Isaac and Lillian Belasco greeted the news of the pregnancy with the same enthusiasm as the first time. They refurbished the room they had ready for the other baby and prepared to pamper it. “If it’s a boy and I’m dead by the time he is born, I suppose you’ll give him my name; but if I’m still alive you can’t do that, because it would bring bad luck. In that case I want him to be called Lawrence Franklin Belasco, after my father and the great president Roosevelt, may they rest in peace,” the patriarch declared. He was fading steadily and was hanging on only because he couldn’t leave Lillian; his wife had become his shadow. She was almost deaf, but she didn’t need to hear. She had learned to decipher other people’s silences with great accuracy: it was impossible to hide anything from her or fool her, and she had developed an incredible ability to guess what people were about to say, and to reply even before they spoke. She had two obsessions: improving her husband’s health, and seeing that Nathaniel and Alma loved each other as they should. For both of these she turned to alternative therapies, which went from magnetized mattresses to healing elixirs and aphrodisiacs. At the forefront of naturalist witchcraft, California offered a wide variety of people selling hope and consolation. Isaac resigned himself to hanging crystals around his neck and drinking alfalfa juice and scorpion syrup, while Alma and Nathaniel put up with massages of ylang-ylang essential oil, Chinese shark-fin soups, and other alchemical remedies Lillian turned to in order to boost their lukewarm love.
Lawrence Franklin Belasco was born in the spring with none of the problems the doctors had been anticipating as a result of the eclampsia his mother had previously suffered. From his first day in this world his name seemed too big for him, and everyone called him Larry. He grew healthy, fat, and self-reliant, without any need for special attention. He was so placid and quiet that sometimes he would fall asleep under the furniture and no one would notice for hours. His parents handed him over to the grandparents and a succession of nannies, without worrying too much about him, because at Sea Cliff there were several adults who doted on him. He didn’t sleep with his parents, but with Isaac and Lillian, whom he called Papa and Mama; he called his own parents by the more formal Mother and Father.
Nathaniel spent little time in the house; he had become the city’s most prominent lawyer, earning a vast amount of money, and in his free time played sports or explored the art of photography. He was waiting for his son to grow a little before initiating him into the pleasures of sailing, without ever dreaming that day would never come. Since her in-laws had taken charge of their grandson, Alma began to travel in search of ideas for her work without feeling guilty about leaving him behind. In Larry’s early years she planned more or less short trips in order not to be apart from him for any great length of time, but she soon learned that this didn’t matter, as whenever she returned from either a prolonged or shorter absence, her son greeted her with the same polite handshake rather than the passionate embrace she had been longing for. She concluded with regret that Larry loved his cat more than her, and this gave her the freedom to travel to the Far East, South America, and other remote spots.
THE PATRIARCH
Larry Belasco spent the first four years of his life spoiled by his grandparents and the employees at Sea Cliff, cosseted like an orchid, his every whim satisfied. This system, which would have forever ruined the character of a less balanced child, instead made him friendly, helpful, and even-tempered. This did not change with the death in 1962 of his grandfather Isaac, one of the two pillars holding up the fantasy universe he had lived in until then.
Isaac’s health had recovered when his favorite grandson was born.
“Inside I feel like a twenty-year-old, Lillian. What on earth happened to my body?”
He had enough energy to take Larry for a walk every day, showing him the garden’s botanical secrets, and even crawled around the floor with him. Isaac bought him the pets he himself had wanted as a boy: a boisterous parrot, fish in an aquarium, a rabbit that disappeared forever under the furniture as soon as Larry opened its cage, and a long-eared dog, the first of several generations of cocker spaniels that the family had from then on. While the doctors were at a loss to explain the marked improvement in Isaac’s health, Lillian put it down to the healing arts and esoteric sciences in which she had become an expert.
One day Isaac took little Larry to Golden Gate Park, where they spent the afternoon on a rented horse, with the grandfather in the saddle and Larry sitting in front of him, enfolded in his arms. They returned home sunburned, smelling of sweat, and enthused with the idea of buying a horse and a pony so that they could ride together. Lillian was waiting for them at the garden barbecue to cook sausages and marshmallows, the favorite dinner of both grandfather and grandson. Afterward she bathed Larry, put him to bed in her husband’s room, and read him a story until he fell asleep. She drank her small glass of sherry with a tincture of opium and went to bed herself.