In My Father's Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page A

another?”
    “Yes, Daddy.”
    I do not remember ever getting to swim in Acapulco. Instead, when I wasn’t watching my father and Rita make their movie, I was exploring the winding paths and terraced gardens near the hotel. The grounds sloped gently down from the hilltop hotel to a white, sandy beach in a sheltered cove. Much as I liked being there with Daddy and Rita, I began to wish something I had never wished before: to go home to our beach house in Santa Monica before it was time. I was running out of ways to amuse myself in Acapulco—how many more times could I count the rowboats busily ferrying cast and crew members from the yacht to the shore and back again? As I stood on the hotel terrace, looking down at the sparkling bay, then following the curves of mountains that leaned against the sky, I felt homesick for
my
beach and
my
ocean with its thunderous waves, its wheeling, squawking gulls.
    Yet I still looked forward to eating meals with my father and Rita in the hotel dining room. Especially at lunch, my father seemed more relaxed, expansive, and ready to laugh at almost anything I said, even when I wasn’t trying to be funny. Then one day a new busboy named Pablo was assigned to our table. He was a dark-skinned boy of twelve or thirteen with coal black eyes, and I felt drawn to him without knowing why. I could not help smiling at him whenever he came to fill our water glasses, and he smiled back in an easy, natural way. At that point my father, who noticed everything, began teasing me about “falling in love with Pablo.” The more I protested that falling in love was “silly,” the more he insisted it was “love at first sight.” Hadn’t I just smiled at Pablo again, ho, ho. What was a smile from a lovely young lady but an invitation to flirt with her?
    Once it had begun, the teasing went on at every meal. Finally, near tears one day, I begged him, “Daddy, please stop it! I’m not in love with Pablo. Honest …”
    “The lady doth protest too much!” He laughed with such gusto, crinkling up his eyes, yet at times it was also the high, wheezy sound of a man close to pain.
    “Do let up on her, Orsie.” Rita laid a comforting hand on my arm.
    I pushed the food around on my plate, my appetite gone. At last the plates were whisked away. “May I be excused, please?”
    “What, no dessert? Ah, what love will do!” my father roared to one and all as I fled red-faced from the dining room.
    The constant teasing left me feeling humiliated. I was not good at being teased by anyone, but when my father teased me, I was unable to laugh it off because I could not be sure, deep down, if he really loved me. I knew that he found me amusing and precocious. Unlike my moody, volatile mother, he was consistently warm with me and openly affectionate. But was he proud of me? He did not seem that impressed when I played the piano for him, or showed him my latest drawing, or gave him one of my illustrated stories at Christmas. How was I going to make him proud of me?
    The answer came to me when the location for the day’s shoot was moved from Errol Flynn’s yacht to a dusty mountain road overlooking the bay. My father was telling the crew to move the camera here and set up the lights there, then changing his mind and making them move everything to another spot. The men were grunting, “Yes, Mr. Welles,” and “No, Mr. Welles,” as if lugging around heavy equipment in the hot sun was how they wanted to spend the rest of their lives. It was clear to me, young as I was, that the entire cast and crew saw my father as an exalted being. As he stood around in his open-neck shirt and baggy pants, laughing his wheezy laugh, waving his cigar, he acted as though he were giving a party. “I want everyone to have a marvelous time,” he seemed to be saying, “and I’m going to have more fun than all of you put together!”
    Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I ran up to my father and tugged on his shirt until he looked down at