Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Page 25

  Suddenly Maricela went to Mexico, leaving Danny and me in charge of Dad for two weeks. I felt very daughterly, in the importance of my mission. I was twenty. The Allegrita had become the Anjelica; maybe this would give me an opportunity to regain some ground. Every four hours someone had to perform on him a procedure called cupping: he lay on one side, then the other, and we rhythmically tapped over his lungs with cupped hands, to loosen the mucus. I liked doing it: it gave me pleasure to look after Dad in this vital, intimate, wordless way.

  Maricela’s departure was unexplained and bizarre: she never left Dad’s side. And to leave him at a time like this, when his health was so precarious and his mood so brittle? I asked him why she’d gone. He didn’t want to tell me, it was obvious, but evidently he couldn’t think of a convincing lie.

  Marisol had been playing on the beach with a friend. The friend’s mother had seen sexual knowledge in her that a little girl shouldn’t have. As a result, they had discovered that a man who was working at Las Caletas had been abusing Marisol.

  I felt sick. Tears stung my eyes. I hated myself for having been such a coward when Gladys died—afraid of Dad’s ridicule as much as of the responsibility of looking after a little girl. If I’d taken her then, this would never have happened. I realized that my fault was small in the scheme of things, but it was mine.

  “Of course,” said Dad dismissively, into the silence, “her mother was a whore.”

  I stared at him, dumbfounded. His face held its customary sage-like certainty, which had always told me that Dad knew best. This was his judgment: born of eight decades of accumulated wisdom of the world. He had spent his life telling stories of human nature. Sexual looseness was in Marisol’s genes. Dad wasn’t inclined to blame the man; he seemed to think that what Marisol had done while playing with her friend came to her naturally. If she had been abused, the abuse was her fault.

  “Dad, she’s seven!” I couldn’t believe he was saying this.

  “Well.” His voice was curt. The subject was closed.

  He would have listened to a psychologist, a child behaviorist, a Jungian or a Freudian analyst, an anthropologist—even a judge or a cop or a private detective. Maybe, even, a mother. He wasn’t so self-obsessed that he thought he knew everything; he loved to learn new things, and his face came alive as he listened to people whose knowledge he respected. But there was no middle ground. Either he, the expert, was pronouncing, or another expert was.

  There was no point in arguing. He wouldn’t listen to me.

  Here my memory cuts out. Did I yell at him, furious as I was, or did I just leave the room? Probably I turned and walked out, and that’s why I don’t remember it. I feared discord: the tiniest disagreements left me shaking. I would have been prouder of myself if I’d hauled him over the coals. Not that it would have changed his mind—but he deserved at least a little discomfort. He had insisted on keeping Marisol in Mexico, where nobody truly cared about her; and this was the result.

  That was the break. What had happened to Marisol could have happened to me; or, in a better world, my life could have been hers. I’d had the luck, but I was powerless to help her. She was beyond my reach.

  Dad had wrenched my entire moral universe off its bearings—which showed me, in a dawning of consciousness, that I had one, and that it wasn’t his, wasn’t anyone’s but my own. Until that moment, I’d accepted everything. I might have grumbled inwardly, or sulked alone in my room, but I didn’t question the fundamentals. People made mistakes, of course, or were forced by circumstances into courses they might not have freely chosen, but it was my role to understand, and forgive, and make the best of what they decreed for me.

  Not this time. But if I unpicked all the strands, the assumptions that led to Dad being able to say such a thing—with no twinge of sorrow for this little girl who had already lost two mothers, and no sense of his share of the blame—I’d never be able to look at him, love him, again.

  Exactly at this time, Dad was contacted by a journalist who had interviewed him for Playboy. The interview was published in the issue that had nude photos of Madonna, so its sales were astronomical; and on the strength of it a biography was commissioned. The writer asked Dad for his authorization. Dad—newly leashed to the oxygen machine; angry, depressed, and bored—agreed.

