In My Father's Shadow (33 page)

“And all the lovely money Orson is making from this terrible movie is paying for this suite,” Paola wailed.

“Not
all
, my love. Let’s not exaggerate.”

“It costs much too much to stay here, Orson. You know it does! I can’t bear giving away all that money to the Peninsula Hotel!”

“We’re not giving it away and getting nothing in return,” my father said with a laugh, gesturing at their well-appointed rooms that overlooked Victoria Harbor with its cheerful procession of boats. “You’re staying in the best suite in one of the world’s top hotels.”

“But it’s so impractical, Orson. Why can’t we move to a small, inexpensive hotel, like the one where Christopher and Norman are staying? I’d be perfectly happy in a place like that.”

“No, you wouldn’t, my love. There’d be no photographers to catch you making a grand entrance down the staircase or wearing your latest outfit for afternoon tea in the lobby.”

“Do be serious, Orson.” I could tell from the way Paola’s lovely dark eyes
were flashing that she didn’t like being teased by my father any more than I did. “I’m ready to move to a cheaper hotel right now!”

“But I’m
not
moving, my sweet.” It was said with quiet finality, the way a parent says no to a child, and Paola found a pretext to flounce out of the room. “I do have an image to maintain,” he muttered to Norman and me, “such as it is.”

For a moment I was able to put aside my own neediness and empathize with my father’s dilemma: how humiliating and depressing it must be for a genius like him to have to appear in a potboiler like
Ferry to Hong Kong
. Perhaps the only thing that made it tolerable was staying in “one of the world’s top hotels,” which had always been his preference, even if he had to pay for it himself.

The following morning, I went up to the suite without Norman, hoping to have a private moment with my father. I found myself alone with Paola instead. “Orson’s going to be shooting all day today,” she explained, then patted the sofa cushion beside her. “Come sit down next to me.” She smiled engagingly. “I’ve been wanting to have a talk with you.”

“Oh? What about?” Something in her voice put me on my guard.

“That time you called up your father in Paris and told him you couldn’t see him anymore . . .”

“But that isn’t what I—”

“He was so hurt! He couldn’t believe you’d turn against him like that.”

“But I—”

“I was with him when you called, and I saw his reaction with my own eyes.” She paused, studying me, no longer smiling. “So many people in Orson’s life — people he loved and trusted—have betrayed him in the end, and so you can imagine how bitter it was for him when you, his own daughter —“

“But I
didn’t
betray him, Paola! It was my mother who—”

“Orson said you turned away from him because you didn’t trust him. That is a betrayal, not to trust your own father!”

There was so much I could have said in my defense, but I saw it would do no good. To break the escalating tension, Paola called up room service and ordered coffee for us both. Then, turning back to me, she continued on a note of wonder: “I don’t understand how you could do such a thing. It would never happen in an Italian family. The only way I can explain it, as I told Orson, is that you must be very close to your mother.”

“Actually, we’re not that close. My mother doesn’t like me very much.”

“She doesn’t? I can’t imagine a mother who doesn’t love her own child.”

“Then you should meet mine some day.”

“You say that so coldly, Christopher. I have had many ideas about you and what you are really like, but I never imagined any daughter of Orson’s could have a cold heart.”

I got up and walked over to the window so that Paola would not see my eyes filling with tears. Behind me I heard a discreet knock on the door. Our coffee had arrived on a gleaming silver tray. “Do you take sugar?” asked the stepmother who saw me as unfeeling and capable of wounding her beloved Orson.

“No, thank you.” I glanced at my watch. “Oh, I didn’t realize it was so late. I’m supposed to meet Norman at the tailor’s.” I rushed off without saying goodbye.

S
TILL HOPING TO
see my father on his own, I went to his suite the following morning and found him at work in his usual armchair by the window. “Paola’s out having her hair done,” he told me distractedly, then went back to his scribbling. I sat down on the couch and waited. Time passed and I was beginning to think I should leave him to his work, when he looked up at me, scowling, as though my presence had brought back unwelcome memories. To my surprise, he suddenly asked, “Do you ever see Chubby Sherman?”

