Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  Like a totem I wore Mum’s ring, which Anjelica had given me for my twenty-first birthday. Anjelica had always worn it. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen: a gold panther crouched in the delicate gold branches of a tree, with diamond blossoms. I thought of the panther as crouching on his pile of diamonds. She had pulled it off her finger on the spur of the moment in the Star of India restaurant, and I slipped it onto mine quickly, before she had a chance to change her mind. Mum had bought the ring as her own gift to herself when she got engaged to Dad.

  Number 26 was one of the white stucco houses, like number 31. I couldn’t avoid it, couldn’t keep to the far end of the street that didn’t look like the Maida Avenue I remembered. This is silly, I thought. It’s a street, a house. Everyone in the world has to revisit places where someone they lost once lived.

  I parked on a road behind, walked up Warwick Avenue, and turned right, to the second house. Number 31 was blocked by a solid steel gate between the pavement and the front path. Beside it was the brass box of an entryphone.

  I couldn’t look at it: so cold, so impersonal, so excluding. It seemed to divide those who belonged in that house from those who didn’t. A plain front door invites you to walk up the steps and press the bell; that entryphone asked for a password that I didn’t have. It was unbearable to stand there as a stranger—a stranger to my own amputated childhood and the world my mother made.

  The tree, I thought. In that last picture of Mum and me is one of the thick-trunked plane trees. We’re walking away from the house—to her car, I guess, without knowing why I think so. The tree blocks the line of parked cars from view. Its deeply ridged bark is stalwart, indestructible. I wanted that tree to be there. I needed it to be.

  I battled my memory, forcing it to give up the tiniest peculiarities of the shape and bark of that tree, so that I’d know it in the crowd. The trees are close together; I wasn’t sure which one it was. If the person who took the photo was standing at the foot of the front path, which they probably were, it would be the second tree to the east. Was it that one? It had a pair of burls where my right hand would touch it—I didn’t think those burls were in the photo. Maybe it was the next one, or the one before. Suddenly I was relieved that I couldn’t tell exactly which one it was. It would have been like a gravestone, and I’d have collapsed in front of it in tears—which would have been embarrassing on a public street, and besides I had a business meeting in five minutes.

  Happiness rushed through me with the knowledge that the tree—whichever one it was—was still there. There are no gaps where one might have died and been cut down. No saplings. All old giants, with leaves as big as plates, just as I remembered them.

  I had never wanted to get married, except for the party. If we had a wedding, I’d think idly, my whole family would have to come: the Hustons and the Coopers, and who knows who else from my past. The more I thought about it, the thirstier I got for this to happen. But at the price of getting married: of asserting a future that might not come true, of tempting fate? And besides, Cisco didn’t propose.

  Cisco Guevara is a Rio Grande whitewater rafter, champion country-and-western dancer and storyteller, with a long braid of hair down his bull-strong back and an ever-present black cowboy hat that looks like no other hat, because it’s been shaped by the river. In London, restaurants fall silent when he walks in. Nobody looks exotic in London except Cisco.

  “Mum would have loved Cisco,” said Tony—for the same reasons that Dad would have loved him: his deep knowledge of the natural world; his ironic sense of humor; his colorful history and sense of adventure; his uncompromising, almost unconscious insistence on always being himself. Dad would have delighted in the fact that Pancho Villa married Cisco’s great-aunt, that his grandmother ran a brothel–cum–gas station in Chihuahua, and that his father was a thermonuclear engineer who worked on the hydrogen bomb. Mum, the political idealist, would have been proud that her grandson shares an ancestor with the legendary Che.

  When I found I was pregnant, the plan formed instantly: a christening instead of a wedding—a big party, to which everyone would have to come. A baby was a far better reason to haul them to Taos. He would be here, a fact in himself, and that’s what we would celebrate. No promises that could be broken. No curdling of hopes.

