Becoming Mrs. Lewis

by Patti Callahan

  “And these accusations,” I said. “It’s all because I was once such a submissive and acquiescing wife.” I tapped my finger on the divorce decree. “He doesn’t think I have it in me to fight, or he’s forgotten. But I won’t buckle under his rhetoric. I’ve done it for far too long. I feel as if I’ve jumped into a time machine and I’m back there, and Bill is drunk and the boys are cowering. I feel myself shriveling and scared, nervous and hopeless. I never want to feel that way again.”

  “You shan’t,” he said and almost, God help me, almost took my hand. But he didn’t. He leaned back and lit his cigarette, a motion so familiar. “You have the strength, Joy. You always have. I don’t know anyone stronger.” His words carried such force that I believed him. He folded the divorce decree and handed it back to me. “As I said, rubbish.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But freedom . . . a blessed release.”

  “Freedom,” he echoed, and beamed at me as if we’d just decided to jump into the pond on the first day of spring, a mischievous look. “Think of your new life, Joy. Courage has brought you to a new place.”

  “My sons and me.”

  “Speaking of your sons, talk to me about Davy and Douglas. How was your visit to Surrey yesterday?”

  A new energy rushed through me. “Simply wonderful,” I said. “I saw them play cricket and I met some more of their teachers. Davy is getting personal tutoring in math. It’s honestly more than I could have hoped for. Someday I’ll pay you back.”

  Jack stood and held out his hand to lift me to stand. “Let’s take a walk. A slow bimble to the park? It’s finally warming.”

  I allowed him to pull me to stand, and then he released my hand. The dull ache in my left hip sent me to quickly sit again. It was one of my favorite things to do—walk with him, ambling slowly through gardens, but I couldn’t. “Jack, I’m so sorry. My hips are acting up again. I have no idea why. Rheumatism, they say. I’m hoping it will clear whenever the everlasting rain leaves us.”

  “There is no need for apology.” He smiled. “It’s nice to sit still for a while.”

  “I’ll make us more tea and bring out the stories we started to read yesterday.”

  “No need for stories today, Joy. If we want to read some jolly good fiction we could just reread the divorce decree.” He laughed that hearty laugh and patted his breast before removing his pipe.

  I laughed in return so fully that we both bent forward to clasp our knees, leaning toward each other face-to-face. It was there we paused, close, only inches. It would only take one of us to close the gap, and finally our lips would touch. But for now, it was only our smiles that met across the inches of space between us.

  How, I wondered, does one make oneself not fall in love? Not destroy the most sublime philia?

  As usual, I didn’t have the answer.

  CHAPTER 38

  Do not be angry that I am a woman

  And so have lips that want your kiss

  “SONNET XXXIX,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  August 1954

  “Warnie had the most awful binge.” Jack said this with the twist of pain in his voice. “He’s off to treatment, and that means I’m with you and the boys for a couple weeks. You must tolerate my company also.”

  Jack and I sat together in the Bird and Baby, which was as stifling inside as the August weather that simmered across Oxford. It was finally summer break and we had come—my sons and I—to spend a month at the Kilns. A month!

  “Tolerate?” I laughed and shook my head at him. “That’s not the right word. I’m sorry about Warnie. You know how much I love him, and I wish I could help. But by golly, I’m happy you’ll be here with us.”

  He lifted his beer in salute.

  “Is it over?” Jack asked quietly. “Are you legally divorced?”

  “Yes indeed. I’m single.” I allowed the simple statement to shimmer between us, watched carefully for the change those two words might bring, but found only the same kind smile. “And do you know what Bill did? He married the very next day. He married Renee the very next day.” I shook my head. “But how could I have expected any different? Where we start is where we end, or so it seems.”

  “How do you mean?”

  I cringed and, feeling peevish, told him what I never had. “Bill was married before me. He didn’t have children, and it wasn’t very real as far as marriages go—that’s what he told me at the time. He married me only days after that divorce was final. How could a tiger ever change his stripes?”

