Becoming Mrs. Lewis

by Patti Callahan

  “Joy. A shamshir—a magical sword from all fairy tales. It’s exquisite. I shall hang it right above the fireplace, allow it to remind me of you, our friendship, and your boys fighting with their invisible swords.”

  He ran his hand across the top of the metal sword, and then his finger slipped ever so slightly. A thin line of blood appeared on his forefinger as he withdrew his hand.

  “Oh, Jack.” I took his hand in mine and bent to kiss the wound, a quick and natural reaction to injury.

  He withdrew quickly and with such deft sureness that my lips landed on nothing but air. He put his finger against the wool of his coat and laughed. “I’m such a clumsy bloke. It’s no wonder they never let me play sports.”

  Red heat filled my chest. He turned to place the sword on the mantle, and the structure of his chin, the lines of his smile, caught the firelight. A line of poetry surged forward in my mind: the accidental beauty of his face.

  I was dangerously close to allowing this love to become what it must not.

  He set the sword on top of the fireplace mantle. “Thank you, Joy. Look at it up there, so stately.”

  Together we sat on the chairs and stared into the fire, the quiet stretching into sleepiness until I shifted in my seat. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about a book I just finished. It really must be your next.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I think I’ve told you of Arthur Clarke. He’s one of the sci-fi boys in London. He’s written a book titled Childhood’s End. He’s sold so many copies, hit the jackpot if you will.”

  “Jackpots aren’t always the best things,” he said. “But it will be my next read so we might talk about it.” He leaned forward, his eyes catching the shadows of the fire. “It is jolly well one of my favorite things to do—talk about stories with you.”

  “And I, you.” I glanced around the room. “Where has Warnie gone?”

  “He fell asleep in his chair when you tucked the boys into bed. I helped him upstairs.” Jack’s voice held the anxiety and grief I knew well—that of loving another who is destroying himself with alcohol.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. I know how you feel.”

  “Just when I believe he’s kicked it, he hasn’t. It’s the war. It still lives in him, and he tries to quiet it. I’d rather not speak of it. But thank you for your sympathy. It’s a hell of a thing.”

  I did reach for him then, across the space between us. I touched his skin, the small space between his shirt sleeve and wrist. I ran my finger down to the knuckles, a gentle trace, and then gave his hand a squeeze of sympathy. This time he didn’t withdraw.

  “You love Warnie deeply and with such devotion. If only everyone in the world had such love.”

  “He’s my brother,” Jack said, as if that answered all doubt. “When Mother died, I would have also if not for him.”

  I withdrew my hand from his wrist and settled back into the chair. “Jack, have you ever been in love?”

  He laughed, and in his way scattered the question across the room like ash. “If I ever find the beautiful blonde I’ve been looking for all my life, I will let you know.”

  His joke, so like him to deflect, hurt no differently than if he’d taken down the sword from above the mantle and swiped it across my heart. But I tried to laugh. “I will keep my eyes out for you.” I smiled.

  “Of course I’m being cheeky, Joy.”

  “Your humor, Jack, you use it to hide your heart, an armor to keep anything from touching it. I know because I do the same.”

  He was silent for a long moment, and I wondered if I had crossed a boundary. When he spoke it was with his face set to the roaring fire. “Do you know the German word sehnsucht?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered. “The idea of an inconsolable longing for what we don’t understand. You believe that longing is for God. Or heaven. And that we can confuse it with longing for someone or something else.”

  He leaned forward, and for a moment I thought he might touch me, but no. “This deep and abiding friendship means more to me than I can say.”

  “Yes.” I bowed my head. “It means more than we can say.”

  The morning came bright and clear, the fog lifting for the first time since we’d arrived. By the time I appeared in the kitchen after a restless night’s sleep, the boys had already gobbled down their breakfast and set off into the woods to say their farewells to the pond and the kilns and the forest itself. I dropped our packed bags by the front door. Jack sat at the wooden kitchen table still in his lounging clothes, a cigarette already lit. “You must eat before you leave,” he said.

