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

  I didn’t feel them rising to heaven. They just echoed in the cavern of my skull.

  17

  At Cholmondeley Castle, during our two days of gentle collision for Tony’s wedding, Dad had drawn pictures of the place he was building in Mexico. It was outside the town of Puerto Vallarta, beyond the reach of the coast road, which turned inland to avoid the mountains. Foreigners weren’t allowed to buy coastal property in Mexico then, so he’d bought a ten-year lease from the local Indian community. His face glowed as he described how the buildings were designed to melt back into the jungle. It disturbed me that he was, so bluntly, planning for his death—and so soon. When he described the buildings disappearing into the jungle, I saw his body merging into the earth.

  I went to Las Caletas—“the little coves”—for the first time the Easter after I came back from London. I was longing to see it, this Swiss Family Robinson enclave that Dad had built. I wasn’t living with Cici, so I wasn’t so torn between her and Dad as I used to be; and as the years went by, Maricela was becoming as irrelevant to me as I was to her. I wanted to spend time with Dad, to reestablish the relationship we’d had. I wanted to prove to him that John Julius’s appearance in my life made no difference to my love for him.

  At Puerto Vallarta airport I was met by a woman named Joan Blake, who described herself as Gladys’s secretary. Gladys was living at Las Caletas with Dad. There was no telephone service there, so Joan was the anchor in town, with a CB radio for communication. We drove on a narrow two-lane road through fields and into town, which was just as I remembered it: a grid of cobblestone streets with tendrils climbing up the hillside. We carried on out the other side, toward the beaches where Cici and her gang had loved to go, past Mismaloya where Dad’s set for The Night of the Iguana stood deserted and crumbling into the jungle, just as he’d designed his new home to do. Finally we came to a little fishing village called Boca de Tomatlán.

  There was a makeshift café on the beach: a few tables and a refrigerator of soft drinks. Open boats—pangas—slid slowly up and down the swells, anchored to buoys, motors slung up at their sterns. A few men pulled in nets, with fish flapping inside the twine. I heard Joan asking for Armando or Javier. Their names were like an incantation, the boatmen who could carry me to Dad’s new kingdom beyond the waves.

  I think it was Javier that day. A panga drew up at the little wooden jetty, and I got in. There were a few boards across it for seats, and fishing nets lay in the V-shaped keel. It was a weathered, creamy white. I could see the linenlike weave of the fiberglass through the syrupy paint.

  Joan waved as Javier revved the motor and we headed out of the cove. Pelicans perched on the rocks and dived after fish. Low, dark green trees, tangled with vines, furred the steep hillsides all the way down to the rocky shoreline. I gripped the plank to stop from bouncing as the panga bumped across the corrugated water.

  The salty air was thick, rich with the smells of damp greenery and fish. As I breathed it in, I felt I was drinking it, slaking a thirst for the expansive wonder of the world. Here was space and freedom. A sour-sweet whiff of gasoline spiced it as Javier gunned the motor into the open bay.

  We passed a finger-shaped cove, tiny and deep, with a scrap of beach gleaming white in the sunlight like a buffed fingernail. I longed to take a picnic there one day. The coastline was almost uninhabited: one house at the long beach called Las Animas, “the spirits”; the village of Quimixto, thatched huts clinging to the hillside and a big brick house on an outcrop into the water. For half an hour the boat bumped on, the motor droning, the wind warm in my face, a double spray of white feathering at the bow.

  I knew we’d reached Las Caletas when Javier pointed the boat toward shore. There was one perfect, secluded little beach, with a thatched house set in a cleft of hillside; then a small point of rocks; then another beach, shallower and longer, with a patch of flattish ground beyond, planted with flowering bushes and traced with brick pathways. I almost couldn’t see the houses. Their red-tiled roofs were already mottled with lichen, and they had no walls, just screens that shimmered phantomlike amid the lush tangle of greenery.

  Anchored about twenty yards offshore was a blue panga. As Javier gunned the motor to run us up on the beach I saw the name painted on the side of its bow: Allegrita.