  “Well, it’s over,” Jack said and lifted his house cider, as yet untouched. “Here’s to the forgiveness of sins.”

  I smiled and lifted my own cider. “And here’s to Bill and all the pleasure he may find.”

  We clinked glasses, and our eyes met and held. He hadn’t believed a word written in that lie-soaked decree. He knew my heart and my mind; he understood the harsh and the cruel, the soft and the vulnerable.

  “How is Warnie doing at the hospital?” I asked when we set down our glasses.

  “Not very well, Joy. I’m worried near to death. This binge was the worst yet. The doctors believed he might not make it, but he’s recovering.”

  “I know the pain of watching someone you love destroy himself with drink. It seems there must be something to do, but then they off and binge again, breaking your heart. Breaking their own hearts. You know I’ve been through this, Jack. If you’d like I can tell you some of the AA steps and theories. They really do work. They are very spiritual, all about surrender to God.”

  “Thank you.” Jack lifted his own glass of cider. “Of course drinking itself isn’t a sin. It’s the too much of it all. It’s temperance. Going the right length and then not any further than that.”

  “Mere Christianity,” I said. “You said that in there.”

  “Did I? What a fool, repeating himself in a bar. Ignore me. I’m knackered.”

  We talked a bit more of Warnie and how to help him. I suggested bitter ginger at the end of the night, which tasted like liquor but was not.

  “However would I do without you now?” he asked me as finally we rose to set off and walk Shotover with Davy and Douglas as promised.

  “I hope you’ll never know.” I jostled him as we walked out the door.

  Shotover Hill had become as familiar to me as the curve of Jack’s neck. My first long walk with him had been on this hill, the thick, tufted grass like patches on a bald man’s head, punctuating the pathway. For each season I’d hiked it since, the flowers and trees had shown new faces. In fall, the leaves dropping one by one until the trees bared their skeletons, the acorns plopping to the ground like footsteps. In winter I’d crunched over frosted grass, seen the white landscape of barren trees crystalized with ice. A season later I’d swatted at nettles and memorized the woodland flowers, multihued, their faces lifted to the spring sun. Now summer, the heat and breeze mixing in an intoxicating scent of new grass and damp earth.

  The white-balled flowers of the marsh valerian lined the pathway, wandering up the hill to join the scaly fern in nature-marriage. The orpine flower, its burgundy flower head, stood proud and tall. The bark of the gnarled sycamore enchanted, and the rain of white and pink petals from the cherry tree covered the ground.

  Gratitude flooded me with warmth and chatter.

  “Remember in Phantastes, each little flower had its own fairy?” I asked Jack as Davy and Douglas crested the hill to see Oxfordshire. My breath caught in the back of my throat, the hellish exhaustion pulling me down when I wanted to be up. I leaned over, balancing my hands on my knees, and then picked a round-faced daisy. I stood and handed it to Jack. “My favorite was the daisy fairy. The way MacDonald described it as a fat child, a cherub.”

  “The ash tree in that book frightened me,” he said and pointed to an ash only four feet away, its bark corrugated and emulating small rivers. “For years I looked out my window to see if one was coming for me with its bloody knobbed and twisted hand.”

  “The things we remember a
bout stories,” I replied with a laugh. “If you had to choose only one, flower or tree, which would you keep in the world?”

  “Trees,” he said. “The ones that hold steady.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “I think about those snake roots below the ground, reaching and reaching and never seeing the light.”

  “Just like all humans,” he said with such a grin. “A hidden life.”

  “We all have one, don’t we? But with friends maybe we can show a little bit of it, let it see the light, even though the trees don’t have a choice at all.”

  “Not with all friends. But with someone like you, Joy, that’s possible. It’s only in friendships like this that I’ve ever been able to discuss the deeper questions—probe at the hidden life.”

  With someone like me. I took those words and I placed them on the altar of my memory. Then I bent over to take another breath.

  “Are you okay?” Jack asked.

  “Just a bit tired, I suppose.” I stood to face him. “Well, more than that, actually. I went to see the doctors in London.”

  “And?” He glanced at my boys and then back to me, concern in his eyes.

