Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  He was wearing shorts. I could see his bare, broad back and his legs, crossed at the ankles, confidently reaching into the sky. His face was turned away from the driveway, as if it didn’t matter to him when we arrived, or if we did at all. When the car stopped, I could hear him:

  OH what a BEAU-tee-full MORRR…NING!

  OH what a BEAU-tee-full DAY!

  “There’s Grampa,” said Nana for my benefit, barely looking at him herself. He didn’t come down off his head, or show any sign that our arrival might be a reason to stop what he was doing and do something else, like say hello. That was pretty much how I remembered him from the house on Lago Maggiore—self-contained and upside down. This time I was old enough to wonder why he was singing about the morning when it was already afternoon.

  Grampa spent most of his waking hours on the throne of his own triangled arms. Like an obsessive, crazy version of Dad, he expected his world to shape itself to him.

  “We’re having a real American barbecue for your first day here,” Nana said to me as we went inside. “Have you ever had a hamburger?”

  I had, the kind that Nurse made in the kitchen of the Little House, ground beef with diced onions and parsley, held together with egg, and I liked them a lot. I wondered how an American hamburger could be different, but I was shy of asking. Besides, I had an Irish accent now and Nana was barely able to understand me.

  “Have a rest, then we’ll go down to your uncle Nappy’s house.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. In England and Ireland, a nappy was what babies peed and pooped in. I’d never be able to call him that. I settled on “Uncle Nap,” but it never felt quite right, so I tried not to call him anything.

  He had actually been christened Anthony, after Grampa, but when he was a baby Grampa decided he looked like Napoleon. Of course, a lot of babies look like Napoleon. But nothing could argue Grampa out of a conviction once he got it into his head, and here was visible evidence of his own grandfather’s Bonaparte heritage. I’m sure, if he was alive, he’d look at a photo of my own son as a baby with his hand stuck between the buttons of his shirt and see only further proof of the impressive strength of the Bona-Peppa-Soma strain.

  Uncle Nap was in the garden in front of his house, wearing shorts and a shirt unbuttoned all the way, a big spiky fork in one hand. Smoke leaked out of a shiny contraption in front of him. His French wife, Aunt Dani, was laying out platters of coleslaw and other salady things in the kitchen. I was handed a plate made of paper. Its floppiness worried me.

  “This,” said Uncle Nap, forking it off the grill and onto the bun that Nana had laid open on my plate, “is a real American hamburger.”

  It was weirdly flat and compacted, as if an elephant had sat on it. I wasn’t at all sure how to handle it.

  “Put the top on and pick it up! Wait a minute, don’t you want some ketchup?”

  My cousin Martine, two years older than me, was staring in amazement, as if she couldn’t believe that anyone could never have seen a hamburger bun before. Self-consciously I bit into it. The bun was cottony and cardboardy at the same time, how a box of Q-tips would taste if it had been ground up and baked. I could barely swallow it. I saw Nana’s face as she watched me pick at the hamburger patty with a fork, and I knew I’d disappointed her.

  I’d never been in a house as informal as Uncle Nap’s. The kitchen bled into the living room (no “drawing room,” no “study”), and my cousins had the run of it, getting their own food when they wanted it and eating with the grown-ups as if that were normal. The Lynches’ house at St. Cleran’s was the closest to it that I’d known, but that was different: the Lynches worked for us and they had seven children, which I realized was, in Mum’s and Daddy’s world, unseemly. In the houses I knew, the children had their separate spaces and separate routines—and it was the same in the books I read, like Peter Pan and The Secret Garden. I’d always felt peripheral: not unwanted or unloved, but I knew my place. I was drawn to my cousins’ freedom, but I knew it wasn’t mine.

  I felt like a freak. My voice, my clothes, the food I was familiar with: nothing fit in here. This was my family, I knew, but I was a stranger. I’d never get the hang of being American, I thought, and I decided I didn’t want to. I was only there for the summer, anyway.