  “I’m not hungry.” I patted the packed bags. “I’ll eat when I arrive back at Avoco so I don’t get travel sick.”

  The boys then burst back into the kitchen, a whirling cyclone of my sons.

  “Well, boys,” Jack said. “I have something here you might enjoy.”

  They stopped dead still, bundled in their coats, and looked at him.

  “What is it?” Douglas asked eagerly.

  Davy adjusted his crooked glasses and leapt forward.

  From the side table Jack produced typeset pages. “This is the newest Narnian book, set to come out this year. I’ve dedicated it to the both of you. It’s called The Horse and His Boy.”

  Davy removed his gloves and took the pages from Jack’s hands and held them against his chest. “No one has read it yet?” he asked with wide eyes.

  “Only my publisher, and your mother, who typed some of the pages for me. And I’ll tell you a couple secrets about it, if you please.”

  “Yes!” Douglas’s enthusiasm could not be bound. He, like his mother, could not hide what bubbled below the heart.

  Jack lowered his voice and placed his hands on either side of his full mouth as if telling a grand secret. “I wrote it before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released. The events happen before The Silver Chair.”

  “What’s it about?” Davy asked, looking down at the treasure he held in his hands.

  Jack sat up and resumed his normal voice. “After the last chapter in Wardrobe, there is a battle in Narnia.”

  “What happens?” Davy’s voice dropped.

  “I won’t tell you what happens, but I will tell you my favorite part.”

  “What is that?” Davy asked.

  “The battle cry.” Jack paused for great effect until the boys were straining forward. “Narnia and the North!” he said with great gusto and lifted his hand to the sky. “Narnia and the North!”

  “Where home is,” I said softly. “North.”

  “Yes, true home.” His kind eyes held such a look that I would have believed it love if he had not told me otherwise in every possible way.

  “Home?” Davy asked as if just remembering we didn’t truly have one. “Where will we spend Christmas if we don’t have a home? What about . . . Santa?”

  I switched on my brightest voice. “Oh, Davy, we do have a home. Avoco House. We’ll get a little tree and I’ll cook turkey and Mrs. Bagley and some other friends are coming to eat with us. Jack.” I turned to him. “This is too kind. Dedicating the book to them.”

  “I could not think of any two boys more worthy.” He smiled at them.

  “Early Merry Christmas,” Warnie said as he entered the kitchen. I hugged him and breathed the stale whiskey and sweat, and that very aroma punched a hole in time: I thought of Bill coming home late, this same smell wafting through the house like evil. I released Warnie and stared at him, grounding myself in the present, in England, in Oxford, at the Kilns.

  With lavish good-byes and promises to return, my sons and I strode with the new manuscript in the opposite direction of the Kilns.

  Somehow I felt that we were a new kind of family. Who was to say there was only one way to love someone? I knew he loved us; words didn’t have to be spoken. And this, for now, would be enough.

  CHAPTER 36

  And yet the horror is a woman still;

  It grieves because it cannot stroke your hair
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  “SONNET XXI,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  April 1954

  My first spring in England was like the first day of being alive in the world, a deaf woman’s first chord of Beethoven. Daffodils, tulips, and blue primroses the color of sky filled London in wild bursts. The anemones and bluebells and star-faced daisies were overwhelming in their intricate beauty. Like the Greek goddess of spring, Persephone, it arrived in a slow seduction. First the cherry trees, scattering their pink-white petals through the air like snow, then the currant bushes with their fiery blossoms. Gardens erupted with earth’s desire to create a torrent of color and aroma.

  It was now April, the boys were home from school for the holidays, and soon we would leave for the Kilns. I would again see Jack, his smile turned up at the corners, eyes crinkling under his spectacles, cigarette ash falling onto his lap.

  I allowed the boys to sleep a little longer before I roused them for our journey to Oxford.

  It had been late January when I’d dropped Davy and Douglas off at Waterloo Station with a tall, Adonis-like man they called a headmaster. Other little boys in uniform, clean and buttoned, gathered like a herd of baby lambs around the man, who, in his bowtie and jacket, drew my sons to him as if he’d known them all along. This, I thought, was the exact right decision. Though the boys had said they didn’t want to go, I could see the goodness in it. I would miss them, and yet I felt a sense of relief. They would be educated, well, and taken care of, and I could work again to provide for us.

