I shuddered in disgust. “Poor Renee.”
Anger twitched beneath his muscles as I stood to leave.
“Do not walk away from me,” he warned.
Enough damage had been done, and I wouldn’t allow myself to listen to one more word of rebuke. It was all enough.
And yet, even as I left our living room and opened the front door to escape to the orchard, I could recognize one thing—Bill was the father of my boys. There was no room for reconciliation today, maybe not for many days to come. But the old pull to appease didn’t die easily. It was only courage that carried me forward now.
Renee:
Dear Joy,
I am devastated by Bill’s decision to stay there with you. I don’t know what to do.
Joy:
Dear Renee,
Do not be sad, cookie-pie. We have both been played the fool. I did everything I could to make him go to you. Now there is nothing left for me to do but console you with the fact that I too have been his victim. Remember, most men are not as bad as he. I have a favor to ask of you. Will you please sign a piece of paper and admit to an affair so that I may file for divorce with cause?
The days dragged as I fought not to believe Bill’s threats and insults. I knew by then I didn’t have to stay and tolerate the abuse. I had a choice; there were other ways to live. And those were choices I would make, as difficult and awful as they might be. Maybe by the rules and laws of Leviticus, I was drowning in sin, but in the same way God was with me that night in my sons’ nursery, he was with me in the agony—not fixing it but always near.
By April I’d gone to the lawyer and filed for a legal separation. On my way home I stopped for a checkup with our family doctor, Fritz Cohen.
I told him of our woes.
“I believe he’s a psychopath, Joy.” This is what the doctor who had known us for years told me.
“I think, Dr. Cohen, that he’s merely a louse. But it doesn’t matter; I just want my freedom.”
The checkup showed me healthier than when I’d left, but still with low thyroid and aches the doctor claimed were middle age.
“Middle age is thirty-eight?” I asked with a sad smile.
He patted my leg. “Please take care of yourself, Joy. Your living situation is most likely adding to your ill health.”
The time passed in slow motion, and I saved money. Bill eventually took a job that carried him out of town for most of the week—traveling with a PR firm as a press agent. When he was home he endured the days with sleeping pills and tantrums. His fits now ended in crying jags, and I often felt like I was taking care of an adolescent trying to decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.
In May and June, my two articles in Presbyterian Life came out back to back, while Chad Walsh advised me on what publisher might be best to bring out the entire series of articles as a book. I was close to having enough money for tickets across the sea.
Although I missed Jack and anticipated a reunion, the decision wasn’t about him. I wasn’t leaving for him, because there was no going to him. I was leaving for my soul and for the souls of my children.
Joy:
Dear Jack,
I have filed for separation. It’s been a living hell and sometimes I believe I have ruined our lives. But courage will carry me forward now.
Jack:
You will get over this, Joy, for you are strong. You can’t go on loving someone you don’t respect. Do not think of yourself but of the boys. Do not believe that you’ve ruined your life. You are but a spring chicken at only thirty-three years. Life is ahead.
But ah, I was thirty-eight years old by that time. I didn’t correct him.
“Life is ahead,” I said to Davy and Douglas when I told them of our impending move to England.
Life is ahead, I told myself.
Life is ahead, I mumbled inside my mind as Bill berated and blustered and bellowed and slammed doors.
By July Bill started traveling with a carnival. Without him in the house, my nerves calmed and I began to think straight again. I slowly shifted from terror to pity. Although he’d taken the car and I had to hitchhike into Poughkeepsie for errands, the peace we found without him in the house was worth being stranded.
I held Douglas and Davy close in those days, reading books at night, mainly the three Narnian chronicles already out, The Wizard of Oz, and Charlotte’s Web. I tried to take them into the fantasy that might sustain them until our new life started.
When Bill came home for the weekends I made myself scarce.
One August afternoon while he was gone, together my sons and I hung the FOR SALE sign, nailing the black-and-white placard to a post.
“So that’s that,” I said, taking their hands in mine. We stood in a line staring at that sign as if it had grown from the earth.
“Do you think someone will buy it?” Davy asked.
“Of course they will,” Douglas said, as if he were the older and wiser. “It’s the best house.”
“If it’s the best, why are we leaving it?” Davy released my hand and pushed at his brother.
I squatted down and took Davy’s face in my hands. “Because we are going to have a grand adventure in England. A brand-new life.”
“I like this life,” Davy said.
I’d run out of assurances and promises, so I took him in my arms and hugged as tightly as I could for as long as he let me.
Through the next weeks we watched as couples and families roamed through what had once been my dream. The farmhouse sold quickly, and the furniture with it. We owed so much in back taxes and mortgage payments that most of the money went straight to the treasury department.
It was a lovely couple who bought the house—Sara and Wade, and I could never remember their last name. They roamed the grounds with their two young daughters and fell in love with all I had once fallen in love with: Crum Elbow Creek, the orchard and wild flowers, the plotted garden, and the front porch that seemed to offer lazy afternoons sipping a cold lemonade while the perfect family ran through the yard with glee. For me it had been real, even when it had become an illusion. Losing it hurt as any death would.
