Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Page 24

  I thought this was as funny as he did. Not everyone would, I realized. Our sense of humor was the same.

  As he talked, footsteps thudded down the stairs. A tall, Tiggerish figure in corduroy trousers bounded into view and smothered me in a hug.

  “Allegra! I’m your brother, Jason!”

  He said it as if it was the most wonderful surprise. And it was, to me. I thought I was a problem, an outpost in John Julius’s life, something to be, if not quite ashamed of, then discreet about. In public, he was my godfather, I was his goddaughter. Discretion suited me fine. I didn’t want to have to explain him any more than he wanted to explain me.

  That wasn’t how Jason saw it at all. I was his sister; there was nothing more to it than that. There was no reservation in his delight: no doubt, no resentment, no duty. I felt like the gift he’d always wanted, tied up in a big red bow.

  His older sister, Artemis, had sought me out at Gloom Castle, and come for an awkward dinner. I’d changed in the year that had elapsed since then. With Artemis I’d been reserved, still unsure about whether I wanted this other family. When I met Jason, I’d committed myself to following John Julius’s path to Oxford, which had been Artemis’s and Jason’s too. Gradually I found myself pulled into their embrace. A few years later, when Artemis had a daughter, she asked me to be Nella’s godmother and gave her the middle name Allegra. And when, at the age of six months, Nella was rushed to intensive care with a mysterious infection, I sat shifts beside her hospital bed as one of the family, holding her hand. Her little body was red and massively swollen, with tubes coming out of all parts of her. She looked like a little prizefighter—too strong to die. I brought in a cassette machine and played Chopin nocturnes to her, as my mother had played them for me.

  Jason and Artemis had no truck with the “godfather” rigmarole. I was their sister, in public as well as in private. My American accent, and my name, created confusion. Often I’d have some explaining to do.

  Where are you from? people would ask me at parties. What does your father do? How many brothers and sisters do you have? Sometimes I used one father to base the answer on, sometimes the other. And then I’d regret the choice, because the next question was easier with the other one. I’d feel myself becoming shifty, volunteering either too little information or too much. I devised a short version, which was Dad and the Hustons, and a long version, which included the English side. Whatever I said, I felt I was lying.

  Even so, it seemed natural to plan on staying in London once I finished at Oxford. Moving back to L.A. would have been like cutting off half of my family, half of myself—and anyway, both Tony and Danny were in England. In L.A., I didn’t fit in; being there exhausted me, for I knew I wasn’t really being myself, even though I wasn’t sure what this was. In my mind, Southern California had become a glittering, sunlit hellhole of blandness and hypocrisy and worship of fame. I know now, from reading Mum’s letters, that the sprawling fakeness of L.A. depressed her too.

  In London, Mum had found a city which allowed her to forge her own identity, to cut her own path through it. She didn’t have to be “John Huston’s wife” there, and I didn’t have to be “John Huston’s daughter”—or John Julius Norwich’s either, since I was still a half-kept secret. An American in London has fewer pressures to conform than an English person does. Despite my family there, I always felt American. When I visited the United States, I felt English. Being an outsider was comfortable now. I was different, and I didn’t mind looking—or sounding—that way. It took the pressure off.

  I loved the irreverent stories John Julius told about his family—mine. His grandfather, he said, had been the venereal-disease specialist to the aristocracy, including King Edward VII; and our royal ancestor William IV was famous for nothing but having nine illegitimate children and no legitimate ones and a head shaped like a pear. Illegitimacy ran in the family, evidently—which made me feel a legitimate part of it. His mother, Diana Cooper, whose mother was the Duchess of Rutland, was notoriously not the daughter of the Duke of Rutland but of a local lothario named Harry Cust—in whose house the grandmother of Mrs. Thatcher, the prime minister, is said to have been a parlormaid. Mrs. Thatcher’s round, unearthly blue eyes could have been Diana’s eyes, Harry Cust’s eyes. One night at dinner with Jason and Artemis at the round table in the basement of the house on Blomfield Road, with the many volumes of history he’d written lined up on a shelf behind him, John Julius delightedly recounted for us the moment when he’d approached Mrs. Thatcher’s daughter at a party and said something like, “Isn’t it funny, we’re cousins!” He got the impresion that her mother wouldn’t find it funny at all.

