Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  We went to the baggage carousel. There was nothing there. In my daze I hadn’t realized I had to clear customs in New York, so my suitcase was still there.

  I slept in Anjel’s little rented cottage that night. The next day Nancy Reagan phoned to offer Air Force Two to take Dad’s body back to L.A.

  Anjel broke out laughing when she hung up the phone. “It’s a good thing he’s already gone back so we don’t have to refuse,” she said. Nancy’s father, a brain surgeon, had operated on Dad’s mother; but Dad despised Ronald Reagan as a McCarthyite fellow traveler, a posturer, and a panderer. Nancy, for all her adoration of Ronnie, never held it against Dad. She kept inviting him to the White House, and he kept refusing. He would have been livid if we’d accepted anything that was Reagan’s to give.

  His business manager called, and his lawyer—the evil-hearted Henry Hyde. I could see Anjel, on the phone, starting to lose her temper. Suddenly she calmed, as if a breeze had lifted her and erased the frown between her eyes.

  “I heard Dad’s voice!” she said when she hung up. Her eyes were gleaming, as if she’d experienced a miracle. “‘Rise above it.’ You know how he always used to say that? ‘Rise above it.’” She imitated his honeylike voice. “I didn’t just remember it, Legs. I heard his voice saying it to me.”

  I rode in the limo with Anjelica and Jack to the Hollywood cemetery. It was the old cemetery, laid out in the nineteenth century, with Paramount Studios across the street. Dad’s mother was buried there.

  Jack and Anjel weren’t exactly together at that point, so it surprised me that he came with us. But he had adored Dad, and Dad him. “I’d like to have one of that litter,” Dad used to say about Anjelica and Jack. Anjelica had turned to him, and he was there.

  He wore his usual dark glasses. I thought they were inappropriate for a funeral: too casual and recreational. Then we stepped out of the limo into an explosion of flashbulbs. I ducked instinctively; it was like gunfire. I wanted to close my eyes against them, but if I did I’d stumble. Anjel had put on sunglasses too, I noticed. I understood: sunglasses were the flak jacket. They let you move through the firestorm unscathed.

  Inside, Dad was lying in a coffin on a dais. His head rested on a cream satin pillow, which was badly out of character for him. The lower half of the coffin lid was closed over him, as if maybe his lower half wasn’t there or had to be hid. The St. Bernard in the glass case in the hall of John Julius’s house popped into my mind. The sacrilegious thought made me smile, and I felt a flood of affection for both my fathers, together.

  Dad’s face was smooth. Alive, his face had been full of changing expression. The furrow between his eyebrows would flash in and out as he concentrated, or leaned forward with interest. Now it was the deadest part of his face. His cheeks were rosy; later, Anjel made a crack about the makeup artist having had too heavy a hand with the rouge. I wished I could take a Kleenex and pat it off. When Dad had campaigned against the colorization of black-and-white films, he had talked about them as if they were babies: people had cut them and mangled them, and now Ted Turner wanted to dye their hair. Here he was, my poor dad: they had colorized him.

  I leaned down and kissed his forehead, as I used to do when I said good night to him in Mexico. He felt hard—not as cold as I’d expected, but hard like wood. I tried to make myself remember that foreheads are hard, they’re bone under the skin, but still the nerve endings in my lips missed the infinitesimal pillowing that the pulsing of blood would have made there. It wasn’t creepy or upsetting: it was like kissing a statue of Dad, the way you kiss the statue of a saint. I thought of the foot of Saint Peter in the Vatican, which Dad had taken me to see: the sculpted lines of the toes worn away by the millions of lips that had brushed across them. I imagined the abrasion of my kisses on Dad’s forehead: lines in living flesh smoothed away over ten years—what for stone took centuries.

  It wasn’t him: not the body that I had hugged, not the hands that had sketched me. The eyes that had interrogated me or delighted as I made an unexpected move at backgammon were sealed under embalmed eyelids. He was gone—vanished, just like Mum.

