“I could not think of any two boys more worthy.” He smiled at them.
“Early Merry Christmas,” Warnie said as he entered the kitchen. I hugged him and breathed the stale whiskey and sweat, and that very aroma punched a hole in time: I thought of Bill coming home late, this same smell wafting through the house like evil. I released Warnie and stared at him, grounding myself in the present, in England, in Oxford, at the Kilns.
With lavish good-byes and promises to return, my sons and I strode with the new manuscript in the opposite direction of the Kilns.
Somehow I felt that we were a new kind of family. Who was to say there was only one way to love someone? I knew he loved us; words didn’t have to be spoken. And this, for now, would be enough.
CHAPTER 36
And yet the horror is a woman still;
It grieves because it cannot stroke your hair
“SONNET XXI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
April 1954
My first spring in England was like the first day of being alive in the world, a deaf woman’s first chord of Beethoven. Daffodils, tulips, and blue primroses the color of sky filled London in wild bursts. The anemones and bluebells and star-faced daisies were overwhelming in their intricate beauty. Like the Greek goddess of spring, Persephone, it arrived in a slow seduction. First the cherry trees, scattering their pink-white petals through the air like snow, then the currant bushes with their fiery blossoms. Gardens erupted with earth’s desire to create a torrent of color and aroma.
It was now April, the boys were home from school for the holidays, and soon we would leave for the Kilns. I would again see Jack, his smile turned up at the corners, eyes crinkling under his spectacles, cigarette ash falling onto his lap.
I allowed the boys to sleep a little longer before I roused them for our journey to Oxford.
It had been late January when I’d dropped Davy and Douglas off at Waterloo Station with a tall, Adonis-like man they called a headmaster. Other little boys in uniform, clean and buttoned, gathered like a herd of baby lambs around the man, who, in his bowtie and jacket, drew my sons to him as if he’d known them all along. This, I thought, was the exact right decision. Though the boys had said they didn’t want to go, I could see the goodness in it. I would miss them, and yet I felt a sense of relief. They would be educated, well, and taken care of, and I could work again to provide for us.
January then birthed a winter so fierce and frigid that I’d given it a name—Fimbulwinter, after the great Norse winters that came right before the end of the world. I wrote like death was knocking at my door and my work could convince its dark specter to depart. It’s not the best way to write—in a panic of poverty—but it was all the inspiration I had. In four months I’d finished a novel called Britannia and also written at least twenty-two short stories, which I sent to my agent at Brandt and Brandt.
Nothing sold.
I had also ripped away anything in Smoke on the Mountain that sounded “American” and then sent it off to the English publisher, who wanted it because Jack had agreed to write the foreword. In it he’d said, For the Jewish fierceness, being here also modern and feminine, can be very quiet; the paw looked as if it were velveted, till we felt the scratch.
Is this about my work or about me? I wondered, but didn’t ask.
I even took out my mentions of Ingrid Bergman and Ginger Rogers, as the publisher was fearful they might sue me for using them as examples of breaking the Ten Commandments.
I worked on King Charles and tinkered with Queen Cinderella. From afar my life might appear not so much miserable as difficult; one might believe that my choice to leave America hadn’t worked out very well. But non! No matter the dingy and damp basement job at European Press, where I used Dexedrine to keep myself awake, or the poverty, or the sleep deprivation, I felt I was becoming—in some way—my true self. As I told one of my sci-fi boys, “For such a long while there was a breach between the woman I mean to be and the woman I am, and now that gap is closing, slowly. It just ain’t so pretty in the becoming.”
Meanwhile, I’d taken Jack up on his offer to pay for the boys’ schooling through his Agape Fund. I hated to take his money, and I’d been skipping lunches, making things stretch as far as I could, with the intention of paying him back—I had every intention of all my writing paying off. I also begged and nagged and pleaded with Bill for more money, but one could not squeeze water from a stone. He was out of work again, and I highly suspected he was back with Renee, although he wrote to me that it was only friendship. But this was the same man who had married me days after his first divorce was final, which ours was not yet. It was ekeing along as slowly as a snail in mud.