joke.

  It bothered me that the photograph wasn’t framed. I knew it ought to have been; neither Mum nor Dad would have left it leaning against the wall, bending under its own weight, fading and staining in the humid air. Maybe Grampa was angry at Mum for having died, I thought, and in revenge he was letting her photograph molder away.

  There was no sign of Mum the person with a life of her own: no photos of her grown-up and inhabiting her life; no photos of her with Tony and Anjelica or me. I wondered if for Grampa she’d died—or been embalmed—long before: when she left New York, left him. It nagged at me that the unreal Mum in this house—her face blacked out in the silhouette, objectified in the photograph—was more materially real than the Mum whose image faded and flickered inside my head. It was as if one Mum was the shadow, or the echo, of the other. When I looked at that photo—as I did many times a day, every time I walked through the living room—I couldn’t be sure which was which.

  I was retracing Mum’s footsteps—but backward. From Maida Avenue to St. Cleran’s to Long Island—and with each step I took, the last place disappeared into Mum’s future. I brought nothing with me but my clothes and my blue suitcase, which was mine because it had my initials on it—and Nurse, who was so much a part of me (now that she and I were equally foreigners) that I hardly conceived of her as a separate person. She never talked of the past. I had no tangible evidence that my previous worlds had ever existed, no proof of Mum’s future and her death, but me. I felt dizzy sometimes, as if I were hovering near the ceiling and watching my mind turn actual memories into illusions, or wipe them away.

  I was, I sensed, the living shape of Grampa’s loss of Mum, and the cascade of disappointment and fury he had felt when her life didn’t turn out to be as grand and historic as he had hoped. Like my dead mother—like every person in Grampa’s world—I was more abstract than real. Something like affection emanated from him occasionally, in my direction. It felt impersonal, a condition of his blood pumping, like body heat or breath.

  Most of the time, he seemed not even to care, or to notice, that I was there. It was easy not to disturb him. Martine and I would sometimes spy on him as he sat in lotus position in his room, and when we rode our bikes outside, we would look up and see him on the flat roof, upside down. Usually he wore a ruglike wrap around his middle which, when he stood on his head, fell the other way and covered his chest. He didn’t believe in underwear. When I started school, fourth grade, I never dared invite friends over to play.

  “Look, Allegra. Come and see this.”

  Nana held up a magazine: Vogue. She flattened it open on the dining table. Underneath her strong, weathered fingers was a photo of a dark-haired girl with her hand to her cheek, gazing soulfully out at me.

  “That’s your sister. That’s Anjelica.”

  I knew I had a sister and her name was Anjelica, but that was about all. I hadn’t seen her since the turbulent, forgotten months after Mum died. She was, by now, nearly as lost to me as Mum was.

  As I looked at her picture, a sense of recognition came to me, dimmed by strangeness. Was I really remembering Anjelica’s own face? The dark coloring and arched eyebrows were Mum’s.

  In the three years I’d lived at St. Cleran’s, Anjelica had never come there. Though I knew Daddy was her father, and though Tony came to visit, I didn’t expect her to. She was the goddesslike creature who had inhabited St. Cleran’s—and my room—before me, in the golden age when Mum was still alive, and who had left a mark so deep and lasting it would survive for all the decades of Angelica Healy’s life. A visit from her would have been very nearly supernatural.

  She was living in New York now, Nana told me, and working as a model. Soon she would come out to Miller Place to see me.

  Anjelica was tall—taller than anyone else—and thin, with the bony angles of someone who was important in the world. Her clothes—I don’t remember what they were—seemed dramatically casual, like nothing anyone in Miller Place would wear. We were either sloppy, or self
-consciously dressed up like my teacher, Miss Burdi, a tiny woman whose long fingernails always matched her outfit, changing daily from green to blue to black to yellow. I was probably wearing my favorite outfit, which came from Kmart: a shocking-pink polyester T-shirt and matching stretchy pants.

  Anjelica seemed distracted and distant, an exotic bird in a chicken run. My imagination strained to connect her to my earth. We were ordinary and suburban in Miller Place, despite half-naked Grampa on his head on the roof. I wasn’t quite sure why she came to see me. What interest could I possibly hold for her? Neither of us knew what to say to the other. I showed off my bicycle-riding skills, waving with one hand. She didn’t look impressed, which made me feel better about my half-cracked courage. I didn’t think she’d have been any more impressed if I had let go with two hands, like Martine and Nancy did.

  Because she was my sister, it made sense to me that she wanted to see me again, and brought me into the city to stay with her. Even so, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had disappeared without another word. Because, like Daddy, she existed on a more exalted plane, that would have made perfect sense too.

  She took me with her on a modeling assignment. I watched her being dressed and made up, seemingly oblivious to the people fussing around her. Then she stretched out on the floor, on a giant sheet of white paper. The lights were so bright that I had to squint, but she seemed not to notice them. She knotted her fingers in her hair—which I’d watched being rolled and sprayed into the kind of curls my hair would never hold (my Irish ringlets had always fallen out by lunchtime). As the photographer jumped about, clicking his camera, she moved in slow motion, making constant tiny alterations to her pose, like a creature lifted and curled by the gentle swell of waves.

  She looked comfortable, at rest in herself. This was, in my eyes, the real Anjelica; she’d been awkward in Miller Place because there she was in disguise, a goddess who’d had to put on human form. Here, in a secret studio suspended in the midst of a blindly bustling New York City, the handmaidens—who had seemed to be dressing her up—were actually removing the disguise. I was an outsider who had been allowed into this sacred space only because I was her sister: a sister with feet of clay, but her sister nonetheless. I felt favored. I realized that everyone I knew in Miller Place would live their whole lives without ever seeing anything like this.