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

  13

  “My other children call me Papa, pronounced roughly to rhyme with ‘supper,’” John Julius wrote to me not long after our strange, disconnected meeting. That flummoxed me for a bit. The way I said “supper” didn’t sound like any pronunciation of “Papa” I could come up with. I was an American now.

  I had avoided calling him anything that day. It was impossible to think of calling him “Papa.” It sounded so intimate and easygoing, as if everything were normal father/daughter stuff between us. He didn’t sound too sure of it either: something behind his words made me feel that he was trying it on. This whole relationship was so new as to be experimental. I wasn’t at all sure that the experiment would succeed, or whether I wanted it to.

  I didn’t need a new father. I already had one. True, he wasn’t around on a daily basis, but I was used to that. Sharing a house with him had been unusual: when he left for Mexico, he took on his true kingliness again. He was more himself when he wasn’t living with Cici; I must have felt his unhappiness without understanding what it was.

  I saw Dad every month or so when he came to L.A. It never occurred to me that he might not be “Dad” anymore; John Julius’s arrival in my life didn’t change my image of Dad in the slightest. Our relationship had never been based on the primal bond: its pillars were respect and gratitude on my side, generosity and affection on his. The love between us had grown from those. It didn’t depend on biology or habit.

  Dad never mentioned John Julius, though Cici must have told him that we’d met. He continued as if nothing had changed between us. So nothing did.

  What could this new father give me? Not much that I wanted. He sent me books about his family—my family, in theory only—which I didn’t read. I had enough people in my life who were family but nowhere near: Dad, Tony, Nurse, Nana and Grampa, my cousin Martine—and Danny, my lost brother whom I found again in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I saw him with Dad for the first time since I’d left St. Cleran’s. He gave me a ring of gold and turquoise, which sent Cici off on a fantasy about how he and I would marry, which we could since we weren’t blood relations. It was a similar fantasy to the one I’d had, for a moment, when John Julius and Cici sat together on the sofa: that the far-flung ends of my family might come together and close the circle.

  For as long as I could remember, I’d spent time with someone and behaved as I thought a daughter or a sister or a granddaughter should; then I’d been whirled away. I couldn’t just abandon those daughterly, sisterly, granddaughterly feelings; so I was stretched thin, holding on to them all so many thousands of miles apart. My family bonds were like wires stretched around the curved surface of the earth, pulled so very tight they were liable to snap at any moment—and me with them. John Julius was yet another claim on me, someone else I had to write to, another hook in my flesh.

  He’d disappeared from my life once before. Maybe after this first flush of rather lukewarm enthusiasm, he would again.

  I was solitary; I had little emotional strength left for friendships. I had friends at school that I ate lunch with, but I rarely invited them home with me, and I rarely went home with them. All I wanted to do was read and play backgammon. Much of it was the vagueness of being twelve. The rest was exhaustion of spirit.

  Cici got the idea of sending me to boarding school at Ojai Valley, where she had gone. Kids could have their own horses there, she told me; there were all kinds of great things to do. I think she hoped it would energize me, help me find a focus, some kind of passion for life.

  I didn’t want to go. Half of my favorite Enid Blyton books were set in boarding schools, but I knew they were fantasy—and besides, they were English. Nothing about Ojai appealed to me. And one thing terrified me: that if I was sent to boarding school, I’d get marooned there. When the next upheaval came, I’d be forgotten about. I’d have no home left.

  I was sent to an educational psychologist, who had me do logic puzzles and asked me if I felt academically challenged at Paul Revere Junior High public school. Earnestly I lied and told him I did. When his report came through, Cici let me read it. I took pride in having pulled the wool over his eyes. Reading it later, I see that he was smarter than I thought he was. Partly disguising his reasons, he delivered the verdict that he knew I needed: he recommended that I stay where I was.

