A Story Lately Told (4 page)

Betty had bought Waterford, a hunter, for Mum in a sale. She was a coffin head, a tall dull-bay mare with a mind of her own. Mum made valiant efforts to impress Dad, but she got dumped practically every time they rode out. She made forays into the hunting field, always immaculately dressed, with a bowler hat on her head and her ballet toes pointed outward. At the first wall she and Waterford came across, the horse would refuse, and Mum would come tumbling down. She broke her
wrist in one fall. But as Dad later told the story, one day, stunningly, Waterford cleared all the jumps. My mother had lasted through the hunt. It was a triumph. The fifty-odd riders were clattering back down the boreens, the back roads, until they came to a farm and somebody opened a gate to a pigsty. All of a sudden, Dad looked to the left and saw that Waterford was slowly plunging her feet back and forth in the muck. He said, “Ricki. Pull her up!” But of course, it was too late. Waterford went down. All the way. And started to roll. My mother disappeared momentarily from view. When she stood up, she was covered in pig shit from head to toe, nothing visible but her eyes. That was the last time Mum ever hunted.

•  •  •

We were in a plane, flying over turquoise water, on our way to visit Dad in Tobago, where he was filming
Heaven Knows, Mister Allison.
His home there was a two-story house that stood alone on a pale gold beach, with high palm trees all around that the native boys climbed to cut down coconuts. In the mornings we awakened to the smell of bacon frying on an open barbecue. Every Saturday evening outside the house, a party would gather to cook crab stew in a giant pot and dance the limbo deep into the night, to the rhythm of the island steel drums. Tony and I would dance with them by the firelight and try to pass under the stick without making it fall. I remember an electric eel of a woman who somehow managed to get under no matter how far they lowered it, and everybody would be laughing and singing, their teeth white in the darkness. The air at night was full of fireflies and the same temperature as your skin.

One morning while we were swimming, it started to rain, a soft shower on a warm sea. When we walked onto the beach, I saw something shining, like painted leopard skin, and pulled
a large perfect cowrie shell out of the sand. I got a terrible sunburn in the first week; my milk-white skin was scalded and coming off in ribbons. Dad put me in an ice-cold shower and I screamed with pain.

A movie starring Deborah Kerr was screened in a theater. Deborah, whom Tony and I had christened “Mrs. Boogum,” and Bob Mitchum were there. Beside their seats on the aisle were tall stand-up placards with their names spelled out in big black letters. She was in a silvery blue dress with her hair up, radiant, like a princess, and everyone was deferential to her. Mitchum was as tall as Dad, deadpan, with dark wavy hair and a pronounced cleft in his chin. They were joking and seemed to be on good terms. Before the movie started, all three stood up and everyone clapped. This was my first taste of what fame looked like.

One night, Dad took us through the jungle to a big, open building, like a barn. It seemed we were the only white people there. On a raised, ringed-off platform at the center of the floor, two men were boxing. Someone asked Dad to referee the next match. Leaving his seat beside me, he climbed under the ropes into the ring. At a distance in the dark heat, he was a stick figure in a white linen suit, prowling and bobbing between the fighters.

Dad had a pet agouti, a rabbit-like creature with grizzled fur and an extraordinary capacity for speed. He fed it coconut and raisins at breakfast and said it was the fastest animal in the world, but I never saw it in full gallop. Down at the harbor they had caught the sea turtle that was to take Mitchum for an underwater ride in the movie. It was an enormous creature, with a great shell from under which a vulnerable-looking head was poking. There was a boat that took you out to the reefs, and they gave
you a glass tray to look down into a wild aquarium—an amazing wealth of fish and other sea creatures populated these waters.

There was a costume party at the hotel one night. Tony went as a clown, in a striped shirt and Dad’s big shoes; it was what he wanted to be when he grew up. Mum made me a little tutu, with sequins sewn on a pink satin bodice, and layer upon layer of pink and yellow tulle. I thought it was so beautiful, I never wanted to take it off.

