Before our trip ended, Dad took us back to the Yellow House to see where I was born, just a short drive from where we were staying. It was as if he wanted us to see the beginning of the story. To show us, this was what it was all for. This was what we were running all that time to save.
When we arrived, the house had been painted gray and a big dog with glistening gums barked and growled and stopped us getting at our past. Dad pushed Caitlin forward. “You’re good with animals,” he said. Tentatively, she let the dog sniff her hand, and it promptly rolled over, panting heavily in the afternoon sun.
We walked up the drive, through the shadowy arches of the apple trees’ twisted branches, gnarled like an old man’s arthritic hands. We trespassed on the lives we could have led had Dad never got in trouble. Cait and I tugged at Dad’s sleeves, urging him back to the car, knowing how foolish it was to break the law now—of all times. But he wanted a closer look. “It’ll be fine,” he said, like he always had.
He wanted to peer through the windows to see what they had done to the rooms we had lived in. He pointed over to the lake, once home to two black swans, now present only in the glimmer of pond skaters, a shadow on the surface. He wrapped his fingers around the wire fence of the tennis court, overgrown with ivy, and his eyes animated memories I could not share. I stood close to him, listening eagerly to his silence, waiting for something to dislodge my infant amnesia, a glimpse of the house from a certain angle, perhaps, and I would see it suddenly through the blurry, colored orbs of a baby’s vision and hear the chirp of the ducklings Mom kept in the paddling pool—but nothing came. The opening pages of my story remained blank.
* * *
The gray house Dad took us to bears no resemblance to the Yellow House in my head. My Yellow House is inescapably beautiful, like a promise that can’t be broken. It has become a mythic place, a place we might go when we die. I built it on the backs of secondhand stories, told to me over the years, and then remembered and retold, so many times the truth has become lost like a fading photograph—curled at the corners with nostalgia and stacked in a box labeled photos #2.
My family moved into the Yellow House in 1981, shortly after Caitlin was born, in anticipation of more babies. Built in the sun-drenched wine country of northern Marin County, like Midas, everything the house touched turned to gold, from its lemon-yellow walls to the bleached-blond crowns of my brother and infant sister.
Mom spent her days barefoot and serene, padding around the eight acres of land with a pair of secateurs in her hand, watching Cait out of the corner of her eye to stop her shoveling dirt in her mouth.
In theory, Dad had quit the pot business by this time, a promise Mom had elicited from him just after Caitlin was born. As he cradled his first daughter in his arms, still astonished by her existence and so in love with every little part of her, Dad was happy to quit. He promised Mom he wouldn’t take on another deal without her permission, and even though this promise sounded flaky and thin, she still pocketed it for safekeeping, knowing she might need it later on.
Dad channeled his surplus energy into developing what he called our “compound.” He reinforced the lake, draining it and installing an overflow system, so the fish he had stocked it with—trout, bluegill, bass—wouldn’t die every summer when the lake dried up. He rerouted the surplus water from winter rain into an irrigation network throughout the gardens so the parched Californian land burst with roses and vegetables.
He built an octagonal tennis court, so the balls didn’t collect in the corners, and designed a state-of-the-art playground with Evan’s input. He installed an intercom so we could all communicate from any room in the house, except it was pointless, as Mom refused to be communicated with at someone else’s whim. He commissioned a guesthouse, a forty-foot swimming pool, a pool house, and a boathouse with a matching rowboat for the lake.
Dad collected vintage cars and art. We played with toys as Warhol’s Mao presided over us, red-lipped and enormous.
He spent a lot of time sitting in a sun lounger by the pool, naked with his emergency red telephone in his lap, working on his tan while contemplating our future. This was to be the start of a great dynasty. It was also important to have bronzed hands because they looked especially handsome beneath a white shirt. A peacock would join him, fan his green feathers, and strut as they basked in each other’s reflected glory.
