by Anna Vaught
Ha. I just screamed and facked in my sleep, then.
I am Violet Gibson, the Honourable. Of Merrion Square Dublin and Grosvenor Square London and daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Member of Parliament and created First Baron Ashbourne. SO THERE.
You can see why I was considered troublesome in asylums.
It won’t be long now, I said when I woke, you near me, my Lucy Light—so I want to think only of what comes next, for I am tired. Give me the funeral I want, lay me down and you, girl, I am dead, thou livest, will you report me and my cause aright? Too wordy! Tell the story. Remember me.
I am not innocent, entirely, but I have been so alone.
And now, passerines: If—I am quoting Florence Nightingale again: you remember her Cassandra?—you knew how gladly I leave this life, how much more courage I feel to take the chance of another, than of anything I see before me in this, you would put on your wedding clothes instead of mourning for me!
Dr Griffith was back in the room, assessing me, to see if I was properly calm; also, I suppose, to check that they had not accidentally becalmed me altogether, sedating an old bird like that and one who, not long ago, they had thought was finally shuffling off. They don’t want to kill me accidentally. One should never do that.
For years, the staff here doubted what I said: I am not mad. I am not sorry, exactly, but I am not mad. I won’t do it again. I am harmless. Although I couldn’t say that if you gave me my Lebel revolver back, I’d not shoot at another tyrant. But I am not mad. Let me be. I will be still, until I die, send me to the nuns, I had told them, and I will contemplate and let my thoughts be relieved by prayer, which pierces so.
Hamlet’s death, that previous bit, Lucia would have said. Yes. I am pretty confident that Lucia had made it into the room too, clever girl. And that you all, for as long as you could be, were my witnesses.
Prospero’s farewell to his magic, said Dr Griffith. The bit about being relieved by prayer.
Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra, said Nurse Archer. I read that. Thought it was like screaming, rather than writing.
I found out her name, the nurse’s, is Nancy. She is from County Roscommon and nurses here with two of her sisters. I wanted to say that I remember a picnic once at Lough Ree and walking in the grounds of Boyle Abbey on a fine June afternoon. But it felt too late. It was as if I had looked at her for the first time. And she’d never told me about her reading. I do hate to say it, for I’m not a modest woman and make few mistakes, yet I underestimated her.
But: Do not interrupt me, said I!
And so continued: The world will be put back some little time by my death.
Isn’t that Florence Nightingale again? says Nancy the nurse.
I can’t go on. I will go on. Cod Beckett! And I say, yes, Lucia, your Sam, but I am short of breath so my final word to shh you is that this is the voice of Florence Nightingale’s dying woman and she said: The world will be put back some little time by my death... you see I estimate my powers at least as highly as you can; but it is not the death which has taken place some years ago in me, not by the death which is about to take place now. And so is the world put back by the death of everyone who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality. My people—this is the dying woman again and this is me, too; Florence turns a long sentence!—were like children playing on the shore of the eighteenth century. I was their hobby-horse, their plaything; and they drove me to and fro, dear souls! Never weary of the play themselves, till I, who had grown to woman’s estate and to the ideas of the nineteenth century, lay down exhausted, my mind closed to hope, my heart to strength.
Free-free-oh! divine freedom, art thou come at last? Welcome beautiful death!
Let neither name nor date be placed on her grave, still less the expression of regret or of admiration; but simply the words, I believe in God.
Have you done, Violet? I mean, you went ON AND ON, would trill that Naughty Niluna, that Lucia, and then I’d have retorted, Lucia, if I had been the barnacle, I’d not have abandoned you, but would have taken you in hand, girl—but listen: I do believe, I do. In God. Girl, in you. In the fire in your brain whether your wordy daddy gave it to you or not. Use it. Finish the book. You must. On my grave, though, Lucia, one day, get the words right, then strew meadow flowers and place a little bird. Do this for me?
Lucia would have reflected. Nodded assent. Complicity. Cries and quotes from my passerines!
So much talent!
So many gifts!
Such good which you might have done!
They were thinking about me (as I said, I am not modest) but also about themselves. Attend them! It would be a good end.
