Trieste
MAY TO JULY 1907
“IT’S A DARLING THING, JIM!” I’M HOLDING THE COPY OF CHAMBER Music in wonder and passing my hands over the cover. He has collected a parcel of the books from the post office and brought them home so that, after him, I might be the first to see them. Elkin Mathews has done a fine job of the book. I lift it to my nose and sniff gently.
Jim laughs. “That was my first action, too, Nora.”
“The smell is glorious. And isn’t it wonderful that the book is green, like Ireland?” I say, running the tip of my finger gently across the moss linen, then over the golden letters of Jim’s name. “Now, doesn’t it look very fine indeed? Like something a prince would have.”
Jim laughs. “Oh, Nora,” he says, shaking his frayed shirt cuffs, “I’m not likely to be mistaken for royalty.”
I hold up the volume. “This is an absolute credit to you, Jim. There’ll be great praise of this book at home, wait till you see. The literary fellows will be punching each other out of the way to be the first to applaud it.”
“Open it, Gooseen, go on.”
My breath comes short as I turn the cover to find—though it hardly seems possible—that the insides are even better than the front. “Oh, Jim, look.” There’s a drawing of a piano with columns around it that are draped in scrolls of sheet music. “The publishers thought of everything.”
“I’m heartily glad you like the book, Nora,” he says, his face lit up like summer.
I turn the pages reverently, afraid to soil them or bend even the smallest corner. I find one of the poems I really admire and read part of it now to Jim:
O, it is for my true love
The woods their rich apparel wear
O, it is for my own true love,
That is so young and fair.
My eyes clutter up with tears, so moved am I by the poem once more, but also by the fact that Jim now has a real book, a gorgeously made one. That he’s a published author, as he’s always wanted to be. Jim can hold his head high now—he’s not just a teacher—and those scamps back in Dublin who scourge his heart with their tattling talk will have to sit up and take heed.
THE FIRST REVIEW WE GET TO SEE IS FROM ARTHUR SYMONS. Aunt Jo has promised to send a copy of The Nation, the magazine that it appears in. We’re like sausages dancing in hot butter so jittery are we waiting for the post. The parcel comes at long last and Jim rips it open but then can’t bring himself to read the review and hands the magazine over to Stannie. I take Giorgio onto my lap and we wait.
“Go through it first,” Jim says, “and if it’s terrible, don’t read it out.” He puts his pince-nez on and off, agitates the back of a chair with his fingers. “No, do. Call out the bloody thing, whatever it says. Go on!”
Stannie clears his throat and begins. “‘I advise everyone who cares for poetry to buy Chamber Music, by James Joyce, who is in no Irish movement, literary or national and who has not even anything obviously Celtic in his manner.’”
“Hurrah for that,” says Jim and I laugh.
Stannie, who cares more for nationalism than Jim does, looks at us sternly and I nod for him to go on. “‘The poems are all so singularly good, so firm and delicate, and yet so full of music and suggestion . . . No one who has not tried can realize how difficult it is to do such tiny, evanescent things as that; for it is to evoke, not only roses in midwinter, but the very dew on the roses . . . There is almost no substance at all in these songs, which hardly hint at a story; but they are like a whispering clavichord that someone plays in the evening, when it is getting dark. They are so slight, as a drawing of Whistler is slight, that their entire beauty will not be discovered by those who go to poetry for anything but its perfume.’”
“Oh,” I say, “now doesn’t that sound grand?” I’m not sure what Mr. Symons means entirely, but it reads well, all the talk of roses, perfume, and music and catching people’s fancy.
Jim frowns. “‘No substance’ Symons says. ‘Slight.’ You were skipping over parts, Stannie. Is there worse?”
Stannie shakes his head. “There’s some more comment, but it’s a very positive review, Jim. Symons says there’s beauty and hidden depths.” Stannie searches the page again with his eyes. “Look here, he pronounces that the poems are ‘firm and delicate.’ That’s lofty praise, Jim.”
Jim lights a cigarette and blows smoke out into the air. He nods sharply and holds his hand out for the magazine, which he then hands to me. “Put it away, Nora,” he says.
JIM’S NOT HIMSELF AT ALL; HIS LOVELY VOICE HAS BEEN REDUCED to a whisper, he complains of aching knees and elbows, of being too hot then too cold, and he slobs around like a sack of spuds, not even interested in going to a caffè for one little drink. But he refuses to take to the bed and get rest, though he shivers and moans and can’t get comfortable.
“Should we ask Doctor Sinigaglia to come?” I say to Stannie.
He looks over to the chair where Jim is slumped with a book on his lap, though he doesn’t turn the pages. “Let’s see what happens and how he progresses, Nora. Is he drinking the lemon water regularly?”
“He is but with no good grace. He seems worse to me, Stannie, since Sunday.”
“I can hear the pair of you snoddering like two old sows.” Jim’s throat rasps like a rusty gate. “What are you saying about me?”
“I want Doctor Sinigaglia to have a look at you.”
“I’m not dying,” Jim whispers, lifting each leg with a long groan. “Though it feels a little as if I might be.”
“He’s wretched, Stannie. Would you see if the doctor can spare a few minutes?”
Stannie goes off and I coax Jim into the bed for, if the doctor sees him up and dressed, he surely won’t take things seriously. The hours tick by and Jim dozes and I try to keep Georgie quiet, but he’s not a lamblike child so, eventually, I shunt him out into the corridor to play. The baby in my belly kicks wildly and I have to stay still until the frenzy calms. I stand by the door, close my eyes, place both hands to my stomach, and wait for the kicking to stop. When I glance to Jim, he’s watching me.
“She’s a wild one,” I say.
“Does it hurt?”
“It feels as if she’s tumbling like an acrobat. Sometimes I think she means to kick a hole in me and climb out.”
“Our little dancer. Do you think it will be a girl, Nora?”
“Only God knows that, Jim.”
“And as he doesn’t exist, even he doesn’t know,” Jim says and laughs, but the laughter hurts his throat and he begins to cough, a brittle sound. Jim beckons me over to the bed and I go to sit by him. “Thank you for looking after me, Gooseen. I’m not a patient patient. Pappie never let us be sick when we were children, so I don’t know how to conduct myself.”
“It’s all right, Jim.” I hold his tired head to my skirt. “I’ll mind you.”
A rap to the door and Stannie comes in with Doctor Sinigaglia who goes to Jim and throws back the sheet. He lifts Jim’s shirt and we all peer in to see that his stomach is pocked with red spots. Sinigaglia asks in rapid Italian about other symptoms and Jim lists them off.
“Febbre reumatica,” the doctor says, “for certain.”
“Translate for me, Jim.”
“Rheumatic fever.”
I cross myself. There were many that died of the same thing back in Galway.
“He must go to the hospital, Mrs. Joyce, particularly as you are with child, and it’s better to keep him from Giorgio, too.”
“With luck it’ll develop into Saint Vitus’s dance, Nora, and I’ll do a jig around the hospital ward to entertain my fellows.” Jim cackles.
“Do not joke about it, James Joyce,” I say, trying to quell tears. “Will it cost us?” I whisper, but the doctor hears and understands me.
“We provide care to all who need it, Mrs. Joyce.”
Stannie puts his hand to my arm. “Don’t be worrying, Nora, about anything. I’ll get Jim over to the Ospedale Civico. Everything will be grand.”