Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  Looking back, I think Tess of the d’Urbervilles may have been the first book I ever read in which things turn out really badly. The heroine does not find happiness; she is pummeled by men and by the universe, then executed, a sacrifice to society, a “sport,” Hardy tells us, for the “President of the Immortals”—his ironic stand-in for God. But I did not, as I have said, possess the frame of reference for registering the impact of such bad fortune—either a personal frame of reference or a literary one. I had not yet even read my first Shakespeare tragedy—that would be Julius Caesar in seventh grade. What, in retrospect, I remember best is the book itself—object and fetish—the only present ever picked out for me by my father, except for the silver porringer that I discovered in 1989 he had sent after my birth in 1942. I found it mentioned in my mother’s papers after she died in a list she’d kept of presents received for her new baby. The porringer, coming to light so belatedly, hardly counts the way the book does. I fix on that one particular book, even though other books enter into our story. Books, in fact, surrounded our slender history, setting it off almost like bookends.

  I knew Freddie Ayer for thirty-five years; of those I knew him as my father for only the last six months. When he died in June 1989, six weeks after I had gone to visit him in London as his acknowledged daughter, I said to my sixteen-year-old son, who was with me when I got the news, that truly I was now an orphan. “No, you’re not,” he replied. “An orphan is someone who needs parents to take care of her. You’ve been taking care of yourself and others for years.” What my son didn’t understand—how could he?—was the sharpness with which I felt cheated and abandoned.

  Unsure of my status, ill at ease, I returned to England a month after Freddie’s death, to attend a large public memorial for him at University College London. He had been teaching there when I first met him, before his later appointment at New College, Oxford. It was on the second day of my visit that Freddie’s widow—an American-born journalist named Dee Wells, now Lady Ayer, who had become Freddie’s second wife in 1960, divorced him in 1982, and remarried him just months before his death—broached how Freddie had said to her, “I must do something for Wendy.” I held my breath waiting to know what that something could be. When friends in America had asked me whether Freddie had left me any money, I had consistently treated the inquiry as rather crass. “Oh no, I don’t think so,” I had said. “I didn’t expect him to.”

  “And sooo,”—Dee drew out the word—“he has left you the choice of twelve books of English literature from his library.”

  The library occupied a floor in the house that Freddie had inherited from his third wife, Vanessa, who had died of cancer. It occurred to me that this was the third London address at which I had known Freddie. I had met him in his flat on Whitehorse Street, frequented the house he had with Dee on Regent’s Park Terrace, and then come to “claim kin,” as it were, in this house on York Street, once again in Mayfair. Now he was dead, and his library remained—testament in its thousands of tomes of philosophy and history and biography and the literature of different countries, to his breath of knowledge and enthusiasms. Choosing the books of my legacy meant combing through all that to pick out my precisely defined dozen, and it was a hard, even bitter task. A six-volume set of Jane Austen took care of half my bequest and seemed apt. When I had arrived at the York Street house on my earlier visit after Freddie had written me that he was my father, I had found him in the library with his secretary and been subjected to a quiz.

  “What is Mr. Darcy’s first name?” he had asked, looking up from his work.

  “Fitzwilliam,” I had said, relieved to know the answer.

  “And where in the novel does it occur?” he had pressed.

  I hadn’t known, and Freddie, delighted to get the better of a PhD in English literature, had informed me it is when Darcy writes to Elizabeth in the wake of her rejection of his first proposal. I tried to laugh off my discomfiture, but the exercise seemed too much at my expense.

  Back in that library and forcing myself on in the selection of the books, I chose Oscar Wilde’s Intentions, which included his essay on “The Decay of Lying,” a leather-bound edition of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a 1865 leather-bound edition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a Hogarth Press first edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Moment and Other Essays, and an e.e. cummings 95 poems, in which the author had scribbled a few words to his friend Freddie.

  And there I stopped with eleven books chosen. I looked over others but couldn’t decide on a final volume. I kept worrying how much the books would weigh in my suitcase, and though I tried to tell myself this was a silly concern, the books, in truth, felt to me like lead, each chosen one another loadstone to sink my spirits further. I couldn’t pick a twelfth and left it at that. Perhaps with a book still to go, any of the multitudinous books of English literature in the library seemed still potentially mine. Or perhaps I simply couldn’t bear the dispossessed way choosing these books made me feel. Later Dee wrote to ask me to give back the cummings, saying the whole collection of cummings had been left to her and Freddie’s son, Nick, and offering me another choice. I returned the cummings but did not replace it. Twenty-six years after Freddie’s death, I have never opened any of the books of my bequest, which sit grouped together on a shelf in my living room bookcase.

  When I think of Freddie and English literature, I think of his love of Dickens and I think of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Freddie was Angel Clare for me, a man of quick-paced intellect and bodily lightness of being, a spirit of air like his name, not a creature of gross flesh like the detested Bow Wow. He was a free-thinker, a renowned atheist. But he was also Alec d’Urberville, a roué, a compulsive seducer of women, a sensualist. “What was my mother like?” I had asked him on my daughterly visit. He had smiled and thought for a moment. “I remember her as being rather plump,” he said. I expected something else, something more, but that’s what he chose to remember.