The Yellow House was overrun with animals. There were two ponies in the paddock, which Mom rode with Cait, on a horse before she could walk, tucked safely between her legs. Dad had sent Mom shopping with $5,000 cash, and she had returned with two rescue ponies and a bag full of charity shop clothes. She returned $4,950 and went to introduce Lucky and Rub to their new home.
There was the Siamese cat, called Sativa, who meowed down the chimney whenever she was locked out, sending great echoing wails through the house until someone opened the back door, and Omi the Akita, a handsome but stupid dog.
On the lake, there was the pair of black swans, imported from Australia as a housewarming present from one of Dad’s associates. And there were the ducks, who finally had ducklings just weeks before we were due to leave. Every night Mom collected the ducklings into a box and brought them inside to be safe from the foxes. Mother duck would wait on the doorstep for her babies to be returned in the morning. One day when Mom was unwell, Dad left the box outside. In the morning, all that was left was torn cardboard and a bloody trail of yellow feathers. Not one baby was left. Mom said that was the first thing Dad did that she could not forgive.
For days afterward, the mother duck waited on the doorstep quacking imploringly. By then, Dad was busy preparing for our departure, and everywhere he went she followed him, flying overhead, hoping he would lead her to her babies. It was the persistent presence of the mourning duck that broke him. He sat down by the lake and cried. He cried for his mistakes. For his family’s lost future and for the duck’s lost babies.
* * *
Throughout his life, Dad had felt blessed, a good fortune foretold in his freckles. His childhood was the stuff of all-American Coca-Cola daydreams, and his luck expanded and grew up with him. Born in Washington Heights in 1943 to a second-generation immigrant family working in the garment trade, by the time he left for college, his parents had moved to a nice house in Long Island and spent summers in the Catskills with other well-off Jewish families. Grandma’s interior design business was taking off and Grandpa had come on board after his own company had declared bankruptcy.
Each winter Dad shoveled snow from neighborhood drives with his friend Jimmy to earn pocket money. Dad had the idea one year of putting all their earnings together to buy a snow plow and be twice as efficient. They made so much money that the following year he could afford to buy his first car, with his parents’ help, a 1962 red Corvette. Jimmy bought him out of the plow, and it didn’t snow again for two years.
When Vietnam came marching in, Dad and his friends enlisted in the reserves, hoping to avoid active duty. Just a week before he was preparing to fly out, a letter fell on his doormat with an honorable discharge due to a heart condition he didn’t have. While friends fought in strange jungles far away, he began to climb the Wall Street ladder.
A combination of luck and guile saw him get out of trouble again and again. The Gods of Good Fortune poured their bounty on him, offering him gold, and land, and love, and he still asked for more, until one day they shook their weary heads, turned their backs, and walked away, leaving him—greedy fool, a mere mortal—to his fate.
According to Mom, this day came when I was nothing more than a cluster of cells in her womb, a secret that no one yet knew. She remembers the conversation they had. It must have been at the beginning of 1983. They were probably in the kitchen. Maybe she was making coconut macaroons or picking the scraps of meat from a carcass of desiccated roast chicken, like I have seen her do so many times since. Maybe Dad was sitting at the other end of the long oak table, where he would usually read the Wall Street Journal and talk to her while she cooked. In a moment of domestic harmony like this, Dad mentioned in an offhand way that Ray had come over that day and asked for his help with another deal.
Mom, eyebrows shooting up and casting him a razor-blade glance, was immediately angry, knowing exactly where the conversation was going, and he felt her anger in the way she crunched the remaining chicken bones into the pot with both hands. “That didn’t last long,” she said.
Ray had previously been a cocaine runner for the Colombians and then used his connections to set up his own trips. He wasn’t someone Dad would normally do business with—he was the one member of Dad’s group who carried a gun, the “pretty scary guy”—but Ray’s girlfriend, Lucy, had been involved with Dad’s last two major smuggles, and Dad trusted her. Lucy had stayed in contact with Thai Tony, who controlled the marijuana fields, and helped Ray set up another smuggle, bringing in 35,000 pounds of high-class Thai stick. They had found a 500-foot-long Greek shipping freighter for the transportation and organized the offload site—all they needed from Dad was to bring together the investors.
