Girl in the Moonlight Read online

  Nothing like it would have been invented now; the risks are too great. Parents were more accepting of fate in those days, less fearful and litigious. The children less coddled. Already I had heard about the son of one of my father’s friends, only a year older than I, who had drowned in a sailing accident because he wasn’t wearing a life jacket. Such calamities were accepted. One pushed on. These were people of the generation that remembered the war, knew fathers and brothers and husbands who never came home.

  I watched as one of the girls, skinny as an acrobat, swarmed up the rope. She used only her hands, like a pirate. Then the leap and a smile. It was obviously dangerous. That was the thrill.

  “Want to try?” she asked.

  I nodded. There was no alternative but shame. I was a goose among swans, the unwelcome guest. I clutched the thick, knotted rope. Pushed up my glasses. I was never good at climbing. Four pairs of dark eyes watched me, suddenly aware. Waiting. It was an initiation of sorts. If I passed this test, there would be another, and another. It was a club I would never be allowed to join, but that had not yet been made clear to me, and I was too young and trusting to know otherwise. I tried to hoist myself up. It was impossible. I lacked the upper-body strength. I had no brothers or sisters, no one to compete against. One of the children laughed, but I pretended not to notice.

  I tried again, and this time actually got a purchase on one of the thick knots and was able to reach up quickly with my other hand for the next knot. Jumping up, I closed my feet around the base of the rope. And then I hauled. The branch was barely ten feet off the ground, but it seemed as high as heaven, and as unattainable. Slowly, difficultly, I inched up the rope, nearly falling once or twice, my heart pounding, on the verge of tears, my soft palms burning, the insides of my knees raw. I dared not look down.

  “Good, now grab the branch with one hand,” said Aurelio. He had thick, longish black hair. The lean build of a soccer player. Kindly eyes. He was already my hero. I did as he instructed, feeling the rough bark under my hand. “Now the other,” he said. “And swing yourself up.” I did that too, badly scraping my arms and inner thighs, hugging the branch with my bare pink legs and hands. “Now stand up and walk toward the roof.”

  But I couldn’t. I froze, unable to advance or retreat. I would never get down unless I fell.

  “It’s easy,” called one of the girls. It was Cesca, the eldest. Like her siblings, she was dark-haired and barefoot. Fearless. Tanned, coltish legs, her knees covered in scabs. Dried calamine lotion on her ankle. It was easy to see they spent the summer outdoors. Like cats, they only came inside when it rained.

  I stared at her. Even at that age everything about her seemed authentic. She was almost a teenager. On her slender frame her breasts just beginning to bud. It was clear she would be a great beauty. Already her parents’ friends noticed it.

  That was not how I saw her. To me, at that moment, she was already perfect, blinding. “Just grab one of the branches above you,” she said. I looked up and saw a slender one above me in the canopy of green leaves. I reached for it. It was surprisingly resilient. Tentatively, I slid my feet down the limb toward the roof, the limb unsteady under my weight. I was doing it for her. I wanted to impress her with my bravery. Nothing else was important. But what seemed like a negligible distance from the ground now yawned before me. “You can do it!” she yelled. One of the children whistled. More laughter. I leapt.

  Except, of course, I couldn’t do it. I had misjudged the distance. Or did I have second thoughts at the last minute? I can’t remember. It is all a blur. In any event, I fell to the earth, luckily missing the paving stones and only breaking my left arm. My howls of pain were unmanly, but I was no longer trying to show off for anyone. My mother appeared first, hysterical, which made me cry even louder. The men, who had finished playing tennis and were now sitting on the deck drinking beer, came next. My father picked me up, his shirt wet with perspiration, his forearms slick. “It’s okay, champ,” he said, as he placed me in the backseat of our station wagon next to my mother for the long drive to Southampton Hospital.

  2

  YEARS PASSED BEFORE I SAW CESCA OR ANY OF THE BONET children again. But that didn’t mean I didn’t think about them—and that my attention wasn’t drawn to hearing about them.

