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

  “Well,” she said, “it would set my mind at rest if you’d open that closet so I can see it’s not there.”

  “That closet” was a door I kept locked, mostly to hide my little shrine of John Travolta pictures. I also kept my coin cabinet in there, with its few little disks of gold—wanting to feel that it was valuable enough to be locked up, even though I knew it wasn’t. Hanging on the rail were some old clothes of mine that had come in the trunk from Ireland.

  “Why don’t you just look where you keep it,” I said. “You’ll see it’s there.”

  “That’s not it, Allegra,” she said firmly. “I need to see inside that closet to put my mind at rest.”

  I knew perfectly well the dream was a fiction. I couldn’t be angry; it was too transparent. I pitied her for letting her curiosity humiliate her. I could see her making up her own certainty as she went. The further I pushed her, the further she’d go. I didn’t have the stomach for it.

  I fished my keys out of my bag, unlocked the closet, and dropped to my knees to fold up the magazines with the John Travolta photographs. I felt her behind me, not quite wanting to crane her neck into the closet and not prepared to push me aside to move closer. I thought I could actually feel the wave of anticlimax crash against the back of my neck.

  I pulled open the drawers of my coin cabinet one by one. Most were empty.

  “Okay?” I said. “It’s not here.”

  I could have hidden twenty rings in the rest of the closet and she’d never have known.

  “Thank you, Allegra,” she said, and went out.

  Two years later, when she gave my things away in my absence—some clothes, the portfolio of Halsman photographs of my mother—I realized that she felt that as long as my things were in her house, they were actually hers.

  Helena came to London for Christmas and made a deal with me. If I agreed to go back to Gloom Castle, I could stay with her on weekends and help her run her new roller-skating club, Skataway.

  Skataway had started when I was in London and Helena had had a birthday party at a roller rink in Reseda, in the depths of the San Fernando Valley. She had, she told me, been a champion skater as a teenager. The first friends she invited protested, so she just told people to meet her on a street corner and bring socks. When it was over, so many people begged her to do it again that it turned into a regular Monday-night event. Many of Helena’s friends were actors, singers, and musicians, so the paparazzi staked it out. That was where the roller-disco craze of the 1980s began.

  Helena was fierce about her rules. No cameras; no alcohol or drugs, because they were dangerous if you were on skates. Nobody was allowed in uninvited, and if you were there, you had to wear skates. There was usually a knot of fans outside the door, and I’d see the flashes pop when Cher, or Don Henley, or Jack arrived or left. For most of my life, I’d felt peripheral; now here I was at the center of the in crowd, at Helena’s right hand. I had the run of the DJ booth and the area marked private and felt second in importance only to Helena herself. Plus, I could skate. I wasn’t brilliant at it, but I didn’t fall and I could dance. Finally my body felt integrated with my head and my spirit. I wasn’t uncoordinated and incompetent anymore; I was smooth.

  Someone brought the football star Jim Brown one night. Helena didn’t know who he was, but she was told that he was bad news. When he asked if he could become a member, Helena came straight out with it.

  “They told me you threw a woman out the window,” she said. I would never have had the guts to say something like that to anyone.

  “That was the past,” said Jim.

  Helena made up her own mind about people. She was very clear about who she thought was a good person, and who wasn’t. I watched her at the door of the Reseda Roller Rink and thought of Saint Peter: letting the good people in, and consigning the rest to the outer darkness of a parking lot in the San Fernando Valley.

  “Okay,” she said to Jim, “you can become a member.”

  “I’ll be your door guard,” he said. “You get any trouble, I’ll be there.”

  If anyone tried to crash the door, Jim would materialize out of nowhere, huge and intimidating. The longest conversation I had with him was when I sold him a Skataway T-shirt—size small—but every week when they called a pairs skate, Jim would glide up beside me and link his arm in mine.

