Nora -A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce - Nuala O'Connor Page 0,2

and let the tea scald my tongue.

“All that trouble I took to be born,” I said. “All that falling from a tree and bouncing on waves and landing onshore and bursting from a shell to be scooped up by Mammy.”

Only to be sold off like a goose at a fair, I now think. Might it not have been better if I had come more naturally, I ask myself, to have entered the family with some portion of stealth? If I had managed that, maybe Mammy would not have given me away to Granny. If I’d managed that, maybe I’d still live among my sisters and brother and be part of everything in the house in Bowling Green. Maybe, if I’d come into life more naturally, Mammy would love her Gooseen well.

Heartbalm

Finn’s Hotel

AUGUST 1904

MONDAY AND I LIE ABED, THINKING OF JIM, WHEN I SHOULD be up and getting into apron and cap. But divil I’ll get up until I’ve let my imaginings play out. My hands wander under my nightgown, I slip a finger into my crevice and press; I knead my bubbies and let my palms slide over my nipples, while keeping Jim’s sweet face fixed in my mind. He’s all I need in my head.

Last night, when we walked to Ringsend, he told me he was called “farouche” by a lady he knows, one of those moneyed ones, no doubt.

“Farouche, Jim?”

“Wild, savage.”

He seemed hurt by the word. “Sure, isn’t your savagery one of the best parts of you?” I said. “Isn’t it what makes you the man you are?”

And he pushed me against a wall and whispered my name into my ear over and over and called me by his names for me: Goosey, Sleepy-eye, Blackguard.

He said, “I will make you my little fuckbird,” and my reason slithered to pulp when I heard that and I kissed him with all the fierce light of my body.

JIM HAS ME WRITE LETTERS TO HIM, BUT MY THOUGHTS ARE STIFF on the page—I’m not fond of writing; words don’t slide off my pen the way they do for him. I left school at twelve, like most people, and haven’t had much call to write more than a few lines since. But Jim wants to know what I think of when we’re apart, to bind us closer, but it seems to me all I think of is him and does he want to read letters that are all about himself? Perhaps he does.

I slip from the bed, gather my paper and a book I’ll use to help me write the letter—I need it, truly, for I don’t know what to be saying and am sitting here chewing my fingers and gawping at the blank paper. After much scribbling and mashing of spoiled pages, I come up with a few lines:

Darling Jim,

At night my soul flies from Leinster Street to Shelbourne Road, to entwine with yours. Jim, I can’t bear to be apart from you and my mind conjures and caresses you every minute of every hour that I do my work fixing beds and waiting tables, as if my heart will dry up without the balm of you to oil it. This is love, Jim, it is constant and racking and true and I will see you, my precious darling, tonight and we will hold hands and rejoice that we found each other of all the people in Ireland. I bless the day you first accosted me on Nassau Street with your serious face and sailor’s cap and dirty shoes, and I thank Our Lady that I could see immediately, from your polite manners, that you were a good man. And I bless the day we first walked out together—the sixteenth of June is etched on my soul. I am lonely without you, Jim, believe me to be ever yours,

Nora

I scramble into my uniform and web it, lightning quick, to catch the post for I want Jim to read my words this morning; I hope he likes them. He’s right about jotting things down, it does make me feel closer to him. The letters are heartbalm.

Mouth

Dublin

AUGUST 1904

JIM HAS A MARVELOUS WAY OF SPEAKING. IT’S NOT ONLY THE lovely words he knows, a whole dictionary of them inside his mind, it’s his voice. It goes up and down but keeps itself still and contained, too. Jim sounds like a man on a stage, giving a speech. He could be saying any old thing and still he comes across as if he’s rehearsed lines and