Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  Ritually, as the thunder crashed through the living-room wall that wasn’t there, Cici put the same record on the turntable: a mystery story called The Shadow. It began with creepy chords and a sepulchral voice intoning: “Only the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of…” Men, the line went. But Cici, Collin, and I were chanting along with it, and by the time we got to the end of the line—that is, if the electricity didn’t fizzle out—we had drowned it out: “…what evil lurks in the heart of Henry Hyde!”

  Henry Hyde was Daddy’s lawyer in New York. I never asked Cici what he’d done to make her hate him so; it just seemed natural. The name fit: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was one of Collin’s favorite movies. I had met Henry Hyde once during the year I lived with Nana and Grampa, when he had given me a pile of books published by Random House, on whose board of directors he sat. Even though one of the books was a big, flat, illustrated Just So Stories, which I loved, the businesslike blandness of the gift rankled. I wasn’t quite sure whether he was giving me the books, or Daddy was. Someone should have gone to the trouble of choosing books for me, but these were just freebies Henry Hyde had been given; so I took a dislike to him.

  I’m not sure what Daddy was doing while we were gleefully shouting about the evil heart of Henry Hyde, but he must have heard us, night after night. Cici was unapologetically vicious about people who crossed her—such as her neighbor Dr. Chainsaw, a psychiatrist she loathed because he was always cutting down trees—and devised all kinds of imaginary torments for them. I, who held my tongue about anything and everything, was awed by it. Plus, it was fun. We were a little cabal—and it didn’t bother me that Daddy wasn’t in it. I didn’t understand that the chant was partly aimed at him.

  Cici trusted animals more than she trusted people. Her favorite dog, Meece, had saved Collin’s life when he was a baby and the house caught on fire, by howling at the maid until she rescued him. Cici loved to make Meece sing. Being a malamute, he couldn’t bark, so they would howl “yow-yow-yowwwwww” together.

  In her favorite photo of herself, which was taken a few years earlier on the set of Daddy’s film The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, she is riding a lion. She’s not smiling or even looking at the camera. This isn’t a pose. All her attention is focused on the lion as it lopes forward. Her hair falls in soft curls like the lion’s mane; her legs, in jeans and cowboy boots, hang strong and loose by its muscular sides. That was the image of her I internalized: powerfully beautiful, protective of her own, and able to turn in an instant fierce and unforgiving.

  It was odd, and a little nerve-racking, to live in the same house as Daddy. The months in the Big House didn’t quite count, for the Big House had been so big that our lives ran on separate tracks, and I saw about as much of him as I had when we’d slept under different roofs. Cici’s house, though comfortable, wasn’t very big; it was a family house, not a formal one. And family rhythms were foreign to us. I thought they might be foreign to Daddy entirely. I knew he hadn’t been an approachable, domestic father with Anjelica and Tony, and I didn’t expect it of him. But the terms of our lives now begged for it. We both had to learn how.

  Cici went back into the hospital for an operation. And I got out of bed with a tangle in my hair.

  Mum had let my hair grow long, and Nurse had brushed and combed it every morning and night. Anjelica kept talking about cutting bangs across my forehead, and the thought terrified me beyond reason. I wouldn’t even let Cici trim off the split ends. My long hair was my past made visible—and proof that my past was really part of me. I had been a little girl with long blond hair when Mum died, a little girl with long blond hair running in the woods in Ireland and playing on the beach in Long Island. Without my hair, who would I be? Who would even know that I was me?

  The tangle was in the sensitive hollow under the curve of my skull, at the top of my neck. It was there most days. Usually I could get it out by myself, with the help of Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tangles—a discovery Nurse and I had made when we came to America. If I couldn’t, Cici did it for me.

  I struggled, wincing with pain. The tangle held solid. I couldn’t just leave it; Nurse would never have allowed that.