  I loved telling Aunt Dorothy about this, and about my friend Miguele Norwood, a teacher from Detroit who taught me to skate, because both Jim and Miguele were black, and I knew she didn’t approve and she couldn’t say it because then she’d be admitting she was prejudiced. Best of all were the nights when Miguele or the dancer Charles Valentino gave me a lift home. Now she had to think of me alone with black men in cars—beat-up cars at that, because neither Miguele nor Valentino had money. I knew she worried that I’d be found dead in a canyon, or knocked up with a black baby, and what would she tell Dad then? I had no sympathy. That was my revenge. If she didn’t want secrecy, fine; I’d be honest.

  I knew too that by any standards other than mine and Helena’s, all this was very unsuitable for a fourteen-year-old. I was out skating with celebrities till midnight on a school night; and after that, often as not, I’d go on to Carlos ’n Charlie’s nightclub, where we’d have the private VIP area. If I ordered a frozen strawberry margarita, they served me. We danced till two, which meant I didn’t get back to Gloom Castle until two-thirty. Valentino would lift me above his head and spin me around, and I’d try to point my toes and arch my neck to look graceful. If Anjelica was there he’d lift her up and spin her around too. I couldn’t quite identify, or allow myself, the hurt I felt as I watched them. I knew I didn’t look as graceful as she did.

  My schoolwork didn’t suffer. I was taking classes one or two years ahead of my grade level anyway. I wasn’t getting into any trouble. Nobody was offering me drugs, older men weren’t taking advantage of me, and I knew that if anyone did try to, Helena would throw them out on their ear. The rest of the week, I sat in my room reading and watching TV. Without Skataway, I’d have gone so far into my shell that I might never have come out again.

  I even arranged to get school credit for roller skating. Since seventh grade I’d been getting doctor’s notes to excuse me from PE on the grounds of “arthralgia of the lower extremities exacerbated by exertion”—in other words, growing pains. Helena knew I needed exercise, and she made sure I got it. Whenever she saw me sitting and chatting, she’d scold me: “Stop socializing! You gotta skate. It’s schoolwork!”

  I spent Friday and Saturday nights in the Father O’Sullivan Suite, as the maid’s room of Helena’s house was called, after Jack’s family priest from New Jersey. Usually Roberto would drive me to her house, but I loved it when Helena picked me up at Gloom Castle in her microscopic shorts and strappy high heels and leotards, because she was a creature totally outside Aunt Dorothy’s frame of reference. It amused me to see Aunt Dorothy have to swallow her prejudices: about class, about clothing, about what I’m sure she thought were Helena’s dubious morals. I knew how wrong she was. I knew that if there was anyone in my life I could rely on, anyone who was completely upright and true of heart, that person was Helena.

  She was so discreet that, though I spent almost half the week with her, I never knew anything about her private life. She listed people by first name in her address book, and if their last name was famous—like “Dylan”—she put only an initial. (It was Anjelica who told me who “Bobby D” was.) To me, with my tangled ego in relation to the famous people I knew, it was amazing to understand how, for Helena, despite her starry circle of friends, her own self was enough.

  Once she picked me up from school, and I was furious. I hated her to see me in my uniform with its drooping polyester pleats, knee socks, and horrible crepe-soled shoes.

  “Allegra,” she said severely. “Who cares about the outfit.”

  I did. I felt like a pretender now when I was wearing that uniform: the good Catholic schoolgirl, the levelheaded misfit in my
sister’s life. We were all pretenders there. One girl, who was fifteen—with braces, I couldn’t get over that—used to meet her flying instructor in motel rooms.

  When I was with Helena, I felt like myself. She took me everywhere with her: to casting auditions, to Jack’s business manager’s office, to her electrolysis appointments, to the garment district where she was having T-shirts and satin bomber jackets made for Skataway, up to Marlon’s house, where I sat on his bed and played chess with him. I was her prodigy. She loved that I was smart, but I never felt that I had to be. All she expected of me was loyalty, honesty, good sense, and high standards. For the next year and a half, when without her I would have slowly twisted into craziness alone in my room in Gloom Castle, she kept me sane.

