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

  I was used to Cici drinking rather than eating. She’d stand at the open fridge door and swig fruit juice and liquid protein, which came in evil-looking plastic bottles covered with writing to give the stuff scientific credibility. After Stephan’s death, the trips to the fridge were for grapefruit juice and vodka. I didn’t think much of it; grapefruit juice was normal in the mornings, and every freezer I’d ever known was stocked with Stolichnaya. I never saw her drunk; she just wasn’t really there.

  In place of Maricela, we now had Ana Maria and Eduardo. They had an air of concealed malevolence which Cici, clouded by grief and desperate for help in looking after us, couldn’t see. I guessed that they resented us for being spoiled American kids.

  One day Collin and I were in my room playing with Snowflake, our dog, a Samoyed. She loved to ride in the back of the pickup truck with us, and her black mouth looked like it was always laughing. We had the lunging whip from the tack room, an eight-foot-long snake of leather, and we were wiggling it across the floor. Snowflake yelped as she tried to trap it between her paws. The door was closed, probably because we always closed it against Ana Maria and Eduardo, since they had a way of staring in at us as if we were doing something wrong.

  Suddenly the door slammed open and Cici stormed in, grabbed the whip from my hand, and slashed it across our legs.

  “Don’t you ever whip an animal!”

  “We weren’t—” I started.

  “Ana Maria said you were whipping Snowflake. She could hear her crying.” I could see Ana Maria in the hallway outside, looking pleased with herself.

  “We would never whip Snowflake!” I was furious through my tears. I couldn’t understand how Cici could believe we’d do that, even if Ana Maria had told her so. Didn’t she know us any better than that? But she wouldn’t listen, and disappeared back into her isolation at the other end of the house.

  We were forbidden TV for a week and kicked out of the house for the afternoon. Cici did that sometimes, chastising us for not getting enough exercise or fresh air. Nurse had rarely told me what to do with my time, and I resented being made to do something because Cici decided on the spur of the moment that I should. Still, it was better than indifference; it proved she cared about us.

  We climbed up past the last house in the canyon to the caves. I trod gingerly on the sandy trail. The mountainside was steep, and there were prickly plants; though I probably wouldn’t have fallen far, my fear seemed more legitimate than my old terror of jumping across the little chasm in the woods at St. Cleran’s. I was proud that at least I wasn’t afraid of rattlesnakes. Saint Patrick had driven the snakes out of Ireland, and I was certain they’d never come near me.

  The caves were shallow dents in the mountainside, barely caves at all, not deep enough for bobcats or bats. The sandstone was bare around them, glowing golden even at midday. We sat in the snug shadow of the overhang, tossing stones down the mountain as we talked. As usual, Collin led the conversation to dinosaurs and superheroes. I didn’t care about dinosaurs or superheroes except in that they were the coin of my communication with him. I could discuss them as long as he wanted.

  The sandstone was nubbly and gritty under my fingers as I crumbled it into little stones. We didn’t hear them land when we threw them; they disappeared into the soundless air. The tang of scrub oak and dry dust stung the membranes of my nose. The heat and the ocean haze fuzzed the outlines of things, making the world filmy and vague. I felt disconnected—from the earth and from my place on it, wherever that was. Irish rock had been cool and damp on the warmest summer day, velvety with moss and lichen, so solid nothing could break it apart. This sun-heated sandstone was more like dead skin: satisfying to pull off, and only a few steps up from dirt. The roiling towers of white cumulus that built in the sky were nothing like the low, fast-scudding clouds of Ireland.

  With Dad gone and Cici adrift in a parallel world, there was something unreal about the progression of days. They ought, I felt, to pass solidly, one by one, like bricks, forming a solid mass of past that I could stand on to look out at the future. Instead they were undifferentiated, all blending into one—like the sandstone, which looked like rock but crumbled to dust in my hand.

  11

  There were three lanes in the drop-off zone at the Beverly Hills Hotel, separated by thin strips of curb. The red Datsun pickup truck was out of place among the Mercedes and Porsches, and usually whoever was driving it—whoever was working for Cici at the time, as maid-cum-nanny—headed for the slot farthest from the door.