As movers and trucks came to dismantle my life piece by piece, I felt I was crumbling along with the rotten wood on the porch. But it was the piano that broke me open to tears. I hadn’t played it in years, and yet when they came to load it, I sat on the bench before my Steinway and began to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. My fingers remembered the score and fluttered over the keys, heartache thrust upon the ivory and ebony as the music came alive. My sons watched with clenched fists, as if they would fight someone to keep the instrument.
The movers, two large men sweating in the late-August heat, watched me too and didn’t move.
“Ma’am,” one said, “would you like us to leave this?”
“It can’t be taken on a ship,” I said. “It has to go.”
“Mommy?” Davy came to sit next to me on the piano bench. He wiped my wet face with his small hand. “Don’t cry. Remember that story you told us? The one about the man waiting in the forest? Think about that instead.”
Oh, the wisdom of small children.
One sad night after the house had sold, I’d told them a story of two young children lost in the woods who stumbled upon the house of a shepherd—an ivy-covered cottage that very much resembled the Kilns, a pond that very much imitated their lake, and an old man who looked very much like Jack. It had been my way of telling my boys that yes, we were lost and scared, but we would find our way.
Now it was my son who comforted me with the same story.
As Jack had written to me, the world holds a long sordid history of man searching for happiness in everything but God.
No more would I do so—or at least that was my intent, an intent I would again and again forget and again and again remember. I gently closed the piano top and then stood. I turned my back to avoid seeing the men take my Steinway, and we set off to the creek. The boys fished for carp, and I picked ap
ples from the orchard for the last time.
Joy:
Dear Jack and Warnie,
I have done it. The house is sold and we shall be in London come November.
Jack:
This is jolly news, the best I’ve heard in weeks. Between sinus infections and examinations and student demands, I have been fathoms deep. We shall see you soon. And as you know, if there is any kind of help that you need, Warnie and I are here for you.
In October my sons and I moved into a boarding house on the winter-whipped bay in New Rochelle, New York, where we shared a kitchen with other women, bided our time, and waited for our departure on November 13.
I prayed fervently, out loud, silently, all day. Whatever kinds of prayers there were, I prayed them. Begging. Repenting. All of them to carry us toward a new life. While my boys played on the sandy beach, foraging for shells and discovering sea life carcasses as treasure, I prepared for the journey. Bill had finally ceased fighting our leaving, exhausted in his own right as I was, and he promised that money would be waiting for us at Phyl’s house.
It seemed impossible, but my entire life’s belongings had been distilled to this—four trunks, three suitcases, and tickets to England on the SS Britannic for an eight-day journey to London.
PART IV
ENGLAND
November 1953–July 1960
ASLAN
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what
Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about
safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, C. S. LEWIS
CHAPTER 32
I wish you were the woman, I the man;
I’d get you over your sweet shudderings
“SONNET XXXVII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
November 1953
England embraced us with cold, foggy arms. Douglas had turned eight years old on the Britannic in the midst of a gale fierce and wild. He’d clung to me and wondered in dramatic fashion if we would make it to the port alive. Well, we did. Alive and bedraggled and quite nervous.
Life is ahead.
Whatever dreams or fantasies I’d formulated of our romantic arrival in England evaporated in the soggy air as Davy stood on the dock and declared, “I don’t like it here. It’s ugly and cold.”
I’d arranged for us to stay at Avoca House Hotel, near Phyl and her son, Robyn, in the convenient London neighborhood I’d already come to know. When we arrived, Davy clung to me in fear and Douglas was wide-eyed with hesitant wonder. My sons hid behind me as we entered the boarding house, seeking tea and biscuits on our first morning.
“Mommy, I want to go home.” Davy’s voice cracked under the exhaustion and unfamiliarity.
“Davy.” I cupped his chin in my hands as the clerk came to check us in and give us our key. “This is home.”
“No,” he said. “Our real home.”
“Love, sometimes we ache for what is familiar even though there is something better out there for us. Just give London a chance.”
“What about school and friends and Crum Elbow Creek?” His eyes overflowed with tears, and my own rose also. Would heartbreak ever end?
“We will find a new school and new friends. And wait until you see the pond behind Mr. Lewis’s house. You know what he told me one time? That sometimes we want to stay and goof off in a mud pit when God has an entire seashore for us to play in. England is our new seashore.”
I dangled the Kilns like bait for my little fishes, but I too was scared to death as I wondered what I had done.
Life is ahead.
That first week hit us all hard. We’d rushed straight from the hotel to Phyl’s house to discover that Bill hadn’t sent the money he’d promised. Because of the Aliens Order of 1920, I needed to register as a foreign national, which meant I couldn’t job hunt until I heard from the government. In my mind I calculated and recalculated the money I had and how long it would last: not long was the answer. Had I been too impetuous? Had I left America too soon?
I shoved fear from my mind, stretched food as far as I could, and didn’t let on that I was as terrified as I’d ever been. Was I as big a fool as Bill said I was? No. It had been change or die—and I’d decided there was too much to live for.
When I saw Jack the next month I could ask him for money, but I was loath to do so. I wanted so much from him, but none of it was material.