  The door to the hallway which led to Daddy and Cici’s bedroom was open. Tentatively, I moved forward, comb in one hand, the bottle of No More Tangles in the other. The hallway was maybe fifteen feet long, with sliding-door closets on one side and an alcove with an always-closed bathroom door on the other. It was a passage between worlds: the kind of place where Orpheus turned to look back at Eurydice, or a horizontal version of Alice’s rabbit hole.

  “Dad?” It was around then that I stopped calling him Daddy.

  “Yes, honey?”

  It was okay, I could approach. There was no door at the far end. The hallway led straight into the bedroom.

  Dad was sitting on the bed, about to put on his shoes. I knew he was going up to his studio on the hillside above the house. I loved to go up there and watch him paint, just as I had at St. Cleran’s. But, now I was older, I was self-conscious about intruding on him. Quiet as I was, I knew I disturbed the air when he wanted to concentrate, alone. I didn’t want to put him in the position of asking me to leave, so I didn’t go up there often.

  “I’ve got a tangle, and I can’t get it out.”

  A look of confusion crossed his face, as if he didn’t know what a tangle was. He glanced around to locate the person who could deal with it. But he and I were the only ones in the house.

  “Well of course, honey.” I could hear in his voice that he didn’t know what to do.

  I held out the comb and the bottle of No More Tangles. “You squirt this on it,” I said, and settled myself on the floor at his feet. I wanted to make it as easy on him as possible. This way, he wouldn’t even have to move.

  We were facing mirrored closet doors. I saw him lean forward in his typical pose, bony elbows on bony knees, trousers riding up above his long ankles, elongated like a painting by El Greco. I could feel his fingers teasing out the tangle. They were gentle—gentler than Nurse or Cici would have been.

  I closed my eyes and sank into the cushiony intimacy—and realized that it was as brittle as an eggshell. Dad was gentle because he was afraid of hurting me; at this rate, we’d be here for hours. I was afraid his patience would turn. I gritted my teeth and made sure I didn’t flinch.

  I was electrically aware of the enormity of what I’d asked of him. Dad was a great man, a famous film director, revered almost like a god—not someone who should be expected to comb a little girl’s hair. I was transgressing the boundaries I’d set for myself: of being no trouble, of being able to look after myself.

  “That’s okay. That’s good enough.” I lost my nerve, and stopped him before the tangle was gone. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  I’m sure of that “Daddy.” It sits like a shard of glass in my memory.

  I kissed him, went back to my room, and attacked the tangle again. I had to give up. All day I felt the stub of it, like a tuft of fur in the nape of my neck—or like the soft pressure of Dad’s warm fingers.

  I remember that morning alongside the night in the Bhutan Room when Dad passed his hand across my feverish forehead: ordinary moments, maybe, between most fathers and daughters. They are the only two I have. I feel certain that if there had been others, I would remember them.

  9

  The first time Cici met me, she wanted to mother me. I know this because she wrote up a little memoir of it, and stored it with her letters and Dad’s in a box on the floor of the guest-room closet in the house where she lives now, on her stud farm in Santa Ynez.

  She remembers meeting me the day before my memory of the party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was brought to Dad’s hotel room and told to do my party piece, the double jig that Karen Creagh had taught me. Cici saw an uncertain eight-year-old girl eager to please, with a steely-haired Irish nanny smoking grimly in the shadows; a trick pony put on show for a roomful of old codgers chewing cigars. She
hated it. And even though she wasn’t yet married to Dad, she knew she was the only person in any position to change things.

  Cici felt a kinship to Mum, too. The day after she married Dad, he took her to Ireland, where she found Zoë and Danny in residence. Dad hadn’t warned her, hadn’t even told her that they existed (and hadn’t warned Zoë, either, that he had a new wife in tow). She was appalled to discover that she was expected to stay in the Big House while her six-year-old son was put with his nanny in the Little House, a ten-minute walk away. Swords were drawn against the new Mrs. Huston. Betty O’Kelly, resentful at being supplanted as the mistress of St. Cleran’s—and the mistress of its master—told the maids that Cici beat her servants. Knowing that Dad’s finances were rocky, Cici set to work at the accounts with the exactness that Uncle Myron and Aunt Dorothy had instilled in her—which led to Betty’s departure in a fury. Cici was not allowed the keys to a car, on the excuse that she might have an accident since the Irish drove on the other side of the road. Lonely and miserable, she longed to run away. She thought of Mum’s departure for London, ten years earlier, as an escape from jail.

