Becoming Mrs. Lewis

by Patti Callahan

  “Merry Christmas,” I called out and bent over to put my gifts under the tree.

  They both startled, and Jack rose with a stretch. “Feliz Navidad, Joy!”

  He went straightaway to the tree and retrieved a package wrapped in brown paper with a red string ribbon. “For you.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I have something for you also.”

  “Open yours first,” Warnie said and rose to stoke the fire.

  I stood for a moment, taking in the room and the Lewis men I had grown to love with such depth. Soon it would be over. I wanted to hold this moment close, tuck it into my heart, because I would need it when I went home.

  I took the package from Jack, and then sat in the ragged chair I’d come to think of as mine and opened it slowly. It was a copy of The Great Divorce. I opened the cover to find a quote written in Jack’s now-familiar tight cursive handwriting, the fountain pen ink bleeding into the cotton paper.

  There are three images in my mind I must continually forsake and replace by better ones; the false image of god, the false image of my neighbors, and the false image of myself. And then his signature, C. S. Lewis.

  I held the book to my chest. “I cannot tell you how much this means to me,” I said. “Where is that quote from?”

  “A chapter I never included,” he said with a nod.

  “There’s more,” Warnie announced.

  “Wait, it’s my turn to give.” I placed my new book on a side table.

  From under the tree I brought out gifts for the men. For Jack, The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. Inside I had written a line from G. K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse, but slightly altered for my own influence on the line: And men grow weary of green wine and sick of crimson seas.

  For Warnie, a new book of French history from Blackwell’s Bookshop. To Warnie, With great love, Joy.

  There aren’t two men who would be more content with such gifts. They perused the books immediately and thanked me as if I’d given them a second home in Oxford.

  After a long moment, Jack handed me another gift. This time it was not his own work but Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald—the author we’d both loved in childhood. I stared at the red cover with calligraphy letters spelling out the title, and tears welled in my eyes. I reached under my glasses and wiped them away before opening the cover to see that George MacDonald had signed his name on April 27, 1885. Below George’s signature Jack had written Later: from C. S. Lewis to Joy Davidman. Christmas 1952.

  He had gifted me his personal signed MacDonald and signed it to Davidman. Not Gresham.

  A flood of gratitude poured through me, settling into the cracks of my pain. I might have been reading signs where signs weren’t meant to be, like the ancient Greeks who believed that the Nine Muses hidden behind the golden cloud influenced their writing and creation. But read the signs I did.

  I took a chance I had not yet taken and I went to Jack, put my arms around him, and hugged him tightly. I held to him for longer than he did me and then drew slightly back to look at him, my hands on his shoulders. His eyes, wet with unshed tears, felt like they bore right into my soul.

  “Jack, I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Joy.”

  I let my arms drop to my sides but kept my eyes fixed on his. “You are precious to me. You are a gift.”

  He smiled and touched my arm for just a moment. “As you are to me.”

  I turned to look at Warnie. “And you too, Warnie. I don’t want to leave you or this place.”

  “Don’t think about that now,” Warnie said. “It’s Christmas. There’s much to celebrate.”

  Jack flicked ash off his trouser legs and straightened his jacket. “Let’s gather our things and begin the walk to Trinity,” he said. “The Christmas Eucharist begins in thirty minutes.”

  I clutched MacDonald’s book to my chest and sent a prayer for my family at home. I felt it rise to the heavens. Then I opened my eyes to Jack and Warnie and all the day might hold.

  It was after we returned from church that Jack stopped me in the hallway. “Joy, I must tell you how much your edits and work on O.H.E.L. have meant to me. I’ll be dedicating the book to you.”

  “To me?”

  He nodded and smiled as if he’d just offered the most beautiful Christmas gift—frankincense or myrrh. And he was right. It was a gift of immeasurable value.

