Sometimes Diccon would read his poems to me. He said I had a good ear. There would always be tea—he was mad for my ginger scones, he said—and of course, we would get to talking on every subject imaginable.
It was on one of those quiet afternoons that he talked to me about his lonely upbringing, the shadow of death that hovered over his early childhood. His older brother, Arthur, had died at thirteen months, just eight days after Diccon’s birth, and his sister Grace had died at four, when Diccon was just two. When he was five, his father died. He had only the vaguest memories of his father and of course none at all of the infant brother who had died before he was born, so it wasn’t that he mourned terribly, he said, but that he lived every day with the cruel repercussions of so much death. He’d never been able to escape the atmosphere of sadness, the feeling of having got a bad lot in life. You could just see how it all weighed on him. He told me that even still, he felt in his house a load of grief.
“Like a heavy fall of snow,” he said.
I nodded. I understood.
His mother hovered over him, he said. Even now. It was quite suffocating.
“Not that I blame her, she’s lost so much, and I know she can’t stop worrying that she’ll lose me, too. I do love her, of course. Still, it’s difficult. I feel I must be watching out for her always. And she seems to be ill so often—she needs me to be with her all the time, and I feel like a caged lion, but she doesn’t seem to notice, just smiles at me sadly and tells me what a good son I am.”
I thought of my own mother. Her sorrow had been no easier to bear, no less heartbreaking, but in her grief she was altogether different. She had never clung to Cecil and me as life rafts, quite the opposite. More than ever, she encouraged us in our freedom. This would have been natural to her. She would find her way out of the wreckage, and she would expect us to find ours. I remember my father saying that that’s why he’d married her. Your mother has the spirit of Diana, she could live on a mountain, talk to the animals. Your mother is a wild woman, Margery! And he would laugh.
If it was what he loved most about her, it was also the reason his parents had been against the marriage. Florence Harper was not at all what they’d dreamed of for their son, an up-and-coming barrister. Not the right class, that was bad enough, but worse, a bohemian, a girl who insisted on wearing unacceptable clothing— crazy gypsy dresses, sometimes even turbans. With feathers! Who could take her to Claridge’s for tea dressed like that? And Mother worked. That, too, was unacceptable. A piano teacher.
But my father had his own wild streak. He was both sides of a coin—on the one side, a barrister and a classical scholar of some renown, and on the other a devil-may-care liberal and fun-loving adventurer. When he died, the obituary in the barristers’ journal referred to him as “that crazy Bob Williams.” Together, my parents reveled in all the absurdities of life.
What I remember most about that time, before it was all taken away, was that the house was filled with laughter.
? ? ?
When Mother lost her husband and daughter, she suffered through the funeral services and the burials. And the official visits of the rector. Apparently, it was this messenger of the Lord who unnerved her. She found his assurances about God’s plan for all of us curiously cold. She could not find a crumb of comfort in any of it. The Church had not eased her burden, it had hardened her heart.
Mother was a woman of action. She would not look to others, she would not sit back and wait to see what happened next, she would orchestrate it herself. She quickly made two decisions.
The first was to leave the Anglican Church.
She told the story to Cecil and me often enough. It was Ellen, the housemaid, who’d made the impression on her. After my sister Agnes died, Ellen came to Mother, holding a little card. Don’t mean to be disturbing, Mum, but I wanted to give this to you, I’ve been praying for you. To Saint Anne especial, she’s always been of help to me in my troubles. She’ll look out for you, help you find comfort.
Ellen handed the card to my mother, who’d never seen such a thing. It’s a prayer card, Mum. I’ve been praying for your family, and I’ve been lighting the candles at St. Mary’s, too.
I still have that prayer card. On the front is a drawing of a beautiful woman standing in a field, her hands clasped in prayer. She wears a flowing, pale-blue dress. A gilt-edged scarf is draped over her head, and falls to her knees. She smiles down at three peasant children, who kneel at her feet.
A prayer is printed on the back of the card. O good St. Anne, filled with compassion for those who invoke you, I cast myself at your feet. . . . That much I can remember still.
Mother always said that right away she felt peace creeping into her heart. This Anne, mother of Mary, the saint with the sweet smile and open arms, was welcoming her. Was welcoming her especial. It was then that my mother decided that she—and naturally, Cecil and I—would convert to Catholicism.
As if converting were not enough, my mother made another sweeping decision. We would all move to America, she said. She had a cousin who had a farm in Sharon, Pennsylvania. There was a Catholic girls’ school nearby.
I never return to those saddest days. There is no need, I carry them with me always. But for Diccon, I made an exception. He would understand, he would know how the past gets stitched inside you and though the threads may come loose you can never rip it out entirely.
I told him only the barest of facts. Even so, as I told my story, a sea of sorrow flooded in, washed over my heart. And Diccon nodded sadly, his usually piercing eyes gone soft with pain.
Like a heavy fall of snow.
I am seven years old. A carriage is coming to take my father away, and I listen for the clomping of horses and pray that the carriage never comes.
The house in London is dark, the curtains drawn. I sit cross-legged on the floor in a dress that yesterday was yellow but today is black. The dress smells funny. I know how it got that way. I stood on tiptoe to watch as Ellen poked a broomstick about in the tub full of black dye, pushing the clumps of sunny dresses every which way, turning them to thunderclouds. Daddy is dead.