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

  That was big money to me. Three doubles would bring a game to an eight-dollar stake, and we played at least ten games at a sitting. We settled up whenever Dad went out of town, and usually I’d be up about sixty dollars. Solemnly he counted out the notes and I stashed them away, to spend on books.

  I knew he expected the same from me if I was down, but I thought it would never happen. Then it did. His departure date was approaching, and my nerves made me turn down more doubles than usual. The decline was inexorable. I started to resent it: I was only a kid, and twenty-three dollars meant much more to me than it did to Dad. But even though I longed to be indulged, I didn’t think indulgence was on offer and I didn’t dare test it with even the most offhand remark in case Dad lost respect for me. I was proud that Dad took me seriously as a backgammon player, so I avoided playing in the last few days, then on the day he left I dug into my hoard and ponied up.

  When Dad’s friends came over to play, men in their fifties and sixties, he would say to them, after a few games, “Why don’t you play my ten-year-old daughter?” The friends always agreed. That was polite, of course, but I noticed a glint of subservience in many of his friendships. As I played—sliding the pieces decisively, never counting, making my move the second the dice stopped rolling—I would see a hunted look come into my opponent’s eyes. He’d glance at Dad, who sat to the side like a tennis umpire, and Dad would blandly raise an eyebrow as if to say, You didn’t think I would indulge a child, did you? The joke was on them, and I was the implement of it. I glowed inside.

  “Well done, honey,” he’d say as he took my seat. I’d played my part, the innocent demon, and I was dismissed.

  One day, Billy Pearson, Dad’s closest pal, offered to back me against the rube of the day at twenty dollars a point. Thrilled to be playing for real stakes, I started setting up my pieces.

  “No, honey. Absolutely not.”

  I was surprised, and upset. Dad seemed angry at me, and I didn’t know why. I so wanted to play; I was good enough to win; I couldn’t put up those stakes myself; and I’d known Billy since St. Cleran’s. I implored Dad silently, and uselessly. A veiled rebuke was issued to Billy, and I was told to go to my room.

  “Never gamble with other people’s money,” he said to me the next day, as if I should have known it. “If you lose, you’ll be in debt to them. If you win, you’ll feel you’re owed something, but it’s their choice whether to share the winnings with you—and how much. It’s a position no woman should put herself in.”

  It is, I think, the only piece of life advice he ever gave me.

  In a velvet-lined case in Dad’s closet sat a collection of brooches: modernist sculptures of bone set in irregular rectangles of handwrought gold. They were ancient Coptic artifacts, ridged and splintered, very bonelike, as if the meat had been gnawed or weathered off them and they’d been left to bleach in the sun. They reminded me of saints’ relics. It had been Tony’s idea to make them into brooches, and Dad was now occupied with finding suitable women to give them to. Cici and Anjelica were each given one, one went to Aunt Dorothy, one was dispatched to France to the Baroness Pauline, one was given to his old friend Cherokee MacNamara.

  I wasn’t at all sure that I liked them, but I desperately wanted one. It would put me in the company of women to whom Dad gave treasures. I wanted him to think of me as someone who could appreciate the things he thought were beautiful.

  I didn’t ask for one. It would have been embarrassing—but more importantly it would have erased the value of the gift. Occasionally I would hear him tell Cici the name of another woman to whom he was giving a brooch, and which one. Finally the case was empty.

  When he came back from Morocco, Dad brought more treasures: exotic objects, such as those that had filled St. Cleran’s. An old Moroccan door became the new coffee table. Rolled up in ropes of tissue paper were heavy Berber necklaces, of coral and amber. Mine had thin strands of tubular coral, strung in groups of three, separated by coins.

  The coins were the reason he’d bought that one for me: and I hated them with silent fury. My necklace was the smallest of all of them, the thinnest, the crudest. The coins were set into rings of dark gray metal, like pull tabs from 7-Up cans. The rough ends of the coral beads showed the fraying black thread that held the whole thing together.

