She was still scared, but she felt light-headed and gay, the way Papa did when he was going away from home. She thought she must be like Papa, the kind of person who was always glad going away instead of coming home. She looked out the window, feeling the other self inside her, the self that had no feelings and could never be hurt, coming out stronger and stronger, looking at the fringe of London Junction and the beginnings of Milltown with calm, almost without remembrance.

Without remembrance? On the contrary—Powell remembered everything. Eugene O’Neill called his Long Day’s Journey Into Night a “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood”: a similar claim might be made for My Home Is Far Away.

The critic Matthew Josephson, who was responsible for the first posthumous study of Powell’s work (published in the Spring 1973 issue of Southern Review) wrote to Jack Sherman in August 1972 for information about Powell’s early life. “I thought her novels wonderfully witty but unfinished,” he confessed by way of introduction. “Now I like them about as they are. My Home Is Far Away is not for fun, and it is a masterpiece.”

Tim Page
1995/2004

PART ONE

The Man in the Balloon

1

THIS WAS THE MONTH of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day. It was not birthday, Easter, Christmas, or picnic, but all these things and something else, something wonderful, something utterly unknown. The two little girls in embroidered white Sunday dresses knew no way to express their secret joy but by whirling each other dizzily over the lawn crying, “We’re moving, we’re moving! We’re moving to London Junction!”

Down the cinder driveway between the Willard house and Dr. Bird’s box hedge rumbled the hay wagon, laden with the Willard furniture. The sudden picture of their home, everything that was theirs, yanked out of its familiar roots like baby teeth and stacked up on wheels, made the children stand still, staring, uncertain. There was their little pine bed standing on end, the baby’s high chair hanging by a rope from the corner pole, the big walnut dresser with its front bulging out like a funny-paper policeman’s; there were the two big parlor chairs, wide rockers curved in perpetual grins, wonderful for scooting games; there was the couch bought with coupons—bright yellow fuzzy stuff with red and green caterpillars wiggling circles over it so that it always seemed alive and dangerous; there was the pine kitchen cupboard tied on its back to the dining table as if it had left its little corner only when overpowered by force. Yes, there went their little yellow house itself, for without these things warming its insides, the little yellow house was nothing but empty doors and windows. They watched the wagon wheels roll relentlessly over the pansy border and leave deep ruts in the soft new grass, but it didn’t matter because they didn’t live here any more. Like their furniture, now being brushed by the overhanging branches of Peach Street, they were suspended in space between the little yellow cottage, Number Twenty-Three, and the unknown towers of London Junction. This must be the reason that time, too, was suspended, for no matter how often they ran to ask their mother the time, it was always nine o’clock, a little before, a little after, but not quite starting time. So round and round they swung each other over the grass, as if this example of speed would whip up the minutes.