In My Father's Shadow (34 page)

“But what are you doing in Macao?” I asked her.

“I live here. Don’t you remember?”

Then it came back to me. Of course, Didi was Portuguese and her family had settled years ago in the Portuguese colony of Macao. Although she and I had liked each other at school, we had failed to keep in touch later on, which made me feel a little ashamed now that I saw how glad Didi was to see me again.

Once Didi was on board, I introduced her to Norman and my father. Then, to our surprise, she proposed that we all come to her house for lunch. My father demurred. Wouldn’t we be putting her to a great deal of trouble at the last minute? Didi insisted that nothing would give her or her family greater pleasure than to have us share their midday meal. Her eyes sparkled when we accepted, and I realized that, as pleased as she was to see me again, nothing could beat the thrill of having Orson Welles to lunch.

How sweet and genuinely himself my father was as we sat around the
dining room table with Didi and her family. We were treated to an elaborate five-course lunch, and as each delicacy was set before him, my father exclaimed that this was the best Portuguese food he had ever eaten. Shyly at first, Didi’s mother and other family members asked him a few discreet questions about himself, which he answered with such endearing modesty that everyone around the table visibly relaxed. Soon they were all laughing and talking as though having a world-famous actor and director to lunch was nothing out of the ordinary.

After lunch Didi brought out some photo albums that commemorated our schoolgirl days in Pensionnat Florissant. She was eager to share her memories of our adventures in Lausanne and on the ski slopes of Crans-sur-Sierre, whereas I felt embarrassed. Didi recalled the name of every girl in every photo, while I, at best, dimly recognized a face here and there.

After saying our goodbyes to the Jorges family and on our way back to the ferry, my father took me to task. “I felt awfully sorry for your poor friend Mimi — “

“Didi.”

“ — trotting out her photo albums, which she was so anxious to share with you, and then you just sat there in a trance.” He frowned at me. “How is it possible, Christopher, that you remember so little about your days in finishing school?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it will come back to me one day.”

“Maybe it will come back to you? What in God’s name is the matter with you
now
?” Although he laughed, I could tell he found my lapse of memory disquieting. “It isn’t as though you went to that fancy school in Lausanne fifty years ago, you know.”

But I remember everything you ever told me
, I wanted to tell him.
Everything we ever did together. Every moment with you. Everything
.

“Y
OU CAN
’
T LEAVE
Hong Kong until you’ve had Sunday brunch at the Repulse Bay Hotel,” my father declared. “It’s a grand old tradition at one of the world’s grandest hotels.” So, on our last Sunday, my father hired a limousine, and we made the scenic trip to Repulse Bay. In this tranquil spot, a British colonial hotel even more imposing than the Peninsula stood overlooking the bay and miles of beach. Here we enjoyed the famous brunch.

When we had finished eating, my father suggested a stroll on the beach, but Paola preferred to sit in the hotel garden, and Norman stayed behind to keep her company. I had given up hope of having more time alone with my
father but now here we were, sauntering down to the beach, with no Paola, Norman, Marie, or Beatrice trailing behind us.

I had been waiting for such a moment to tell my father something close to my heart. Now I came out with it. “You know, while I was living in Chicago, I saw
Citizen Kane
several times, and I thought it was the most extraordinary movie I’d ever — “

“
Citizen Kane!
Good Christ, that’s all I ever hear about. You’d think I’d never done anything else in my life.”

I was dumbfounded by his reaction, but then I realized he didn’t seem to be talking to me. He was thundering away instead at a huge, invisible audience gathered around us. “This one picture I made in my hot youth, when I didn’t know any better and used every trick shot in the book just to prove I could do it, this is the picture they rave about. This is the one they hold up to me like the gold standard so that every other picture I’ve made falls short of the mark. And now my own
daughter
comes prattling to me about
Citizen Kane
. I’m not to be spared even that!”

