Paris
1929
THE SIXTEENTH OF JUNE AND WE’RE ON A HIRED OMNIBUS TO Les Vaux-de-Cernay, a village near Versailles, with family, friends, and journalists, headed for the Hôtel Léopold to celebrate the French translation of Ulysses and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s events. Miss Beach and Miss Monnier have taken it upon themselves to organize the outing, which they’ve christened Déjeuner Ulysse, and they may well regret the whole caper for Beckett and McGreevy, normally rather serene and usually very mannerly, have decided today to jabber wildly and sing endless old songs like a pair of escaped lunatics.
As soon as we’re seated at the table in the Léopold, they begin to funnel wine down their throats and I poke Jim so that he sees what they’re doing and will castigate them.
“Way hay and up she rises,” sings Beckett, knocking his glass to McGreevy’s, “early in the morning.”
McGreevy points at Beckett, trying to focus on his face, which is hard because he’s laughing so much. “Shave his belly with a rusty razor,” he roars and snorts, slapping Beckett on the shoulder.
Jim sits dumb as an oyster.
“Say something, Jim,” I hiss. “Scold them.”
He shakes his head and I’m too aware of the journalists sitting nearby to say anything myself, though I stare at the pair continually to show my disapproval. Lucia laughs like an imbecile when Beckett slides off his chair, and she runs to help him up, whispering something into his ear while she settles him in his seat once again.
“Lucy, Lucille, Lucinda, Lucia Anna,” he says. “Little ray of light.” He leers at her and blinks and she all but swoons for she finds it so hard to catch Beckett’s eye when he’s sober. I wish he wouldn’t come after her now, drunk, for Lucia will think he’s being sincere and it’ll raise her hopes.
“You’re in rare form today, Sam,” she says.
“Indeed and he is,” I say and Lucy reluctantly comes back to sit beside me.
“Beckett is drunk as a lord and McGreevy is no better,” I whisper to Jim. “They’re making bloody eejits of themselves; they must have been drinking all morning in Paris.”
“Lucky them,” Jim says. He stares ahead and eats nothing. He refuses to speechify when asked by Miss Monnier and drinks wine until it nearly pours out of his eyes. I grimace an apology to Miss Beach and her friend and try to keep one eye on Beckett, in case he upsets Lucia.
“You’ve had enough,” I hiss at Jim, but he waves me away and lowers more.
“It’s my day, Nora. It is, in fact, Mister Bloom’s day.” He holds up his glass. “To Bloomsday.” He hiccups.
“Well, Jim, from now on, you can go to these literary events alone if this waste of hours is all I can expect.” I slug my wine, which tastes like unripe peaches and push away the glass.
In the bus on the way home, Beckett and McGreevy continue to sing songs designed to aggravate such as “The Sash My Father Wore” and “Erin Go Bragh.” I make sure that Lucy sits nowhere near them, but they upset everyone’s peace with their high old time and we have to stop at a café to let them use the WC. The omnibus idles outside for ten minutes or more.
Miss Monnier shouts, “Let’s leave them behind.”
“Driver, go on,” Monsieur Valéry calls. “We’re all in agreement here. Leave them!”
I look around and, catching Georgie’s eye, I toss my head toward the café. He and Helen get off the bus in search of the missing Irishmen and find them in the café, a bottle of wine open between them. Stern words are exchanged and Georgie and Helen return to the bus, shaking their heads.
“Drive on,” Helen says.
The driver looks at my son. “Do what she says, man,” he says.
Jim starts to giggle and he waves at the retreating café. “Farewell, Beckett! Farewell, McGreevy, ingloriously abandoned by our wagonette in a wayside café. Oh, to be young and free!” He stands up, waving vigorously, and encourages all around him to do the same. I pull him down.
“For shame, Jim.”
“Happy Bloomsday, Nora,” he says and settles his head on my shoulder.
WE SPEND THE REST OF THE SUMMER IN LONDON AND TORQUAY, with the children and Helen, and the Gilberts, too. Mr. Gilbert is writing a book about Ulysses and he and Jim confer daily, and Helen helps them out, too, note-taking and so forth. Giorgio disappears for hours on end while Helen works with his father. On his return this morning, he joins me in the glass room of the hotel that overlooks the sea, sitting heavily into the wicker seat beside mine. He closes his eyes, throws his head back, and sighs. The sweet, oily smell of cognac hangs between us.
“Have you been drinking, Georgie?” I ask.
“I’m a man, Mamma.”
I turn my face away, disappointed in him, and surprised, for he’s disdained drink up to now. I’ve noticed, too, that he eats less and less every time we dine.
“Are you turning into your father?” I ask.
Giorgio lights a cigarette. “What if I am?”
“I thought you’d more sense than that.”
Georgie shrugs, but I can see a pinch of pain around his eyes; I’m sorry to hurt him but one drinker is enough in any family.
WE ALL GO TO THE RUSSIAN BALLET AND LUCIA IS SAD AND downhearted afterward.
“It’s so enormous, so serious, so vast,” she says. “It makes what I do with Kitten and the troupe seem juvenile. I’ll never dance like those Russians.”
“But that’s classical work, Lucia,” her father says. “You’re a modernist. Like me.” This cheers her and she smiles at Jim, the only one she has time for anymore it seems; I can barely raise a civil word from her and her monkeyish grin is like a memory only.
I like England enormously; it doesn’t have the false friend feeling of Ireland or the snootiness of Paris.
