He folded me in his arms and for one happy moment, it was as though the four years of silence and separation had never happened. Yet the man I was hugging wasn’t Daddy anymore — not the Daddy I had known in London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, and Saint Moritz. Now he held me at arm’s length as though I were some exotic creature who had fallen from the sky, and I realized with a shiver what strangers we had become.
“You are so beautiful,” he was exclaiming and beaming down at me while I blushed, “and what’s more, you look exactly like your mother. For a moment, you know, when I first saw you, I thought Virginia had come back to haunt me.” He laughed uproariously, his whole body shaking, and I did not want to spoil the moment by pointing out that my mother was a petite, blue-eyed blond, while I, on the other hand, was a brunette with hazel eyes, the same color as his. “Come, Christopher, you must meet Paola and Beatrice.”
“And you must meet Norman.”
“Norman? Ah yes, how do you do.” He shook my husband’s hand distractedly.
Paola and Norman greeted one another like old friends, while Marie and I were so overcome at seeing each other again that we shed a few tears. Beatrice was dancing around the circle of adults, shrieking to get our attention. After all the hellos and the hugs, the hotel manager came scurrying up to inform Mr. Welles that his suite was ready at last. His moon face glistening with embarrassment, the manager had begun to apologize profusely for the delay when my father interrupted him with a lordly wave of his hand. “Never mind the apologies, my good man. Just send up a magnum of champagne.”
“Oh, Orson, not so early in the day!” Paola sounded more dismayed than shocked. I suddenly remembered Granny Hill telling me Paola had been trying very hard to help my father control his drinking. Was she succeeding, I wondered, now that I noticed his ruddy face and bloodshot eyes?
“Just kidding, my love. Just kidding.” He put one jovial arm around her. “But we do have a lot to celebrate, you know, seeing Christopher again and meeting . . . uh . . .”
“Norman,” I supplied.
“Ah yes, Norman.” He turned away from our little group, looking for the elevators. “You must tell me all about yourselves, but right now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go up to our suite and make an urgent phone call.” I wanted to put a restraining hand on his arm but did not feel I had the right to keep him away from the telephone. Then Norman asked the question on my mind.
“When will we see you again, Orson?” I marveled at my husband’s easy familiarity.
“Whenever you like.” Orson treated us to his most captivating smile. “Talk to Paola — she knows my schedule — and arrange it with her.”
As I watched him walk away — and how gracefully he moved for a man carrying close to three hundred pounds — I wondered what I should call him now that Daddy was out of date. Dad struck me as too familiar, and I could hardly call him Mr. Welles.
ALTHOUGH I SAW a great deal of my father during the rest of our two-week stay in Hong Kong, I could not shake off the feeling that he was keeping me at an amiable distance. That did not mean he was not affectionate toward me, booming “Here’s Christopher!” the moment I appeared and enveloping me in a bear hug. But we were not connecting the way we had years before. For the first time, I was finding it difficult to reach him, as though he had erected a barricade of preoccupations and sorrows between himself and everyone else. Even Paola, who clearly adored him and would have done anything in her power to make him happy, could not distract him from the gloom that descended when he was alone with us in their lavish suite at the Peninsula. Which was worse for him, I wondered: mulling over in private the lost opportunities, the criminal waste of his talents, or having to play “Orson Welles” in public, besieged for his autograph, his photograph, his handshake, while fielding such questions as, “Why’d you leave Hollywood, Orson?” (It infuriated me when strangers appropriated his first name as though it were their right.) As for Beatrice, he treated her like an adorable nuisance to be led away by Marie and not seen again until bedtime, when she made a brief appearance in pajamas, to be hugged, kissed, and promptly dispatched to oblivion.
