Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  Or we’d all sit on his bed and watch TV. I was working on flirting and I practiced my look on him: not turning my head, but swiveling my eyes ninety degrees to the side. It hurt.

  “One day you’ll drive men crazy with that look,” he said. Exactly the response I wanted.

  One night we went out to dinner, and then drove up to the front of the Whisky nightclub. Ryan got out, spoke to someone, then came back and drove around the corner. We went in through a side door near the kitchen, and straight up to the balcony. We were given a table at the edge, with a good view of the stage—and Griffin and I were placed at the back, where we couldn’t be seen from below. Toots and the Maytals were playing. Anjel and Ryan danced in place at the table, so I did too. She rolled her hands around each other the way John Travolta did in Saturday Night Fever, so I did too. It was harder than it looked; the beat tripped me up and my arms wouldn’t do what I wanted them to. So I gave that up and just stepped from one foot to the other. Ryan grinned at me. He pulled a little vial from his pocket and took a toot of coke with the tiny spoon that was chained to the lid. He didn’t bother to hide it. He was untouchable.

  Even at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, when we went to see Joan Armatrading in concert, he barely hid it: just leaned down a little for the toot. We were sitting at one end of a row of seats, with real people—not in some special place reserved for movie stars, where the law didn’t apply. I was afraid he’d be seen; but I didn’t want to look around since that would make us look guilty.

  The little vial was with him always: when he was driving, when we went to the movies, or when we were just sitting around on his bed watching TV. He bent down to it as casually as Cici would put a stick of gum in her mouth.

  I didn’t always know who would be picking me up from school: sometimes Ryan, sometimes Tatum’s friend Esme, sometimes Roberto, who worked for Aunt Dorothy, to take me to Gloom Castle for a few days. Sometimes Anjelica.

  I was happiest when I saw her little gray Mercedes waiting for me, the car that Jack had given her for her twenty-third birthday. The fact that she still drove it meant to me that she still loved him, that somehow, behind it all, he was the permanent one.

  “Dad’s in hospital, Legs,” she said as I got in. “He couldn’t breathe.”

  When they examined him they found an aneurysm in his aorta: a bulge in the artery wall like a balloon. If it burst, he would die, as his father had in the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Anjel and I talked only a little on the way to the hospital. She told me they’d made him quit smoking, cold turkey, to give his lungs a chance to strengthen before the operation. He’d had emphysema for nearly twenty years by then, and sometime in the 1960s he’d been given five years to live. Anjel told me how she remembered meeting him at Victoria Station in London after Mum died, nearly nine years before. He’d taken the train from Rome because his lungs were too weak for him to fly.

  He was on the eighth floor of Cedars-Sinai, the VIP floor, holding court as usual. Aside from the hospital bed and the high-mounted TV, the atmosphere was just like the hotel rooms that I was used to seeing him in: a sofa of people discussing his next project, a pile of scripts and books, Gladys in a straight chair taking notes. Except for the bland curtains and furniture and waiting-room art on the walls, it could have been a French king’s levee. When the nurses came in to check something, Dad tolerated them graciously. When someone lit up a cigarette, he leaned over defiantly to inhale the smoke.

  Maricela was there. She disappeared as soon as we arrived.

  It was a balancing act between aneurysm and anesthesia: the longer they waited for Dad’s lungs to strengthen, the higher the risk the aneurysm might burst and kill him instantly. They waited a week. I spent the day of the operation wondering whether, if Dad died, they would call me immediately or wait till school was over. The sight of Anjel’s little car in the driveway at three o’clock reassured me. If Dad was dead, she wouldn’t have been able to drive, or if she had she’d be standing outside the car to embrace me.

  Dad was in intensive care. I’d never seen anyone look so ill. His skin was blue and dirty-looking. The bags under his eyes hung to the sides of his face.

  “Hello, girls.” His smile was weak. And then, to the nurses: “My daughters.” A formal introduction to assert his control of the situation, or a boast? I wasn’t sure which.

