I’m looking up at Mum, perched on something high. She’s reaching for the top of a Christmas tree, and fiddling something into a knot with the tips of her fingers. Frustrated, she balls it up and hands it down to someone to throw away. It’s a piece of sticky tape. I can’t figure it out. I saw her twist it up deliberately, so why is she angry and throwing it away?
That’s the only memory I have of Mum’s Christmases. Did I remember more of them when I was six? I don’t know.
At St. Cleran’s, Christmas was a performance orchestrated by Betty. One day, as if by magic, a gigantic tree appeared, rising up through the well of the staircase in the Big House, already dripping with balls of silver and gold. Mounds of presents filled the space beneath. They didn’t increase as the days led up to Christmas; they appeared all at once with the tree. Like everything at the Big House, it was perfectly done. It was not a family enterprise.
Galway is a long way north. In winter, it was dark before five. On Christmas Eve, everyone squeezed into the hall, bright under the huge chandelier: me and Nurse, Danny and Zoë, Daddy, Mr. and Mrs. Creagh and Karen, all the Lynches, Mary and Mary Margaret and their families, wild-haired gypsy-dark Paddy Coyne, other families from round about, so many I didn’t know them all. Everybody talked in whispers.
Bells jingled outside the front door. Betty ran to it, and looked outside. “Santa Claus is here!”
There was a great commotion of more bells and snorting and a lot of “ho-ho-ho”s, and Santa came in through the heavy door. He was big and fat and bearded, exactly as he was supposed to be. His “Merry Christmas!” echoed around the edges of the ceiling. He added, to us children: “The reindeer are waitin’ outside. You might give ’em a carrot or two.”
I didn’t believe in Santa, or at least I thought I didn’t. I tried to figure out who this man was, standing by the tree and calling everyone’s name in turn to come forward and get their present. Every possible Santa I could think of was there, accounted for, in his regular clothes. In that case, perhaps Santa really did exist. Of course, if there was a Santa, he would come to St. Cleran’s exactly when he was wanted, to dish out the presents that I knew Betty had prepared. If I ran into the dining room and looked out the window, would I see reindeer? I didn’t want to risk it. What if I wasn’t in the hall when Santa called my name?
The first Christmas Eve, I wheeled my doll in her new pram back through the darkness to the Little House. That was what I’d written to Santa to ask for; it was all I wanted, and I was happy. We didn’t have a tree in the Little House and all the presents from beneath the Big House tree had been handed out, so I thought that was it, Christmas was over, even though the day itself hadn’t yet arrived. The next morning, Nurse gave Danny and me our breakfast, then told me to go with him to the Big House for “family Christmas.”
I felt suddenly scared again, and out of place. This was a ritual which families did all over the world—and I didn’t know how to do it. I had liked being part of the crowd in the hall. Now I would be on display as Daddy’s daughter again. Danny had Zoë for support, and anyway he always knew what to do. Nurse wouldn’t be a part of this. I was on my own.
I’d snuck into the drawing room a few times when Daddy wasn’t there, just to see what it was like—it was only used by the grown-ups in the evenings. The carpet was cream, and so were the sofas, so that I was afraid of marking them, and on the ceiling was a starburst of gold. The study—the room we usually used—was a deep blue, comfortable and inviting. The drawing room was elegant and formal. Every room in the house held art, but here were the finest pieces. Once there had even been a Monet water-lily painting. Daddy’s friend Billy Pearson, a jockey who was his usual partner in escapades, later told me the story of how he had got it.
They had all been in Deauville: Billy and his wife, Mum and Dad and Tony and Anjelica, who were still small. Dad, as he loved to do, had explored the antique shops and seen the painting: dusty, shoved into a corner, vastly underpriced. But he didn’t have the $18,000 he needed to buy it, even so. In fact, he had almost none, just what they were living on, and he’d given that to Mum. He demanded it back: he couldn’t leave Deauville without the Monet, and the only way to get enough money to pay for it was at the casino. So Mum insisted on going too.
Off they all went, and Dad was on a roll. The chips piled up in front of him at the roulette table, higher and higher—until finally the moment came, and he lost. According to Billy, Mum’s face crashed as she saw the croupier’s hook pull the whole pile away.
