What falls away : a memoir

by Farrow, Mia, 1945-

  about his every move and word, and every bite he ate. She made everybody nervous, especially Michael, but at the same time, you couldn't help feeling sorry for her.

  Mr. Boyer was another story entirely. I liked him a lot— and unlike Michael, he always noticed me. Not only did he remember which of the seven I was, but he even asked me how things were going, and seemed interested while I told him. It was amazing. Sometimes he would tell me about Paris, which sounded too beautiful to exist, and I longed to see it. And what was more, he paid almost no attention to my brothers and sisters. I wished he didn't travel so much, so Mrs. Boyer would relax a little: then Michael could relax too, and who knew, one day his stutter might just disappear. I'd be happy about seeing more of Mr. Boyer myself. Because what he didn't know, what nobody knew, was that, after Eileen and my parents, Mr. Boyer was my favorite grown-up.

  So I was glad when he stopped by our beach house one hot morning of my tenth summer. I hung around while he chatted with my parents, then he asked to walk me back to his house for a visit with his son, who we both knew would tolerate the encounter with polite indifference.

  Together we set out along the shaded sidewalk, and as always I asked him where he'd been lately. He told me of his travels, and I watched his eyes get the far-away look. Just then, where I nearly stepped on it, a baby bird sat on the sidewalk, its mouth wide open and a little buzzing, squawky sound coming out of it. Mr. Boyer went right on walking and talking because at this point he was virtually in Pans, but when he noticed I'd stopped and why, his whole face changed. He leaned over and squinted hard at that tiny bird, then he reached up into the tree that hung over the sidewalk and tore off a clump of leaves. Mystified, I watched him scrub them mto his hands.

  "What're you doing that for, Mr. Boyer?"

  "To take away the human scent," he said, in a new, hushed voice.

  He hfted that baby bird so carefully and, on tiptoes, placed it back m its nest. I stuck my bare foot between the slats of the white wooden fence and climbed high enough to see inside: five little ones were in there, five open mouths, and now you couldn't even tell which was ours. We positioned ourselves across the street and watched for what seemed a long time, until the mother bird, a worm drooping from her beak, flew back to the nest.

  "Ahhhh," he breathed softly.

  Mr. Boyer and I had shared an important thing.

  Again we set out, but now there was no talking. He placed his hand on my shoulder, the one nearest him. The intimacy and tenderness and enormity of all of this was more than I could understand or bear and it started my ten-year-old heart pounding. I fixed my attention on my feet as they moved automatically, one in front of the other, and I struggled toward other, more comprehensible thoughts.

  "Later this summer," I observed, "my feet'll get so tough I'll be able to walk on broken glass." He didn't say a word.

  When we got outside the back door of the Bover house, he turned me toward him. He had a grip on both of my shoulders so that I felt I ought to look right into his face, and I did that, even though it wasn't easy. Then in his beautiful French accent, Charles Boyer said, "Your life will be a wonderful one, but difficult I think." Probably I said thank you or something, so as not to hurt his feelings, and 1 hoped with all my might he understood that this was just too much for me to begin to know how to respond. I ducked out of his grasp and ran inside, and as the screen door slammed behind me, I took the stairs two at a time and didn't stop or turn around until I reached Michael's door, which was open a crack.

  Michael Boyer was lying on his bed listening to the ra-

  dio, his head propped with an elbow. He went right on ignoring me.

  Every room in the house of my childhood evokes a rolling of memories, and none more powerful than those of the living room because it was the room for occasions. I remember gray mornings and sun mornings and being small and scared in my navy blue uniform with a brmimed felt hat, sitting at the window seat sucking my thumb and watching for the school bus. Sometimes my father in his silk bathrobe stood next to me sipping coffee. Or Eileen sat beside me. My mother has never been an early riser.