  By this time Collin and I had Sue, from New Zealand, to look after us. I liked her at once, with her uneven teeth and unglamorous body: she seemed steadier, more reliable, than Lisa and tall, gay, handsome Rock. Cici’s friends had made good companions for Collin and me, and they’d let us have Tuna Helper and Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner as much as we wanted, but when something went wrong, I felt put on the spot. Rock had once taken a corner too fast when Collin was riding in the back of the pickup truck (usually we both did, sitting up on the wheel arches like Mexican gardeners): the truck went up on two wheels, and the road swam in front of my eyes. I was sure that Collin must have fallen out. Rock drove on as if nothing had happened. I’d have to stop him, I thought, and we’d go back to find Collin with his head smashed open on the asphalt. When I looked back, I saw only empty wheel arches—until I spotted Collin up close to the cab in a heap, eyes wide, his tanned face gone the dead color of sand. He gave me a crooked smile through the glass.

  I didn’t tell Cici. I didn’t know what would happen if I did. Maybe it would destroy her friendship with Rock, put an end to the mad laughter of our evenings. Or she might just think I was exaggerating—after all, Rock hadn’t acted as if anything awful had happened. Which was worse: to be the wet blanket tattletale, or to be disbelieved again? Best to say nothing, and take care of it myself. Make Collin ride in the cab, or ride in the back with him and demand that he sit down low and hold on tight.

  Sue took me bowling with her English friends. I felt we shared some kind of Commonwealth bond. Even though I tried not to think about my new English father, something crept into my spirit beneath my consciousness: a rootedness derived from that long line of aristocratic ancestry. My father wasn’t a random someone I met in a hotel room. He was someone who had truly loved my mother; who had been there when I was little; who was separated from me by social convention and by tragedy. This was the kind of story I read in books. I was the only person in the world with this history: arrows of circumstance had flown on a converging trajectory to produce nobody other than me. That sense of difference I’d felt for as long as I could remember: on bad days it still left me feeling fraudulent and alien, but now, on good days, it became a sense of specialness.

  When Cici and Collin went out of town, Sue’s English friends came over for dinner and Scrabble. Suddenly she keeled over backward, as if an invisible force had grabbed her chair and flung it flat. Scrabble tiles erupted off the table. Sue thrashed in spasms on the floor, her eyes rolling like a crazed horse. I screamed, and the only sound was the banging of her head on the floor. I wanted to run, but my muscles wouldn’t move.

  Her friends jammed a spoon between her teeth and cradled her head till the fit passed. They told me it was epilepsy. I’d heard of it; I knew it was a normal, maybe even common disease. I knew people used to think epileptics were possessed by the devil, and that “those who knew,” as Dad would say, could look down on their ignorance.

  “Please don’t tell Cici.” It was the first thing she said—lying on the floor still, looking up at me.

  I felt a power seep into me, and I didn’t like it. I knew Sue should have told Cici she had epilepsy before she got the job; and I knew that meant she probably wouldn’t have got it. This time I knew well I should tell. But I wanted someone to look after me—Sue, the way she had been before this happened. I wanted her to tell me what to do. I didn’t want the choice to be mine.

  “I’ll lose my job.” Her eyes were wet and pleading.

  I hated this. She was Sue again, but my heart was still pounding. I didn’t want to go near her. I’d never imagined epilepsy could be as terrifying as this.

  I felt the eas
y way out unrolling in front of me, like a carpet. I inched down it. Sue hadn’t had a fit before now, I told myself. Maybe she wouldn’t have one again.

  “But what if you’re driving?”

  The words crept out of my mouth. I hated her to see that I was afraid. I didn’t want her to think I was ignorant, or prejudiced against her for having a disease that wasn’t her fault. I felt it was wrong to sound like I didn’t trust her.

  “I feel it coming on, and I can pull over,” she insisted. “It doesn’t happen very often. Please, Allegra. She’ll send me away.”

  I tried not to think it: Hadn’t she felt it coming on just then? Couldn’t she have done something to stop it, or at least have run to her room and had the fit in private? If that was all the warning she got, it wouldn’t be much use on the freeway.

  We had already got Cici’s permission to go on a road trip once school let out for summer, to the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and Yosemite. If I told Cici about the fit, Sue would probably be told to pack her bags at once.

  “I won’t tell,” I said. I could watch Sue extra closely when she was driving. Now that I understood, I could grab the wheel if I had to.