  Where my necklace had coins, the others had beautiful amber beads, the color of honey, round like dull suns. Those went to Anjelica. I felt that Dad had an idea of me, which was partly true but not entirely. I was the egghead, but an “expert” type rather than the kind of creative thinker that Dad really admired. Tony held that slot, though I was aware that he wasn’t, in Dad’s eyes, quite living up to it. Anjelica, of course, was the beauty, the princess, the jewel: the one who deserved to be given the really special things—the things that I wanted too.

  I felt furtive and guilty, as if it was I who was hiding some aspect of my true self from Dad—which I was, because I never told him that I didn’t want the coins, didn’t like them, wasn’t interested in them. Secretly I blamed him for not knowing it, for not being bothered or able to notice that I had other dimensions to me. I felt I’d been assigned a part, one that was important to the story but wasn’t a leading role. And if that was my part, I ought to accept it, and corral my emotions inside its limits.

  “He’s not really your father,” said a girl at school. I’d been talking about how my dad was going off to Morocco.

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “You’re adopted.”

  “No I’m not!”

  I’d never heard this, or thought it before, but I knew instantly it was possible. I felt a trapdoor fall open, and I was teetering on the edge.

  “That’s what it says in the Palisades View. That’s what your stepmother said.”

  I’d watched Cici curl her hair in rollers for the photo in the local paper, thought how beautiful she was, barefoot and relaxed, lit by the sunlight shining unbroken through the plate-glass windows of the living room. Why would she have said something like that if it wasn’t true?

  I searched the house, but I couldn’t find a copy of the paper. The shops of Pacific Palisades were literally miles away, out of reach. Days later—or maybe it was only hours, or a day at most—I found the paper lying on the dining table, took it to my room, and closed the door.

  The journalist wrote that Cici lived with her husband, the film director John Huston, her son Collin from a previous marriage, and John’s adopted daughter Allegra. I read the words over and over, wondering if the journalist could have confused the fact that I wasn’t Cici’s real daughter with my not being Dad’s. Was I Cici’s adopted daughter because I had given her maiden name at the bank? She usually referred to me simply as her daughter, without “step” or “adopted” or anything like that. Was “adopted” better than “step”? Was that what Cici had really said to this journalist, who was so stupid that she’d mixed it up? The explanation held water—sort of. Not wanting to tip it, I never asked Cici what she’d said.

  It festered. I sensed there was some kind of truth in it: it explained that vivid memory of playing on a rug in a hotel room with the sharp corner of a coffee table near my cheek, and a voice saying, “This is your father.” If he was really my father, surely I wouldn’t have had to be told. But if he was Tony and Anjelica’s father, which he obviously was—and I was sure they were really my brother and sister, and that Mum had been the mother of all three of us—why hadn’t I already known he was mine?

  Mum was really my mother. It had to have been my real mother who died; otherwise the loss of her—the emptiness I’d felt my whole conscious life—meant nothing. “Adopted” stripped me of Mum and Dad both. I wouldn’t accept it; the journalist had obviously got it wrong. It was a local paper, after all, so any journalist who was any good wouldn’t be working for it, they’d be working for the Los Angeles Times.

  I took my passport out of the shoe box in my closet where it lived. Etched into the soft surface
of my photograph was Dad’s distinctive handwriting: a signature that read “John Huston (father).”

  The letters canted forward with determination and certainty, the crosses of the “t”s fierce downstrokes that allowed no argument. It was a legal document. Dad couldn’t have lied.

  I’d got that passport during the year I’d lived on Euclid. We’d had a number of meetings with a lawyer, which culminated in a white building with the tall, lone, slablike monumentality of a tombstone. This was the Federal Building at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard. We were there to make me an American citizen.

  I’d never seen Dad in a situation like this: supplicatory, uncertain, not in control. His knees and elbows seemed stiffer and more angular than usual, as if a giant hand had folded him up and wrapped him in a rubber band. A feeble half smile was fixed on his face, waiting to be switched off. I sat tensely beside him, dreading the questions I was sure would come at me. The federal man didn’t know that Dad and I didn’t live in the same house, and I figured he ought not to. He might say I couldn’t stay, couldn’t be American, and I’d have to go live somewhere else. Where? In London with Tony, whom I’d barely seen for years? St. Cleran’s was gone.