  When the men had wandered off for their nap, I found myself alone in the common room. I walked about, picking up framed photos in an effort to glimpse the Jack-of-the-past: the boy, the adolescent, the soldier, the atheist, the man. Seventeen of his years had occurred before I even entered the dingy world of the “Jewish ghetto” in New York City.

  There he was—a boy wearing knickers and knee-high black socks, a dress shirt with a triangular white collar, a white whistle lanyard looping down and into his top left pocket. I picked up the photo, ran my finger along the grainy black-and-white of the boy with a mother who loved him and had not yet fallen ill. Then there was another—a young boy, maybe eight years old, standing with his brother in the Irish countryside, both in suits and knotted ties, holding onto their bicycles, staring almost blankly at the camera. Then the soldier with a pipe in his mouth, a roguish smile on his face as if he knew he would survive and that God was fast on his heels. The posed photo of a man of maybe twenty, sitting in a three-piece suit with a book on his lap, gave me quite the thrill. Goodness, he struck such a handsome pose, so trim as he looked directly into the camera, his grin the same, impish and ready for trouble. I loved that young man I never knew. A far-reaching yearning bled backward in time, to a world that existed with Jack in it while I was still young and an ocean away. I pined for the time lost, something and someone I never could have had even then.

  I set the past aside and entered the kitchen. I’d volunteered to cook Christmas dinner and half expected the men to retire to the common room or their offices while I bustled about the kitchen. Instead they planted themselves at the wooden kitchen table, regaling me with stories as I basted the turkey and simmered the cranberries, as I lit the stove and chopped the potatoes.

  In the lull of another story about Warnie and his childhood happiness at Little Lea, I spoke.

  “I once believed that it was Christianity that would finally make me happy.”

  “Oh, the history of man looking for something to make himself happy.” Jack smiled.

  “Well, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier than I’ve been today, even with the melancholy of missing of my little boys.”

  “If you’re looking for a religion to make you happy, it wouldn’t be Christianity,” Jack said with a laugh. “A bottle of port might do that, but Christianity is rightfully not here to make us comfortable or happy.”

  “Cheers to that,” I said and lifted my glass. “Tell me another childhood story.” I poured a cup of burgundy from Magdalen’s wine cellar into the gravy and stirred.

  “Wait!” Warnie stood. “You pour wine into gravy?”

  I stopped midstir. “You’ve never seen such a thing?”

  “Never,” Jack said.

  “Well, I’m here to educate you on finer cooking.”

  Warnie scoffed with laughter. “Oh, don’t you let Mrs. Miller hear you talk of any finer cooking than hers.”

  “I won’t let her hear me, but my goodness, of course there is.”

  Silence settled for a moment, and then it was Warnie who answered me first. “My favorite times were the ones when our family would go to the seashore. It was where I fell in love with the ocean. With ships and with mariners.”

  “When Mother was alive,” Jack added, in a voice so tender it took great self-control not to put down my whisk and sit before him, take his soft and beautiful face in mine, and kiss every corner of it.

  “Let’s not talk of this on Christmas Day,” Warnie said firmly. “Look at that huge turkey. I’m not sure where you found one that size, but in anticipation, let’s imbibe immed
iately.”

  “What we need,” I said, “is some champagne.”

  “Oh no.” Jack placed his burgundy glass on the table and lifted his hands in surrender. “Anything but champagne.”

  “Who doesn’t like champagne? That seems nearly impossible.”

  His brow furrowed between his spectacles, his eyes going distant in the look I’d come to understand meant his mind’s eye had been cast to the past. “It was the Battle of Arras in 1915,” he said, but then fell silent.

  This was the first time I’d heard him talk of his time in the First World War. I knew from his writing he’d been a commissioned officer in the Somerset Light Infantry and he’d reached the front line in France on his nineteenth birthday. I could barely imagine his fear, yet he not once had spoken to me of it. That May he’d been injured in the Battle of Arras—these were the facts, but I knew nothing else. I set my wineglass on the counter in a silent urge for him to continue.

