Then the proclamations were set down, one after the other in quick and unrelenting succession.
I must tell you the truth of our lives here also—Renee and I are in earthshaking love. We are blissfully happy and feel that we are more married than in our marriages. I know this must come as a hurt and a shock, but you and I both know that willpower cannot make you love me or me love you. Being writing partners and having a companionable friendship does not make a marriage work.
And to state the obvious, Poogle, you don’t much want to be a wife. You will never be anything but a writer. Renee cares about the things I do—making a home, taking care of all the children and her man. You could promise to try harder or attempt to be more like Renee, but we both know you would go insane.
Bill was both blunt and articulate, as if writing an appendix for his novel. His words were like a great bludgeoning hammer.
He suggested that I find someone to fall in love with in Staatsburg, and then we could live near each other and raise the kids together. Oh, he was even so kind as to suggest that he could wait to marry Renee until I too fell in love, of course with someone convenient and near.
And, could I believe, he didn’t see anything sinful in “attaining the maximum love with Renee”?
Nausea boiled. The cold felt colder, the bare floor rougher. How had I held this understanding at bay? Maybe I hadn’t. Maybe the past weeks of anxiety had been nothing more than this knowing breeding inside.
He ended by telling me not to feel “forsaken and unloved, Poogle.” But what the blazing else was I supposed to feel? I was a teenager and overweight, and my mom forbade me to wear the dress that made me look fat. I was in love with my professor, and he slept with me and went home to his wife. I was standing outside the circle of beautiful girls in college who knew how to giggle and flirt. I was reading a horrific review of my novel. Jack told me of my manly attributes and joked of his love for blondes. I relived all these moments in one fell swoop of the grand forsakenness Bill told me not to feel, each memory rising to join anger and rejection. My cousin? My beautiful cousin and best friend?
I slammed my hand on the table, typewritten pages of O.H.E.L. falling to the floor.
Bill ended the letter with the announcement that he wouldn’t carry my sons to the docks to pick me up in a few weeks, but they were excited I was returning home. The end of the letter was filled with chatter as casual as if he’d told me he loved a new car or book, not my cousin.
I sank to the kitchen chair and wondered what the annoying high-pitched scream above me could be when I realized it was the kettle. I rose in a daze and mindlessly poured the boiling water over the tea ball, bounced it up and down, dropped in two cubes of sugar, and took a sip. I cradled the cup and drank, tears as hot as tea rolling down into the corners of my mouth before I knew I was weeping.
If I went back to bed, I wouldn’t get up. I had to keep moving. Maybe I should have never left to pursue anything other than what I’d been given at home. Was I being punished? Did I even believe that God punished?
I glanced at the pages scattered across the tiny kitchen table: my notes, work, and research. It all seemed futile. I tried and I worked and I tried and I wrote and I did what I thought was best—and now my cousin was sleeping with my husband? She wanted to claim my family as hers?
My emotions spun out of control—I blamed myself, blamed Bill, blamed Renee, and then of course blamed God himself. Bill was despicable. He wandered through life fulfilling his needs and then settled on my cousin? Rage coursed through my body like fire.
I finally dressed and with haste pulled my hair up, wrapped myself tight in a coat, and burst outside to find my breath.
I walked the streets like the dove from Noah’s ark in search of mooring but finding only water, endless miles of ocean and nowhere safe to land. It was of course all my doing, the ruin in which I found myself. What did I think would happen if I left Bill with the perfect Renee? What did I think would happen if I chased peace and health across an ocean?
I had destroyed my own ark.
For hours I wandered through London—the first city I’d ever really loved—twisting through alleyways I’d never seen, around squares that ended where I started, in parks of deep green. It was late afternoon by the time I paused on Westminster Bridge over the River Thames. The sunlight both rosy and golden, the bloated and magnificent moon hanging in the sky behind me while the false moon of Big Ben loomed before me. When darkness began to filter through, evening leaking into the edges of the river, I walked with determination to the Abbey. The arched windows of the sand-castle cathedral glittered in the twilight, their stained glass beckoning me to view their glory inside. It would close tomorrow to prepare for the June coronation, and I needed to find refuge before the doors shut me out.