  So on June 8, 2003, I sat with Cisco and our eight-month-old son in a rubber raft covered with feathery juniper boughs, bunches of plastic grapes and trailing vines and sunflowers, and glittering tin milagros of hands with eyes in the palms and hearts on fire. The walls of the Rio Grande Gorge rose hundreds of feet above the river: tumbled black basalt formed by the lava of ancient volcanoes nocked with buffalo grass and Apache plume, and here and there burly piñon trees and gnarled junipers which were saplings when the Spaniards first came here five centuries ago. I knew of eagles’ nests upstream and downstream; and I’d seen owls in the gorge, which reminded me of Nurse. Owls were her favorite creatures. We used to call them oolas, the Irish word.

  I wore a pleated, flowing, blue-green Fortuny-like dress, and a crown of gold laurel leaves. Around the crown of Cisco’s hat was a garland of wildflowers. The little boy on my lap wore a white Chinese outfit that my oldest friend, Kate O’Toole, had given him, and a lei of plastic marigolds.

  Behind us, two guides who worked for Cisco each rowed one oar. They wore wildflower garlands too. It was a low-water year, fortunately; I hadn’t thought of what we’d do if the river had been raging, as it might well have been in early June. That day it flowed in soft, purling eddies through the deep-cut artery of the parched high desert of northern New Mexico.

  As we floated downstream, I looked over to the far shore. A year or so before, a homemade wooden cross had been planted there: a descanso to honor a teenage boy who had died one night trying to swim the river. Usually you see descansos by the side of the road, covered in plastic flowers, hung with toys and tinsel and beads: not grave markers, but little shrines to beloved sons, brothers, fathers, daughters, who died at that spot. If my mother’s car had crashed in New Mexico instead of in France, I thought suddenly, she would have a descanso, with her name on it perhaps, and words like amor and muerte. It would mark the place where her spirit had left her body. Each bright flower that I fixed to the cross would be the earthly shape of a kiss that I sent toward her cheek, her hair, her forehead. I imagined her there, on that other bank, the lines of her face and hands traced in the particles of pollen and dust by the lowering rays of light.

  She has no gravestone. Her ashes were sent to her father, and for the year that I lived in Grampa’s house, I didn’t know they were there. When the house burned to the ground, with Grampa in it—aged eighty-nine, and well on his way to a hundred—the remains of Mum disappeared into the smoke. Now she is nowhere, and everywhere.

  “As I went down to the river to pray…” My friend Tara’s voice rose, singing the Southern spiritual, for which she and I had written new words to welcome Rafa. Her voice was joined by more voices, at first a ragged choir, hardly enough to imprint the air. As we came closer, they grew stronger, the words lapping against the canyon walls, tucking into the spaces among the boulders.

  We rounded a bend, and I saw them all: Tara, in another pleated, water-colored dress hitched up above her Teva sandals, high on a rock like an Arthurian priestess, and below her, on the dusty beach, more than a hundred people: John Julius, Artemis, Jason, and my godmother Gina, who had all come from London; my mother’s friends Jay Hutchinson, who had come from Boston, and Lillian Ross, who had come from New York; Anjelica, Tony, and Danny, all four of us together again—not as unusual as it once was; and all of Cisco’s closest family. His sister Ana had come from Atlanta. His mother, Luchi, sat in a camp chair, a long clear tube running from her nose to a silver canister of oxygen behind her.

  Everyone held a sunflower. That had been Anjelica’s idea. In researching Saint Raphael, her nephew’s namesake, she kept seeing sunflowers. They grow in northern New Mexico, but not unt
il later in the summer, so she FedExed a hundred and fifty long-stemmed sunflowers to me the day before the ceremony.

  From behind a rock a procession emerged, led by Tony, wearing an animal skin draped over one shoulder and a shoulder-length wig of black curls like Charles II. He carried a tall staff. This apparition was his surprise for me: a christening in the river demanded a John the Baptist.

  Dad would have been apoplectic with anger. I loved it, because it was something only Tony would have done.

  Behind Tony walked Anjelica, in yet another Fortuny-pleated dress. Behind her came Joan Buck and Cisco’s niece Ana, wearing two more of the dresses—all in different shades of water and fog. They were Anjel’s costumes from The Mists of Avalon, and because there were five, another layer of ceremonial was added: attendants.

