Widowed for more than five years, I still hadn’t moved on with my life. Perhaps it looked from the outside that I had—after all, I had given up a salaried corporate job for the freelance life; I had sold or given away most of my possessions and rented out my house; I had moved country. For a while I even had what Stevie Wonder called a part-time lover. But inside, I didn’t feel that much had changed. Most of the actions I’d taken since my husband died were about renunciation—giving up things, just as I had done in abandoning the piano after I failed at the Chopin competition. I hadn’t replaced what I’d farewelled with a hopeful vision of my future and a clear plan to achieve it. I felt as though I were treading water. The water just happened to be in the northern hemisphere. I had longed to be free and to be anonymous in the big city: I was both, and I was lonely. What I really wanted, I realised, was to experience love and intimacy again. I was, after all, human. That goal felt small, and immense, and impossible.
I lived in the tiniest bedroom of a decrepit three-bedroom apartment on St John’s Place in the Prospect Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn, which hugs the north-eastern tip of Prospect Park. It is—or was—the poor cousin to the more prosperous Park Slope, the location for many independent films about angst-ridden thirty-somethings. My flatmate Derek worked at a nearby cafe, Cheryl’s Global Soul on Underhill Street, while he tried to further his career as a cartoonist and illustrator. Due to the dimensions of my room, which I referred to as the cabin, I did my writing and editing at Cheryl’s, or at the Brooklyn Public Library on Eastern Parkway, two blocks from our doorstep. We picked up our essentials from the corner store, which we dubbed the cat-piss bodega due to its persistent odour. A pair of running shoes was slung over the telegraph lines at our nearest intersection, just like you see in the movies. The neighbourhood was quiet, except for the very occasional gunshot.
Derek was an excellent cook, and he and I would feed each other if we happened to be home together. One morning he announced that he had invited around a friend to share dinner with us that evening. I smiled when he told me, but I had been dreading it all day—the last time a friend of his had joined us for a meal, I had retreated to my cabin after an excruciating attempt at conversation.
This time the friend was a fellow cartoonist, from the Midwest, who had only recently moved to New York. When people ask me how Nate and I met, I like to say that he walked into my kitchen. He was handsome, funny, intelligent, and refreshingly unperturbed by the fact that I was a widow. To top it all off, he loved jazz. Our first date was at a now-defunct jazz bar called Puppets in Park Slope, where the tenor saxophone of Noah Preminger was so loud we had to shout at each other. Which is the only time in the eight years since that we’ve done that.
33
IN APRIL 1934, SIX YEARS AFTER Jimmy’s death, George and Alice again made the journey to Newcastle in the old green kerosene-powered truck, this time with ten-year-old Charlotte squeezed between them. At Newcastle Hospital they signed the final papers and collected a healthy three-month-old boy with wisps of white-blond hair. Who knows why his mother had been forced to abandon him. Well, I’m sure that Alice suspected why, and that she was relieved she hadn’t ended up pregnant with John Henry Edwards’ child. I wonder if the relief of not having to face an unwanted pregnancy, and a likely forced adoption, had softened the pain of his lies and her humiliation. Pregnancy by a bigamist would not have been a good look in Partick parish in 1918—and especially not for the choirmistress.
But now, Alice and George officially had a new son: John. Did it bother Alice that her son shared the name of the bigamist? Perhaps, being such a common name, it was easier to bear as sheer coincidence. According to my aunt Charlotte, John was the name that his biological mother had chosen for him, and that was good enough for Alice. Staring at her new baby, I can only imagine how Alice’s heart burst with love for him as she yearned for James, the son she had lost. I wonder if she thought much over the years about the woman who gave my father up for adoption—and about whether the agony of giving up a baby and wondering, year in, year out, where he was, how he was, who he was, and dying without ever seeing him again, would be even more difficult than burying one’s own child.
Under any circumstances, the decision to adopt a child is enormous. But for Alice and George Lloyd, having raised a daughter for ten years and having endured the loss of a son, to take on the care of a newborn baby was an act of almost unfathomable hope. Their generosity in adopting John does not quite gel in my mind with the apparent lack of maternal feeling Alice displayed toward Charlotte, or her severity to other members of her family. Such as her daughter-in-law, my mother.
‘Your father was Mummy’s little soldier,’ Aunt Charlotte told me. ‘She always preferred boys.’
John, who grew up knowing he was adopted, never felt compelled to find his birth mother. Over the years, whenever I asked him about it, he said, ‘I had a happy childhood, and I knew I was loved.’ John survived the inherent life-limiting risks of a bush upbringing, endured every minute of school until he could leave at fifteen, and worked in his father’s stock and station agency. Too young to go to war, John moved