I slipped in. A service had just begun. The sanctuary surrounded me like a Gothic forest, the buttresses winging down over the crowd of over five hundred people. I took stock: altar boys in white carrying burning candles, priests in black at the front of the altar, and the black-checkered floor leading me toward a pew on the left side.
“The Lord be with you,” the priest said from the front of the church, his words echoing with a reverberating bellow.
“And with thy spirit,” we responded as one.
I stayed, and the service felt both familiar and cleansing, a ritual that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, a sanctity. When the lights were shut off for the homily, only candlelight and torches and twilight saturated the sanctuary. When the Eucharist was over I was the last to linger, alone in a pew with thoughts that would not settle. Eventually I rose to return home and collapse into bed, the grief as heavy as concrete.
I wept for all the loss I had never acknowledged, all the pain I’d held in reserve: my marriage, my dreams, my career, and my health. To acknowledge their demise meant to mourn them, and I hadn’t been ready.
The next morning I began my wanderings again, prowling through the city like a stray cat. I didn’t want Bill back. Not now. Almighty, no! But the betrayal in my own house felt as sick as any illness that had sent me to bed.
It was unseasonably warm, the sky a cloudless and intense blue. I draped my coat over my arm and put one foot in front of the other. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t read. I could merely walk and feel.
This time I found myself at St. Paul’s perched on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in London, where I might be closest to God or myself or whatever great sorrow moved within me. It was an Anglican church, and I’d seen the old black-and-white photos of it surrounded by smoke from the bombings of the 1940 blitz. The great dome of the cathedral built in the 1600s, a round mountain of man’s tribute to God, had survived. Men had stood all night, passing water buckets and fighting to save what now stood as my sanctuary, and I climbed to it with knees shaking, entered with the remnants of my torn life trailing behind.
This time the church was empty, my footsteps echoing under the vast dome as I approached the altar. The English baroque style was a sharp contrast to the Gothic spires of the Abbey. There was too much for my eye to absorb—gold and winged archways, jewels and embellished carvings, and stained glass everywhere as the scenes of Christ’s life unfolded before me. Sunlight spilled from the windowed dome overhead, falling upon me, the floor, the pews, and carved statues. Ropes held me back from approaching the gold and marble altar, three candlesticks on top—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The dark wood pillars on either side were twisted, leading my sight upward, past the arched stained glass of Christ on the cross, higher still to the dome, where marble angels looked heavenward as if to remind us we were being guarded and loved.
I’d once heard Jack say, or had I read it, that sometimes a soul would cry out, “Thy will be done” to God and other times, with fury say instead, “Fine, have it your way.”
I knelt on a padded bench and uttered the latter.
What could I have done differently? I begged the tortured Christ in stained glass.
My
parents had warned me—Why can’t you be softer, nicer, and kinder? Prettier? More like Renee? Why couldn’t I? Was this my punishment for such self-will?
I stayed for I don’t know how long, until finally I grew restless. I rose and made my way to the stairs that led to the Whispering Gallery, where I could climb to the dizzying top of the dome itself, as if maybe there I might finally reach God. Higher and higher I climbed, counting each of the 257 steps. The dome itself reminded me of Davy and his intense interest in the constellations, and a poem unraveled in my mind.
“I’ll make a magic to ferry you soon,” I mumbled out loud. I would rescue my sons from the sickness of Bill and Renee. I would build a new life with them.
The Whispering Cathedral was so named because one person could stand against the ornate golden wall to whisper, and another, standing far away but holding his ear to the same wall, could hear what was said. Even in all my confusion, something in it summoned my deep connection to Jack, and I wondered if I murmured something here and now, in this sacred space against these walls, he might somehow hear me.
Instead it was Jack’s words that came to me, an echo from one of our letters. God did not love us because we were lovable, but because he is love.