  “Do you want to go to the beach?” Anjel asked me. She was still living in Dad’s studio on the hillside above Cici’s house.

  “Sure.” She was my sister: I would have gone anywhere with her.

  We headed up the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu: past Patrick’s hamburger stand and the beach where Cici went; past Lou Adler’s house with its rock-studded wall, where I’d been with Anjel and Jack. The beach was hidden by shoulder-to-shoulder houses, which parted only when a rocky outcrop, that couldn’t be built on, broke into the waves.

  We pulled out of the streaming traffic into the center lane. On the far side, a garage door swung up. We pulled into the cavern beside a burgundy, new-model Rolls-Royce Corniche.

  Aunt Dorothy drove a vintage Rolls-Royce: 1964, the year I was born. Beside it in the triple garage at Gloom Castle was a James Young touring Rolls-Royce limousine, 1966, one of only two ever made. Both were a blue so dark they were nearly black. Those Rolls-Royces were elegant and streamlined. Corniches, on the other hand, looked fat to me, like the blood-gorged ticks Cici and I burned off the dogs with cigarettes. I looked down my nose at people who drove Corniches. They were showing off how rich they were.

  This one even had a personalized license plate: PRO 3. But I was with Anjelica, at her new boyfriend’s house, so I said nothing.

  She led me along a tiled hallway, nondescript, with a door on either side, into a room whose huge windows were filled with beach and ocean and sky—nothing else, nothing between. The room itself seemed to disappear, irrelevant in the face of this vista. The wide beach was like golden suede: beautifully, serenely empty of people. The gray ocean rolled onto it in a rhythm so close to perfect, so minutely irregular, that it stroked smooth the knotty ridges of my mind.

  I was prepared to dislike the owner of the Corniche, especially since he wasn’t Jack. But I thought I could never dislike someone who lived in the embrace of these waves.

  We changed into bathing suits and went out onto the small wooden deck that perched above the dry upper reaches of the sand.

  The beach wasn’t deserted, after all. Near the ocean, where the sand was hard with water but not soggy with too much, were three men, so far apart that I had seen, through the windows, only the space between them. There were two to my right, one to my left. Frisbees flew between them, flat and straight like precision missiles. Not one Frisbee, but lots: a bombardment fired back and forth, sometimes two together coming apart in midflight, a capsule birthing out of a mothership. A dog chased any Frisbees that landed in the water. I’d never seen Frisbee played like this. I’d thought it was a kids’ game.

  Anjel ran to the lone man and kissed him. I followed.

  “This is Ryan,” she said to me. O’Neal: I knew. He was big and broad-chested, with wavy blond hair and lips the same color as his skin. He’d starred in Love Story. When I was in fourth grade in Long Island, a boy in class was reading the book, and the rest of us were shocked.

  The men at the other end were, I found out later, his brother and his coke dealer. They sloped off northward up the beach—playmates on call, no longer required—when they saw Anjel and me arrive.

  We took up position closer to Ryan than where they had been, and the incoming fire started. I wasn’t any better at Frisbee—even Frisbee as I knew it—than I was at any other physical activity. I could catch them if they didn’t hit my hand too hard—which most of Ryan’s did, except the baby of the mother-and-baby pairs. My dives after low-flying shots were almost always too late. When I threw, the Frisbee either went flinging off wildly or ran out of steam no more than halfway to where Ryan stood.

  He loped up the beach. “Let’s see you throw.”

  I wound up my wrist. Before I could let go, Ryan took my hand and flipped it over. My fingertips were flat against the underside, the way you’d carry a plate.

  Ryan put his fingers over mine and curled them into a fist with the rim of the Frisbee inside. My fingernails were too long to get a grip, even though most of them were already broken. I bit off the ragged points.

  With his arm still around me, holding the Frisbee with his fingers over mine, he moved me so that I stood with my back to the ocean, sideways on to where I wanted the Frisbee to go. He curled his arm, and mine, across my body, and tucked our wrists into the space beside my waist. Without letting go, he demonstrated a few times: the whip of the wrist that launched it into flight.

