A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York

by Huston, Anjelica

  Dad shared her passion for pre-Columbian art, and she became the curator of his prized collection, housed next to the Gun Room at the Big House. Gladys could sniff out a fake a mile away, and it was always bad news if Dad returned home from Mexico from a lone shopping foray for pre-Columbian art. Gladys would sniff, scratch, and spit on the piece in question, and before too long, you’d hear the crash of shattering ceramic against the basement walls.

  She had a copious handbag from which she could pull out at a moment’s notice practically anything you might imagine, whether it be chocolate or toenail clippers. Though Dad preferred not to notice, the handbag was also a habitual repository for smuggled pre-Columbian gold, and on one occasion that haunted him for a long time, some precious objects got mysteriously secreted in its folds on a departure from Egypt—a crime that in those days was punishable by death. When questioned at customs, Gladys was implacable. Because she was the essence of fairness and virtue, no one might have the temerity to suspect her of any type of moral lassitude; she would have made a supreme spy. However, Gladys was not above releasing a confidential opinion, sometimes regrettable in the cold light of morning, as to why Dad was behaving badly, or spending too much money, or imbibing too much alcohol.

  But everyone drank in Ireland, even our local Garda, who came from Loughrea on his bike every year on Christmas Eve to fall, stocious, over the back of the sofa. Drinking was what the adults did, and the abstainers were solemn characters who pointed piously to a white badge with a red cross on their lapels and asked for lemonade or tea instead. It was not uncommon to see a lone figure weaving down a country road at night, or men brawling in a pub. In every town hung the sign “Guinness is good for you!”

  It seemed these days that Mum was always away. Tony used to sit behind the bar in the inner hall at the Big House and mix drinks. A little bourbon, some vodka, a drop of crème de menthe, Coca-Cola, gin, Irish whiskey, angostura bitters, with a maraschino cherry floating on top. This he would sip slowly and deliberately before dinner. No one really said anything about it. Betts would pour me a sherry, which I’d favored since falling off the banister at the Little House. And Dad would ask for a martini. He had shown me how to make one to perfection: the crushed ice, the dash of bitters, the cold vodka, the drop of vermouth; how to shake it up and pour it out so the olive floated. As soon as the volume in the martini glass looked shallow, he would hold his long arm out for another. Generally, it was Betty who would perform the duty, leaving the room to refill the glass, but sometimes as I followed her out to the bar, she would mutter, “I’m going to water it down. Your father is one over the eight.”

  When I went back to the study to present Dad the watered-down martini, it was tantamount to an act of betrayal. He’d take a sip and then fix me with a challenging eye. “Come on, honey, get me a drink,” he’d say. “I’m serious.”

  Dad taught me how to prepare a cigar—how to listen to the wrap of the tobacco and test the smoothness and texture of the skin, how to warm the cigar and pick a hole at the tip without benefit of a cutter, how to light the end from a match and blow on the ember, how to suck in the smoke and then exhale. There was poetry to the art of smoking. If I promised to smoke it all the way through, I could have a Monte Cristo on New Year’s Eve.

  CHAPTER 7

  Anjelica and John, the drawing room in the Big House, St. Clerans, 1960

  Mum and Dad never told Tony and me that they were separating, so I was confused when Mum started a sort of slow-motion move to London, in 1960. And I don’t really know whether it was before or after Mum had decided to leave, whether it was a mutual course of action, or simply Dad’s decision, but Betty O’Kelly was asked to come down west from Co. Kildare to be the estate manager at St. Clerans. Betts accepted the offer and moved into the Bhutan Room up at the Big House. I was still living, for the most part, at the Little House, and Betts encouraged me to move into the Lavender Room at the Big House. With Mum’s gradual absence, the place grew more conventional in aspect. Now there were Betts’s invitations to hunt balls balanced on the mantelpiece in the study, Betts’s photo albums full of fox-hunting pictures and sailing in Galway Bay.