  Some time later the biographer came to interview me in London. I didn’t want to talk to him, but I felt that, as Dad had authorized him, I had no right to refuse. I wasn’t as smart as Anjelica was; she managed to put him off for two years without ever saying no.

  “Is it true that your mother was decapitated in the car crash that killed her?” he asked me.

  I knew the cause of death was “head injuries”—I had seen the death certificate a long time before. Occasionally those words had come back to me, a vision of my beautiful mother with her head smashed through a windscreen, or on a dashboard. There was blood in her hair, but her serene face was perfect, even with the impact of death.

  “I don’t know,” I said. My tongue stumbled on the words. The image was obscene to me; I knew Mum had died violently, but I couldn’t bear to think of her torn apart. “Why do you ask me? I was four.”

  And then came the next question: “Who is your father?”

  I didn’t answer. That was the last time I felt I had something to hide.

  John Julius turned sixty just before the book was to be published, with its newsworthy revelation that he was my father. So we arranged a photo in the gossip column of the Daily Mail: the Viscount Norwich with his wife, Mollie (John Julius and Anne had finally divorced a few years previously), and his three children: Artemis, Jason, and Allegra. So normal as not to require any explanation at all.

  I stopped choosing one father or the other on which to base an answer to those chatty questions. I started to say, “I have two.” The more often I said it, the more confident I felt, the richer for having two. I developed my own shorthand to distinguish them: “my father” and “my dad.”

  19

  I didn’t go to Las Caletas the following Christmas. The Christmas after that, 1986, Marisol wasn’t there. She’d been sent off with Maricela’s mother to Guadalajara, or Mexico City, or somewhere. Dad never had to see her again.

  (I never saw her again either, nor could find out what happened to her. Eventually, when the time came for her to receive her inheritance from Gladys, Maricela said she didn’t know where Marisol was—and Gladys’s estate went, unclaimed, to the state of West Virginia.)

  Dad went to Las Caletas against doctor’s orders. Zoë came with Danny, and Tony was there too. Anjelica wasn’t. Tony’s wedding would remain the only time when Dad and his four children were all together.

  Dad was due to start filming The Dead in less than a month, with a script written by Tony, and they were putting the finishing touches to the script, the casting, the design. I was edgy, waiting for the blowup between Dad and Tony, afraid of what it would do to Dad’s health. They’d always found something to argue about. I remembered Tony picking up an apple, an orange, and a banana in the dining room at St. Cleran’s and juggling them after lunch; I thought it was fantastic, and couldn’t understand why Dad was incandescent with rage. The only other time I’d seen Tony at Las Caletas, he and Dad had argued so vehemently about how to score gin rummy that Tony had packed his bag and left for town. For as long as I’d known him, Dad had complained about Tony in a tone of wounded worry. Each seemed to feel let down by the other. It was a miracle, I thought, that they’d made it to the edge of shooting The Dead, and I prayed in my atheistic way that they’d make it to the other side.

  Dad rarely came out of his bedroom into his sitting room, where we’d spent so many days talking, making our list of the hundred essential books, playing backgammon, and in the last few years watching football and baseball on TV. The satellite dish ruined the hazy progression of days which I had loved so, the sense of being suspended in a pocket in time as long as I was at Las Caletas; but for Dad, drifting toward death, it a
nchored him to the world. When he was with us, at lunch, he seemed unusually introspective, even glum. I put it down to sadness at the knowledge that, after this holiday was over, he would never see Las Caletas again. However long he lived, the doctors would forbid him to go anywhere so remote, and I sensed that he’d used up all the defiance he had in coming this time. He was very frail. His skin was translucent, as if it was thinning away.

  I’d found a pair of turquoise dice in London, about three inches on a side. I’d spent all the money I had on them, and I was thrilled because I thought they were the perfect present for a gambler, a backgammon player, who had collected beautiful things. They were the kind of object I could imagine displayed on a table in St. Cleran’s.

  I gave them to him on Christmas morning, in his bedroom. Danny and Zoë and Tony and I had gathered there, because he was too weak to walk up the hill to the living room where the tree was. I saw confusion on his face when he unwrapped them, as if he couldn’t understand what they were.