  Back in Los Angeles, with St. Cleran’s sold, Cici lobbied again to take me. Nurse was the sticking point: Cici couldn’t see Nurse living in her house, and Nurse didn’t want to live there either. “Oh, Miss Medcalf,” my godmother Gina remembers Nurse sighing plaintively before she left, racked by worry over Cici’s influence on me.

  But the arrangement on Euclid was untenable: I was getting older, Nurse couldn’t drive, Gladys would be going with Dad to Morocco to film The Man Who Would Be King. Plus, I loved Cici; she treated Collin and me equally, and I felt her love for me. In her letters from the time, Collin and I are always “the kids”: no distinction between us.

  I was given money for my birthday, or maybe it was Christmas. Cici took me to the bank to open a savings account. Since it was my account, she let me answer the questions that the woman on the other side of the counter asked.

  “Name?”

  “Address?”

  “Phone number?”

  The woman was filling in the form by hand. She held her fingers at a weird angle so that her long fingernails could slot together around the pen.

  “Mother’s maiden name?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t call Cici “Mom,” but in every other way she was my mother now. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. And Mum had dwindled to a rumor in my memory.

  “Shane,” I said.

  It was close enough to the truth, I told myself. Still, I felt shifty. I wondered if Cici was pleased, or shocked by my disloyalty to Mum. I’d lost my moorings, and was steering by instinct. With one word, I’d given myself a live mother again.

  I wanted Cici to think it was the most natural thing in the world for me to put her maiden name on the form. I wanted her to think that I didn’t doubt myself, and I didn’t want her to doubt me, which she might if she saw me look to her for approval. So I kept my eyes fixed on the woman’s nails as she wrote.

  Cici said nothing either. But I felt a warmth emanate from her, as if a heater had been switched on.

  I had the sense that Dad had married Cici without quite knowing what he was doing. She unsettled him; he didn’t seem at all sure that she was the kind of woman he was supposed to be with. To start with, he was thirty-four years older than she was; exactly double her age, as I calculated it. She wasn’t “a lady,” as I’d been brought up to conceive of one: she walked around wearing very little, she swore, she cackled when she laughed with her friends. There was nothing proper about her. She wasn’t particularly interested in art, didn’t read books; she and Dad didn’t have the kind of intellectual conversations he had with his friends or in watered-down versions with me. When he laughed at something Cici said, they weren’t really laughing together. It wasn’t that he was mocking her, but he laughed at her in the way you laugh at a thing that amuses you—which, at another time or place, might not. I sometimes doubted that he respected her—or himself for marrying her.

  Cici loved horses. It was the one thing about her that fit in with Dad. The room by the garage door was a tack room, full of saddles and bridles and ringed with blue and red and yellow and green and white ribbons from horse shows. She rode almost every day, even though she always came back with her nose and eyes streaming with allergies. But Dad didn’t ride with her. He seemed to have given it up. Her kind of riding wasn’t his. Irish hunting was full of dress-up and ritual, with huge gleaming horses, red coats and hairnets, flimsy English saddles, crazy hounds, a galloping tear across fields and stone walls—an intensely social event. Cici rode western, in boots and jeans and, being her, bikini tops; usually alone, on trails up into the hills of Will Rogers State Park, which was across the canyon from her house. Her riding was meditative and private, quiet and slow.

  She gave me one of her horses, an albino with blue eyes which we named Blanca. Because Blanca was a Connemara pony—from Ireland—Cici said it was right that she should be mine. I loved Blanca for being Irish, for being white, for being small and gentle. I liked combing her mane and brushing her tail, though the power of her back legs so close to me was frightening, but I dreaded having to get on her back. I’d retreated into books so completely during the year on Euclid that my physical ineptness had calcified. My body felt disconnected, out of my control.