  Throughout my early adolescence, I dreamed of seeing Cesca again, eager to redeem myself. It was not Aurelio, Cosmo, or Carmen I wanted to impress. It was only Cesca. As I grew, I carried her image before me. I had no idea what she was really like, so I made her up in my head. She was not only the most beautiful girl in the world but the kindest, bravest, and smartest too. Everything I did, I did in the hope that she would find me worthy. When I did well on a test, when I scored a touchdown, I told myself it was for her. One day I hoped to make her love me. I don’t know why I fixated on her, but I did. No one else had ever inspired these feelings in me. It was the purest kind of love, of course. That of a knight for his lady. It was the kind of love I read about. That was all I knew.

  On the sporadic occasions when I heard my father mentioning that he had dined with Roger or had been at a cocktail party where he had seen Cesca or one of the other children, I squirmed a little with remembered embarrassment. It wasn’t just that I had fallen from the tree. It was more than that. That afternoon was my first inkling that there was more to the world than it appeared. Like the glimpse of a secret garden through a crack in the door, I discovered something I hadn’t known was missing. Where colors were brighter, tastes stronger, feelings deeper. And once I recognized it, I wanted it, missed it—and was unsure I would ever find my way back to it. It was a land of Cockaigne, the hidden kingdom.

  Such a moment is unequal, though. Like passing a beautiful woman in the street who doesn’t register you: It is of no importance to her but might have changed your life forever. I was sure that Cesca and the others had forgotten me, or, if they did remember me, it was only as the kid who fell and broke his arm. Though I had met and already discarded details about numerous playmates and children of my parents’ friends over my short life, I recalled all four of the Bonet children vividly. And in my dreams and youthful fantasizing, it was always Cesca’s face that returned to me.

  I admit that I invented scenarios, some absurd, that put us together. She would be drowning, and I would save her. Or maybe it was a fire. It didn’t matter. In all my fantasies, I played the romantic lead, she the grateful maiden. But I was to be frustrated in my hopes of showing my bravery. I envied Tom Sawyer the chance to rescue Becky Thatcher, Perseus’s winning of Andromeda.

  Whenever my father casually suggested I accompany him to the Bonet house when he went to play tennis with Roger—by now I had learned to play—I eagerly grasped the opportunity, hoping each time that I would enter their world and Cesca would see me. But no matter what, I always seemed to be one or two steps behind.

  Invariably Cesca was never there when I was. She and her siblings had already left by the time I arrived; gone to the beach, a party, or somewhere else that, I felt sure, was much more glamorous and fun. Even so, I was convinced that, in her wake, there were little bits of light, like the disappearing tail of a comet. Wherever she went was brightest, everywhere else dull by comparison.

  Sometimes she hadn’t been there at all. Every summer the Bonet children would spend a month in Spain with their father. They were a family to whom passports, other languages, knowledge of the world—all of which was unimaginable to me—were commonplace.

  Disappointed, I would stay at the tennis court and play a few sets of doubles if a fourth was needed. Or I would sit there with a Coke or an iced tea, feeling like a passenger who had missed a connecting flight.

  When no one was watching I would wander through the house, looking at photographs, piecing together my own version of history. Cesca aged five on a pony. Another one of her a few years later in a bathing suit, laughing in a translucent Caribbean surf. Aurelio on skis. The whole family with the Eiffel Tower in the background. On a sailboat, slig
htly older. I looked at all the photographs, but it was over Cesca’s image that I lingered longest.

  I couldn’t bring myself to go upstairs where their rooms were, however. That would have been a violation, I knew. And what if I were caught? It would have been unpardonable. So, like a zoologist in the field, I contented myself with studying my subjects’ natural habitat, inspecting empty nests and broken grass, while I waited for them to show up. I began to feel that I knew them even if they didn’t know anything about me. And, of course, most of what I thought I knew turned out to be wrong.

  What I did know was that they, like me, lived in the city and came out to Long Island on weekends and the summer. I had heard of their school, but it was not where I went. It was a school where, unlike mine, the boys didn’t have to wear jackets and ties. They could wear pretty much anything they wanted. The girls too. This was an undreamed-of freedom. They lived in Greenwich Village. At that time, I had never been south of Fifty-Seventh Street. Downtown in those days was a different continent, exotic as Africa.

