“She will recover a future, and I will recover a past.”
San Lorenzo, on Beauchamp Place in London, was my mother’s favorite restaurant long before it became the favored lunch spot of the famous. I will be early, and as I wait for her, I will see a few people I recognize. With my unsteady sense of facial recognition, I won’t know at first whether these are friends, acquaintances, or just faces from movies and magazines. My mother, when she enters this bright, sunlit room, will be one of them. She will look as familiar to me as the royals and movie stars, and as much a stranger. I will recognize her only from photographs. I don’t know the sound of my mother’s voice or the music of her laugh. I don’t know my mother’s face in three dimensions. In the few memories I have of her, she is not looking at me. I see her from the side, driving a car, but it’s her hand on the gearshift that has my attention. And again her hand, as we run for a train. In these memories, I can have been no more than four years old.
I have no sense of my mother’s face in movement. Warm people have mobile expressions, changing from moment to moment—and from the love of the friends who survived her, I know she was warm.
But perhaps I will recognize what she smells like. Smell is, they say, the sense most closely associated with memory. As I sit at our table, nervously picking at a rosetta of bread, I will be hoping that her scent has been stored in some primitive part of my brain so that, when I stand up to embrace her, all sense of strangeness will dissolve. I’m fairly certain that she will be wearing Shalimar.
She has no photos by which to identify me. She will laugh when I explain that she recognized me because I look like my father in drag. I know that my mother found the marks of age beautiful: I have a few of the objects she collected, things that are cracked and stained, faded and frayed. Will she find the lines and sags of my fifty-three-year-old face beautiful, or will they make her sad to see them? My father once told me that one of the rudest insults of age is seeing your children grow old.
Her own face, at thirty-nine, will be at the height of its extraordinary beauty. As a young woman, she looked sad and out of time, her face too dramatic for her years. In time, she grew into it; it no longer overwhelms her. It has acquired fun and lightness and kindness. At last, she is grounded.
My mother was born Enrica Soma, the daughter of Italian immigrants. Her father owned a restaurant in New York, Tony’s, where he entertained customers by standing on his head and singing operatic arias. (My mother’s scrapbook, which I have, contains an illustrated clipping from the New York Times.) When she was eighteen, she appeared on the cover of Life magazine only because she was so beautiful. The caption was “Young Ballerina”; she danced for Balanchine at the New York City Ballet and was already a soloist. I’ve often wondered why she didn’t send me to ballet class; four wasn’t too young to start. I will ask her.
That cover resulted in a train ticket to Hollywood, where she was placed in the back row of Life’s photo of the young starlets of 1949, hands crossed over her heart like a doleful Madonna, labeled, strangely, “Rick Soma.” Center front, sitting cross-legged, is the only one of these hopefuls who made it: Marilyn Monroe. My mother never made a feature film. She married the director John Huston and gave birth to her first child at twenty, my brother Tony, and her second, my sister Anjelica, just after her twenty-second birthday. Did she regret the lost career that I believe she never really wanted? Did she wish she had stayed in New York and had kept dancing? I will ask her.
The name by which everyone knew her was Ricki: a unicorn’s name. I have never met, or heard of, another Ricki. I thought, if I had a daughter, I would name her Enrica Luz, after her two grandmothers, but I would have called her Lulu. I would not have dared to call her Ricki, both because it would feel like sacrilege and because it would have been too heavy a burden for that notional little girl to bear.
My mother had, I think, grown out of wanting to please her tyrannically demanding father. She had, for the first time, embarked on a love affair with a man who was not more powerful and seen in the world than she is. Her glamorous, glittering husband had sucked out her energy and her talents, and after the children have been raised and the house restored and decorated, he had left her in his wake. Why had she hung on to the marriage? Because she was afraid of her father’s explosive wrath? For the identity of “Mrs. Huston”? My mother lived at the intersection of bohemia and society; might divorce have exiled her from at least some of the places she wanted to be? I will ask her.
Her husband had fathered a child with another woman, and she had had a child with another man: me. This other man was married. Every man worth having was married then—and my mother had been brought up to look only at men worth having. My father was not her first married lover; indeed, John Huston was married when she met him. And there were others, once the marriage died. But my father was the one whose child she carried, and I know, from reading her letters to him, that this time she was not quite able to keep her yearning, her frustration, or her fury under control. Did she ever wish I would just disappear and never be born? I will ask her. I will not mind—not even a tiny bit—if she says yes. And I will see in her eyes if she is concealing the truth.