I
was five when we moved from Courtown House to St. Clerans, a 110-acre estate in Craughwell, Co. Galway. Some twenty miles in from the coast, the West Country looked as if the sea had recently washed over it—the hawthorn trees on the high embankments turned their shoulders from the wind. On the boreens that intersected the potato fields, high wet grass and Queen Anne’s lace bordered the bog lands, pastures, and coverts off the Dublin-to-Galway road. Three miles before Craughwell, down a shadowy green avenue of high elms and chestnut trees, the passage through a stone gateway led to a
generous courtyard with a limestone, slate-roofed two-story cottage on the left, the Little House. A round lawn occupied the center of the courtyard, where a painted cast-iron Punchinello, wearing a tricorn hat and grinning a gap-toothed smile, perched cross-legged on a column, fanning himself. He was Dad’s newest import from France.

The Little House was the steward’s house to my father’s future home, the Big House—just a few hundred yards away, across a bridge over a trout stream with a little island and a gentle waterfall, where a great gray heron pecked hatchlings from the shallows on one leg. When their new friends from Galway, Derek and Pat Le Poer Trench, first brought my parents to see St. Clerans, the seventeen-room estate was in disrepair. Dad purchased the property from the Land Commission for ten thousand pounds. For the next four years, my mother worked on restoring the houses. They were united in this endeavor.

Opposite the Little House were the stables, and above them, Dad’s painting loft, where he would live temporarily until the Big House was completed. The loft had sea-grass matting on the floors and bull’s-eye windows with seats of white báinín wool. In the bedroom, the walls were, in Mum’s words, “red, the color of a Galway petticoat.” A Galway petticoat was a heavy skirt made from lamb’s wool and vegetable-dyed. When we were first in Ireland, they were sometimes, if rarely, seen on the women up in Connemara and those living out farther on the Aran Islands. If the wearer was a widow, a black grosgrain ribbon would circle the hem; if she had lost children, there would be additional circles of ribbon. Driving with Mum on a deserted stretch of road between Maam Cross and Ballynahinch, we once saw an old lady under a black shawl with five black rings sewn to the hem of her petticoat.

Next door was the groom’s house, which Paddy and Breda Lynch came to occupy with their children—Mary, almost a year younger than I was, with black hair and bright blue eyes, whom I played with, and Patsy, who was Tony’s sidekick.

The Little House was where Mum, Nurse, Tony, and I lived. The rooms were comfortable and cozy, the hall under the stairs was hung with hats, and two orange Sheffield porcelain dogs sat atop a side table in the entryway. The sitting room, with its salmon walls, green carpet, and brown silk curtains looking onto the garden, had a huge stone fireplace.

There was a fine selection of records at the Little House. My mother favored Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Ella Fitzgerald, Yves Montand, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday; there was an eclectic collection of folk, country, and Calypso albums, including Lead Belly, John Jacob Niles, the Kingston Trio, Burl Ives, Marty Robbins, and Harry Belafonte. We listened to a Frenchman called Mouloudji, who sang a song, “Comme un p’tit coquelicot,” about a girl who is shot by her jealous lover in a field of poppies, and to Count John McCormack, the Dubliners, and Brendan O’Dowda. There were also spoken-word records—among them, Marlon Brando in
Julius Caesar,
Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, and Walter Huston’s reading of
The Gettysburg Address,
as well as comedy albums such as
Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads,
by Stan Freberg, and the great recordings of Mike Nichols and Elaine May.

At the end of the short hall was the garden room, with shelves containing row upon row of Penguin paperbacks and back issues of
The New Yorker.
The wallpaper was a crisscross pattern of bamboo and ivy on a white background. To the left of the hall was the kitchen, with a round table and a lazy Susan by the double windows overlooking the courtyard.

Upstairs was Mum’s room, with wallpaper of fig leaves on a pale blue background. The windows looked out over a giant yew in a walled garden filled with exotic trees and shrubs that its former master, an explorer named Robert O’Hara Burke, had brought back from his world travels during the mid-nineteenth century. On Mum’s bedside table was, as she described it, “a pale green jade horse’s head, that curves swanlike to form something resembling a sword handle.”

