A Story Lately Told (5 page)

Dad called Tony “my son and heir,” and it was generally expressed to us that one day Tony would inherit St. Clerans. I think we were, if unconsciously, already vying for the attention of our parents. Tony complained that I was spoiled, that I got my way all the time. And I think he was jealous of the attention I drew because I was a bit more nimble than he was. I knew how
to play people. I was romantic and companionable and a bit of a crybaby. But I also knew how to make people laugh, and I had an ease that he didn’t seem to possess.

One day, Tony organized a boxing match between a local boy and me on the front lawn of the Little House. A single blow to my mouth from his fist and my two front baby teeth went flying. Dad, who was in Japan making
The Barbarian and the Geisha,
volunteered to get me a perfect pearl to fill the gap. This started a ritual in which he would give me a precious stone every year. A ruby when I had the measles “to match my largest spot,” an emerald for Christmastime in Ireland, a single canary diamond because every girl should have one. Tony in turn received an antique orrery and a carved cherrywood crossbow from the court of Louis XIV.

Dear Santa,

Please

may I have a baby

in a cradle

with a pink bow

on it and a box

of sweets and

a little book

I would also

like a necklace

and a bracelet

and earrings

a doll’s house

and some perfume

and a bigger fairy dress

Love, Anjelica

I wrote this letter one Christmas Eve under great duress in front of a big turf fire in the Little House sitting room. I remember breaking down several times: the difficulty of getting my letters straight, desiring all those presents, and the exhaustion of having to spell it all out on paper. It was the year before Tony blew the whistle on Santa Claus.

On Christmas morning, we awoke at the crack of dawn after a fitful sleep following every attempt to stay awake and catch Santa in the act. We dove to the end of our four-poster beds to check out the stockings we’d hung the night before, complaining about the lumpy fillers, the walnuts and foil-wrapped tangerines, burrowing deep for what often proved to be the best presents of the year: a charm bracelet with a miniature enameled Jonah praying inside the mouth of a golden whale, a tiny Etruscan ring with the black cameo of an angel. Each individually wrapped by Mum.

On Boxing Day (St. Stephen’s Day), the Wren Boys, or Mummers, would come to St. Clerans wearing crude masks, lace curtains, and their mother’s lipstick. Their song went:

The wren, the wren,

The king of all birds,

St. Stephen’s Day

Was caught in the furze.

Although he was small,

His courage was great,

Cheer up, old woman,

And give us a treat!

At this point, they’d give you a glimpse of the tortured little bird they were carrying in a cardboard box. Mum always bought
the birds from them, and we’d try to feed them worms, but they were usually too traumatized to live, and we’d have a sad little burial in the garden before the first day of the year.

I remember a pine tree lit up with colored bulbs in the garden room, hearing Tony’s and my new budgies chirping in their cage, and folding my arms, leaning over to slide down the banister on my armpits, then realizing that I’d tilted too far, falling over the rail, and dropping onto my head, maybe ten feet, to the floor below. As I came to, Dad was holding me on his lap. “Get her some sherry, honey,” he said to Mum. It tasted delicious as I sipped it, lying in my father’s arms, feeling dizzy. I loved the Little House. It was intimate.

Mum would give me jobs for a few shillings an hour, like digging in the lawn with a potato peeler for dandelions to make salad, or polishing the silverware. Every day I was expected to make my bed with the hospital corners favored by Nurse. I had to shine my own shoes and, as soon as I could be trusted not to burn myself, to iron my shirts. Mum said you had to be able to do these things in case you grew up to be poor and couldn’t have servants.

As a child, she herself had to make many beds and change the water in many vases and do the washing up. I understood, and although it was tedious, it made basic sense. What I didn’t understand was that the same did not seem to apply to the boys, or, more specifically, to Tony, whose only appearance at the kitchen sink was to gut trout or dismember small birds.