  The New York of my childhood was almost feudal in character; neighborhoods were like fiefdoms, duchies. There was little exchange between them and often open hostilities. Even the language changed. When people ask me today where I am from, they often don’t believe me, expecting all true New Yorkers to speak like the Dead End Kids. They aren’t aware that my part of town also has a distinctive accent. The Upper East Side, where I lived, was the castle on the hill. For those defectors like Kitty, the Village was a rejection, a thumbing of the nose. A way to épater le bourgeois.

  As with many bohemians, family money was funding the rebellion. Roger and Kitty’s father, a self-made millionaire, had, in the time-honored fashion, fought his way from a tenement apartment on Eldridge Street to a town house off Park Avenue. Like many rich men who had been born poor, he spoiled his children, determined to give them everything that had been denied him. Servants, cars, piano lessons, and private schools. Trips abroad in the years before and after World War II. The Queen Mary. Claridge’s, the Ritz. During the war it was Palm Beach, Yellowstone, and the Super Chief to Los Angeles. Roger, the only son, had gone to Harvard, where he met my father. Generous trust funds allowed Roger and Kitty to live as they liked and to marry whom they liked.

  Roger, a ladies’ man, married several times but never had a family of his own. Kitty married the painter Ugo Bonet. There was a younger sister, Dot, who never married.

  Ugo was Spanish—or, to be more precise, Catalan. He and Kitty met at a party in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, when the Village was the center of the art world. Much more I learned later, when I no longer had to snoop. When it was all offered to me.

  I didn’t know Ugo then, of course, but I was told that, when he was young, he was very handsome. His children, who all greatly resembled him, adored him. He was effortlessly masculine in the way of Latin men. Tall and dark, coarse black hair. Rugged hands like a fisherman’s. Cesca had the same hands; strong, capable. He was older than Kitty. After the war, he had lived in Paris. It was said that Peggy Guggenheim had fallen in love with him, offering to pay his way to New York. When Kitty met him, he had no money, which had never been a concern for him. He had always been able to find a woman who could give him a place to stay, something to eat. For a few days or a few months. It didn’t matter to him.

  When Kitty became pregnant, she insisted he marry her. His response was to disappear, only to be found several weeks later in Brooklyn by detectives hired by Kitty’s father. They presented him with an ultimatum and he accepted the less unpleasant option. There were advantages to having a rich wife, after all. They were married in City Hall and then went to India on honeymoon. Several months after they returned, laden with Benares brass, Mughal miniatures, and rugs from the Kashmir, Cesca was born. She once said to me that the reason she found it so hard to settle down was that her mother traveled so much while she was pregnant with her.

  Kitty’s father bought them a town house on Perry Street and installed a studio for Ugo on the top floor. The other three children followed in rapid succession. But Ugo was not a man to be tied down. A brief trip he took home to Spain extended into nearly a year, the money Kitty kept sending him for his return passage inevitably being used to prolong his stay. When he returned, his children barely knew him. The first thing he did was paint them. The painting still hangs over their mantel. I have seen it many times. Kitty, a resentful Madonna with the twins in her arms, surrounded by the other two children, beautiful as angels.

  His wanderings became a pattern. Ugo would disappear and reappear without warning, leaving an unfinished canvas on the easel. A cigarette burning by the sink where he washed his brushes. The phone would ring, and people—gallery owners, surprised women—would complain that they had an appointment with him, and he never showed. Europe, South America, New Mexico. Kitty knew it would do no good to hide his passport. Deny him money. He would find a way. Once, he worked his way to Morocco on a tramp steamer.

  She endured his absences, daubed at the paintings she tried to make, opened her home to artists and writers, critics and choreographers. There were parties, lectures, buffet suppers. The rooms blue with smoke. Sometimes the sweet smell of marijuana. It was a time when everyone drank to excess. Bins full of empty bottles were hauled out to the curb the next morning by the maid. A critic for the Voice once fell down a flight of stairs, and to everyone’s amazement got right up and staggered away into the night. It was obvious to most people that Kitty was not a great painter, but everyone agreed on her charm. She was sexy, long-legged, and busty. Her laugh was irresistible. As was her hospitality. She took lovers. Some of them Ugo’s friends. Her children helped pour the drinks and clean the ashtrays. It was a better education than anything they could learn in school.

