Josephine Humphrey: Rich in Love

“Perhaps someday we’ll recall with joy even these things”

These are Aeneas’s words in Virgil’s The Aeneid; spoken to encourage his men in the face of hardship. They are also the words of Lucille, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Josephine Humphreys’ novel Rich in Love, spoken to encourage herself. This is the story of the unravelling of the Odom family and the seventeen-year-old who tries to keep them together.

Humphries writes a fantastic paragraph that condenses the story so well, “I have never understood how events are linked in the world, I don’t know now whether the disappearance of my mother was like a trigger mechanism setting off the series of surprises that was to follow. There is no reason the one thing had to lead to the others. But a family without a mother is vulnerable.” (24) When Lucille’s mother disappears in the middle of the day, the family loses its grounding.

Lucille sees everything. She sees how her Pop needs taking care of. He is completely lost without his wife, “He needed a haircut, I notice, and a shave, and he needed to get the hair in his nostrils clipped…Pop was letting himself go, paying no attention to personal grooming and I couldn’t do anything about it.” (37) She hopes buying him some new toys “might distract and entertain him.” (38) She buys a little television, “a waterproof radio”, a “computerized bridge game” and an “exercycle.” Her Pop was “the kind of man who should never have retired….He was not made for rumination.”(79)

She notices how her sister Rae was different since she returned home. “I noticed hundreds of tiny changes in her posture and gestures, new words in her vocabulary, an unfamiliar flush on her skin, a more desperate style of smoking.” (44) But her sister “seemed stronger” too.

And she sees how much her sister’s new husband, Billy McQueen was in love. “Her presence in t he room changed him. He stood up awkwardly, spilling some of his milk onto the place mat. He acted altogether like a bumbling cowpoke smitten with  love for the schoolteacher.” (65)

All these small noticings of her family makes Lucille love them and want to care for them even more.  She has put all her own desires and needs on hold to take care of them. Her Pop asks “When is graduation?” and Lucille tells him it was the “day before yesterday.” She’ll make up her final exams some other time. Right now she is going to tend to the crisis of her family.

“Food had a new appeal to me,” Lucille tells us, “ I had a feeling in my abdomen that was similar to hunger…sometimes food made the feeling of hunger go away.”(99)

There are small telling moments of Lucille’s own needs and desires. She describes an old disintegrating war stature where bees had made their home. She says this is her “idea of what a man should be. A warrior, secretly filled with sweetness.” (70) But is it a man she is describing or herself? Later she annoyed at the white boys at her high school who primped and prened over themselves, “A man’s attention ought to be directed out upon the world, onto tasks and labors. The great heroes never studied themselves.” (126) Again, Lucille is describing herself. She understands everyone else around her but is not particularly self-aware. She can’t figure out how she feels about Wayne, a boy she’s been dating on and off because she “had too many people within my own family, whose lives I was trying to straighten out.” (129)

All of Lucille’s energy is spent on those she loves. She had “been accumulating [love] silently over the years like equity in a house. [She] was rich in love, even though no one could see it.” (146) It is her brother-in-law, Billy McQueen who sees it. “You have a lot of love in you,” (159) he says and Lucille feels recognized for the first time in her life. Being recognized is love to Lucille. She has a lot of love for her family but they didn’t see it. She did not feel loved back. “Sometimes you have to look through the eyes of a stranger in order to see anew the things you have been seeing in filmy old ways,” (160) she tells herself.

There is a painful sweetness in the tone of this book. Lucille has such a sense of longing for love and in the end, I think she grows content with being the one who loves, not necessarily is loved back. She tells her niece she will not marry, that she is not afraid of living alone. So much of the book’s tone has to do with her inner life. I loved seeing that movement as my own writing weighs heavily on the inner life of a young person.