He walked on, propelled by his demons, while I hung back, still wanting to tell him what a revelation
Citizen Kane
had been to me. Until I saw it, I had never imagined a movie could also be a work of art. And while I was sitting in that movie theater in Chicago, thrilled by his handiwork up there on the screen, he had seemed close to me again, as though we were back in Europe, wandering through an art gallery, and he was taking me by the hand. Opening my eyes to greatness.

I
T WAS OUR
last day in Hong Kong before flying back to Seoul. I was about to go into the Peninsula Hotel to say my goodbyes when I saw my father getting into a chauffeured car parked out front. “Daddy!” I called out without thinking. He turned, smiled, and held the door open for me.

“I’m on my way to our location for today. Want to come along?” I scrambled into the backseat beside him. “After the driver drops me off, he can take you back to your hotel or wherever you want to go, but at least this way we’ll have a few moments together.” As we drove along, I was transported back to childhood when I had driven with my father to the studio every morning during the frantic filming of
Macbeth
. . . but the illusion crumbled when I heard him say in a low, caressing voice, “You’re so beautiful. I just can’t get over it, how beautiful you are.” He was gazing at me in a way that I found intensely embarrassing.

“It’s been wonderful to see you again, Father.”

“It’s been wonderful for me, too.”

“And I’m so glad you finally got to meet Norman. Isn’t he terrific?”

“Yes . . .” It was said with a hesitation that took me by surprise.

“He’s been awfully good for me,” I rushed on. “I used to be horribly shy. Well, I still am, but Norman has helped me enormously with my self-confidence.”

“Has he? I don’t remember your being that shy or unsure of yourself when you were a little girl, or a teenager for that matter, so this must be something new.”

We’ve spent days together
, I thought,
and yet we’ve shared so little of ourselves
. My father was warmly affectionate with me — he had always been that — but the closeness between us was gone. And now, to complicate matters, there was Paola, who no matter what she said would never invite me to sample her cooking in the many homes she would occupy with my father. I could not ask my father if he had distanced himself from me because he felt, as Paola claimed, that I had turned against him. Nor could I assure him that I had always taken his side and refused to join the chorus shouting that he was unfit to be my father.

How do you see me, Father? What do you really think of me?
My worst fear, as I had written Granny Hill, was being “a bourgeois vegetable” in his eyes. If he had revised his view of me in Hong Kong, I had merely become a beautiful bourgeois vegetable, which was still insufficient to hold his interest.

“Norman thinks I have a talent for writing,” I suddenly blurted out.

“I’m sure you do.” It was said smoothly, easily.

“He says all I have to do is to start believing in myself.”

“Is that all?” My father laughed softly. “I would think doing a
lot
of writing would be essential, and I mean writing every day, until it becomes a habit you can’t do without . . .” His voice trailed off. Now he was gazing intently out the window, no longer listening.

I wanted to tell him — if only we had more time! — that living in South Korea had been a transforming experience for me. It had expanded my ideas of landscapes, art, architecture, and interior decor. For the rest of my life, I would feel a special connection with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art.

We were nearing our destination. Too late to rattle on about Norman, who had taught me how to cook and now claimed I had far surpassed him. Sometimes we had as many as forty people to dinner, I might have mentioned. And
if I was dressing more stylishly these days, it was also thanks to Norman, who had spent a fortune on my wardrobe while we were here in Hong Kong.

The car stopped. There was just time for me to say, “Norman’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Well, that’s good. I’m glad you’re so happy with him.” The driver was holding the car door open.

“Don’t you think he’s wonderful, Daddy . . . I mean, Father?”
Please say that he is
.

“He’s very nice and very good-looking, and I gather he’s good at whatever it is he does, but I’m afraid . . .” Half in, half out of the car, my father paused, carefully choosing his words. When he spoke again, there was a hint of sadness in his voice. “I’m afraid you’ll find out he’s not enough of a man for you.”

There was no time to ask him to elaborate. In the next moment he was gone.