  Our living room was for special affairs. You didn't play in there. It was a spacious thirties-style room with a spotless white carpet, green striped couches, and an intense hand-painted German mural covering an entire wall, including the door that led to all the bedrooms. One long wall faced Beverly Drive through the olive trees. The opposite wall was sliding glass doors, so guests could flow easily outside onto the patio. It was a serious room, and except for the mural, which depicted a battle with horses, it was not a room for children. In the evenings, I came to the living room and stood on my tiptoes in tiny monogrammed slippers to good-night kiss my parents, and when the room was filled with strangers, loud talk, smoke, shrimps, and maids, I survived countless curtseys and how-do-you-dos.

  On Christmas Eve, I spelled out my wishes and watched them lift in flames to waiting elves. I remember tree trimmings and bulbs breaking and long crimson stockings (crocheted by our nanny Barbara) now hanging empty, now bulging in front of the fireplace, and a shiny red bicycle too, and all the flutter and wonder of those first Christmases.

  A less entrancing Christmas tradition was the ceremonial visit with my godmother. Louella Parsons was not noticeably talented or witty or wise, but her column appeared

  daily in Hearst newspapers across the country and was read by "everyone" from the thirties through the fifties, when people believed what was written, which made Louella Parsons very powerful in the movie business. She could wreck entire careers—and did. That was how thmgs were when my parents offered the legendary columnist their first-born daughter as a godchild, and all things considered she took her role in my life surprisingly seriously. She was a devout Catholic and could be seen every Sunday at the Church of the Good Shepherd at the twelve-fifteen Mass.

  Each year during Christmas week, my parents and I would dress up and drive the few blocks to Aunt Louella's house to deliver our present. We brought an important-looking package that had been wrapped in the store so I didn't have a clear idea of what was inside, but it was always big and breakable, and my father would carry it up to the door. A maid m a fancy black uniform would let us into the entrance hall; while we waited, our eyes fell on the virtual tidal wave of packages emanating from the white-frosted Christmas tree way at the end of the living room and flowing high and wide—silver, green, red, and gold— right up to the shiny black toes of my Mary Janes. And each year we were humbled into silence.

  In time my godmother would emerge from the dark back regions of the house where she had her offices. She looked ancient, with a humped, neckless little body, a large head, and a vivid lopsided slash of a mouth that was pulled alarmingly toward the left (a pioneering face-lift, explained my mother, and don't stare). "Well, how nice!" she would say, in her distinctive singsong. "Thank you. Is that the dress I gave you? Don't you look pretty in it!" At this point my mother would give me a poke, just in time to stop me from saying how itchy that organdy dress is so please don't give me any more. "Well, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas." Then we would bend down to respectfully place our

  gift along the shore of the sea of packages. Afterward, I always felt very tired.

  In the deflated hours of Christmas afternoon, Aunt Louella would arrive in her black Cadillac to distribute her presents. We all liked her chauffeur, Collins, who doted on her and fussed over her. He called her "Missy" and "Honey," and they say that when he died he left her all his money. Collins would carry seven sumptuous-looking packages into our living room and we would savage them on the spot; but every single year it was matching bathrobes. After the flat thank-yous we would stand around fidgeting while Aunt Louella lowered herself slowly onto the gold silk cushions of the big armchair in front of our living room fireplace. All of a sudden I wouldn't be able to remember what the chair looked like without her, and I'd get a panicky feeling. For an eternity her tea would be served, then sipped, and in that strange voice she
would ask us the usual questions and we would give her the usual answers. Then we would gratefully flee the living room.

  Every Sunday, my father, my mother, and their seven children—boys in gray flannel suits, girls in itchy pastel organdy dresses with crinkly petticoats, straw hats, white cotton gloves, and socks neatly folded above black patent-leather shoes—marched up the aisle, far too conspicuously, I thought even then, to the very front of the Church of the Good Shepherd, where all of the Farrow children were baptized, and an entire pew was reserved for our family. We looked for meaning in the long mysterious Mass, but restlessness and boredom inevitably triumphed.

  I come from a tradition of big families, and that is what has always felt most natural to me. I like the raucous vitality, the sense of being on a team or in a club, only better. But being a part of such a large whole may explain my early appreciation of solitude.