  I was torn, in the secrecy of my heart, between my two families. Could I really have two, or did I have to choose between them? Without question Jason and Artemis felt like my brother and sister. I’d had practice in picking up a brother, with Danny. It was the same with Jason: almost instantaneously we were comrades, we turned to each other for help, support, advice. Once I tried to bring my two families together, giving a dinner party when Anjelica was in London to make The Witches, and inviting Jason. It wasn’t a success. So I let them stay separate, and I lived in two different families as two different selves.

  I still didn’t think I felt about John Julius the way a normal daughter feels about a father. He was more like a favorite uncle, who took me to the theater and the opera, to lunch and to dinner. It had seemed a bit thin at first—not enough for a father and daughter—but I didn’t know how to ask for more, or even what that more might be. Then I realized that in fact I didn’t want anything more. I hadn’t grown up with John Julius as my father; knowledge and experience were two different things. It was a relief not to feel we had to create some kind of backdated relationship. Gradually, we built a closeness without a name. I never called him Papa, like Jason and Artemis did. Occasionally people who knew the truth would refer to him as my dad and I corrected them instantly, probably rudely, in a kind of panic, before the thought could be allowed to settle. John Julius could be accurately referred to as my father, though the combination of words still rang a little strangely in my ears; but I had only one Dad.

  18

  “Hello, honey. This is your father.”

  I’d answered the phone in the flat John Julius had rented for me. It was the spring of 1981, less than a year after the summer in Budapest. Hearing that voice, I sank into the little flowered boudoir chair beside the telephone table. I knew something terrible was wrong.

  I’d never picked up the phone and heard Dad’s voice. Always it had been Gladys, saying, “Your father would like to speak with you.”

  “Hi, Dad.” I waited for the blow to fall.

  His voice was somber, its music minor and descending. “Honey, Gladys is dead.”

  Gladys was ageless, not old. She was never sick. I could hardly believe she was gone.

  “She went to lie down yesterday evening,” Dad continued. “She never woke up.” His voice was nearly breaking.

  They were in New York, preparing to shoot Annie. Again, Marisol had been left behind in Mexico.

  I’d seen Gladys just a week before, on my way back to London from L.A. I hung up the phone and booked a ticket back to New York. I wanted to be with Dad. Gladys had been his rock, his Helena. He was unmoored without her, uncertain of his days.

  “What about Marisol?” I asked him when I got there. She’d been my first thought. Gladys had had her for only two years. She was three years old. Too young to remember the kind, sphinxlike woman who took her on, in defiance of all reason, and loved her so.

  Dad saw Marisol as his charge now, because Gladys had brought her into his world—just as I had become his charge when my mother died. A friend of Gladys’s in New York had already offered to take her. Dad had refused.

  “She’s a Mexican,” he said, when I asked why. “She’ll always be a second-class citizen in the United States. It will be hard for her to amount to anything here.”

  I didn’t belie
ve it, and I was shocked that Dad did. Did he really believe that American society would refuse to let Marisol be anything but a maid, just because her skin was brown? Was prejudice against Mexicans so powerful that even a wealthy New York upbringing, and bright little Marisol herself, couldn’t overcome it? It made no sense to me.

  “She’ll stay at Las Caletas,” he said. “Maricela will adopt her.”

  Four words. I swallowed them and felt them gnawing like a hyena at my guts.

  Maricela had hated Gladys in her feral way. It was obvious to everyone except Dad, who affected not to notice. Like Aunt Dorothy, he was a master at shaping the world to his will. To him, this solution was the most natural thing in the world. Just as he had welcomed me into the Huston fold, he welcomed Marisol, and that was the best in him. But I had had Nurse; Marisol had nobody. That was the worst in him: he refused to consider other people’s realities if they didn’t chime with what he decided was right.

