A Fractured Memoir, and Childhood, Far From a Fairy Tale

Which is worse: an abusive parent or a parent who simply abandons a child?

The parents whom Paula Fox depicts in her restrained yet unsparing memoir “Borrowed Finery” combine the worst of both modes. Not content with consigning their infant daughter to a Manhattan orphanage, Fox’s birth parents had the gall five years later to come back into her life and whisk her away from the nurturing home she had found with a poor but kindly small-town minister in upstate New York. Little Paula soon finds herself, quite literally, at her parents’ disposal. They routinely leave her alone at home when they go out to parties. One year, they dispose of her by placing her in the Queens home of her batty, impecunious maternal grandmother from Spain. Another time, they ship her off to Cuba to stay with a distant relation. Or to boarding school. Or to the home of a friend in Florida--or California.

Fox’s father, Paul, is a feckless, mercurial, narcissistic boozer who gets by on his skimpy charm and even skimpier talent as a screenwriter. (One of his films, “Last Train to Madrid,” Graham Greene pronounced “the worst movie I ever saw.”) Fox recounts an incident in a hotel room, when her father invited her to order her supper--lamb chop and peas--from room service:

“When the tray was delivered ... I looked at it and saw I had forgotten something.

“ ‘There’s no milk,’ I observed.

“At once, my father carried the tray to the window, opened it, and dropped the tray into the air shaft. ... Through tight lips, my father said mildly, ‘OK, pal. Since it wasn’t to your pleasure....’

” ... I was profoundly embarrassed, as though I were implicated in my father’s act. But nearly as painful was the gnawing hunger I suddenly felt for that lamb chop lying 14 stories below.”

Compared with his wife, however, Paul looks like Ozzie Nelson. A tall, dark, Spanish beauty, Elsie is icy, humorless, arrogant, easily angered, and not only uninterested in her daughter but actively hostile.

Even though Paula is nominally in their custody, they make a habit of dumping her onto various relatives, friends, acquaintances, most of them strangers to the child. Years later, her father tells her what her mother had threatened on one such occasion: “‘She gave me an ultimatum .... She said, ‘Either she goes or I go.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘I had no choice,’ he said, in a faintly self-pitying tone of voice.” Despite such twisted demonstrations of spousal devotion, Paul and Elsie were more often apart than together. They were also routinely unfaithful to each other. Eventually, if hardly surprisingly, their marriage, a monument to instability, dissolves.

In tracing her childhood and youth from her early, happier years with “Uncle Elwood,” the minister, to the peripatetic existence forced upon her by her fly-by-night parents, Fox’s narrative line gradually loses its cohesiveness and becomes increasingly choppy and fragmentary. The reader, by now probably following Fox’s story with great interest, is likely to find this disconcerting: So much seems to have been left out; so many dots remain tantalizingly unconnected. But from another perspective, this fragmentation aptly mirrors the increasing instability that the narrator experiences: Instead of a comprehensible “story” of which she is the protagonist, her life has become a series of discontinuous, arbitrary incidents that make very little sense to her.

Fox is an accomplished writer, with a gift for penetrating to the heart of complex feelings and complicated situations. Her tools are a lucid style, a cool, mildly ironic tone and an ascetic refusal to wallow in emotion, even as she succinctly reveals or expresses it. She has won critical acclaim as an author of children’s books that demonstrate an uncanny sympathy with children baffled by hard circumstances or daunting surroundings. Her six adult novels have been justly praised for their unflinching portrayal of life’s hard edges. In “Borrowed Finery,” we can see some of the personal experience from which she has quarried her uncompromising art.