If my father had asked, I would have told him about our life in Seoul. I was eager to boast about the enormous success Norman had made of his design center in a very short time, and how the economic coordinator for South Korea made sure to show it off to every visiting U.S. senator . . . but my father did not ask. When he talked to me, which he did in his better moments, he was like a man roused from a troubled sleep who suddenly remembers he has a visitor. Then he talked about himself as a schoolboy at Todd or about the Hills and his parents. These monologues took place in the intimacy of his suite where he sat in a free-flowing caftan, the inevitable cigar clamped between his teeth. After a while I felt that, although I happened to be the one sitting across from him, another being could have slipped into my skin and it wouldn’t have made any difference. This was not the father I had been missing so acutely but a world-famous personality who had graciously consented to spend a few moments with me, recounting the same witty anecdotes he had told only weeks before on British television. Did he really expect me to believe that my grandmother Beatrice Ives Welles had been a crack shot with a rifle or that my grandfather Dick Welles had broken the bank at Monte Carlo? Maybe he was keeping me at a distance because he knew he wasn’t fooling me. Did he see in me that irritating member of his audience who refuses to believe in magic and wants to know how the trick is done? Or perhaps he feared that if he let me get too close, I might pull back the curtains, as Dorothy had done in The Wizard of Oz, and expose him for the lovable illusionist that he was.
Of course, I could hardly blurt out, “What were my grandparents really like?” No, my role was to listen, laugh, applaud, and discreetly disappear into the next room when the phone rang. Or I could hang around and watch him work. He would scribble away on a yellow pad, pause to stare glumly out of the window, then attack once more the script spread out on his expansive lap.
When I got up the nerve to ask him about Ferry to Hong Kong, he sighed and said it was a terrible movie, he hated his part, and he had agreed to it only because he was desperate for money.
“And all the lovely money Orson is making from this terrible movie is paying for this suite,” Paola wailed.
“Not all, my love. Let’s not exaggerate.”
“It costs much too much to stay here, Orson. You know it does! I can’t bear giving away all that money to the Peninsula Hotel!”
“We’re not giving it away and getting nothing in return,” my father said with a laugh, gesturing at their well-appointed rooms that overlooked Victoria Harbor with its cheerful procession of boats. “You’re staying in the best suite in one of the world’s top hotels.”
“But it’s so impractical, Orson. Why can’t we move to a small, inexpensive hotel, like the one where Christopher and Norman are staying? I’d be perfectly happy in a place like that.”
“No, you wouldn’t, my love. There’d be no photographers to catch you making a grand entrance down the staircase or wearing your latest outfit for afternoon tea in the lobby.”
“Do be serious, Orson.” I could tell from the way Paola’s lovely dark eyes were flashing that she didn’t like being teased by my father any more than I did. “I’m ready to move to a cheaper hotel right now!”
“But I’m not moving, my sweet.” It was said with quiet finality, the way a parent says no to a child, and Paola found a pretext to flounce out of the room. “I do have an image to maintain,” he muttered to Norman and me, “such as it is.”
For a moment I was able to put aside my own neediness and empathize with my father’s dilemma: how humiliating and depressing it must be for a genius like him to have to appear in a potboiler like Ferry to Hong Kong. Perhaps the only thing that made it tolerable was staying in “one of the world’s top hotels,” which had always been his preference, even if he had to pay for it himself.
The following morning, I went up to the suite with
out Norman, hoping to have a private moment with my father. I found myself alone with Paola instead. “Orson’s going to be shooting all day today,” she explained, then patted the sofa cushion beside her. “Come sit down next to me.” She smiled engagingly. “I’ve been wanting to have a talk with you.”
“Oh? What about?” Something in her voice put me on my guard.
“That time you called up your father in Paris and told him you couldn’t see him anymore . . .”
“But that isn’t what I—”
“He was so hurt! He couldn’t believe you’d turn against him like that.”
“But I—”
“I was with him when you called, and I saw his reaction with my own eyes.” She paused, studying me, no longer smiling. “So many people in Orson’s life — people he loved and trusted—have betrayed him in the end, and so you can imagine how bitter it was for him when you, his own daughter —“
“But I didn’t betray him, Paola! It was my mother who—”
“Orson said you turned away from him because you didn’t trust him. That is a betrayal, not to trust your own father!”
