Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (7 page)

“You’re going to come and live in the Big House, Allegra,” Betty O’Kelly said to me soon after we got back. “The Little House is being sold. Your father can’t afford to keep it anymore.”

I felt like the earth was falling away from under me. I had thought St. Cleran’s was forever and unchanging; it had existed as the Hustons’ home for longer than I’d been alive. The idea that Daddy didn’t have enough money to keep it was terrifying. He was the king here, and kings didn’t have to sell. And a child—me—was going to live in the grown-ups’ house.

“Where will Nurse sleep?”

“In Mary Margaret’s room. We’ve had to let Mary Margaret go.”

I didn’t dare ask about everyone else: the Lynches, Paddy Coyne. Their homes were part of the Little House courtyard. My world was being broken in two.

My toys and clothes were moved into the Bhutan Room, across from Betty’s room at the top of the stairs—the room I had run through on my circuit from the Napoleon Room, when Zoë slept there. At seven, I was a bit old for running in circles, and I felt very grown-up to have this beautiful room for my own. No changes were made to it for me—for a child. Its identity was fixed, and I stayed in it like any other guest. The walls were dark blue, and the bedspread and curtains were made of golden-orange embroidered squares which, Betty told me, were Bhutanese wedding cloth. Daddy had brought them back from Bhutan himself. It was a Himalayan kingdom closed to outsiders, misty and mythical. The sort of place where Daddy, unlike mere mortals, could go.

I ate breakfast at the round table in the bay window of the dining room, and sometimes Daddy would come down to eat buttered toast and read the newspaper across from me. I’d hear the crunch of gravel and see Paddy Lynch drive around the corner below me, then I’d lug my book bag down the steps from the front door, proud of how big and heavy it was. I got to school half an hour earlier than the other girls for my French lesson with Sister Annunciata, which consisted of a walk through the halls of the convent singing “Frère Jacques” and “Alouette”—which were probably the only French she knew.

My school friends didn’t come over to play anymore. Even Jackie and Caroline grew distant. The chest of dressing-up clothes, which was our favorite thing to play, hadn’t come to the Big House with me. I did my homework, properly, in the study; my books stayed in my room. This wasn’t a house where dolls or games could be left lying around.

At night I would hear Seamus, the Irish wolfhound, patrolling up and down the stairs. He spent his days sleeping on the first half landing, and you had to pick your way across him to get up-or downstairs. He was so big that once, when I was four, Paddy Coyne had held me on his back and let me ride him around the kitchen of the Little House. His long, old legs plodded in a rhythm slower than you’d expect from a dog. Dad loved it that guests would hear those padding footfalls and think it was the ghost.

The ghost’s name was Daly. For some reason he’d been hanged, and the women of the house had watched from the upstairs windows. After that the windows had been blocked up. Dad and Mum had unblocked them, and let Daly’s ghost back in. Dad claimed that one woman houseguest actually saw Daly, when everyone else had gone out with the hunt and she’d been sitting alone in the study reading: the door had opened to admit a man dressed in eighteenth-century costume, who saluted her wordlessly and left again.

I’m sure Dad provided the ghost, though he never admitted to it: a not-very-local man, an outfit from the film costumers Bermans
& Nathans, a briefing on what to do and when to do it. He loved practical jokes, and wouldn’t have let an opportunity like that slip by. At the time, I was never sure whether to believe Betty when she said Daly’s ghost was real. My brain and my instincts rebelled against it. My mother’s absolute vanishment proved that the dead didn’t come back to any kind of life. I never heard her voice, smelled her scent, saw her shadow disappearing around a corner, or felt her presence watching over me. There were no signs of her in the material world. The only traces I had left of her were disappearing into the treacherous depths of my memory.