  I wanted to like riding, both because Dad prized good horsemanship and because it would give me something to share with Cici—especially since Collin didn’t ride. She led me along trails on her gray Arabian stallion, Khedeer. The ground was sandy, rocky, unstable, and even at a slow walk sure-footed Blanca would stumble. With each tiny catch in her gait, my muscles seized up, my heart pounded, and my skin tingled as if my nerve endings themselves were sweating. I grabbed the saddle horn or Blanca’s mane until the panic passed, hoping that Cici wouldn’t turn and see what a coward I was. I understood what riding was supposed to feel like—a sense of oneness with the horse, the hoofbeats like the heartbeat of the earth thudding through you, the rich oxygen flooding your lungs—but it was unreachably distant. If I stretched for it, I’d fall.

  I felt Cici’s disappointment. This was something she wanted to give me, and to give Dad by giving me. All I felt from Dad was obliviousness. Once he came out the front door and remarked that I had a natural seat—but Blanca wasn’t moving at the time, she was still tied to the iron hitching post at the edge of the rose-fringed crescent of lawn. After a moment he went inside. He didn’t wait to watch us ride away.

  Dad praised accomplishment, not effort. That made sense to me. I wanted to do things right, and I didn’t see anything to praise in doing them badly just for the sake of it. And he, good at so many things, made them all seem effortless. I had little concept of learning, outside of academics; I thought you ought to be able to paint, or sing, or ride, the first time you did them—or at least, show obvious talent that required only honing and direction. So I avoided the things I couldn’t do, and played to my strengths. I read classic novels that I could talk to Dad about, I did my Irish jig when asked, and I was always ready for backgammon.

  I was good enough by now to play him on equal terms. He had given me books on backgammon when I was living on Euclid, and I’d studied them thoroughly. I knew the theory of doubling; I knew the odds of any particular roll of the dice; I knew the pros and cons of every possible opening move. If Dad made a weak play or an old-fashioned one, I would—sometimes—point it out. I felt a spark of energy pass between us, a give-and-take that signified the possibility that I might be earning his respect and admiration.

  He had ordered a special backgammon table, with the board sunk into the top under a removable panel. It had square, splayed legs like an alien landing craft, and the whole thing, legs and all, was covered in split bamboo. I saw Dad’s face cloud over when it arrived; he found it as graceless as I did. As I watched, his face lost that vague expression and hardened into a grim half smile, daring anyone—even himself—to cha
llenge his necessary delight in what he had caused to be made.

  Though it wasn’t beautiful, the table was lovely to play on. The rim around the sunken board was wide, with plenty of space for a drink and a scorepad—we had to be careful not to roll our drinks instead of the dice cups. The leather board was padded underneath, and the points had been sewn in seams, not appliquéd, so that there were no rough edges to catch against the pieces. Dad slid them elegantly across the leather surface, the pads of his flat, manicured fingertips caressing them firmly into their new places. When he had to pick them up—to bear them off, or to move them across the central bar—he trapped them with the barest amount of pressure, his knuckles straight, as if the pieces held to his fingers by magnetic affinity, not the crude clutch of anatomical joints. He looked pained if his opponent picked up a piece unnecessarily, and almost ill if you turned a piece on end and tapped it along the points to count out a move. He never had to count, and neither did I. We read the points as we read writing.

  Dad’s movements at the backgammon board were as rhythmic as a weaver’s. He shook the leather cup three quick times, thumb and two fingers holding it lightly, fourth and fifth finger folded into his palm, all movement coming from the wrist. He rarely delayed to think, and as he slid the pieces he spoke the numbers in an incantatory tone, rounded and rolling like the buff-cornered dice. We talked only in short snatches—no probing questions or challenging discussion. Sometimes we played for hours.

  “It’s not a real game unless you play for real money,” said Dad one day. “If there’s nothing at stake, the doubling dice means nothing, and the doubling dice is the most fascinating element of the game. We’ll play for a dollar a point.”