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"  When I was 11, I chose Ricki Huston as my second mother. My own mother existed on an anxious plane where everything had to be perfect, but Ricki was exotic and earthy. I&amp;#039;d known my mother all my life. Ricki was new. From the moment she taught me to bake Irish soda bread, I knew we were soul mates. She already had two children, and indeed taught her daughter Anjelica how to bake Irish soda bread at the same moment she taught me, but I felt I had the receptors for her instruction, and assumed that Anjelica, who was all of eight, was doubtless as weary of her mother as I was of mine.  The two women were not that different, and both beauties. My mother was on the cover of Charm at 17; Ricki was on the cover of Life at 18, posed by Philippe Halsman as the Mona Lisa, though she was better-looking than the painting. Joyce Getz had been an actress and model from the age of nine until she married my father, Jules Buck, at 19; Enrica Soma had been a young ballerina who danced for George Balanchine before she married my godfather, John Huston, at 20, while pregnant with their son, Tony.  My mother had a good marriage. She fulfilled the duties of a movie producer&amp;#039;s wife, looking good, embodying success, hosting dinners, and soothing egos. She wore suits from Paris with straight skirts, diamond pins, spike heels, and a smile. Her impeccable Kelly bags were weighed down with a silver compact, a silver cigarette case, a silver lighter, all from Boucheron in Paris, like her watch. She believed in the power of positive thinking. Her fine hands trembled a little.  Ricki Huston had a bad marriage to an absent man with mistresses, and she sublimated its misery through a gallant deployment of aesthetic choices that made her character clearer to me than my mother&amp;#039;s could ever be.  In the west of Ireland, Ricki&amp;#039;s uniform was a brown leather jacket with knitted sleeves, an Aran sweater, and baggy pants; in London, she wore Cossack boots and fine wool smocks from Donald Davies in Dublin. The holes in her cashmere sweaters were sewn over with tiny knitted lozenges, and her single Kelly bag was, to say the least, distressed. At night she dressed far away from status and out of time, from a costume chest, in robes from Central Asia, pillbox hats, capes, saris. Enthralled, I copied her. I didn&amp;#039;t want to censor myself to please one man; I wanted to live for adventure and discovery, as she did.  Her hands were always busy in the kitchen and the garden. Her father, an Italian yogi named Tony Soma who owned a restaurant on West 52nd Street, had told her, &amp;quot;Sex is natural, smoking is not.&amp;quot; She took him at his word; two years after John Huston had his son Danny with another woman, she had a daughter, Allegra, with another man.  I wished my mother could be like Ricki, but Joyce wasn&amp;#039;t going to start baking bread, wearing Cossack boots, or living a fearless life of the senses. My mother was entirely urban, her only connection to earth a few pots of geraniums in the conservatory. In Ricki&amp;#039;s Irish garden, ivy ringed the base of a tree and covered the grave of Little Chip, a cat named after an Irish marmalade; there were acres of grass, sweet peas and asters, and cabbages, carrots, and lettuce, which Anjelica and I picked for dinner, because Ricki taught us how to cook, how to grease baking pans and make salad dressing, and how to wash wineglasses by pouring hot water from one glass into the next, a restaurant trick from her father.   John Huston&amp;#039;s Irish domain, St. Clerans, consisted of a big house for adults and adult guests; a little house for Ricki, children, and child guests; a stable yard where his hunt, the Galway Blazers, gathered before galloping out across the fields; and a ruined castle keep. Ricki endlessly verified the smooth working of the big house, from paint to plumbing; took baths in every guest room; cut flowers in the garden; and stood at the special sink in the basement to fill vases. When she moved to London, she roasted lamb with potatoes for huge Sunday lunches. Joyce wrote with a golden ballpoint; Ricki, always, in ink, with a fountain pen. My mother was absorbed in a life of lunches, drinks, dinners, and premieres, with trips to the South of France. She talked to me about who was present at said lunches, drinks, dinners, and trips to the South of France. Ricki&amp;#039;s life was Anjelica, Tony, and then Allegra, and books and music and art; her trips were to Egypt to watch a Coptic bishop be ordained and to travel down the Nile, to Norway, to Greece. Among her lovers were a diplomat, a great travel writer, and the historian John Julius Norwich.  