  Every day Anjel picked me up at school and drove us down Sunset, to Beverly Glen, along Santa Monica Boulevard, and into the parking lot entrance between the twin towers of Cedars-Sinai. I began to dream about that drive, like a scene from a movie with the sound turned off, Anjel and I side by side framed by the windscreen and the top arc of the steering wheel under her hands, a rear projection of green lawns and trees and nondescript corner stores rolling past the windows on an endless loop. We never arrived. We were both anxious in those dreams, as if we’d be driving for our whole lives and Dad would die just before we got there.

  We took Dad for walks down the corridor of the VIP floor, Anjel supporting one arm, me supporting the other. It was carpeted, wide and silent; the nurses’ station reminded me of the reception desk at Dad’s business manager’s office. Spaced out along the walls, a little too far apart, were small, ugly paintings by famous artists: the ones that nobody wanted to look at, I figured, so that’s why they’d been donated for tax deductions. There was something grotesque about these million-dollar paintings in a hospital. I wondered if the VIPs felt better knowing they were dying within twenty feet of a Picasso.

  Dad was very grumpy; I guessed the bad-paintings-by-the-best-painters thing annoyed him. All they gave him to eat was baby food, like Jell-O and squelchy lasagna, and 7-Up with the bubbles stirred out. Anjel solved this problem by getting takeout from Chasen’s. When Dad was discharged, she convinced Ryan to lend him the beach house to recuperate in. It was November. We’d have Thanksgiving there.

  Anjel cooked a turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans. I hoped desperately that it would go well, for her sake, but I knew from the start that it wouldn’t. Dad was in a foul mood: he didn’t like Ryan, especially in comparison to Jack, and hated being beholden to him for the loan of the house. He also, of course, disliked holidays that were centered around eating. Maricela was her usual silent, inscrutable self. Ryan sulked—because, I figured, he resented being a guest in his own house. The sky outside—which was inside too, thanks to those huge windows—was suffocatingly overcast. Lee’s Bars Stools and Dinettes pounded south, as usual, through a malevolently still ocean.

  I hated the meanness. Anjel had tried so hard, and Griffin and I were the only ones who appreciated the work she’d put in, or valued what she was trying to create: goodwill, warmth, togetherness. Dad was sick, so I cut him a bit of slack, but Ryan had no excuse. Anjel wanted a family as much as I did, and she was doing all she could to make us one. And they were spitting it back in her face.

  It rained hard that winter: apocalyptic rain. The sandstone cliffs above the Pacific Coast Highway started to crumble. Huge clods tumbled down, threatening to cut off Malibu from the city. Houses slid down the hillside as the earth collapsed away. The templelike Getty Museum, with its Roman balustrades, hung on the edge. I wondered if I’d see it fall, on the way to school or back again: the museum breaking into its separate blocks of marble, paintings and sculptures skidding across the highway, a Greek arm here, a Cubist canvas there, and people screeching to a halt and diving through the traffic to grab a fragment of mosaic or Vermeer.

  It seemed like the coastline was dissolving—and we were in the middle, on the front line. I stood at the huge windows, watching the hungry waves eat up the beach. At high tide, they smashed and sucked beneath the house. Up the coast, Linda Ronstadt had students from Pepperdine University helping her sandbag her house; I pictured her in her Boy Scout hot pants and the students in regular Scout uniforms heaving away. Floating tree trunks and telephone poles thudded against the pilings. I’d lie in bed imagining one splintering and a corner of the hous
e breaking off like a piece of cookie—the deck probably, and some of the kitchen with it.

  I was sharing Griffin’s room now, as Tatum had come back. He had a king-size water bed, and we’d try hard not to move in our sleep so as not to send waves to wake the other. In my dreams, if I wasn’t driving endlessly to where Dad lay dying, I was adrift on an endless ocean, emotionlessly alone.

  I got into Anjel’s car one morning, ready for school. I loathed my uniform, but it set me apart at Ryan’s house. I was a schoolgirl—not a thirteen-year-old glamour-puss; not a neglected, stoned surfer-child. Griffin and Tatum didn’t go to school. I did: I was normal. Plus, I was good at school.