  On Sunday mornings, all the cousins would come up to Nana and Grampa’s house. Grampa would kneel in the middle of the living room, lace his fingers tightly together with his forearms flat on the floor, nestle his head into the cradle of his hands, curl into an upside-down fetal position, and finally, methodically, power up into a headstand. Six or seven or eight pairs of legs would fling themselves up into the air next to him, in a raggedy line. Grampa would kick it off with the enthusiasm that was his almost delusional spiritual practice:

  “OH what a BEAU-tee-full MORRR…NING!”

  As Grampa blasted it out, the tempo thudding like a battering ram, the cousins droned along dutifully: “Oh what a beautiful day…”

  One verse was all that was required. I’m not sure I ever heard Grampa sing beyond that, even by himself. Then seven or eight or nine pairs of feet would hit the floor, and Grampa would dole out a quarter to each cousin in pocket money. It seemed measly, even to a little girl who had never had pocket money before.

  Nana tried to teach me to stand on my head so that I could join in this family scene. I could barely put my head on the floor. When I finally built up the courage to kick up my legs, with Nana holding my ankles, it was the worst combination of feeling lost in space and on the verge of crashing to the earth. I was afraid of Grampa’s contempt, so after that first Sunday I made sure I wasn’t in the living room when my cousins arrived.

  The singing was for the benefit of prana, because it encouraged deep, regular breathing. When Grampa was right way up, he hawked up mucus from his throat every few minutes and spat it with great force and satisfaction. Old newspapers were spread out all around him—changed daily by Nana, I suppose, as I can’t imagine Grampa doing anything so menial for himself. They covered great swathes of his room, which took up the whole of the upstairs. (Nana slept in a room off the kitchen, as far as possible from Grampa.) When he came down to watch television, the coffee table and the floor around it, along with half the sofa, disappeared under drifts of yellowing newsprint.

  This was, for Grampa, pretty much what yoga amounted to: standing on your head and singing, and sitting in lotus position and spitting. It was, as far as I could see, more or less what his days amounted to; and he was as contented as a cat. Uncle Nap ran the restaurant in the city. Nana cooked his meals and did his laundry, and aside from that, she more or less ignored him.

  Every day, in late morning, Nana packed us all into her wood-paneled station wagon to go to the Beach Club. The house actually had its own beach, at the base of the cliff on which it sat: but it was a long way down—and up. It was solitary, too, and—though he never went down there—part of Grampa’s domain. The Beach Club was Nana’s. She would sit under a big umbrella in a folding chair, or wade into the calm water and float on her back. Nurse didn’t swim, just sat under the umbrella looking hot, with Reader’s Digest on her lap. Aunt Dani lay on a lounge chair in the sun, with the straps of her bikini top undone and pebbles wedged between her toes. There was something intensely feminine about Aunt Dani’s routine, as if she were doing something in public that ought to be private. I put it down to her being French.

  I’d been to the beach a few times in Ireland, at the cottage in Connemara and at the O’Tooles’ house in Clifden, but the water was so cold it made my teeth chatter. The Long Island Sound was a bath in comparison. There were no waves, except on stormy days. I could see Connecticut on the far side.

  Martine and Nancy—Uncle Fraser’s stepdaughter, the only girl among Aunt Rose’s seven children—taught me to swim out to the raft moored offshore. We jumped off in cannonballs, and caught little stingless transparent jellyfish and stuffed them down one another’s bathing suit. We did the dead man’s float, facedown, a
nd pulled our bathing suits aside to compare our tans. Both Martine and Nancy had dark Italian skin, and I roasted myself trying to be like them. Every night I sprayed on Solarcaine to soothe the burn.

  When we were tired of swimming, or in the hour after lunch during which we were forbidden to go into the water, we’d walk up and down the pebbly shore looking for beach glass. It came from bottles thrown overboard from boats, we figured, but it was transformed by the gentle, relentless action of the ocean into something mystical and strange: the hard surfaces sandblasted into a translucent fog of color, all jagged edges worn away so that the shards were rounded like cabochons. The pieces lay everywhere among the ordinary stones, the way you’d find jewels in an Enid Blyton story. Any pieces that weren’t perfectly smooth and misted over we threw back into the water as far as we could.