  “It was during an artillery barrage when I’d taken my men over the parapet.” He shook his head. “A debacle. It was my sergeant who died instead of me.” He blinked slowly, as if all these years later, it still cut deeply in his psyche. What the public saw was a mask, just like any I wore. Behind it was a man who still trembled with sorrows and pain: the death of his mother, the harsh bringing-up at boarding school that had tortured him as a young boy, two wars, his failures at Oxford.

  Humankind’s cruelty in its entirety.

  “The shrapnel buried into my body and sent me to the hospital. While the cries of other men echoed in my ears, they moved me behind the lines. The only liquor available was champagne, and I swallowed rivers of it. I’ve not been able to abide the taste of it since.”

  I stepped closer to him. “I’m sorry for that,” I said. “Blast the champagne then. We shall break out more wine!”

  “It’s all in the past,” Warnie said.

  “Except when it isn’t,” Jack replied, and they exchanged a look, the kind that only those who know your innermost spirit can read.

  “I wish I could scrub the horrid parts of the past clean for both of you.” I paused. “For all of us.”

  We were silent for a while longer until I served the food and Warnie lit the candles, and we all began to sing the verse from the Christmas pantomime we’d gone to a few nights before.

  Jack first: “Am I going to be a bad boy? No. No. No.”

  Warnie next: “Am I going to be awful? No. No. No.”

  And then finally my tone-deaf voice joined in: “I promise not to pour the gravy over baby’s head.” And with that I poured the Magdalen burgundy gravy over the turkey and we sat to eat.

  We prayed over the meal and lifted our glasses to Christmas Day. Before he took his first bite, Jack reached over and took my hand. “Merry Christmas, Joy.” He ran his thumb over the top of my hand in a motion so innocent and yet intimate that my limbs loosened and my breath was lost.

  “Merry Christmas to you too, Jack.”

  CHAPTER 27

  A thing to move your laughter or your loathing;

  Still, you may have my love for what it’s worth

  “SONNET XII,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  The morning of my leaving I stood in the hallway of the Kilns, its friendliness holding me one last time. My valise and suitcase were packed and waiting by the door, and I glanced at them with scorn, hating them for what they represented.

  Jack and Warnie were bumbling about in the back of the house; I heard their footsteps and the water running fierce through the pipes.

  The kitchen was empty. The copper pots hung clean from their hooks where Mrs. Miller had put them, but there was no leftover evidence of our frivolity or deep conversations. When I left, the house would resume its natural rhythms.

  I’d become at home in the kitchen, and I took a frying pan from the hook. It clattered as it hit the stove: iron on iron. The black market eggs huddled in a bowl on the counter. I took one and cracked it open against a white porcelain bowl. The yoke remained whole and floated in the globular whites. I lifted a fork and punctured that yellow dome, watching it spread and stain before I stirred it. Somewhere in the back of the house Warnie called Jack’s name, and then there was laughter and a closing door, shuffled footsteps.

  I dropped a dab of butter into the warming pan and inhaled the comforting aroma as the butter spread and melted, sliding to the edges of the pan. The lump of fear about going home lodged beneath my throat. I poured the eggs into the hot pan and began to stir them as they cooked. A sprinkle of salt, and I whisked the eggs to finish.

  “Good morning, Joy.” Jack’s voice startled me, and the spatula clattered to the floor.

  “Jack.” I turned and pasted on the smile, lifted the utensil from the ground, and wiped it off on a towel.

  “Today you leave us.” He brushed his hand across his unshaven cheeks, staring out the wide windows to the garden outside.

  “Yes, today,” I said. I placed my scrambled eggs on a plate and sat at the kitchen table. Jack joined me. “I have a story I want to tell you.”

  “Please!” He leaned back in his lounging clothes and worn slippers.

  “When I was a child,” I said quietly, “my brother, Howie, and I would sneak out at night to go to the zoo. We’d slink through the dark streets of the Bronx, holding our hands so tightly together it hurt. We’d slip through a hole in the fence, and the first thing I would do was run to the lions’ cages.”

