Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  When the seasons turned, Anjelica took me shopping for a coat. I knew what I wanted: one like a girl at school had, red with white fur trim. And there it was, in Bonwit Teller, hovering like an apparition. I think it even had a hood.

  “There,” I said timidly. “That’s the one I want.”

  I saw the look cross Anjelica’s face, and knew I should have expected it. My taste was small-town and childish: of course what appealed to me would be wrong. Still, she let me try it on.

  “It looks like Santa Claus.”

  She picked out a coat of fawn-colored suede with fox-colored fur edging and embroidered swirls around the hem. I didn’t like it at all, but she insisted I put it on. The color was dull, and the embroidery was exotic and hippie-ish. It was a New York coat, not a Miller Place one. I could imagine myself wearing it in the city, though I wouldn’t actually like it, but in Miller Place it would be embarrassing. I sent one last, longing gaze over to the Santa Claus coat, now back on its hanger. I saw, through Anjelica’s eyes, how tacky and garish it was. I still preferred it, though I knew I shouldn’t.

  I wore the hippie coat all winter, as I had to for warmth. Every time I put it on, I felt chic and fashionable—an alien. And, to a degree, a fraud: this fashionable person wasn’t me. I felt torn, in a way I wouldn’t have been able to describe: ordinary in myself, but made different by the accident of my birth. I understood that it was good to be attuned to art and beautiful things, to have high and exacting standards, to float above the ordinary as Anjelica and Daddy did. It was just that I doubted I could, and didn’t know how.

  That Christmas of 1972, Nurse and I went to California, where Daddy was living now, with Cici. Uncle Fraser drove us to the airport, late as always. It was, I guessed, his silent rebellion against doing Grampa’s bidding. Just as we had done the previous summer, on our way back to Ireland, Nurse and I had to run to the gate.

  Gladys met us at the airport. It was the first time I’d seen her since leaving St. Cleran’s. She was wearing sandals with low heels; it seemed slightly indecent to see her in public in warm-weather clothes. The warm weather was odd in itself. This was Christmastime; I hadn’t quite understood that it wasn’t cold everywhere (except Australia, of course, where everything was the opposite of how it was supposed to be). Flowers didn’t bloom in December—but suddenly, as we turned out of LAX, my eyes were dazzled by a cascade of blazing magenta: a waterfall whose element was transfigured into soft, flaming petals, with not a shred of green among them to crack the illusion.

  I had loved the lilac at St. Cleran’s—even more so because someone told me that Mum had planted it. There were three different colors: a pale, dawny mauve, a mid-purple which was my least favorite, and a darker purple the color of a summer sky just before night. I would watch the buds, waiting for them to burst out in little droplets; then the blossoms would blow about like skirts in the wind before they finally snowed to the ground. This bougainvillea seemed as indomitably permanent as the lilac was delicate: blooming bizarrely in midwinter, its color vivid and unearthly. It had no visible connection to the earth; it erupted from the stony innards of a high concrete wall. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and craned my neck as we drove past.

  We left the flat streets lined with low, gap-faced buildings—not like any city I’d seen before—and began to climb a winding road. Around hairpin curves, along the side of sheer drops with only a flimsy guardrail, up a mountain so high and steep it didn’t belong in a city. Here and there bougainvillea covered the guardrail, like padding; it comforted my fear.

  “You’ll be staying with Celeste’s parents, Allegra.”

  When Gladys said Cici’s name she pronounced it “sissy,” as if she couldn’t hear how everyone else said it. More often, she called her Celeste. It was her name—but from the way Gladys said it, with her lips tightening slightly like someone sucking a lemon, I knew she didn’t like her.

  “That is their house.”

  On the far side of a wide, deep canyon was a huge gingerbread house, with pointed gables and dark half-timbering. This mountain, unlike the cliff in Long Island, was not falling away. With its thick pelt of trees it made a vast pedestal for the house, which looked monumentally solid and phantasmagorical at the same time—being so English in this very un-English place.

  “You may call me Aunt Dorothy,” said Cici’s mother when we arrived. She was a small woman in her sixties, strikingly beautiful, with perfectly painted nails and a large, dangerous-looking diamond on her right hand.

