Warnie laughed and dug his foot deeper into the damp soil as if planting himself. “I think Paxford is trying to show off for you. On your last visit you gave him advice and now he wants to prove that his garden is worthy.”
“Worthy? Cat’s whiskers indeed. This land could go without a man to tend it. What rich soil.” I bent down and scooped a handful into my palm, allowed the dirt to run through my fingers. Looking up, I approached the next subject gingerly, with care.
“Jack, when you describe joy in your biography, I realize that sometimes I can’t feel that emotion, as if it’s left me for good. But right now, with the garden just about to burst wide open, and the boys laughing out there in the woods, hearing them and knowing they’re here, I believe I feel it again.”
Warnie let out a sound very close to a sigh. “Jack’s first taste of joy was in a little garden.”
Jack nodded, and he too bent down and picked up a handful of dirt, cupped his other hand overtop and shook it before releasing it to the ground. “Yes,” he said. “Have you come to that part yet? When I was sick as a child and couldn’t leave the bed, Warnie went outside and made me a little box, a little fairy garden as it were. Inside a biscuit tin he set twigs and moss, tiny flowers and grass, even pebbles. It was a veritable world as small as a hand. And I felt it, the simplest joy. It was a mystical quality, and I’ve spent most of my life looking for it ever since.” He smiled. “It is a feeling that jumps up under one’s ribs.”
“And here you have it,” I said. “Joy.” I pointed at myself in jest; a great smile spread across my face.
“Yes, indeed we do.” Jack released that laughter I loved.
“But honestly,” I said, “the way you describe it is palpable. It’s a word that barely has a description, but you find a way—how it is a reminder.”
“And isn’t it odd,” Warnie said and slapped his walking stick to the ground, “how he states that misery feels much the same as joy at first feels?”
I nodded.
“Quite,” was all Jack said. He seemed embarrassed that we talked of his work as he stood there. He fell silent and ambled a few feet ahead of us, swinging his walking stick. We traipsed along the soggy path toward the pond, where the boys’ cheers echoed. The air smelled of lost rain and fetid earth, of green and of birth. I inhaled deeply.
When I drew closer to Jack he looked from the ground to my eyes. “And what have you thought of it so far?”
I touched his coat sleeve and smiled at him. “When I type your words and read your work, I know this: our experience is alike, from the surprising mystical quality of nature to open our hearts to the reluctant conversion. How could I have anything but wonderful things to report?”
He nodded.
“And I think you’re right about the misery,” I said. “There’s a certain pleasure in the acuteness of that agony, in the piercing of the heart. It’s not the same as joy, but isn’t it?” I paused. “As you wrote, ‘joy is different than happiness or pleasure and it is never in our power.’”
“‘Surprised by joy—impatient as the wind,’” he said, quoting Wordsworth, the poem from which he took his title.
I replied in same. “‘I turned to share the transport, Oh! With whom but thee.’”
“Indeed,” he said quietly and then took me in with his gaze, steady and still. “Nothing is ever wasted on you, is it? I believe more than anyone I know, you are enchanted by this world and its sentiments.”
I couldn’t respond to this compliment, to the vision he had of the woman I was and always had been. Had anyone ever known me so well? I allowed the intimacy to linger between us for a moment before I drew a breath and kept on. “If people are expecting you to reveal secrets of your life in this biography, they’re going to be disappointed.”
“It’s meant to be a story of conversion, not a tell-all,” he said.
“Of course. You aren’t quite the tell-all type.” I tipped my imaginary hat to him with a laugh. “To me it feels like the story of a conversion that is ever unfolding, as if you could write this book for all your life. But there is something I want to ask you,” I said quietly, so Warnie would not hear.
“Yes?”
“I see parts of us in your work, pieces of our relationship and our discussions.” I swallowed. “Is this true?”
“Of course it’s true. How could you not be part of it? But if anything has crossed the line, you must point it out, because nothing would be said or done without your permission, or if plagiarized.”
“No, Jack! Nothing like that. But when you describe your conversion, for example, the way it sneaked up on you, the ‘reluctant’ conversion, it’s like my essay.”
He shook his head. “Your description rang the same bell as mine.”
I didn’t feel he was stealing my words, and I didn’t want him to think so either—he’d started this book long before he met me. I wanted him to see that we’d landed on the same shoreline after two disparate shipwrecks, that our love wasn’t merely intellectual, but also spiritual—I pointed at our inevitability.
We reached the pond’s edge, and Douglas ran to Jack. “Mr. Lewis, can we go out in the canoe?” He pointed to the red punt sinking into the new-soft spring earth. “Please? It was too cold last time.”
“Of course you may, son, but don’t go scaring my two ducks. They aren’t used to such exuberance. They’re accustomed to two old men piddling about.”
“Old men?” I said. “Ha!”
Jack bent over to help my sons drag the punt from the mud with a great sucking noise. With effort, and merry laughter, they launched from the dock with a paddle. The boat shimmied and rocked and then settled on the lake, ripples radiating outward, a circle of misplaced water that reached the shore’s edge to dance with the tall grass.
We stood watching until Jack roared out to the boys, “Narnia and the North!”
