Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Read online

  One night Anjelica took me to Chinatown. It was my first visit to a film set, and the sense of occasion was exciting: a street blocked off to traffic, black vintage cars gleaming under the megawattage of huge round lights on high poles. But mostly it was boring. Lots of people stood around, muttering to one another with bent heads, while others ran about purposefully, making me afraid of getting in their way. When the camera rolled and everyone fell silent, I was too far away to hear what the actors were saying.

  Daddy was on the set that night, though I barely saw him. Possibly, as he was playing an incestuous villain, he preferred not to see his daughters. Anyway, it was Anjelica’s new boyfriend we had come to visit. We waited in his trailer for him to finish a scene. Finally, the door swung open.

  “Hey, Toot!” Not as in toot-toot, the noise of a train. More like “tuht,” the singular of “Toots.” Sometimes he lengthened it to “Tootman.”

  “This is Jack,” said Anjelica to me. At age nine, I hadn’t heard of Jack Nicholson, or seen any of his movies. I’d seen very few movies, in fact. Nurse didn’t take me, since there wasn’t a cinema in walking distance of Euclid Street.

  “Allegra. Pleased to meet you.”

  He shook my hand, then sat down in front of a big mirror surrounded by lights. A woman bent over his nose, where a line of black threads was sewn in knots, like a butchered centipede.

  “It’s just makeup, darling,” Anjel reassured me. It made me queasy, especially when the woman’s fingers fiddled with it. I could barely look at him.

  A few weeks later, a fever suddenly hit me while I was at Anjelica and Jeremy’s house. She put me in her bed, and sleepiness furred my senses. I heard footsteps on the stairs. A man appeared in the doorway. Jack.

  “Leggsie!”

  He drew out the name across seconds of time, like someone savoring toffee. I loved it suddenly; it was mine, it was me. The beam of Jack’s attention made me feel like a minor deity evilly laid low.

  “I brought Scatman to see you,” he said. “The Scatman will make you feel better.”

  Beside him was a black man with a lined face like leather that cracked into a wide grin. He perched on my bed and started to sing, his voice gravelly, the tune wild and rollicking, every word balanced on the brink of laughter. It was the title song from The Aristocats, a Disney movie which Anjel had taken me to see. My fever made the room dreamy and fantastical, and misted Scatman into a sweet, gnomish Rumpelstiltskin. This was the L.A. I’d been seduced by: a place out of time, where flowers were permanent, where sickness didn’t mean boredom and misery but instead brought Scat Cat himself to my bedside, singing just for me.

  8

  When summer came, my weekend visits to Cici and Daddy grew longer. Most days we’d head up the Pacific Coast Highway to the Malibu Colony, where they had rented a beach house. Cici’s car was a Citroën Maserati—there weren’t many of them, she said—and when she turned the key in the ignition, the back end rose up hydraulically, like a robotic baboon in heat. She called it the Brown Mound, or just the Mound. I sat in the front seat, a leather bucket tipped backward as if by g-forces. Her son, Collin, pretzeled himself into the stunted back seat, his double-jointed elbows and knees sticking out at odd angles, a sheepish grin on his face.

  Cici rested her right hand on the gear stick as she drove, tapping it so that the underside of her ring pinged against the chrome. It was a long slab of jade, a green as soft as wool, the stone shaped across her index finger like a snippet of armor. Sometimes she also wore an emerald-cut diamond the size of my thumbnail, which she told me had been an engagement ring from a man she hadn’t married. She’d tried to return it and he’d refused to take it back—but should she still be wearing it? I was a bit shocked, but I felt a thrill too. Cici didn’t feel the obligation that I felt: to do what other people thought I should. She did exactly what she wanted.

  She drove fast, changing lanes constantly to weave through the traffic. It was like an arcade game: the other cars were there only to make our journey more exciting. My job was to watch for cops. Cici showed me how to lower the visor and watch behind us in the makeup mirror—because, she said, a face looking out the back window would be suspicious. We didn’t want to let the cops know we were onto them. When I yelled “Cop!” she’d slam on the brakes, smiling a fake-innocent smile to amuse Collin and me. “Nasty little piglets,” she’d say with a kind of hiss as we drove past the cop car at exactly the speed limit, or as the cop whizzed past us on the tail of someone else.

