A Story Lately Told (10 page)

Love, Anjel xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Xxxxxxxxxxxxx

The grown-ups dressed for dinner, the women in cocktail attire or evening gowns, the gentlemen in black tie. On big occasions, Dad would wear white tie and a red tailcoat and black velvet slippers with foxes’ masks, with ruby eyes embroidered in gold thread. Jules Buck took a series of photographs that first Christmas at the Big House: the women in saris, my mother with her long neck and even gaze perched on a cream-colored sofa among the other ladies in the drawing room.

We sometimes loaded up into several cars and drove out the gates of St. Clerans with the guests in tow, for windy sightseeing expeditions to Co. Clare or up to Clifden in Connemara to see the beautiful clear lakes and have picnics and shop for Aran sweaters. When they commented on the beauty of the landscape, Dad became almost proprietary, smiling proudly. “It’s quite something, isn’t it?” he’d say modestly, as if Ireland herself belonged to him—his most beautiful and valuable possession.

After these outings, we loved to go to Paddy Burkes pub. The fastest oyster shucker in the world, Johnny, worked there. He’d won first prize at a contest in the U.S. for several years running. And Paddy himself was a favorite of Dad’s. They made a big fuss when Dad walked in. The oysters came straight out of the bay. You’d squeeze lemon on them, and they’d wriggle. I thought they were slimy, but Tony used to eat close to two dozen at a shot, then order two dozen more. We were allowed a Babycham when we went there. It was sweet and bubbly, with a little blue deer on the bottle, and actually had a bit of alcohol. I would always ask for smoked salmon and brown soda bread, the best bread ever.

On the way home, in the car, there were songs. I remember resting beside my father, with my head on his breast, listening
to him sing, “Oh, my pretty dragoon. My flower that faded too soon. My heart’s like the strings on my banjo, all broke from my pretty dragoon.” I loved when he sang that song, because the “oon” was really resonant in his chest. And then “Waltzing Matilda,” although none of us really knew all the verses. And then there’d be “Alouette, gentille alouette.” Roundelay songs, like “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” And from my brother, “Kevin Barry,” an Irish revolutionary song about a young man who meets his death by hanging.

In a clear voice, Mum sang the Scottish air “Matty Groves,” about a lord who goes away to battle and upon returning to his castle finds that the servant boy is sleeping with his wife:

How do you like my feather bed?

And how do you like my sheets?

And how do you like my fair young bride,

Who lies in your arms asleep?

It’s well I like your feather bed,

And it’s well I like your sheets!

But it’s best I like your

Fair young bride, who lies in my arms asleep!

“Mrs. McGraw” was my forte, another Irish revolutionary song. “Now, Mrs. McGraw, the sergeant said, would you like to make a soldier out of your son Ted?” we’d all caterwaul. There would have been quite a few black velvets, a champagne-and-Guinness combination, consumed at Paddy Burkes, and so the adults would be feeling no pain. We’d be covered up in the back of the car with the woolen blankets we’d laid down for picnics, rough sheep’s wool with the smell of oil still in it. There were
not to be many repetitions of these happy moments
en famille.
Although it was not mentioned to me at the time, Mum had already decided to leave Ireland.

•  •  •

The summer I turned nine, Mum had arranged a student-exchange program with the assistance of our tutor, Leslie Waddington. A girl my age called Adama Boulanger appeared at St. Clerans. I assume the basic intention on Mum’s part was to help me along with my French. Around the same time, a boy called Pierre Edouard arrived to fill in as a companion for Tony. I remember little about Pierre other than that he frustrated Nurse by peeing in his bed nightly. Adama stayed for a few weeks, tasted freedom for the first time in her life, and returned to her parents and France after a great holiday, happy and content, speaking English a lot better than I spoke French.

Mum was very excited because Adama’s parents, both doctors, owned a windmill, a
moulin,
in northern France. She found this terribly romantic and arranged for me to stay with them the following summer. She had shown me pictures enthusiastically, but for me the vacation was a torment. Anything you wanted to do, you had to ask first, even if it was to ride a bicycle around their property or take a dip in their pool. Adama had a younger brother, Charles, and a little sister of about five called Angélique.