I was her devoted acolyte; she was my mentor. She talked to me about Jung and poetry, about love, and she admitted when she was sad, which my mother never did. Ricki took me to Sotheby&amp;#039;s to root through small trays of Greek and Roman flotsam, coins, bronze hands, and tiny statues, and taught me how to bid. She gave me Chinese soapstone vases, a red straw box from the South Seas sewn with cowrie shells, a tight red Mexican belt with silver studs, a dark-red William Morris scarf from Liberty&amp;#039;s. I had dates with her for theater and movies, for museums, not always with Anjelica, and would tentatively announce to my parents that I was off to Ricki&amp;#039;s for the weekend, trying to hide how much I longed to be with her. She gave me magic and freedom, and showed me the way into impossible worlds through art. I knew Ricki for only nine years. She died in a car crash in France at the unthinkably early age of 39; I was 20, Anjelica was 17, Tony 18, Allegra four.  I have looked for her in the things she loved, the books she read, the people she loved for more than 40 years. I wore my hair like her, cooked like her, dressed like her, pretended to be her, to keep her alive. As the years went on, I was less her, and more me; when I cut my hair short like my mother, I knew I was giving in to nature and genes and the shape of head I had inherited from Joyce. I am both my parents now; I soothe egos and ruffle feathers, often simultaneously. When I&amp;#039;m sad I read poems, as Ricki did. Last year, longing for lost worlds, I found myself copying W.H. Auden&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Atlantis&amp;quot; into a notebook. It begins &amp;quot;Being set on the idea/ Of getting to Atlantis,/ You have discovered of course/ Only the Ship of Fools is/ Making the voyage this year.&amp;quot; Over the years, Anjelica has become an increasingly precious friend, as has Allegra. I&amp;#039;ve stopped looking for Ricki in them; her daughters are themselves, they contain her naturally, in the blood. Anjelica in the garden is like Ricki in the garden, but fiercer. Allegra lost Ricki when she was four but makes wherever she lives look like Ricki&amp;#039;s houses. I&amp;#039;m the only one who still falls into costume. &amp;quot;Harem pants again?&amp;quot; Anjelica will ask. &amp;quot;Really?&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m writing this in Anjelica&amp;#039;s house in Los Angeles. Last night, she opened a drawer, and there was a small brown leather book with Ricki&amp;#039;s initials, ESH, on it. I&amp;#039;d never seen it before. I took the book up to my room for a longer look, opened it slowly in the middle. It&amp;#039;s an address book that Ricki didn&amp;#039;t use for addresses. Things Greek are under &amp;quot;G,&amp;quot; things Irish under &amp;quot;I,&amp;quot; and so on, all in the same blue-black ink I know from her letters and postcards. It has names of antiques dealers and Greek hotels, prices for Tyrolean jackets. Flowers cut 50 years ago are Scotch-taped to the thicker paper of the tabbed dividers, wildflowers at &amp;quot;G,&amp;quot; a flat violet on the back of &amp;quot;MN,&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;Norway&amp;quot; written above and &amp;quot;Bristol Hotel-Oslo&amp;quot; below. There are garden notations: &amp;quot;Chicken manure for all garden but not&amp;quot;\u2014underlined twice\u2014&amp;quot;roses.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Horse manure good for compost.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Put an onion by each rose root for better scent.&amp;quot; I went back to the beginning of the book. The first entry under the letter A is &amp;quot;Atlantis: W.H. Auden.&amp;quot; Forty years before me, she&amp;#039;d copied out the entire poem. Halfway through, I stopped at these lines: &amp;quot;\u2026 Unless/ You become acquainted now/ With each refuge that tries to/ Counterfeit Atlantis, how/ Will you recognize the true?&amp;quot;     "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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