  At that moment my head filled so full of sound and sight and memory, and the man next to me and the little boy on my lap, that I couldn’t take in any more. The voices dissolved, though I could still see mouths moving as the song was sent into the sky. The faces merged, so that I could hardly tell one from another. I felt the gift surge toward us—so many people coming from so far away, my friends and family adding their own ideas into the ceremony, so that it became richer and more wonderful than I could ever have made it on my own. It lifted us up above the water, the three of us, into a protected, temporary little realm of pure happiness.

  A banner wobbled up into sight above the singing faces: blue velvet edged with fringe and tassels, with my son’s full name in gold: Rafael Patrick Gerónimo Niño de Ortíz Ladrón de Guevara.

  Rafael because we liked the name, and the short version Rafa. Patrick, because it had always been my favorite name, and Irish. Geronimo, at Anjelica’s urging, because he was born on San Geronimo Day, which is the feast day of Taos Pueblo and a celebration of thanksgiving for the gifts of the gods. All the rest is Cisco’s surname, commemorating a long-ago battle in the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. When Rafa was born he was an elfin creature, with pointed tufts of hair on his ears, and he looked around the room very deliberately, as if to decide whether he really wanted to commit himself to being here. Naming him was frightening, like pronouncing a sentence that might someday prove to be unjust.

  As we floated to the shore, Anjel waded into the water. The pleats of her dress swirled around her knees, the gray-purple of an evening sky with a storm blowing in. She reached to take Rafa and handed him to Tara, who set him on her shoulders. The attendants ranged themselves around her. Suddenly Jeremy, Anjelica’s old friend, rushed into the water, thigh-deep, holding the banner with Rafa’s name on it. Tony was with him, holding the other pole. They raised the banner behind Rafa, who sat calmly chewing on his plastic marigolds and surveying the crowd—“just like the Queen Mother,” as John Julius said later.

  None of this was rehearsed, or even planned. When I’d first thought of having a christening, my only idea was to do it in the Rio Grande, and have the three of us arrive by boat. One by one, people added their inspiration: Anjelica, the sunflowers and the Mists of Avalon dresses; Joan Buck, the garlands of flowers and my crown; Bruce and Kim, each taking an oar; Tara, the singing; my friends Annapurna and Janet, the decoration of the raft and the gold-lettered banner; Jeremy, holding the banner where it belonged; and the indescribable vision that was Tony.

  And one more, someone that none of us expected: a guy who had been sitting drinking by the river when we arrived. It was a public place; we couldn’t ask him to leave. So we explained what we were doing, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind turning down the norteño music on his truck radio. He obliged, and I forgot about him.

  We had asked Cisco’s friend Steve Harris to officiate, since he’s a minister of the Universal Life Church. He has the narrow face of Ratty in The Wind and the Willows, with lively eyes and a droopy mustache, and the waterlogged look of a lifetime boater. Just as he pronounced Rafa’s name, a voice echoed off the cliffs: “Don Rafael!” It was the drinker, following an old Spanish custom. Because of him, Rafa has the right to call himself don, the Spanish equivalent of “sir.”

  Anjel gave a heavily Catholic sermon on the meaning of Rafa’s three names—she went to the nuns in Loughrea too. And then Louie Hena, an elder of Tesuque Pueblo and Cisco’s closest friend, baptized Rafa in the Tewa language with an Indian name: Tseh Shu Ping, Flying Eagle Mountain. I can see Flying Eagle Mountain—better known as San Antonio Mountain, a freestanding dormant volcano—from my kitchen window, and I think of it as Rafa’s mountain. It’s very round, with a concave groove in the center of its horizon. The Tesuque people say that its top is shaped like the outspread wings of an eagle. I see a giant loaf of Irish soda bread, just like a hill in Connemara called Roundstone. Louie had no idea how he pulled my past and present together when he gave Rafa that name.

  Louie spoke in Tewa, and then in English, of the spiral patterns of the universe: in the eddies of the river and the currents of the air, in the whorl of hair on the crown of Rafa’s head. Nothing is linear, he said. Life and time circle back on themselves, joining up, making new patterns. There is no beginning or end. Only the movement of energy.