  There’s a line in James Joyce’s “The Dead” that says, “We used to go out walking in the rain, the way they do in the country.” And that was what I’d do with Betty. We’d go out on hare hunts with Mindy, Seamus, and the little shih tzu, Shu-Shu, that Dad gave to her.

  In her mid-thirties, Betty was an enthusiast; she loved a laugh, was “full of gas.” Betts told a story of going to visit an old lady who had lost her son and was living alone in a tenement in London during the war. Betts had sat down to tea and the woman had served Spam with worms in it. When I asked her what she had done, Betts said, “I ate it. It was a luxury she was sharing with me. I had no choice.” This was Betty’s code of behavior. She was a kind person, and very good to me. She took me to church with her on Sundays and allowed me to follow her around and listen to her stories of being a debutante, and of the handsome young men who had courted her at hunt balls back in Co. Kildare.

  Betts taught us a great card game called “Racing Demons.” It was basically built along the lines of solitaire but with never any fewer than four screaming, cheating players smacking down cards and calling one another abusive names against the familiar background roll of the dice in leather cups next door in the drawing room, where Dad and Tony were immersed in backgammon. The first time I ever played gin rummy with Dad, I beat him, which he couldn’t get over, and then I beat him again. When we went to the Galway Races, I picked out a horse I liked and placed a bet. “The horse is sweating heavily, honey, it looks tired,” said Dad before the race. The horse came in nine lengths in front of the rest of the field.

  I could tell that Dad was proud, fascinated, but a bit baffled by me. He knew that I had an ability to channel my instincts. But on the other hand, I was emotional and stubborn and not interested in following his advice. Holidays in Ireland felt strange and empty after my mother left. In her absence, I looked to Betts for warmth and distraction.

  In the late summer, the forest rabbits developed myxomatosis and flopped blindly across the driveway under the headlights of our white Opel station wagon. It was almost comical until Betty told me they were dying of a disease that made them sightless. Bulldozers had uprooted the old-growth apple trees to make room for a tennis court. At the Little House, my bedroom had undergone a radical change—the candy-striped four-poster beds had been replaced, and many of my toys had simply disappeared. The underlay of Mum’s original colors and fabrics remained, but it felt as if she were being exorcised from St. Clerans.

  Betts was the first person to ever talk to me about our resident ghost, but because she was prone to tell tall tales of banshees and hauntings in Irish houses in general, I took the narrative with a pinch of salt. As the story went, some two hundred years before, a man by the name of Daly was accused of shooting the bailiff at St. Clerans. For an Irishman to shoot a functionary was punishable by death. Daly insisted he was innocent, but the judge, a member of the Burke family, who owned St. Clerans, pronounced him guilty. Daly was sentenced to hang. The gallows were erected a mile away from St. Clerans on a hill. The Burke family watched the execution from two windows of an upstairs bedroom on the south side of the house. As the judge rode down from the gallows, he met an old crone by the side of the road. She pronounced a widow’s curse on him—that the grass would not grow where her son was hanged, that no rooks would ever nest at St. Clerans, and that none of the resident Burkes would ever die in their beds. Later, the windows were blocked up for fear that Daly’s ghost would enter to haunt the Big House. Naturally, Dad had the windows restored when the Burke bedroom became the Bhutan Room.

  Sometimes, on walks, we would go up on the hill to the area where the purported gallows stood, and Betts would point out three spots in the earth where the grass never grew. There was a tunnel, something like an old mine shaft, that you could crawl into, but it had crumbled and was
impassable. Betts said the tunnel led all the way back to St. Clerans, but we never had proof of this, and as far as I could see, the rooks nested by the dozens in the old ruin of the tower on the estate. I had heard that there had been sightings of Daly. Once, I fancied I saw him wandering through the study, wearing a green velvet jacket and knee britches.