  January then birthed a winter so fierce and frigid that I’d given it a name—Fimbulwinter, after the great Norse winters that came right before the end of the world. I wrote like death was knocking at my door and my work could convince its dark specter to depart. It’s not the best way to write—in a panic of poverty—but it was all the inspiration I had. In four months I’d finished a novel called Britannia and also written at least twenty-two short stories, which I sent to my agent at Brandt and Brandt.

  Nothing sold.

  I had also ripped away anything in Smoke on the Mountain that sounded “American” and then sent it off to the English publisher, who wanted it because Jack had agreed to write the foreword. In it he’d said, For the Jewish fierceness, being here also modern and feminine, can be very quiet; the paw looked as if it were velveted, till we felt the scratch.

  Is this about my work or about me? I wondered, but didn’t ask.

  I even took out my mentions of Ingrid Bergman and Ginger Rogers, as the publisher was fearful they might sue me for using them as examples of breaking the Ten Commandments.

  I worked on King Charles and tinkered with Queen Cinderella. From afar my life might appear not so much miserable as difficult; one might believe that my choice to leave America hadn’t worked out very well. But non! No matter the dingy and damp basement job at European Press, where I used Dexedrine to keep myself awake, or the poverty, or the sleep deprivation, I felt I was becoming—in some way—my true self. As I told one of my sci-fi boys, “For such a long while there was a breach between the woman I mean to be and the woman I am, and now that gap is closing, slowly. It just ain’t so pretty in the becoming.”

  Meanwhile, I’d taken Jack up on his offer to pay for the boys’ schooling through his Agape Fund. I hated to take his money, and I’d been skipping lunches, making things stretch as far as I could, with the intention of paying him back—I had every intention of all my writing paying off. I also begged and nagged and pleaded with Bill for more money, but one could not squeeze water from a stone. He was out of work again, and I highly suspected he was back with Renee, although he wrote to me that it was only friendship. But this was the same man who had married me days after his first divorce was final, which ours was not yet. It was ekeing along as slowly as a snail in mud.

  The month before I had awakened one morning to a man’s face on the pillow next to mine: Harry Williams from the sci-fi crowd. His soft snore let me know he was still asleep. We’d flirted for a few weeks, and then one night when the whiskey and the thick beer had done their intoxicating job, we admitted that we both needed some love, and not the permanent kind or the I’ll-take-care-of-you kind. Just the variety that warmed the last of winter’s chill from our bodies.

  It didn’t last long, this brief, tepid affair, but it was enough to quench a rising hunger for touch and skin. It was only Jack I wanted to be near, but it was Harry with his jolly Cockney accent, deep belief in aliens on other planets, and large soft hands who slept next to me that morning and a scattering of others.

  This was a sin. I wasn’t a fool; I knew the commandments of my religion. I wrote about them. Still I fell. And repented. And fell again. Maybe I always would, but somehow grace felt big enough, sturdy enough as I stood again, resolute to do better. Meanwhile, I wrote my sonnets. I eased the pain and loneliness by forging sheaves of poetry no one would ever read.

  My friendship with Jack and Warnie grew—we wrote back and forth as always, our conversations pausing and beginning again, making plans to meet in London or Oxford. On rare times we chatted on the crackling phone in the hallway.

  My most pleasurable hours were either with the writing crowd on Thursday nights or typing Jack’s biography, both critiquing and editing as he’d asked. Surprised by Joy, it was titled. He was coming to depend on me with his work, but alas, the title had nothing to do with me! Slowly I ran my eyes over his handwriting, able to decipher even phrases he couldn’t read after he’d written them from his inkwell.

