Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston Page A

Mum, with Grampa thrashing in fury as he, the old alpha, was toppled by the new. As Daddy’s daughter, I took it personally. I was loyal to him. I couldn’t help comparing him to Grampa: each was a king in his own realm, surrounded by a court. But Daddy’s world had been run for everybody’s happiness, while Grampa’s had one transcendent purpose, which was himself. Grampa set himself above the world; Daddy enthusiastically took part in it. When Daddy looked at me, sketched me, I was a person, flesh and blood in front of him. I was real.
    On one trip to the city sometime in August, Martine and I weredressed up in our best clothes and taken to Radio City Music Hall for the premiere of Daddy’s latest movie, Fat City. It was a story of down-and-out boxers, and way over the heads of two little girls (though later Martine excitedly told me she knew what it meant when one of the characters said, “He threw me down on that bed and he raped me!”). Afterward, there was a party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Martine and I ran around among the tall statues. The white marble floor was pale and cold, hard beneath our feet. Everything glittered: the marble, the lights, the beaded dresses and jewels. Daddy was at the center of it; it was like seeing his power source, flashes of electricity whizzing around him. It energized him; it made the kingdom of St. Cleran’s possible.
    Standing beside Daddy was a woman unlike anyone I’d ever met. Her hair fell back from her face in waves, like a lion’s mane. Her shoulders were bare, and her skin was tanned and freckled by the sun. She was much younger than him—and younger than the grand women who had visited St. Cleran’s and stayed in the Gray Room, those ladies with thick lipstick, pale skin, and patronizing hands. She didn’t wear that slashing lipstick, and she was wearing a dress that none of those women would have worn: covered all over in pale lavender sequins and held up only at the back of her neck, like a bathing suit. Those women had carried hard, invisible shells around themselves, like display cases; she gave the impression of hiding nothing.
    “This is Cici,” said Daddy. She sank down so that our faces were level, and took both my hands for a moment, as if to see whether I was prepared to be hugged. I wasn’t—she’d taken me completely by surprise. Even Zoë hadn’t done anything like that.
    Cici’s smile was square, seeming to turn down at the corners because it didn’t turn up. There was something wonderfully casual and self-possessed about it, as if she were smiling for nobody’s pleasure but her own. If you shared it, you were sharing a joke, or a secret. I didn’t know what the secret was, but I loved the complicity of her smile.
    When we said good-bye, Cici embraced me. This time I let her, willingly. I couldn’t understand why she was genuinely pleased to meet me, but I accepted wholeheartedly that she was. I had no idea what connection she had to Daddy—or might have to me. My universe had fixed points: Daddy, Nurse, Betty, Gladys, Nana and Grampa. It didn’t occur to me that the stars might shift their courses, or that the very shape of my universe might change out of recognition. I’m not sure I even wondered whether I would see Cici again.
    Not long afterward, Daddy wrote to tell me that he and Cici had been married. I think the letter said that he hoped we would become close. He didn’t use the word “stepmother”—and I didn’t think of her as a replacement for Mum since I had no conception of Mum as Daddy’s wife. In any case, Daddy was virtually a different species from the husbands-and-wives-and-children whom I knew. Theirs was not a pattern that I expected Daddy—or Daddy and me—to follow.
    He also told me that I wouldn’t be going back to St. Cleran’s. Nana and Grampa’s house was my home now.
    I didn’t ask him, or anyone else, why I’d been exiled from St. Cleran’s. His marriage to Cici obviously had something to