“Narnia and the North,” they cried in unison, raising their fists as they paddled to the far edge of the pond.
Jack then turned to me with such a serious expression I at once thought something wrong. “I would like to talk to you about something, Joy.”
“Anything. What is it?”
“Warnie,” he said and turned to his brother, “would you mind very much making sure those young chaps don’t drown while I return to the house with Joy? I’d like to ask her opinion on Cambridge.”
“I believe it is a task I am fit for,” Warnie said and smiled.
Settled into the common room at the Scrabble table, Jack took his lovely time tamping tobacco into his pipe and lighting it with a match. Then he looked to me, smoke curling from his lips, the sweet aroma of the rich tobacco filling my senses.
“Joy, I’ve been offered a job at Cambridge and I’ve turned it down, but now I’m having my doubts. I’ve talked to Tollers and wondered if you too would delve into the problem with me.”
“Problem?” I asked. “Aren’t you honored?”
“Of course. It’s Cambridge.” He drew on his pipe. “And they’ve created a position just for me. Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.”
“Oh, Jack. That’s simply wonderful.” I leaned my elbows on the table, avoiding the tiles, and told him, “When I first visited it last year, I wrote to Bill and told him how much I loved it, how it is more compact and harmonious than Oxford, more Old World. But that I love the architecture better in Oxford. It’s a glorious city, Jack.”
He was silent as he set a word on the Scrabble board between us, as if it helped him think. He was beating me. I then placed my four tiles, the z on a triple score—zeal. “Looks like the game isn’t quite as over as I thought,” I said.
His laughter caused him to sputter smoke. “Do you mean my career or this game?”
“Both,” I said. “Tell me everything. This offer must feel like redemption after Oxford’s pass-over.”
“It does, but here’s my concern: how could I leave here, Joy?” He spread his hands across the room. “I’ve been at Oxfor
d for thirty-five years.”
I nodded. “Yes, that’s a long time. A little less than a lifetime for me. But maybe change is good. And Cambridge is only a couple hours away; it’s not another country.”
“It’s Magdalene College there also. Only one letter difference.”
“Interesting. Would you stay here? Move? What does it all mean?”
“I could not leave Warnie. Or this home.”
I took four more tiles from the pile, placed them on my rack but didn’t look at them. “There must be a way,” I said. “If they want you that much, enough that they created a position just for you, then they will help you find a way to live here and work there.”
“Yes, they will.” He took a puff of his pipe and closed his eyes. “But maybe I’m too old to make a change.”
In this statement I heard his reticence of all things new, of all things that might unsettle his peace and quiet. He had built a safe life, and anything that rippled it as the punt had just done to his pond was to be avoided.
“Jack, forgive me for my impudence, for possibly offending you with my analysis of this, but I love you, you know that. And I can see parts of your heart that others can’t, that sometimes you can’t either. Your fear of change is palpable. You hide all the turmoil and pain of your past life inside of you: the loss of your mother; whatever happened in the war; the boarding schools. And Paddy and Mrs. Moore. And now here you are, at peace in your Garden of Eden with your brother and your acreage and your students and your Inklings and your friends and your quaint town. All these things both inspire and protect you. But a change might be in order. Not a change that disrupts, but one that expands.” I paused. “Let new things touch your soul.”
He stared at me for too long, so long that I believed I had overstepped. But he blinked once before stating, “You’re right. And Tollers said much the same—that I could use a change of air. He believes Oxford has not treated me well. And the new job is three times the pay with half the work. But the problem is that I’ve turned it down twice now with very eloquent letters.” He shook his head. “Or I believed them eloquent. It would seem absurd, would it not, to tell them that I would now reconsider?”
“Jack, they created the position for you! Why would it be absurd to change your mind? Sometimes we have to mull things over, pray about them, talk about them, and then our eyes are opened to the best path.”
“And perhaps they’ll allow me to live there only four days a week so I can be here as much as possible.”
“You know how to work and sleep in trains. This job is made for you.”
“You know what tells me I should go?” He paused and smiled. “I have already begun lectures in my mind.”
“Then let us go from imagination to reality,” I said.
“Yes, I think you’re right.” He nodded at me. “I shall write to the vice chancellor today and tell him I’d like the job, if it’s not too late.” Then he placed his tiles, forming the word mischief.
I shook my head. “How will I ever win again?”
Jack set down his pipe on the edge of the table and leaned forward. “Thank you, Joy. I always feel clearer and invigorated after talking things through with you.”
Joy, that elusive concept that Jack coveted, enough to make it the title of his biography, washed over me for a blessed moment. It was as he’d written in his very first chapter, It is not happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.
If ever I would glorify this day, and I knew I would, it would be that moment where he asked me to sit with him to discover what next to do with his life.
CHAPTER 37
The monstrous glaciers of your innocence
Are more than I can climb
“SONNET XXXVI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Along with my divorce decree that had arrived from Bill’s attorney across the pond, summer arrived with rains so unceasing that London announced 1954 as the wettest summer in almost fifty years. The earth was soaked and spongy beneath my feet, the flowers outrageous in their glory, raindrops settling in the cups of their raised faces. It was cold too. I was still wearing my wool socks and sweater when Jack came to visit me at the Avoco House that June afternoon.
