Paris and London
1930 AND 1931
THE CHURCH WALLS TWINKLE WITH GOLD AND BLUE MOSAICS; I admire their pleasing pattern and allow my thoughts to unravel. I come here to pray and let my mind boil over one thing and another and it helps me to be out of the flat, to light a candle for the people I love, and to sit in the cool quiet for an hour. Today my mind is a broth of thoughts. I think about Samuel Beckett whom we’ve banned from visiting our home, for his slighting of Lucia. I think about how Jim misses his help. I think about Pappie, who writes to plead with Jim to come home and see him one last time; Pappie says he’s leaving all he owns to Jim, a fact that makes us both laugh as the man has nothing. I think about the Irish tenor Frank Sullivan who Jim is determined to make a star of and how this harms our own dear Georgie. If Jim wasn’t so busy lauding and boosting Sullivan, maybe Georgie’s singing career might rise?
But mostly I think of Lucia and whether she’s normal or not. I believe, more than ever, that there’s something not quite right with her. It’s not just the slovenliness and the bad humor and the obsessing over her looks, or over the slippery Mr. Beckett, it’s as if there’s something missing inside her. She’s vacant when she should be present and shouty when she should be silent; she can’t seem to stick to anything or discover what makes her happy. And, lately, we’ve had to scold her for launching herself at any man who glances her way—there was ugliness with an American sculptor she attached herself to who was not only married, he was unkind and, naturally, he dropped her with no explanation. A repeat of the Beckett incident in many ways. My poor Lucia, she will pick the wrong men to go about with, then she collapses when they don’t want her. She gives herself freely, then can’t understand her own pain. My daughter neither knows who she is nor cares to find out.
I haul myself out of the pew, go to the votive stand, and light a candle for my lovely, lost Lucy, my little star. I watch the flame bend and flicker, and I wonder if it’s the rearing we gave Lucia that has made her so contrary, or if it’s something that was already in her when she grew inside me. We’re born with a soul, maybe we’re born with all our faults, too? I hold my fingers to the candle’s heat, feel its warm glow. Whatever way it is, all I want for her is happiness and that she’ll find the love that she’s seeking. I hope, of course, that she does but I know, too, that it will take a special fellow, some extraordinary man, to be able to handle our dear Lucia. And so, I say a small prayer that just such a man might find the path to our door.
JIM AND GIORGIO AND HELEN ARE IN A HUDDLE IN THE SALON when I get home.
“What are you lot conspiring about?” I ask, unpinning my hat and setting it on the sideboard.
Helen’s look to me is sheepish. “Tell your mother, Giorgio,” she says.
All three turn their gazes to me, something like fear in their eyes.
“Tell me what?” I’m alarmed now. “Is it Lucia? Has something happened?”
Jim rises and comes to me. “No, no. Sit, Nora. We have things to discuss.”
Giorgio, flicking his cigarette nervously, blurts it. “Helen and I are to be married.”
I flump into my chair. “Oh.” I know I must congratulate them, but the words refuse to come. “When?”
Helen speaks. “In December, Nora.”
I nod and push a smile across my mouth. “Well, isn’t that grand?” Jim, like a pirate with his eye patch, glances at Helen and I look hard at him. “What else did you want to talk about? There’s something else, isn’t there? You said, ‘We have things to discuss.’”
Jim shifts in his seat. “Well, Nora, Helen feels that if she’s to marry Giorgio, she would like him to be, well, I suppose, she’d like him to be legitimate. I mean, for him to . . . if he should father a child . . . then, well—”
“What?” I turn from Jim to the other two. “What? What do you mean?”
Helen leans across and takes my hand. “Giorgio and I mean to have a baby together, Nora, once we’re married, and wouldn’t it be better if Giorgio had a true claim to the name Joyce, a legal claim? For inheritance and so forth? That way any child of his—of ours—would also be secure. For the future.”
My thoughts reel, I can’t grasp what she’s getting at; I mean, I think I know, but I’m not sure. Is this to do with her money? Her father’s? With our money? Georgie has no money to call his own, so it can’t be that.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘legal claim.’ Joyce is his name, isn’t it? I don’t understand this stuff, I don’t know anything about the law and things like that. Jim, what does it all mean?”
He smiles. “It’s simple, Gooseen. If Georgie and Helen marry, you and I should marry too.”
“WHY IS GIORGIO HITCHING HIMSELF TO THAT GIGOLO?” LUCIA stares at me from her bed, her hair a mad nest atop her head.
“Such a word to use, Lucy!” I say. “It’s unkind to call her that and, anyway, women can’t be gigolos.” I bite my lip for, in truth, I find it a little funny. Helen is too old for Georgie, too rich, too nerve-ridden somehow, but they’re determined and we must go along with it, it seems. And because of them, I’m to be married, too, though I’d like to have chosen my own time, not for my marriage date to be forced by Helen and Giorgio. Jim says now that he always meant us to wed at some point, but I treat that with the great lump of skepticism it deserves.
Lucy pouts. “I don’t see any reason for them to marry. None at all. You and Babbo have gone along nicely without a marriage certificate.” She frowns. “Though you’ve undoubtedly made fools of Georgie and me.”
And fools of ourselves, I think. “They want to have a child, Lucia,” I say. “Helen wants another baby.”
