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

can’t touch her. Father, friends, lovers tell her how well she writes, but all I have is a filigree of gaps where her letters should be. I found only two letters in her hand, never sent, full of pain and blame of herself, and three tiny scraps of diary, one humorous, one anguished, the third clear-eyed and rational. I feel as I am hearing her voice across a vast distance, a word here and there intelligible, the rest sucked away by the dull air.
    Most of the letters she wrote are gone. Her parents’ house burned down. Dad’s papers didn’t survive him for long. The lovers, mainly, returned to their own married lives. The friends are mostly dead, and Mum means nothing to their heirs.
    As I read through elliptical remarks on indecipherable problems and mundane accounts of daily life, frustration chafes against the sense of thievery I’ve never managed to shake. Fate—or chance, or the blind carelessness of the universe—stole her from me. I had hoped to catch her again in these letters, but I feel like I’m snatching at the hem of her coat as she flies unknowingly away.
    Still, there are motes of insight, single stars that break through a clouded sky. On Mother’s Day, my grandmother writes that my mother is her first child, “and who needs to know that you were five when I married Daddy.” I knew that, like me, Mum had lost her mother when she was young, but I’d always thought she’d been a toddler, barely conscious of it. Now I saw, on a hazy mirror of tears, that she’d been a little girl. With two small children to be tended, Grampa wouldn’t have waited long before marrying again. Let’s say he waited a minimal, decent year—which makes Mum four when, probably, she was taken in to see her mother on her deathbed and hear her last words. Four: the same age as I was when I sat on my mother’s bed in a room that had suddenly become her shrine. In that second, as I held Nana’s letter in my shaking hands, I felt my heart change shape.Mum, who had been my imperfectly healed wound, became my ally, my twin. She and I had had the same strength of understanding when we were told that we would never see our mothers again.
     
    As Dad told the story, he and Mum each saw St. Cleran’s separately while out hunting: an elegant Georgian half ruin, graciously proportioned, its big windows inviting, nestled amid green pastures crazed by stone walls, the fairy-tale woods bisected by that storybook river. This part is true. The implied excitement of a married couple discovering their first family home—the “Shall we?” and “Oh, let’s!”—is not. They had been married for about five years, together for another year or so before that, but when the decision to buy St. Cleran’s was made, Mum and Dad were, at best, doing a kind of stately dance around each other, a flow of synchronized avoidance through geography and time.
    When she was barely eighteen, Mum had appeared on the cover of Life magazine, for no reason other than her breath-stopping beauty. She was, at the time, a dancer with the New York City Ballet. The producer David O. Selznick put her under contract and brought her to Hollywood. She appeared in Life again as one of the young starlets of 1949, identified as Rick Soma, the name she went by then; sitting front center in the photograph is Marilyn Monroe.
    Mum never made a movie. Selznick sent her to acting classes and paired her with actors being screen-tested, but she seems never to have been given a screen test of her own. She performed on stage in La Jolla, outside L.A., and made two shorts for the Red Cross. When her contract came up for renewal, Selznick dropped her.
    Her father urged her to stand on her head and sing in Selznick’s office, to show what she could do. He was Italian and owned a restaurant in Manhattan called Tony’s, where film and theater people liked to go, perhaps because the padrone would stand on his head and sing operatic arias on request. He fancied himself a yogi andsent