  “First I saw the dentist, who told me that the last London dentist—the one I thought had given me such a fantastic deal—had botched the job. Six more teeth needed to be pulled. Then I saw the doctors, eight of them, Jack. What a fiasco. Who needs eight doctors? The poking and the prodding and the needles and the X-rays, all to tell me what they’d always told me—my thyroid is low again.”

  “Can they help?” he asked, concern as softness in his voice.

  “They increased my medicine,” I said. “I had the radium collar when I was a child, and they were quite concerned about that, telling me they don’t use it anymore as it causes burns and cancers and all kind of horrific problems. I told them it was too late to be worrying about all of that nonsense. All we can do is go from here.”

  “Sounds awful.” He leaned on his walking stick, both hands wrapped around its top. “Perhaps the medicine will help?”

  “Yes, I think it will. But there was a bright spot in that long day,” I said. “I whiled away an hour talking to Dr. Greene, Graham Greene’s brother. I told him I had just read The End of the Affair, and we were off and running about the literary London world and its gossip. Our chatter took my mind off illness. We gabbed about Dostoyevsky until they stuck me with another needle and brought in another doctor to stare at me like a specimen.”

  He shook his head, his jowls moving too. “Dostoyevsky at the doctor. Only you.”

  What I didn’t mention to Jack was the actual hell of pulling all those teeth. I’d had so many removed and with such violent pain that only codeine had eased it. I didn’t dare talk about it for reliving it. Nor did I tell him of the lump in my breast, which they once again dismissed as nothing but a cyst.

  “You stay here a moment, rest.” Jack took a few steps toward the boys and glanced over his shoulder, lifted his walking stick to me. “I’ll catch up to them. You push yourself far too much.”

  “All right then, go on,” I said.

  I watched Jack with my boys on the top of Shotover. They’d lugged a folded kite to the top of the hill, and now they unfurled it. Bright stripes of red and blue shuddered in the wind, not taking flight but landing on the ground crooked and hard. Davy ran to it, picked it lovingly off the ground, and brushed it off to hold in his hand.

  “I’ll run,” he shouted into the wind to Douglas. “You keep it up.”

  Davy ran forward, lifting his ten-year-old hands into the air with an offering of kite to wind.

  Jack trotted alongside him to lift the kite until the fabric caught the wind and flapped like a bird, a slapping sound in the sky.

  It was simple—a kite in flight. It was also a miracle, a grace.

  “Ay up,” Jack yelled, and the scene filled my heart.

  Gold light fell upon him, and they all laughed about something I couldn’t hear. Jack was beyond my greedy and needy hands, on top of that hill, and I could still be grateful for all he was to me, and to my sons.

  Before I could climb to meet them, the three joined me and we ambled back to the Kilns. The boys chattered endlessly about plans for the orchard with Paxford, about cleaning the canoe, about visiting the deer park and punting on the Cherwell.

  “Mr. Lewis,” Davy asked as he threw a rock across the tufted grass expanse, “when does our book come out?”

  “Our book?”

  “The Horse and His Boy? The one you dedicated to us?”

  “Ah, that,” Jack said and lifted his walking stick before setting it down with his answer. “This fall.”

  “What’s next after that?” Douglas asked.

  “I just sent off The Magician’s Nephew, where we see Aslan create the world, and we find out how the White Witch got there, and”—Jack whispered—“we discover that the Professor had seen and known it all from the very beginning.”

  Douglas stood on his tiptoes as if reaching for the sky. “I want to read it now.”

  Jack laughed. “Then you shall.”

  Davy and Douglas were gone in an instant, and Jack stopped at a large tree trunk, as round as a table, gutted in the middle and set up in the shade of a fern glen. “This,” he said in a conspirator’s whisper, “is a soaking machine.”

  “A what?” I raised my eyebrows and fiddled with my glasses as if attempting to see a machine somewhere in the thick green of the forest.

  “It’s my name for a place so private that I’m free to be alone and sit idly and do nothing, or think away a puzzle, or write with a notebook and pencil. A place to be free outside and sheltered. That, Joy, is what a ‘soaking machine’ is.”