•  •  •

My first perfume was Blue Grass. I loved the bottle, with the flying turquoise horse with flowers in its mane. Then Mum gave me Diorissimo, which smelled like lily of the valley. Mum wore Chanel No. 5, and later, Guerlain’s Shalimar, which was
exotic and spicy, like burnt vanilla. But each year, when Nan Sunderland would make her appearance from America, the all-encompassing odor of Mary Chess Carnation permeated the ether and lingered for weeks in the Little House after she had gone. Nan was Walter’s widow; we called her “Gran,” though she wasn’t much older than Dad. She was a tall redhead with heavily freckled skin, who wore beaded hairnets and trousers cut high at the waist and wide at the hips, tapering above white ankle socks and penny loafers. She also wore a sizable Bengal ruby on her wedding finger, which I later inherited.

At that time, having converted to Christian Science, she had decided not to accept presents at Christmas. This outraged Tony and me; we were adamant that she should accept our offerings, and left our gifts piled outside her door for her to step over whenever she left the room, until we were told by Mum not to annoy her, that she was fragile.

As far as I reckoned, Nan had the resilience of a sequoia. She had great affection for Dad and would swoop to him, wrapping her arms about his neck, reciting snatches of poetry, or whispering in his ear. Later, when Dad moved to the Big House, she stayed up there, drifting about in a negligee of powder-blue satin, perched at the bay window on the upper landing, alongside the Greek marble horse’s head, reciting lines from
Playboy of the Western World.
She had been a stage and radio actress and had met Walter in 1928 when they were both performing on Broadway in
Elmer the Great
at the Lyceum Theatre. She was his third wife, following Rhea Gore and Bayonne Whipple, with whom he had partnered in vaudeville during the early twenties.

•  •  •

Tony and I were homeschooled, first by a pale redheaded Frenchman with a short temper called Monsieur Monquit.
Gazing into a hand mirror during our lessons, he would trim his thin ginger mustache with small gold scissors. I successfully charmed him into allowing me to do pretty much anything I wanted. It worked particularly well if I spoke in a baby voice.

Margot Stewart was our first governess—she had been secretary to the cultural attaché at the French embassy in London. Idelette followed Margot; she was French and pretty and wore angora sweaters and headbands. She had a vast collection of glass and porcelain miniatures, which Tony tossed into the mossy undergrowth beneath the giant branches of the yew tree in the garden. Idelette was followed by Leslie Waddington, whose father, Louis, a friend of Mum’s, owned the Waddington Art Galleries on Cork Street in London. I found Leslie a lot harder to charm than Monsieur Monquit. He had dark curly hair, fair skin, arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, and a narrow mouth. He was erudite, a big reader of Proust. He was one of those people who seem like seniors before their time, with an air of forbearance. Leslie was very visual—he liked to show us flash cards of the Old Masters. In my first art lesson, he demonstrated the effects of light and shadow on an egg. But he was rigid when it came to multiplication tables.

At six I was dreamy and had difficulty concentrating. Mum wrote to Dad in Japan, where he was filming
The Barbarian and the Geisha,
“Anjel, of course, is pure artist. Everything comes from intuition, some deep incontrovertible source knows all.”

Because I spent long periods of time in front of the mirror, Leslie commented that I was by far the vainest girl he’d ever met. But I was determining my fate. I had overheard a conversation between Mum and Dad. They feared that I was not going to be a beauty. And from looking at photographs of the time, I
can see that I was certainly not promising as a femme fatale. My eyebrows were high and rounded, my nose was the largest feature on my face, I had a weak chin, I walked with an apologetic hump. I swear it was by force of will that I was able to transform in any measure.

•  •  •

I remember ambling along the gravel driveway after Mum and Dad as they toured the site of the Big House with their architect, Michael Scott. Two medieval stone lions had been installed and were gazing out placidly from beside the columns at the entrance of a three-story Georgian manor composed of pale limestone blocks and tall windows with rounded cornices. My father once said, “The house itself was one of the most beautiful in all Ireland.” They were painstakingly restoring its graceful lines and taking out the extra walls that had partitioned the generous and beautifully proportioned formal rooms during the Victorian era. Mum was designing the interior, choosing colors and fabrics to create a background for the many extraordinary and diverse objects in my father’s personal collection—Greek marbles, Venetian glass, dancing Indian Shivas, Japanese screens and woodblocks, retablos, Chinese gongs, Italian carvings, bronzes, guns, ancient weaponry, Imperial jade, Etruscan gold, French tapestries, Louis XIV furniture, an eclectic assortment of fine paintings, and an important collection of pre-Columbian and African art from his trips to Mexico and the Congo.

