Description: Also by MacDonald Harris Private Demons Mortal Leap Trepleff Bull Fire The Balloonist Yukiko Pandora''s Galley The Treasure of Sainte Foy Herma The Carp Castle Tenth The Little People Glowstone Hemingway''s Suitcase Glad Rags A Portrait of My Desire The Cathay Stories and Other Fictions FOR ROBBIE The onlie begetter of this insuing boke Copyright Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love and she be fair! KEATS 1. I was born in 1950 in a rather odd part of Los Angeles that not very many people know about. If you are like most people, you probably don''t regard Los Angeles as a very enchanting city. But I can assure you that St. Albans Place is a very enchanted street indeed. It is a private drive that you enter through a large and ornate iron gate on Wilshire Boulevard, where a guard is always on duty in a small kiosk like a miniature alpine chalet. From there it winds its way--sending off a number of tributary streets with names as spuriously English as its own--through a park of enormous trees and well-kept lawns, to end at Olympic Boulevard at another iron grille that is never opened, although there is a small pedestrian gate at one side that can be unlocked, if you know of its existence and have the right key. The park was subdivided and most of its houses built in the Twenties, when the city first left the confines of the downtown area and began moving out to the west. The trees were planted at that time. Now they are huge--elms and sycamores for the most part, with gnarled trunks and thick over-arching branches. When you come into it from the traffic of Wilshire Boulevard the place has something of the atmosphere of a bird sanctuary, or a cemetery. The noises of the city are shut out by the trees, and you are conscious only of quiet and isolation, of the pastoral and shady green light that pervades everything, and of the sense of privilege that comes from being very wealthy. The street is broad and curves its way with a kind of negligent magnificence through the sylvan atmosphere of the trees and lawns. The houses on it have only one quality in common--they are all large and expensive. Except for that they are a kind of anthology of all the pretentious and derivative architectures of the time--fake Florentine villas, English country houses, Venetian palazzos, stucco Spanish palaces with tiled roofs, and one house with eaves curled up and stone lions in front of it that vaguely attempts to be Chinese--we always called it the Pagoda. The one I grew up in is a large shingled house with overhanging eaves, a kind of Cape Cod cottage magnified to the dimensions of a mansion. It was built by my grandfather, a Harvard professor who lived most of his life in Cambridge and spent his summers on Martha''s Vineyard. He was independently wealthy (the family came from a plumbing manufactory that owned the patent on the flush toilet, in case anyone is curious), and when he was widowed in his fifties he retired early and came to Los Angeles, bringing with him my mother, who was born late in his marriage and still a small child. He acquired a large lot in St. Albans Place, and there he built an exact replica of what he regarded as an ideal habitation, even though it was far too large for a middle-aged professor and a small child--a Cambridge townhouse like those along the winding and shady sanctuary of Brattle Street. The furnishings of the house, as I remember it from my childhood, were expensive but ill-sorted--some heirlooms, some acquired at a later period. Most of the furniture was that left by my grandfather, whereas the bric-a-brac and small objets d''art had been acquired by my mother and father, or, as I always called them, Astre and Dirk. (My grandfather was a professor of French literature, and it pleased him, out of a kind of antiquated perversity, to name his only child for a character in a seventeenth century pastoral.) There was a pair of Sisleys, said to be authentic, on the wall by the mantelpiece, and a photograph of my mother by Man Ray. In the dining room there was an extraordinary piece of furniture: a Louis Quinze sideboard with gilded legs and a large ornate mirror covered with gray splotches, which in my childhood I endowed with all the mystery and significance of a map of an unknown land. I identified continents in it, rivers, and even cities, which I inhabited in the secret reveries of my imagination. The house was full of a clutter of other odd things: a camel saddle, a bronze Pompeiian figurine with a phenomenal erection (when I was small I thought it was only the way he carried his sword), an arquebus which worked and could be fired on the Fourth of July, and a toilet in the downstairs bathroom so old that it might have been the original of the family patent, with a brass chain hanging from the tank on the ceiling and a pattern of stains, in the bowl, almost as complex as those on the tarnished mirror. This we called the Infernal Machine. It had a sound all to itself: a wheeze, a gurgle, a chuckle or two, and then, after a pause, a great rush of water that went on for a long time and left all the pipes in the house humming. Finally it shut itself off with a snap, the gasp of a person suddenly throttled with an iron hand. My grandfather died when I was still very young, so that I hardly remember him and I think of the house mainly as a place where Astre and Dirk and I lived together. We must have seemed an odd family to others, although, since we lived almost entirely to ourselves, our way of life seemed to us perfectly natural. Both Astre and Dirk were exceptionally good-looking and seemed eternally young. They were always blithe and happy and gave the impression somehow that they were living in a romantic comedy rather than a life in the real world. Sometimes they sang to each other, trading lines like characters in a Noel Coward musical as they moved through the house from room to room. "Many''s the time that we feasted ..." "And many''s the time that we fasted ..." "Oh well, it was swell while it lasted ..." "We did have fun ..." "And no harm done ..." And then, with a look of mock sentiment and a glance through the doorway between them, they would join together in two-part harmony for "Thanks ... for the memory ..." Astre had difficulty taking things seriously, including her own unique and striking boyish beauty, the wealth she had inherited so effortlessly, and even the house itself. Sometimes, when the three of us came back at night from the noise and traffic of the city and stopped the car in the drive, in the silence and the dank, slightly foreboding shade of the old trees, she would intone in a fakey theatrical voice: "A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e''er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover!" They lived their lives almost entirely together and for each other, so in some ways they hardly paid attention to me. They were always going on motor trips, burning the toast, quarreling and making up, trying to outspend each other for clothes, and having disagreements which turned into torrid clinches and then ended in the bedroom. When they went away on trips, often for a week or more, they left me with a sitter, a disagreeable middle-aged woman named Mrs. Bent whom I detested. Mrs. Bent, however, was engaged more to satisfy the legal requirements about child care than out of concern for my own security or welfare. If it hadn''t been for the law, they would probably have gone off and left me alone in the house when I was a boy of ten. It wasn''t that they were lacking in affection for me or that they were bad parents. It was simply that they had no experience of children and didn''t understand them very well. They had no friends who had children, and neither of them had had brothers or sisters. So they hardly knew how to regard me, and they ended by regarding me simply as a person like themselves. It was true that I was physically smaller than other people, so that my chin came only to the edge of the table and my clothes had to be bought in the boys'' department at Bullock''s, but they saw this as no reason not to treat me exactly as an adult--a friend perhaps of whom they were very fond, and yet didn''t mind leaving for a week or two when they went away on a trip. They were aware, of course, that this behavior was unconventional, but rather than address themselves seriously to the question of what childhood was or how a child ought to be brought up they preferred to regard the situation as a joke. " I was certainly never ten years old," said Dirk, regarding me gravely over the dining-room table, "and neither was anybody on my side of the family." Still I had an intimate, if intermittent, relationship with the two of them. Dirk called me "old fellow" even when I was seven, and had long conversations with me in which he would explain to me, for example, that the reason Astre was out of sorts today was that she was having her period. Women were difficult at such times, he advised, and it was best to have nothing to do with them. Having married into the family money, he had no need to work and never did so, even though he had a university degree in architecture. He had a single passion, antique cars. He bought and sold at least two dozen of them during my childhood, spending great time and effort searching for rare p

Please Wait