  Dad appeared from among the bushes, wearing a pajama-like outfit of thick white cotton that stopped above his ankles. He looked brown and healthy: not strong, but hale. His step was light, as if the warm brick of the path shot energy up into his bare feet. He stepped down onto the sand to hug me. Instantly I loved this new incarnation of him. This was where he belonged: still king of his domain, but a small and cozy domain, with nobody to impress, luxurious with fruit and flowers instead of valuable artworks and hot and cold running servants, and edged by the protected water of the bay.

  “Welcome to Las Caletas, honey,” he said, his arm around my shoulders. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  Danny had been there during construction; Tony and Anjelica had never seen it. It warmed me to be the first of Dad’s children to come and stay in his new home.

  I slept in Gladys’s house, since the guesthouse on top of the hill wasn’t finished yet. Though the houses were close together, you couldn’t quite see one from another. There were big sheets of sailcloth on runners under the wide eaves to draw closed at night, and terra-cotta fireplaces for warmth. We could find one another or disappear, as we liked.

  As well as the two beds in Gladys’s L-shaped room, there was a crib. She had just adopted a little girl: Marisol.

  Marisol was less than two; Gladys was over sixty. The story I was told—I can’t remember who told it, but not Gladys—was that a friend of Gladys’s had wanted to adopt a baby, and Gladys had gone in search of one for her. She’d ended up at the Puerto Vallarta brothel, where Marisol was pulled out from underneath a bed. Her mother was happy to give her up, especially to a promising future in America. Then the friend in New York said no: this little girl was too old. Gladys couldn’t leave her at the brothel, so she kept her.

  Gladys adored her. She was a round little thing, always laughing. For the week that I was there, she hardly ever cried. She loved it when I bounced her on my lap and tickled her. I’d never played with a toddler before, and I fell in love with her too. She could barely talk, so it didn’t matter that my Spanish was broken. I was surprised that Gladys had called her by a name so like Maricela’s, since I knew that she disliked Maricela; but I never asked her why. Perhaps it was the name her mother had given her, and Gladys hadn’t wanted to change it.

  Dad swam in the mornings, and we played backgammon, and he sketched me while we talked. His gaze felt like a caress, sweeping softly over my face, and his pencil was an honest recorder. He didn’t want a pose; just me.

  Talk was easy here: about books mostly, and the doings of Las Caletas. I didn’t feel interrogated, as I always had in the Beverly Hills Hotel; I was here for a week, not one of those crammed afternoons which were too long and too short at the same time. Our words were shot through with sunlight and airy with the breeze that came off the salt water and through the screens and the fat, shiny hibiscus leaves outside. Often he’d play with some new pet: a boa constrictor called Lechugita, an ocelot, a ring-tailed tejon. In the background was the constant crackle of the CB radio, turned down low until we heard Joan’s voice saying, “Joan to Las Caletas. Joan to Las Caletas. Come in, Las Caletas.” There was a generator to power a walk-in fridge—unlike the other houses along the coast, which had no electricity—but no phone, no newspapers, no television. The CB was our only connection to the outside world.

  We had one strange, trivial disagreement, when Dad told me how a local worker had let him down with the excuse that his mule was pregnant. He shook his head in condescending amusement at how the man could be so stupid as to think anyone would believe such an excuse.

  “Maybe it’s in the translation, Dad,” I said. “He probably said burro. It’s a donkey. It could be pregnant.
”

  “No, honey. He said, his mule. And everyone knows mules are sterile.”

  Dad didn’t speak Spanish. I knew he had no idea what the man had actually said. Nor did I, but I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Dad wasn’t. I realized that he’d clutched on to this idea of the thick-witted, colorful locals, and he wouldn’t let it go. He always insisted he loved Mexico and loved Ireland; but he loved the Mexicans and the Irish like children. When, at school in L.A., I wanted to take Spanish for my foreign language because it would be more useful, he insisted I take French because, he said, it was the language of culture and civilization.

  (He didn’t really speak French either. Anjel has memories of following him, cringing with embarrassment, through hotels as he cast “bone-jure”s right and left, like a king scattering coins to the populace.)