That Christmas, the
Irish Times
ran a coloring competition, a big drawing of Santa with presents that filled half a broadsheet page. I entered it, mainly because Karen Creagh was doing it. She had a red-and-blue color scheme, which I thought was perfect. It would have been cheating to copy it, so, feeling unimaginative and second best, I used purple and yellow. I won: I’d been judged the best colorer in all Ireland. I didn’t believe it. Karen’s entry, for one, was much better than mine, and there had to be hundreds more. I decided it was a fix. I’d only won because I was “Mr. Huston’s daughter” and he was such a huge celebrity in Ireland that they—the
Irish Times,
the people who were in charge of Ireland—wanted to make him happy. My prize was a beautiful wooden case filled with artist’s oils, like the ones Daddy used.

Nothing could convince me that I was artistic. Mum had been—Betty showed me the place in the basement of the Big House where she used to arrange flowers—and obviously Daddy was. I knew that those paints were not legitimately mine. I never touched them.

In the Little House the previous Christmas, Tony had made a Nativity. He’d gone out to the thicket of bamboo at the far end of the garden, where the fox lived, and cut stalks for the stable—it was going to look like a log cabin. I watched as he held them upright, slicing them lengthways with a kitchen knife, straight down, one, then the next, until the knife caught on a joint of the bamboo and slid
diagonally across the pad of flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. First there was just a long red line, then blood started to pulse out of it. The skin pulled apart. Tony stared down at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. Nurse jumped up and ran, sloshing through the gravel, through the gates, across the bridge, up to the Big House. I raced after her. We found Betty, who put Tony in her car and took him to the hospital in Galway. Nurse couldn’t drive.

While Tony was gone, Nurse told me the story of when he’d fallen off a horse and been dragged through a wood, his foot caught in the stirrup. He’d needed nearly a hundred stitches in his head that time. I began to enfold lack of creative skill into my identity, along with physical cowardice. Carving knives wouldn’t slice me open, and fallen branches wouldn’t tear at my skull.

Lying in bed in the Bhutan Room with a fever, I felt guilty. Nurse was in Dublin, on her annual week’s holiday. It wasn’t anyone else’s job to take care of me, so I ought to be able to take care of myself. I’d been allowed to come live in the Big House with the grown-ups; I wasn’t supposed to be sick.

Dr. Payne came from Loughrea to examine me. He diagnosed spots on my tonsils.

Before he went down to dinner, Daddy came into the Bhutan Room to see me. He was wearing a velvet jacket and a silk shirt with a plain front and a high rolled collar. The silk, when I touched the cuff, was softly magnetic under my fingertips. He sat on the bed beside me, and laid out the crossword from the newspaper. I loved crosswords, and he loved that I was good at them. Each clue I solved was a rush of warmth, as I felt his pride in me. When Betty came in, also dressed for dinner, he kissed me on the cheek and they went downstairs.

I could hear the talk floating up from below, then hollow footsteps as people crossed the wood-floored hall to the dining room. I couldn’t sleep; I was too hot with fever. There were the footsteps
again, clattery this time, crossing the marble hall to the drawing room. Then the door opened, and it was Daddy.

Maybe I was dreaming him. I was amazed that he had remembered me, amazed that he had left the laughing and drinking to come upstairs and sit on my bed again, draw a hand across my clammy forehead and make sure there was a glass of juice beside me. We were in a cocoon, just the two of us: in this high, dark, quiet space. Did they notice, downstairs, that he wasn’t there? Of course they must. But no one would guess that he was here in the Bhutan Room, with me.

A few months later, just as suddenly, Nurse and I were moved back into the Little House. Talk of selling vanished. All was back to normal. When school finished, I packed my blue suitcase again—the one that went with me everywhere, which had my initials, A.H., stenciled on it in white—and we went back to Nana and Grampa’s house for the summer. I left my treasure chest behind.

G
rampa’s restaurant was in a brownstone at 150 East Fifty-fifth Street, with an awning over the sidewalk reading, in cursive script,
Tony and Tony’s Wife.
I thought it was insulting—but characteristic of Grampa—that he had a name and Nana didn’t. I’ve since learned that it was originally just called Tony’s Wife, and was a spin-off of Grampa’s first restaurant, Tony’s. When they closed the first one, they merged the names.