  During these hours of typing Surprised by Joy, my emotions swung wildly. His words, the means by which I had first come to love him, now told me of his childhood and life, and it only made me love him all the more. I read much of what he’d already told me: the pain of losing his mother when he was ten years old; the horrific boarding school; the war and its horrors. I also spied parts of our relationship in the telling of his story, or did I only see what I desired? Whether it was the description of his conversion sounding similar to mine, or the phrasing of a thought he’d voiced on our long walks through the moors, nettles stinging our ankles and laughter following us high into the hills.

  And my sons—on Sundays I would worship at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, where I had once been cleansed by the one o’clock bells, and then hop the train to visit them in Surrey. Those visits were the lifeblood I needed to begin another week.

  As spring arrived, the trees covered in milky mist as they moved toward green, I walked for miles and miles through London. I sat in Primrose Park with a notebook and ball pen overlooking Hampstead and Belsize. I spread an inexpensive orange blanket I’d found in the market on the thick grass to write and revel in earth’s rebirth: the May trees, the roses everywhere, the rhododendron and elder trees competing in a beauty contest. It was there that I plotted Queen Cinderella with Warnie’s outline as a guide. I felt like she could be a real moneymaker, something to free me from begging Bill for money or depending on Jack for the boys’ education.

  I also planted a small garden behind our Avoco House room, and by April the vegetables were just beginning to sprout from the ground. Sometimes I would imagine a green bean or tomato busting forth and be taken back in a rush to my garden on Staatsburg. But by then another family lived there, other children ran through its acreage and splashed in its creek. I hoped they were happier than we’d been.

  Do you miss it? Jack had asked in a letter a few weeks before.

  I felt inside myself, poked around for the answer. No, I’d written. I mourn what it could have been. I feel sad for what I wanted it to be but it never was. Maybe I miss the idea of what I wanted for all of us. But no, I don’t miss what was.

  Never had a man been such an integral part of my life without also being in my bed. It was taking some getting used to, and included some heartache to boot.

  But on this April morning, instead of typing more of Jack’s biography or forging another sonnet (now numbering more than thirty), I took the quiet time to mend my boys’ frayed clothes and sew name tag
s on their new shirts and pants. My little calico cat, Sambo, curled in my lap, and I worked around his soft, purring body.

  The boys awoke without my prodding, and soon they came running into the hallway, their traveling clothes buttoned and ready. Sambo flew from my lap, and Davy tripped, landing flat on his bottom. Douglas roared with laughter, staying on his feet with a deft move.

  “Stupid cat,” Davy screamed, and Sambo was off, hiding beneath the couch.

  “I’m ready, Mommy,” Douglas said, and his voice contained the tiniest hint of an English accent, the mommy sounding a bit like mummy.

  “Douglas, my poogle. You’re starting to sound like a proper English boy,” I said.

  “I’m practicing,” he said. “American accents can get you beat up, you see. Other boys can go barmy with it.”

  “Barmy?” My voice held restrained laughter.

  “It means crazy.”

  “I know what it means, Douglas. It sounds quite proper coming from you. I like it.” I placed my forefinger on his chin and tilted his face to mine. “Are you getting beat up?”

  “No, Mommy.” He glared at Davy. “And neither is Davy.”

  Davy stood by quietly, back on his feet with an angry look.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” Douglas stood taller.

  “Well then, are you both ready to go to the Kilns?” I asked.

  “Very,” Douglas said. “I wish we could just live there. Let Mr. Lewis teach us instead of going back to that school.”

  Davy poked at Douglas with a closed fist against his arm. “It ain’t so bad.” He glared at his brother.

  Douglas beamed then. “I’m going to help Paxford plant some fir trees and new green bean stalks.”

  “Then we best be going to Paddington Station,” I said.

  We arrived at the welcoming green door and pressed the same thumb latch to be greeted by the same Mrs. Miller. The same bellowing voices came as Jack and Warnie arrived in the back hallway.

  Without the need of coats and bundling, we were off into the springtime land of the Kilns before our suitcases were even unpacked. The boys ran into the woods and out of sight, leaving me to stand in the newly sprouted garden with Jack and Warnie. I touched the very tip of a tomato plant, its tiny frond just sprouting from the earth. “The earth is waking up.”