Paris
1934 TO 1936
WE ARE BACK ON THE RIVE GAUCHE, WHERE WE BELONG, AT rue Edmond Valentin, near the Tour Eiffel; we have five elegant rooms on the fourth floor and, with just the pair of us now, there’s ample space. I turn fifty and a motoring holiday with some new friends does me a power of good; it lightens me up, lessens my sorrows.
We visit Lucia at Nyon and she is weepy and sorrowful, but radiant, too, and taut as a tram wire.
“Mamma, I’m so very glad to see you.” She wipes at a waterfall of tears. “I’m sorry for all the hurt I caused you, truly I am. Can you forgive your silly girl?”
“Of course, my Lucy.” I kiss her head, relieved that she seems, at least, to understand she has behaved badly.
She leaps to Jim. “How is Paris, Babbo? Do you miss me?”
“Horribly, my darling.”
She clings to her father and I trail along behind them through the grounds, glad to see them so thick, but wondering if Lucy will ever be right. Right enough to marry or survive in a flat alone, if it comes to it. Doktor Forel says she has too many white blood corpuscles and I nodded along as if I knew what that meant; it’s hard, I find, to have conversations with these doctors; they speak in riddles, as far as I’m concerned.
Back at our hotel, Jim is melancholic. “Wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove, that’s our lovely Lucy,” he says.
I raise my eyebrows and say nothing; I’m not altogether convinced of her virtue. The telephone rings, it’s a nurse at the hospital. Lucia has set fire to her bedroom.
WE MOVE LUCY BACK TO THE ASYLUM AT BURGHÖLZLI IN ZÜRICH on the advice of Doktor Forel. She is catatonic, will not talk, will not move. She’s like a mannequin in a shop window, rigid and silent, and to look at her that way frightens me to my bones. How does a person get like that? It seems neither real nor right to me. The doctors say she might benefit from the wisdom of Mister Jung at nearby Küsnacht, on the lakeshore. Though Jim disdains the same man since the Mrs. McCormick incident, he’s willing to try anything.
“Jung will be the twentieth doctor,” I say, hoping by saying it aloud Jim will hear my meaning. It’s all too much. For us. For Lucia. We need to stop shunting her from medic to medic and get her settled somehow. But how and where?
LUCY WILL ACTUALLY SPEAK WITH JUNG—WITH HER OTHER doctors she mostly preferred silence. She says she set the fire at Nyon so the nurses would open her door; she says she was too much alone.
“I was horribly lonely,” she says, in the voice of a lost child and my heart cracks to smithereens.
She says her father’s face is red—from wine—and fire is also red and that’s another reason why she burned her room. Lucia says she knows she’s spoilt, that her life has been “too nice.” She thinks Jim and I should return to Paris because Switzerland is, according to her, “not the worst place in the world” to be. She says she longs to go to Ireland because it is her babbo’s place. I, seemingly, am of nowhere.
When we come to visit, Lucy apologizes over and over, tries to figure herself out.
“I’m sorry, Mamma, for all the upset I’ve caused. Maybe I’ve eaten too many potatoes in my life,” she says. “They’re the devil’s food, Babbo, you know that, I’m sure?”
“I think not, dear Lucy,” Jim says, his face the face of a sorrowing wreck.
JIM CAN’T BEAR TO VISIT KÜSNACHT THIS MORNING, SO I GO alone. When I’m let in, I see that Lucia’s in her green beaded evening gown with her opera cloak about her shoulders. She has painted her face with black ink. I stare but say nothing. The whole reason for these dramatics may be to evoke a response, the doctor says, but to me, not to respond seems like further madness.
“Harriet Weaver put the evil eye on me, Mamma,” Lucia says. “Devil Harriet.”
“No, Lucia. Miss Weaver is the best of women, her gifts of money have kept us alive for a long time. She has been nothing but good to our family, you know that.”
Lucy stands and throws off her cloak. “They’re all stealing from me here. They took the pen that Babbo gave me.”
I get up. “Let me look for your pen, peteen. It’s probably here somewhere.”
“No!” she screams and I cover my ears.
“JIM, IT’S CLEARER THAN EVER TO ME THAT SHE’S MAD.” I TELL him about Lucy’s appearance, her inked face, her comments about Miss Weaver, the missing pen.
“They knew it was my pen, whoever took it,” he retorts. “They’ll try to sell it now and profit from us and us paying ten thousand francs a month to them. The blackguards.” He pulls on his beard.
“Jim, have sense. Lucia probably threw the pen into the lake herself.”
“No, no, no,” he says, his voice breaking.
“Listen to me, Jim. Lucy says she wants to go home to Paris. She raved on about it, saying she’d like her aunt Eileen to come there as her companion. I told her that Eileen has her own three children to worry about, not to mention her job.”
He squints at me. “Eileen?”
“Lucy says as she and Eileen are both ‘a bit loony’ they’d be a good match.” I snort. “We actually both laughed when she said that.”
Jim looks at me and his mouth curves upward. “Maybe it’s not a bad plan.”
“Jim! Lucia can sound quite normal, but this is just a mad scheme.”
“Maybe not, Nora.”