  As we talked and played, we’d hear a panga, which was the signal that Archie, a jolly Hawaiian chef, had arrived from Quimixto. An hour or so later Archie rang a bell and we all came together for lunch, the only meal we shared: Gladys, Dad and I, and usually an ex-CIA agent named Bill Reed, who lived down the coast at Las Animas and was helping Dad write his autobiography. Maricela didn’t join us. She was Dad’s personal attendant; she had no interest in anyone else. She tolerated other people only because he wanted us there.

  I felt closer to Dad at Las Caletas than I ever had. I loved this idyllic place that he had created as much as he did. I felt loved too: he had named the panga after me.

  I was fifteen, and finishing eleventh grade. I’d taken all the twelfth-grade classes Marymount had, English more than once. Sister Colette agreed there was no point in my going back for the final year of high school. I wouldn’t graduate with the seniors, which was fine by me; I didn’t care about things like that. I got my high school diploma by mail.

  I took the exams I needed for college entrance, and applied to a few in a halfhearted way, because it was the thing to do. I didn’t want to go to college aged sixteen—I knew I wasn’t ready for that social world. I didn’t know what I did want to do, though. I could carry on living at Gloom Castle—and it would be easier with a driver’s license, which I could get in August, when I turned sixteen—but it wasn’t an appealing prospect.

  Dad was about to leave for Budapest, to film Escape to Victory with Sylvester Stallone (I could never hear his name without thinking of Marlon’s practical joke), Michael Caine, and Pelé. The story was based on a real incident, in which the Nazis had organized a soccer match between some prisoners of war and their guards, but the script was pretty silly. Dad was doing it for the lark. In Ireland, he’d always watched the World Cup, and Pelé had been the star of four of them. Dad wasn’t impressed by many people, but he was impressed by Pelé.

  He arranged for me to work on the film as a production assistant. I was excited, and nervous. I’d come to rely on Helena for moral support, a sort of lodestone for what was right in the world. Dad wouldn’t give me that; he’d judge me, and find me wanting if I was wanting. He liked people to be sure of themselves, and not just good at what they did but the best. How could I be that, right off the bat, doing something entirely new?

  Maricela, obviously, would be no comfort. I was trying hard to be her friend, but I couldn’t read her. Sometimes she seemed to accept me, even like me; other times I thought she hated me, or just wished I didn’t exist. She told Dad that I stole things from Las Caletas, when all I’d done was borrow a facecloth to wrap my special acne soap in. Gladys would be in Budapest too—without Marisol, who had to take second place to Dad—but her quiet reserve was ironclad. She wasn’t someone to turn to if things went wrong.

  My ticket arrived from the travel agency. I’d be flying alone. As the date closed in, I started to panic. I couldn’t back out; Dad would despise me for a coward. Something, some accident, would have to save me from going. I wished for one of those earthquakes or car crashes that teenagers wish for, the kind that only harm other people but throw everything into disarray.

  If I break something, I thought, I won’t have to go. I wasn’t brave enough to throw myself down the stairs or jump from a great height—which I’d have to lie about anyway, and I knew I was a bad liar. Maybe, I thought, I could break my finger. I laid the pinkie of my left hand on the bookshelf, and brought a rock of turquoise down on it, which a friend of Dad’s in Mexico had given me for Christmas. It hurt—but the skin was barely red, and the bone wasn’t even close to breaking. I smashed the turquoise on it again, harder, and harder again. I could feel the muscles of my right arm seizing up, trying not to hurt my finger even as I tried to break it.

  This is ridiculous, I thought, staring at my sacrificial finger. There’s no way I’ll ever be able to break it. And if I do, what am I going to tell Dad? That I’ve broken the little finger of my left hand and that means I can’t come? Even a broken arm wouldn’t do. It would have to be a broken leg. Which would mean I couldn’t roller-skate either, so I’d be marooned even more gloomily in Gloom Castle. And if I can’t break my finger, what chance on earth would I have of breaking my leg anyway?

  So I got on the plane.

  My room at the Budapest Hilton connected to Dad’s suite, but mostly I kept the door closed. He was tired and went to bed early after a day on set; we ordered room-service dinners independently. He didn’t keep tabs on me, or set any rules. I was responsible for myself—in effect, living on my own.