  I’d never once seen Maricela show affection for Marisol. I should take her, I thought. At least I love her. And I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about money; Dad would support us. But I had no idea how to look after a little one, and I didn’t know what my immediate future held. I’d failed the Oxford entrance exam once, and was preparing to sit it again. How could I go to Oxford and take Marisol with me?

  I knew Dad would have none of it. And though I felt passionate—at least about the barrenness that I feared faced Marisol with Maricela as her keeper—I didn’t think I could argue passionately, because the arguments he’d use against me were already undercutting my own certainty that it was the right thing to do. I felt ridiculed even for thinking of it. If Dad dismissed Gladys’s friend for wanting to bring Marisol to New York, how much more ridiculous was it for me, aged sixteen, to pretend to be able to look after her in London?

  So I held my tongue, and let the guilt sink in.

  Danny and I met up at Las Caletas every Christmas now, and often at Easter and in the summer as well. Marisol was there, a little figure following the caretakers around, but we couldn’t play as we used to. She was growing up into a girl whose only language was Spanish. Now that she could talk and wanted to, I couldn’t talk to her.

  Danny was as golden as he’d been at St. Cleran’s, full of adventure, laughing at every scrape he got into. To begin with, we stayed side by side, in the two bedrooms of the guesthouse on top of the hill. Then, one night, I found a scorpion under my pillow. I moved into his room and slept in the other twin bed. There was no strangeness between us, even though we’d shared so little of our lives.

  Age separated the four of us into two and two, with an eleven-year gap between Anjelica, who was a year younger than Tony, and Danny, who was two years older than me. I felt a sweetness in Danny’s and my relationship with Dad that I suspected had been lacking for Tony and Anjelica. From what they’d told me, he’d judged them almost cruelly, riding them hard to be accomplished, and was stingy with praise.

  Dad was simply happy that Danny and I came to Las Caletas; that was, almost, enough for him. Dad worried that Danny wasn’t turning out to be the well-read man he wanted him to be, and during one weeklong visit, he and I made a list of the hundred books an educated person should know. This, of course, turned out to be a list of classics, dotted with some of Dad’s favorites like Eric Newby and Kipling. Once we’d completed it, Danny’s shortcomings were less glaring. Dad hadn’t read many of the books on the list, and neither had I.

  One Christmas Eve, Danny and I were sitting on the beach watching the sun go down when I was suddenly certain that we’d both got Dad the same present. We had: a book of photographs of Paris in the 1920s by Brassaï.

  There was no way we could get into town to buy something different. If we were to find anything else, we’d have to find it here, in this unadorned little compound of buildings, and the jungle around us, which was quickly getting dark. We’d have to make something.

  I looked around and saw the foot-thick piece of heavy Styrofoam that Miguel, who worked there, used as a raft to paddle out to the panga where it lay at anchor. “How about a float for his snorkel?” I said. “So we can see where he is.”

  We decided to cut off a corner of the Styrofoam raft and carve a whale.

  The sharpest tool we could find was a steak knife. We kept at it hour after hour, taking turns when our tired hands couldn’t saw away any longer. Blisters rose on the insides of my knuckles. The waves crashed lightly on the sand, glittering in the moonlight. Occasionally we’d hear a thudding splash: a manta ray leaping out of the water. They were enormous creatures, flat and diamond-shaped, dark gray shadows of themselves. I could hardly see them when they jumped, even though the moon was full and my eyes, accustomed to the night, saw the rocks and trees in sharp, unearthly detail.

  It was past midnight by the time we finished our whale, fat with a fluked tail curling over his back. The contours were rough because of the nubbly Styrofoam, and we smoothed them the best we could. We found some red paint and stuck a sign into the whale’s back with a toothpick: moby john.

  The whale looked rattier by daylight than it had in the moonlight, but still I was proud of it. I hadn’t made anything for Dad in ten years, and I dared this only because it was a joke, and a last resort. Danny and I had made Moby John out of love for Dad, and I figured that if he didn’t appreciate it, that was his failing, not ours.