  But the questions didn’t come. The federal man pulled a blank passport out of a drawer. Gladys handed him a black-and-white photo of me that we’d just had taken. He glued it in, pushed my new passport across the desk to Dad, and handed him a pen.

  I watched the pen dig into the thick surface of the photograph, the bones of Dad’s knuckles radiating out like the points of a star. Then the federal man stamped embossed letters into it with a tool that made the muscles in his hand bulge, as if a mole were tunneling under the skin.

  My old passport had identified me as a two-foot-six-inch British subject, with no distinguishing characteristics. It was signed by my mother. My new one gave my address as that of Dad’s business manager’s office, and it didn’t ask for distinguishing characteristics. It was signed—it said so, straight out—by my father.

  10

  Sometimes in the mornings, while I was brushing my teeth, I would hear Cici and Maricela, the maid, talking together in the kitchen about how they’d had to carry Dad to bed because he’d drunk himself unconscious. Their voices were low and giggly, like thieves who had pulled off a heist of Dad’s dignity. It made me uncomfortable. He was my father, after all. Maybe I ought to take his side, I thought. But how could I? It was shameful to drink so much you passed out. Besides, it was Cici I felt close to, Cici who had given me a normal life.

  Maricela was Mexican, from a large family in Tijuana, most of whom were now in Los Angeles. She insisted that she didn’t know how old she was, which I found impossible to believe. Cici used to say that Maricela was like a daughter to her, since she’d been with her from the age of fourteen. That was six years before, putting her at about twenty.

  She had long, almost Asian eyes and cropped hair like a boy’s. She never wore makeup or anything girly, just T-shirts and jeans. She had a way of hiding from people, like a feral cat.

  She didn’t like me. I did my best to win her over—it scared me not to be liked—but it was no good. She told Cici that I hated Collin, which was so obviously untrue that Cici, fortunately, didn’t believe it. She also told her that I buried my food in the garden like a dog, a story she worked up from the time I hid some cookies in my room, for later. She had an introverted sense of humor, and her sudden curt laughs left me mystified. With Collin she shared a sense of being different from the ordinary world, and she was kind to him. Me, she ignored as thoroughly as she could. I attributed her disdain for everyone and everything to an unsentimental practicality forced on her by her poverty-stricken childhood, so I didn’t hold it against her. In fact, it fascinated me. I wished I could care as little as she did.

  During one of Dad’s trips to Morocco, Maricela went into a depression. She had, she said, had an affair with an airline pilot named Juan, and she was pining for him. I heard some rustle in the air that she was pregnant, but there was no baby on the way. I wondered how, or where, she could possibly have met an airline pilot. She wasn’t the type to go to bars. It was weird to think of Maricela with any man at all.

  Cici was worried about her, and decided she needed a vacation. She gave Maricela an airline ticket to wherever she wanted to go. That place turned out to be Morocco; Juan turned out to be John; the airline pilot was actually a film director. Tony, my brother, found Dad and Maricela entwined. After three years—one of which I’d shared with them—Dad and Cici’s marriage was over.

  I typed the forms that Cici had to fill out for the divorce. It seemed natural, since I was good at typing and she wasn’t. I was proud that she trusted me, at age eleven, to do them correctly. I decided it wasn’t disloyal to Dad, since he had left me with Cici; but I did think that it was better not to tell him about it.

  If I was asked whether I wanted to stay with Cici, I would have answered that I did. I don’t remember being asked. Where else would I have gone? Not with Dad and Maricela to Mexico. Cici wanted to keep me. Either Dad recognized that she was a good mother to me and wanted me to stay with her—though the divorce turned vicious fast—or he just took the easy way out.

  Cici had lists of objects that ran for pages and pages, more objects than it seemed possible for one house to hold, things with strange names, such as an Egyptian jade pectoral and Etruscan burial glass. These were the inventories from St. Cleran’s, annotated according to what had been kept, sold, stored, or given away. The remaining items were marked with initials to show which things would go with Dad and which would stay with Cici. Cici was furious that Dad took the silverware. I was sorry to see that the gold-embossed champagne glasses were going too.

