In My Father's Shadow (9 page)

“Do you know where Italy is, Christopher?”

“No, Daddy.”

“No? What on earth do they teach you in that school of yours? What grade are you in now?”

“Third grade, Daddy. They skipped me again.”

“Don’t they teach geography in the third grade?”

“Yes, but we’ve only studied the geography of California.”

“What? This is appalling!” His thunderous voice made the people in the next booth jump as though they had been shot. Then they swung around and stared at us, open-mouthed. To add to my embarrassment, the waiter appeared, shook out a napkin, and tied it around my neck as though I were a baby in a highchair. “We will have to do something about your education,” my father rumbled, but soon he was lost in the delights of studying the menu
and conferring with the waiter. “Hmmm. How is the lobster bisque? Is it made with fresh cream? And how are the oysters served.” I could see him tasting each dish in his mind, lost in delicious hesitation, as though his well-being depended on whether he ordered the bisque, the oysters, the steamed mussels, or something called
gazpacho
. Meanwhile, I kicked my legs against the hard underside of the booth and studied the signed caricatures of movie stars that covered the walls, looking for people I knew. In the end, I predicted, my father would order what he usually did when we ate here: a Cobb salad, followed by another and another. He would tell me once again that the dish had been invented by the owner of the Brown Derby, David Cobb, and that whenever I ate in restaurants—not a frequent event in my nine-year-old life—I should order what the restaurant was famous for, listed on the menu as
the specialty of the house
. Now he lowered the menu and bathed me in one of his marvelous smiles. “What will you have, darling girl?”

“A hamburger and a vanilla milkshake, please.”

“Again?” The smile faded.

“Yes, please, Daddy.”

“Why don’t you be more adventurous today? How about some oysters?” I made a face. “Have you ever eaten one?” I shook my head. “Then how do you know you won’t like it? You may not know where Italy is, but we can certainly do something to educate your palate.” A burst of wheezy laughter and a conspiratorial wink at the waiter. “Bring my daughter a dozen oysters, please.”

“Oh no, Daddy, I’ll be sick.”

“Nonsense. Oysters are good for you.”

The next ten minutes were misery. To distract myself from the impending disaster of gagging on the oysters and then having to run to the restroom to throw up, I asked him why he was going to Italy.

“To be in a movie,” he said, sighing. “Not mine, unfortunately. Someone else’s. But if I want to keep working as an actor, I have to go where the work is, you know.”

“Oh.”

“Is that all you have to say? Just ‘oh’? Don’t you want to know
what
movie or what part I’m going to play?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“I see you’re as blasé as all the other Hollywood kids, and how I make my living doesn’t really interest you.”

I didn’t know what
blasé
meant, but from his tone, I could tell it was a disappointing quality for me to have. At such moments, the euphoria of being
with my father became infused with anxiety. What if I didn’t measure up? Could I be myself and also be Orson’s kid? At that moment the waiter set before me a plate of oysters, so fishy-smelling my nose began to twitch. I stared down at the fat, grayish white globs stuck to their shells and told myself I might be able to get them down if I closed my eyes and pretended they were raw eggs.

“Now use that small fork to dig one out … That’s right, Christopher. Now sprinkle a little lemon juice on it. There you go. Don’t sniff it, for God’s sake. Eat it!”

“Do I have to chew it, Daddy?”

“Down the hatch!” He watched while I poured one down my throat and felt it wiggle as though it were an eyeball blinking open. “Now isn’t that delicious?”

“Yes, Daddy,” I lied. Then, after a nervous pause, “Do I have to eat them all?”

“Just one more. That’s my girl. Now was that so terrible?”

“No.”

“You have to
try
things in life, Christopher. There’s a great big world out there that has nothing to do with Hollywood. Geography doesn’t begin and end with California, you know. Now what shall we order next? I’m going to have another Cobb salad …”

“I’ll have a hamburger and a vanilla milkshake.”

