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

little, awkward skips to match his long, oblivious strides. If he chanced to glance down at me he'd sometimes smile and in those moments I nearly drowned in such almighty happiness and gratitude and love that the only commensurate thing I could think to do was to lie down on the pavement, there at my father's feet, and offer him my entire mortal being; but of course I didn't do that, or speak of these feelings, since they would surely have been as far beyond his comprehension as they were mine. So I scampered mutely by his side.
    I remember sitting under the olive trees one hot summer afternoon trying to read a passage from Out of Africa to my younger brother and sisters and the Roach kids, in which Isak Dinesen describes two captured giraffes onboard a boat

    in the harbor of Mombasa, waiting to be shipped to a traveling menagerie in Europe.
    In the long years before them, will the giraffes sometimes dream of their lost country? Where are they now, where have they gone to, the grass and the thorn trees, the rivers and waterholes and the blue mountains? Where have the other giraffes gone to, that were side-by-side with them when they cantered over the undulating land? They have left: them, they have all gone and it seems they are never coming back. The giraffes stir, and wake up in the caravan of the menagerie, in their narrow box that smells of rotten straw and beer. Good-bye, good-bye, I wish for you that you may die on the journey, both of you, so that not one of the little noble heads that are now raised, surprised, over the edge of the case, against the blue sky of Mombasa, shall be left to turn from one side to the other, all alone, in Hamburg, where no one knows of Africa. As to us, we shall have to find someone badly transgressing against us, before we can in decency ask the giraffes to forgive our transgressions against them.
    I found this passage so wrenchingly beautiful that I remember the afternoon vividly. How very far from Beverly Drive those words had carried me, and how important it was, that visit to Mombasa, in the tangled ivy outside our house, flicking bugs off my knees, trying for all I was worth to convey this to the kids in my gang, so that we could share something wondrous, something better than ice cream. But it was a tough job, trymg to hold the group together for a reading like that, and they flew apart before I'd finished.

    Our shuttered, single-room cabin stood on a barren plateau and faced the sea; a ragged outhouse slouched about twenty feet away. Both constructions were of the roughest lumber, rutted and weathered gray. Ash-dry hills shouldered high behind, and at the left a narrow dirt road ribboned all the way up to the rushing Pacific Coast Highway.
    It was always dark inside the cabin, and it smelled of seaweed; the walls were the other side of the same un-painted planks as the exterior. Two canvas cots were set along each side wall, with a good-sized maple table between them, on which had been placed a plain-glass hurricane lamp and a puckered, mildewed book with colored semaphore illustrations; cracked, browning soap stuck fast in an abalone shell by the stained porcelain sink, sand and earth insects pressed into crevices and down the drain; a rusted can opener dangled from a string nailed into the wall where barbecue utensils also hung. In one corner a scrimpy broom leaned out of a bucket, and cobwebs entangled fishing rods (we were not fisherfolk), and a bag of charcoal bled its sooty contents onto the floor. Through small dusty win-dowpanes there was a startling view of the sea. This was the cabin when last I saw it. Through aU these years it has held a fixed place and rank within me; in its plainness and usefulness, its utter lack of pretense and any embellishment, in the integrity of its existence, it is a thing by which all the rest can be measured.
    My mother had purchased the property at Trancas Beach with inheritance money from my grandfather. From time to time we came to visit,