I imagine Nana at the time she married Grampa. It was during Prohibition, and the restaurant was a speakeasy; he had two motherless children, officials to charm, policemen to bribe, and liquor to hide. Scottish as she was, Nana was swept off her feet by Grampa’s swashbuckling canniness, along with her own maternal instincts. It was a strange marriage; not devoid of affection, but marked by emotional and physical cruelty.

In his letters to Mum, Grampa swings between contempt for Nana and dependence on her. In his eyes, she existed either to enable his glory or as a drag on it. She, not surprisingly, was prone to depression, and turned to Mum as an ally. She told Mum about going in front of some city board for a liquor license and being asked if she’d ever been convicted of a crime. “Marrying Tony Soma,” she answered, which made the liquor-board guys laugh. It made me laugh too—until I sensed Mum’s silently pleading misery at being caught in the battle between her father and her stepmother: on one side, blood, the man to whom she owed everything, and on the other, no blood, but the only mother love she’d consciously known.

There was never any question of Nana leaving her life with Grampa, and by the time I knew her, she’d carved out her own space. I liked seeing her in the city, being served a solitary, queenly dinner at the round table in “Nana’s sitting room” on the first floor above the restaurant by a waiter in formal jacket and bow tie. It was only when I saw the waiter bowing slightly as he set the plate in front of her, shaking out her napkin for her, that I realized that I didn’t like how Grampa treated her. Grampa saw himself as an unusually wise and spiritually evolved being, and, so very pleased with himself, he considered himself above the demands of common kindness. I didn’t buy it.

No one said it, but I got the idea that Grampa hated Daddy. I picture the two of them as chimpanzees tussling over Mum, with Grampa thrashing in fury as he, the old alpha, was toppled by the new. As Daddy’s daughter, I took it personally. I was loyal to him. I couldn’t help comparing him to Grampa: each was a king in his own realm, surrounded by a court. But Daddy’s world had been run for everybody’s happiness, while Grampa’s had one transcendent purpose, which was himself. Grampa set himself above the world; Daddy enthusiastically took part in it. When Daddy looked at me, sketched me, I was a person, flesh and blood in front of him. I was real.

On one trip to the city sometime in August, Martine and I were
dressed up in our best clothes and taken to Radio City Music Hall for the premiere of Daddy’s latest movie,
Fat City.
It was a story of down-and-out boxers, and way over the heads of two little girls (though later Martine excitedly told me she knew what it meant when one of the characters said, “He threw me down on that bed and he raped me!”). Afterward, there was a party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Martine and I ran around among the tall statues. The white marble floor was pale and cold, hard beneath our feet. Everything glittered: the marble, the lights, the beaded dresses and jewels. Daddy was at the center of it; it was like seeing his power source, flashes of electricity whizzing around him. It energized him; it made the kingdom of St. Cleran’s possible.

Standing beside Daddy was a woman unlike anyone I’d ever met. Her hair fell back from her face in waves, like a lion’s mane. Her shoulders were bare, and her skin was tanned and freckled by the sun. She was much younger than him—and younger than the grand women who had visited St. Cleran’s and stayed in the Gray Room, those ladies with thick lipstick, pale skin, and patronizing hands. She didn’t wear that slashing lipstick, and she was wearing a dress that none of those women would have worn: covered all over in pale lavender sequins and held up only at the back of her neck, like a bathing suit. Those women had carried hard, invisible shells around themselves, like display cases; she gave the impression of hiding nothing.

“This is Cici,” said Daddy. She sank down so that our faces were level, and took both my hands for a moment, as if to see whether I was prepared to be hugged. I wasn’t—she’d taken me completely by surprise. Even Zoë hadn’t done anything like that.

Cici’s smile was square, seeming to turn down at the corners because it didn’t turn up. There was something wonderfully casual and self-possessed about it, as if she were smiling for nobody’s pleasure but her own. If you shared it, you were sharing a joke, or a secret. I didn’t know what the secret was, but I loved the complicity of her smile.

