Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (3 page)

Inside was a sunny room overlooking the beautiful garden I loved; a bed with a beige bedspread, impersonal and, if anything, masculine; and shelves of books. I felt silly for fearing, or hoping for, something that I couldn’t even name.

Back in London when the summer ended, I climbed the stairs of Leslie’s house to the room that was to be mine. There was my pink-striped bed, the paint nubbly on the iron rods. The blue-striped bed was in Nurse’s room, as it had been in Maida Avenue. Instantly I felt resentful. I didn’t want to live here. I wanted the blue bed, and nobody had cared enough to know that and give it to me. I had lost my mother. I deserved the blue bed, but I wouldn’t expose my hurt by asking for it. Anyway, nothing would make me feel better enough.

Aged five now, I was one of the big girls at Stepping Stones, in the Dolphins class upstairs. When I was younger, I had gazed up those right-angled stairs to the heights where the Dolphins and the Eagles were, and longed for the day when I would be important enough to climb them. Now that I had made it, I didn’t care. Aside from the blue-striped bed, I didn’t care about anything.

I can’t blame Leslie for writing to Ireland to say he couldn’t keep me. Ferriel had a new baby, and my sullen gloom must have strained her nerves. I was the child of a woman with whom, she probably knew, her husband had been at least half in love—a woman adored by many for her beauty, wit, and intelligence, now haloed by a sudden
and gruesome death. In Ferriel’s place, I would have felt obscurely judged and found wanting.

Mum had wanted me to grow up a little English girl. She chose Leslie to look after me instead of her own parents, who lived outside New York City. Leslie tried his best, and the guilt of his failure scorched him. He disappeared from my life for twenty years, until finally, out of the blue, he found the courage to call me and ask, tentatively, if I would let him back in.

H
igh in a tower of Houghton Hall, in the low eastern hump of England, my mother’s letters lay locked in a trunk. Tony took charge of them when she died and stored them there, in his brother-in-law’s house, when he left England. On a midsummer day in 2006, I went to find them.

Houghton is probably a hundred years older than St. Cleran’s, and was built by the first prime minister of England. It has a tower at each corner, with a fat, pointy roof like the tents you see in old paintings of tournaments. I took an elevator, then stairs, to climb up into one of the tower attic rooms. It was octagonal, its high pointed ceiling ribbed like the inside of a strange fish. The plaster was bare and finely cracked, softened by centuries and yellowed by smoke. An arc of low, square-paned windows looked out onto the pillowy tops of old trees and, far below, smooth grass glittering in the sun.

There were angular piles draped in heavy canvas dust sheets and, in a corner opposite the windows, a cluster of tin trunks and leather suitcases. I found a bunch of keys in a chest of metal drawers, but they fit only some of the locks. A paper clip sprang the locks of others. Trunk after trunk contained sweaters, falconry equipment, children’s report cards and letters, random odds and ends.

The last trunk was navy-blue tin, with steel corners and a tarnished brass lock. It had to be the one. No key opened it; not the paper clip; not a corkscrew. I went downstairs and asked for a screwdriver.

The trunk breathed out the air it had held since 1969, the year Mum died. The dusty sweet smell of old paper flooded up into my face, stopping my hands where they rested on the manila folders that topped the pile inside. That smell had followed me from Ireland through all the houses I lived in, buried deep in the gutter of an old paperback of
Alice in Wonderland,
which I believed had once been Mum’s. As a child, as a teenager, I opened the book and pressed it against my face so that its pages blotted out the light, and inhaled, along with the delicious weirdness of the story, the melancholy of my old, accustomed loss.

I didn’t read the letters there, in that beautiful, octagonal, sun-washed room. They came back with me to New Mexico, where they sat in a suitcase at the foot of my bed for almost a year. Finally, in another big, sunlit house—this one built by my husband that I’m not married to, as they say in Taos—surrounded by the snowy fields of a bitterly cold winter, I laid them out, and explored, very gently, the hinterlands of my mother’s life.

Almost all the letters from the trunk were written to her. There is a box of girlish back-and-forth with her ballerina schoolmate Tanaquil LeClercq, a card “from the desk of Jean-Paul Sartre,” a thank-you note from Lauren Bacall for Mum’s condolences on Bogie’s death, picture postcards from Truman Capote, a mountain of rambling scrawls from her father, terse telegrams from Dad…and
some names I’d never heard of before, letter after letter mounting into high piles of passionate longing. Relics of her shadow life.

But even with this suitcase of letters spread around me, still I can’t touch her. Father, friends, lovers tell her how well she writes, but all I have is a filigree of gaps where her letters should be. I found only two letters in her hand, never sent, full of pain and blame of herself, and three tiny scraps of diary, one humorous, one anguished, the third clear-eyed and rational. I feel as I am hearing her voice across a vast distance, a word here and there intelligible, the rest sucked away by the dull air.