  I picked my way through the limos and fancy cars and walked up the green carpet to the door, which Ennis opened for me. I think he recognized me as Dad’s daughter, though his professional smile of welcome could have been for anybody. Gladys told me that it was Ennis who had tended to Dad’s father, Walter, as he died from an aortic aneurysm that burst there in the lobby.

  I knew where the house phones were, and asked for Dad’s room.

  “Come on up, honey,” he’d say, and give me the number of his suite.

  The corridors were lined, the top half, with wallpaper of dark green palm fronds on a background creamy with age. I loved that wallpaper; it seemed to contain everything good about California, and best of all was how well I knew it.

  Inside the rooms, the hotel uniform of dark green and baby pink gave way to a warm yellow. Dad was always installed on a sofa, knees pointing up, long shins narrowing down to his perfect shoes. Gladys was usually with him—it was she who always called Cici’s house and asked to speak to me. “Your father would like to see you,” she’d say each time, like an incantation.

  Maricela was not in evidence. She was either hiding in the bedroom, or had been left behind in Mexico.

  This was Dad’s world more than Cici’s house ever was, even with all his treasures in it. Are hotel sofas always set facing the window, against the wall where the entry door is, with a painting above and a coffee table in front—in Claridge’s as well as in the Beverly Hills Hotel? In my memory, I always approach him from an angle somewhere over his right shoulder.

  He quizzed me about school, asked after Collin and Aunt Dorothy. We played backgammon. He never mentioned Cici’s name.

  Their only direct communication consisted of curt notes informing her of his plans to be in L.A. and his desire to see me. Cici showed them to me, trying to conceal her fury and failing completely. She had been betrayed, and now she was being made the villain. I didn’t know—still don’t know—what made Dad hate her so. In his autobiography he referred to her only as a crocodile.

  I felt the injustice, and the inconsistency. If he really hated her that much, what did it say that he left me with her? That newspaper story, the word “adopted,” nagged at the edges of my thoughts. Was this proof that the story was true? An adopted child could be left anywhere; all it needed was a home, any home. Would Dad have left his real daughter with a woman whom he now obviously despised?

  When Cici and I played backgammon on the specially made bamboo table—which Dad had left behind—she’d snarl made-up words when she got bad rolls: “Glurm” or “skrungle,” with a twist of her double-jointed fingers into witchy talons. When she got a good roll she’d snort and cackle. She chanted a rhyme every time I won:

  “Nasty little rat-slime,

  Icky picky poo

  Horrible little rotten child

  I hate you!”

  The ease with which she said that told me how much she loved and trusted me. And I made myself her champion in the lists of the Beverly Hills Hotel. I took every chance to speak her name, tell Dad the good things she’d done for me, the fun we had. “Ah-hah,” he’d say. “Very good.” Noncommittal. Patient. A warm stone wall.

  In one letter, he asked for me to be sent to Mexico for a visit. I didn’t want to go. I feared that he’d try to turn me against Cici. I feared that Maricela would take out her various inscrutable resentments on me. And Mexico as I’d known it without Cici and Collin consisted of germs, sickness, goopy food like
beans and guacamole, and boredom. I couldn’t just refuse, so I said, at Cici’s suggestion, that I wanted Cici or Aunt Dorothy to go with me. The subject wasn’t broached again.

  “Do you like Chinese food, honey?”

  For once Dad was staying not at the Beverly Hills Hotel but at the Shangri-La in Santa Monica, and it was dinnertime, which it usually wasn’t when I visited, and there was a Chinese restaurant downstairs.

  “Yes,” I said. “I love it.” Cici often took us to Madame Wu’s. An enormous tree in the lobby grew up through a hole in the ceiling. We had sweet-and-sour pork, and fortune cookies.

  “It’s one of the three great cuisines of the world,” Dad said. “French, Arabic, and Chinese.”

  I knew French food was supposed to be the best in the world. I’d never heard of Arabic food. I was a bit surprised to hear him put Chinese in this company, since the Chinese restaurants I knew didn’t have that kind of reputation, but I never questioned Dad’s pronouncements. They often elevated an unexpected opinion to ultimate truth, and seemed calculated to throw people off balance.

