By Kaylie Jones
One night when I was perhaps two, I stood up in my crib when my parents came in to say goodnight and announced to them, "I'm all alone."
City of Lights
By Kaylie Jones
By Kaylie Jones
"No, no," my father explained, "you're not alone. You have us."
"No. You have each other," I told him, "but I'm all alone."
Apparently my father sat down in a chair and burst into tears. My mother used to say that these words of mine were what convinced them to adopt my brother.
What was it about my statement that made my father cry? Perhaps this is only wishful thinking on my part, but I hope that on some unconscious level, he knew my words were true.
When I was little my mother often told me, "If I had to pick between having your father or having you, I would pick your father." This seemed to me a perfectly reasonable and honest statement because, given the choice, I also would have picked my father.
In 1958, James Jones decided he wanted to live in Paris for a few years, and so my parents, newlyweds still, moved there, neither one of them speaking a word of French. This was seven years after the publication of From Here to Eternity, a novel based entirely on my father's experiences in the peacetime, pre-World War II army. The book, which won the National Book Award in 1951, was published worldwide, and sold over three million copies in the U.S. alone. The film, starring Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, and Burt Lancaster, won eight Academy Awards in 1953.
By the time they moved to Paris, he'd written two other novels, Some Came Running and The Pistol. All three were best-sellers, and Some Came Running was made into a Vincente Minelli film starring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Dean Martin.
They moved into a little one-bedroom apartment on the quai aux Fleurs, a block from Notre-Dame. Over the course of a year, my mother suffered several miscarriages, but eventually she became pregnant with me. Five months into the pregnancy, she had some complications, and total bed rest was recommended. My mother, for the next four months, was confined from the nightlife she loved.
At the time, my father was writing The Thin Red Line, his Guadalcanal combat novel, and my mother lay flat on her back in the bed, listening to him clacking away on the typewriter in the next room. One day, the laundry man arrived just as my father was writing one of the saddest scenes in the book. Sergeant Keck, a die-hard, solemn, no-bullshit veteran, during an attack, in a moment of foolish excitement, pulls a hand grenade out of his back pants pocket by the pin. Sergeant Keck makes this terrible mistake, and, realizing it, in the three or four seconds he has left, goes off by himself to die.
My father got up and opened the door and there stood the old laundry man, carrying their clothes. My father was shaking, his face twisted up, tears flowing, and the laundry man could see my mother through the door, lying hugely pregnant in the bed. As my father reached for his wallet, the laundry man threw up his hands and said, "Ne vous inquiétez pas, Monsieur! Pas de problème!" Don't worry, Sir, no problem! And he refused to take my father's money. "You pay me next time!" My father, with his very limited French, couldn't convince the kind man to take his money.