A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries: A Novel

By Kaylie Jones

A girl comes of age in Paris with her expatriate family—and struggles with sibling rivalry—in a “delightful” novel that “captures the essence of childhood” (Library Journal).
 
Based on the author’s life with her famous father, novelist James Jones, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries tells the story of Channe Willis, who happily lives with her parents in Paris. But when they adopt a French boy named Benoit—ending Channe’s only-child status—her idyllic world is disrupted, and the relationships among this unusual family turn volatile. The basis for a Merchant Ivory film, this is a “discerning, brightly written” novel about love and loss (Library Journal).
 
“Although we’ve gotten used to second-generation actors equaling or surpassing the accomplishments of their parents, the same hasn’t happened with second-generation novelists. Nonetheless there are a few . . . and added to their small number ought to be Kaylie Jones.” —The New York Times
 
“Every page is a joy.” —Sue Harrison, Self Magazine
 
Includes a new introduction by the author and a previously unpublished chapter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Release date: Dec 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781617752254

Kaylie Jones

Kaylie Jones’ latest novel is The Anger Meridian. She is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me. Her novels include A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, released as a Merchant Ivory Film in 1998. She co-chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 yearly to an unpublished first novel.

Book preview

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

[e-mail]

www.akashicbooks.com

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

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction 2003

The Suitcase

A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries

The House in the Tree

Human Development

Candida

New Year’s Eve

Mother’s Day

Citizenship

The Diary

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.

INTRODUCTION 2003

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.

Many family members and friends found their way into his novels. But my father was always making composites—a little of this person, a little of that person—changing the facts to fit the story. The story comes first, he always said. His loyalty was to a higher truth, which, as he saw it, was not always best represented in fiction by the facts.

Why did I call A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries a novel? Because it is not a memoir. None of the facts match up to the reality. Every person in my family remembers the events differently, from his or her own point of view. What in reality may have happened over a period of years, might happen in the novel very quickly, because to make a point, sometimes facts need to be boiled down to their bare essence.

The Suitcase, the first chapter in the novel, was a story my father wanted to write, one that he’d told me. In reality, I don’t remember the events surrounding my brother’s arrival in our home, only my father’s retelling of them. His version, of course, was already colored by his vivid imagination, and his loyalty to the story and its higher truth. So The Suitcase is not even really my own story, but my interpretation of a story my father intended to write, but never got the chance.

A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries is in every way a work of fiction. My father would certainly agree with me.

THE SUITCASE

I remember the day my brother was brought to our house from the children’s home, and everything is tinted a lemony yellow. This is not unusual, for I see my momentous childhood memories as though through colored lenses. Red, I identify with illnesses, high fevers, and summer heat. I learned to ride a bicycle on a winter day, and our little street, my clothes, the cobblestones, and the surrounding buildings are tinted steely blue. At four I fell in love with Mathieu, a boy of five who smiled at me and then stuck his hand in my turtle aquarium. My turtles, Mathieu’s eyes, his sweater with sleeves pulled up past his elbows, live on in cool shades of green.

My fevers still seem red to me, and happy winter days steely blue. But I do not have other yellow memories, not even of the brightest summer afternoon. Yellow is the day my brother arrived from the children’s home.

It might be the fear and jealousy I felt—my parents never remembered the day as having been particularly yellow—but the sunlight seemed blinding outside our long French windows. We lived on a quai above the Seine in Paris, and the sun glinted so brightly on the river you could not look at it for long or without squinting.

My father stood on the balcony leaning on the railing with a Scotch and soda in his hand. I was restless. I did not have the patience to stand in one place for long, and ran to and from the balcony. Joining my father for the twentieth time, I pushed my head into his hip and tugged at his back pocket. But he was not in the mood to pay attention to me.

DADDY-Y-Y-Y. Is the little brother coming soon?

Any minute now, my father said, not looking at me. He was watching the taxis crossing the wide cement bridge.

DADDY-Y-Y-Y. I changed my mind. Tell him not to come today.