  I’d never swum in real surf before. Collin showed me how to get out past the breakers, jumping and diving through the incoming walls of water, and paddling to catch the wave. All I had to do was close my eyes and hold my breath, and let the wave pick me up and throw me onto the shore. The graze of sand on my skin was just this side of painful. It was the present scraping against me, letting me know I was there, part of the real world, as long as my breath held out.

  Collin was two years younger than I, and I felt protective of him. Gladys had warned me that he had learning disabilities. It was true that he couldn’t read or write well, though he was eight. But he was a very long way from “slow.” He called Cici’s brother David—a classic seventies swinging bachelor, with shoulder-length curly hair, shirt unbuttoned to the navel, and gold chains nestling in the chest hair—the Chicksweeper. I wished my brain was quick enough to come up with a name like that.

  Collin was obsessive about his enthusiasms, and his sense of the border between reality and fantasy wasn’t strong. But then, neither was mine—though mine was the mirror image of his. For him, fantasy was real; for me, reality was as unreliable as fantasy. He wasn’t “normal”; he didn’t operate on the ordinary wavelength. I wasn’t “normal” either. A cloudy sense of foreignness enveloped me. I felt it like a veil between me and the girls at school, and it was hard to make friends. Collin took me on my own terms, and I took him on his. With him I was in the present, or in a fantasy; either way, future and past fell away. It was a relief.

  Daddy always said the same thing to prove that Collin wasn’t stupid: “He can name all the prehistoric reptiles.” It was the tone you’d use to tell someone about a memory freak or a circus act: “Just imagine that,” I could hear him saying. “He can juggle jellyfish.” He said it with exaggerated seriousness, as if this feat of Collin’s was so extraordinary that one could only gape in wonder. It drove me nuts. He sounded so pleased with himself for being able to appreciate Collin’s particular intelligence—as if he felt the need to demonstrate that Collin wasn’t an idiot, which only showed that he entertained the possibility. And why “prehistoric reptiles”? Was he afraid that if he said “dinosaurs” people would think he was ignorant?

  Besides, what made Collin’s intelligence remarkable was his sharp wit, which Daddy seemed unable to hear. Collin knew as much, and as little, about dinosaurs as any boy. I knew that, at least as far as dinosaurs were concerned, Collin was totally normal—and Daddy obviously didn’t. It nagged at me too that the dinosaurs might not all have been reptiles. So many seemed to be between one thing and another, like the fishy ichthyosaurus or the feathered archaeopteryx. Because I actually talked with Collin, rather than making pronouncements about him, I soon knew more about “prehistoric reptiles” than Daddy knew—or, it occurred to me, pretended to know.

  I’m not sure when it happened: that Daddy became fallible. Perhaps during that dreary summer in Cuernavaca. Perhaps when he parked me in the house on Euclid with Nurse and Gladys, and I felt banished to the murky outskirts of his world. My heart had been readied to see faults in him—and that obnoxious, patronizing, pseudo-admiring evaluation of Collin was the first.

  I didn’t like the enclosed, sullen person I’d become in the dark house on Euclid, and I couldn’t be that person in Cici’s house. Almost every room had a door to the outside. I liked to lie in bed and count them in my head—there were eight. Some were huge sliding doors that stood open all day long.

  The house was tuck
ed away in a dead-end canyon off the rural, western end of Sunset Boulevard. Just to start with, that address was a huge improvement on Euclid. The house was perched on a ledge halfway up a steep hill, with a semicircle of lawn fringed with rosebushes, which Cici fed with the manure from her horses. They lived in corrals across the creek at the foot of the hill. She watered constantly, wearing a bikini and floaty chiffon tunics, barefoot on the paving stones. I loved how permeable the house was: the smells of wet flowers and distant horses drifting inside, the purring rumble of Teddy Pendergrass and Isaac Hayes drifting out.