There was so much I could have said in my defense, but I saw it would do no good. To break the escalating tension, Paola called up room service and ordered coffee for us both. Then, turning back to me, she continued on a note of wonder: “I don’t understand how you could do such a thing. It would never happen in an Italian family. The only way I can explain it, as I told Orson, is that you must be very close to your mother.”
“Actually, we’re not that close. My mother doesn’t like me very much.”
“She doesn’t? I can’t imagine a mother who doesn’t love her own child.”
“Then you should meet mine some day.”
“You say that so coldly, Christopher. I have had many ideas about you and what you are really like, but I never imagined any daughter of Orson’s could have a cold heart.”
I got up and walked over to the window so that Paola would not see my eyes filling with tears. Behind me I heard a discreet knock on the door. Our coffee had arrived on a gleaming silver tray. “Do you take sugar?” asked the stepmother who saw me as unfeeling and capable of wounding her beloved Orson.
“No, thank you.” I glanced at my watch. “Oh, I didn’t realize it was so late. I’m supposed to meet Norman at the tailor’s.” I rushed off without saying goodbye.
STILL HOPING TO see my father on his own, I went to his suite the following morning and found him at work in his usual armchair by the window. “Paola’s out having her hair done,” he told me distractedly, then went back to his scribbling. I sat down on the couch and waited. Time passed and I was beginning to think I should leave him to his work, when he looked up at me, scowling, as though my presence had brought back unwelcome memories. To my surprise, he suddenly asked, “Do you ever see Chubby Sherman?”
“Yes, I do. As a matter of fact, he came to our wedding.” And you didn’t.
“I suppose he’s given you an earful about me.”
“Well . . .”
“Just as I thought.” He chomped on his cigar, but he was no longer scowling. “He did the most terrible thing to me, you know.”
“You mean when he left your Mercury Theatre company?”
“I mean the way he left me. If he’d reached the point where he couldn’t take it anymore, he should have come to me and talked to me, man to man. This was my dear old friend from Chicago, you know, the actor I believed in long before anyone had heard of him. This was the man who had eaten at my table, befriended my wife and child . . .” He paused, his eyes misting. “And he didn’t have the decency or even the professional courtesy to let me know he was leaving me. Not a phone call. Or even a note if he was too embarrassed to talk to me. That’s what I can’t forgive, Christopher. Our ship wasn’t sinking, far from it, when our dear Mr. Sherman turned into a rat.”
“The first rat in history to leave a ship that wasn’t sinking.”
“That’s good,” he muttered, but he didn’t laugh. After relighting his cigar, he went on, “We’d planned our entire second season with Chubby in mind, and when he left us at the last minute, there was no time to recoup. I knew we were finished as a repertory company, and I couldn’t believe Chubby had done this to me. I lay in bed for days, trying to believe it . . .”
His voice trailed off as he revisited the scene of his first betrayal by a good friend and colleague. The first of many.
IN THE DAYS that followed, I found it awkward whenever the four of us got together, which we did almost every evening. Yet I seemed to be the only one feeling the strain. Paola put herself out to be charming, and my father regaled us with witty anecdotes. Norman’s buoyant laugh rang out in the right places, and any onlooker would have assumed we were all having the time of our lives. I envied Norman his easy capacity to enjoy himself. He seemed oblivious to the undercurrents that were bothering me, and he plunged into the conversation whenever there was an opening, which was not often. Unless my father or Paola asked me a direct question, I said very little. Periodically my father would exclaim to Paola in his most velvety voice, “Isn’t my daughter beautiful?”
“Especially when she’s blushing,” Paola would reply with her vivacious laugh.