When we said good-bye, Cici embraced me. This time I let her, willingly. I couldn’t understand why she was genuinely pleased to meet me, but I accepted wholeheartedly that she was. I had no idea what connection she had to Daddy—or might have to me. My universe had fixed points: Daddy, Nurse, Betty, Gladys, Nana and Grampa. It didn’t occur to me that the stars might shift their courses, or that the very shape of my universe might change out of recognition. I’m not sure I even wondered whether I would see Cici again.

Not long afterward, Daddy wrote to tell me that he and Cici had been married. I think the letter said that he hoped we would become close. He didn’t use the word “stepmother”—and I didn’t think of her as a replacement for Mum since I had no conception of Mum as Daddy’s wife. In any case, Daddy was virtually a different species from the husbands-and-wives-and-children whom I knew. Theirs was not a pattern that I expected Daddy—or Daddy and me—to follow.

He also told me that I wouldn’t be going back to St. Cleran’s. Nana and Grampa’s house was my home now.

I didn’t ask him, or anyone else, why I’d been exiled from St. Cleran’s. His marriage to Cici obviously had something to do with it, but I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t picture her at St. Cleran’s, with its rainy skies and headscarf-wearing women and a butler banging a gong to announce lunch. I didn’t know much about her, other than that she was from Los Angeles, and she was clearly at home in Daddy’s world of money and famous friends. She wasn’t an actress; it didn’t occur to me that she might “be” anything other than herself. I understood why Daddy was entranced by her. I was. Somehow I had the sense that she knew who I was, too. Maybe she had convinced Daddy that I was better off in Long Island with my cousins than as a solitary Irish princess with the groom’s children for friends. Fleetingly I wondered whether I should have put more effort into becoming friends with the other girls at the convent school in Loughrea.

Still, after a second summer collecting beach glass with my
cousins, I wasn’t unhappy with the change. I sensed that Daddy was starting off on a new life and leaving the old one behind. It seemed natural that I would be left in his wake. Other people had been found to look after me, and nobody seemed to think I would have any feelings about it at all—so, conveniently, I didn’t. If Daddy and I weren’t both living at St. Cleran’s—which had happened only in short bursts, anyway—I had no conception of what life with Daddy could possibly be.

Great chasms shivered the cliff below Nana and Grampa’s house, scoring its surface into deep wrinkles like tissue paper that’s been used too many times. It was, visibly, falling away. When Grampa had built the house—when Mum was a girl and first living on her own in California—he’d built a bocce court between the house and the cliff edge: a long narrow rectangle of sand rimmed with boards. Now it was half gone, and the cliff edge crept closer to the house every day. The wooden staircase that led down to the beach ended in midair.

The certainty that one day the house itself would tumble too fascinated me, the way disasters do in a country you’ve barely heard of. It was neither sad nor frightening, just inevitable and satisfyingly dramatic. I didn’t like the house much. Despite all its windows, it felt dark, and it was flimsy after the thick stone of St. Cleran’s. The Irish windows that I loved were set deep, so that looking through them felt like looking through a telescope or a peephole, and the golden-gray light ran liquid through the old, swirling glass. The Long Island glass was as flat and featureless as plastic, and marred by ugly screens. I was offended by the miserly shallowness of the windowsills.

Nurse and I slept in the guest bedroom—she in the double bed, which I soon joined her in, and I, theoretically, in the single one beside it. The white candlewick bedspreads were thin, like the windows: worn and saggy by nature, they pulled my spirit down. I’d grown accustomed to rooms Mum had furnished with deep colors
and strange objects enriched by the marks of age. Here, old things were just old: tired and visibly ready for their end.

And here too there was talk of selling up. The place was too big; Grampa couldn’t support all these households. I bridled inwardly, on everyone’s behalf but my own. Uncle Nap worked hard running the restaurant in the city, and I didn’t see how it could be his fault that its heyday was past. Uncle Fraser didn’t have a real job—but Grampa required a flunky, and if it wasn’t Uncle Fraser, who would it be?