And Violet paused. Pale; trembling a little. I suppose she’d given me an idea of what to do, hadn’t she, when the last days or hours came? When Violet’s breath was jagged and the signs were there, but she was smiling at me, urging me both for herself and for my own future. So God love this woman, she barks out, now, with that day not too far away, herself tremulous and forever a paradox, the following:
Now, Lucia. Quickly. If you were to choose. To choose different things, what might they be? Be quick. I think I am going. At that point, you’ll all need to be looking at me, not at you while you sit there all flaky and Wakey! Ha!
So.
So be it.
Something for Lucia? For me? Slowly I begin to describe what I might choose. Choice, as you might have gathered, has not been a key feature of my life until now. I’ve been spectated upon, curated, chosen for. Now that choice might be alive, it is both luxurious and frightening. But I’ve had a little time and the encouragement of my friends, so I say that I’d like, perhaps, an engagement of my choosing, not one chosen by Daddy and tidied up by the barnacle, then fallen flat; details unknown: shame like a scimitar, right through. Hourly.
And you know that you don’t need the child and the man, oh no. But. A baby. I always loved children, more so after hanging around for years with all these old women! No offence, Lady Gibson, but still, you can’t turn a cartwheel! Oh. Better times. To finish the novel, as you would have me do, Violet, a poetry anthology of my own with my own name on, my own face on it, or a dance school. To have my daddy for longer? Had he not been carried off by the sepsis when he was, then I might not have been left behind at the hospital in Ivry, where Giorgio saw me taken, straitjacketed. Though I cannot be sure, I think that once he, Daddy, was gone, trying to rescue me from inside Occupied France was not, for the family, a priority and to have me gone, there was a push because it meant freedom. For them, not me. For the barnacle, for my brother, then my nephew and on and on—and thereon into the future for any Joyce; that’s how it seems to me, though I’m not saying I was a pretty prospect and I know I pained them.
I was trouble. But I was theirs. So I suppose I also want... I want... Yes, an apology from my family. I think it’s all we ever want. I want them to say, ‘I was cruel. I was a bad parent. I put The work/The Wake/The home/The drink before you. And then I died before I had a chance to set it right. I stood while you were vanished into a straitjacket.’ Especially YOU, Mother. I didn’t visit you: France; England; those years away in Wales, Llanfairfechan, with the soft hand of the Irish nurses from Roscommon ministering to you, daughter. I said you were a burden; a strain. Later I burned your past or locked it up and if I didn’t light the match, I watched its glow or smelled its sulphur and I mouthed yes and did nothing.
That. That is what I want, have always wanted to hear.
But no, I am not saying I was easy company, oh no. I’m not a simpleton. I read about myself; that I was a schizophrenic. At St Andrew’s there was some doubt, you know, about my pathology. Actually, I saw numerous specialists: there was doubt aplenty. But it’s easier just to make someone a case, with a name, a number and a disease. Don’t you think?
And I want to know. So much I want to know.
It’s a multitude of mysteries.
I want to see my records. What all those men wrote about me.
There are people I want to know about. The doctor who kept us safe from the eugenicists, we feebles, at the hospital in Ivry during the war. Dr Delmas. That was his name: I have been thinking about him and about it all. How did he do it? If the brutes had got to me, my teeth might have been pulled, blood counted, memory tested and mocked to death. Injected with pentobarbital again and again, like Mussolini’s son, until he was no longer for this world. Until I was reduced to rubble and someone’s notes.
I want to know. To know exactly. Why did Mother refuse to come and see me. Ever?
My fiancé, as Violet’s? What happened to them? Where did they go?
And you do know, reader, that I am not—I am not—letting myself off the hook. I will have been difficult. Am I saying I was not ever ill? No. But I’ve made it plain, as have my friends about their lives, that it would be too simple to say that it was all me or all her. I have made it plain that the definitions of madness are shifting and, sometimes, prompted by convenience. Hell, by the patriarchy. But most of all, I am just saying that I want the hand of a parent and for a crinkled-up eye to assure me, You are my child and I am sorry.
I am sorry.
So a world dissolves and is still. Passerines, full throated, are on the wing, happy and never too close to the sun. Let me conclude. It is only right. I’m the one writing all this down and it’s clear I’ll be the one to set it out in the world, though broken and quaking it might be.