  “Well then, here’s to a lifetime of finding soaking machines.” I drew back a step or two. “In fact, let’s find another one now.”

  We were soon at the back door of the Kilns. Far off, Douglas’s voice rang out with Paxford’s name, and Jack looked over his shoulder as if he might be bowled over by one of my sons.

  “They’re exhausting, aren’t they?”

  “I’m glad you’re all here. It would be morbidly sad without Warnie in the heat of summer.” He opened the back door and we entered the house, Mrs. Miller arriving in her swirling apron and chattering inquisitions about our day and our well-being.

  “Tomorrow,” Jack said over his shoulder as he headed to his room to rest, “we’ll go punting at Cherwell with some friends. The boys will enjoy it.”

  “Jack, your friends don’t seem keen on me. Maybe you’d like to go without us.”

  “Hogwash,” he said and came back down the two stairs he’d already climbed. He faced me.

  “What did Moira and George have to say about me?” I asked. “I hadn’t seen George since our first meeting in Eastgate, and when we had tea last month he was cold and clammed up. His wife looked at me like I was naked at the table.”

  “Moira is quite proper. Maybe she didn’t like that you could talk circles around her. Or that you drank whiskey while she drank tea. I suggested Childhood’s End to them based on your suggestion, and they both loved it.”

  “I don’t want your friends to avoid me; I have plenty of my own.”

  “No one is avoiding you. And even if they were, I most certainly am not.” Jack smiled at me and then took the stairs to his room, leaving me to stare after him with an almost irrepressible urge to follow him uninvited.

  While Jack napped, I wandered outside to the garden, where Paxford had planted the tomatoes and beans I’d suggested. I closed my eyes, allowed the golden sun of Oxford to press gently on my head and body. I’d celebrated my divorce with a pint of cider and a hike with Jack and my boys. I couldn’t have hoped for such when that first letter arrived in my Staatsburg mailbox over four years ago.

  Even as Jack withheld his body from mine, he pressed his heart and mind as close to me as skin to bone. No, I thought, love has never quite succumbed to my sense of timing.

  CHAPTER 39


  Yes, I know: the angels disapprove

  The way I look at you

  “SONNET XXXVIII,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  I tucked Douglas and Davy into bed in the cozy side room off the kitchen, pulling the sheet tight under their chins and kissing them each before reading a chapter from the unpublished Narnian chronicle. I hadn’t yet typed it, and the story spread before us in Jack’s cursive quill and ink handwriting.

  “What will this one be called?” Douglas asked, eyes already at half-mast.

  “He hasn’t decided. Maybe The Last King of Narnia. Or the other title he likes is Night Falls on Narnia. Warnie and I suggested The Wild Wastelands.”

  “Just read, Mommy.” Davy pulled the covers up to his chin.

  With a low voice, I began. “‘There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious . . .’”

  My sons rested in bed as I read, but I knew their imaginations were elsewhere, in a land through a wardrobe where a false Aslan reigned.

  “Go on, Mommy,” Davy said. “One more chapter.”

  Always one more chapter.

  I kissed them good night before joining Jack in the common room, the words ready on my tongue to tell him how the boys were enthralled with the new story, but on my way out of the room, I paused beside a photo in a tarnished silver frame that sat on the hall table. I’d passed it many times and turned away—an older woman with white hair and a look of scorn upon her tight mouth. Beside her sat a younger girl with lush dark hair. Bruce II, the predecessor to Bruce III, sat upon their laps in what appeared to be the backyard of the Kilns. Janie and Maureen Moore. I don’t know what caused me to pause that evening, or why it seemed time to dig into the past with a shovel when I had let the dirt on top of this phase of his life rest long enough.

  After the intimacy of the past days, for the first time I attempted to imagine Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen. But my mind failed me—I had no reference to see two other women in the house. Jack and Warnie, as undefended with me as an eternal hallway of flung-open doors, had never once discussed the two women who had lived some twenty-odd years at the Kilns.