  “And this is Uncle Myron.” Cici’s father shuffled forward and solemnly shook my hand. He was bent over at the neck, and his voice was hardly louder than a whisper. The glint in his eye made him look like a mischievous turtle.

  I followed my blue suitcase—which, I noticed sadly, was starting to look a bit battered—as it was carried up the stairs by Aunt Dorothy’s man-of-all-work, and deposited in a back bedroom. I was glad to see twin beds: one for Nurse, one for me. I would be fine here, I thought—and had no conception that I ought to be, or could have been, anywhere else. Nurse was with me, and I wouldn’t have to sleep alone.

  I was awed by the house, with its minstrels’ gallery high above the vast living room, and an enormous plate-glass window looking out across Los Angeles to the glittering ocean beyond. Aunt Dorothy pointed out Catalina Island, rising in a long hump like the back of a whale. She took personal pride in the fact that the air was clear enough to see it. Even so, I could see the layer of brown below us, sunken as if it were heavier than the blue.

  By the front door was a grandfather clock which Aunt Dorothy allowed me to wind, and the dining-room wallpaper showed the seven wonders of America. Aunt Dorothy told me that Mrs. Kennedy had chosen the same wallpaper for the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House; I understood that Aunt Dorothy had found the wallpaper first. She told me that Greta Garbo had once lived in the house, and—she chuckled in her throat, as if it was something that shouldn’t be said—that the servants from the houses nearby would hide in the woods to watch Garbo swim naked in the pool.

  The next day Aunt Dorothy took me to visit Cici, who was in the hospital for some minor operation. She lay in her bed doing needlepoint: a hunting scene of men in red coats on horseback. It was to be a belt, Daddy’s Christmas present. In the lead was a miniature Daddy, top-hatted as master of the hunt, flourishing a riding crop. I was impressed not just by the tininess of the stitches but by the detail of the scene: dogs baying, stone walls being jumped, streaming manes, the rusty tail of the fox. She had drawn it herself, and transferred it to the canvas. But I was also silently, secretly upset, because this was a scene from the Irish life Daddy had left behind. I didn’t know that Cici had even been to Ireland. Was she trying to take possession of that world, which she didn’t have a right to? Or was it just that she was somehow—despite her beauty, her knowing drawl, and her sardonic smile—more naive than I was? I settled on the latter, and felt protective of her from that moment on.

  I knew she was setting herself up for disappointment, pouring such meticulous work and loving anticipation into this belt. Daddy would never wear it—and why did I know him better than she did? It made me sad. I sensed the gulf between the two of them—maybe before they sensed it themselves. I wasn’t present when Cici gave Daddy the belt, and I never saw it or heard it spoken of again.

  I had worked hard on two Christmas presents that year: one for Anjelica and one for Daddy. I had already given Anjelica her macramé shoulder bag, and she had liked it as much as I’d hoped she would. I was eight years old: still young enough to make all my Christmas presents, but old enough to know that childish drawings weren’t enough. I liked knitting and crocheting and hooking rugs; they always came with a pattern to follow. Macramé was hippie-ish, like the coat Anjelica had bought me, so I thought she would like it better. I was surprised and frustrated by how hard it was to get the tension of the knots and the distance between them just right; once I finished that bag, I never tried macramé again
. I lined the bag—it was about eight inches by six—with pale purple material, the color of the lilacs at St. Cleran’s.

  But what would I do for Daddy? I’d knitted him a scarf the year before, so I couldn’t do that again. He’d have no use for a rug. Crochet was too girly. Finally Nana suggested I make a picture out of beach glass.

  I balked. My collection of beach glass was precious. Still, I couldn’t think of anything else. But what kind of picture? I couldn’t create one of my own. I wasn’t an artist.

  Nana showed me a book of paintings by Winslow Homer. They were seascapes, and their misty greens and grays had just the shimmery quality of the beach glass. I chose a picture of a lighthouse flying a small red flag—a showpiece for my rare, tiny piece of red. I wasn’t thrilled about giving it up, and certainly I wouldn’t have given it up for anyone other than Daddy, but it was the one thing I had that was worthy of him. Briefly I considered substituting a different color or choosing a different painting, but it was too late. I’d thought of using it, and I couldn’t back out. What if my refusal to give up that prize red piece somehow got back to him, and he—rightly—held it against me?