  Anjel swung her door closed and put the key in the ignition. She didn’t turn it. We sat there in the half-light of the garage, in the cocoon of the car, suspended between the house and the highway. The traffic roared outside the closed door behind us.

  “What am I going to do, Legs?”

  I looked at her face, expecting tears. I didn’t see any. She’d cried them all.

  “Leave him.”

  The answer was so obvious. But Anjel looked at me like I’d said something amazing.

  “You don’t have to stay with someone who treats you like that.”

  I didn’t want to stare at her, so I looked through the windscreen at the washing machine and dryer against the wall of the house, and the door into the hallway. I was half afraid that Ryan would come through it and see us sitting there talking. And he’d know what I’d said. Actually, I hoped he would know, but that we’d be out of there first.

  “I love you, Legs.” It seemed like the first time I’d seen her smile in months.

  “I love you too, Jel.” She put her hand on the gear stick, as if she wanted to take some action and that was all she could manage in the small space of the car. I put my hand on hers. I couldn’t understand why she’d never thought of leaving Ryan before, and I didn’t know whether she’d do it, but at least I’d put the possibility in her mind. I felt like I’d given her a gift.

  Gradually I seemed to be moving into Gloom Castle, because Griffin’s room at the Beverly Hills house was too small to share, and there was no question of Tatum—now that she was back—sharing hers. I missed Anjelica, and our expeditions to visit Jeremy in a bohemian section of Hollywood, with fancy old stucco buildings and a bookstore-café with swirly flyers on a pinboard, phone numbers everywhere. People seemed connected there, part of a web of things going on: not like the isolated compounds on the mountaintops of Beverly Hills. Jeremy’s paintings covered the walls of his one-room studio, colorful jungly African scenes, memories of his childhood in Rhodesia. One end was curtained off for his friend Tim.

  “Tim can levitate,” Anjel told me almost in a whisper, the first time I met him. “He’s a master of TM. He can fly.”

  I longed to see him fly, but it seemed rude to ask. I guessed it was something he did in private, behind the curtain. He was gentle, like a deer that you didn’t want to spook.

  At the pharmacy in Beverly Hills, where Aunt Dorothy would take me to buy what I needed with the ten dollars a week she gave me, I saw the National Enquirer at the checkout. In the middle was a photo of Anjelica, with photos of Jack and Ryan on either side. Anjel’s head was lowered, her hair falling lank over her face as she hurried into a doorway. The headline said she was back with Jack: and the photo arrangement had her skulking in his direction, with Ryan glowering behind her.

  Anjel used to like taking me to Schwab’s drugstore and buying every trashy magazine, fashion magazine, and gossip rag on the racks. We’d get back to the beach house with twenty or thirty of them: the National Enquirer, the Globe, the Star, Cosmo, People, Us, Playboy, Playgirl, Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar. She’d dump them all on the bed in Ryan’s room upstairs, and we’d make our way through them, laughing at the gossip and comparing the horoscopes. I thought this was so chic and cool: it was sad to buy one magazine and take it seriously, but fun to buy them all.

  Now that she was on the cover of the worst of them, it wasn’t funny or chic at all. I wanted to know what the National Enquirer was saying about her; I knew how vicious they were. But I couldn’t pick it up, couldn’t touch it, couldn’t buy it. I felt ashamed: because she was my sister, and they were making her out to be a slut; and also because I didn’t know she’d left Ryan and gone back to Jack, and I didn’t want Aunt Dorothy to know I’d found it out from a checkout-line rag.

  The whole thing wasn’t fair. I knew what she’d put up with from Ryan, how patient and forgiving she’d been, how hard she’d tried to make it work. She was right to go back to Jack; I knew how kind and fun he was. (Conveniently, I forgot about her crying.) I prayed Aunt Dorothy wouldn’t see the National Enquirer. And of course she didn’t want to see it, because she didn’t want to talk about it with me. So she didn’t see it. It didn’t exist.

  I wondered if I’d ever see Griffin again. I missed him: my comrade, my ally. I worried that I’d been his last hope, and I’d abandoned him.