  • • •

  A year later, without any restrictions in the Little House, Tony was using it as a virtual aviary during holidays. He had met a reclusive expert on birds of prey up in Connemara, called Ronald Stevens, who was teaching him the art of falconry. Tony was now housing several birds in a stone structure behind the garden room. Every few weeks, a crate of hatchling chicks arrived from Galway, and he would wring their necks, storing the little bodies in a bowl in the freezer and thawing them out as required to feed his hawks. Once, I saved six chicks and kept them in a cage in the garden room, but they grew very big and soon I had to put them out near the stables, where most of them died after being trampled by the horses. They were big, white, dumb identical-looking birds, so-called battery-bred chickens—I guess they weren’t meant to live too long in the first place.

  The alternative to the practice of buying crates of chicks was the suspension of a fishing net across the path at the top of the garden, where it would catch the songbirds as they turned around in flight. I went out early in the morning to see if there were any I could save. The sight of those stiff little bodies stuck in the net, with their feathers ruffled and wet, was nothing short of heartbreaking.

  Tony shot the heron, the big, beautiful bird that used to perch so confidently under our waterfall, sucking up minnows. And then, as if giving this wayward act his stamp of approval, Dad had the heron stuffed at the taxidermist in Dublin. On another occasion, Tony appeared at lunch dejected because he had lost a falcon. He had sent it off after a smaller game bird and it had failed to return. All through the meal, he sobbed. In the afternoon, he went out into the woods with his gun. He saw a pigeon flying overhead and took aim. The falcon fell dead at his feet.

  Even with fish, I always hated the transition from life to death—seeing them hooked with their gills gasping on a riverbank, their scales changing from shining silver to muddy and flat. I got in a lot of trouble with Tony for tossing his fish back into the river when his back was turned.

  • • •

  On summer nights, Paddy would play the accordion and sing, and Mary and I would step out the two-hand reel we were learning at Peggy Carty’s School of Dancing and Deportment in Loughrea. Sometimes on Saturday nights, Breda allowed Mary and me to run a steaming bath in which we bathed the smaller Lynch children. I would scrub them vigorously—Ollie, in particular, whose freckles would not budge, as hard as I tried to erase them from his cheeks.

  Breda made butter from scratch in a churn, then molded it into a yellow slab with what looked like wooden hand paddles. Their house smelled of buttermilk and bread baking; there was always a baby in arms. Breda was a woman of infinite patience; the only time I ever saw her outside their house was going to church on Sunday, when the children, still pink from their bath the night before, the boys’ hair gleaming with Brylcreem, would load into Paddy’s car across the yard and depart for Loughrea.

  • • •

  Christmas at St. Clerans continued to be a grand affair. On our first Christmas Eve without Mum, Tony and I decorated the tree with Betty up at the Big House. It rose, shining with colored lights, from the stairwell of the inner hall to the floor above, the star on top kissing the round crystal globe of the Waterford chandelier. Each year our favorite ornaments would emerge from their beds of tissue paper and make their reappearance like friends you’d half-forgotten. The presents would be piled under the tree. Tony and I were each allowed to open one gift of our choosing on Christmas Eve.

  At ten sharp on Christmas morning, we’d hurry up to the Big House for the formal unwrapping of gifts. The assorted guests would make their appearances, and champagne would be served. After all the presents were opened and we were dizzy with excess, Dad would say, “Shall we adjourn to the dining room?” The long mahogany table was set with lead crystal, Irish linen, and Georgian silver, and the candelabra would be lit. Mrs. Creagh would have made a feast—smoked salmon, brown bread, stuffed roast turkey and a Limerick ham, mince pies and bread sauce, cranberry jelly, three different kinds of potatoes, creamed leeks and sweet peas, broccoli and cauliflower and turnips, followed by a flaming plum pudding with brandy butter and port for the gentlemen.

  Tommy Holland, a local farmer, was generally the designated Santa. Although one year our houseguest, the writer John Steinbeck, was recruited and proved an admirable choice. He claimed to have swallowed copious amounts of cotton wool whenever he inhaled, but visually, he was perfect. I loved John Steinbeck. He was kind and generous and treated me as an equal. One morning, he took me aside to the drawing room and removed a gold medal on a chain from around his neck and placed it around mine. He explained that it had been given to him years before, when he was a young man visiting Mexico City. It was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the name of the girl who had given it to him was “Trampoline.” John wrote to me often and signed his letters with the stamp of a winged pig, “Pigasus,” combining the sacred and profane to great effect.