Here’s the math that Dad would have done before he spoke to Mom: at $1,000 per pound, the deal would bring in $35 million. That’s $5 million to the Greeks for the boat; $5 million to the investors; $3 million for the offload; and Ray would owe the Thais another $5 million. After expenses of houses and cars and workers, Dad would make $150 a pound to be split among his investors and salespeople, netting him a tidy $3 million. I wonder at what price per pound was our future no longer worth jeopardizing. Because that’s the math he was actually doing.
Dad downplayed the smuggle to Mom; he would just be on the sidelines, and Ray and his people would do all the work. It was like making money in his sleep, he argued.
“We have enough money, Ben,” Mom countered.
What made his task difficult was that Mom could not be motivated by money. Dad would come home after a night of gambling with the boys in the pool house and lay out the hundred-dollar bills on the bed, like a hunter displaying his kill. She would smile at him, mildly amused at his schoolboy coup, but she had no need for more money or the curses it brought. Unlike him, she was cautious of good fortune, knowing it was cruel and fleeting. Mom had walked away from both her previous marriages without demanding her due half of their wealth, because she refused to be indebted to anyone.
Happiness, for Mom, was the first shoots of spring. It was raspberries with lashings of cream. It was a perfectly ripe mango eaten in the bathtub or someone else brushing her hair. She did not enjoy being decorated in finery like a trumped-up Christmas tree. She had survived a decade of modeling without vanity and had no place for it now.
For Mom, money offered security and the freedom to make her own decisions and the decisions that were right for her children. Dad’s desire for excessive wealth, for riches beyond necessity—that meant nothing to her. She loved him. She loved us. She loved the Yellow House. She loved her garden. She loved that now she could contemplate going back to school. She had once wanted to be a doctor like her grandfather, but her own father didn’t think women should go to medical school. She paid her way through NYU regardless, graduating summa cum laude in biology, but her income from modeling was insufficient for her to accept the place at medical school. Now it was possible. She sometimes felt overwhelmed by the luck of it all.
Dad argued that while our family might have enough to last the rest of our lives, the other members of his organization did not. He felt he had a responsibility to create opportunities for them.
“Look around you, look at everything we have,” she pleaded. “There’s just too much at stake now.” And then, “I won’t wait for you if you go to jail.”
“No one’s going to jail,” he said dismissively.
The fact was, Dad had made his mind up already, and she knew it.
“How can you be so sure?” she had asked.
“I just know,” he had replied.
And like that, it was done.
* * *
Or maybe it wasn’t done quite like that, but something close; that’s as close to the truth as we can get. Dad admitted on that visit to San Francisco that Mom had told him not to do the last deal, begged him not to, and he had convinced her it would be okay. He told us that if he had listened to Mom, perhaps none of this would ever have happened, perhaps we would still be living happily in the Yellow House and our family would never have fallen apart, and part of me wished he hadn’t said that, because suddenly this all felt frustratingly avoidable.
I started to build an image of the girl I might have been had Dad never got into trouble. This other Tyler speaks with a real American accent, not my befuddled British hybrid. She goes to high school and is confident and bold and knows how to drive a car. The freckles on her nose have spread across her cheeks with a golden-hued happiness, just like in Saint Lucia, and her brown hair is bleached by the California sun. This American Tyler has parents who carry on loving each other all the way until she’s grown up and beyond, and she has her own bedroom, one room for all her life. One day she will leave home, and go to Berkeley to study, and become a famous film director, and when she returns, the multitudinous family will gather around that long oak table in the kitchen and it will be Home with a capital H, one thing in one place.
As I peered through the windows of the Yellow House, now turned gray, I saw this other future, and, standing beside me, Dad saw it too, the vision making him quiet all the way home.