The years pass, and while Jewel has managed to keep Brenda Kay alive, she is still fighting a holding action. Then she learns from an article in Reader's Digest of an association in Los Angeles that's able to help retarded children. Her hope renewed, Jewel overcomes her husband's resistance and convinces him that they must leave Mississippi for Brenda Kay's sake. I'd been handed the dream, my dream of California. But the dream, as Jewel discovers, is a Faustian bargain of gain and loss.
Deliverance comes at a price.
They manage to buy a small bungalow near the ocean where the neighbors are so close that Jewel can hear food cooking in the kitchen next door. Los Angeles in 1952 is a land where the glitzy and the banal mix freely with the new and the promising. Jewel's teen-age children are transformed by the lurid, homogenizing pull of the strange new culture. The boys are changed into body-building creatures whose very names, Burton and Wilman, are altered to Burt and Bill, as if to indicate the thoroughness of their transfiguration. The real change, however, occurs in Brenda Kay, who not only survives but flourishes as she is enrolled in a school for exceptional children run by a quirky philanthropist, a man who holds the revolutionary view that children with Down syndrome are sensitive, loving human beings with vibrant personalities, capable of learning.