  Cici’s feet had high curved insteps, with long second toes that, to me, looked exotically deformed. She’d tuck her feet up beside her on the sofa, or rest them against the coffee table, and when she talked she flexed them, like a cat arching its back in the sun. She even flexed them when she walked, as if each step gave her a jolt of physical pleasure. The tendons of her toes made ridges under her brown skin, and she put her feet down almost flat, as if she were stamping her footprint into the ground. I imagined the elegant shock waves cannoning through the wood and tile and concrete and imprinting her tracks in the earth’s crust below. The sound made a mark on the air too, and set the paper-thin leaves of the Etruscan gold diadem on a table in the living room shivering.

  The diadem had been on a table outside Daddy’s bedroom at St. Cleran’s. In Cuernavaca, or during the year on Euclid, I was told that St. Cleran’s had been sold.

  In secret, I imitated Cici’s walk, turning my toes in, pressing on the ball of my foot, holding the big toe taut so that the inner part of its crease touched the ground. I stretched my ankles, trying to get my insteps to curve as hers did, but they wouldn’t rise above a frustratingly straight diagonal line. Within a minute, my feet got tired.

  The house was filled with things from St. Cleran’s. Collin slept in the brass bed that had been Betty’s. The black table with playing cards painted on it, which had been in the Red Sitting Room upstairs, was the coffee table; and the living room was staked out by the Mexican tables from the study and the two giant mermaids from the inner hall. The three narwhal tusks from the dining room—unicorn horns of spiraling ivory—made a kind of triple axis at the heart of the house. The tallest had had to be sunk below floor level to fit under the ceiling, and Daddy had had a pond built around it, lined in black marble, with three low, Brancusi-shaped fountains gurgling in it. We all loved that pond: it was wonderfully ridiculous in the middle of a living room, and best of all visitors sometimes fell in.

  I slept under the headboard from the Gray Room, where the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild had slept. It was knobbly and uncomfortable to lean against, if you wanted to sit up in bed and read a book, which gave me a sudden rush of sympathy for the Baroness Pauline, who had always seemed so grand and remote. (Her eyelids blinked constantly, and very fast. I used to stare at her in fascination across the dining table during lunch.) However beautiful the headboard was, I didn’t think Daddy would ever have had it in his own room.

  I felt at home among these familiar objects, though they were mixed up higgledy-piggledy. I slept in the bed that Daddy’s most important friends had slept in; but looking down on me was the dark, sad-faced Madonna from the kitchen, her heart pierced with arrows and Latin words surrounding her like ribbons of ectoplasm. It threw my sense of order out of joint; it was a rearrangement of the cosmos. Everything—everyone—was equal here. There was no upstairs and downstairs, master’s domain and servants’. I liked that.

  I was so happy, day after day, not to be told that it was time to return to the house on Euclid that I almost forgot about it. Cici and Daddy seemed to have forgotten about it too. Finally, I asked when I’d be going back there.

  “You won’t,” said Cici. “This is your home now.” I could see how pleased she was to be saying it.

  “What about Nurse? Where will she sleep?”

  I didn’t want to share a room with her again, and the only spare room was mine.

  “She went back to Ireland a couple of weeks ago.” Cici made it sound like it had been Nurse’s idea.

  My stomach shriveled up. I knew Nurse would never have left me unless she was told to go. If I protested, it would sound like I didn’t want to stay with Cici; if I didn’t protest, I would be faithless to Nurse. Instantly I chose the latter. The deed was done. I was here with Cici, and Nurse was gone.

  I took it personally—not as an insult, but as my failing. Nurse, whose only role in life was to look after me, had been sent packing. And I hadn’t even noticed. I had let weeks go by without asking after her, without caring that I hadn’t even spoken to her. I had let her be bundled off in secret after twenty years with the Huston family, with no more than a thank-you and a plane ticket. How must she have felt, knowing that I’d moved on so quickly without even a backward glance? She had given me love my whole life, been there with me always, and all I had given her back was forgetting. She was being thrown out into a hostile world. With me, she’d been protected under the shelter of Daddy’s influence. I would be fine without her, but what would she do without me?