This had been happening for months now, ever since our last visit when we discussed Cambridge—Jack now came to London for no other reason but to see me. Surely he fabricated other reasons, but they were only excuses. We’d pore over the pages of his biography and spread the papers across my little desk, rework and rearrange. We’d walk to the pub for a drink or stroll into Blackwell’s Bookshop to wander aimless and content. Any second I half expected him to reach over and touch me, pull me close. But it never happened, consistently leaving me expectant and yearning, and mostly confused.
What was happening was happening to us both—we missed the other when we were gone from each other. More and more I wanted and sometimes needed to show or tell him what I’d perceived or accomplished in that moment or during that day. I wanted, as did he, to share every moment and thought. Did this describe love? And if so, what kind?
“Do you believe love fits neatly into your categories?” I’d asked during a wild thunderstorm while we huddled in the shared kitchen and I cooked mutton and vegetable soup.
“Fits neatly?” He shook his head and leaned casually against the counter, sloughing off his jacket to toss it over a kitchen chair. “I don’t believe anything fits neatly into anything, but we must at least try, or what else is language for?”
It was true—we had to try, but I very well knew that our love was a fog or wind that could be more felt than seen, slipping in and out of the cracks of Jack’s Greek-word categories. There was no pinning it down, and if I forced him to define it, or us, I was afraid I would lose the magic altogether. I reveled in the unfolding, and I kept guard as well I could over my own heart, watching carefully for the interlopers of fantasy, for the thieves of obsession and possession.
That afternoon the weather had lifted and we sat in my tiny garden, the tulips I’d planted months before bent and subdued by the morning rain. I’d wiped off the two metal garden chairs with a kitchen towel, and we sat with tea.
“To be outside again,” I said. “It might be the cure for all ills.”
“Quite possibly.” Jack pointed to a folded rectangle of paper in my hand. “Is that for me?”
“Well, it’s not for you, but I want you to read it.”
“Ah, I thought it more corrections to my work. I’m not sure I could stand much more of them.”
“Cat’s whiskers, Jack, I don’t correct but improve. Part of me is worried that I was meant to be your Max Perkins instead of an author myself.”
“Foolishness,” he said and held out his hand. “A poem?” He took the folded paper from me.
A quick-flash image of offering him my sonnets set me back; my breath caught in my chest.
“No,” I said. “It’s far from a poem, but maybe a grand piece of fiction.”
Jack opened the folded paper, which had arrived days before from Miami—where Bill had moved to be with Renee—to Belsize Park, London. It’s one thing to know of one’s divorce—agreed upon with full custody for me and visitation for him, along with sixty dollars a week in alimony and child support—and another to see a sheet of paper that reads vinculo matrimonii (dissolved marriage). Bill and I had written to each other, agreed upon the terms, and yet the accusations inside the decree were disgusting and heartbreaking. I hadn’t expected them, and all the more it socked me in the gut.
Jack read slowly, adjusting his spectacles, and once in a bit his eyebrows rose above his glasses. Every line or two he would burst out with a sentence.
“‘The plaintiff alleges the defendant has been engaged in literary efforts and has a desire to be an author or writer and is overwhelmingly ambitious and desirous of furthering herself in this field.’” He seemed to spit the words, Bill’s words, into the air. “Is he writing a complaint or spewing envy? Hogwash.”
He continued reading, an
d then his head lifted with moist eyes. “Joy, this is rubbish.” He glanced down again to read out loud. “‘She continually and continuously indulges in alleged excitable and ungovernable displays of temperament and apparently lives in an artistic dream world.’”
“Yes,” I said and sipped my tea. “I obviously live in an artistic dream world as I raise our children, write, and work.” I pointed at the paper. “It gets worse, if you can believe it.”
“I don’t know if it can.” His eyes shifted down to the paper.
While Jack read my divorce decree, I watched two red robins settle on my bird feeder and peck away at the seeds.
“And then there’s this.” Jack’s free hand slapped the edge of the chair. “‘The defendant feels that her artistic career is much more important than her domestic career, life, and duty to her husband and family.’” His hand was so tight on the document it began to crumple beneath his fingers. “How did you live with this? It is degrading.”
“Yes, it is and it was. But I’m here now, Jack. Right here.”
His cheeks grew redder, his mouth tighter. “Joy. He states here that he begged you to live happily with him and the children but that you refused to do so.”
“Well then, there it is,” I said, lifting my teacup. “Now who lives in a dream world?”
“This is such drivel and so smarmy. All wind and piss.”
I leaned forward, my hands on my knees. “I should have done the filing, and then I could have lodged my complaints. But I know he’s missing his sons, and I’m sure he’s lashing out at me.” I exhaled and felt the tension twist below my belly. “I don’t think I can trust his child support and alimony unless I hire my own lawyer to ensure he makes good on it.”
“Then you must.” Jack lifted his teacup, a dainty flowered one I’d found at the flea market, but he didn’t take a sip before setting it back down. A swallow spun above him as if circling in curiosity and then flew off.
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