Prologue
If I could say only one thing, it would be this – you chose your life.
It was told to me back in the 1970s, that I chose my life. That I chose everything that happened to me. A psychic broke the news. I didn’t want to hear it. I thought, who are you to tell me that? She was just someone I had gone to, someone I’d heard about, who lived near Marble Arch and charged five pounds a session. I was living in London at the time. I was twenty-three, a struggling actress, and it was a tough pill to swallow. I didn’t want to believe it. Oh, certainly I had expected the acting life to be difficult—it was all the other things that had happened. I had been hoping to hear something like a new part was just around the corner, or a wonderful new man was coming into my life. I didn’t want to hear that I chose my life. I didn’t like my life very much in those days. I was confused at just about everything. Why on earth would I have chosen it?
I had gone to the psychic with a complaint. I said, “Why couldn’t my mother have married my real father?” because I thought my mother would have been happier married to my biological father, Milton, and by connection, I would have been happier too.
“But my dear,” said the psychic, “you chose your parents! You chose everything to be exactly the way that it was.”
I just stared at her, this gray-haired middle-aged woman with her cheery no-nonsense English manner, unable to begin to digest such startling information. Everything exactly the way that it was? I was so used to wishing things had been different!
My mother hadn’t told me about Milton until I was nineteen. She sat me down in a French restaurant and suddenly pulled this other father out of a hat. A Jewish father. A man she met on the Greyhound bus and had an affair with, and didn’t marry.
It was the middle of winter, 1949. My mother had been twenty-three then, too. She was pretty and vivacious, and looked very fetching, I’m sure, in the traveling suit she wore. People got dressed up for everything in those days, even to take the Greyhound bus. She was on her way to Nevada where she would stay for six weeks in order to divorce her first husband so she could marry her second, Frank Wait. My older sister, Kathleen, the daughter from her first marriage, was with our grandparents in Decatur, Illinois. Frank was waiting for her in Chicago. But on the bus she met Milton. He wore an army uniform and was going to Tonopah, Nevada, where he had a government job. She said he was handsome, with a shy smile and dark wavy hair. She had never met a Jewish man before. Instead of going all the way to Reno, my mother got off the bus at Tonopah with Milton. By the end of March when her divorce came through, she was pregnant. She went to Chicago anyway, and married Frank.
I was born late that fall as Frank’s child. That was how it began. I lived in blissful ignorance until I was nineteen and my mother decided to tell me the truth. Because of the shock, and many other things besides, I fled to England. It’s true what they say about how you take all your problems with you, but sometimes you just have to go anyway. Especially if you’re young. So I went to London to live with my boyfriend, but then I left him too. That was when I made an appointment with the psychic and learned I had chosen my life.
A few years later, while I was still abroad, Milton died. By then I had had the chance to meet him, to know him slightly. I came home after his death. I was homesick after seven years, but it was also easier to be back in the States having only one father again. Then, shortly after my return, my mother threw me another bombshell. It seemed as if she was always giving me shock treatments. This time she angrily blurted out that she had conceived me in revenge for World War II.
Would the psychic have said I chose that as well? To be my mother’s revenge?
My mother was still angry after all these years. We were sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee. She had dropped by after work, seemingly in a good mood. I don’t remember what set her off, but it didn’t have anything to do with me. I was tired. I had been working all day too, and wanted to relax. I asked her to leave. I said, “I’d like you to go now,” and “Please leave,” because the way she was carrying on about whatever it was, I could see that her mood wasn’t going to change anytime soon. I’d only recently started hanging up on her when she went into tirades over the phone, and that was only because my boyfriend told me I could. “You can just hang up on her,” he said. “You don’t have to listen to that.” And then he told me I could throw her out of my apartment too. I didn’t believe him. I thought I could never do that. But I didn’t want to listen to her venom. She always went on about the same things—how wronged she’d been, how badly she’d been treated by everyone.