Each morning we had a tartine for breakfast and were forced to drink a bowl of warm goat’s milk, which I found repulsive. Every afternoon we were sent to our bunk beds for what seemed like an eternity to take a nap. Charles had secreted a vast number of cigar labels on the underside of his mattress, and these proved something of a minor distraction during the enforced periods of rest. I loathed staying with the Boulangers, and when
I spoke to Mum on the phone I begged her to visit. Thrillingly, she replied that she would come. I was overjoyed to see her, the only problem being that Angélique never left her lap for the entire first day, which made me terribly jealous. I wanted to sleep with Mum in her bed, but this was not particularly welcomed by her or by the Boulangers.

The next morning, I awoke to howling from the direction of her room. When I ran in, Charles was prostrate on the floor, screaming. Mum’s hand was bleeding. As I understood it in the retelling, it seemed that he had come into her room with the intention of playing and, in his overexcitement, had bitten her. She in turn had bitten him back, which seemed only logical to Mum, but obviously not to his parents. After a few heated words between them, Mum came to Adama’s room and packed my bag.

I said goodbye to Adama, and Mum and I drove off down the coast toward Mont Saint-Michel, where they made omelets like soufflé in long-handled covered copper frying pans on an open fire. At one three-star restaurant along the way, we had lobster in the shell with garlic and butter, and we drank the local cider. I was Mum’s ally and sidekick. It felt great to escape the
moulin.

The following summer, when Joan Buck returned to St. Clerans, we swam in the Japanese bath, and Tony tried to pull off her bathing suit. Joan told me that she was going to star in a movie in England called
Greyfriars Bobby,
which meant that she couldn’t ride horses or climb trees or jump on the trampoline or do anything remotely dangerous. I found this very irritating.

The night before she was to depart for London, I hid her passport in the antique picnic box Dad had brought me back from Japan and denied all knowledge of its disappearance, which convinced her there were ghosts at St. Clerans.

•  •  •

Platinum blond with pale skin, in her late thirties, Gladys Hill, a refined and fair-minded woman from West Virginia, became Dad’s assistant in 1960, succeeding Lorrie Sherwood. Billy Pearson christened her “the Iron Maiden.” She had been Sam Spiegel’s secretary during the filming of
The Stranger
in 1945, when Dad was helping Sam and Orson Welles with the script. Gladys left Sam in 1952 to marry an electrical engineer; she lived with him in Guadalajara and they began collecting pre-Columbian art. In the fall of 1959, after she had divorced her husband and was working for an independent producer in Los Angeles, she wrote to Dad about a project. He sent her a cable: “Since you like to travel and since your job is temporary, why not come to Ireland and work for me forever and ever?”

Gladys moved into the studio next door to Dad’s painting loft, above the Lynches’ house. We loved going up to Gladys’s for parties. She would play Trío Los Panchos or Trío Los Paraguayos on the record player and sing along. It was like a little Mexican fiesta in her loft, with multicolored rugs from Guadalajara overlaying the rush matting on the floor and her fabulous collection of pre-Columbian art and objects on the bookshelves lining the walls. Gladys would pull out a drawer by her bedside, lined in ocher velvet, and show me, piece by piece, her cache of Mayan and Aztec gold mythical beasts—birds, lizards, and frogs.

After a few margaritas, Gladys might be persuaded to sing “Down in the Meadow,” which went:

In an iddy biddy pool

Fam free liddle fiddies

An da mommy fiddie too!

I loved when Gladys sang that song. Dad called her “Glades,” because I’d misspelled her name in a letter once, and she was Glades from then on.

She was sweet when she was tipsy and slurring her words. As with all the women surrounding Dad, she loved him like no other, but I doubt that she ever had anything to do with him romantically. She was too canny for that. She was also a considerate moral compass who looked after his life: communicated with his friends, made his dates, traveled with him, returned letters, and wrote scripts with him; negotiated with his business managers, his present and ex-wives, his lovers, his gambling partners, his old friends and new acquaintances; and followed him from home to location, with a lifer’s dedication. I was always grateful that Gladys was present as a buffer when I visited Dad on film sets. She kept a lid on things, and I loved her for her kindness and decency.