“Can we try London out, Jim, as our home?” I ask often. “Come for a while and see how we get on?”
“Soon, soon,” he says.
Which really means that he wants to get Finnegans done in Paris, before he’ll go anywhere else and I have to bide my time, as always.
LUCIA SITS IN THE SALON AT SQUARE DE ROBIAC, LOOKING LIKE the kind of woman you’d see under a bridge. Yesterday, against my advice, she took Samuel Beckett to lunch at Le Perraudin and went straight to her room on her return, slamming the door mightily behind her and going to bed, though it was barely four o’clock. I got up from where I was reading the newspaper and tried to talk to her through her door, but she refused to answer.
Today I’m minding Helen’s son, David, for his nurse has a day off, and Helen is taking dictation from Jim, whose eyes are weeping so badly that he can’t write. Little David is solemn but sweet-natured and he stays in the corner by the window, reading through some old children’s books from when our own were small. I sit opposite Lucia, taking in her mussed hair and disheveled appearance and the general unease that reeks from her.
“Well, what happened with Beckett? Tell me.”
She clenches her fists. “He turned up to our lunch with a friend. Can you credit it, Mamma?”
“And you were vastly disappointed because you wanted him alone.”
“Naturally, Mamma. Why else did I ask him? Why else did he agree to meet me?” She tuts and knots a strand of hair around her finger. “Immediately I couldn’t eat. The fish I’d ordered wouldn’t move out of my mouth and down my throat. After fifteen minutes of not eating, and horrid silence between us all, I jumped up and left the two of them there. I walked through the Jardin du Luxembourg and all the way home. Sam didn’t even call out my name as I left the restaurant, never mind come after me.”
“Beckett should have told you he meant to bring a friend to lunch, that would’ve been mannerly.”
“He’s cruel to me.”
“Well, unless there’s some understanding between you, Beckett can do as he pleases, I suppose.”
“Mamma, you’re meant to be for me, not him!” Her voice is sharp and little David stops reading and glances over at us; I smile to reassure him.
I speak in a whisper. “I’m not for Beckett, Lucy, I just don’t want you wasting your time if he’s not interested in forming an attachment and, so far, I don’t see that he has shown an interest.” She lies down on the sofa and I bristle. “You needn’t think you’re going to loll around here all day like the queen of the Nile. Wash yourself, Lucy, for starters,” I say.
She shrugs. “For what? For whom?”
“For yourself. For me. For little David over there.” Her hair is poking about her head like a wire brush. “Fix your hair.”
“Nobody cares if my hair is neat or not.”
“I care. Babbo cares.”
“Samuel Beckett clearly cares not at all.”
I ignore this. “Your friend Kitten, no doubt, cares. Your dance teacher surely cares.”
Lucia scowls. “Kitten, Kitten, Kitten. Look how lovely she is. See how well she moves. Don’t all the men love pretty little Kitty. That’s all anyone ever says to me. See how Kitten’s eyes are straight and perfect. Unlike mine.”
“Stop being such a raspeen, Lucia; I’ve never compared you to your friend before.”
“It’s not just you,” Lucy says, scowling.
“Put a brush through your hair, that’s all I’m saying. Or do you want to look like an urchin and shame yourself and all of us?”
“Shame? You know a lot about that, Mamma,” she spits.
“How dare you!”
She hops up, marches to her room, and comes back with her brush, which she tears through her hair as if she means to drag every blade out of her head. David comes to sit by me and he stares at Lucia who begins to glare back in a wild, devilish way.
“What do you want, child?” Lucia says. “Speak!”
“Why,” David asks, “if you’re talking to me, are you looking over there?” He points to the corner of the room.
Lucia gasps. “You see, Mamma! Even a ten-year-old can see that my stupid eye is wayward and wrong!” She jumps up and storms into her bedroom.
David pouts. “Lucia never looks straight at me, that’s all I mean.”
“I know, pet,” I say, “that’s because she has a turn in her eye. She was born with it.” I sigh. “And she doesn’t like it much.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No, loveen, it doesn’t. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about Lucia at all,” I say, but meanwhile my own heart is crosshatched with distress. I hardly know what to do with Lucy, or what to say to her, most days.
LUCIA WANTS AN OPERATION TO FIX HER EYE.
“I’ll never find a husband with this stupid squint.” She glares into her hand mirror, begins to examine the scar on her chin—a tiny comma—and says it mars her looks even more. “Was I dropped as a baby?” she asks.
“No, you were not,” I tell her.
“Did a dog attack me?”
“Never.”
“Who will want me?” she says, poking her chin and lifting her eyelid with one finger.
“You are beautiful, Lucia,” Jim says.
“Am I as beautiful as Napoleon’s Joséphine, Babbo? As pretty as Mrs. Lita Chaplin?” She lifts her mirror again and stares into it.
“You are Mademoiselle Lucia Joyce, a rare beauty in her own right,” Jim says. “Why are you comparing yourself to those women?”
“I want to be as fetching as the wives of my heroes. What’s wrong with that?” she shouts.
Jim looks over Lucia’s head at me and raises his eyebrows.
Lucia feels left out when Giorgio sings at a concert.
Lucia has an eye operation that makes little difference to how she looks.
Lucia says she no longer wants to be part of her dance troupe.
Lucia says she doesn’t want to dance.
Lucia gives up dancing.
Lucia cries for a month.
“Who is there for me?” is her constant wail. “Who in the world is there just for me?”