I wandered to a window and felt in the deepest part of me that I would return to England, but with my sons by my side. Fantasy? I didn’t know. Maybe. But in that moment it felt true. The city below was shrouded in mist, and from there I could see the cavernous abscesses of earth blasted by bombs dropped from on high, the ruined churches, remnants of World War II and the same horror that had sent the children to Jack’s house.
I left the hallway and followed a stairwell down to enter a library and trophy room, where I found a verger in robes.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.” He bowed his head down and then up. “Welcome to St. Paul’s.”
“It is glorious,” I said, my voice full of the shed and unshed tears of the past two days.
His face softened, as if he could see my pain shimmering around me. “I urge you to rise to the belfry as they ring the one o’clock hour with one hundred tolls of the bell.”
“Yes.” I nodded at him. “Can you show me the way?”
“Follow me, please.”
We reached the top of the bell tower, where a group of people were clustered expectantly, awaiting the great ringing. A young woman with three children clinging to her hem leaned toward me. “Those bells up there weigh seven tons,” she said. “Isn’t that marvelous?”
I smiled at her. “Marvelous indeed.”
“They say it is the largest ring of bells in the world.” She pointed, and I cranked my neck back to see the bells and wheels above me, feeling dizzy.
“A ring of twelve bells,” the friar stated.
The room was warm: a circular space with pale-yellow plaster walls and photos of the grand cathedral framed and hung. Twelve men entered the room to stand on foot-high wooden platforms. Their muscles bulged from their tight shirts as if to burst as they grabbed the ropes hanging from the plaster ceiling and at once, in unity, began to pull.
One resounding ring after the other filled the tower. In a great stationary dance, the men pulled and grunted, they swung and moved, as the bells tolled. Of the ten people there, most ran from the tower, but others only covered their ears. I did neither. I stood still and allowed the reverberating air to swallow me whole.
I stayed and felt the enormous noise vibrate through my body. Chills ran through me, and I shivered with the unceasing sounds, which were cleansing me, coursing through my veins, through my mind and my spirit. The tenor and the fifth ringing together, not synchronized or in harmony but in perfect sublime sound. My boundaries dissolved; transcendence enveloped me. God was with me, and always had been. He was in the earth and the wind, in the ringing and in the silence, in the pain and in the glory of my life.
Those bells rang for a full five minutes, but an eternity in my soul.
The scabs of my ego fell off in large chunks of acceptance: Bill doesn’t love me.
When it was over I stood in the resonating air with a sense of emptiness and relief, of calm and cleansing. I was as pure as if I’d partaken in the holy act of Communion on my knees.
One by one the crowd wandered away, and soon the ringers were gone also. I stood alone in that tower, my hands over my heart, tears wet on my cheeks. God might not fix things for me, but he would be with me in whatever waited ahead, that was clear. I knew nothing of the future, except that in two days’ time I would arrive at Warnie and Jack’s to spend Christmas at the Kilns.
And in the new year I would return home to a new kind of family.
CHAPTER 23
I brought my love obedience; cupped my hand
And held submission to his thirsty mouth
“SONNET VIII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
December 15, 1952
Oxford slumbered under a freeze, but I didn’t bother about the weather at all as the taxi careened on the ice toward Kilns Lane. I only cared that I would have two weeks with Jack and Warnie. Back in London, thick fog carrying the smoky remnants of coal exhaust had consumed the city, killing thousands (they were still counting) and sending Parliament into a tizzy until Winston Churchill finally declared he would implement new laws to protect his citizens from the poisonous smog. I’d been hiding in my room with a cloth over my face, and I was thrilled to be away from it all.
I stood at the end of Kilns Lane as the taxi drove away with a few of my last shillings. I’d left most of my belongings in London, as I’d return there for a few days before boarding the ship home.
Silver birch trees formed a long path to the brothers’ home. The lane was thin and muddy, frost and ice at the edges.
“The Kilns,” I said to the air and the birds and the naked trees, with a great love for everything that was to come. I lifted my suitcase and took a few steps to the fork of the lane, where a ramshackle shelter, possibly a garage caved in on itself, stood with a sign attached that pointed the way down the lane. The Kilns, it said in crooked letters with an arrow.
