Harriet Brown, a novel

The Faces of Harriet Brown (Opening)

(The complete novel is available, either in trade paperback or as an Acrobat download, at my bookstore.)

Prologue

When my mother was 12 years old, directing imaginary plays from the little outhouse roof in her tenement back yard, she knew that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the world.

Standing by her living room window catching a glimpse of the East River these many years later she knew it to be a bad place. Whether this knowledge had consumed her little by little over the intervening years, and just now let on, or whether it had suddenly gulped her down just a moment ago, since breakfast, she could not quite tell. Only that it was now very clear to her.

But she mustn’t let this ruin her day. She put on her beige duffle coat, her sunglasses, covered her head with a gray scarf, patted her coat pocket to hear the keys tinkle, made sure she had her cigarettes, and her lighter, and headed out for her morning walk.

A Gift

My mother gave me away when I was two weeks old. Yes, I was a gift. That’s what she later told me: a gift. Of course, I was also the quite unthinkable and the world must not know about me, at least not her world. I had to be hidden from it. I later realized I also had to be hidden from her, the deeper the better.

And given sounds so much better than hidden, don’t you think, she said when we first met. Than unthinkable.

The original benefactee—if that’s a word—was my father, at that time a reasonably well known mystic, quite famous in his day, now more a myth than anything, if thought of or remembered at all. Well, he has left a bit of a legacy, and a few schools here and there, but the man on the street will look at you blankly if you mention his name.

At first he argued that she should keep me. Children should be with their mothers, he said, that’s why women give birth and not men. Besides, would not a child be in his way as much as in hers? This, however, he soon had to admit, even to himself, simply was not true. To him I would be a burden, yes, an inconvenience, and perhaps a bit of an embarrassment, but to her I would be the end of a career, the end of a life. So he relented, and not so gracefully, from what she later told me, accepted me, the gift to be hidden.

There was never any doubt about me being his and her son. The color of my hair and the color of my skin were his, the color of my eyes, and the shape of my nose and mouth were hers. If my father had entertained contesting his involvement, he must have abandoned any such notion the moment he saw me. Very much his, and very much hers. Not that I cared then.

He didn’t keep me for long, however. A week perhaps, long enough to realize what a burden I actually was, then he packed me off to Mandanapalle, a town smack in the middle of Southern India where he had grown up and where his mother still lived.

Long and short: I was raised by an old Indian woman named Madhuri who knew how to talk to snakes, in a town now and then overrun by rats (not in and around Madhuri’s house of course, her snakes took care of that) and, three months of the year, inclement weather.

This all happened in the spring of 1928. I was born in April.

So I’m getting on a bit. Well, you do the math, as they say. But I’m doing pretty well, not all that much worse for the wear, if I may say so. This I ascribe to clean air and vegetables

A month to the day after giving birth to me, with me safely out of the way and by now enroute to India, War in the Dark—which was the working title for The Mysterious Lady, one of my mother’s many films—went into production in Los Angeles, and this was the first time Harriet was seen in public since she grew too large to be seen at all in December of the previous year. I am, by the way, afraid that I can’t refer to my mother by her real name, for her estate has trademarked it and I really can’t be bothered with the legal wranglings it would take to obtain the right to use it for this little tale, if tale you can call it. So I’ll use Harriet, her alter ego, instead. Harriet Brown. They didn’t, or couldn’t, trademark that. Besides, she was always Harriet to me.

Even though she had exercised very hard and showed no evidence whatever of her recent pregnancy, no sagging or stretch marks—she was only 22 years old then, and quite resilient—she wanted no one on the set that did not belong there, just in case, and requested that it be blocked off by a maze of black screens, a request which was granted, as were most of her wishes.

She worried unduly. No one did notice, and no one ever found out. I am mentioned nowhere, by anyone. Not by Beaton, who did know but had given Harriet his word that he would never reveal the secret, and not even by Miss de Acosta who, if indeed she knew—I guess she may have suspected—kept me out of her rambling diaries. Officially, I don’t exit.

But in the end I came to exist for her, and she for me, and that is what counts.

The complete novel is available, either in trade paperback or as an Acrobat download, at my bookstore.

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