  Both Alec and Angel fail Tess. I could say that Freddie failed me. But that pronouncement seems too blunt—it belies the intricacies of my story. I think I need a different author than Hardy to help me convey its nuances and its treacheries, perhaps someone less fixed on “the President of the Immortals,” existent or not, and more on the willful duplicity of human beings. Hardy’s characters are too subject to fate and ultimately too fragile for my purposes. I need an author whose personages do more to “choose” the tangles of their lives and then have the stamina to live with what they’ve chosen.

  One of the most cherished books in my library is a tattered Riverside edition of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the first work we read in a year-long freshman English course at Bryn Mawr College. Studying The Portrait of a Lady, writing papers about its narrative techniques and its use of imagery (I remember tracing window and bird imagery) taught me techniques for approaching modern literature. I learned to appreciate the subtlety of the author’s presence, the way, in James’s own words, he “get[s] down into the arena” and “rubs shoulders” with the characters, and the emphasis on subjectivity and the drama of consciousness, culminating in the famous Chapter 42, in which his heroine Isabel, eyes closed, ruminates through the night and sees the truth of her situation clearly and deeply—she has married a man who hates her and can do nothing except understand this. “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” James writes in “The Art of Fiction.” I read that essay three years later in a senior seminar on literary theory. But James’s injunction conflates for me with the story of Isabel Archer, on whom so much is initially lost and whose fulfillment, even whose triumph, it can be argued, lies in her painful coming to consciousness. Isabel is yet another nineteenth-century orphan, but she’s also something else: a proto-new woman, a modernist heroine of interiority. Because my old college edition of the book is falling apart—it has split in two—I recently obtained a new copy, but I still use my old falling-apart one with all my notes for teaching.

  In “The Decay of Lying” Oscar Wi
lde asserts that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. His serious point, beneath the wit of the epigram, is that art furnishes us with life’s plots and its paradigms. We see the sunset a certain way because we know the paintings of Turner. A novel by Balzac shapes our understanding of ambition and betrayal. In my case, life imitates the art of Henry James. My story’s themes are adultery and concealment, the question of who knew a sexual secret and who didn’t. Its central irony is the blindness of the person who wished to be someone on whom nothing is lost. I am the protagonist kept in the dark, the personage on whom a great deceit was practiced but who finally, only at the very end, too late to do much about it except in terms of awareness, learned the truth. “It’s a story by Henry James,” I kept telling my friends at the time of its unfolding. “Everyone but me knew that Freddie was my father.”

  By “everyone,” of course, I mean many: my mother, Freddie, Dee, Gully Wells—Dee’s daughter by an earlier marriage, my mother’s friend Jean Dalrymple, and even my husband, Donald, who took note of the physical resemblance between father and daughter and silently wondered, and who knows who else. But this list did not include Trevor Westbrook. He was the man my mother duped into marriage.

  After Scott Fitzgerald had his fatal heart attack in her Hollywood living room a few days before Christmas 1940, my mother kept herself going, among other ways, by returning the following spring to England as a war correspondent. In Hollywood, as she later told me, she had suffered from nightmares that Hitler was personally gunning her down from a plane. In England the nightmares ceased, and she got involved with Trevor. Perhaps it helped on the nightmare front that Trevor was the man Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of War, had put in charge of English wartime aviation production. At any rate, my mother liked his single-minded determination, which was also a kind of narrowness. Trim and dour, his dark hair combed always neatly into place, Trevor used to boast he had never read a book. My mother said she found comfort in the contrast this presented to Fitzgerald.

  Back for the 1941 autumn in New York, my mother reconnected with Freddie, whom she had met earlier that year in London. In this new affair she became pregnant—possibly on purpose but if so, her motive, at thirty-seven, was to have a baby, not to entrap Freddie Ayer. He was still married to his first wife, René, and in any case not interested in marrying my mother. I get the sense that she was using sex, probably with a lot of people, to console herself for the terrible loss of Fitzgerald and that Freddie was simply engaged in his habitual philandering. It was not a serious liaison. At this point Trevor Westbrook turned up on a mission to Washington with Lord Beaverbrook. My mother went to see him, told him she was four months pregnant with his child and persuaded him to marry her. Soon afterwards she announced that she had lost the child and soon after that that she was pregnant again. I have pieced together this audacious layer of lies from Freddie and from a Westbrook cousin in whom Trevor confided. He sensed he had been tricked into marriage, but that was the extent of his suspicions.

