Read Online Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston - Free Book Online
Authors: Allegra Huston
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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, whichI 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
W hen 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
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, whichI 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
W hen 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
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