I opened my eyes to the morning sun, to the children’s voices and the new day. I wanted to be a different kind of parent for my boys than my parents were for me. Was I?
With these long, slow days of summer, I’d decided, with great fortitude, that my top priority was to look after my sons, my husband, my garden, and my house—all gifts given to me. I wanted to heal my marriage, ease into the early happiness of those first days together. I wanted to rest in the gentleness we found with each other in small moments—writing together, playing with our sons, making love. It would take radical forgiveness and grace, but these were my goals, and maybe joy and peace would show up with their accomplishments. Here’s for hoping, I thought.
My cotton nightgown tangled in the sheets as I rose, and I laughed, slipping the gown over my head to change into shorts and a worn red T-shirt left over from Bill’s college days. I pulled aside the red-checked curtain and called out the window, “Good morning, all you lovies out there.”
“Mommy!” Douglas waved from the rope swing that hung from the lowest gnarled branch of an old oak. “Mrs. Walsh is making pancakes for breakfast. Hurry!”
Jack:
But what has arrived at our home, the Kilns? You sent Warnie and me a ham! Thank you very much. You can’t imagine what this means during the days of food rationing. We are not short of food, but we are quite tired of the repetitive choices.
Joy:
You are more than welcome. I could barely tolerate knowing you were eating the same foods day after day. Here my summer garden is abundant! I’ve made jams and canned the beans; I’ve baked pies with the apples and pears from my orchard.
There in Vermont, the children ran through the forest as wild as the flowers themselves. I took all six children on long walks through the woods, stalking mushrooms, teaching them the names and tastes of all things wild. The boys teased the girls for being too frightened to eat what I picked from the soft earth. I knew they thought me eccentric, and I didn’t mind.
Our summer hours with the Walshes were garrulous and inspiring. We walked and talked philosophy. We played card games and Scrabble. We discussed Bill’s thoughts on Buddhism, and we both admitted that we’d had to scramble for money by writing articles and books we didn’t always want to write. We talked about the atom bomb and how it might change our world.
Sometimes during those bright and truth-filled debates I felt the freedom and intellectual stimulation I had experienced during my four summers at the MacDowell Colony. In that community of artists and writers in New Hampshire, on acres of pristine woodlands, the combination of quiet for writing and the conviviality of peers had offered the creative backdrop for my best work. That was back when writing was all I did and all I talked or thought about.
Jack:
I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your new work on the Ten Commandments. Do remember, Joy, that what does not deeply concern you will not interest your reader.
Joy:
Oh, Jack, it does concern me deeply. I am just finding theology more difficult to write about than I’d anticipated. Maybe I wasn’t ready. But sometimes we must do what we aren’t quite ready to do.
The rain was incessant, but I knew friends in New York were burdened under the heat, and there I was with foggy mornings and steaming soil. The earth was so soaked that the weeds grew almost overnight and yet the tomatoes never seemed to ripen. Thunderheads gathered like gray armies on the horizon, and the storms were both foreboding and magical.
I’d heard talk in town of people blaming the clouds and boomers on the atom bomb. “The end of the world,” they murmured. I wrote and told Jack he could find quite the storyline in the American gossip of end days.
It was a moonless evening, the electricity shut off by a storm, when Bill, Chad, Eva, and I again talked about writing and publication. Eva said, “Oh, Joy, tell us how Weeping Bay is doing.”
I cringed, and yet knew she asked from love. “False gods of all kinds are revealed in Weeping Bay, but that doesn’t matter because it has not done well, my friend.” I took a long swallow of wine. “A quite fervid Catholic boy in the sales department found my book offensive and buried it. You can hardly find it now. You can’t know what it’s like to pour your heart into a novel and have it discarded for its merits.”
“What about its debits?” Bill asked in the Southern accent he turned on and off at will. He was right, the novel hadn’t done well, and the reviews had been tough. “‘Marred by obscenities and blasphemies,’” he quoted from the harshest critique of them all.