A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
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Authors: Kaylie Jones
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Biographical, #Coming of Age, #Family Life, #ebook, #book
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any re-semblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
Originally published in 1990 by Bantam Books
©1990, 2003 Kaylie Jones
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: “Rocky Raccoon” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, copyright ©1968, 1969 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music, Inc. under license from ATV Music (MAClen). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission. “Autobiographia Literaria” by Frank O’Hara, copyright ©1967 Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted from
The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara
, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. A portion of the introduction appeared in a different form in the
New York Times
, copyright ©1998 The New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
Grateful acknowledgment is also made to James Ivory and Ismail Merchant for the use of the cover photo from the set of the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of this novel.
The chapter, “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” originally appeared in a different form in
Confrontation
#30-31 (November 1985); “Mother’s Day” first appeared in
Confrontation
#82-83 (Spring/Summer 2003).
ISBN: 1-888451-46-7
eISBN: 978-1-61775-225-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003106949
All rights reserved
First Akashic printing
Printed in Canada
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
To my brother Jamie
AUTOBIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.
I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.
If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out “I am
an orphan.”
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
—Frank O’Hara
CONTENTS
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries
I would like to thank my oldest friend, James Bruce, for reminding me of how terrible I was when we were four years old,
and Joy Harris, my agent, who is as sensitive as she is tough.
Electric cables, television monitors, lighting and sound paraphernalia crowded the front hallway of the two-story saltbox house. Gingerly stepping over the wires, I crossed the foyer—and the family home of my imagination came alive.
I spotted the dining room through an archway: a faux-Tiffany lamp hung above an antique table of dark luminous wood, surrounded by six red-velvet Louis XIII chairs. Made to order in Paris by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant for their film
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,
these were replicas of the originals I grew up with. Real ones would have been too expensive to buy and then ship all the way to the United States, as my parents had done in real life.
My father, the writer James Jones, had bought the table and chairs at the Village Suisse, an antique center in Paris, a few months before my birth, for the Île St.-Louis apartment he had just purchased. He was decorating it himself, since my mother, Gloria, was bedridden for the last four months of her pregnancy. The Tiffany lamp came later, one of my mother’s finds, when we moved to an 1865 saltbox farmhouse in Sagaponack, New York. (The film transposed this Long Island locale to North Carolina.)
In front of the large bay windows stood a colonial side table that held a silver tea set my father had inherited from his mother. But of course it was not really our table, or our tea set. Dreams are like this. You find yourself in your own living room and everything is as it should be, but then you open the front door and you are standing in a different country.
James Ivory had invited me to the home he had recreated for his adaptation of my novel,
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,
filming in Paris and Wilmington. Bill Willis, played by Kris Kristofferson, and his wife, Marcella, played by Barbara Hershey, are the parents of Channe and their adopted son, Billy, characters I based on the lives of my father and mother, my brother, Jamie, and myself. Jim had warned me that I might be disappointed if his aesthetics did not reflect “reality.” The raw material for my novel was mined from my childhood memories, so I asked Jim which reality he meant. His vision? My novel? Or my memories?
On the walls hung three luxuriant Paul Jenkins paintings, on loan from the artist, a lifelong friend of the family. Near a bookcase was a replica of an 18th-century wooden pulpit from a French village church, one of my father’s prizes, also purchased at the Village Suisse and set up as a bar—the centerpiece of our Paris living room. This is where James Baldwin had often preached late at night.
My father had a rule that anyone with a point to make could take the pulpit and speak uninterrupted for up to ten minutes. Baldwin, who came from a long line of Baptist preachers, loved to expound on racism, maintaining that all white Americans were racist, which enraged my father, who believed he had thrown off the shackles of his puritan upbringing.
As a little girl, I would drag my blanket to the living room and stretch out on the couch, observing these soirées. When my parents’ friends commented that this might not be healthy for a child, my father would tell them, in no uncertain terms, to mind their own business. (My father loved his pulpit so much that later, when we moved to Sagaponack, he had to tear a hole in the wall to get it into the house.)