  “They’re giant dice, Dad,” I said. “They’re turquoise. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  He threw them on the bedspread. They barely rolled, for their corners were square.

  “They’re not really for playing,” I said feebly. “But don’t you think they’re beautiful?”

  “Yes, honey,” he said with effort, but I could see it was an automatic response to the pleading look on my face. He’d moved beyond the reach of useless, beautiful things.

  By the end of the day, his unresponsiveness had shaded into a staring blankness. I didn’t recognize what was happening. I’d never been with him when he’d been rushed to hospital, and I’d imagined his collapses as something more dramatic, like the collapses of Mr. Smallweed in Bleak House. There was no clutching at his chest, no wheezing for air. Just a closing of the shutters over his consciousness.

  The following morning it was obvious that he hadn’t improved. Tony got on the CB to Joan, in town, and she phoned the airlines. They were booked solid. She managed to get three seats—only three—for the following day. The rest of us would have to wait two days more.

  Zoë and I talked often. Dad was dying, we knew; and we both felt that the constant in and out of hospital was killing his spirit as much as the emphysema was suffocating his body. I don’t remember which of us said it first, but we felt the same: “We should just let him die here, in peace, in this place he loves.”

  Tony was furious that we could even consider it. Danny, characteristically, agreed with his mother and me and agreed with Tony too. But what Zoë and I felt was irrelevant. Dad was being taken away, and the only point at issue was how to get him from Las Caletas to the airport.

  There was no stretcher, and we doubted he’d be able to sit up in the panga. His mind was too fuzzy from lack of oxygen to understand what was going on. He would need a chair—an armchair, that he couldn’t fall out of. The only one we could find was a heavy, carved thing, with a leather seat and thick square legs. A couple of strong men picked it up with him in it, and waded into the waves. They wedged it between the thwarts of the panga. And so Dad left Las Caletas on a throne, with Maricela and Tony on either side of him, holding his arms.

  Zoë, Danny, and I stood on the beach and watched until the panga was out of sight. It grieved me to see him go so blank and dopey, like a baby, with no power left to him even to say good-bye. I wondered if he’d come to Las Caletas hoping that the ordeal of the last few years might end quietly, without drama. That hadn’t happened. The atmosphere was tense and excitable, with constant CB conversations to Joan in town, and Tony furious at Zoë and me for wanting to allow Dad what we thought was a good death. An Irish proverb that Dad loved counseled one to die by the sea.

  Looking back on it, I’m not so sure as I was then. Dad had launched Anjelica’s career with Prizzi’s Honor. The Dead would, he hoped, launch Tony’s; and after that he planned to act in Danny’s first feature as a director, Mr. North. I was already on what looked like my life’s path, working in publishing, an appropriately Marietta Tree–like occupation. I think the intense desire to see all his children set was what gave him the strength to last so long.

  It felt wrong to see Dad so rarely, and only when he was sick. Even that last Christmas, which was meant to be a celebration, tailed off into the usual routine of the VIP floor of Cedars-Sinai. Was I abandoning him in favor of my English family? Tony, Anjelica, and Danny were all working with him, in his business; I wasn’t. I used to describe myself as the family rebel, the only one who’d completed university and held down an office job, but it was bravado. Dad didn’t need me. Anjel was there to see he was well taken care of, and to bring him food from the best restaurants when hospital food was getting him down. It was I who needed him: needed to be a good daughter to him, in return for his greatness of spirit in taking me in and loving me.

  The phone call came in late July 1987, as I worked in my minuscule office halfway up the grand staircase of a Georgian building in Bloomsbury, which I loved for its west-facing window and because it was mine.

  “You should come now, Legs, for his birthday,” Anjel said. “If you want to see him before he dies.”

  His birthday was August 5. Mine was the twenty-sixth. When I was little, I’d seen this cradling of our birthdays in the same month as a sign of destiny.