I
DID NOT SEE
my father again for eight years. In the interim, his prediction about Norman turned out to be correct, and with much heartache on both sides, we were divorced a year after our return to Chicago. It was also in Chicago that I began a career in educational publishing, first getting my foot in the door as a secretary and then working my way up to assistant editor and, finally, a full-fledged editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica. My work took me to Vienna and Los Angeles for long periods, and I also spent about a year in Rome.

What my father had been doing all this time was not clear to me, as we were not often in touch. Although I wrote him letters, which I mailed to his constantly changing addresses, I rarely received a reply. He preferred to make telephone calls or send telegrams, and I usually heard from him at Christmas, provided he knew where to reach me. It was not easy to track me down during that peripatetic stage of my life, when I might be spending Christmas in Vienna or Rome, or perhaps in Lisbon, where my mother and stepfather had moved from Johannesburg. Nor was it any easier to keep up with my father in his gypsy wanderings across Europe with Paola, Beatrice, and their caravan of luggage trailing after him.

At least our meeting in Hong Kong had broken the painful silence between us. I no longer became upset at the mention of his name, nor did tears spill down my cheeks whenever I sat alone in a darkened movie theater, watching him on the screen. What I felt instead was an incurable longing to see him, talk to him, spend time with him, and be invited to his home — along with a stubborn refusal to accept that the little he gave me of himself was all he had to give. No matter how hard I kept trying, he was not going to enfold me into his personal life. He would remain the affable figure who once announced
himself on the long-distance phone in that full-bodied voice of his: “Hello, Christopher? This is your errant father speaking.”

When my father and I did talk on the phone, much of our conversation was wasted on protestations. “But I
did
write to you, Christopher,” he would say in the aggrieved tone of one falsely accused of paternal neglect. “Many, many times. Do you mean to tell me you didn’t get
any
of my letters? Then you must have moved
again
and not told me.” As for why he had not received any of my letters, the only explanation he could offer was that I had sent them to the wrong address unless, in a momentary aberration, I had forgotten to apply the necessary postage. We would then meticulously record each other’s addresses, repeating them several times to be sure we had written them down correctly, and my father would invariably add the address and phone number of his current secretary, whom he portrayed as the most reliable being on earth. She knew where to track him down at any hour of the day or night and would forward his mail to the North Pole if necessary. So there was absolutely no reason in the world why any letter I wrote to him should not reach him. While we were on the subject of writing letters, he wished I would communicate now and then with my little sister Beatrice. “It might help her believe in you,” he said, sounding plaintive. “She thinks I made you up.”

“She doesn’t remember meeting me in Hong Kong?”

“She was only three years old, you know. You can’t expect . . .”

These conversations would leave me fuming. I didn’t believe in the mythical letters he claimed to have written to my “vanishing addresses” as he called them, any more than I believed stamps had fallen off my letters. And why should I write Beatrice, as much of a stranger to me as I was to her? Besides, if my father was really so anxious for Beatrice to get to know me, all he had to do was invite me to his home. During the six months I had lived in Vienna, working on a special project for Encyclopaedia Britannica, I could have spent a weekend with the Orson Welles family in London, and later, when I was living in Rome, I could have visited them in Madrid. It rankled that Paola had invited my half sister Rebecca several times to stay with them and “get to know Beatrice.” And I was still waiting like the wallflower at a dance.

N
EW
Y
ORK
! I had been circling the globe all my life and never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. Then, in the spring of 1967, I returned to the city of my birth. I had not been living in Manhattan more than a few months when I got an unexpected call from my father, who was
staying at the Plaza Hotel. He began, as usual, by saying how difficult it had been to track me down, since the last he had heard I was living in Rome, but “the indefatigable Hills” had come through as always and given him my New York phone number. “I’m in town for a few days,” he went on, “taping my first appearance on the Dean Martin television show.”

“The Dean Martin show?” I hoped I didn’t sound too shocked, but I couldn’t picture my father on a variety show hosted by a pop singer whose public persona was that of a handsome drunk.