Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found Read Online Free Page A

anything.
    I can’t blame Leslie for writing to Ireland to say he couldn’t keep me. Ferriel had a new baby, and my sullen gloom must have strained her nerves. I was the child of a woman with whom, she probably knew, her husband had been at least half in love—a woman adored by many for her beauty, wit, and intelligence, now haloed by a suddenand gruesome death. In Ferriel’s place, I would have felt obscurely judged and found wanting.
    Mum had wanted me to grow up a little English girl. She chose Leslie to look after me instead of her own parents, who lived outside New York City. Leslie tried his best, and the guilt of his failure scorched him. He disappeared from my life for twenty years, until finally, out of the blue, he found the courage to call me and ask, tentatively, if I would let him back in.

3
    H igh in a tower of Houghton Hall, in the low eastern hump of England, my mother’s letters lay locked in a trunk. Tony took charge of them when she died and stored them there, in his brother-in-law’s house, when he left England. On a midsummer day in 2006, I went to find them.
    Houghton is probably a hundred years older than St. Cleran’s, and was built by the first prime minister of England. It has a tower at each corner, with a fat, pointy roof like the tents you see in old paintings of tournaments. I took an elevator, then stairs, to climb up into one of the tower attic rooms. It was octagonal, its high pointed ceiling ribbed like the inside of a strange fish. The plaster was bare and finely cracked, softened by centuries and yellowed by smoke. An arc of low, square-paned windows looked out onto the pillowy tops of old trees and, far below, smooth grass glittering in the sun.
    There were angular piles draped in heavy canvas dust sheets and, in a corner opposite the windows, a cluster of tin trunks and leather suitcases. I found a bunch of keys in a chest of metal drawers, but they fit only some of the locks. A paper clip sprang the locks of others. Trunk after trunk contained sweaters, falconry equipment, children’s report cards and letters, random odds and ends.
    The last trunk was navy-blue tin, with steel corners and a tarnished brass lock. It had to be the one. No key opened it; not the paper clip; not a corkscrew. I went downstairs and asked for a screwdriver.
    The trunk breathed out the air it had held since 1969, the year Mum died. The dusty sweet smell of old paper flooded up into my face, stopping my hands where they rested on the manila folders that topped the pile inside. That smell had followed me from Ireland through all the houses I lived in, buried deep in the gutter of an old paperback of Alice in Wonderland, which I believed had once been Mum’s. As a child, as a teenager, I opened the book and pressed it against my face so that its pages blotted out the light, and inhaled, along with the delicious weirdness of the story, the melancholy of my old, accustomed loss.
    I didn’t read the letters there, in that beautiful, octagonal, sun-washed room. They came back with me to New Mexico, where they sat in a suitcase at the foot of my bed for almost a year. Finally, in another big, sunlit house—this one built by my husband that I’m not married to, as they say in Taos—surrounded by the snowy fields of a bitterly cold winter, I laid them out, and explored, very gently, the hinterlands of my mother’s life.
    Almost all the letters from the trunk were written to her. There is a box of girlish back-and-forth with her ballerina schoolmate Tanaquil LeClercq, a card “from the desk of Jean-Paul Sartre,” a thank-you note from Lauren Bacall for Mum’s condolences on Bogie’s death, picture postcards from Truman Capote, a mountain of rambling scrawls from her father, terse telegrams from Dad…andsome names I’d never heard of before, letter after letter mounting into high piles of passionate longing. Relics of her shadow life.
    But even with this suitcase of letters spread around me, still I