Her mouth drops. “What? But the gigolo is as old as Methuselah. Can she even do that?” She makes the shape of a bulging stomach with her hands.
“Women can have babies beyond forty and they do. Helen has time.” I sit on the bed. “Wouldn’t you like to be an aunt, Lucy?”
“Certainly not.”
I smooth her hair down with my fingers. “Lucia, the fact is, Babbo and I are to marry too.”
Lucia pulls my hand from her head. “For goodness’ sake, Mamma, you’re wearing me out completely with all this talk of weddings.” She lies down abruptly and pulls the sheet over her head; I sit for a few moments, hoping she’ll look at me and say something kind, about my marriage. Despite how it’s come about, I’m happy at last to be marrying Jim, more than happy, the thought of it has me giddy as a goat. I cup Lucia’s cheek through the bedsheet.
“Don’t you want to congratulate me, Lucy dear?”
“You can go now,” she says.
THE HONEYMOONERS ARE BACK FROM GERMANY AND THEY TAKE us to Les Trianons for Jim’s forty-ninth birthday. It’s a quiet evening but, later, we raise a toast with the Jolases, Paul and Lucie Léon, Lucie’s brother Alec Ponisovsky, who’s teaching Jim Russian, and Padraic and Molly Colum, and it strikes me that, once more, our circle has shifted without me even noticing much. The Nuttings went home to America and Jim spends less time at Shakespeare and Company now and is convinced Miss Beach has diddled him out of royalties, which seems a little far-fetched to me, but Jim loves to make villains of people, so there it is. He’s thinking now of letting the Jolases publish Work in Progress, not Miss Beach and Shakespeare and Company, and Giorgio agrees that he should.
“You’re a world-famous author, Papà. You need a better outfit than Sylvia’s dusty bookshop now. Think how it looks.” He waves at the company. “Mr. and Mrs. Jolas will do a fine job. Don’t you agree, Mrs. Colum?”
“Well, yes, no doubt they would do a splendid job,” Molly Colum says. “But I feel your father has pulled enough legs. He’s indebted to Freud and Jung, with all this interior monologue stuff, but will only credit some obscure old French chap. Isn’t that right, Joyce?” She shouts at Jim as if he’s half deaf instead of half blind.
Jim puckers his lips. “I do so hate women who know anything,” he says, not looking at Mrs. Colum.
“Huh. You don’t, Joyce. You like them hugely. Look at Weaver and Beach. They know plenty and where would you be without them?” She leans toward him. “And where, sir, would you be without your wife? A woman who knows more than every man at this table put together, if you ask me.”
Jim turns to her and smiles. “Touché,” he says and a tiny laugh erupts from him. “What, dear Mollycoddle, did you think of the last section of Work in Progress that I showed you?”
“Joyce,” Mrs. Colum says, in her strident way, “it’s outside literature.”
Jim sips his wine. “Molly,” he says, “it may be outside literature now but, in time, it will be firmly inside literature.”
JIM SAYS THAT FOR GIORGIO AND LUCIA TO BE HIS LEGAL HEIRS, we must marry in London, but it must look like we live in London to do that, so we pack up Square de Robiac and remove ourselves to Campden Hill, Kensington. Lucia will not call the flat in Campden Grove anything other than Campden Grave. Jim chooses the fourth of July—Pappie’s birthday—for our big day. We do everything quietly, but still the newspapermen snuffle their way into our business and, not satisfied with announcing the date of our marriage on the front of their papers, they’re outside the registrar’s office, too, like dogs after hares, shouting, “But aren’t you married already, Mr. Joyce?” We shove past them and, when I see the drab room within, a flash of Eileen’s wedding in the beautiful church of San Giusto in Trieste lights up my inner eye and I clench my teeth. The world will realize that we’ve been unwed until now, no matter what yarns Jim spins, and the thought of it makes me shiver. Still, we’re here now and that’s enough.
Lucia sticks to my elbow, muttering to herself, and I swing around to her. “What is it, girl?”
“This is the worst day of my life.” She flicks her hand toward her brother. “Everyone knows now that Giorgio and I are bastards and always have been.”
I could slap her face, but I clutch my handbag with both hands to stop me. “Control your tongue,” I growl.
THE PARTY IS LACKLUSTER. JIM IS GETTING MOROSELY DRUNK BESIDE me and I feel I’d rather be alone in a dark room, with my mind emptied of every single thought, rather than here. The children are sullen and our few guests are as much fun as the departed at a wake. When I imagined this day, I always saw bright sunshine and myself in layers of Alençon lace and circles of happy faces around me; I saw a priest and a marble altar. I didn’t see myself in my old fox fur and coat in a drab Kensington office and, after the ceremony, pulling my cloche hat low over my face to stop those horrible men with their cameras taking my picture.
Now Jim sits, a silent, crooked bird and Lucia is his double on my other side, a sulky little pullet, thinking of no one but herself. Giorgio would hop on the boat to France today, if I’d let him, to get back to Helen who’s suffering through her pregnancy with queasiness and general unease. I sip a glass of brandy and look around at everyone. Nobody cares that I got no bouquet, no church, no iced fruitcake. It bothers no one but me that I didn’t even get a wedding picture.