Dad collected people as well. Like his grandfather John Gore, who once appeared home from a trip with a boy, Henry, whom he claimed to have adopted, Dad had adopted a child, Pablo, while making
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
in Mexico. We’d met him only once or twice, but we understood that he belonged to Dad’s last life, in America. Pablo was a good deal
older than Tony and me, married now, and living in California, and no longer seemed to be part of the collection.

•  •  •

Dad’s stories usually started with a long, deep pause at the beginning, as if reckoning with the narrative, his head thrown back, his brown eyes searching to visualize the memory, taking time to measure and reflect. There were a lot of “ums” and drawings on his cigar. Then the tale would begin.

He talked about the war. During the shooting of a documentary for the War Department at the Battle of San Pietro, the 143rd Regiment needed eleven hundred new troops to come in after the initial combat. Steel cable was stretched across the Rapido River to allow the troops to cross at night to the other side. But the Germans struck and the soldiers took a terrible hit. On the opposite side of the river, a major stood waist-deep in the water, his hand blasted off, and saluted each of the soldiers as they crossed. Dad said, “I never gave a sloppy salute again.”

There was the story of a crash landing in Adak, when Dad was filming another documentary,
Report from the Aleutians.
On his first flight out on a B-24, the plane’s brakes had frozen when they came in for a landing, skidding and slicing off the wings of two other B-24s on the runway. When the plane came to a halt, someone shouted to get out fast before it exploded. Dad tried to photograph the rescue team as they came aboard in an attempt to revive the unconscious pilot and copilot, but realized that he was shaking too hard to take the picture. He “put the camera down, and ran.” Mercifully, the explosion never happened. Dad told of another flight, over Kiska, an island in the Aleutians, when the Japanese pilots attacked and he tried to photograph the air battle over the body of the waist gunner, who had been killed in action.

He described being in Rome at Thanksgiving, when American trucks poured into town stacked high with plucked turkeys. His terrible revulsion at seeing this spectacle rendered him unable to eat poultry for the rest of his life.

Dad’s stories were quite like his movies—triumph and/or disaster in the face of adversity; the themes were manly. The stories often took place in foreign, exotic places with an emphasis on wildlife, which we loved. We begged to hear our favorite ones from the location of
The African Queen
: the marching red ants that ate everything they came across, and how the crew had to dig trenches, fill them with gasoline, and set them on fire because it was the only way to stop the ants from devouring everything in their path. There was the story of the missing villager whose pinkie finger turned up in the stew, and the hunt for the bull elephant and of being downwind of a water buffalo. And the one where the whole crew was suffering from dysentery, which was holding up the shoot, until a deadly poisonous black mamba was discovered wrapped around the latrine. Dad would laugh. “Suddenly, no one had to go to the bathroom anymore!”

•  •  •

For a short while a mannish German, Miss Perry, worked as a housekeeper up at the Big House, and Paddy Coyne came to work for us as a houseboy at the Little House. He had grown up in an orphanage in Cork; he was short and strong, with ebony eyes and a shock of black hair. Kitty was one of the staff that had come to St. Clerans from Courtown. She had a hooked nose and looked like the drawings of Granny in the
Addams Family
book. It took little effort for me to persuade Kitty to remove her dental bridge, shine a flashlight under her chin, and, wrapped in a sheet, chase Tony, me, and the Lynch kids up and down a
darkened passage at the back of the Big House as we screamed in terror.

Betts would come down from her home in Kilcullen, and she, Paddy Lynch, and my parents would go on outings to Connemara, Clare, Cork, and Limerick to scout the fields for horses. One such search led to the discovery of Blue Jeans, a horse that competed in the Olympics after Dad sold it. Another was the several-times winner of the Galway Championship Stone Wall, the winning show jumper at the Dublin Horse Show, the main trophy winner at Mountbellew in 1957, and the winner of two trophies later at Ballinasloe Fair. Mum had spotted a magnificent bay gelding on a range of mountains near Clifden called the Twelve Pins, and Dad had bought him for a song. Mum had christened him Errigal.