In “The Decay of Lying” Oscar Wilde asserts that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. His serious point, beneath the wit of the epigram, is that art furnishes us with life’s plots and its paradigms. We see the sunset a certain way because we know the paintings of Turner. A novel by Balzac shapes our understanding of ambition and betrayal. In my case, life imitates the art of Henry James. My story’s themes are adultery and concealment, the question of who knew a sexual secret and who didn’t. Its central irony is the blindness of the person who wished to be someone on whom nothing is lost. I am the protagonist kept in the dark, the personage on whom a great deceit was practiced but who finally, only at the very end, too late to do much about it except in terms of awareness, learned the truth. “It’s a story by Henry James,” I kept telling my friends at the time of its unfolding. “Everyone but me knew that Freddie was my father.”
By “everyone,” of course, I mean many: my mother, Freddie, Dee, Gully Wells—Dee’s daughter by an earlier marriage, my mother’s friend Jean Dalrymple, and even my husband, Donald, who took note of the physical resemblance between father and daughter and silently wondered, and who knows who else. But this list did not include Trevor Westbrook. He was the man my mother duped into marriage.
After Scott Fitzgerald had his fatal heart attack in her Hollywood living room a few days before Christmas 1940, my mother kept herself going, among other ways, by returning the following spring to England as a war correspondent. In Hollywood, as she later told me, she had suffered from nightmares that Hitler was personally gunning her down from a plane. In England the nightmares ceased, and she got involved with Trevor. Perhaps it helped on the nightmare front that Trevor was the man Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of War, had put in charge of English wartime aviation production. At any rate, my mother liked his single-minded determination, which was also a kind of narrowness. Trim and dour, his dark hair combed always neatly into place, Trevor used to boast he had never read a book. My mother said she found comfort in the contrast this presented to Fitzgerald.
Back for the 1941 autumn in New York, my mother reconnected with Freddie, whom she had met earlier that year in London. In this new affair she became pregnant—possibly on purpose but if so, her motive, at thirty-seven, was to have a baby, not to entrap Freddie Ayer. He was still married to his first wife, René, and in any case not interested in marrying my mother. I get the sense that she was using sex, probably with a lot of people, to console herself for the terrible loss of Fitzgerald and that Freddie was simply engaged in his habitual philandering. It was not a serious liaison. At this point Trevor Westbrook turned up on a mission to Washington with Lord Beaverbrook. My mother went to see him, told him she was four months pregnant with his child and persuaded him to marry her. Soon afterwards she announced that she had lost the child and soon after that that she was pregnant again. I have pieced together this audacious layer of lies from Freddie and from a Westbrook cousin in whom Trevor confided. He sensed he had been tricked into marriage, but that was the extent of his suspicions.
Trevor died in 1979 without ever knowing I was not his daughter. My mother died in November 1988 without ever telling me the truth. This was her last consequential secret—or at least the last we learned about—coming to light six weeks after her death and thirty years after I had learned she was Jewish. The person who revealed it was Dee Wells, then still divorced from Freddie and living in New York but about to go back to England and remarry him. She had left him for a black American clothes designer, who, in turn, had left her, and, now financially and emotionally rather stranded, she welcomed the return to her former husband. Dee would care for Freddie in his final months, acquire the title of Lady Ayer, and live in the house on York Street for the remaining fifteen years of her not very happy life.
I find it diverting to try to cast this genealogical tale in terms of the characters of The Portrait of a Lady. The ones I call into service are the deceived heroine, Isabel Archer, her insidious husband, Gilbert Osmond, Osmond’s innocent daughter, Pansy, Pansy’s secret mother, the smooth mannered, unscrupulous Madame Merle, and Osmond’s “tropical bird-like” sister with her “long-beaked nose” and “shimmering plumage,” the Countess Gemini.
Dee is clearly the Countess Gemini, an expatriate