  He didn’t say much, and he didn’t criticize. He took the attitude that nobody except him knew how to throw a Frisbee, and it was his mission to teach the underprivileged. So he was patient and precise. This one movement was the axis on which he turned. It was the secret of strength, grace, power—if only I could get it right.

  “Let’s try it.” He moved his arm with mine, whipping it forward so hard that the momentum sent me after it. The second time, I planted my foot firmly. My back leg slammed forward into it, straight, like the snap of a scissors. I hadn’t planned that, but it felt good: strong, balanced, controlled. Anjel smiled at me. I smiled back.

  I ran and leaped for the Frisbees and flung them back again, my legs scissoring like Anjel’s. It didn’t surprise me that Anjel was good at it; she was good at everything. I traded with her for the lighter ones, which were easier to throw—and some actually made it to Ryan. He gave me a nod of approval whenever I threw one well. I felt sporty, coordinated, capable, for the first time in my life. I was with Anjel in her world—and I belonged there.

  The next day I woke up and couldn’t move. My brain sent messages to my legs, but they were as immobile as felled logs. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I was frightened.

  “I can’t get up,” I said to Cici. She started laughing. I was hurt. She could often be curt and practical when I was in difficulty, but I’d never felt a lack of sympathy before.

  “It only shows that you don’t get enough exercise,” she said, and left me to force my legs, seized up with pain, to move.

  I knew that she felt both Collin and I were too indoorsy. She didn’t like weakness, and I didn’t blame her for that. But this was something different. She was angry about where I’d been.

  The previous Christmas, when Anjelica gave me an outfit of bell-sleeved blouse and bell-bottomed trousers in silky white rayon, and a pair of sandals like cat’s cradles fixed into shiny wooden platforms, Cici had contemptuously pronounced them “Tatum O’Neal clothes.” Tatum was only a year older than me, but Ryan bought her slinky dresses and took her to parties. Cici didn’t approve at all.

  I didn’t dislike the Tatum O’Neal clothes: they just had nothing to do with me. I didn’t even feel right hanging them up with my other clothes. Had Anjel given them to me because she wanted me to be like Tatum, whom I still hadn’t met? I didn’t have a tenth of the confidence to carry them off. They stayed in the
ir box on the floor of my closet.

  Now I was sleeping in Tatum’s bed—actually, beds. Ryan had two houses: the Malibu house and another in Beverly Hills, on top of a mountain across the canyon from Gloom Castle. We’d spend a few days at one, then a few days at the other, according to his moods. Tatum was in England, making International Velvet, but her closets were bursting with the clothes she’d left behind, all scented with Saint-Laurent Rive Gauche, which—I discovered when she came home—she sprayed directly onto them and poured into the rinse water of the washing machine.

  She and her brother Griffin lived with Ryan because, I was told, their mother was crazy. Griffin was a year younger than me and small for his age, with leaf-green eyes and a freckled face like a street urchin out of Dickens. Instantly he became like another little brother to me. I felt tender toward him, protective of him. He seemed lonely.

  He tried on my high-platform shoes once at the beach house, acting the clown. Anjel was fixing a Coke and lemon in the kitchen, and I saw her glance nervously at the stairs. I realized that she didn’t want Ryan to see this: his son wearing girl’s shoes, even for fun. I made my laughter less loud, and tried to get my shoes back. But Griffin kept clomping around in them, stretching out the joke, as if daring his father to come down and see him.

  Ryan was filming The Driver that summer, and it was mostly night shoots. He’d wake up around two or three in the afternoon and head out onto the beach, Anjel and I following, for a session of Frisbee. Griffin rarely played—he liked to surf, but mostly he just stayed in his room, smoking dope. Ryan’s next-door neighbor, a white-haired man we always called Lee’s Bars Stools and Dinettes—his commercials were all over the TV—plowed through the waves some way out, parallel to us, as the sun started to sink behind the ocean.

  Then we’d all have a sauna together. Soon I stopped being self-conscious about my nakedness, or about Ryan’s. I did start shaving my legs.