FOR TWO POUNDS A WEEK, EILEEN WATCHES OVER LUCIA IN Paris, then they both travel to London, to stay with Saint Harriet, at her invitation. I’m relieved. Eileen is a no-nonsense sort and Miss Weaver is the same way; between them they’ll be able to settle Lucy into some sort of routine until we can decide where she should live and with whom. Eileen telephones us at six each evening. Today she tells me that Lucia asked for a gun.
Eileen laughs. “I said to her, ‘Lucy, I’ll buy you two guns, in case the first one doesn’t go off,’ and Lucy and I laughed until we nearly fell over; Miss Weaver didn’t see the joke.”
I tut and mouth to Jim, And you think Lucia’s all right? I turn my attention back to Eileen. “But Lucy’s in good form, other than that? She seems quiet in herself?”
“She’s grand, Nora. And Old Harriet finds her very sane.”
But Eileen has to go back to Ireland to tend to a problem with her young Patrick, and when Miss Weaver and Lucia are left alone, Lucy takes to the bed for days on end and won’t speak. To cheer her up, Miss Weaver takes her out for the day, but Lucia runs off “to see Piccadilly” and stays out all night. Miss Weaver telephones once Lucy turns up, but Jim is in a red fury with the poor woman.
“We trusted you!” he screeches into the phone.
“Calm yourself, Jim,” I say. “Plenty of times Lucy disappeared on us. Don’t go falling out with Miss Weaver over this.” But Jim loves to lay blame all around him and poor Saint Harriet is firmly in the bold girl’s corner now.
LUCIA GOES TO DUBLIN ON SAINT PATRICK’S DAY, SAYING IT’S the only place she wants to be and Jim lets her, because he panders to her every whim. She stays in one half of a cottage in Bray, County Wicklow, rented by Eileen’s daughters, Bozena and Eleanora, who are sixteen and eighteen now.
“I’d prefer if Eileen was there, too,” I tell Jim, “but perhaps her girls will put some smacht on Lucia, tame her a wee bit?”
“Perhaps,” he says.
But, no, it’s not to be, for who can rein in that girl? Lucy goes missing over and over and her cousins are moidered trying to keep up with her. In the end they contact my uncle Michael and he spends six long days searching for my daughter, which, thank God, we don’t hear anything of until afterward.
I read out Uncle Michael’s letter to Jim:
Dublin, June 1935
Dear Nora and Jim,
It pains me to write such a letter as this to you but I think—and Eileen Schaurek thinks—it is better for you to know what Lucia has been up to for it might help with her treatment as time goes on. Her cousins are finding Lucia to be a handful and they’ve related to me some of what she has been getting up to and I admit I was shocked. I will record some of it here so that you have a picture of what has been happening and I apologize in advance if it’s very distressing for you:
When she is out and about, Lucia does not wear underwear and lets people know that she doesn’t. At home she wears a kimono and nothing else. She also swims naked in the sea at Bray. She talks freely with men she doesn’t know and goes to pubs with them. She has been telephoning and telegraphing people she admires, such as Maud Gonne, and gets angry when they do not respond well. This anger manifests itself as setting fires in her bedroom (on the rug, in the corners), drinking champagne until she falls over, and singing all night so that nobody sleeps. (Her entire diet according to Bozena and Eleanora consists of baskets of fruit, bottles of champagne, handfuls of aspirin, and undercooked sausages.) Lucia has painted her bedroom black and hung black curtains. Her clothes lie in heaps everywhere. She smokes in bed and tosses the cigarette ends to the floor. The landlady has threatened to evict all of them and the Schaurek girls were nicely settled there before Lucia’s arrival so, naturally, this upsets them. Dear Nora and Jim, I’m sorry for this catalogue of misdeeds, but I think it better that you’re aware. What am I to do? Please advise.
Your loving Uncle Michael
Jim looks at me. “Swimming in the sea is exercise. Isn’t that good for her?”
“Jim! Have you not heard another word of what I’ve just read? Honest to God, are you that deaf, that blind?”
He drops his head almost to his lap and stays bent over for some moments. “Oh, Nora, she’s lost control altogether, hasn’t she? People will think she’s soft in the head.”
“You mean they’ll know,” I say evenly.
He looks up at me. “What will be said? All of Dublin must be talking about her.”
“Is that what you’re worried about, what people will say? Is it your own name being blackened that you’re concerned about?” I rattle the letter at him. “Lucia needs to be admitted to an asylum now. Before she burns down that cottage, killing herself and taking her cousins with her. She needs minding, Jim, and she needs help. She’s our responsibility and we have to help her. Properly help her. That’s all there is!”
LUCIA IS ADMITTED TO FARNHAM HOUSE IN DUBLIN.
“And there she can stay,” I say to Jim, relieved that she is not able to harm herself now or anyone else.
“No,” he replies. “She’ll end up as she was after seven months in Nyon. Lucy may have lived like a gypsy in Bray, but I won’t leave her in an institution. I won’t.” He bites his lip. “Miss Weaver must step in again.”
I shake my head; he’s determined to believe that Lucy is well enough that between our friends, relatives, and ourselves we can somehow fix her. I can’t argue it out with him anymore and so, in August, Lucia returns to England.
Lovelands Cottage. Barred windows. Injections of bovine serum. Miss Weaver and Mrs. Middlemost—Scottish nurse—who does a Highland fling to make Lucy laugh, then force-feeds her through her open mouth. Finally, to St. Andrew’s Hospital for Mental Diseases in Northampton. Our darling Lucia, inside again. Inside and safe.