  Seeing his body made it no different. I hadn’t seen Mum’s dead body, of course, and I never asked what was done with it. I have no bodily memories of her—of touching her, of being hugged by her. Who she was, and the substance she was made of, are two entirely separate things to me. If Mum is buried somewhere, I didn’t want to know; it would locate her somewhere definite and unyielding, away from me. I knew, as I looked down at his Dad-less body, that I’d never revisit Dad’s grave.

  Anjel told me that they’d held a Quaker service for Mum: no priest or prayers, just a gathering of friends who stood to speak as they were moved to words. Dad’s service was the same. His agent and oldest surviving friend, Paul Kohner, who owned the house in Cuernavaca where I’d had the piñata birthday so long ago, gave a eulogy in his thick Swiss accent. I don’t remember what he said, what anyone said, what I said, just that I stood and said how I’d loved him.

  Tony, Anjelica, Danny, and I walked out with our arms linked. It was only the second time we’d all been together. I felt that we were strong. In his leaving, Dad had united us.

  “Dad wouldn’t want to be put in an ugly funeral-home urn. We should find a nice box to put him in.”

  Anjel and I were sitting at her kitchen table, in the little pink house off Beverly Glen Boulevard that Jack had bought for her. It was full of objects I recognized from St. Cleran’s, including Dad’s silver cigar boxes. They looked too small to contain the ashes of a giant.

  “How big a box do we need?” I asked.

  Anjel looked at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we should ask.” We started to laugh.

  Anjel called the funeral home and asked. It was surreal, taking notes on the size of our father’s ashes as if we were taking dimensions for a refrigerator.

  The box we liked best, casket-shaped and decorated with cameos, was slightly too small. We didn’t see how we could leave a bit of him out—even to bury some of him and scatter the rest. So in the end we let them put him in a funeral-home box. As long as it wasn’t actually an urn, we decided; he would have thought that was cheesy.

  When we arrived for the burial, they handed us a package wrapped in white paper, like a box of See’s chocolates without the ribbon. Anjel took it, then handed it to me. My arms sank under the weight. I hadn’t expected it to be so heavy.

  “It’s bronze,” said Anjel. She smiled. A thread of light flew from her eyes to mine.

  Dad’s mother’s grave was marked by a bronze plaque set in the grass, just as his would be. Rhea Gore Huston. Next to it was a small hole in the turf. Anjel set the box in the hole. We threw earth onto it, each of us in turn. The white paper still shone through.

  “Good-bye, Papa Bear,” Maricela said. She had said nothing at the service. She had nothing to say to the living; only to him.

  Tony wandered down to the lake and played Irish melodies on a tin whistle as Anjelica, Danny, Zoë, Maricela, and I watched the gravediggers fill in the hole.

  Afterward, Anjelica took us all—Maricela and her sister too—to the property she’d just bought in central California, a few hours’ drive from L.A. At its center, on a small hill, was a little adobe house, and another building next to it which she called the bunkhouse. There were two lakes, which Jeremy had put in—he’d bought there first, and brought Anjel.

  It was bare, dry land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada—but we could walk down to the Kaweah River to swim off the summer heat. Later Anjel would plant a beautiful garden down the slope, lush with flowers and fruit trees, and put in a fountain and shady arbors. Pale purple water hyacinths would grow over one pond, like a shimmering carpet. She brought in horses and chickens, and bought another little house so that there would be enough room for all of us to come and stay.

  We hid out there, playing backgammon, reading magazines, and talking about Dad. He never saw this new St. Cleran’s, but his pai
nting of Saint George and the dragon hung there already.

  At the Directors Guild tribute a week later, Harry Dean sang a song of the Mexican revolution. My Spanish was better by now, and I could understand a good deal of it: it was a celebration of bravery and victory against the odds. Horses featured in it, and comrades, and the sun and the stars. Harry’s voice caught and slid between the notes, as it always did—and I could hear that the barbs of emotion were in his heart, not just in the music. He had played poker with Dad, and made Wise Blood with him. His song that afternoon was the tribute Dad would have loved beyond any words of praise.

  At the end, we played Dad’s father’s recording of “September Song,” which Anjelica and I had chosen. It was an old, crackly recording; and Walter’s voice was old and crackly too.