Most of the letters she wrote are gone. Her parents’ house burned down. Dad’s papers didn’t survive him for long. The lovers, mainly, returned to their own married lives. The friends are mostly dead, and Mum means nothing to their heirs.

As I read through elliptical remarks on indecipherable problems and mundane accounts of daily life, frustration chafes against the sense of thievery I’ve never managed to shake. Fate—or chance, or the blind carelessness of the universe—stole her from me. I had hoped to catch her again in these letters, but I feel like I’m snatching at the hem of her coat as she flies unknowingly away.

Still, there are motes of insight, single stars that break through a clouded sky. On Mother’s Day, my grandmother writes that my mother is her first child, “and who needs to know that you were five when I married Daddy.” I knew that, like me, Mum had lost her mother when she was young, but I’d always thought she’d been a toddler, barely conscious of it. Now I saw, on a hazy mirror of tears, that she’d been a little girl. With two small children to be tended, Grampa wouldn’t have waited long before marrying again. Let’s say he waited a minimal, decent year—which makes Mum four when, probably, she was taken in to see her mother on her deathbed and hear her last words. Four: the same age as I was when I sat on my mother’s bed in a room that had suddenly become her shrine. In that second, as I held Nana’s letter in my shaking hands, I felt my heart change shape.
Mum, who had been my imperfectly healed wound, became my ally, my twin. She and I had had the same strength of understanding when we were told that we would never see our mothers again.

As Dad told the story, he and Mum each saw St. Cleran’s separately while out hunting: an elegant Georgian half ruin, graciously proportioned, its big windows inviting, nestled amid green pastures crazed by stone walls, the fairy-tale woods bisected by that storybook river. This part is true. The implied excitement of a married couple discovering their first family home—the “Shall we?” and “Oh, let’s!”—is not. They had been married for about five years, together for another year or so before that, but when the decision to buy St. Cleran’s was made, Mum and Dad were, at best, doing a kind of stately dance around each other, a flow of synchronized avoidance through geography and time.

When she was barely eighteen, Mum had appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine, for no reason other than her breath-stopping beauty. She was, at the time, a dancer with the New York City Ballet. The producer David O. Selznick put her under contract and brought her to Hollywood. She appeared in
Life
again as one of the young starlets of 1949, identified as Rick Soma, the name she went by then; sitting front center in the photograph is Marilyn Monroe.

Mum never made a movie. Selznick sent her to acting classes and paired her with actors being screen-tested, but she seems never to have been given a screen test of her own. She performed on stage in La Jolla, outside L.A., and made two shorts for the Red Cross. When her contract came up for renewal, Selznick dropped her.

Her father urged her to stand on her head and sing in Selznick’s office, to show what she could do. He was Italian and owned a restaurant in Manhattan called Tony’s, where film and theater people liked to go, perhaps because the
padrone
would stand on his head and sing operatic arias on request. He fancied himself a yogi and
sent out Christmas cards with messages like “May the spirit of Prana be with you.” In his mind
prana,
breath, was a kind of elixir of the superhuman.

Until this point, Mum had always met with success. Not only did she dance for Balanchine; she was a soloist at the age of seventeen. As the beautiful daughter of the restaurant, her autograph book full of good wishes from patrons such as Zero Mostel, she grew up in the knowledge that a place in that pantheon of glamour and artistic accomplishment was reserved for her, and all she had to do was claim it. I can hear, between the lines of the letters her father wrote to her, echoes of her baffled despair. She didn’t know what to do in Hollywood; she didn’t know what she was doing wrong. Did the loss of her mother teach her—as it taught me—that it’s useless to struggle? Mum was not as determined, not as single-minded, not as convinced of her superiority to the rest of humanity as her father thought she should be.

He barraged Mum with letters full of exhortations to become ever more flexible and disciplined, to be always bright and delightful and never show weakness or sorrow, to become a Nietzschean superhuman like himself. He told her that nobody could judge her but herself, that exalted humans like themselves were always right—though reading his letters, I wonder if Mum felt she was ever good enough. I imagine her walking to the mailbox in the lobby of her apartment building and seeing her father’s scrawl on yet another fat envelope, and steeling herself to open it.

She was his firstborn and favorite. His moods swung from fury when she didn’t write often enough, or long enough, to an embarrasingly detailed appreciation of every beauty of her physical and mental form. He admonished her constantly on everything from how to be prepared to escape from a blazing hotel to the exact position in which she should hold her lips when she sang or read aloud—away from her teeth, with her voice projected from her diaphragm. I sense her losing her bearings under the onslaught. How could she be
natural on-screen or onstage when she was forced into a pricklingly minute self-consciousness by her father’s fusillade of instructions?