Mum’s evening dresses were couture, somehow too glamorous for Ireland. She was very chic and had a real sense of humor about the way she dressed. She’d buy tweed in Clifden or Donegal, take it over to Paris, and have Chanel make it up into suits. At a time when no one else in Ireland wore blue jeans, she did. She wore ruffled Spanish shirts, a gondolier’s hat with a red ribbon, and a gold bracelet with a medal of the Madonna of Guadalupe—a fixture on her wrist, which she’d been given by dignitaries in Cuba when she went there as a ballet dancer. She wore a gold ring with a little leopard climbing over a bush of diamonds. One day she showed me a collection of the most beautiful jeweled hats from Dior. Already they seemed like relics from her former life, along with the hamper of tutus and tulle she kept for me for “dress-up.”

The guest room was next door to Mum’s. Two primitive eighteenth-century paintings, one of an outsized cow and another of an enormously distended sheep, hung on either side of a French wrought-iron bed.

Tony and I shared the front bedroom overlooking the courtyard. Mum had decorated it like the interior of a circus tent: gray-and-white-striped wallpaper, with painted papier-mâché animals that Dad had brought back from India, lining the shelves alongside Mum’s old ballet books—
Flight of the Swan: A Memory
of Anna Pavlova; Nijinsky;
a book of cartoons of the ballet dancers Michel Fokine, Alicia Alonso, and Tamara Toumanova—next to my favorites,
The Little Prince, Orlando, Alice in Wonderland, Babar,
and
Madeline.
Our beds were French antique candy-striped four-posters, Tony’s blue, mine pink, with a white organza frill on top. At night Tony would sing and pound his face into his pillow, which made it hard for me to get to sleep.

Outside, the vegetable garden grew stoutly under the green thumb of Odie Spellman, the head gardener. Odie was in his eighties when we came to St. Clerans. He told me that one day the wind had lifted him and his umbrella several miles in a storm, all the way to Carabane. Mary and I fully believed him. Tony, Patsy, Mary, and I would run behind the stables through the black wrought-iron gates bordered on either side by fuchsia bushes, up the path into the vegetable beds, grazing as we went on Brussels sprouts, cabbage stalks, tiny peas fresh from their pods, prickly gooseberries, red and black currants dangling on the vine, and the occasional fat pink strawberry. Mum encouraged me to have my own garden, and I planted nasturtiums, in the shape of a heart, like I’d seen from the train traveling from Davos to Klosters in Switzerland.

There was the shell of a Norman castle that dated from 1308, but it was kept under lock and key by an inheritor, Mrs. Cole, who came to visit it yearly but would never sell it to my father for fear he would tear it down. This, of course, would have been unthinkable to him. Not that it made any difference to Patsy, Mary, Tony, and me; we climbed easily over the wall and spent many happy hours running up and down its circular staircase of ancient polished stone and playing in the ruins.

In the long summer evenings when it would stay light past our bedtime, we would have endless games of tick, the Irish
version of tag. Later, when we had visitors from England and America, children of our parents’ friends, we learned how to play Sardines, a version of hide-and-seek, and often dressed up to amuse ourselves or, if in luck, a passing adult.

I spent a lot of time in veils and loved to dress up. I remember running back and forth with Tony, in and out of our bedroom at the Little House, putting on outfits to make our parents laugh. After exhausting several different efforts from the dress-up hamper, I charged into the bathroom naked and sprinkled talcum powder on my ass. I ran back into Mum’s bedroom, turned around, exposing my bare bottom, and declared, “I’m Japanese.” And this, for some reason, got a gale of laughter. I remember feeling extraordinary satisfaction at that early applause, and to see Mum and Dad briefly united in mirth was like winning a prize.

•  •  •

To celebrate our arrival in the West, we were invited by the parish to a dance in the church hall at Carabane, some three miles from St. Clerans. I wore a blue tartan dress that had belonged to Grandma Angelica at the turn of the century. The room was dark, with wooden floors and tall windows, and it smelled of damp and porter. Girls on one side of the hall, men on the other. Dad lifted me onto his shoulders and walked me around above the heads of the dancers; I could feel his pride in me, his pleasure in showing me off to the crowd.