Read Online Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Allegra Huston
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outside the terminal was thick and sticky in my nose as Nana led Nurse and me to a long blue Cadillac. I’d never known air like that, so heavy I could feel its weight on my skin. On top of the long flight from Ireland, it made me feel fuzzy-headed, and I struggled to focus as we drove east along the Long Island Expressway.There were no roads that big and crowded in Ireland, and the Cadillac went fast, with a low growling roar.
My uncle Fraser drove. He wore black mirrored sunglasses, held by thin wire frames, which made him look casually sinister, like a villain in Hawaii Five-O —as I imagined one, never having seen it past the opening titles. He didn’t talk much, which I soon sensed was due not to dark intentions but to a kind of diminishment of spirit. He seemed to have no work other than to attend to Grampa, driving him back and forth from the city (as it was always referred to), doing whatever errand needed doing. He’d married a woman with six children—tiny Aunt Rose, who marched for women’s lib and burned her bra at the state capitol—and even in his own house he seemed overwhelmed. He was the youngest of Grampa’s five children, and I wondered if he’d spent his childhood being constantly told to shut up.
Finally we reached the town of Miller Place, and turned up a dirt driveway, bordered by long grass and high hedges of honeysuckle. We passed a house with a garden in front, then the road plunged into the shadows of a thickety wood. On the far side of the wood, up a little hill, stood Nana and Grampa’s house: flat-roofed, with an upper story like the pilot’s cabin of a ship surrounded by a wide skirt of roof. There on the roof was Grampa, on his head.
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 Iremembered 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
My uncle Fraser drove. He wore black mirrored sunglasses, held by thin wire frames, which made him look casually sinister, like a villain in Hawaii Five-O —as I imagined one, never having seen it past the opening titles. He didn’t talk much, which I soon sensed was due not to dark intentions but to a kind of diminishment of spirit. He seemed to have no work other than to attend to Grampa, driving him back and forth from the city (as it was always referred to), doing whatever errand needed doing. He’d married a woman with six children—tiny Aunt Rose, who marched for women’s lib and burned her bra at the state capitol—and even in his own house he seemed overwhelmed. He was the youngest of Grampa’s five children, and I wondered if he’d spent his childhood being constantly told to shut up.
Finally we reached the town of Miller Place, and turned up a dirt driveway, bordered by long grass and high hedges of honeysuckle. We passed a house with a garden in front, then the road plunged into the shadows of a thickety wood. On the far side of the wood, up a little hill, stood Nana and Grampa’s house: flat-roofed, with an upper story like the pilot’s cabin of a ship surrounded by a wide skirt of roof. There on the roof was Grampa, on his head.
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 Iremembered 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
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