Violet is very quiet now. At some point, we crept back into St Andrew’s and to our rooms. I cannot quite explain how it all came to pass. Violet was very tired, ashen in her black crêpe dress, resting on her bed. And Dr Griffith said: Now Lucia, I think you’d better go and feed the birds on your own. Nurse Archer will keep an eye from the window.
Yes, shortly before dusk I went out. Rushed beauty surrounded me and a swallow swooped to the eaves of the hospital and I thought of Fra Angelico’s painting and Lady Gibson’s winged helpers. Sometimes that pretty bird was in The Annunciation; sometimes, I felt, he slipped away to see Violet. Isn’t that an entrancing conceit?
15
I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
If I were to blow my own trumpet or write my own bill, what might I halloo? It is Miss Lucia Joyce! She sings; she flies. Miss Lucia Joyce. Dancer, writer. Fine of lettrine and illumination. Beautiful, isn’t she? And richer still, with more confident plumage, when not confined or overly drugged with physic. Well...
But yes, it is Lucia. Violet, darling, it is Lucia. This is your testament, my friend, Violet. And I am as your daughter. You saved me. You did it. You made me see another way, if I were imaginative and would believe in my own self. Anna O—Bertha as you were and as you are, Blanche—Marie as you were and as you are, if you change your mind. This is how it ends and how I remain. Oh, the adventure we had! Some of it was a swerving black, I know, but Oh! I will never stop dreaming of you, or of us all.
And I was thinking about us and our song and, of course, the journeys we had. Essential in that drear place, the asylum. Now. By that hateful but majestic sideboard by the screened lifts in St Andrew’s there was a bookshelf. On it were hobby books. Making; watching; collating. Here, Birds of Britain and Northern Europe by James Joyce and Nora Barnacle! I saw an avocet wrest one out, a barnacle, once, Mother, barnacle. From a rock. Slurp it went, up and you were gone. I jest. But I am angry; I remain angry. That’s sanity! But here’s another; part jest, part axiom. Did you know that they once thought geese came from the barnacle? Like Dr Griffith, I have read some abstruse books. Oh yes, Gerard’s Herbal; Violet has it and showed it to me. But I found out that the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had a barnacle examined and found no evidence of a bird-like embryo in it. And now I am crying and realise I am rambling-mad as Violet and I must be seen to hold it together. Because when your imagination or the associations you make between ideas become too lickety-split, well, medical professionals look at you askance.
Like I said, I am angry. And I’m bloody sane as day. Excited, too.
Lucy Light. That’s what Violet called me, after Finnegans Wake, Daddy. She also thought of me as the song thrush, when she names us, her passerines. Visible in flight. Its call: sipp! Alarm: rapid, repeated and scolding tchuk-tchuk-tchuk. And its song! Loud and sustained, very characteristic sets of phrases and repeated two to four times. Like the movements of a dancer.
Violet. The sparrow. Mostly sedentary (well of course; hard to bounce like a high-hatted lover when medically becalmed and getting on: dicky heart, scant of breath: behind bars); sociable; noisy; chirruping. I think that was, is you. Rather than the sharp repeated teck of the tree sparrow. But you loved them both!
Blanche. The robin. Flanks warm buff. Its call a scolding tic-tic and a high-pitched tswee. Its song is melodious, a melancholy marble. I wrote that as marble, thinking of that fine white breast in Brouillet’s painting. I mean warble. Freudian slip. Bloody men.
Bertha. Anna O. The nightingale. Skulking, so hard to see. And we didn’t see you, did we? Until twenty years after your death. You kept yourself hidden all those years, who and what you were. Splendid song, rich melodious phrases, trills, whistles, a recurring group of chooc chooc chooc and your flute-like, higher pitched, pioo pioo pioo. Naughtingel, as my father would have you. You know, in the incandescent poetry of The Wake.
Reader. Later, we buried her, Violet Albina Gibson, the Honourable, poor wonderful victorious thing.
I said to her grave: Violet, it is Lucia. Lucia Anna. Syracusa; all sorts. Daddy. I saw him again. Beckett, too. Came from France. But how did I see Daddy if he were dead? Ah well, read on. You will see how strong I am now—so if something is gone, or taken, I set it straight in my mind and see it clearly. It’s real and don’t go saying that’s madness or I’ll shoot. Or have at you with the mop like you did that old fustian, Miss Drool.