“Yes, I do. As a matter of fact, he came to our wedding.”
And you didn’t
.

“I suppose he’s given you an earful about me.”

“Well . . .”

“Just as I thought.” He chomped on his cigar, but he was no longer scowling. “He did the most terrible thing to me, you know.”

“You mean when he left your Mercury Theatre company?”

“I mean the
way
he left me. If he’d reached the point where he couldn’t take it anymore, he should have come to me and talked to me, man to man. This was my dear old friend from Chicago, you know, the actor I believed in long before anyone had heard of him. This was the man who had eaten at my table, befriended my wife and child . . .” He paused, his eyes misting. “And he didn’t have the decency or even the professional courtesy to let me know he was leaving me. Not a phone call. Or even a note if he was too embarrassed to talk to me. That’s what I can’t forgive, Christopher. Our ship wasn’t sinking, far from it, when our dear Mr. Sherman turned into a rat.”

“The first rat in history to leave a ship that wasn’t sinking.”

“That’s good,” he muttered, but he didn’t laugh. After relighting his cigar, he went on, “We’d planned our entire second season with Chubby in mind, and when he left us at the last minute, there was no time to recoup. I knew we were finished as a repertory company, and I couldn’t believe Chubby had done this to me. I lay in bed for days, trying to believe it . . .”

His voice trailed off as he revisited the scene of his first betrayal by a good friend and colleague. The first of many.

I
N THE DAYS
that followed, I found it awkward whenever the four of us got together, which we did almost every evening. Yet I seemed to be the only one feeling the strain. Paola put herself out to be charming, and my father regaled us with witty anecdotes. Norman’s buoyant laugh rang out in the right places, and any onlooker would have assumed we were all having the time of our lives. I envied Norman his easy capacity to enjoy himself. He seemed oblivious to the undercurrents that were bothering me, and he plunged into the conversation whenever there was an opening, which was not often. Unless my father or Paola asked me a direct question, I said very little. Periodically my father would exclaim to Paola in his most velvety voice, “Isn’t my daughter beautiful?”

“Especially when she’s blushing,” Paola would reply with her vivacious laugh.

I wanted to ask my father if that was all he saw when he looked at me with his penetrating eyes — a beautiful young woman who happened, amazingly, to be his daughter. Now that we had spent some time together again, was there really nothing else about me that awakened his admiration? Why couldn’t he observe to Paola, “Isn’t my daughter clever?” Better yet, “Isn’t it wonderful to have Christopher with us?”

My shyness was hardly helping the situation, nor were my mixed feelings about Paola. I could see her good qualities and wanted to like her, but that was difficult now that I knew how she felt about me. Then the girlish, flirtatious way she behaved with my father made me uncomfortable, even jealous, as though my lovely, young stepmother had displaced me in my father’s affections. We were too close in age to behave like a stepmother and stepdaughter. Now that I had met Paola, I realized Granny Hill had been right about her. Paola was so determined to make Orson behave like a father to Beatrice — a feat she had not yet achieved — that she would do everything to put Beatrice forward at the expense of me and my half sister Rebecca.

My father with his third wife, Paola Mori, and their daughter Beatrice.

One night my father took us to a well-known “floating restaurant,” as the boats converted into restaurants were called in the fishing colony of Aberdeen. At the entrance, we ordered the fish we wanted for dinner while they were still swimming or scuttling around in a huge tank. “Now that’s what I call fresh,” my father laughed while ordering several lobsters. We were then ushered ceremoniously to our table.

During the superb meal, Paola began to boast about her cooking. “When you come to visit us in Fregene,” she told us, “I will make you a
pasta d’amore
that will be more delicious than all the fishes in the sea.”

“What you mean, my love, is that you will go out to the kitchen while our cook is making dinner and sniff the pots and lick the spoon she used to stir the sauce.”