  “What about Italian?” I said. I hated to advance opinions except on the subject of backgammon theory, but Dad expected me to converse, so I offered myself up again and again. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, I had listened to him order prosciutto and melon from room service. When I protested at the combination of meat and fruit, he’d said, “Anyone who knows food will eat melon only with prosciutto.”

  “Italian food can be good, if prepared well,” said Dad. “But it’s not a great cuisine.”

  I was learning the ways of the sophisticated world, and that was a good thing; and certainly I preferred that he wanted to see me, even if it meant that I felt, often, inadequate or in the wrong. But I was always tired when I left.

  Dad didn’t like eating in public. He said it was revolting to watch people stuff food in their mouths; eating ought to be done in private, like going to the bathroom. But civilization dictated that meals were a social activity, and so—if they had to be public—they were, with Dad, as civilized as possible. I was always hyperaware of eating properly around him. At the Big House, I had struggled to cut the lettuce on my side plate with the blunt edge of my fork, because Nurse had told me it was bad manners to take too big a mouthful, and Betty O’Kelly said it was improper to cut salad with a knife.

  We were seated across from each other in the middle of the restaurant, near a column. Madame Wu’s had booths; so did Grampa’s restaurant in New York, and so did the Hamburger Hamlet that Gladys took me to near Dad’s agent’s office in Hollywood. This table felt formal and exposed.

  The waiter set my chicken with pea pods in front of me, and spooned rice onto my plate. I picked up my fork.

  “Put that down, honey,” said Dad immediately. “Chinese food must be eaten with chopsticks.”

  “But I don’t know how to use chopsticks.”

  “Then you’ll learn, right now.” He gestured to the waiter to remove our forks.

  I picked up the two sticks. They looked like wood but they were shiny and hard-surfaced, more like plastic, or some other substance that I couldn’t identify. The square ends seemed like they’d be better at picking up food, and the round ones fit better in my fist.

  “No, no. Like this.” He reversed the chopsticks in my hand, and demonstrated how to hold them, the upper chopstick protruding a precise distance beyond the lower one. They lay against his long fingers like stiffer extremities of the same insect.

  “I’m surprised you don’t know how to use chopsticks, Allegra. You say you love Chinese food, but you’ve never really eaten Chinese food if you haven’t used chopsticks.”

  I took this as criticism of Cici. I didn’t feel that chopsticks were as important a gauge of cultural refinement and mothering skills as Dad obviously did.

  I went for a piece of chicken. Its irregular shape looked easier to grasp than the slippery pea pods. The chopsticks scissored in my hand. The chicken bounced off the column onto the floor. Dad winced and pretended not to notice.

  I managed to spear another piece of chicken and maneuver it to my mouth. It was too big. Two awful choices: stuff it in and make my cheek bulge, or bite off a chunk and put the rest back on my plate. I risked a furtive glance at Dad. His eyes were on the waiters moving silently around, on the potted plants, on the piece of chicken I’d Frisbeed onto the floor—anywhere but on my face and clumsy fingers.

  He waited until I’d dealt with that bite, then rested his eyes on me again.

  “What are you reading, Allegra?”

  I didn’t own up to the bookcase full of Agatha Christies. “Gulliver’s Travels,” I said, truthfully.

  “Very good.” He nodded approvingly. “The horses are far superior to the humans.”

  At night, Cici and I would creep outside like criminals under cover of dark, drop a hose into the septic tank that lay underneath the lawn, and siphon the sewage over the side of the hill. “The nighttime drools,” she called them. The toilets had taken to backing up and she couldn’t afford the constant visits from Walt, the Reddi-Rooter man. Soon we had to stop, though, because of the smell, and Walt came back. In a new truck.

  “Walt!” As usual, she was wearing a floaty top and a bikini bottom. Her legs were long and lean from riding, polished by the sun. “What happened to Old Red?”

  Walt’s face was weathered, as if it was carved out of wood. “Well, Miz Huston, I done cut some holes in her an’ my wife ’n I’re usin’ her for an RV.”