Violet. In the end, I got out. And I mean properly.
My novel and the poems, all with my lettrines. I made them and I finished them so they were whole. Again, sweet you, read on. I taught dance again, as I had been instructed by Margaret Morris in France. I taught children, new mothers. I was not too old and my body came to feel lithe; I sloughed off the flaccid weight of older years, as it would settle, as it does for all the women, in Northampton, the forever place, where I could not run or argue because I had to be obedient and sprinting looked like escape; a mad dance like an episode. And my medications: while they calmed me, their doses were generous, I think and I felt, then, my body waste and my thought ossify because I was on slow speed. I was becoming Miss Drool and it terrified me.
But Violet. You had given me hope. I talked to them, our carers, officials, made them listen. Them. Griffith. Area medical board: the men in charge. I was reasonable. Could we reduce my drugs and see how I did? Could we try? Could we have a plan? I remembered what Bertha had said about how she was effective in her work although she was never wholly well, not always, but well enough and full of purpose. As I said, I was reasonable and, in the end, slowly, slowly, they listened to a request for parole.
When that funny old loon (the Honourable) whispered through the walls and made me rage; when she took me outside the first enclosures to her little gravel corner and I saw the passerines and together we fed them. I saw a nuthatch and I gulped cold winter air and swam in it. Had a sense of life anew, a salty day, a Galway Bay. I was lucid, and I was his, my daddy’s, Lucia. I was not a genius like him but by God, I was clever and that clever had been wasted. Violet, with her jokes, books, and her little bird on a Fra Angelico pillar, had seen me who I was; seen me as the crossword to my father, but began to solve me.
Oh yes. My gutturals like furrows, as she had them, well now they hid thought and time; when I came to St Andrew’s, th
e boredom and the casting off—one so still as to scream like Cassandra, the other so painful, its hideous rejection, mother, brother, man, woman—as to be unspeakable, ah, couldn’t mouth it. What I wanted and how I might get it. There is a sort of sadness which stops your mouth. But she, Violet, with her words to the birds released something in me. First I screamed like Cassandra as Virginia Woolf had it, then I knew song and the creatures of the air. And in their song, which spoke first only to her, to Violet, flowed hope and the light foot of a dance. I calmed; I stopped mangling the language. I also turned away from my defence of mutism and took brave steps forward. They, doctors, nurses, all, began to listen to me. And still I had friends. What harm could I do?
There was news. Marvellous news. Oh, Violet, something happened. Dropped through the air, came a letter from New York: the offer of work and to be an ambassador for me. It was a letter of love and a record of faith in me by someone who, like Violet, thought I was whole. From Frances Steloff, the inimitable New York bookshop owner who knew Daddy. She got to hear of me. Some part from you, Violet? I don’t know. Slowly, gradually, they decided I was better. I mean, better enough. Medicated and monitored just so, but better enough, thus I went steady on the psychogenics. Friends of our family came forward: I thought they had all gone, but now I think it was the hope that brought them forward and made me see them. Does that make sense at all?
I lived some years without you, Violet, but you stayed in me. That day, brilliant rime on the gates, lemon sun against the mist, Anna Livia Plurabelle, well well well! She went out. Before I did, though, I changed a few things and we’ll come to that.
In New York, I went to work at Gotham Book Mart, as had been suggested by our friend, Frances Steloff. 51 West 47th, 41 West 47th, 16 East 46th! Just saying this, writing it. Numbers, movement, streets to shift down, that freedom is so very delicious. Move a girl, a book, a shop, a mind. It was their bookstore, the Steloffs, but even when Frances sold it, she kept working there, that was how much it meant and how much she loved it. Move a girl, a book, a shop, a mind. The people I saw! And I could talk to them! Yes, sometimes it was too much, but the world had begun to exude possibility and I could rally, with rest and friendship. But most of all this. The bookshop, as you might know, was where they curated The James Joyce Society ten years before I got out. Then Frances was its treasurer and Mr T.S. Eliot its first member. You know, that fellow you pointed out when we were in Switzerland? There on the waters, with Viv, for his nerves? Apologies. Digression? But we are all ill sometimes; maybe all mad: no-one is immune. Why would you think otherwise? It’s just redaction and gall, not to admit it, I think.