  Cici pointed to one item, Night Image, with “JH” next to it. “That’s Cousin Itt,” she said. “He should be yours.”

  An abstract sculpture covered in differently colored segments of string and thread, about four feet high, Night Image looked exactly like the character in The Addams Family, without the sunglasses. We all loved The Addams Family, and watched it most afternoons. Cici did a brilliant imitation of Thing, the hand in the box, and was always doing Lurch voices, sometimes in the character of Gladys. The sculpture had stood on the table in the upstairs hall of the Big House, looking alien and slightly forbidding. At Cici’s house, renamed, he became my pet. I loved to groom him, untangling his threads with my fingers and brushing him with a soft, silver-backed brush that Aunt Dorothy gave me.

  Nervously I wrote to ask Dad if I could keep him. I would never have dared ask for anything without Cici’s urging, and I worried that I was letting her push me into a big mistake. What if it made Dad mad at me? Worse, what if he decided that Cici was a bad influence and took me away?

  Dad wrote back to say that of course Night Image should be mine; it was only fitting, since the sculpture was the last thing my mother had given him. The formality of Dad’s words—a sort of official presentation to me of this piece of art—seemed to be taking credit for his thoughtfulness in giving Itt to me. So why did I have to ask? I thought at once. If I hadn’t asked, if Cici hadn’t made me, Cousin Itt would have been swept off without a thought for me or Mum and who knows where he would have ended up. In storage, somewhere, in a box in a dark warehouse.

  Also, why not call him by the name we always called him? The words Night Image had never passed our lips, at St. Cleran’s or at Cici’s house. The whole letter rubbed me the wrong way. Sides were being taken, and I knew whose side I was on.

  When the moving van came, Cici and I were waiting. It was summer, so I wasn’t in school. Collin was.

  The moving men set up a packing station on the lawn. Cici didn’t want them galumphing around the house, so she and I carried Dad’s things outside.

  It was impersonal, like cleaning up the ash after a fire. Dad was gone, I wasn’t sure where he was. These things, if they had any meaning left for me after their years in Cici’s house, meant St. Cleran’s, the place, not Dad, the pers
on; and St. Cleran’s had been lost for years.

  We picked up the life-size crucifix from the living room, Cici at the top, me at the foot. We had to swing around awkwardly so that we wouldn’t fall into the pond in the middle of the floor, or hit Cousin Itt where he stood on his table, safe now with me.

  “Onward Christian soldiers,” Cici started singing. She gave the words a sarcastic twist. Though I could only see the back of her head, I knew the corners of her mouth were turning down.

  I thought it was funny too.

  “Marching off to war!” We belted it out—wrong. Then we got stuck. Neither of us knew the next line.

  Cici started at the top again. “Onward Christian soldiers,” we sang as we marched in step with the cross on our shoulders out the wide front door. “Onward Christian soldiers,” over and over, as we collected up the various saints and Christs. Hypnotized, I started to feel like a Christian soldier myself—fighting the good fight. Ridding the house of Dad’s relics felt more and more like ridding it of devils.

  Cici had started the singing to cheer me up, because she was afraid that I’d mourn the loss of these things as a symbol of losing Dad. Now each object that left the house was an enemy slain. I was almost disappointed when we came to the last thing on the list: the dark Madonna that loomed over my room.

  I used to stare at her before I fell asleep, with the arrows in her heart and her tender wrists extended. The Latin words floated around her like horseflies ready to sting her; yet her face was calm. I felt a kinship with her but I hated her too: hated her for being so serenely shameless in her anguish, so ready to be hurt even more, so proud of her throne of sorrow. She kept wounds open, for to her they were badges of honor. Mine were well scarred over, and I didn’t like the thought of her probing them as I slept.

  Cici and I lifted her up between us and carried her directly outside. Framing my door were beds of pansies, then the lawn with its ring of flowers. The Madonna lay on the grass, waiting for the men to pack her up: a node of darkness in the bright day. I was glad to see her out of my room. I hadn’t realized how much she had oppressed me. Now that she was going, she pulled all the darkness out of my room with her. Liquid sunlight flowed in through the open door in her wake.