  Nana got me a small sheet of glass and we laid it over the page in the book. Carefully I made a mosaic. I had to give up most of my blue beach glass, too, the second rarest color; it was painful, but necessary. The beach glass wasn’t flat, and sometimes the glue didn’t hold, so I searched for flatter pieces, ones that fit into a tighter jigsaw, to make the picture as perfect a replica as I could. I was a bit disappointed with it all the same. I worried that it was childish and clumsy—maybe even silly. I’d never heard of a beach-glass picture before.

  On Christmas Day, Aunt Dorothy drove us to Cici’s house in Pacific Palisades, on the west side of Los Angeles near the ocean. Cici was back home, looking a bit pale because she’d had an allergic reaction to the hypoallergenic equipment they’d used on her. That impressed me: she, too, was special. I’d been a bit worried that, because she wasn’t remote, she might be too ordinary to belong in Daddy’s world.

  Nervously I gave Daddy my present. His long, square-tipped fingers flipped open the card, and he read it out loud.

  “With apologies to Winslow Homer.” He looked at me quizzically, then slid a finger under the overlap of the wrapping paper and sliced it open.

  Nana had suggested writing those words on the card, so I did, though it felt as if I were giving Winslow Homer some kind of credit for my piece of red beach glass while apologizing for making the picture at all.

  “Aah-hah,” said Daddy as he uncovered the picture, which, despite being wrapped in tissue paper and put in a box, had lost two of its pieces of beach glass. I longed to grab it from him and disappear with a tube of glue to fix it, but my limbs had frozen.

  He started to chuckle. “You’re a great admirer of Winslow Homer, I see. How well do you know his work, honey? And tell me why you feel apologies are in order.”

  I stumbled to answer him, unable to explain how special the red piece of beach glass was. I heard a contempt for Nana in his teasing, and I resented Nana for the waste of my treasure and the shattering of my feeling that it was treasure at all. I resented her fiercely, with every drop of resentment I had—so that none would be left over for him.

  “Thank you, honey,” he said finally. “It’s a wonderful present.” He put it aside, and I knew instantly that he would never pick it up or look at it again.

  Why should he have liked it or wanted it, anyway? Beach glass wasn’t paint, and when it was stuck to the glass it looked crude—like the trash it was. Winslow Homer had probably been the wrong choice, too: suburban, second-rate, not in the pantheon of artists Daddy admired. I realized I’d never seen that kind of painting at St. Cleran’s—obviously Daddy didn’t think it was worth having. I should have known better than to think a painter that Nana liked was good enough for Daddy. But what would have been? Even if I’d copied a Toulouse-Lautrec, it wouldn’t have been a Toulouse-Lautrec, just my copy of it. In beach glass. You were supposed to make up pictures yourself, not copy other people’s.

  I felt like a savage duped by worthless trinkets, an idiot who knew nothing about art. I wanted more than anything to please Daddy. At St. Cleran’s I had felt able to, with my drawings, my gift for games, my Irish dancing. In the last six months, evidently, I had taken a wrong turn without knowing it, away from the person I was supposed to be if I was to be worthy of being Daddy’s child, Anjelica’s sister. In the absence of talent like they had, I’d relied on my intellect; but my intellect had let me down. It wasn’t the execution of the beach-glass picture that was the problem; it was the very idea of making it at all.

  7

  The car juddered down a cobbled street lined with plain, blank walls. I liked the colors of the walls—pinky-orange, pinky-brown, orangey-yellow—but their blankness was unsettling, like a row of faces with skin where eyes ought to be.

  I sat in the back seat between Nurse and Gladys. A dark-skinned, dark-haired man drove. He had a round, flat face like the faces of Daddy’s pre-Columbian idols, except that he wasn’t scary like them, because his face seemed shaped for smiling. His name was Arturo and he always drove for Daddy in Mexico City. He had once been a boxer and had killed a man in the ring. Of course Daddy would have a driver with a story like that.

  “Gracias, Arturo,” said Gladys as we pulled up in front of an iron gate. A gardener unlocked it for us. As we went inside he locked it behind us. How odd, I thought—like a prison. This was a street lined with prisons that people had put themselves in.