  Anjel was in Newport, Rhode Island, acting in Danny’s film, Mr. North. Dad had been there too, as a nominal producer, though Robert Mitchum was playing the part Dad was too frail to play. The nearest hospital was in Fall River, Massachusetts, nearly an hour’s drive away.

  I didn’t feel any great pleasure from him in seeing me. Another sickbed visit: my duty to him, made because I’d been summoned, not because I’d come of my own accord. It was true. The same sense of duty was in his welcome. I was pained, even more than I had been by the sight of the Anjelica, by the erosion of the closeness we’d had. Now that Las Caletas was in effect gone, it was up to me to pull its spirit around us: the long peaceful mornings, the delicate threads of appreciating each other through pencil and backgammon and talk.

  We were all there except Tony. In his hospital room, I gave Dad a birthday present of fur-lined slippers, which I’d bought when I got to Newport. They turned out to be half a size too small. We didn’t exchange them. It was an unspoken admission that by the time the cold weather came, his feet would no longer need warming.

  “We won’t feel guilty, Legs, that we’ll be relieved when it happens.”

  We were alone together in a car again, Anjel driving, me beside her. The summer sun was bright on the low clapboard buildings, broken by the nearby ocean into a million prismatic strands that flashed through the town like a web. She was smoking, as she usually was. Even with Dad dying of emphysema in his hospital room, she and Danny would have to retreat to the corridor for a quick cigarette. Each time I heard the sound of her breath as she drew smoke into her lungs, I felt my heart beat fractionally faster.

  “No,” I said, loving her for trusting me enough to say that. “We won’t.”

  I saw tears in Anjel’s eyes. She saw tears in mine. She smiled. It was our pact.

  The routine of hospitalizations was grinding on all of us: Dad and Maricela, Anjelica and me. The first one, when she’d picked me up from school and driven me to Cedars-Sinai, had been almost ten years before. They were getting more frequent. Tony and Danny were there for some of them; but it seemed that Anjel and I were there for them all. Anjel was first on the scene, then she’d phone me in England and I’d get on a plane. I got to know the particular intensity of her voice saying “Hi, Legs” when she was calling with the same wrenching news. She had taken the place of the loving, conscientious daughter that, for two years or so, was mine. She’d been wrapped up in the complications of her own life and distant from him during those years; now I’d moved away to try to make a shape of mine.

  “He hates this,” she said. “He’d never have wanted it. He’ll be glad when it’s over.”

  I knew she was
right. Dad was fed up with the duty of staying alive.

  On my birthday, back in London, I gave my contractual month’s notice that I was quitting my job. I had a feeling that Dad would die in November. My plan was to work out my notice, good girl that I was, then go wherever he was in late September and stay with him until the end.

  Two days later, the phone call came. “Legs, it’s me.” Anjelica was crying. “He’s gone.”

  I hadn’t called him in those two days. I didn’t know how to say, I’ve quit my job so I can be with you until you die. None of us spoke of his death to him, nor he to us. I’d been dogged by a wild notion that he’d be annoyed at me for tossing in my career, even for his sake. So he never knew that I’d given my notice and was coming to be with him.

  I’d been waiting for the moment of Dad’s death for ten years. I thought I’d be calm, able to handle it. Instead I couldn’t stop crying. I felt untethered, like an astronaut on a space walk whose cord has come undone. It took all my concentration to get myself home, get to the airport, change planes in New York. I tried to tell the flight attendants I needed help, but I was trying to communicate across such a vast distance that they didn’t understand me.

  In Providence, I was the last person off the plane. I could barely find my shoes, my carry-on bag, my handbag, and collect it all to me. My power—the energy force that held my atomized self together—had gone.

  There was no one at the gate. It was late; the airline staff had gone home. Dimly I walked through the empty airport and found an escalator going down. At the bottom was an echoing marble hall, deserted. I didn’t know what to do.

  Then I saw a figure in a camouflage jacket walking toward me: Harry Dean Stanton. His long, sunken face shone to me. He was also in Mr. North, and he’d insisted on coming to the airport for me. Behind him was Anjelica.