Dad shared her passion for pre-Columbian art, and she became the curator of his prized collection, housed next to the Gun Room at the Big House. Gladys could sniff out a fake a mile away, and it was always bad news if Dad returned home from Mexico from a lone shopping foray for pre-Columbian art. Gladys would sniff, scratch, and spit on the piece in question, and before too long, you’d hear the crash of shattering ceramic against the basement walls.

She had a copious handbag from which she could pull out at a moment’s notice practically anything you might imagine, whether it be chocolate or toenail clippers. Though Dad preferred not to notice, the handbag was also a habitual repository for smuggled pre-Columbian gold, and on one occasion that haunted him for a long time, some precious objects got mysteriously secreted in its folds on a departure from Egypt—a
crime that in those days was punishable by death. When questioned at customs, Gladys was implacable. Because she was the essence of fairness and virtue, no one might have the temerity to suspect her of any type of moral lassitude; she would have made a supreme spy. However, Gladys was not above releasing a confidential opinion, sometimes regrettable in the cold light of morning, as to why Dad was behaving badly, or spending too much money, or imbibing too much alcohol.

But everyone drank in Ireland, even our local Garda, who came from Loughrea on his bike every year on Christmas Eve to fall, stocious, over the back of the sofa. Drinking was what the adults did, and the abstainers were solemn characters who pointed piously to a white badge with a red cross on their lapels and asked for lemonade or tea instead. It was not uncommon to see a lone figure weaving down a country road at night, or men brawling in a pub. In every town hung the sign “Guinness is good for you!”

It seemed these days that Mum was always away. Tony used to sit behind the bar in the inner hall at the Big House and mix drinks. A little bourbon, some vodka, a drop of crème de menthe, Coca-Cola, gin, Irish whiskey, angostura bitters, with a maraschino cherry floating on top. This he would sip slowly and deliberately before dinner. No one really said anything about it. Betts would pour me a sherry, which I’d favored since falling off the banister at the Little House. And Dad would ask for a martini. He had shown me how to make one to perfection: the crushed ice, the dash of bitters, the cold vodka, the drop of vermouth; how to shake it up and pour it out so the olive floated. As soon as the volume in the martini glass looked shallow, he would hold his long arm out for another. Generally, it was Betty who would perform the duty, leaving the room to
refill the glass, but sometimes as I followed her out to the bar, she would mutter, “I’m going to water it down. Your father is one over the eight.”

When I went back to the study to present Dad the watered-down martini, it was tantamount to an act of betrayal. He’d take a sip and then fix me with a challenging eye. “Come on, honey, get me a drink,” he’d say. “I’m serious.”

Dad taught me how to prepare a cigar—how to listen to the wrap of the tobacco and test the smoothness and texture of the skin, how to warm the cigar and pick a hole at the tip without benefit of a cutter, how to light the end from a match and blow on the ember, how to suck in the smoke and then exhale. There was poetry to the art of smoking. If I promised to smoke it all the way through, I could have a Monte Cristo on New Year’s Eve.

M
um and Dad never told Tony and me that they were separating, so I was confused when Mum started a sort of slow-motion move to London, in 1960. And I don’t really know whether it was before or after Mum had decided to leave, whether it was a mutual course of action, or simply Dad’s decision,
but Betty O’Kelly was asked to come down west from Co. Kildare to be the estate manager at St. Clerans. Betts accepted the offer and moved into the Bhutan Room up at the Big House. I was still living, for the most part, at the Little House, and Betts encouraged me to move into the Lavender Room at the Big House. With Mum’s gradual absence, the place grew more conventional in aspect. Now there were Betts’s invitations to hunt balls balanced on the mantelpiece in the study, Betts’s photo albums full of fox-hunting pictures and sailing in Galway Bay.