  To the children their father was a wizard, a djinn who could fly over mountains. He would send them letters, lavishly illustrated, from his journeys. Poems in many languages. Packages wrapped in brown paper and clustered with exotic stamps would arrive from time to time, filled with strange candy, costumes, enormous seashells, or, once, the complete skeleton of a fruit bat. He could perform magic tricks, pulling cards or coins out of ears. He tore dollar bills into pieces and made them whole again. Read the children’s futures in coffee stains, promising them all long, happy lives and prophesying fame and fortune. When he was home, they knew to leave him alone while he worked. The door to his studio was closed. But when he emerged, he took them for long, rambling walks down to the docks, where he would converse with sailors and stevedores in one of the languages he spoke. They were never sure how many. Was it four or five? Did dialects count?

  They would sit quietly by his side while he drank with friends in bars or visited other painters’ ateliers. The afternoon sunlight slanting through the window. The children doodling on napkins, talking quietly among themselves. Their bond unbreakable. Everywhere they went it was obvious that people were happy to see him. And because they were his children, people were happy to see them too.

  Occasionally, he would take Kitty’s car and drive them out of the city even though he didn’t possess a license. To the beach, to the markets along Arthur Avenue, to find baby goat to roast in the backyard, to fish for striped bass along the Hudson. Some days it would get too late, and they wound up spending the night, sleeping in the car if they didn’t have enough money for a hotel. He was a terrible driver. The kind who gesticulated with his hands and looked at his passengers to make a point or tell a story. Everyone agreed it was a miracle he never killed himself or anyone else. Once he forgot to put gas in the car, and they all had to return to the city in the back of a milk truck.

  Ugo was also a cook. Kitty, like many rich girls, was not good in the kitchen, nor did she care about food. An old black woman named Mamie came in every day to clean and cook for the children. Fried chicken, stew, spaghetti, lamb chops. When Mamie wasn’t there, Kitty would burn TV dinners for the children. But their father created marvelous meals. Traditional fish
stew, of course, but also whole cod with raisins and pine nuts, fricandó, a kind of pizza called coques, loin of pork that melted in the mouth, tuna escabèche. Telling them the names for the food first in English, then in Spanish, and last in Catalan, so it would stay with them. “This is esqueixada de bacallà, this is escudella.” While drinking wine, he would sing and tell jokes. He taught the children how to chop garlic, how to tell when snails were cooked, how to look at a fish’s eye to know if it was fresh. He had deals with the butcher, the fishmonger, the grocer, the liquor store owner. He would trade drawings for food and drink, flirt with the waitresses and the shopkeepers’ wives. Kitty would press money on him, but he would only pocket it, preferring to barter. So many fish for a drawing of such a size, so many bottles of wine for a painting. It was an inexact but virtuous math.

  Unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t last. Kitty and Ugo were divorced in the early 1970s, although life carried on much as it had before given Ugo’s long absences. They remained friends. He would still return to his wife’s houses, still cook for his children, even occasionally still make love to his now ex-wife, assuming her latest boyfriend didn’t object too strenuously, and he would still depart without warning.

  BEFORE THE DIVORCE, EVERY SUMMER FOR FIVE OR SIX years when the children were very young they would all accompany Ugo back home to Catalonia, to the village on the Ebro where he had been born and where he still had much family. There he would be welcomed like a returning celebrity, bringing presents of duty-free whisky and American cigarettes bought with Kitty’s money. Donkeys and chickens wandered in the yard, where lunch was eaten outside underneath an arbor, the scent of lemon trees perfumed the air. The tables were rough, wooden. Cesca and Carmen, as girls, helped to cook and serve while the men sat and joked and played botifarra, Kitty insisting on sitting with them.

  There were always picnics, expeditions to the ruins of a nearby castle sacked during the Peninsular War, and fishing trips for mackerel and bonito. Later, they would spend a few days in Barcelona. A visit to a favorite restaurant, where one of Ugo’s paintings hung on the wall. A tour of the galleries. Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. Drinks along the Ramblas. Once, a bullfight, but never again because it made Aurelio throw up, and Kitty forbade it. Late nights with the children in tow, Carmen asleep on Cesca’s lap in a nightclub while their parents danced.