  The truth was that without her there, I felt freer and stronger. If she wasn’t there to protect and look after me, that meant I didn’t need to be looked after and protected. Anyway, she couldn’t protect me from the things that made me feel really vulnerable—being tossed about from this house to that one, not knowing where I’d be when the next month came. All she could do was share them, and the farther we went from Ireland and London, the more miserable I knew she was. I figured they hadn’t told me Nurse was leaving because they were afraid I’d protest or make a scene; if they waited until I asked, maybe I’d accept it more easily. And I did. Had they all been winking at one another, Cici and Gladys and Daddy, thinking how wonderful it was that Allegra still hadn’t asked about Nurse? I couldn’t blame them. It had been up to me to ask, to remember, and I hadn’t. It showed what kind of person I was.

  Once again, the pattern had been played on me: wait for the end of the school year, send me somewhere that seemed temporary and see how I liked it, then fix things behind my back and tell me it’s permanent. I was happy with the outcome this time, but the technique wasn’t hidden anymore. I resented being the subject of an experiment that nobody admitted was being conducted on me.

  At the airport, while Dad walked up to the Mexicana desk, Collin and I stood to one side with Cici. She was wearing her usual summer outfit of bikini top—my favorite one, with a tropical sun setting on each breast, which I had encouraged her to buy—and jeans. Her stomach was bare and brown and her light-filled hair tumbled onto her shoulders.

  It was just like an ordinary (though still rather special) family going on vacation—but it seemed all wrong to me. Daddy didn’t deal with things like tickets and passports; it was Gladys’s job to be his intermediary with the everyday world. Gladys wasn’t here (that seemed right—it was a family vacation), so perhaps it should be Cici’s job; but she seemed so calm and sure of her place, waiting while her husband took charge, that it didn’t seem like it should be her job either. Her job was to be beautiful and patient, and hold the children’s hands.

  A slim, rectangular, zippered, chestnut-colored leather bag dangled on a thin strap from Daddy’s right shoulder. Men like Uncle Nap and Uncle Fraser didn’t carry bags; they had pockets. Daddy’s safari shirt was covered in perfectly pressed pockets; I wished he’d use them. I hated that feminine bag. It diminished him. Fumbling in it, he looked incompetent and pretentious. As the father of a regular, two-plus-two family going on vacation, I realized, without quite knowing it, that he was miscast. It just wasn’t us; it was a pretense, it couldn’t last. From that day on, I noticed every sign that Daddy and Cici’s relationship was coming apart. When it finally happened, I couldn’t have been less surprised.

  I wasn’t thrilled about going back to Mexico, but at least I had Cici and Collin, and we weren’t going to the low-security prison of the Kohners’ house in Cuernavaca. We were going to Puerto Valla
rta, where there was a beach.

  This was a Cici kind of Mexico. We tooled around in a jeeplike Volkswagen Safari with plain metal sides and no windows, full of her friends, with me and Collin stuffed into the space behind the back seat. We were part of the gang. Her friends were loud and laughed a lot, and had romances, and smooched in the ocean. Dad was rarely with us. Often we’d meet him for lunch at the beachfront El Dorado—don’t eat the tomatoes or the watermelon, Cici told me, they water the fields with sewage; always order drinks sin hielo, without ice. After lunch, Daddy and I would play backgammon. Under the table I dug my toes in and squelched them in the sand.

  We stayed in the house Richard Burton had built after making The Night of the Iguana there with Daddy, ten years before. It was on the side of a hill, and the long wall of the living room was only half height, a balcony open to the hot, humid air. Collin and I were allowed to go out by ourselves after dinner and run down the stepped street to Bing’s ice-cream parlor for hot-fudge sundaes. The fat pink and white stripes painted on its walls made it look exactly how an ice-cream parlor should look. It sat in the shadow of the cathedral, whose tower was topped by a filigree iron crown which—I loved this detail—had been donated by the Corona brewery. The Catholic icons everywhere reminded me of Ireland, but religion wasn’t as glum and heavy here. It was candy-colored and lighthearted. It didn’t wag a finger at people on Sundays and drive them to drink.

  Every evening, as dark fell, the towering yellow-purple thunderheads that had been gathering all afternoon erupted into an apocalyptic storm: jagged lightning tearing through the sky, thick rain falling in sheets, thunder so loud my body shook. It was prehistoric—the way storms must have been in Collin’s dinosaur world. I felt I was sharing it with him.