  “Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few

  September, November…”

  Those were the years in which I’d known Dad. It grieved me that my timing had been bad: to have been born too late to know him in the prime of his youth and health, to have quit my job too late to spend those last precious days with him. It tore me apart that I had been so conscientious in returning to London and hadn’t just stayed in Rhode Island with him. Why had I thought his death would come in November? He was tired: of the relentless rigmarole of his collapsing body, of being too weak to do the things he loved. He dreaded another turn in hospital. That he had managed to make The Dead was a miracle—one he wouldn’t be able to repeat. When he saw his friends, in those last days, he bade them—as he had not used to do—a formal good-bye.

  I am certain he chose his time to go. It was still August, the month of his birthday and mine.

  20

  John Julius still wears the slippers Mum needlepointed for him. Whenever he mentions her to me—which he does easily, with no restraint or regret—he calls her “your darling Mum.” But they weren’t together anymore when the car crash killed her. She had fallen in love with a new man. John Julius tells me that she had, he thought, finally found true happiness.

  That man, whom I’ve never met, was driving. He was, apparently, from Jamaica, and not used to driving on the French side of the road. The story I’ve always heard is that, when the car hit a pothole and jounced up, out of control, he instinctively yanked the wheel to turn it off the road and instead turned it into the path of an oncoming truck. Mum took the full impact. His injuries were minor. He survived.

  Mum didn’t have time to make the baby book she’d planned for me. I found a little cache of things for it: my hospital tag, showing my name as “Allegra Soma”; a clipping from The Times of “The Night Sky in August”; a photo of John Julius as a little boy in a sailor hat on a ship (probably the Admiralty yacht, as his father was First Lord of the Admiralty); and, pressed flat in separate pieces of tissue paper, a small yellow rose and a much larger red one. I’m sure John Julius sent them to her.

  And there are thirteen scraps of paper, little notes that she wrote on whatever was to hand, recording my first smile, the day I discovered my hands, the week I perfected my crawling, my first few teeth, the first time I stood alone and my first step, my first words (which included “a very clear ‘Hello’ in greeting to ‘Dolly’ as she was gathered up to play with”), and my favorite: “July 19th: I realized today for the first time Allegra was calling me by name.”

  I called Mum “Mamam” then. When Anjelica told me this, I felt a tingle of memory so faint that it might have come from the farthest reaches of space. I felt my lips, without conscious intention, moving in the shape of the word; and warmth bled through me. Probably I called Mum that only for a short time, and grew out of it before she died.

  Mum called me “the Empress” in her letters to John Julius. She told him about my progress, but the reports are dutifully informative rather than intimate. All those milestones that she recorded for my sake—she doesn’t mention them to him.

  I can see her passion for him trickling away. After that brutally blunt letter to the poste restante address in France, the sweet deliriousness with which she used to write to him is gone. She has reread his two-volume history of the Norman kingdom in Sicily, and kicks herself that she didn’t do a better editing job on the manuscript. He arranges for her to be a panelist on a BBC television cultural commentary show called Three After Six, on which he has appeared. She reminds her friends that he is an expert on Venice and many other things, in case they know of media or lecturing work that might suit him. They go on holiday to Norway, with me, just before I turn two. And after that, the letters fade. Months, then years, pass between them.

  And here chance flings a dart into me: her last letter to John Julius, written in January 1969, the month she died, was written from St. Cleran’s. Why did she go there? I don’t know; she doesn’t say. The letter is chatty about doings: Dad getting his Irish citizenship, Tony going fishing, a book she’s read, a beautiful little piece of pre-Columbian art that Gladys gave her for Christmas. I’m pleased to see that Mum was fond of Gladys—that Cici’s war with her was hers alone.

  She calls John Julius “dearest” again and signs with the initial R, as she used to. There has been some reconciliation, after—I guess—an estrangement between them. Mum’s writing slopes forward again, as if yearning for him—in the few letters before, it became rounder and more upright, as if she was attempting to speak clearly to someone who may not hear. That “dearest”—it comes as a gift to me. I didn’t want Mum to go to her death with coldness in her heart for him. She wouldn’t have wanted to either; I know it would have mattered to her.