Dad turned to her, and revealed a little stash of chips she hadn’t seen him hide.
“It’s all right, honey,” he said. “We won the Monet.”
He’d lost it again a few years before I arrived at St. Cleran’s, during another cash crisis. But still the room was filled with treasures: gold objects in cases, iridescent Etruscan glass bottles and Egyptian pieces, and a mysterious painting of an angular, leaping horse, that seemed to be a picture not so much of a horse but of its spirit.
Daddy was sitting on a sofa, holding a tall thin glass with lacy gold patterns around the rim. I couldn’t take my eyes off the bubbles in the golden drink inside it. They weren’t like the bubbles in orange Fanta, which I once drank enough of to make myself sick; they were small, so small that if they were any smaller I didn’t think I’d be able to see them. They made a continuous little explosion, as if the essence of the glass itself were erupting into Daddy’s hand.
Zoë was there, in the shimmery clothes I loved, and Betty. They both held bubbling glasses as well. Danny went straight to Daddy, where he sat on the sofa, to be embraced. I did too.
“Merry Christmas, darlings,” he said. Betty handed him a wrapped present, which he gave to Danny. Then she went to the door into the marble hall, disappeared, and came back wheeling a bicycle with a ribbon on it—for me.
I felt trapped. The only presents being given out were the “big” presents for Danny and me, and it was up to us to accept them properly, the way sons and daughters were supposed to do on Christmas Day. I was tongue-tied, conscious that I didn’t look happy enough about the bicycle, but I was too afraid I’d do the wrong thing in this room. That was wrong too; dimly I dreaded that Daddy might think I was ungrateful. As Danny chattered along, sunny and charming as he always was, all I could think of was the lunchtime gong. When it clanged, the ordeal of “family Christmas” would end.
When Daddy was away, which he was most of the time, we prepared for his return. Betty organized an ongoing drawing competition among us girls, which Daddy would judge when he came home, and award prizes. She told us not to write our names on the back, just our ages, so that the judging would be fair. It never occurred to us that he could tell whose drawing was whose by the age on the back. Only Caroline and I were the same age.
Karen, the oldest by five years or so, was a champion Irish dancer. The Creaghs had an apartment in the basement of the Big House, and once Karen led me inside to show me her four boxes of medals, lined in green velvet. She pointed to two first-place medals in the all-Ireland championship; then she picked out the world championship medal, which she’d won for Ireland. She showed me her competition dress, made of heavy green wool, with a long flap hanging from one shoulder down her back embroidered with complicated knotty patterns. For competitions she did her hair in ringlets. I begged Nurse to roll my hair on sponge curlers overnight so I could have ringlets too.
Karen decided to teach Jackie and Caroline and me to dance so we could put on a performance for Daddy. Betty had matching red skirts and white blouses made for us, and Karen drilled us in the one-hand reel, a two-hand reel for me and Jackie, and a three-hand reel for the finale.
We waited still as statues in the black marble hall, right toes pointed out, hands clasped in fists by our sides. Daddy and his houseguests ranged themselves in the doorway to the inner hall. The Creaghs and Nurse and Mary and Mary Margaret clustered in behind them. Betty started the cassette, and we sprang into motion, like windup toys
. We danced with our arms rigid by our sides, no smiles or eye contact allowed, somber in spite of the hopping steps and slow spins as we circled one another and made figure eights on the floor. I danced in the center, pudgy and blond, between bucktoothed Jackie and Caroline with her thick dark-rimmed glasses.
“Wonderful, girls, wonderful,” Daddy pronounced as applause echoed around the hall and died away.
Soon I added a double jig to my repertoire—much harder and faster. The fact that I could do Irish dancing proved that I was becoming Irish, which I knew pleased Daddy. I’d named my pet rabbit after a mythical Irish warrior, Oisín, which I thought was the most beautiful name I’d ever heard. When I got a female, Tony named her Gubnit, the stupidest-sounding Irish name he knew. Tony made fun of everything Irish, and I resented it. I felt protective of Ireland, which I loved. My favorite joke, which Nurse told me, was of an Englishwoman asking a train conductor, “Could you tell me when we’re at At-henry?” This was our local station. I thought it was hilarious, because the proper pronunciation was “Ath-en-rye.” I was in the in crowd now. Not only could I pronounce the place-names, but I laughed at the English.