“Dear God, it’s hopeless!” He laughed, good-humoredly, though.

The people in the next booth kept gawking at us and whispering among themselves, which meant they must be “civilians” (as movie people referred to anyone who wasn’t “in pictures” like themselves). While our neighbors made me uncomfortable, my father paid them no more attention than if they had been flies buzzing on the other side of a screen door. He was between his second and third Cobb salad when one of them approached our booth, armed with a menu and a pen. “May I have your autograph, Mr. Welles?”

“Certainly. Where would you like me to sign?”

“Right here, Mr. Welles, and I just wanted to say …” Eager to spout his opinions of
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
, the stranger lingered while my father continued smiling, nodding, murmuring, “Thank you so much. That’s so kind of you.”

Why does this always have to happen when I’m alone with Daddy?

“Autographs are stupid,” I burst out after the interloper had returned to his booth.

“Shhh!” My father put a finger to his lips. “I happen to agree with you, but you can’t tell a person that something he wants is stupid. That would be very rude.”

“But, Daddy,” I babbled on, “kids at school have autograph books, and they go around showing them off to other kids and boasting they’ve got Elizabeth Taylor or Clark Gable, and sometimes they get into fights about who’s got the biggest stars in their book. It’s so
stupid
!”

“Now I know what to get you for Christmas!” He gave me a twinkling look. “An autograph book!”

“You know, Daddy,” I rushed on, “one of my teachers asked me to get your autograph, but I told her you were away, making a movie, and I didn’t know when you’d be back.”

“You shouldn’t have said that.” He looked at me reproachfully, then sighed. “What is your teacher’s name?” After I told him, he scribbled a message on the back of a menu. “Now you give this to your teacher the next time you see her, and don’t ever refuse another request for my autograph.”

“All right, Daddy.”

“When someone asks for your autograph, they’re paying you a compliment, don’t you see?”

“But why do they have to bother us when we’re having lunch? Why don’t you ask them to come back later?”

He laughed though I hadn’t meant to be funny. “Well, Christopher, I hope for your sake that you never become famous.”

“Oh, I don’t want to be famous, Daddy.”

“You don’t? Why not?”

“I want to be a civilian, like Marie.”

“So you’re going to grow up to be a nanny. Well, now I’ve heard everything,” and he laughed so long and with such gusto, throwing back his head, his chest heaving, that he had to wipe his eyes with a napkin.

When my father hugged me goodbye that day and told Shorty to drive me home, neither one of us realized that the next time we met, it would not be in Hollywood. In going to Italy, my father assumed he would not be there any longer than it took to shoot his scenes in
Black Magic
. While abroad, he also hoped to find financial backing for a movie of his own based on Shakespeare’s
Othello
. He had no idea that his jaunt to Europe to appear in a movie would stretch into years of wandering from country to country, hat in hand.

So ended the Hollywood chapter of our lives.

“I
F
I
HAVE TO
go to Daddy’s school in Woodstock, why can’t Marie go with me?” I demanded of my mother during the “safe” hour when she was having breakfast in bed. How fresh and beautiful she looked in the early morning, her skin glowing as though a thousand tiny candles had been lit inside her.

“You’re too old to have a nanny, Chrissie.” She lit an unfiltered Camel cigarette, her hand trembling.

“I’m not too old. I know lots of kids my age …” I was not yet ten.

“Besides,” my mother rushed on in a too bright voice, “you’re going to be living with Hortense and Skipper, and you know how much they love you. Orson lived with them when
he
was a little boy. Why, the Hills are practically your grandparents.”

“I don’t want to live with them, Mommy.”

It was as though she couldn’t hear me. “They’ll take
marvelous
care of you, you’ll see, darling, and after a while you’ll love being with them and you won’t miss Marie at all.”

“I
will
miss her! I will!” I had not meant to shout and stamp my foot. “I want to stay here with Marie and Granddaddy!”

“But not with me, is that it?” Suddenly her voice was icy and her eyes were flashing like blue knives. I started backing toward the door.

“No, Mommy, I didn’t mean …”

“Whatever you meant, it doesn’t matter, because you
can’t
stay here.” She pushed the breakfast tray off her lap with such force that an empty juice glass fell over. “You know Charlie and I are getting divorced.”

“But why, Mommy? Why do you have to get divorced?”

“Oh, really, Chrissie, what a little bore you are!” I could not decide if she was going to leap out of bed and shake me until my teeth rattled or bury her
head in the pillows and burst into tears. “Who gives a damn what you want anyway?” she exploded. “You’re going to live with the Hills until I can put my life back together again, and that’s that. And if you’re going to cry, go and do it somewhere else! My nerves are shot to hell this morning!”

I was not going to cry—she was—but I knew better than to rush back to the bed and throw my arms around her. She was no longer the amenable mother of the morning but the edgy woman with the volcanic temper who ruled the rest of the day. I pretended I was leaving, but hovered outside her doorway, listening to her muffled sobs. Soon I would be living in someplace called Woodstock, Illinois, where my father had gone to school, and my mother would be living in New York City. Without me. What would her bedroom in New York look like? Would she decorate it in soft shades of lavender, pink, and gray to match the one she was leaving behind in Beverly Hills? Would I visit her in New York and perch again at the foot of her bed in the early morning? And who would carry in the breakfast tray now that Marie was being “let go”?

I tried to imagine some future time when I would find my mother pounding on her portable typewriter at her elegant antique desk, or stretched out on her pink velvet chaise longue, her head raised on a mound of lacy pillows, reading a novel while she nibbled on her nails.
Why can’t I live with you in New York? Or with Daddy in Italy? How long are you going to leave me with Granny and Skipper?
Unasked and unanswered, my questions hung in the air, which smelled in equal portions of her spicy perfume and the cigarette butts piled up in crystal ashtrays.

I
HAD NOT
been a student at Todd School for Boys very long when Skipper, the school’s headmaster, wrote to my father in Rome: “A much too efficient secretary ruins approximately every tenth day of a fast ebbing life by placing on my desk a list of parents to whom I owe letters … Today your name appears on such a list! I owe you an orientation report. My God!” While Skipper feared “this may herald the end of a beautiful friendship,” he went on to report that I was “pretty damn well oriented” and that “if Hortense can stand it … I’m now quite certain it will prove really grand for Chrissie.” He then repeated to my father what he had written my mother the week before: “The initial cold plunge into her new environment has drawn from Chrissie none of the squeals of terror I anticipated, rather prolonged shrieks of exuberant delight.”

Left:
Roger “Skipper” Hill.
Right:
Hortense Hill.

While I liked living with the Hills in their cozy, rambling farmhouse far from the campus, being the only girl in a school for boys left little room for exuberance. It was with relief that I returned to the farm at the end of the school day and to the unfailing source of warmth and support I found in Granny Hill. Looking back, I doubt that I could have survived my years at Todd without her, and she was to remain, throughout my life, a far more loving mother than my own.

The farm was a soothing place for a high-strung child whose previous world had collapsed without explanation. I liked to sit in the empty barn and listen to the whoosh of wings when barn swallows flew in and out, or lie on my back in fields of alfalfa and listen to the wind rustle through them. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend it was the sound of the ocean on that long-ago beach in Santa Monica, where my father had been close by, and which seemed to me now the only place where I had been truly happy.

Yet I was quite happy when I dashed into Granny and Skipper’s bedroom early in the morning and snuggled down between them in their messy bed. (It brought back those sun-drenched mornings I had spent sandwiched between Daddy and Rita in their bed.) Although the Hills looked ancient to a child of ten, they were enjoying a vigorous middle age. Granny was growing stout and matronly but glowed with good health. Skipper’s unruly hair had turned bone white, but his unquenchable energy kept him younger than Peter Pan.