Still only nineteen, she was by this time involved with the legendarily hell-raising director John Huston, twenty-three years her senior. He was exactly the sort of man my Grampa dreamed of for his daughter: celebrated, artistic, intellectual, larger than life, and the son of an even more famous actor, Walter Huston. Grampa knew them both, from the restaurant. Grampa was thrilled, too, by the news that Mum was pregnant, even though Dad was still married to the actress Evelyn Keyes, his third wife. There was no scandal in his eyes; all he saw was a grand meeting of dynasties. A divorce would be obtained and a marriage performed just in time, a month before my brother Tony was born.

Again and again, Grampa refers to “the Soma-Peppa strain”: the genes Mum has inherited from him and his sainted mother, whose name was Peppa. He puns on the Greek meaning of
soma
—the physical body—as somehow expressing the idea that the Somas are the ultimate humans. Occasionally he extends this to the “Bona-Peppa-Soma strain.” Grampa’s grandfather was a foundling, and Grampa was convinced he was descended from Napoleon Bonaparte.

He makes constant swipes at his first wife’s materialism, her shallowness, her general inferiority to the Soma-Peppa strain. How anguished and confused Mum must have felt, alone on the treacherous soil of Hollywood, as she read her father’s cutting words about her mother. Like me, she had memories of her mother—but fitful ones. She knew she hadn’t known her really, hadn’t known what kind of a person she was. Even if she tried not to believe what Grampa said, his insults must have thrown shadows on her memory. Which side of herself, which half of her blood, did Mum want to be? In Grampa’s eyes, every complaint, every worry, every sign of weakness, betrayed the insidious mediocrity of her mother’s heritage.

Grampa made swipes at his second wife too, my Nana, who loved Mum like her own daughter. In response, evidently, to Mum’s
complaints about her husband, he placed Nana and Dad together in the category of introverted, cold Anglo-Saxons, in contrast to the life-affirming extraversion of the Italian Bona-Peppa-Soma strain. They were the inferior mates that he and Mum, the exalted Somas, were doomed to suffer. It can’t have been much comfort. I imagine Mum isolated and lonely in Malibu (then even farther north of L.A. than it is now), fighting a grim and silent resistance against her father’s attempts to alienate her from the mother she’d lost and the stepmother she loved, and yet, by force of habit and training, wanting to please him; buffeted by the hormones of pregnancy and Grampa’s violent swings between adulation and fury; with a husband cavorting from California to the Congo, and a career for which she had spent her short life preparing dying in her hands.

By the time she was twenty-two, Mum had two children: Walter Anthony, named for his two grandfathers, and Anjelica. No “Rhea,” for Dad’s mother, or “Dorothy,” for Nana. Dad was filming
The African Queen
and reachable only by tom-tom when Anjelica was born, so Mum had a free hand with the birth certificate. She named her daughter firmly for her own lost mother—with Nana’s blessing, for she had suggested it with genuine delight in how beautiful the combination “Angelica Huston” sounded. But Mum chose to spell it differently, with a “j” instead of a “g.”

Was it superstition, like the tags on her jewelry and the lack of a will? This baby would not do what the first Angelica did. She would not die and leave Mum behind—nor would she repeat the past and lose her mother as Mum had.

When Mum died, my sister Anjelica was seventeen. I was the little half-orphaned girl that Mum had been—the daughter named Allegra, Italian for “happy,” the daughter whose name promised, in an Italian proverb, the protection of the gods.
La gente allegra i dei proteggono.
A friend of Mum’s, the
padrona
of an Italian restaurant in London, wrote it out for me twenty years after Mum died.

Anjelica was only a month old when Dad insisted Mum go with
him to London, where he was to do postproduction work on
The African Queen.
She left her babies with Nana and Grampa. I read the letters from Nana describing their progress—Tony’s walking, Anjelica’s babbles and smiles—and I feel the wrenching anguish Mum must have felt at leaving them, every maternal instinct screaming against it, but the two men who ruled her life insisting she go. She was Mrs. Huston, and it was her duty to live up to it.

Dad was a difficult person to be married to, and Mum was the fourth woman to attempt it. He was unfaithful, egocentric, impatient, judgmental, cuttingly sarcastic, and a gambler. The role of Mrs. Huston—“you know, he directed Moulin Rouge or Moby Dick or whatever the film is,” as she put it in her diary, with the bluntness of a stick to the head—gave her prestige in the world, but it was barren. Grampa, in his cruelly boastful superiority, needled her for expecting that marriage should bring happiness; while he obviously wanted her to be with a famous man, he seemed to believe that she would be better off as a courtesan than a wife. (He was, by now, writing that her biggest mistake had been to marry Dad.) I don’t believe she really believed him; but in her darker moments, he must have seemed right.