  The holidays were always peppered with Dad’s ex-girlfriends and ex-wives. It wasn’t long before I realized that my father was making love to many of the women who I thought were my friends at St. Clerans. By now, I had a fair idea of what this meant, Joan and I having witnessed the furious mating of a stallion and mare in the back courtyard below the windows in Dad’s loft, an event that had rendered us wide-eyed and literally speechless. I didn’t know when I was little that he’d been married three times before. I only really became aware of that later on, when there was talk of his first wife, who I’d heard became an alcoholic.

  And I knew about Evelyn Keyes because there was a story that he told about a monkey he’d owned when they were married and how the monkey had objected to its cage. He’d allowed the monkey to spend the night in the bedroom. When the curtains were drawn in the morning, the room was destroyed. Evelyn’s clothes were in shreds, and the monkey had defecated all over her underwear. It was the end of the line for poor Evelyn, who cried, “John, it’s the monkey or me!” To which Dad replied, “I’m sorry, honey, I just can’t bear to be parted from the monkey.” Evelyn came to St. Clerans one Christmas, at a time when she was married to the bandleader Artie Shaw. She appeared to me totally mad. She bounded around in a series of velour jumpsuits. I don’t think she ever went outside the house, but she complained constantly about the cold.

  There was a girlfriend called Lady Davina with a very upper-class British accent. I used to imitate her, much to Dad’s amusement. There was a pretty brunette American conquest called Gayle Garnett, who sent recordings of her love songs. There was Min Hogg, who was young and arty, had long dark hair, and wore black most of the time. Min let me wear her fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes, so I could practice walking like a fashion model, up and down the driveway. There was the novelist Edna O’Brien. I met Edna one morning on the bridge to the Big House. She was attempting to write a screenplay for Dad. I think it was The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. She was in tears. “Your father is a terrible man,” she said, “a cruel, dangerous man.” The patrician beauty Marietta Tree, an American socialite who represented the United States on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under President Kennedy, was a visitor. Dad remained devoted to her all his life. He was particularly proud showing her around St. Clerans, offering his arm to her to walk in to dinner, her printed chiffon caftan billowing like a butterfly as they crossed the hallway.

  And there was Zoë Sallis, who looked like an Indian princess. I remember Zoë in a white angora V-neck sweater, ballet slippers, and black capris. She showed me how to make a ducktail on the outer corners of my eyes with her Max Factor eyeliner. She had beautiful, slanting brown eyes, like Sophia Loren. T
ony put a live rooster behind the Japanese screen in the Grey Room when Zoë first came to stay at St. Clerans. I’m not sure what he expected from this exercise, since no one, least of all himself, would be awake to witness the joke, and I would guess that Zoë was sleeping with Dad in his room at the time.

  I remember Tony taking me up to Dad’s bathroom and opening a small wooden Japanese box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He pulled out some pictures of a blond, naked to the waist, with a handwritten caption, “Looking forward to seeing you, John.” I felt a drumroll in my heart. I wasn’t prepared for it. Later I came to recognize her as an actress he was seeing during the making of Freud when I went to visit him on that set.

  There was Afdera Fonda, Henry Fonda’s fourth wife. She wore Hermès scarves and Pucci silk blouses; like Evelyn, she never left the house. Valeria Alberti, an Italian countess. Very cool, a little boyish. She had piercing brown eyes, acne scars, and a good suntan. She looked like she’d been out on a beach all her life. She didn’t speak a word of English, but she laughed at everything Dad had to say.

  My father’s girlfriends were very diverse. Some of them desperately wanted to get up on the horses to impress him; they’d assure Dad that they were great riders. They’d be mounted on the calmest of the rather hefty thoroughbreds in the stable, and invariably there’d be some drama, and it would become blatantly evident that they had no experience whatsoever. Dad would find this vastly amusing. And one couldn’t help but agree with him because they were so earnest. “Oh, yes, John, I ride!”