  By the time I was six or seven I found myself looking for privacy so that I could read and daydream without interruption. Toward that end, I hollowed out a little chamber where the ivy was thickest against the pool-yard fence. Inside, lying on a bath towel with sunlight filtered delicate green through the ivy, in a state as close to perfection as I have ever come, I embarked on the great journeys of The Secret Garden, the entire Wizard of Oz series, Mary Poppins, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, all m the ivy chamber of our garden, and in bed by flashlight at night.

  My brother Mike, six years my senior, taught me to read before I was four, kindling a passion that has never waned. I discovered that through the written word I could voyage outside the perimeters of my own awareness into other minds, other sensibilities, and into any imaginable experience. Even now when I bring home a new book, my heart beats a little faster, I am each time atingle, more eager than I want people to know.

  Before long my father and I discovered our common ground, and spent silent, blissful hours browsing in the local bookshop. Then, with new books tucked under our arms, we walked home together. I liked to look at him and did my best with giant steps and little, awkward skips to match his long, oblivious strides. If he chanced to glance down at me he'd sometimes smile and in those moments I nearly drowned in such almighty happiness and gratitude and love that the only commensurate thing I could think to do was to lie down on the pavement, there at my father's feet, and offer him my entire mortal being; but of course I didn't do that, or speak of these feelings, since they would surely have been as far beyond his comprehension as they were mine. So I scampered mutely by his side.

  I remember sitting under the olive trees one hot summer afternoon trying to read a passage from Out of Africa to my younger brother and sisters and the Roach kids, in which Isak Dinesen describes two captured giraffes onboard a boat

  in the harbor of Mombasa, waiting to be shipped to a traveling menagerie in Europe.

  In the long years before them, will the giraffes sometimes dream of their lost country? Where are they now, where have they gone to, the grass and the thorn trees, the rivers and waterholes and the blue mountains? Where have the other giraffes gone to, that were side-by-side with them when they cantered over the undulating land? They have left: them, they have all gone and it seems they are never coming back. The giraffes stir, and wake up in the caravan of the menagerie, in their narrow box that smells of rotten straw and beer. Good-bye, good-bye, I wish for you that you may die on the journey, both of you, so that not one of the little noble heads that are now raised, surprised, over the edge of the case, against the blue sky of Mombasa, shall be left to turn from one side to the other, all alone, in Hamburg, where no one knows of Africa. As to us, we shall have to find someone badly transgressing against us, before we can in decency ask the giraffes to forgive our transgressions against them.

  I found this passage so wrenchingly beautiful that I remember the afternoon vividly. How very far from Beverly Drive those words had carried me, and how important it was, that visit to Mombasa, in the tangled ivy outside our house, flicking bugs off my knees, trying for all I was worth to convey this to the kids in my gang, so that we could share something wondrous, something better than ice cream. But it was a tough job, trymg to hold the group together for a reading like that, and they flew apart before I'd finished.

  Our shuttered, single-room cabin stood on a barren plateau and faced the sea; a ragged outhouse slouched about twenty feet away. Both constructions were of the roughest lumber, rutted and weathered gray. Ash-dry hills shouldered high behind, and at the left a narrow dirt road ribboned all the way up to the rushing Pacific Coast Highway.

  It was always dark inside the cabin, and it smelled of seaweed; the walls were the other side of the same un-painted planks as the exterior. Two canvas cots were set along each side wall, with a good-sized maple table between them, on which had been placed a plain-glass hurricane lamp and a puckered, mildewed book with colored semaphore illustrations; cracked, browning soap stuck fast in an abalone shell by the stained porcelain sink, sand and earth insects pressed into crevices and down the drain; a rusted can opener dangled from a string nailed into the wall where barbecue utensils also hung. In one corner a scrimpy broom leaned out of a bucket, and cobwebs entangled fishing rods (we were not fisherfolk), and a bag of charcoal bled its sooty contents onto the floor. Through small dusty win-dowpanes there was a startling view of the sea. This was the cabin when last I saw it. Through aU these years it has held a fixed place and rank within me; in its plainness and usefulness, its utter lack of pretense and any embellishment, in the integrity of its existence, it is a thing by which all the rest can be measured.