I wanted to ask my father if that was all he saw when he looked at me with his penetrating eyes — a beautiful young woman who happened, amazingly, to be his daughter. Now that we had spent some time together again, was there really nothing else about me that awakened his admiration? Why couldn’t he observe to Paola, “Isn’t my daughter clever?” Better yet, “Isn’t it wonderful to have Christopher with us?”
My shyness was hardly helping the situation, nor were my mixed feelings about Paola. I could see her good qualities and wanted to like her, but that was difficult now that I knew how she felt about me. Then the girlish, flirtatious way she behaved with my father made me uncomfortable, even jealous, as though my lovely, young stepmother had displaced me in my father’s affections. We were too close in age to behave like a stepmother and stepdaughter. Now that I had met Paola, I realized Granny Hill had been right about her. Paola was so determined to make Orson behave like a father to Beatrice — a feat she had not yet achieved — that she would do everything to put Beatrice forward at the expense of me and my half sister Rebecca.
My father with his third wife, Paola Mori, and their daughter Beatrice.
One night my father took us to a well-known “floating restaurant,” as the boats converted into restaurants were called in the fishing colony of Aberdeen. At the entrance, we ordered the fish we wanted for dinner while they were still swimming or scuttling around in a huge tank. “Now that’s what I call fresh,” my father laughed while ordering several lobsters. We were then ushered ceremoniously to our table.
During the superb meal, Paola began to boast about her cooking. “When you come to visit us in Fregene,” she told us, “I will make you a pasta d’amore that will be more delicious than all the fishes in the sea.”
“What you mean, my love, is that you will go out to the kitchen while our cook is making dinner and sniff the pots and lick the spoon she used to stir the sauce.”
“How can you say that, Orson? You know what a good cook I am!”
“It’s true you’re very good at tasting the sauce after someone else has made it. In fact, there is no one better.”
“Oh, you’re impossible! Why won’t you take me seriously?”
My father began to laugh in his inimitable way, while my stepmother pouted and Norman tactfully changed the subject.
After dinner we boarded a junk my father had hired to take us for a moonlit sail up and down Victoria Harbor. For my father and Paola, kissing and murmuring endearments to each other, it was a moment of high romance, but for me it was as embarrassing as if I had come upon them naked in the act of love. Even my gregarious Norman found nothing to say, nothing to dispel our growing discomfort as we rode the choppy waters, the junk rocking under our feet, its red sail cr
eaking in the wind. The two of us retreated to the other end of the boat where Norman put a comforting arm around my shoulders. I fixed my eyes on the gentle hills of Hong Kong rising and falling as though they were breathing — the hills wearing diamond necklaces of lights.
MY FATHER HAD to spend an entire day on location in Macao, and I was delighted when he invited Norman and me to accompany him. (Paola, Beatrice, and Marie were staying behind in Hong Kong.) At last I had a chance to spend considerable time with my father on his own. I was up half the night, going over in my mind what I might say or do to reestablish myself in his eyes as a loyal, loving daughter. My memories of our times together in Europe, before the Fatal Phone Call, gave me hope. Surely, the relaxed, fun-loving Daddy I had known as a schoolgirl had not entirely disappeared into the polite father who talked to me as though he were being interviewed on television.
We left Hong Kong at six in the morning, traveling with the cast and crew on the same ferryboat being used in Ferry to Hong Kong. Standing at the railing beside my father, watching the churning waters below, I realized I could not make any of the impassioned speeches that had held off sleep the night before. “I was so impressed with the way you handled that drunk in the elevator the other night,” I told him instead. Clearly, he had no idea what I was talking about. “The drunken man who wanted your autograph and was so rude about it?”
“Oh, that.”
“And you were so polite and gracious to him.”
“Well, I’m glad I’ve done something to impress you, Christopher.” Yet how low in spirits he sounded.
“Oh, Daddy, you know . . . I mean . . . oh, I don’t know what to call you these days.”
“What’s wrong with Daddy?”
“I’m not a little girl anymore.”
“That is true.”
“Would you . . . would you mind if I called you Father?”
In My Father's Shadow Page 24