Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Page 16

  Mum met John Julius at a house party in the early autumn of 1961. By the time of the first letter, October, passion has flooded her. She yearns for his body, his mind, his generous self. She loses herself in the blue crystals of his eyes.

  I am happy for her: for her delirium of passion, and for the fact that the person who aroused it in her was my father. But my emotions are wrenched by the intensity of the life force flooding through the ink of her pen. A life force that only a few years later will be extinguished in the split second of a car jouncing into a pothole and up into the path of an oncoming truck.

  I put the letters down, unable to bear it; and the second I stop reading, I have to start again—as if the sorrow of reading them were heroin. She is electrically attuned to the currents of the weather: the tiniest fluctuations of the light, the breaths of wind that stir leaves and grass and brush her skin, the shadings of the clouds, the scents of flowers and rain. I can follow the wave lines of her moods: the joy of John Julius’s love soaking into her pores and shimmering from her; the sadness she attempted to conceal and overcome; the shadow of iron circumstances from which she bravely turns her face away.

  Mum had, by 1961, resigned herself to being John Huston’s wife. They had worked out a modus vivendi: she oversaw the smooth running of St. Cleran’s, designing and decorating and arranging for repairs, and creating the illusion of family life on Dad’s sporadic visits home. She had “succeeded so well,” she wrote, “that it really is John’s place now.” The rest of the time—most of the time—she was a single woman living alone in a house that Dad had never slept in. She kept her love affairs discreet so as not to cause scandal or confuse Tony and Anjelica.

  She loved her little house—she always called it the Steward’s House—and had no qualms about bringing the men she loved there. She sent John Julius photographs of it the first Christmas they were apart. Later she would bring him there too.

  Growing in confidence, she began to push the bounds of what life as Mrs. Huston might allow. She thought of taking an apartment in Paris, then decided to rent one in London. Tony and Anjelica were getting too old for the local Irish schools. They, and she, needed to feel part of the larger world.

  Even so, she felt deeply wounded by Danny’s birth in May 1962. She knew, during the filming of Freud in Munich, that Zoë was pregnant; she makes forced, spiky jokes about it in her letters to John Julius. Obviously the insult wasn’t in Dad’s unfaithfulness; it was in his total disregard for her, and how it might affect her. He never spoke to her about the situation himself, but left her to guess; he betrayed not a twinge of concern that this child might subject her to gossip, humiliation, or those pitying glances that she would have dreaded more than anything. His silence suggested that it was none of her business, that it was irrelevant to the life they led together—which, to her, meant that he was careless of the impact it would have on Anjelica and Tony. That infuriated her. She struggled to understand, to accept, to banish hate and anger.

  Still, she seems not to have considered divorce. John Julius was not free to marry—and I sense that after the first desire to possess him utterly, she saw advantages in that. Her life suits her: she has independence in London, the ongoing project of St. Cleran’s, and stability for her children, who are the center of her world. She can toy with the idea of working, but there is enough money that she doesn’t really have to. She had been with Dad since she was nineteen, married to him since she was twenty. Cutting those ties—changing her identity—would be an upheaval.

  To my surprise, she writes fondly of Dad. The anger at his callousness over Danny’s arrival wears off quickly; she understands him well and knows that he won’t change. She doesn’t call him “the Monster,” as she did during her love affair with Lucio. Emotional distance has brought her closer to him. She writes of him as a wayward, exasperating, childish genius: her charge. She worries about his health. She finds his films remarkable, and recommends them proudly. She writes a screenplay and works on it with him, with the understanding that he will direct it. She is delighted when she finds the perfect Christmas present for him: Night Image, my own Cousin Itt.

  He was, in his limited way, supportive of her. He encouraged her move to London, and seems to have been genuinely excited about the purchase of the house on Maida Avenue, and the renovations it required. In their shared enthusiasm for doing up houses, they seem almost not to have cared that they would not live in them together. Still, his desires always came first. Money suddenly became tight, and Dad insisted that what they had be spent on a new heating system for the Japanese bath at St. Cleran’s, instead of on necessary repairs to Maida Avenue. Mum was forced to borrow from her father—Grampa.