  My mother had purchased the property at Trancas Beach with inheritance money from my grandfather. From time to time we came to visit, though never as frequently as I would have wished, because it was a substantial drive from Beverly Hills, and we had a well-equipped beach house in Malibu. But each Fourth of July, toward evening, a bright yellow school bus jogged down the steep hillside to the plateau, conveying my family, friends, food, drink, and all manner of

  i

  fireworks. In cardboard boxes we carried the things down steep wooden steps to the beach—by July our feet were tough as shoes.

  Blankets were spread upon the sand and the women settled into soft, intimate talking and the men and boys gathered driftwood and dry seaweed to build a fire, and the kids flew like kites on summer wmds. When the signal came, we pulled off the sweatshirts covering our bathing suits and on borrowed bravery we waded after our father toward the rising palisades of water and followed his deep dive beneath the waves. Out past the breakers, fear of the dark heaving ocean and the riptides and all manner of creatures in its chill depths kept me close to my father, and when I grew tired I held on to his strong shoulders. Coming back through the waves I stayed near, so when they pounded me, churning the last breath from my lungs, he would find me and deliver me to the welcoming of rough towels under which I shivered into dry jeans and a white sweatshirt, with sand in everything. Then we sat with our mothers on blankets and looked into the fire. With the warmth swelled a sense that all was well and our thoughts returned to familiar things.

  After hot dogs sloppy with mustard and potato chips, we waved sticks over leaping flames, blackening our marshmal-lows, and when at last it was night, fireworks hissed and boomed and bejeweled the summer sky. Awed, we shouted and shook our sparklers on the Fourth of July. When it was over our father threw sand on the dying fire, then weary from the hard sun and wind and the demands of the terrible swim, with the night chill settling into blackness, we gathered our things and climbed the steps to the plateau, where the bus awaited the sleepy journey home.

  Visits to that place by the sea inspired intense and indecipherable feelings, a confluence of wildness and order, of magic and the commonplace, of vitality and death, content-

  ment against unutterable yearning, instantaneous and eternal.

  When I was ten, and had resumed full school days, I began playing with an El Salvadoran girl who spoke little English, named Roxanna Tinocco. Soon, she
was one of my closest friends, but her family was going back to El Salvador, and who knew i£ we'd ever see each other again? So we were shuffling morosely around the school yard, arm in arm, when Roxy invited me to El Salvador for the summer. The thought of going so far for so long was frightening, but by the time her parents made the invitation official and my own parents got enthusiastic, I could see that it would be an adventure.

  My mother insisted on taking me out to buy new clothes for the trip, even though shopping was an ordeal we avoided whenever possible because I hated it so. I hated having to look at clothes and hated trying them on and invariably I became cranky and literally faint from boredom. But this time she kept the expedition brief and cheerfril— soon we were sipping tea at the Beverly Hills Hotel, eating delicious cakes and chatting happily. And as we sat there, I became aware that my mother was talking to me like a friend, as if I was grown-up. In that moment some essential part of me, stirring in my most intimate, shadowy center, was acknowleged and stepped blinking into the bright afternoon light.

  The departure was wrenching. The Tinoccos had to pry me off my parents and I cried all the way to San Salvador, where, within hours of our arrival, the resident seamstress came to measure me for riding clothes. Later, three sets of snow-white jodhpurs and shirts arrived, neatly folded and wrapped in brown paper and a perfect fit, for my lessons the following morning.

  On a tour of the house I noted that the Tinoccos'

  kitchen was bigger than our living room. One of the cooks sat talking animatedly to Roxy while wringing a chicken's neck. Their conversation, which of course I understood nothing of because it was in Spanish, continued until the hen was bald. I felt homesick.