  The house was in Cuernavaca, a resort town about two hours from Mexico City, and belonged to Daddy’s agent. He was borrowing it while he worked on the screenplay of The Man Who Would Be King with Gladys. Cici wasn’t with them, and I didn’t think that odd at all. I would have found it much stranger if Cici had been there and Gladys hadn’t.

  Though Gladys kept herself apart from Dad’s social life—she’d never been part of the gang at the Big House, watching racing or the World Cup in the basement TV room, or following the hunt, or drinking cocktails in the study—it was impossible to imagine her without him. She was his moon, her orbit sometimes closer, sometimes farther, but always held by his gravity. She was ageless, as if she’d managed to keep the harshness of life at one remove, the way she’d kept the skin of her face untouched by the sun. Her severe hair and black-rimmed glasses were not designed to attract a man; she wore lipstick only because she would have been half dressed without it. There was something wraithlike about her paleness. She was neither heavy nor thin, but she moved silently, and sometimes you didn’t realize she was there.

  She and Daddy occupied the two bedrooms of the main house. Nurse and I were given the guesthouse. I was happy to be with Daddy again, but nervous too. I felt an intense pressure to be the kind of girl I ought to be—whatever that was. All I knew was that it was not the girl I was becoming as a Soma cousin in Miller Place. Trying not to be that girl made me mousy. Daddy didn’t seem to notice. He was remote—traveling imaginatively in the fictional Himalayan kingdom of Kafiristan, or (I suspect now) wandering gloomily through the collapsing promises of a new marriage going bad. I watched him through the open garden doors as he sat in a leather bucket chair, the legs of his cotton trousers hiked up by his knees, his long bare ankles sinewy and brown like the leather of his loafers; or as he paced the room in long strides, arms hanging, while Gladys scribbled furiously on a yellow legal pad on her lap.

  As the days wore into weeks, I felt more invisible than inspected. Daddy and I didn’t play pelmanism anymore, and I’d lost any appetite for drawing after the Winslow Homer beach-glass debacle. As we didn’t eat meals together, all conversations had to be initiated from across what suddenly seemed to be the vast gulf of the last year. We didn’t talk about the lost paradise of St. Cleran’s, or Nana and Grampa. Eventually Daddy hit on the idea of teaching me backgammon. It was like a rope flung across the abyss, and I quickly became good enough for him to enjoy
playing with me.

  Mostly I just splashed about aimlessly in the pool while Nurse watched from the side. One day Gladys showed me how to dive.

  “You bring your hands together above your head,” she said, “fingers pointing where you want to go. Then just fall forward.” She demonstrated.

  I couldn’t follow her. Gladys climbed out of the pool and bent my knees for me.

  “Like a frog,” she said. I looked for a smile on her face, but she was completely serious.

  Still I couldn’t let myself fall, so she bent my knees farther, until I was squatting so low I was almost sitting.

  “Try it from there.”

  She accepted my fearfulness as a matter of course, not worthy of notice, and that took away its sting. Her way of not treating me like a child made me think I could choose to be taught, just as she chose to teach me.

  I longed to be physically competent. After a year in Miller Place, I had still never dared ride my bike with no hands. American schools gave a grade for PE, and it infuriated me when my straight A’s were unfairly ruined. A mother—my mother, I fantasized—would have taught me to play tennis on the court at St. Cleran’s, and would have kept at me until I learned to ride a horse.

  I practiced diving for hours a day. There were no English-speaking kids to play with, no books I cared to read, and no bookstore to buy more, no beach or woods or river. Just this squared-off pool, a brutal burning sun, and packs of cards with which I played solitaire, recording my score on page after page in the cumulative Vegas style that Daddy showed me. I made endless lists of world nations and their capitals, and which ones I had currency from. Daddy gave me some, the leftovers from his travels—and so began a desultory, unexciting coin collection, which hung around me for years like a drizzly cloud. I feigned enthusiasm to please Daddy. He seemed to think a coin collection would distinguish me, give me an area of expertise. He liked people to be expert in something. I often heard him say things like “He’s the finest mule breeder in the state of Jalisco,” or “the cleverest plumber in the west of Ireland.” Arturo was the finest driver in all Mexico.