  She had been brought up to please a demanding, eccentric, irrational, charming, selfish, domineering man. The man had changed, but the pattern was the same. Grampa and Dad were the twin poles of her existence. Accepting that, and understanding her role in it, gave her freedom.

  I find it hard to understand how Mum could have written, to her lover, so admiringly of her husband. The balancing act comes naturally to her. What really throws me is how sweetly she writes about Anne, John Julius’s wife. How can she not be jealous or resentful? How can she not wish Anne at the bottom of the ocean? But she doesn’t. She writes with generous understanding of Anne’s artistic struggle as a painter. She tells John Julius, who is leading a tour group in Turkey, what Anne was wearing and how beautiful she looked at a party at his mother’s house.

  Mum had become friendly with John Julius’s mother, Lady Diana Cooper, with whom she shared a garden wall. When she was young, Diana was considered the most beautiful girl in England. Her husband, Duff Cooper, had many affairs; Diana dealt with them by becoming the best of friends with the women her husband fell in love with. She welcomed Mum in, I guess, the same spirit, and saw no reason not to invite Mum and Anne to the same party. I feel sorry for Anne (who, in the future, would be warm and welcoming to me); she was the one who wasn’t in on the secret.

  When she saw Anne at that party at Diana’s house, Mum was pregnant. She first knew it during the Christmas holidays at St. Cleran’s in 1963. She’s cagey even in her letters to John Julius, hugging the secret—me—to her like a hot-water bottle. She is filled with joy. Literally. The English equivalent of my name is Joy.

  I had always thought of my name as a sort of prayer. A wish for how I’d become, not a statement of who I already was. I’d imagined Mum torn by the fact of me: the marriages, the timing, all wrong. I didn’t know whether she would ever have considered an abortion, but I’d thought that, at best, this seed growing inside her was somewhat of a problem. Happiness rushes in through my eyes and my fingers as I realize I was wrong. There is no tension about my name. I made my mother purely, completely happy by putting in that bid for existence. There was not the tiniest shadow in her mind that she might not want me.

  When I read about that abortion with the Argentinian diplomat, I felt something of myself fly away from my fingertips. Instantly I knew how heart-tearing it was for her to snuff out the child of a man she loved. I knew it because I am the evidence that she wouldn’t do it again.

  Now I read something else, and it twists my guts: “All those children I stopped.” There were others.

  How many? When? With whom? I don’t know, and I probably never will.

  “Ephemeral regrets,” Mum wrote to John Julius. “But even ephemera have substance.” Is she being brave? She’s contradicting herself. If they were ephemeral, the regrets have gone. If they have substance for her years later, how ephemeral can they have been?

  Eight years earlier, she wrote about how she longed, too quickly after falling in love with a man, to have his child, and chastised herself for it. Birth control before the pill was patchy. But I know, from reading that scrap of diary, of her longing; and pragmatic as she must have been each time, I sense what the stopped child cost her. Each one stopped romance, stopped hope, stopped a possible future for all three of them. After that, t
he love affair could only be a death walk to the end.

  What was different this time? It must have made things easier that she was living a sea apart from Dad, not just ten minutes’ walk away. She didn’t want to pretend that Dad was my father. At St. Cleran’s, she would have had to if the routine of their lives was to continue. In London, she could brazen it out.

  She never betrayed to John Julius any hope that my appearance would change things between them. It’s impossible that she didn’t feel it. But she could master her emotions. Grampa had been drilling her to do that, her whole life.

  She dreaded only one thing: the scene that would take place when she told Dad. She wrote to him in March, as soon as she’d passed the three-month milestone. He summoned her to Ireland.

  Cici tells a great story of the scene. She got it mostly—though obviously not all—from Dad.