“How can you say that, Orson? You know what a good cook I am!”

“It’s true you’re very good at tasting the sauce after someone else has made it. In fact, there is no one better.”

“Oh, you’re impossible! Why won’t you take me seriously?”

My father began to laugh in his inimitable way, while my stepmother pouted and Norman tactfully changed the subject.

After dinner we boarded a junk my father had hired to take us for a moonlit sail up and down Victoria Harbor. For my father and Paola, kissing and murmuring endearments to each other, it was a moment of high romance, but
for me it was as embarrassing as if I had come upon them naked in the act of love. Even my gregarious Norman found nothing to say, nothing to dispel our growing discomfort as we rode the choppy waters, the junk rocking under our feet, its red sail creaking in the wind. The two of us retreated to the other end of the boat where Norman put a comforting arm around my shoulders. I fixed my eyes on the gentle hills of Hong Kong rising and falling as though they were breathing — the hills wearing diamond necklaces of lights.

M
Y FATHER HAD
to spend an entire day on location in Macao, and I was delighted when he invited Norman and me to accompany him. (Paola, Beatrice, and Marie were staying behind in Hong Kong.) At last I had a chance to spend considerable time with my father on his own. I was up half the night, going over in my mind what I might say or do to reestablish myself in his eyes as a loyal, loving daughter. My memories of our times together in Europe, before the Fatal Phone Call, gave me hope. Surely, the relaxed, fun-loving Daddy I had known as a schoolgirl had not entirely disappeared into the polite father who talked to me as though he were being interviewed on television.

We left Hong Kong at six in the morning, traveling with the cast and crew on the same ferryboat being used in
Ferry to Hong Kong
. Standing at the railing beside my father, watching the churning waters below, I realized I could not make any of the impassioned speeches that had held off sleep the night before. “I was so impressed with the way you handled that drunk in the elevator the other night,” I told him instead. Clearly, he had no idea what I was talking about. “The drunken man who wanted your autograph and was so rude about it?”

“Oh, that.”

“And you were so polite and gracious to him.”

“Well, I’m glad I’ve done something to impress you, Christopher.” Yet how low in spirits he sounded.

“Oh, Daddy, you know . . . I mean . . . oh, I don’t know what to call you these days.”

“What’s wrong with Daddy?”

“I’m not a little girl anymore.”

“That is true.”

“Would you . . . would you mind if I called you Father?”

“Not at all. In fact, that’s what I called
my
father, you know.
Father
. Yes, it has a nice biblical ring to it.” He laughed delightedly, and I wanted to bury my
head on his massive chest and say how sorry I was, and ask was it true what Paola had said about the phone call, because I had never meant to hurt him, never, and I would do anything to make it right between us again . . . but at that moment, the director’s assistant came up and spirited him away.

After the ferry docked in Macao, everyone went to work on the day’s shoot, everyone except Norman and me, idling on the sidelines and succumbing to the boredom that pervades a movie set. During one long wait between takes, my father sauntered over to us and confided in a stage whisper, “I don’t know how many times I’ve told them that the only way this picture is going to work is if we turn it into a comedy.” It did not look to Norman and me as though the picture would “work” under any circumstances, and as the hours dragged on, we became convinced that possibly the worst movie in cinema history was unrolling before our eyes. For the first time in my life, I felt something new and uncomfortable: pity for my father.

A sudden commotion jolted Norman and me out of our stupor. I heard a voice calling my name, and there on the pier below, waving and struggling to board the ferry, insisting she knew me, was a slim, olive-skinned young woman I recognized: a former schoolmate from Pensionnat Florissant, Didi Jorges. “Didi!” I screamed, rushing down the gangplank. “It’s okay,” I told the men who were restraining her. “She can come on board. She’s my friend.” We were giddy young girls again, laughing and assuring each other that we looked exactly the same, as though five years had collapsed into a few hours.