  Most of the beach glass was white, green, or brown. Occasionally we’d find a piece of blue, always tiny, as bright as a sapphire. We decided the blue had to come from Milk of Magnesia bottles, though it was hard to believe that something so rare and precious came from such lowly beginnings. Once I found a piece of red, about the size of my pinkie fingernail. I thought it was more beautiful than the ruby in the ring Martine wore sometimes, which had been found on the sink in the ladies’ room at the restaurant in the city.

  On August 26, I told everyone at the Beach Club that it was my birthday. One man replied that it was his birthday too, and he was seventy-seven—exactly seventy years older than me. I was amazed, almost, that it could be possible for the two of us to be there, in the same place; I felt the hand of destiny. Two days later, the seventy-seven-year-old man appeared with a present for me: a jewelry chest about the size of a shoe box, with dovetailed joints and three drawers lined with red felt. He’d made it himself, like a woodcarver in a fairy tale. It came back to Ireland with me and sat on the windowsill, where the early sun, slanting across the courtyard, made the wood glow. I had little to keep in it, but that didn’t matter; the chest itself was the treasure, since it had been made especially for me. Fingering its tiny knobs, pulling open the smooth-sliding drawers, I was the princess. I sat beside my little chest every morning, practicing my knitting—casting on, unraveling, casting on, unraveling—while Nurse brushed my hair.

  “You’re going to come and live in the Big House, Allegra,” Betty O’Kelly said to me soon after we got back. “The Little House is being sold. Your father can’t afford to keep it anymore.”

  I felt like the earth was falling away from under me. I had thought St. Cleran’s was forever and unchanging; it had existed as the Hustons’ home for longer than I’d been alive. The idea that Daddy didn’t have enough money to keep it was terrifying. He was the king here, and kings didn’t have to sell. And a child—me—was going to live in the grown-ups’ house.

  “Where will Nurse sleep?”

  “In Mary Margaret’s room. We’ve had to let Mary Margaret go.”

  I didn’t dare ask about everyone else: the Lynches, Paddy Coyne. Their homes were part of the Little House courtyard. My world was being broken in two.

  My toys and clothes were moved into the Bhutan Room, across from Betty’s room at the top of the stairs—the room I had run through on my circuit from the Napoleon Room, when Zoë slept there. At seven, I was a bit old for running in circles, and I felt very grown-up to have this beautiful room for my own. No changes were made to it for me—for a child. Its identity was fixed, and I stayed in it like any other guest. The walls were dark blue, and the bedspread and curtains were made of golden-orange embroidered squares which, Betty told me, were Bhutanese wedding cloth. Daddy had brought them back from Bhutan himself. It was a Himalayan kingdom closed to outsiders, misty and mythical. The sort of place where Daddy, unlike mere mortals, could go.

  I ate breakfast at the round table in the bay window of the dining room, and sometimes Daddy would come down to eat buttered toast and read the newspaper across from me. I’d hear the crunch of gravel and see Paddy Lynch drive around the corner below me, then I’d lug my book bag down the steps from the front door, proud of how big and heavy it was. I got to school half an hour earlier than the other girls for my French lesson with Sister Annunciata, which consisted of a walk through the halls of the convent singing “Frère Jacques” and “Alouette”—which were probably the only French she knew.

  My school friends didn’t come over to play anymore. Even Jackie and Caroline grew distant. The chest of dressing-up clothes, which was our favorite thing to play, hadn’t come to the Big House with me. I did my homework, properly, in the study; my books stayed in my room. This wasn’t a house where dolls or games could be left lying around.

  At night I would hear Seamus, the Irish wolfhound, patrolling up and down the stairs. He spent his days sleeping on the first half landing, and you had to pick your way across him to get up-or downstairs. He was so big that once, when I was four, Paddy Coyne had held me on his back and let me ride him around the kitchen of the Little House. His long, old legs plodded in a rhythm slower than you’d expect from a dog. Dad loved it that guests would hear those padding footfalls and think it was the ghost.