  Dad is in the study in the Big House, entertaining the local priest to after-lunch drinks. (First unlikely event.) Mr. Creagh comes in and announces that Mrs. Huston has arrived.

  “Mrs. Huston,” says Dad to the priest. “How wonderful. I haven’t seen my wife in more than a year.” (Not true. She was there for Christmas.)

  Mum walks in, wearing a cloak. When she takes it off, the bump is only too evident. Dad is scarlet with embarrassment. Later, in his bedroom, he breaks her wrist with the poker from the fireplace.

  He didn’t break Mum’s wrist. But Cici believes he was capable of it. She describes him in a fury as the Red Devil—the most terrifying creature she’d ever faced. And this, from a woman who rode a lion.

  Mum had hoped for reason and understanding, but she knew it was unlikely. She had done nothing that Dad hadn’t done two years previously. She felt she was due some generosity of spirit, some recognition of the partnership they had developed, some recompense for her own understanding. Even simple kindness. Instead, she was hauled over the coals.

  Mum stayed silent as Dad flung vicious remarks at her, asking nothing of him, avoiding blame and all mention of Danny. He asked her if she wanted him to pretend to be the child’s father. No, she said; all she wanted was silence, the space of a few years, until Tony and Anjelica were old enough to understand the truth. Until then, she thought they would accept simply that the child was hers. It would, she reassured him, be racially no different from them.

  If she had said yes, she told John Julius, she thought that Dad would have “figuratively, at least, kicked my face in.”

  So ended the first scene. But Dad brooded on that one sentence. He decided to take it as a slight to Danny and his multiracial mother.

  For the first time in years—and not jokingly—Mum calls him a monster. Did he hit her? I can’t tell. He didn’t the first day—though, as Mum tells John Julius, he had in the past. I’m pretty sure he called her a whore, and probably worse. She is deeply wounded that Dad would think her capable of a racial insult against Danny or his mother, when all she had tried to do was reassure him about Tony and Anjelica. He is, she thinks, willfully misunderstanding her to fan his own fury. “Why,” she writes, “is it only he has pride to be hurt, feelings to be considered, good nature to be taken advantage of, patience to be taxed? Don’t I as well? Why is all equality out of the question?”

  Without excusing him, she questions herself. Was it her own tongue-tied silence, her lack of confidence, that provoked him to be so cruel? She is sure she could have handled it better—but how? She feels hate rising in her, and she begs John Julius to help her understand Dad so that she will not hate him. She hopes never to see him again.

  He wanted, she wrote, for her to throw herself on his mercy, to come to him saying, “John, I’m in a fix,” so that he could say something to the effect of “Well, honey, let me help you.” She wouldn’t do that. “My dear John Julius,” she wrote, “I am not in a fix, am I?” Her contentment—which surprised me so, and makes me so happy—was what drove Dad crazy.

  The day after these scenes, Mum wrote John Julius a second letter, this one on canary-yellow paper—which she apologizes for, it being so inelegant. But it’s appropriate. Dad has left St. Cleran’s; the storms are over. The sun shines through the balsam poplars outside the window of Mum’s bedroom, and the viburnum is coming into bloom. Though she still loves her little house, and her blue room, she feels as if she is getting out of jail.

  “My blue room.” The room at the top of the stairs, whose door was closed. The room I barely dared enter until Danny came to stay. Its walls and bedspread were beige.

  When Mum was gone, Dad erased her from the Little House. Anjelica’s room was left alone, and the guest room, the garden room, the kitchen. He turned his anger on two rooms: her bedroom and her sitting room. That sitting room was, says Tony, the coziest room he’d ever known, with music playing and sweet-scented flowers and oversize art books which they’d pore over in the dark evenings. Its walls, as Mum described them, were the color of tomato soup. Dad had the walls repainted dark green, and ordered the furniture packed up and sent to Zoë and Danny in Rome.

  It became the Yeats Room, a little museum of Jack Yeats paintings in frames with lights on top. There was no sofa; maybe not even a chair. Just tables against the walls. No one ever went inside. It was a dead room.