“Alright, I’ll go,” she said angrily, haughtily. Her face was flushed, her features vivid. Her hair jutted out from her face in soft, frizzy black curls. She was fifty-two and a little overweight, but still attractive. I held the door open while she gathered up her things, and then she came and stood next to me. She was five-feet-two but looked taller in high heels. I was amazed she was listening to me, that I could actually tell her to go and she would. I’d never felt that powerful with her before. Her dark hazel eyes bored through me, to some deep wound from long ago. I felt guilty. I always felt guilty somehow for her unhappiness.
And when she delivered her parting shot—“I conceived you in revenge for World War II,” I felt a wave of heat pass through me. It was like an electrical charge, resonating in my gut. As if in a queer sort of way I had always known this—or something like it. She left then, and I closed the door, listening to the clack of her high heels echoing down the stairs, then fading away. I just stood there for a while, leaning against the door.
Revenge. It’s such a loaded word. The ramifications were intense, unsolvable.
Ever since I’d heard about Milton and Tonopah, I’d seen myself behind the flowery romantic screen of their brief love affair, and thought of myself as a “love child.” Now I would have to deal with this too.
It wasn’t until I became a painter that things began to fall into place. I found a clue on the canvas. After hundreds of paintings, many of them from my imagination, or subconscious, I found a clue. It was the painting of a young girl in a red dress sitting calmly at the bottom of the sea. She sprang from somewhere deep inside me. I thought of her as my own lost self. And I knew that I had now found a part of myself that had been lost. But in order to bring her to the surface, raise her from the deep, and find my whole self, to be whole again, I had to become a writer next. I had to write about my life, starting from the very beginning, remembering everything, leaving nothing out. Along the way, I recalled a message another psychic had given me. The first one I had ever gone to.
She was actually a medium. Which is the same as a psychic really, but this medium had sessions at the British Spiritualist Society. It was an impressive and imposing white townhouse in Belgrave Square. A friend had taken me along. I was about twenty at the time, completely in awe of the whole process. First her eyelids fluttered, and then her eyes rolled back in her head as she seemed to go into a kind of trance.
“Leslie Howard is looking after you,” she said.
Leslie Howard? Ashley, in Gone With The Wind? I was too surprised to ask for details, such as how, or why. I was an actress at the time, and for all I knew, Leslie Howard was looking after a bevy of young actresses here on Earth.
I didn’t give it any more thought, not for a long time. I think I had to become my own psychic, able to own who I was, to see deeper.
It was while I was writing it all down that I learned Leslie Howard had been killed by the Nazis during World War II, his plane shot down over the Bay of Biscay. Also on board was a young English girl named Petra Hutcheon.
When my mother told me I was her revenge for the war, my first thought was that I was reincarnated, and had been a victim of the Holocaust, dead in one of the camps. But now I wondered if this dead girl, Petra, had something to do with the drowned girl in the red dress I had painted? The name Petra means rose-red. It’s the name of an ancient city in what is now Jordan, known for it’s reddish sandstone. What if, along with my lost childhood self, I had found another self at the bottom of the sea—Petra? Could she have been the one Leslie Howard was “looking after” when their plane was hit by machine gunfire? Was that what the medium saw in her trance? The same girl I saw on my canvas?
It was a British plane, a civilian airliner called Ibis. The Ibis departed from Lisbon. Petra was eleven, traveling with her mother and baby sister. They had been living in Canada during the war, and were on their way back to England. All thirteen passengers and four crew members perished on June 1, 1943. Because it was war time, there was no search for bodies, and no bodies were ever found.
I was born December 1, 1949, exactly six years and six months later, to the day.
But more than the symmetry of calendar dates, are the events that befell me, pushing me towards the eventual discovery of the girl Petra. We had both been lost. But now, with this writing and the painting, it is like I have brought her back, in a way. And in so doing, brought myself more to life. So that I would one day come to believe that everything did happen for a reason. And like the psychic had said, I chose those things. Or rather, my soul did. So that I would come to know that I had a soul. And there is no death. The soul knows no death. The soul knows there is only transformation from one form of energy, of livingness, to another.
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