  Trevor died in 1979 without ever knowing I was not his daughter. My mother died in November 1988 without ever telling me the truth. This was her last consequential secret—or at least the last we learned about—coming to light six weeks after her death and thirty years after I had learned she was Jewish. The person who revealed it was Dee Wells, then still divorced from Freddie and living in New York but about to go back to England and remarry him. She had left him for a black American clothes designer, who, in turn, had left her, and, now financially and emotionally rather stranded, she welcomed the return to her former husband. Dee would care for Freddie in his final months, acquire the title of Lady Ayer, and live in the house on York Street for the remaining fifteen years of her not very happy life.

  I find it diverting to try to cast this genealogical tale in terms of the characters of The Portrait of a Lady. The ones I call into service are the deceived heroine, Isabel Archer, her insidious husband, Gilbert Osmond, Osmond’s innocent daughter, Pansy, Pansy’s secret mother, the smooth mannered, unscrupulous Madame Merle, and Osmond’s “tropical bird-like” sister with her “long-beaked nose” and “shimmering plumage,” the Countess Gemini.

  Dee is clearly the Countess Gemini, an expatriate American of blunt temperament and sexual indiscretion, someone who had “consoled herself outrageously” for her husband’s infidelities. James debated whether it should be Madame Merle or the Countess who tells Isabel about Pansy, and he chose the Countess, regretting, though, “that in that way [he loses] the ‘great scene between Madame Merle and Isabel’” Since my story also lacks a great scene between my mother and me—the scene in which she might have been the one to tell me who my father was—and the role fell to Dee, her casting as the Countess is perfect.

  I had sought out Dee to be a speaker at my mother’s memorial and she had then asked me to a dinner party at her daughter Gully’s brownstone in Greenwich Village. I gave her a ride in my car after the party to her apartment in the East 30s. She was full of her plans for resuming life with Freddie and invited me to come and see them at their house in the South of France.

  “Freddie is very fond of you,” she said, as we sat for a moment in the car in front of her building. When I demurred, since her words seemed polite but perfunctory and I was eager to get going, she looked at me in a hard, peculiar manner.

  “Has it never occurred to you that Freddie is your father?” she said.

  “No,” I replied, stunned. I asked Dee if Freddie thought this was a guess or a certainty. Dee said Freddie considered it a certainty. She said that she would get him to write me.

  I have my own version of Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady. It begins on my drive home to my apartment in Brooklyn after leaving Dee and continues over the ensuing few days. On the drive home I felt I was seeing with Freddie’s eyes, smiling his smile, experiencing myself as his daughter from the inside out. Then over the next few days our whole past history rose before me for reevaluation. I remembered how Freddie had befriended me, taking me to lunches and to museums on my frequent trips to England as a teenager and how Donald and I had stayed with him and Dee in London and also in France on the trip we took abroad the first summer of our marriage. It also made sense why Dee had written such a virulent review of Beloved Infidel in her days as a journalist for the Daily Express. It had a memorably outrageous conclusion. “And I suppose in a way you have to hand it to the ex-East End orphan named Lily Shiel. Just what to hand her, I’d be hard put to say. But I do know it’s nothing I’d touch with a ten-foot pole. With gloves on.”

  My mother had walked out of a 1959 lunch with Freddie and me in a London restaurant because he confessed to having seen the review before it went to press and done nothing to stop it. That was before Dee and Freddie married and subsequently had my half-brother Nicholas. Dee then set about befriending my mother. The Ayers were living in Regents Park Terrace, and my mother had bought a little house on Lancelot Place—“a whisper from Harrods and a shout from Hyde Park,” as she described it. The visits went back and forth between these residences. “Of course, I can never trust her,” my mother would say. But she seemed happy to be invited to tea and to dinner parties, and a mutual if wary respect arose between these scrappy fighters. Finally, it made sense why Dee in 1975, when I, then thirty-two, was living in England with Donald and the children, had invited me for lunch at their house and then, oddly, gone out as soon as I arrived, leaving me with Freddie. He and I had sat on a sofa, both of us stroking a cat. I had thought about his reputation as a womanizer and wondered if he were going to make a pass at me. I think Dee meant for him to tell me then he was my father, but he didn’t.

  His “I am your father” letter came a few weeks after Dee’s return to England. It began:

  Dear Wendy:

  Your asking me to write to you is presumably the outcome of the conversation that you had with Dee after your mother’s funeral. You were then feeling your way towards the truth. I am your father . . .

  To continue with
the casting, I put Freddie, for his part in the concealment, in the role of Gilbert Osmond, though doing so is hardly fair, considering his amiable temperament, intellectual originality, and liberal politics. Freddie resembled Osmond only in his social snobbery and emotional indolence. His letter to me spoke of his regret that Dee’s hostile review of Beloved Infidel had put an end to my mother’s “bringing you to visit me in London but there was nothing I could do about it.” It was Dee who took the initiative to make peace with my mother—Freddie’s letter marveled that they had later become such good friends—and who took the lead in keeping in touch with me. Freddie was passive. He was not a man of deep emotions. There is a chilling passage in John Osborne’s autobiography, describing how Freddie had come to see his ex-girlfriend Jocelyn Richards (then living with Osborne) when he was contemplating marrying Dee: