What falls away : a memoir (2 page)

"Not at all," said he, "I'm your grandfather."

As my mother did, Eileen Taylor, our cook, told me stories of Ireland that were thrilling, powerful, and beautiful; they summoned things ancient and yet to come. Eileen was a quick-witted, warmhearted woman with high cheekbones and a handsome face, and my invaluable ally in the adult world. Most afternoons we had tea in the "grown-ups' kitchen," and my teacup was a little replica of her larger one. When we finished, she'd teU my fortune with the tea leaves on the bottom of the cup. In the mornings, while I waited for the Marymount school bus with Eileen in the bay window seat of our living room, I listened in awe to her accounts of banshees, the warrior Cuchulain, fairies in the woods and at the bottom of the garden; of rocks with magical powers, and children who disappeared from sodden fields or their nursery beds, and of lamp-lit houses with more rooms than anyone could count, where ghosts did mischief. These stories were seamlessly woven with those of Jesus and His miracles, the cross, the nails, the crown of thorns, an agony beyond comprehension, and out of everything the rising in an exultation of angels, and oh the glory and mystery of all these things.

When the school bus came, I said tearfully, "I'm already homesick." But the big girls on the bus were jolly, singing "Put Another Nickel In," and "Good Night, Irene," and eventually I sang too.

I was frightened of the nuns waiting at school, frightened then and, in varying degrees, throughout the thirteen years of my Catholic schooling. I wonder what my life would have been like had I not been afraid of so many things. Sitting on that school bus, I was afraid (in no particular order) of amputations, nuns, God, the devil (especially the devil), certain diseases but mainly leprosy, and my

nannies—all of them, even Mary Red Socks, who only came on weekends. I worried about saymg or doing some-thmg that would make my mother or father love me less, or that my parents or my siblings would die, vacuum cleaners, killing someone, getting lost, and grown-ups in general— not including Eileen of course, or Jess the gardener, or our neighbor Mr. Boyer.

My first nine years were spent in Beverly Hills, California, in a ranch-style house, U-shaped around a brick patio with a tile fishpond at the center. I liked watching the goldfish doze in the sun and dart beneath the slimy lily pads. At half an acre, our garden was large by Beverly Hills standards, an explosion of orange, lemon, magnolia, banana, and olive trees, a profiasion of flower beds. We had to watch out for the sprinklers when we ran barefoot on the large, manicured green lawns.

Our right border marked the beginning of the even bigger property of Hal Roach, a producer responsible for Our Gang, and the Laurel and Hardy movies that he screened for us on special occasions in the oak-paneled basement of his Tara-like mansion. In his late fifties he had fathered three little girls, the eldest of which was my closest friend, Maria. The two gardens were separated by an easy fence for climbing, and a strip of woodland that was for us comparable to Sherwood Forest. Their swimming pool was far grander than ours or anybody else's: Olympic-sized, it was tiled all around with lifelike pictures of sea creatures. You could swim down to the deepest bottom and stab the octopus in the eyeball with a rubber knife. Our playhouse, however, had it way over theirs, with its two full rooms, a slanted shingled roof, shuttered windows, and a tiny white picket fence defining its front yard.

But the Roaches lived in an honest-to-goodness mansion, containing whole corridors we children were not permitted

to explore, and this lent an air of mystery and foreboding to their house. I wondered too at the tiny figure of Mrs. Roach, endlessly at work around the grounds, weeding and sweeping and weeping into her broom.

My own mother, moving gracefully through the house and garden, arranging flowers, breakfasting on a white wicker tray in her bedroom, was easily the most beautiful creature imaginable. She was Maureen O'Sullivan, a famous movie star, and her voice was soft with a light Irish accent. She seemed possessed of magical qualities, an unendmg supply of stories, and the ability to make me feel safe and happy. She was, of course, unaware of her own perfection or the unsettling, elusive quality that could flood me with yearning and loneliness. At night I lay in bed listening for the rustle of silk or taffeta, waiting for her perfume to overpower the scent of jasmine.

That time shines now like a beautiflil, far-off, golden dream: gentle sunshine, dappled shade, butterflies in February, and barefoot summers, the nurseries of Beverly Hills, where children were tended by British nannies in crisp, white uniforms, and feted with clowns, ponies, magicians, castles for cakes, and personal soda fountains.

There were seven children in my family. Our father had fought in World War II, which might explain the gaps of several years between and after the births of my older brothers. Michael was the oldest, then Patrick, and I followed as the senior of the ensuing cluster of five.

Mike was so smart that even when they skipped him a grade, he got straight A's. And he was handsome too, an Adonis, people use to say. The girls were nuts about him. I could tell from the way they got all mushy around him and they called so often that my parents had to get him his own phone number. There was always a bunch of his friends around, tinkering with cars on the driveway, in and out of

the swimming pool, with music going, chasing here and there, cutting up—Mike had it all. He was the bright and shining hope of my family. He's gonna be the President, I used to thmk, and the topper was that he loved me. I never doubted it.

"How's it going, Mouse?" he'd say, because I was a runt, and I'd feel my face go all hot and I could scarcely look at him for happiness. The presence of my brother's friends around the house almost chased away lingering tendrils of the dark nights and made the world seem well and happy and safe.

During the summer after polio, Mike got his first steady girlfriend, Joan Bailey. She was Mike's age, fifteen, and I tried unsuccessfully not to like her. I discovered that Joan and Mike had a magical gift: they could transform any mundane, done-it-a-thousand-times-before dumb thing into a mysterious, thrilling, never-done-it-before adventure, and their delight in it and in each other was a revelation. I was mesmerized and trailed around after them, hoping they would take me mto their enchanted circle.

"When I first met you," Joan Bailey remembers, "you were going around pmching your cheeks, and I asked Mike why. He told me you'd had polio, and said, 'She thinks if she looks healthy. Mom will let her ride her bike to the store with the others.' You wanted to go with everyone else but you were so pale and thin, your parents were always worried about you, and kept you quiet. You were reading all the time. I remember that summer you read David CopperfieU to your brothers and sisters."

Johnny, a year younger, was closest to me in age and interests. For years, we could credibly pass for twins. If wishing was all it took, I would have been a boy too, entranced as I was by explorers, knights, pirates, soldiers, cowboys, jockeys, deep-sea divers, Robin Hood, and Superman. What exactly it meant to be a woman wasn't at all clear to me. I teetered on my mother's pointy high-heeled shoes,

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and studied her strange undergarments—the girdles, stockings, garter belts, corsets, brassieres—and I worried.

My sister Prudence, next in line to Johnny, was tall, willowy, and a fast swimmer. (All my brothers are tall. I'm the shortest one in the family, perhaps because of polio.) Prudy's dimples were much admired, and her glasses with pale blue plastic frames were forever sliding off her small, freckled nose. She was wildly emotional, totally honest, adventurous, and quick to laugh.

Like our father, Mike, and me, Stephanie, the next to the youngest child, was blond and, in those days, on the chubby side. Her eyes, huge and round, gave her a startled look, as if she had just v/itnessed a train crash. The rest of her face was pinkish and tranquil; it made no statements. When she grew up, she was so pretty that for as long as she wanted she earned a living as a model. Steffi never said much, but she observed the goings-on within the family, and occasionally revealed a position of sorts with her amused, surreal comments. In our brawling family, her neutrality and detached, off-center humor earned respect.

If the Farrow kids pooled freckles, we'd have sunk a dinghy. It was a toss-up whether Patrick or Tisa, the youngest, had more. The nanny liked her best—she was a good kid, smart and funny. When she was six or seven she'd memorize the whole TV Guide and go around announcing what was going to be on—stuff nobody'd even heard of, because we were only allowed to watch The Mickey Mouse Club and The Lone Ranger.

Next door the Roach girls, Maria, Jeannie, and Kathy, fitted perfectly into the gaps between our ages. Other kids came and went, but this was our essential gang. Being so much older, Michael and Patrick had no interest in our activities, which for the most part were pretty standard stuff. We climbed trees, built forts and clubhouses, argued, raced, explored, spied, played on rooftops, rode bikes, roller-skated, and swam. After our toddler years, the nan-

nies didn't even try to keep up with us: we ran wild and unchecked between the two properties and in the alleyways of Beverly Hills.

In front of our house, the ivy lay thick and tangled in the soft shade of eight gnarled olive trees that, though beau-tiftil, were not much good for climbing. But at the tip of the narrow strip of woods that divided the Farrow-Roach terrain there grew a giant pine of rare perfection to which we gave a no-frills name, the Big Tree. Its branches reached far out over the sidewalk to meet the tall palms that lined Beverly Drive, and they were so powerfully seductive that even my parents were discovered, one magical evening none of us will ever forget, trying to climb up into them.

At the highest attainable level of the tree, the massive trunk parted and branched up toward the sky, forming a nest. It was to this place, above the rooftops of Beverly Hills, that I brought the small pets that had passed through my life—the dead hamsters, lizards, guinea pigs, birds, and turtles of my affection, each in an open box covered tightly with Saran Wrap. I placed them there, among the branches, and over time, with deepest respect, I watched them rot.

So often in my dreams I am there still, where the ivy tangles. I see my parents standing in front of my house. They are young, and the sun is in their hair. They are calling me to dinner. I run toward them with all my child feelings, hot from play, out of breath, muddy hands, a wig-gly tooth—but I do not cross the threshold of my home. I never enter, although I have dreamed this dream thousands of times. For I know that if I go inside, i{ I take my place at the table, I will have to live my life from that moment all over again, and invariably the weight of this thought awakens me.

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As children of show business, we came naturally to the business of shows. Rarely was the Roach/Farrow clan with-

out a play in production. They were meandering, melodramatic scenarios constructed around any characters that caught our fancy. Consistently and shamelessly, I took all the best roles, female and male.

Our audience was likely to include an occasional valiantly patient and tactful parent (usually Mrs. Roach or my mother), and any member of the household staff or stray friend we could beg or bully into attendance. When my grandmother was over from Ireland she would be there, cigarette between her lips, oblivious to the long ash that I found so absorbing and that dropped just anywhere at all. Granny was a "character," the grown-ups used to say, and for that I loved her all the more. We had a club, the two of us, down in the cellar, with the suitcases pushed around to make a little, secret place. There she talked about Ireland and the strangeness of growing old, and she would show me her hands, and pinch the veins to make them stand up all by themselves. It was hard to believe that my mother was really Granny's daughter, and it was troubling to hear them speak to each other m distant, chill voices.

Tour buses crept up and down the streets of Beverly Hills, pausing in front of each celebrity's house while a guide chirped starry anecdotes into a microphone—you could hear them coming a half block away. We accepted their presence as inevitable and unremarkable as the sunshine, or the grand houses, crystalline swimming pools, nannies, cooks, gardeners, and the gaze of strangers. It was obvious that for the quizzical faces peering out of the bus windows, movie stars* houses, their kids, and even their dogs were of interest—along the lines, we speculated, of a visit to the zoo, or even a Disneyland ride. That was a lot to live up to. So for the folks on the buses, our shows were frantic, in the broadest, operatic style. We spattered ourselves with ketchup-blood that was stored, along with the rubber dag-

ger, under the rhododendron bush. We strangled, stabbed, staggered, crawled, rolled, and writhed. And we howled and screamed at the top of our lungs.

Drawn by dreams, and some mysterious brew of talent, de-termmation, looks, and luck, our parents came from towns and cities across the United States and Europe too, to their positions in the Hollywood constellation. Once there, in that rarefied setting, it was easy to lose touch with origins, roots, people, perspective.

They couldn't know how their gifts had come to them, or how long they would endure. They worked and played, and fashioned their lives in dazzling light, while insecurity and apprehension curled into tight little balls, and burrowed deep into unacknowleged silence. But over the years, a creeping awareness of the precariousness of their place fed the dark, hidden things that grew, malignant, demanding light, pushing through the cracks in the smooth, polished surface . . .

R I loved my parents with a fierceness and an incomprehension that was terrifying.

My mother was born in 1911, above a draper's shop in the little town of Boyle, Roscommon, in the west of Ireland. Whatever magic is in her soul, she tells me, comes from there. Her own mother, Mary Frazer, was a beautiful and amusing woman, but not a happy one. She found marriage difficult, and never learned to cook or keep house. When her husband said he liked lamb, she bought a whole sheep and hung it over the bathtub, where it dripped blood for days.