I didn’t miss St. Cleran’s, in the sense of longing to be back there. There was no point. That temporary move to the Big House had shut me down. I was to be housed where convenience dictated; I had felt, in the heart of my family, like a guest. I would always stay in other people’s rooms, so I might as well get used to it. I’d just been moved on again—and somewhere in my mind I knew it wouldn’t be the last time. I didn’t think of asking for a poster or a bright bedspread, or color on the walls. I had a nomad’s indifference. But I didn’t have a nomad’s soul.

A few of my things from Ireland caught up with me five or six years later. I never saw my treasure chest again.

Grampa descended from his upstairs realm every night for dinner, and to watch the news on TV. It was 1972: every night, flag-draped coffins came home from Vietnam, families cried over MIAs and POWs, angry people marched against the war. Then, during the Olympics—which Nana and I watched fervently—the Israeli athletes were murdered. The world outside was full of death, mourning, hijacked planes and cruise ships—and I was comforted. I wasn’t the only one who had seen someone they loved disappear into nothingness; my mother wasn’t the only one who died. What had happened to me was important enough to be on the news—but multiplied so many times that it was normal. It cheered me that there were protests:
people who wouldn’t accept it and wanted it changed. Still, I felt wiser than they were. I knew that death was unjust, and didn’t care.

Mum was visible in the house, but never spoken of. On the wall near the fireplace was a vertical row of oval black silhouettes of Grampa’s five children, as children. On the mantelpiece rested a big, unframed print of Philippe Halsman’s famous photograph
The Act of Creation:
Mum’s face and bare shoulders framed by a carved picture frame held in the crook of a naked man’s arm as he lies on his side, his elaborately muscled back to the camera, while the artist Jean Cocteau reaches through the frame to draw a paintbrush along Mum’s eyebrow. It is, in its way, everything Grampa wished for his beautiful daughter to be: a muse, an object of art. A three-dimensional human as the punch line of an artist’s joke.

It bothered me that the photograph wasn’t framed. I knew it ought to have been; neither Mum nor Dad would have left it leaning against the wall, bending under its own weight, fading and staining in the humid air. Maybe Grampa was angry at Mum for having died, I thought, and in revenge he was letting her photograph molder away.

There was no sign of Mum the person with a life of her own: no photos of her grown-up and inhabiting her life; no photos of her with Tony and Anjelica or me. I wondered if for Grampa she’d died—or been embalmed—long before: when she left New York, left him. It nagged at me that the unreal Mum in this house—her face blacked out in the silhouette, objectified in the photograph—was more materially real than the Mum whose image faded and flickered inside my head. It was as if one Mum was the shadow, or the echo, of the other. When I looked at that photo—as I did many times a day, every time I walked through the living room—I couldn’t be sure which was which.

I was retracing Mum’s footsteps—but backward. From Maida Avenue to St. Cleran’s to Long Island—and with each step I took, the last place disappeared into Mum’s future. I brought nothing with me but my clothes and my blue suitcase, which was mine because
it had my initials on it—and Nurse, who was so much a part of me (now that she and I were equally foreigners) that I hardly conceived of her as a separate person. She never talked of the past. I had no tangible evidence that my previous worlds had ever existed, no proof of Mum’s future and her death, but me. I felt dizzy sometimes, as if I were hovering near the ceiling and watching my mind turn actual memories into illusions, or wipe them away.

I was, I sensed, the living shape of Grampa’s loss of Mum, and the cascade of disappointment and fury he had felt when her life didn’t turn out to be as grand and historic as he had hoped. Like my dead mother—like every person in Grampa’s world—I was more abstract than real. Something like affection emanated from him occasionally, in my direction. It felt impersonal, a condition of his blood pumping, like body heat or breath.

Most of the time, he seemed not even to care, or to notice, that I was there. It was easy not to disturb him. Martine and I would sometimes spy on him as he sat in lotus position in his room, and when we rode our bikes outside, we would look up and see him on the flat roof, upside down. Usually he wore a ruglike wrap around his middle which, when he stood on his head, fell the other way and covered his chest. He didn’t believe in underwear. When I started school, fourth grade, I never dared invite friends over to play.