Still, I knew I wasn’t like the other Irish girls. I didn’t go to church every Sunday, I didn’t get a frilly white dress and make my first Communion. I didn’t think of entering Irish-dancing competitions, like Karen, for, even if I’d had the courage, I wasn’t at all sure they’d be open to me.
One day I came into the Little House thirsty from the golden dust of the hay barn, where I’d been playing with Jackie and Caroline. The kitchen was empty. I heard noise from the garden room, where the TV was. I was allowed an hour of TV a day: Skippy the Kangaroo at five o’clock, and Sesame Street after that, and on Tuesdays Nurse would allow me an extra five minutes so I could watch the big wave breaking at the start of Hawaii Five-O.
The TV was on—which it never was in the Little House in the middle of the day. I stopped in the doorway, astonished. Nurse was jumping up and down in front of it. Her face was deep red, like a raspberry, with the gray fuzz of her hair on top. She was shouting, and her voice was so hoarse I knew she’d been shouting for a while. I’d never seen anyone so excited, not even when the TV in the staff sitting room at the Big House set the curtains on fire in the middle of a horse race. Nurse was always perfectly controlled—I could hardly believe this was her. I stared at her, fascinated and a little scared, trying on an experimental disapproval. I wondered if I would ever care as much about anything.
Tony was there too. “It’s the Ireland–England rugby match,” he told me. “It looks like Ireland is going to win.”
Nurse didn’t look at me. She couldn’t drag her eyes from the screen for a second. I’d never known her to watch rugby before, and I knew that she wouldn’t care half as much if Ireland were beating Scotland or Wales or France. Her wild excitement was specifically anti-English; and the part of me that wasn’t Irish was English still.
I fit in in Ireland, as much as a local celebrity like “Mr. Huston’s daughter” ever could. My favorite song was “The Men Behind the Wire,” which I thought was the Irish national anthem but was in fact the anthem of the IRA. But I had a British passport and I’d been born in London, so that meant I was a Brit. (I wasn’t sure about my mother. She was American but she’d lived in London; still, I didn’t think she’d taken British nationality, so she wasn’t a proper Brit.)
It hit me: you couldn’t actually be both Irish and English. If you were really Irish, you hated the Brits.
When Nurse and I had gone back to London after that first summer at St. Cleran’s, I’d seen white letters scrawled on soot-stained bricks: brits out. On the way to the airport as we returned to Ireland for good, I saw it on the dark steel of railway bridges: brits out. Those two words were everywhere, and suddenly I felt that they were aimed at me. Everyone I knew in Ireland wanted the Brits out, and one of the men who worked at St. Cleran’s was rumored to actually be in the IRA. Daddy was officially Irish—even though he was American, he’d taken Irish nationality. Ireland was, for all I knew, my permanent home, but I was still a Brit—the only one among them. Once a Brit, always a Brit. It was a taint that could never be erased. Maybe even Nurse held it against me.
It was around this time that I started seeing flames in the corner of my bedroom. They were always high up, where the walls met the ceiling, and curiously gentle: not raging, not crackling, but silently lapping, as if they were made from some insubstantial golden-red water freed from gravity. I was awake when I saw them, on the verge of sleep. I knew they weren’t real: they were halfway between imagination and hallucination. Still, they frightened me. I was very afraid of fire; but the knowledge that the flames were visions frightened me even more. I was conjuring them up, and I couldn’t stop myself. I never told Nurse that I saw the flames, never even called out to her that I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake in a strangely comfortable terror. The flames weren’t going to get worse, the house wasn’t going to burn down. The intensity of feeling was almost luxurious.
My mind was unreliable—I knew it was starting to betray me. I had a vivid memory of running around the table in the middle of the kitchen in Mum’s house on Maida Avenue, when I tripped and fell against the table. My thumb was sucked into a knothole in the wood, so that I had to yank it free. The knothole pulled up a lump in the middle of the knuckle, like a wart, which never went away. Betty didn’t believe me; she said the lump came from sucking my thumb. Nurse had no recollection of that scene in the kitchen, which I remembered so completely. I was ashamed that I sucked my thumb, and tried not to do it when anyone could see. I was torn about the lump. I wanted it to go, because it looked like I sucked my thumb, but secretly I treasured it as a relic of my life before Mum died, and I knew that thumb-sucking had nothing to do with it. And then, when I did stop sucking my thumb, the lump went away.