  Grown-up though I was from hanging out at the skating rink, I hadn’t had a boyfriend, hadn’t even had a date. I had an impossible crush on Teihotu Brando, who lived in Tahiti and spoke only French; when he visited his father and came down to Helena’s house, all I could do was gaze at him. My French still didn’t go much further than the songs I used to sing with Sister Annunciata.

  Then a guy called John turned up at the rink. I never knew his last name, what he did, where he came from. Week after week I looked for him to arrive, and skated with him. One Monday he came to Carlos ’n Charlie’s afterward, and sat beside me on a sofa. He was wearing a tight T-shirt with a picture of a nautilus shell over the left nipple. I traced it with my finger. He held up a menu in front of us and kissed me, soft little touches of the lips.

  I felt very grown-up, making out on a sofa in a nightclub. I was self-conscious, but not ashamed. This was the kind of thing I imagined Anjelica doing with Ryan, or Jack, at places like Studio 54.

  The next day Helena and I were working on her script in our negligees when Anjelica stormed in from next door.

  “You little tramp! How dare you?”

  That was all she said. I was on the point of tears, but so stunned that they couldn’t fall until my brain started up again.

  “She shouldn’t’ve yelled at you like that,” Helena said calmly when the air settled down again. “But she’s right. It looked trashy.”

  Suddenly I saw us on that sofa: unremarkable John, and me a little girl thinking she was cool. I knew instantly that Helena would never have done anything like that, though I couldn’t quite shake the thought that Anjelica might have. If she had, she had the sense to be ashamed of it.

  I ignored John the following Monday, and I never saw him again. I think Helena banned him without telling me.

  In Budapest, I was suddenly grateful to Anjel. There was a girl on set whom Dad referred to, with patient pity, as “the company lay.” When I heard it, I felt a twisting in my guts. I could have been that without even knowing it.

  When the two months of filming were over, I stopped in London to spend a week with Tony and Margot. It was my sixteenth birthday.

  “What are you going to do now?” asked Tony.

  Dad had suggested I go to Perugia and learn Italian, and had even taken me there during a break in filming. The prospect of being alone in Italy, unable to speak the language, terrified me.

  “Go back to L.A., I guess,” I said. “Work for Helena.”

  Tony had stayed at Gloom Castle and come skating; he knew the shape of my life. I could see he was conc
erned by my aimlessness. He didn’t want me to fall into the sinkhole of the lost children of Hollywood.

  “You always said you wanted to go to Oxford,” he said. “Why don’t you apply?”

  I’d forgotten that I used to say that when I lived in Ireland. In that moment, I remembered. Suddenly I had a purpose—and it was my own purpose, recovered with Tony’s help. He lent me his old flat temporarily, the same one I remembered visiting with Mum. It was around the corner from Maida Avenue, and the canal with its flower-topped houseboats, and John Julius’s house on the other side.

  John Julius had been to Oxford. Maybe Mum had talked about Oxford to me.

  John Julius took me to lunch often, and one day we went back to his house on Blomfield Road. On the blue-painted front door was a bronze plaque of two clasped hands and the word norwich. It was, he told me, from the Norwich Union insurance company. I thought of the little blue-and-white enamel box I had, with cursive letters on the top: A trifle from Norwich. A tourist souvenir from the city. When it came to me in a small, unannounced consignment of Mum’s things, it was empty. He must have given it to Mum with a present inside.

  In the hall, on a bureau, was a piece of pre-Columbian art: a laughing Jaliscan dog like the ones Gladys had. Instantly I felt at home. On another bureau, on one side of a window, was an enormous glass case containing the front half of a St. Bernard emerging from about six inches of doghouse.

  “I found it in a junk shop.” John Julius had seen me staring at this incredible object, so out of keeping with the elegant good taste of everything else (though the Roman bust on a column did have a panama hat on it). The other things in the hall Dad might have had; this, never.

  “I keep looking for the other half, the rear end disappearing into the doghouse,” John Julius said. “I think of putting it on the other side of the window.”