  15

  I’m in the back seat of a car, driving down a narrow street that turns a sharp corner to the left. The reddish brown buildings are high and solid, squaring off the right angle. I’m little, maybe four. It must be before Mum died. Is that her sitting next to me in the back seat? I’m not sure, but I’m not alone. And it’s not a taxi: the seat is low, and I’m craning my neck to see the tops of the buildings, which are crenellated with pointy arches and dormer windows. It’s silent: no talking, not even any engine noise from the car. I’m not sure how I know there is a corner—it looks like a dead-end street. Perhaps because we’re driving so fast we won’t be able to stop, and the road must go somewhere.

  I know it’s London. That’s part of the memory.

  When school finished for the summer of 1978, Anjelica took me to London. It was the first time I’d been back since moving to Ireland.

  Everywhere we went I looked for that street. It was so vivid in my mind that I could have drawn it—but no street matched it exactly. I figured out, from the height and design of the buildings, that it must be in the West End. Stratton Street, off Piccadilly, was close, but it was one-way the wrong way; it bent right, not left. Could the traffic planners have changed it, or had my brain recorded a mirror image? It haunted me, that memory street. I was driven down it again and again, never turning the blind corner, never discovering the secret of what was on the far side.

  I didn’t tell Anjel about the memory, or even ask in a roundabout way where that street might be. I didn’t know what its significance was, or if it really had any. Maybe it was just some random image that had stuck to a sticky spot in my brain. We didn’t go to Maida Avenue either. If she had wanted to take me, I would have gone with her—but I was relieved that she never mentioned it. That was the past, and the past was gone.

  I had learned not to want what wasn’t there. I tried not to ask, or expect, of people what they didn’t have—or want—to give. Really, I tried not to ask or expect anything; that way I wouldn’t be disappointed, and whatever came to me would be a bonus, a treat. I wasn’t by nature a doormat, but I tried to look at things from the other person’s point of view. Circumstances were difficult. Everyone was doing the best they could.

  We were in London because Jack was filming The Shining there. It was a six-month shooting schedule, so Anjel had to go. I felt it was especially important to her that she took me.

  The National Enquirer had been right: Anjel did go back to Jack. But then she suddenly disappeared to Aspen, without him. I was at Jack’s house, with Jennifer, when I spoke to her on the phone and discovered she wouldn’t be back in time to help me with some bit of homework she’d said she would do with me.

  I hung up the phone, in tears. Helena promised to help me with my assignment, whatever it was. That was when I stopped being afraid of her.

  Soon after I’d first met Helena, I saw her in Kansas City Bomber on the little TV in my room at Cici’s house. Collin was a big Raquel Welch fan on acc
ount of One Million Years BC, and we both loved Rollerball, the sci-fi movie based on roller derby. Kansas City Bomber was the original roller-derby movie, and Helena was the villain who threw nasty fouls at Raquel Welch. Her viciousness in the movie fit so well with her wild black hair and tough Boston accent that for years I thought that was who she really was.

  She had a tattoo on her left shoulder, its blue ink gone fuzzy with time, of a square cross, with the letters M–O–M above it. I’d never known anyone with a tattoo before; it looked fierce on her olive skin, even with the spaghetti strap of her nightgown falling over it. But gradually, I came to see it as a badge. She had no children of her own, but she looked after people.

  I’d see Helena described in magazine articles about Jack as his housekeeper, but that was wrong: she was his rock, his anchor, his go-between with the real world. She used to say she didn’t know how old she was, because her parents, when they came to America, put different dates on different forms. I hadn’t believed Maricela when she said the same thing, but I believed Helena. As a little girl in occupied Greece, Helena had been a pet of the Nazi officers who had occupied her house, running messages for them. She told me how she’d been mesmerized by the blazing shine of their boots. In Boston after the war, when her family didn’t have a home, Helena danced at a Greek picnic and made enough for the down payment—and later made thousands of dollars a night belly dancing in Las Vegas. She’d met Jack at a coffee house in Hollywood in the early sixties, when he was still making B movies for Roger Corman. Years later, when she left her husband and needed a place to stay, he gave her the downstairs bedroom in his house, and later the house next door.