  Marlon had a way of arriving unannounced just as we were getting ready to leave for the roller rink, on a little electric scooter. His body, when he sat, was an equilateral triangle, with his beautiful head and falcon’s nose at the apex, and his spreading bulk below. It looked funny perched on the scooter. The scooter was silent, and Marlon moved as silently as a prowling panther, so I never knew he was there until he materialized a few feet from me, near the photo of him in his youth that hung on the wall: black-and-white, in profile, staring through a rain-drenched window. His voice was so quiet you had to lean into the sound waves to hear it, and tune out the rest of space and time. It was a game of his, to make us late. He awed me; but Helena awed me more, by being stronger than him and shooing him out.

  I knew we made a strange pair: Helena with her street smarts and her clothes falling off her, and reserved, bookish me. I typed up lists of members’ names, in three categories: those who were allowed to bring one guest, those who could bring three, and the special few, with red membership cards, who could bring as many people as they liked. I cut the necks out of my T-shirts so that they slipped off my shoulders, the way she did. I tucked up long skirts into my underwear to make miniskirts with bustles on the hips, the way she did. I slept in silky negligees—castoffs from Helena and from Cici—and on weekends wore them all morning, the way she did.

  I helped her with the script she was writing, at a table below that photo of Marlon by the rainy window, and learned about the lives of prostitutes and street people. She called me her secretary, and I felt needed.

  At the end of the school year, some friends and I decided to make a funny tape about our class, using snatches of songs. Most of my contributions were a bit obscure for high-school girls in 1979—Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, songs I knew from the compilation tapes called “Jack’s 20s thru 70s” that played constantly at his house. Then, after we finalized our script, I realized that my eight-track tape of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life was useless for our purposes. The store wouldn’t exchange it because it was a discount version. I convinced Aunt Dorothy to take me to Tower Records, where I knelt down and secretly, I thought, swapped my discount tape for a full-price one.

  The only difference was a strip of yellow on the label, instead of a strip of white. I told myself that it wasn’t really shoplifting, because I was exchanging like for like, not stealing anything. The album was the same; who would even look for that strip of color? I planned to come back another day and officially exchange the full-price eight-track for the LP.

  As I walked out to the parking lot, where Aunt Dorothy was waiting for me, a security guard took my wrist and said, “You’ll have to come with me.”

  I got off with a lecture. It was humiliating, but the worst of it was being caught shoplifting—which, really, I knew it was—with a monogrammed Rolls-Royce as my getaway car. I looked like a little rich girl. It was true to some degree, I knew, but still I felt a gulf between appearance and reality. I wore the same three dresses in rotation; my shoes were hand-me-downs from Anjelica and Cici; my allowance was barely enough to cover basic toiletries. I didn’t have enough money to buy one album so as not to disappoint my friends. I felt poor, even barren. I almost wished I really was, so that my inside would match my outside—and I knew what a hypocrite I was.

  I was terrified that Aunt Dorothy would tell Dad—or Helena. She didn’t. I decided she must think it would reflect badly on her, since I’d never done anything like that before. Dad might ask why I’d felt I had to steal, and then she’d have to admit how little of the child support he paid her actually got spent on me. I was a bad lawbreaker: consumed with guilt, nervous of being caught, glancing about shiftily before fumbling my exchange, sauntering so nonchalantly to the door that it must have been obvious I’d done something wrong. As much as anything else, my total incompetence convinced me not to try anything like that again.

  “You need only to look around you, to see the wonder, to know that a higher Being must have created it,” said Sister Charles, who had made me her pet. With her Irish accent, cropped gray hair, and sensible skirts, she reminded me of Nurse. But she was larger and sturdier, and she had an ownership of her place in the world, whereas Nurse was blown about by the gusts of the Huston family drama. God was her invisible ballast.

  I envied her that unshakable stability, and her golden vision of the world, so perfect and intricate and orderly. That wasn’t what I saw. I saw randomness, indifference, cruelty, and pain. There was no benevolent hand directing it.