  The ghost’s name was Daly. For some reason he’d been hanged, and the women of the house had watched from the upstairs windows. After that the windows had been blocked up. Dad and Mum had unblocked them, and let Daly’s ghost back in. Dad claimed that one woman houseguest actually saw Daly, when everyone else had gone out with the hunt and she’d been sitting alone in the study reading: the door had opened to admit a man dressed in eighteenth-century costume, who saluted her wordlessly and left again.

  I’m sure Dad provided the ghost, though he never admitted to it: a not-very-local man, an outfit from the film costumers Bermans & Nathans, a briefing on what to do and when to do it. He loved practical jokes, and wouldn’t have let an opportunity like that slip by. At the time, I was never sure whether to believe Betty when she said Daly’s ghost was real. My brain and my instincts rebelled against it. My mother’s absolute vanishment proved that the dead didn’t come back to any kind of life. I never heard her voice, smelled her scent, saw her shadow disappearing around a corner, or felt her presence watching over me. There were no signs of her in the material world. The only traces I had left of her were disappearing into the treacherous depths of my memory.

  That Christmas, the Irish Times ran a coloring competition, a big drawing of Santa with presents that filled half a broadsheet page. I entered it, mainly because Karen Creagh was doing it. She had a red-and-blue color scheme, which I thought was perfect. It would have been cheating to copy it, so, feeling unimaginative and second best, I used purple and yellow. I won: I’d been judged the best colorer in all Ireland. I didn’t believe it. Karen’s entry, for one, was much better than mine, and there had to be hundreds more. I decided it was a fix. I’d only won because I was “Mr. Huston’s daughter” and he was such a huge celebrity in Ireland that they—the Irish Times, the people who were in charge of Ireland—wanted to make him happy. My prize was a beautiful wooden case filled with artist’s oils, like the ones Daddy used.

  Nothing could convince me that I was artistic. Mum had been—Betty showed me the place in the basement of the Big House where she used to arrange flowers—and obviously Daddy was. I knew that those paints were not legitimately mine. I never touched them.

  In the Little House the previous Christmas, Tony had made a Nativity. He’d gone out to the thicket of bamboo at the far end of the garden, where the fox lived, and cut stalks for the stable—it was going to look like a log cabin. I watched as he held them upright, slicing them lengthways with a kitchen knife, straight down, one, then the next, until the knife caught on a joint of the bamboo and slid diagonally across the pad of flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. First there was just a long red line, then blood started to pulse out of it. The skin pulled apart. Tony stared down at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. Nurse jumped up and ran, sloshing through the gravel, through the gates, across the
bridge, up to the Big House. I raced after her. We found Betty, who put Tony in her car and took him to the hospital in Galway. Nurse couldn’t drive.

  While Tony was gone, Nurse told me the story of when he’d fallen off a horse and been dragged through a wood, his foot caught in the stirrup. He’d needed nearly a hundred stitches in his head that time. I began to enfold lack of creative skill into my identity, along with physical cowardice. Carving knives wouldn’t slice me open, and fallen branches wouldn’t tear at my skull.

  Lying in bed in the Bhutan Room with a fever, I felt guilty. Nurse was in Dublin, on her annual week’s holiday. It wasn’t anyone else’s job to take care of me, so I ought to be able to take care of myself. I’d been allowed to come live in the Big House with the grown-ups; I wasn’t supposed to be sick.

  Dr. Payne came from Loughrea to examine me. He diagnosed spots on my tonsils.

  Before he went down to dinner, Daddy came into the Bhutan Room to see me. He was wearing a velvet jacket and a silk shirt with a plain front and a high rolled collar. The silk, when I touched the cuff, was softly magnetic under my fingertips. He sat on the bed beside me, and laid out the crossword from the newspaper. I loved crosswords, and he loved that I was good at them. Each clue I solved was a rush of warmth, as I felt his pride in me. When Betty came in, also dressed for dinner, he kissed me on the cheek and they went downstairs.

  I could hear the talk floating up from below, then hollow footsteps as people crossed the wood-floored hall to the dining room. I couldn’t sleep; I was too hot with fever. There were the footsteps again, clattery this time, crossing the marble hall to the drawing room. Then the door opened, and it was Daddy.