I had sought out Dee to be a speaker at my mother’s memorial and she had then asked me to a dinner party at her daughter Gully’s brownstone in Greenwich Village. I gave her a ride in my car after the party to her apartment in the East 30s. She was full of her plans for resuming life with Freddie and invited me to come and see them at their house in the South of France.
“Freddie is very fond of you,” she said, as we sat for a moment in the car in front of her building. When I demurred, since her words seemed polite but perfunctory and I was eager to get going, she looked at me in a hard, peculiar manner.
“Has it never occurred to you that Freddie is your father?” she said.
“No,” I replied, stunned. I asked Dee if Freddie thought this was a guess or a certainty. Dee said Freddie considered it a certainty. She said that she would get him to write me.
I have my own version of Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady. It begins on my drive home to my apartment in Brooklyn after leaving Dee and continues over the ensuing few days. On the drive home I felt I was seeing with Freddie’s eyes, smiling his smile, experiencing myself as his daughter from the inside out. Then over the next few days our whole past history rose before me for reevaluation. I remembered how Freddie had befriended me, taking me to lunches and to museums on my frequent trips to England as a teenager and how Donald and I had stayed with him and Dee in London and also in France on the trip we took abroad the first summer of our marriage. It also made sense why Dee had written such a virulent review of Beloved Infidel in her days as a journalist for the Daily Express. It had a memorably outrageous conclusion. “And I suppose in a way you have to hand it to the ex-East End orphan named Lily Shiel. Just what to hand her, I’d be hard put to say. But I do know it’s nothing I’d touch with a ten-foot pole. With gloves on.”
My mother had walked out of a 1959 lunch with Freddie and me in a London restaurant because he confessed to having seen the review before it went to press and done nothing to stop it. That was before Dee and Freddie married and subsequently had my half-brother Nicholas. Dee then set about befriending my mother. The Ayers were living in Regents Park Terrace, and my mother had bought a little house on Lancelot Place—“a whisper from Harrods and a shout from Hyde Park,” as she described it. The visits went back and forth between these residences. “Of course, I can never trust her,” my mother would say. But she seemed happy to be invited to tea and to dinner parties, and a mutual if wary respect arose between these scrappy fighters. Finally, it made sense why Dee in 1975, when I, then thirty-two, was living in England with Donald and the children, had invited me for lunch at their house and then, oddly, gone out as soon as I arrived, leaving me with Freddie. He and I had sat on a sofa, both of us stroking a cat. I had thought about his reputation as a womanizer and wondered if he were going to make a pass at me. I think Dee meant for him to tell me then he was my father, but he didn’t.
His “I am your father” letter came a few weeks after Dee’s return to England. It began:
Dear Wendy:
Your asking me to write to you is presumably the outcome of the conversation that you had with Dee after your mother’s funeral. You were then feeling your way towards the truth. I am your father . . .
To continue with the casting, I put Freddie, for his part in the concealment, in the role of Gilbert Osmond, though doing so is hardly fair, considering his amiable temperament, intellectual originality, and liberal politics. Freddie resembled Osmond only in his social snobbery and emotional indolence. His letter to me spoke of his regret that Dee’s hostile review of Beloved Infidel had put an end to my mother’s “bringing you to visit me in London but there was nothing I could do about it.” It was Dee who took the initiative to make peace with my mother—Freddie’s letter marveled that they had later become such good friends—and who took the lead in keeping in touch with me. Freddie was passive. He was not a man of deep emotions. There is a chilling passage in John Osborne’s autobiography, describing how Freddie had come to see his ex-girlfriend Jocelyn Richards (then living with Osborne) when he was contemplating marrying Dee:
He had announced that he was contemplating marriage to an American, but was undecided whether the match fulfilled his standards of wisdom and self-esteem. He offered his ex-mistress a two-card choice: he was prepared to marry the American unless Jocelyn should feel impelled to offer herself as an alternative. Anyone less kindly than Jocelyn [opines Osborne] would have kicked this pear-shaped Don Giovanni down the stairs and his cruel presumption. She could find nothing to say except, “But Freddie, it’s too late.”
I never noticed that Freddie was pear-shaped (though, indeed, I am more pear-shaped than was my bosomy, slim-hipped mother),