  In Ireland I’d had to memorize the catechism word for word: no “of” where a “to” should be, no “a” for “the.” Southern California Catholicism didn’t require that kind of precision, but we did go to chapel every Friday, and the familiar ritual was comforting. It threw a line back to my earlier self, my earlier life, and strung the fragments together. Belief in God seemed warm, a sanctuary. It would assign me a place in creation that was uniquely and perfectly mine.

  The year before, I had written out a prayer that I would meet John Travolta, and he would fall in love with me. Even though it had lots of “Please, God”s in it, I felt that it was incomplete, so I finished it off with the entire “Our Father,” even including the last line, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory,” which nobody in Ireland had ever used. I’d heard it on a TV commercial, intoned by a majestic-looking Indian gazing into the sky. I was afraid that leaving it out might be God’s excuse for not granting my prayer, while putting it in, even if it didn’t really belong, surely couldn’t offend Him because it was so complimentary.

  After a few days the one prayer seemed paltry. So I wrote out another, this time in red pen to show how strongly I felt, and all in careful capitals in case God couldn’t read my regular handwriting. I knew it was ridiculous even as I was writing it, but still it felt good. I was doing something to try to take control of my life.

  I folded the papers into little squares. The thought jumped into my head that if God had trouble reading anything other than capital letters, He might have trouble reading inside the folds—but what could I do? I wanted to keep the prayers on me at all times; I didn’t want Aunt Dorothy, or anyone else, reading them. As I didn’t wear a bra yet, I slotted them into my underwear—which meant that I had to wear underwear to bed too. The paper became cottony with the oils from my skin.

  After a few months, I was keeping them just for form’s sake. There was no sign of John Travolta, so obviously God—if He existed—wasn’t interested, and I was losing interest myself in someone who could make a movie as ridiculous as Grease. Maybe it was the thinning of my crush that made me careless.

  In London, I borrowed Jack and Anjelica’s bathroom when they were out, since mine didn’t have a tub. Drowsy from reading in a cloud of stephanotis bath oil, I heard the front door open and leaped out, grabbed my bathrobe, and ran upstairs. Only when I was putting my clothes on ten minutes later did I realize that I’d left the prayers on the edge of the washbasin. I tiptoed downstairs, hoping Anjel wouldn’t confront me. I thought she’d take a dim view of the whole thing, and tell me I was an idiot—which I knew I was. The bedroom door was closed. I sidled into the bathroom, which was right beside it, and there were the prayers, where I’d lef
t them. Unfolded. Read.

  I picked them up and ran back upstairs. I refolded them on their fragile creases and slipped them back against my skin. But they didn’t sit right anymore. They seemed to itch, as if the fingers that had touched them had left a toxic residue. After a few days, I buried them deep in the kitchen garbage. I’d been exposed for having a crush on a dumb guy, but what stung the most was that Anjel would think me credulous for writing prayers to a God who didn’t exist.

  As I sat in chapel at school, still not believing but once again wishing I did, I wondered whether I should ask for Confirmation. A number of girls were preparing for it, and the smooth, tracklike progression of their days appealed to me. I had never made my first Communion, though I’d seen Jackie and Caroline Lynch in their bridelike first Communion dresses, and I wasn’t at all sure that I’d ever been baptized. Probably not, I figured, since I was the product of an illicit love affair. My lack of real belief relieved me of any spiritual qualms about taking Confirmation when I had never been cleansed of original sin; the problem was that I wasn’t sure if the nuns knew what an atheistic upbringing I’d had, or if I’d have to produce certificates of some kind. I certainly couldn’t ask Sister Charles, since then I’d have to tell her that the man who she still thought had made her favorite film wasn’t really my father.

  I decided not to say anything about Confirmation. If I wouldn’t be taking it as a sacrament, why would I be taking it? There was no point in taking a sacrament based on a lie.

  At least I could pray, properly this time. Whether God existed or not, there was no harm in praying. But what to pray for? A mother, a proper father, a normal family life? They were too far beyond what I knew—if I suddenly had those things, I wouldn’t be me anymore. So I prayed for belief, and prayed as if I believed, putting full passion into the silent words in my head.