Two thick green hedges bordered the path to the house by the back way. I carefully stepped forward, keeping my eyes on the ground so I wouldn’t slip. When I reached the end of the lane I glanced up to see the rambling cottage, smoke rising from a roof chimney pot, and a rush of expectation ran through me.
The house spread out as if stretching. Built of deep-red brick and creamy stucco, the dormered windows sprouted like bugs’ eyes from the russet-colored roof, where three chimneys stood staunch guard over the gardens and property. I walked under a brick archway and through a small iron gate that creaked with rust as I pushed it open. I reached the green front door of the house in only a few strides. The white porcelain doorbell was pressed into the doorframe and bade me PRESS in a small white sign. Which I did.
Many others had visited here. I’d heard Michal say that Jack frequently took in strays—both animals and humans. Maybe I was one of them, but a stray I would be.
It was quiet all around, and then came a barking dog and a woman’s voice, and the door flew open.
A balding woman, whom I had to look down at to see her face looking up at me, was wearing a dirt-smudged apron. “Well, well, you must be Mrs. Gresham.”
“I am,” I said.
“Well, don’t stand out there in the freezing cold, my dear. Come in, come in!” She moved aside, and I stepped into the dimly lit entry hall to set my suitcase on the brick floor. Beside me there was a long bench that ran the length of the wall. I set my purse on it.
“I’m Mrs. Miller,” the woman told me.
“I’m Joy.” I smiled so widely I could feel it reach my eyes in a wrinkling at the edges. Her thick English accent and my New York one made it sound as if we spoke altogether separate languages. Already I felt we looked at each other with certain camaraderie—women in a house of men.
“The brothers are in the common room. Follow me.”
We took only a few steps down the dark-
paneled hallway before turning left and emerging into a room so covered in books that I believed they must be holding up the roof itself. I took it all in: papers scattered around, a half-finished Scrabble game on the table, comfortable chairs, and the aroma a soft amalgamation of fire, cigarette, and pipe. The walls were painted a hideous mustard yellow, and the window decor was obviously left over from the war—curtains made of army blankets. A fog seemed to fill the room, and I took off my glasses and rubbed at the lenses with the edge of my cotton shirt.
Jack stood from his chair, a book falling from his lap, and gave a boisterous bellow. “Good afternoon, Joy! Well, well. You must have sneaked into the house like a cat.” He shook Warnie’s shoulder. “Look who’s finally here.”
They both came to me and vigorously shook my hand.
“No use cleaning those glasses of yours,” Warnie said with affable humor. “It’s the fug in here. We wait until the room is unbearable and then out we go for fresh air.”
I laughed. “I’m so happy to be here,” I said, “I don’t even mind the fuggy-ness.”
“It seems you’ve met our housekeeper, Mrs. Miller. Let’s show you around and get you settled,” Jack said. “We’ve given you the best room, but you’ll have to share a bathroom with two old bachelors.”
“I’m not worried about sharing anything,” I said.
Awkwardness settled over us, and I wanted to shoo it from the room. It would take a little bit, getting used to sharing a home.
“This way,” Warnie said and waved his hand toward the hallway.
I followed, Jack behind, until we reached two doorways.
“We added these rooms as soon as we bought the place,” Warnie announced and opened the bedroom door. “This was once my room, but I’ve moved upstairs since Maureen moved out. This will be yours for the weeks.” He waved his hand to the door next to it in the hallway. “This is my study. But I’ll try not to disturb.”
I peeked into his chaotic study, books and papers and a little bronze Buddha sitting serenely in lotus pose on his mantle, staring at the mess. My room was small, with a single bed in the corner, a dresser tight against the wall, and a washbasin. The bed was made with what must have once been a white bedspread, but now was gray and faded. On the walls were pictures of trains and steamships, framed in dark wood and hanging crooked. Without thinking I walked over and straightened a photo, then turned to the men.
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