When they opened her safe-deposit box after her death, they found little tags on her most valuable jewelry, with my name and my sister’s name on them. Did Mum have a presentiment that she would die? But then why didn’t she make a will? I will tell her that I’ve been making wills since my early twenties, and I don’t believe it’s tempting fate. I will tell her that my son, her grandson, laughs at me when I say casually that I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. She will be relieved that he is nearly grown, that the pattern is broken: for she, too, lost her mother when she was four.
Having read my mother’s letters in order to write my memoir, Love Child, I know how she thinks, how intensely she feels, what she finds funny, what tormented her. I brought her joy, but I brought her worry, too. Would this not-technically-illegitimate child carry the stigma that she’d manage to sidestep by not getting divorced? What terror must she have felt at the moment of her death, knowing that she would be leaving this fatherless child motherless, too? Everything about me was a risk, with my own happiness the stakes. My name—which means “happy”—was an amulet. She will want to know if it worked.
I will want to comfort her. Though for decades I felt like a problem, a misfit, adrift, I will tell her that I have weathered the turbulence and reached calmer waters. After all, I am now fifteen years older than she lived to be. Not yet forty, she was still caught in the tumult, suspended at the moment when the car crash snatched her away.
We will both order the same thing: prosciutto and figs, veal piccata with lemon risotto and spinach. We will be amused by how quickly we devour our food. I know this because my godmother, seeing how fast I eat, told me that my mother ate quickly, too. I cannot have learned it from her; it must be genetic.
It will be a rather uproarious lunch. Mum will find that I share her love of wordplay and silliness. We will laugh at all kinds of things: incongruities, idiosyncrasies, foibles—our own and those of people we love. I will catch her up on a number of her close friends and tell her about my own beloved friends. She will be amazed to hear how close I am to my biological father and my brother and sister on that side, and how loved I was by my legal father, her husband, who took me as his daughter when she died; and she will feel, if not exactly vindicated, at least relieved that her gamble paid off so spectacularly, impossibly well. We will talk about books and movies and music and places we love. We will linger over dessert—zabaglione—and cappuccinos. We will not want our time together to end.
So I will stretch the rules and, once we have hugged Mara and Lorenzo goodbye—for they, too, will have been resurrected for this lunch—I will teleport Mum to Taos, New Mexico, where I live. She loved people who carved their own path, so she will be happy to see that I have found a place in the world unconnected to either of my families: a majestic landscape and a culture with a complex depth of history. The two-foot-thick adobe walls of my house will remind her of Ireland, and the hundred-mile view to the west, across ranked horizons of extinct volcanoes, will remind her of the ocean.
I will sit down at the antique Mason & Hamlin piano that I have learned to play in the last five years, with its ivory keys and carved legs, and play her my favorite Chopin nocturne, dotted with mistakes as usual—but maybe with fewer than usual, because her presence will suffuse me and stop my mind from thinking, and I will be nothing but heart and fingers playing. I will describe to her the pleasure of learning a skill for my own enjoyment only, with no measure for judgment other than feeling myself get better. I will tell her that my sister has taken up pottery and sculpting in clay and show her the bowls Anjelica has given me. Mum will, maybe, get a glimmering of the future she will never reach, in which she might take up some similar pursuit, something in which—unlike in her ballet career—striving for perfection is an absurdity.
She will recover a future, and I will recover a past. I’m hoping that these fleeting hours with my mother will bring back the warm, intimate memories that my consciousness suppressed as too painful to keep. I never dared attempt to unbury them, not wanting to second-guess my own forgetting. But if they don’t come, I won’t mind. Now, once she has scattered again, I will know her scent, the ripples of her voice, the expressions of her face. I will know the color of her eyes, their depth, the way the light in them plays on her thoughts.
If you had asked me a few years ago to have lunch with my mother, I might not have said yes. I’m not sure I could have borne it: to hold her and have her ripped away from me a second time. But now I am content with the luck of my life: proud of the son I’ve raised, the books I’ve written, the house I designed, the pattern of my days. I feel lucky even that Mum died when she did—because if she had lived, I would not have the wealth of family she left me. And in her absence, I feel an identity with her that I would be unable to feel if I’d known her as a living woman, with personality and moods and grievances. I feel in a strange way as if I’m carrying on her life, which was so violently interrupted—as if I’m finishing it for her. She is my lodestone. She is also the unicorn I follow and will never catch, led always on by flashes of her beauty as she vanishes again and again into the mist.
Allegra Huston is the author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found and the novel Say My Name, as well as articles for many publications in the US and UK. An editor for more than thirty years, she is also the founder of the publishing company Twice 5 Miles Guides: The Stuff Nobody Teaches You, for which she wrote How to Work with a Writer and co-wrote How to Read for an Audience. She lives in Taos, New Mexico. Please visit allegrahuston.com for details of books and workshops.