How could I have made that memory up? It was so detailed, so explicit. I could feel the grip of the vacuum as my thumb was held in the knothole, hear the pop and flinch with the pain when I yanked it out. My faith in myself, in my knowledge of what was real and what wasn’t, shattered. And yet another thread snapped that had connected me to the house on Maida Avenue, and my mother.
5
When I was three, Mum took me to her father’s holiday house on Lago Maggiore, in northern Italy. I think we flew. A year and a half later, she decided to go by car, and she didn’t take me. That’s when she was killed.
Grampa’s house was tall and white-painted, with a terrace overlooking the lake’s edge. It was summer, and the tile floors felt cool and dry under the sweaty soles of my feet. Sometimes waves would lap against the rocks below the house, and excitedly I would trace the line of white foam out to the middle of the lake until my eyes landed on the speedboat that had caused them. Time moved slowly there; even at three, I felt it.
One day, as we lingered around the lunch table, the doors to the terrace half shut against the heat, there was a thud from upstairs. I jumped half off my chair.
I stared up at the chandelier, its glass diamonds jangling, tinkling, falling silent—waiting for the crash I was sure would come.
“Don’t worry, it’s fixed tight,” said Nana as she fished a fat drop of crystal out of the bowl of peaches on the table. She chuckled, like the sound of water rumbling when you turn on the hot-water tap. “It’s just Grampa coming down from standing on his head.”
Mum is only a shadow in that memory, though I know she was there.
I remembered Nana well when I saw her again in the summer of 1971, the summer I would turn seven: her broad smile, her short waves of gray hair swept back from her forehead as if she were facing into a brisk wind. She was standing outside the customs hall of JFK Airport, in a sleeveless dress which left her strong arms bare.
“Welcome to America!”
She hugged me, her large handbag bouncing against my back. Her laugh rang against the hard marble floor. Nana’s laugh burst like a mortar shell, shattering the membrane
that separated me from the world. At first I felt assaulted by it—but I grew to love it for what it said about Nana: her lack of inhibition, her imperviousness to embarrassment, her devil-may-care willingness to have fun. I was dogged by shyness and second thoughts, and whenever Nana laughed—which was often—they lost a little of their power.
I found out later that Dad hated Nana’s laugh. He thought it manic and unladylike. I got the impression that somehow it scared him.
The air outside the terminal was thick and sticky in my nose as Nana led Nurse and me to a long blue Cadillac. I’d never known air like that, so heavy I could feel its weight on my skin. On top of the long flight from Ireland, it made me feel fuzzy-headed, and I struggled to focus as we drove east along the Long Island Expressway. There were no roads that big and crowded in Ireland, and the Cadillac went fast, with a low growling roar.
My uncle Fraser drove. He wore black mirrored sunglasses, held by thin wire frames, which made him look casually sinister, like a villain in Hawaii Five-O—as I imagined one, never having seen it past the opening titles. He didn’t talk much, which I soon sensed was due not to dark intentions but to a kind of diminishment of spirit. He seemed to have no work other than to attend to Grampa, driving him back and forth from the city (as it was always referred to), doing whatever errand needed doing. He’d married a woman with six children—tiny Aunt Rose, who marched for women’s lib and burned her bra at the state capitol—and even in his own house he seemed overwhelmed. He was the youngest of Grampa’s five children, and I wondered if he’d spent his childhood being constantly told to shut up.
Finally we reached the town of Miller Place, and turned up a dirt driveway, bordered by long grass and high hedges of honeysuckle. We passed a house with a garden in front, then the road plunged into the shadows of a thickety wood. On the far side of the wood, up a little hill, stood Nana and Grampa’s house: flat-roofed, with an upper story like the pilot’s cabin of a ship surrounded by a wide skirt of roof. There on the roof was Grampa, on his head.
Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Page 5