The long beige couch was here as well. This was the couch my mother had collapsed on after my father died; she barely moved for three weeks as worried friends stood vigil. I’m transported back to that time. My mother’s grief was so extreme, so debilitating, that she let us fend for ourselves. We fought terribly, screaming and yelling as our Italian relatives do. At first, I thought shouting would make her snap out of it. When that had no effect, I took to drinking in local bars, sometimes not coming home until after sunrise. She never seemed to notice.
One night years later, my mother, suddenly worried, asked, “Where are you going?” as I headed out the door. “To a bar,” I said vaguely. She told me to be careful, not to come home too late, which made me burst into hysterical laughter. I was so angry back then, incapable of understanding what had befallen me, incapable of forgiving my mother for being paralyzed by her grief. All that lifted with the arrival of my first child, now sleeping soundly in her stroller on this set that was a miraculous reconstruction of my childhood home.
Above the landing hung the Alexander Calder mobile the artist had given to my father in the early 1960s. They had been fast friends, my father writing a moving article about Calder’s work and receiving the mobile in exchange. But wait! My mother, unable to resist an excellent offer, had sold the mobile years ago. How could it be here? It was a lookalike, of course, but one of such quality that it fooled my eye. Upstairs, on the wall in the boy’s room, was a sand-and-glue map of the United States, as crooked as the one my brother, Jamie, had made as a schoolboy. In the girl’s room was the watercolor alphabet my parents’ dear friend, the artist Addie Herder, made for my third birthday. “A” is for Ace, in a family of card players. “L” is for Laughing, and all the faces of my parents’ friends stare at me from behind the glass. “K,” in the original, was for Kaylie, and “J” for Jones.
Not here. “C” is for Channe, and “W” for Willis.
In real life, our family moved to eastern Long Island; in the film, the father returns to his hometown on the southern East Coast. As Jim envisions the story, the father goes full circle, from one beautiful vista of water to another, from an apartment on the Île St.-Louis overlooking the Seine to a stunning blue marsh leading to the Atlantic, visible on the horizon. The sun sets pink and blue over the water. It reminds me of Sagg Pond, with the reeds swaying in the wind.
My father, who was from southern Illinois, adored the water and never liked to live far from it. He would have loved this house and its view just as he loved the view from his office on the top floor of the Sagaponack house, which in winter offered vistas of frozen potato fields and churning gray ocean in the distance.
When we first moved there in 1975, I would go to him on lonely afternoons to talk about my troubles fitting in at school. He was trying desperately to finish his novel
Whistle
, knowing that his heart was failing and that time was running out. He listened patiently, never telling me to go away.
Growing up with a writer is a strange thing. Not only was I competing for attention with the other members of my family, there were all the characters in
Whistle
to contend with. At dinner, during that first winter in Sagaponack, he’d come down from his attic office exhausted, and tell us what was going on with his characters, as if they were real people who lived with him upstairs.
Bobby Prell, who began his literary career as Robert E. Lee Prewitt in
From Here to Eternity,
and was reincarnated as Bob Witt in
The Thin Red Line,
was now, in
Whistle
, languishing in a VA hospital with severe gunshot wounds in both legs. The doctors were considering amputation. My father was very upset. “See,” he told us, “he’s up for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but if they amputate his legs, he won’t get it. They never give it to cripples.”
“I sure hope he doesn’t lose his legs,” my brother said.
“Well, it’s not really up to me,” our father said, struggling as if it were his own best friend lying in the hospital and there was nothing he could do to help him.
After several weeks of vacillation, he came down one evening looking relieved and happy. “He’s going to be okay,” he told us. “Bobby Prell’s legs are beginning to heal. He isn’t going to lose them after all and he’s going to get his medal.”
“Yes!” we shouted. That night, we had a party at dinner, with champagne and ice cream for dessert.
At times, fiction was reality; at other times, reality was fiction. We had a friend named Irma Wolstein who was the prototype for a character called Irma in
Go to the Widow-Maker.
In the novel, the main character teaches Irma to swim. During our first summer on Long Island, my father insisted the real Irma come into the ocean with him. “But Jim,” Irma said, “I don’t know how to swim.”
“Sure you do,” he said, “I taught you.” And nothing in the world could convince him that he’d never taught Irma to swim, that he’d made it up. Pure fiction.