  It shines from her letters: Mum didn’t want to hate. She didn’t want to hold resentments. She always forgave. She wanted to think only the best of people, to hold only the best wishes for them in her heart. Every lover became a dear friend; the shape of her love changed, but not the substance. Rereading her letters to John Julius, I found this, from Christmas 1963, in the letter where she describes herself as “enormous with secrets”—in other words, with me.

  “So much of the St. Cleran’s nightmare to me,” she writes, “is the impossibility of helping John. He grows ever more to me a being in suffering and distress: I can feel his aimless, abortive reachings towards me and I feel so trapped in such a variety of emotions, none of them free of suspicion or temporizing. It is so hard to see one’s duty, somehow. I come back to the children with a sigh of relief. That, at least, is simple and whole-hearted.”

  I think Mum’s heart was always torn, from the time she was a little child. She never knew ease of spirit. From the slashing vortex that was Grampa to the hurricane that was Dad, she juggled loyalty and hurt and tried to live up to the perfection both men demanded of her. In her letters to John Julius, she is harsh on herself. She worries, a little, that she may have told him too much of her past. “I am vain and envious and self-pitying,” she writes. “I don’t even know whether indulgence in such self-castigation isn’t purest proof of monumental egocentricity and selfishness.” It’s not true! I want to shout to her, across the dimensions that sever us. That you can even think so proves you are not.

  But to write that to him is a release for her, and a flowering. Her diary was sporadic because it was written for her eyes only, and she couldn’t believe that she mattered enough to herself to keep it up. Written to another person, her sensations and thoughts and perceptions take on meaning. She bares herself to John Julius. She can be imperfect in his eyes—she positively wants to be. He will love her not for her flaws or despite them, but anyway. She felt that he loved her. Of all the men she had been with, my father was the one who helped her become whole. That, maybe, is the secret of why he is my father, and no one else.

  The pain of losing Mum is caught up in the splendor of coming to know her. Her greatness of spirit, her generosity and intelligence and warmth and grace: I knew all this, always, but I knew it at a remove, as mortals know goddesses. Though it wrung my heart to read her letters, they gave me another gift: the sense of holding Mum herself in my hand, and
coming upon odd resemblances between us. A woman says to her at a first-night party, “But you are always a bit bored.” It isn’t really boredom, but a lack of interest in glitter and adrenaline: a sagging disappointment when she finds the core of an evening, a play, a book, hollow. I recognize that in me. She describes “the sort of pulverizing death I used to feel ten years and more ago, when I went to places and parties in the shadow of John, and felt invisible.” That was me too.

  Yes, I lost her too soon. But what better mother could I have asked for? Whatever I have of her in me is the best of me. I was lucky in my two fathers, but I was luckiest of all to be her daughter.

  I was in my thirties before I dared walk on Maida Avenue again. I drove past it often during the eighteen years I lived in London, on my way to and from John Julius’s house or taking a shortcut to the M1. I could see the number 31 painted in gold on the window above a black front door on the right-hand half of the second building from the corner of Warwick Avenue. If I was on foot, I kept to the streets in front and behind; and if I went to Hsing, John Julius’s favorite restaurant on the corner of Edgware Road, I made sure to turn off Maida Avenue before the brick mansion blocks gave way to white stucco semidetached houses, the second last of which held number 31.

  Then I made an appointment to meet someone who was staying at number 26. “Can you come here?” he said.

  “Sure,” I answered with my heart racing.

  I didn’t know how I’d react to being on that street, with its slabs of stone paving heaved up by the roots of the giant plane trees, the street that my mother’s new car had been parked on, the street where, in the last photo I have of her, I’m holding her hand. I had never been back to a place where I’d been with her—other than Tony’s flat, and that was so full of his personality, his life, that the wisps of her long-ago presence were overpowered and beyond sensing. Gina had moved decades before; so had Leslie Waddington. I was more comfortable keeping my loss without shape. If I was in a specific, Mum-connected place, I might see the gap in space where she was supposed to be.