  I felt, for the first time, at the center of the spiral. Rafa pulled my family together around me, into one. It would have been impossible, once; now it was natural, beyond question. I didn’t have to do anything, be anything in particular: just me, just there, a daughter and a sister, and now a mother too.

  At the party afterward, John Julius commandeered the piano when the band took a break, and he and Jason sang 1940s songs. John Julius danced until his face was the same color as his salmon-colored shirt, bending Tara backward till her hair touched the floor. Rafa spent most of the evening in his auntie Anjelica’s arms. And my favorite moment of all came the next morning at breakfast, when Danny and Jason—who had never met before they came to Taos—slapped each other on the back and said, “My brother!”

  I go to London a few times a year, and stay at John Julius’s house across the canal from Maida Avenue. The room I sleep in is on the top floor, at the same height as my room in Mum’s house, level with the treetops. Far below, I see the black-painted iron railing and the potted geraniums on the roofs of the houseboats. Often Rafa comes with me, to visit his Grappa.

  Every visit, I take Rafa to the zoo on the Water Bus, boarding at the same place in Paddington Basin where Mum and I, or Nurse and I, used to board. Ducks and swans paddle in circles, as they did forty years ago. Everything is the same: the little island where the three canals meet, the shouts of the boatmen as they stride along the roofs of the narrowboats, the thudding cough of the engines, the dark mustiness of the brick-lined tunnels squeezing the boats so tightly together that you might touch a passing one with your palm.

  Often John Julius walks with us to the canal basin to see us aboard. As the Water Bus rounds the little island and heads east down Regent’s Canal, he crosses the arched, blue-curlicued footbridge and walks home along the paved towpath on the inside of the black railings, a few feet below the level of Blomfield Road.

  “Grappa!” Rafa shouted the first time he saw him there, only a few feet away on the far side of the window glass. “Grappa!”

  Seeing his little face at the window, John Julius waved. Rafa waved back, thrilled that someone could walk on land at the same speed as we chugged along on water.

  “Mama, there’s Grappa!”

  They are so alike: bright-eyed and charming, quick-witted, energetic, open to the world. Artemis wrote to me that Rafa is the incarnation of John Julius. It made me intensely happy that she saw it. It would make Mum happy too.

  Is it the ordinary we remember, or the extraordinary? Fondly I think Rafa will remember me pushing him on the swings, or singing a lullaby to him at night, or holding his hand while he learns to skateboard. But perhaps what will stick in his mind is me in a fury flinging his Legos out the front door into the night, or driving too fast, or throwing a tantrum at the dust and cobwebs.

  I am aware of creating his
sense of me—a feeling of extraordinary power and extraordinary powerlessness. I determine the quality of his days, but I have no control over which parts of those days etch lines in his memory. Nor, I guess, does he. I don’t know why I remember the things I do, and not others. Surely I had times of intense happiness with Mum, the kind that adults make mental notes to remember. I feel closest to Mum not in my memory, but in that photograph taken on Maida Avenue, where I’m holding her hand.

  Acknowledgments

  This book grew out of a magazine article I wrote for Harper’s Bazaar, UK, titled “Daddies’ Girl.” Thanks to Catherine Fairweather and Sharon Walker at Harper’s for commissioning it.

  I thought I’d said all I had to say in eighteen hundred words. Three people encouraged me to expand the article into a book:

  Barbara Leaming has been the most wonderful friend to me for twenty years. I’ve edited six of her books, and she reads everything I write. Her generosity of spirit and tireless encouragement have made me a writer. Her unerring instinct for what isn’t there, and her willingness to be brutal and force me to find it, produced many of my favorite passages in this book.

  My sister Artemis Cooper and my stepmother Celeste (Cici) Huston added their voices to Barbara’s. If it hadn’t been for their vision and belief in me, I might never have embarked on this intimidating project.

  My father John Julius Norwich, and my brothers Tony Huston, Danny Huston, and Jason Cooper gave me their wholehearted support, as did Mollie Norwich. Most important, my sister Anjelica Huston, who could be forgiven for trying to dissuade me from revisiting a difficult time in her life, gave me her blessing and said only, “Be kind”—and then, when it was written, gave me the title for the book.