  “You as a child.” Jack smiled tenderly. “I would have loved to have known that little girl.”

  “Oh, you do,” I said and laughed. “She’s here also.”

  He folded his arms across his chest, his eyebrows raised in curiosity. “Go on.”

  “I would call their names, Sultan and Boudin Maid. They were Barbary lions, and they would come to me. To me. Sometimes I would feed them small bites of meat and always bury, if only for a moment, my hands in their manes. Those golden eyes, I don’t know how to describe those eyes. It was like falling and falling into another world where anything was possible. Time stood still. It was forever and not long enough. It was everything to me when that animal paused and let me touch him.”

  “Ah, the magnificent beasts,” he said. “You weren’t afraid?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “But you touched them anyway.”

  “I had to. There didn’t seem to be a choice.”

  “What absolute wonder,” he said, shaking his head.

  I continued because I knew where I wanted to take Jack, what I needed him to see and feel in the cold morning of my leaving. I wanted to understand what we might be becoming; I wanted to hear his heart.

  “It was a wonder, Jack. Years later, I opened The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and again dug my hands into the mane of a great lion. I felt that Sultan had followed me through all of my life, gone to visit you and then returned to me.”

  Jack’s gentle eyes were moist, and his eyebrows fell down into a V. He leaned closer to me. “That’s a lovely analogy. A graceful way to see the past.”

  “It’s not an analogy, Jack. Can’t you see? It’s grace, the kind that hunts us down and doesn’t let us go. It brought us together. The grace that keeps planets in their orbits and causes lilies to open their faces to the sun.” I dared to meet his eyes with mine. “It’s love.”

  He folded his hands in his lap. “Philia, yes. We must love that way. It grows not once but over and over and then again over. I value ours beyond measure.”

  “Real philia,” I echoed, my eggs now cold and congealed on the plate. Yes, that is what he thought of us; this vibrating connection and kindness was nothing more than deep friendship. Then why did it feel more than that one word? Why was I confused?

  He took a raspy breath and continued. “It is difficult for Warnie and me to think of you heading home into that mess. We hurt for you. I do wish there was some way to help you, something more we could do than send you on your way with our prayers. If you decide to return, we will be here. W
e will always be here for you.”

  But like the lion behind a cage, I couldn’t free myself to offer what I was in no position to give—my freedom to be with him.

  “These have been some of the happiest days of my life,” I said.

  “These have been happy days for us also, Joy.”

  “Thank you for taking me in and allowing me to spend Christmas with you. Thank you for my gifts, and for the warm nights, the games, the long walks, and the conversation.”

  Underneath all of this simmered so many unsaid words, so much unexpressed emotion. How was I to leave them?

  Warnie entered the kitchen, coughing into his palm to shake off the cold morning. His eyes were red and his cheeks thick with three days of stubble. “Well, good morning,” he said upon seeing us.

  “You must get to the doctor, Warnie,” I told him, “before that settles deeper into your chest.”

  “I will,” he said. “I have dialed Doc Harvard and made an appointment.”

  It was in that moment that the honk of a taxi startled us all. Jack and I stood.

  “I must go,” I said. “Back to London and to the docks and then . . .”

  “We will miss you, Joy.” He nodded, his spirit closed to me. I couldn’t discern—was he sad or frustrated? Angry? “Please write to us.”

  “I’m going to miss you both terribly.”

  Warnie came to me and also hugged me. “Joy, we aren’t going anywhere. When you return, we will be here.”

  Tears gathered in my chest and then found their way to my eyes, falling before I could catch them. “I don’t know how I’ll find a way to return, but if I can, I will.”

  They nodded at me in agreement and I turned away, walked out the painted-green door of the Kilns and into the taxi waiting outside.

  I’d offered my heart, and now I would pay the price—I always did.

  PART III

  AMERICA

  January 1953–November 1953

  “Courage, dear heart,” said Aslan.