  Mum was beyond insult. It was Tony and Anjelica who felt the cruelty, as—without comment, or any indication that they might be hurt by it—Dad dispatched the last vestiges of her warmth to his other family. I felt the chill that was left.

  John Julius was away, leading a tour group through the eastern Mediterranean, during much of Mum’s late pregnancy. She missed him terribly, of course, in the way any woman would miss a man away on business. She was distracted with longing for him, but—as at the start—filled with joy. She felt me kicking inside her. She thought I was a boy.

  He returned a few weeks before I was born, at the end of August, so the letters stop. They start up again when I am less than ten days old. Now John Julius is in France, having a family holiday with his wife and children. The letters fly almost daily to a poste restante address in a country village. They don’t show the serenity of the summer letters. There is a cold anger in Mum’s longing that wasn’t there before. The intense love she feels for him torments her now.

  He excuses his absence with good reasons: his family has missed him too during his long absence, and this is their last chance for a holiday together before school starts. I know Mum was generous-hearted enough to see justice in this. She says she does not blame him. But she will not let him flit away from the consequences. “I don’t want to embark on myself,” she writes, “but I do want you to digest something: Allegra is an entity in herself, for all the joy and pleasure, and they are enormous, inherent in her presence, the wonderful new richness and dimension she adds to my life. She is not your understudy, a substitute for your presence. Thank heavens for her, these days, my endless gratitude for the mainstaying love of these last three years that have led to her, but never forget about these days, that I needed you.” She ends with no sign-off: just “R.”

  She has never sounded so brutal, so dully certain. The words on the page, in her half print, half script, thud on my eyes like blows: like the blows of each hour of his absence. I feel a blast of loneliness freezing her in the spaces between her bones.

  I spent most of my life believing that I am strong, that Nietzsche was right: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Not long ago, I decided that Nietzsche was wrong. An arm that has broken and knit is not as strong as one that never broke. Some hurts never heal.

  Mum accepted a great deal: secrecy, other commitments, sporadic and stolen time together. She called them “the impossible facts.” It was the bargain she made for love. But that week, a steely truth sliced through it: when it came to the crux, she was alone.

  In October, when I was nearly two months old, Mum went to the Marylebone registry office to register my birth. Probably she left me at home with Nurse; documents from the hospital would have been enough.

  I i
magine her standing at the counter in one of those musty, pen-pushing rooms that still dot London. The varnish on the wood is worn through and peeling. In the corners, the linoleum tiles are curling up. The chairs that line the walls, for waiting on, are hard and scratched and randomly set about. The strip lighting hanging from the ceiling flickers in a futile effort to dispel the gloom of the autumn day outside.

  “Christian name?” says the registrar.

  “Allegra,” says my mother.

  “Any middle name?”

  “No.”

  Mother’s name is next. Then father’s.

  It had been agreed between Mum and John Julius that she would not name him. She hated the thought of scandal as much as he did; it was what had infuriated her about Zoë’s pregnancy and Danny’s birth. John Julius was well known as a writer and television personality, and he had a title, Viscount Norwich, so the gossip columnists would have seized on it. Many people in their circle must have known that John Julius was my father, but in fine English fashion it could remain unsaid.

  In that last, awful scene between them, Dad gave Mum permission to name him as my father. He also banished her from St. Cleran’s and insulted her by cautioning her not to intrigue with the servants. Worst of all, he made out that she was the one who had insulted him: that she was intolerant, prejudiced, ungenerous, unkind.

  I doubt she paused for a moment. She had had weeks to make up her mind. Her armor was on.

  None, she said. Unknown.

  I imagine the registrar staring up at her: a remarkably beautiful, well-dressed, self-possessed woman with an American accent and the bearing of a ballerina. Not the kind you’d think didn’t know who was the father of her child.

  And I imagine Mum staring her down.

  The registrar typed two dashes in that column. Father: unknown.