What falls away : a memoir by 1945- Mia Farrow Read Free Book Online

the end of the living room and flowing high and wide—silver, green, red, and gold— right up to the shiny black toes of my Mary Janes. And each year we were humbled into silence.
    In time my godmother would emerge from the dark back regions of the house where she had her offices. She looked ancient, with a humped, neckless little body, a large head, and a vivid lopsided slash of a mouth that was pulled alarmingly toward the left (a pioneering face-lift, explained my mother, and don't stare). "Well, how nice!" she would say, in her distinctive singsong. "Thank you. Is that the dress I gave you? Don't you look pretty in it!" At this point my mother would give me a poke, just in time to stop me from saying how itchy that organdy dress is so please don't give me any more. "Well, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas." Then we would bend down to respectfully place our

    gift along the shore of the sea of packages. Afterward, I always felt very tired.
    In the deflated hours of Christmas afternoon, Aunt Louella would arrive in her black Cadillac to distribute her presents. We all liked her chauffeur, Collins, who doted on her and fussed over her. He called her "Missy" and "Honey," and they say that when he died he left her all his money. Collins would carry seven sumptuous-looking packages into our living room and we would savage them on the spot; but every single year it was matching bathrobes. After the flat thank-yous we would stand around fidgeting while Aunt Louella lowered herself slowly onto the gold silk cushions of the big armchair in front of our living room fireplace. All of a sudden I wouldn't be able to remember what the chair looked like without her, and I'd get a panicky feeling. For an eternity her tea would be served, then sipped, and in that strange voice she would ask us the usual questions and we would give her the usual answers. Then we would gratefully flee the living room.
    Every Sunday, my father, my mother, and their seven children—boys in gray flannel suits, girls in itchy pastel organdy dresses with crinkly petticoats, straw hats, white cotton gloves, and socks neatly folded above black patent-leather shoes—marched up the aisle, far too conspicuously, I thought even then, to the very front of the Church of the Good Shepherd, where all of the Farrow children were baptized, and an entire pew was reserved for our family. We looked for meaning in the long mysterious Mass, but restlessness and boredom inevitably triumphed.
    I come from a tradition of big families, and that is what has always felt most natural to me. I like the raucous vitality, the sense of being on a team or in a club, only better. But being a part of such a large whole may explain my early appreciation of solitude.

    By the time I was six or seven I found myself looking for privacy so that I could read and daydream without interruption. Toward that end, I hollowed out a little chamber where the ivy was thickest against the pool-yard fence. Inside, lying on a bath towel with sunlight filtered delicate green through the ivy, in a state as close to perfection as I have ever come, I embarked on the great journeys of The Secret Garden, the entire Wizard of Oz series, Mary Poppins, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, all m the ivy chamber of our garden, and in bed by flashlight at night.
    My brother Mike, six years my senior, taught me to read before I was four, kindling a passion that has never waned. I discovered that through the written word I could voyage outside the perimeters of my own awareness into other minds, other sensibilities, and into any imaginable experience. Even now when I bring home a new book, my heart beats a little faster, I am each time atingle, more eager than I want people to know.
    Before long my father and I discovered our common ground, and spent silent, blissful hours browsing in the local bookshop. Then, with new books tucked under our arms, we walked home together. I liked to look at him and did my best with giant steps and