Will you behave yourself? he said, annoyed. I mean, you really do have to behave yourself. He’s going to be scared to death.

Jesus, Bill, my mother said from the other side of the long, cream-colored living room which was bathed in yellow light. She had gotten all dressed up in a pale Chanel suit with matching shoes and she could not sit still, like me. You want to go to the park with Candida, Channe? Maybe she should go to the—

She’s got to be here, Marcella, my father said in a completely calm voice. When he said something in that calm, even tone, no one had the courage to contradict him. I ran off toward the kitchen to bother my nurse for a glass of water. She had been told to stay in the kitchen so that the little brother would not be confused by too many strangers all at once. The waiting seemed interminable and everyone, including Candida, was tense and not in the mood to baby me.

Here. Come here, Channe. Look, my father called from the balcony. I ran to him and stuck my face between two iron bars decorated with iron leaves. A taxi had stopped before the house. The door flew open and a heavy shoe stepped out and landed on the pavement. It was followed by a gray skirt and then a gray head. The woman looked around for a moment and leaned into the taxi and tugged at something still hidden in the car. A little bare leg appeared on the edge of the seat, then another. The woman pulled at one of the knees and a blond head popped out.

My father moved away from the window, removing my hand from his back pocket. Feeling completely abandoned I went, dragging my feet, over to the fireplace and hid beneath the jutting wooden mantle.

Forever, I thought. He was coming to live with us forever and the thought was as confusing to me as the idea of the universe going on forever.

The little brother’s story had been explained to me in careful detail. I was three when the decision to adopt him had been made, and a year had passed since then. His natural parents had died in a car accident right after his birth. This was not true but I have never blamed my parents for withholding the truth, as it would have been too much for my intellect and the little brother’s as well.

He had spent his first three years with a French couple who had only fostered him, not adopted him, and when the foster mother had killed herself by taking sleeping pills, the father, unable to cope, had put the little boy in a children’s home. The couple had been acquaintances of my parents. One day the man called my father and said, Bill, remember that little boy your wife thought was so adorable? As I remember, she said there was nothing in the world she wanted more than a boy like that—well, I can’t keep him, Bill. He’s in a children’s home right now and I can’t stand it.

But it was illegal for Americans to adopt French children, and my parents had bribed and pleaded and paid thousands and thousands of dollars to some official to have my brother’s birth papers disappear. My mother had even had a private audience with Madame de Gaulle (my father’s position as a celebrated American writer living in Paris opened up all sorts of influential doors) and she, the wife of the President of France, had pushed the whole thing through by writing a letter of recommendation. Even with Madame de Gaulle’s recommendation, the deal was tenuous—I did not know this either until many years later: Once a month for the next several years a person from the social service agency came to check on us. One bad word from that person could have sent the little brother back to the children’s home. My parents lived in terror from the moment the little brother walked in the door.

No two people ever fought harder to have a kid in the world, my father had told me over and over again, during the year it took them to get through the bureaucracy.

Didn’t you fight hard to have me?

Yes, we sure did. But it was a different kind of fight. Your mommy was sick. She can’t have any more babies and you always say you’re so lonely. Now you’ll have someone to play with all the time.

Someone to play with all the time! Someone to share everything with, I thought. Someone who would be sleeping next door, in my old playroom!

I heard the doorbell ring and then some French being spoken. My parents spoke French badly, while I spoke almost fluently; I’d been such a terror they’d sent me off to school at the age of two. I heard my father ask the woman if she wanted a cup of tea or coffee or a cold drink. She said non, merci in a grave voice.

Channe, my father called out in the calm voice that everyone listened to, come here.

Out I came from under the fireplace mantle and there was the little brother. He stood as though frozen, his arms crossed over a small, battered black suitcase he kept pressed to his chest. He wore a plaid suit which must have fit him when he was two. My mother says it was blue, but I remember it was yellow with orange lines. The sleeves were too short and the shorts were stretched so that the front pockets bulged out. He would not look up from the floor. His knuckles were white from gripping the suitcase. He had