  Cici let out a screech. “Walt! You’re not!” Her toes scrunched up the grass as if she couldn’t bear the delight. She looked at me to see if I believed him.

  I didn’t, and I didn’t think she did either. But she held the possibility, like some exotic feathered creature that she didn’t want to let go of just yet. Sturdy, rational me: I wanted to feel the pleasure of the forbidden like that.

  Walt held it too. I wondered if that was just how long it took for his features to crack apart and rearrange themselves into a smile.

  “Naw, Miz Huston,” he said at last. “I jes’ wanted to make you laugh.”

  The dark days of winter and the February rains and Cici’s sunken grief were over. She sacked Ana Maria and Eduardo—I hoped, because she realized they’d lied to her about Collin and me—and Lisa moved in. She’d just broken up with the Chicksweeper, and she needed somewhere to live.

  I nursed prim reservations about having blond, breathy-voiced, big-haired Lisa as a nanny, but they didn’t last long. Lisa tore down the invisible wall that the dark machinations of Ana Maria and Eduardo had built between our end of the house and Cici’s. Collin and I adored her, and best of all Cici was happy again.

  “How is everything with Lisa?” Aunt Dorothy asked me when Collin and I were spending the day in her pool.

  “She’s great,” I said. “Only she had to go to the doctor because she had gonorrhea.”

  Aunt Dorothy’s head jerked back as if I’d poked her in the throat. She took a deep breath, arranged her face, and moved her fingers around like she was conducting an orchestra on the sly.

  “I’m sure it was diarrhea,” she said in her most carefully modulated voice.

  It wasn’t diarrhea. I knew perfectly well what that was, and even though I didn’t know what gonorrhea was, I knew the two weren’t the same. I’d never heard of anyone going to the doctor for diarrhea. Lisa did have a habit of mixing up her words, saying “bugular” for “burglar” and having to concentrate really hard not to say “pasghetti.” But that wasn’t it; I’d heard her and Cici in the kitchen laughing as if it were a huge joke, and I’d just wanted to share it with Aunt Dorothy. Inwardly I cursed my big mouth. That’s why they’d been laughing—there was something secret about gonorrhea, and I shouldn’t have repeated it.

  Aunt Dorothy was staring gimlets at me. Her lipstick-pink lips were pressed together.

  “It must have been diarrhea,” I said.

  She looked satisfied; she’d heard what she wante
d to hear. How could she not know, or care, that I was lying? I was weirdly impressed that she didn’t. She’d altered reality by the force of her will.

  “We loved having a little girl in the house again,” Aunt Dorothy had said to me when I left after that first Christmastime visit. The longer I was there, the more I felt some unreachable residue of misery from the time when Cici and her brothers were young. I knew Cici had escaped it as quickly as she could, by getting married at age seventeen to Gene Shacove, the hairdresser who was the model for Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo; it lasted a year. Her older brothers, in their different ways, had rejected family life; her younger brother had killed himself. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.

  Cici called Aunt Dorothy “Mother” to her face. A note of exasperation echoed in it, trapped in the syllables. Sometimes I thought I even heard a lilt of sarcasm. Behind her back, she called her mother Gloom Lady, and Uncle Myron Gloom Man, and their house Gloom Castle.

  Still, they seemed comfortable with their spiky relationship, and obviously it was better than nothing. I didn’t exactly envy Cici having a mother, but I tried on different feelings about it, the way I tried on her shoes. Sometimes I was almost glad Mum had died when I was so little—before I was old enough to know her. Not that I feared we might have had the kind of relationship Cici and Aunt Dorothy had—Mum was always “Mum,” not that formal “Mother”—but how much worse would it be if I had been six, say, when Mum died, or ten or twelve? I would have known her as Joan Buck, Anjel’s best friend, had known her: her beauty, her wisdom, her way of treating children as if they were just as important and interesting as adults. I felt the injustice of Mum having been more a mother to Joan than to me—but I felt a kind of gratitude too in not truly having known what I had lost. As it was, I’d lost only a promise, not the thing itself. And if I had been old enough to know Mum’s perfection for myself, before she died, my own inadequacy would have been even harder to bear.