I filled our time, the boys and mine, with sight-seeing and a forced cheerfulness to try and help them adjust. We trounced through Westminster Abbey, and I remembered the atrocious afternoon when I’d gone there on my knees, repenting of my sins and wanting to go home and fix what remained. That had been only one year ago. As the boys trailed along behind me, I stared at the stained glass window where Jesus peered down at me. Silently I asked him, Did I do right by all of us?
No answer came.
Buckingham Palace with its statues and gardens fascinated both boys, and they stared at the Queen’s Guard—soldiers in red with their furry black hats—motionless and statuesque.
“They’re like the statues at the White Witch’s castle,” Douglas whispered.
“But not frozen,” I countered and tugged on his earmuff hat to pull it down.
“They look frozen to me.”
“But they aren’t,” I told him. “When their shift is over, they walk off just like you or me, to their homes and their families and their beer.” I laughed, catching the sight of a soldier, and swore I saw the corner of his mouth move the tiniest bit toward a smile.
It was in Trafalgar Square that a pigeon landed on Douglas’s shoulder, and he shrieked. We collapsed, laughing, and sat on the curb. The fountain in the middle of the square, larger than most swimming pools I’d ever seen, sprayed water, and Douglas asked if anyone ever jumped into it.
“Try it,” I said.
“You first,” he joshed in return.
Davy noticed the grand carved lions—four of them—on Nelson’s Column. “Oh, look,” he said, pointing to one. “Aslan.”
“Nope. Just another lion. But I can tell you a secret I know about this one,” I said. “The Nazis were going to take it back with them if they won the war. Lions are beloved that way.”
“The war,” Douglas said with a low voice. “It was really here.”
“It really was,” I told him. “It wasn’t just something you read about in books.”
It was later that day when Davy asked what must have been niggling at him. “What will we do about school? Don’t we have to go? All we’ve done is play. Not that I mind very much.” He was right—we’d been to the zoo and the museums, the aquarium and the parks.
“I’ve been thinking quite a lot about that, darling, and I think boarding school is what is best for you both. Here they call it public school.”
“No, Mommy,” Davy said. “I don’t want to leave you again.” He set his fists on his waist, looking like such a man in his buttoned jacket and furry hat.
I shifted his hat on his head. “It’s not leaving me at all. You come home for all the holidays and all the summer. Any school I choose will only be a short train ride away. Tomorrow we’re having lunch with a woman whose son went to one of the schools I’m looking at. Mrs. Travers.” I ran my hand through Davy’s hair, straightened his crooked glasses. “She wrote Mary Poppins and she has a son your same age, nine years old. I bet he can tell you how wonderful it all is.”
He stopped moving and looked pointedly at me. “I won’t think it’s wonderful.”
I kissed the top of his head, which seemed to be the only answer I had lately.
When we returned home that evening, worn-out and hungry, the innkeeper of Avoco House entered the kitchen. Mrs. Bagley had her hair wrapped in a bright-red handkerchief and her robe buttoned tight with a belt pulled into a knot that looked too strained to hold.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Gresham,” she said with her crinkled smile that had become familiar in a homey way.
“Go
od afternoon to you in return.” I slipped off my coat and hat to smile at her as the boys and I sat at the small oak table for afternoon tea and biscuits.
Mrs. Bagley sat with us. Her double chin bobbled up and down with her smile and nod. Her warm brown eyes, set deeply in the folds of her eyelids, seemed to see right through me. “You must be very tired, my dears, from all the travel and adjustments.”
“I can’t even begin to tell you,” I said and exhaled, relaxed. “But there’s much to be done, and honestly, Mrs. Bagley, I don’t believe I can afford to stay here at the inn for much longer.”
“Tell me, dear, what is your situation?”
I paused in embarrassment, but then relinquished the truth to her kind eyes. “I’m going through a terrible divorce and can’t yet lawfully search for a job. Right now I’m a single mother without enough money.” I glanced at Douglas and Davy and didn’t elaborate.
Mrs. Bagley’s downcast eyes filled with understanding. “I have been in your spot.” She rubbed her face as if the memory itched. “Almost thirty years ago I was alone with a young daughter and baby son. I’m here to tell you that it was most awful, but we rose from those ashes and were better for it.” She punctuated her remarks with another firm nod. “Listen, Mrs. Gresham, I have a townhome annex for twelve guineas a month. Would you like to see if it is satisfactory for you?” She smiled at Davy and Douglas, who moved closer to my side.
I calculated in my mind: that was thirty-six dollars. It was less than what I paid now and a tad more than I could afford. But I could find a job. Bill had finally sent sixty dollars, and if I stretched I could make it work.
“Yes,” I said. “Please. I have searched, but no one wants to take in a boarder with two young boys.”
“I know,” she said. “I do know.”
The brief walk to the annex was cold and rainy, an omen I ignored. But when Mrs. Bagley opened the doorway to the rooms, I was flooded with relief. I remembered, with such remorse and melancholy, the first time Bill and I had walked into our house in Staatsburg, chock-full of dreams with our babies and our money and our optimism. But as I walked through the front door of the Avoco House annex, my dreams had tapered down to the most simple: peace, safety, and rest in God.
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