I was genuinely sad when Dad died. He was a good man. He had always done the right thing, as far as he knew. Despite our estrangement, I could see that he tried to do his best under the circumstances. I had been too harsh on him. He had so often begged me to come home for a visit. I should have gone to the funeral, but I was terrified. Mom went over and, now that Dad was out of the picture, I was afraid she might say something. He had the most to lose materially, if the truth were ever to come out. But now he was gone, she could sink us both if she wanted to.
Before Mom left, I begged her to keep our secret. She said it hadn’t crossed her mind; she was too grief-stricken. She accused me of being cold and calculating, and maybe I was, but I was doing it for my daughter.
The biggest shock came about when Dad’s will went through probate. I had always assumed that I would inherit at least two million dollars. Two years previously, we had moved into a beautiful old red-brick detached home in Ranelagh, closer to the city. Ranelagh was quiet but had full access to all the nice restaurants and public transport and was close to the private school I wanted for Lucy.
Jack had been against the move. He hadn’t seen the need for a three-million-euro four-bedroom house when we had one child, and he didn’t want to be saddled with a huge mortgage in hisearly forties.The Round Tablehad come to an end after seven series. He was still getting good film and TV roles in limited series, but they were becoming further apart. It was a year since he’d done a prestige role, and his income was never guaranteed.
In those years, it was very difficult to get a mortgage. I told Jack to flirt with the mortgage adviser. He didn’t think I was serious, but he didn’t realize how much I wanted this house. When I grew up in Boston, we had a big house with a huge lawn front and back, and a double garage. The garden of this new house was beautiful, the kitchen was state of the art, with a separate utility room, and it had a large dining room. ‘We’ll never use it,’ Jack had said. The mortgage adviser was an avid fan ofThe Round Tableand was star-struck. I suspect she worked very hard to get us mortgage approval.
When we moved in, I had dinner parties once a month for the first six months to prove Jack wrong about the dining room. But he turned out to be right. We weren’t dinner-party people – sober alcoholics rarely are. It was too formal for lunch. The circular table in the kitchen seated eight at a squeeze, and that’s where we ended up entertaining lunch parties on a smaller scale. After a year, the only person who went into the dining room was the cleaner to polish the twelve-seater dining table and the candelabra.
I had never worried about taking on a huge mortgage because of Dad, and then I got the shock of my life after he died and I discovered he had only left me $50k in his will. I called Erin and she was snippy with me on the phone: ‘What did you expect? He and Mom already bought you a house. You didn’t visit him. You never met Kathy. You didn’t even come to his funeral.’
I realized with a sinking feeling that paying this mortgage would be a challenge. The Academy was breaking even, but Jack’s roles were not as big as they used to be. He was now represented by CAA in Los Angeles, but he was getting less work than he used to. He was not ageing as well as some of his peers. He neverwanted to be away from home for long, but I pushed him to take the roles that meant he might be away for five months or more. ‘You wanted this big house, and now, to pay for it, I can’t be in it. I miss Lucy,’ he said down the line from Tunisia.
‘Just Lucy?’ I was hurt.
‘Aw, you know what I mean, Rubes. I miss you too, of course I do, but she’s growing up and I’m not there to see it.’
Lucy had turned twelve the summer before Dad died. She had only met him a handful of times, but now she started asking questions about dads, my dad and her birth dad. She had picked up everything she needed to know about the facts of life long before we sat her down, aged nine. At twelve, she was aware of the difference between vanilla sex and kinky sex. I’d had no idea at that age about any sex, except that it was how you made babies. Jack was home at that time. She asked why, if Granny and Grandad loved each other, had they divorced? Was it because they didn’t want to have sex any more? Jack laughed until I reminded him privately of the ‘real’ reason why my parents had divorced.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I forgot.’
I never forgot. It was like having a constant zit. I could see the lie in the mirror every day.
A week later, Lucy asked about her real dad. ‘I think it’s time to tell me the truth, Mum, who is he?’ We were alone in the house.
‘Don’t you love Jack?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, I do, but it’s my right to know. On my birth certificate, it’s blank where it should say his name.’
‘Oh, Lulu, it’s complicated. You know I’m an alcoholic, right? Around the time I got pregnant, I had sex with a lot of people. I couldn’t be sure which one was your dad.’
‘Like a gang bang?’ she asked.
49
In 2020, Jack’s work dried as the Corona Virus spread around the world. We were all home a lot more. We should have been a happy family as a result, but despite the large deposit we had paid upfront thanks to Jack’s earnings and his fan in the mortgage department, the repayments, on top of Lucy’s school fees, were crippling. Jack suggested we should downsize to a smaller house, but how would that look to Lucy’s classmates and their parents, and how would it look for Jack’s career? ‘The appearance of success breeds success,’ I read somewhere. I vetoed the move.
Lucy said we should move, and that ‘it wasn’t fair to put all the pressure on Dad’. I was incensed. I ran the Jack Brady Academy and rarely had time to take the stage roles I was offered before the pandemic. Now we were forced to temporarily close the school and while the government stepped in to subsidize our earnings, they weren’t paying our mortgage.
A distance was growing between Lucy and me. I encouraged her towards acting. It was the family business after all, and she had done all the child acting courses the Academy had to offer, but she claimed now she hadn’t enjoyed them and refused to do any more. Jack quietly said to me that a film or TV set was no place for a child, and I knew he was thinking of his own childhood and his sister, Barbra. ‘We shouldn’t push her, she’s not interested,’ he said, but I couldn’t accept that. Her parents were actors.
One evening when Lucy and I were on our own, I said, ‘You know you could be a big star, like your dad, if you just tried a bit harder?’
‘Or I could be a scientist or a zookeeper or a billionaire like my real dad? I guess we’ll never know, because you slept around so much.’
I was shocked by her words. ‘Lucy!’
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Dad was an addict too. He didn’t have a random child, did he?’
‘You are not a random child. I could have had an abortion. I wanted you.’
‘Why?’ Her question reminded me of the time long before Jack and I were together, when he said that getting sober was a shitty reason to have a baby. ‘I had screwed up my own life. I had an opportunity to make a great one for you.’
‘How many men did you sleep with?’
‘Stop this, Lucy. I am not answering that question. It’s unworthy of you.’