  Dad looked bemused when he opened the wrapping paper. He picked up the whale and turned it this way and that: the crude red paint, the jagged saw marks on what should have been the smooth curve of its tail. I saw them all too—and they didn’t matter. It wasn’t supposed to be art, or even craft. It had been made from a piece of garbage with a steak knife.

  We tied it onto his snorkel when he went into the ocean later that day. It didn’t work very well; it tipped over and lost its sign. I knew he wouldn’t use it again and that it would quickly find its way, with Maricela’s help, into the trash. I didn’t mind. I was, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, euphoric. I felt it was the best Christmas present I’d ever given anybody. The night Danny and I spent making it would be a beacon for the rest of our lives.

  But as the years went by, I felt my hold on Dad’s tenderness slipping. Though he boasted about his daughter who went to Oxford, I sensed some disappointment: I was too ordinary. When I brought my boyfriend to Las Caletas one Easter, Dad didn’t like him. Though he never said so outright, I sensed that Dad had a living model of who he wanted each of us to be: Tony, a Buckminster Fuller–type intellectual; Anjelica, a combination of Greta Garbo and Grace Kelly; Danny, who loved diving, another Jacques Cousteau or Ramon Bravo; and me, an admired social figure like the beautiful, charming, intelligent, cultured Marietta Tree, to whom he had once proposed and who had turned him down. He too should have been a painter, a true artist; though he loved filmmaking, he despised it, just a little, for being a carnival occupation.

  Of all of us, only Anjelica was living up to his hopes. She had been cast in Prizzi’s Honor even before he signed on to direct it. When they were preparing it, she went to Las Caletas, taking two friends with her. I thought that was cheating, as if she wouldn’t be able to bear the remoteness on her own. The photographs of the three of them were beautiful, all taken in the glow of sunset, with flowers in their hair and cocktails in their hands—but that wasn’t my Las Caletas. Mine was a refuge, almost sacred in its solitude. I didn’t think it ought to look like Acapulco.

  Somehow, the pleasure Anjelica took in her visit to Las Caletas robbed me. Of the four of us, I had been there by far the most, and, I felt, loved it the most, in the way it was supposed to be loved. Of course I wasn’t in her photographs; I hadn’t been there at the time. But in my eyes, the completeness of the photographs seemed to imply that I’d never been there at all.

  And then, the next time I visited, and the Allegrita came to pick me up at the Boca, I saw it had been repainted. It was the Anjelica.

  Nobody mentioned it. I wondered if it had bee
n a figment of my imagination that it had ever been the Allegrita. I said nothing to Dad, nothing even to Joan Blake. I didn’t want anyone to know how deeply hurt I was. Dad would just dismiss it, tell me I was being silly; and maybe I was. The change was inevitable. I had had my few years of topping the league table; but the truth was that I could never be as beautiful, as beloved, as extraordinary, as Anjelica.

  Anjelica only went to Las Caletas that one time. She never knew that her boat used to be mine.

  In May 1985, on the last day of my last term at Oxford, I found a phone message on the board in the porters’ lodge: “Call Anjelica.” Dad had been taken to hospital again—as he was, from time to time, because of his emphysema. This time, along with the breathing trouble, he’d had a heart attack.

  “I’m worried, Legs,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

  That night I went to a friend’s twenty-first birthday party, ball gowns and black tie, champagne and a dance floor set out over the lawn. Two or three times I borrowed the phone and called L.A. Dad was in intensive care, but he was still alive. I didn’t go to bed. I got on a plane early the following morning.

  This time it was Jack who lent Dad a house to recuperate in. It was high in the mountains above the beach, beyond Malibu. I’d never known Jack to go to that house; I didn’t understand why he even had it—maybe just for more walls on which to hang his exponentially increasing collection of art. There was a pair of small, blue-green Picassos on the wall of the living room, which had the same unused air as all the movie-star living rooms I knew.

  Dad was, for the first time, on a permanent oxygen feed, like a leash. Someone had to wheel it around after him whenever he moved. He hated it, of course; it marked the end of snorkeling, of wandering around Las Caletas—maybe even of Las Caletas itself, for him. Two hours’ flight from L.A., plus nearly two hours by panga and car: his doctors would be a long way away.