Becoming Mrs. Lewis

by Patti Callahan

  When the room was empty, the doctors departed, and Jack gone to check on Warnie and bring me some things from home, I turned my thoughts to Jack and his pain, as mine was numbed by medicine. He had lost his mother in this same way, the greatest grief of his life buried fathoms deep in his psyche. All his life he’d avoided looking directly at that great anguish, and here I lay, making him relive it. Was it the reason he’d hesitated to love from the very beginning—the ghost of loss looming behind us, a menace of death?

  “God,” I said out loud to the empty room, “how could you be so cruel to those you love? You demand too much of us.” I closed my eyes, and my weeping was silent as I allowed the knowledge to wash over me.

  Jack loved me.

  And I was dying.

  CHAPTER 51

  Love was the water,

  Loneliness the thirst

  “SONNET VIII,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  “Mummy?”

  I jolted awake, a mother’s reflex, pain shattering my consciousness. Douglas stood next to my hospital bed, and I held out my arms. “My poogles,” I said and looked to Davy also, Jack at his side. “Come here.”

  They hesitated, still in their school uniforms and looking as scared as the day we’d landed port in England. My sons, who usually ran into me full throttle, who tossed themselves into my arms, hesitated.

  “It’s okay. I’m still me. Just don’t hit the old lady’s broken leg.”

  Douglas came to me first and then Davy. I held them close. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Douglas touched the tented blanket above my leg. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “But they give me medicine. They’re going to do some surgeries and then I’m coming home to you. God has enough grace for all of us.”

  “Jack says we can move into the Kilns now,” Davy said. “Today.” His voice shook with uncertainty, and I wanted to spring from bed, assure him of what I could not—that soon I would be well.

  “Then you shall,” I replied. “And I’ll join you soon. We’ll be a family.” I stared at Davy with great intent, noticing right then how much he looked like Bill—that pointed chin and high forehead, his glasses on the perch of his nose. I almost saw a moustache that would some day appear. Would they grow up without me? Oh God. No! I’d moved to England to save them, not abandon them.

  Jack came to join us, wrapping an arm around a shoulder of each of my sons and pulling them near.

  “Tell me everything about school,” I said. “I want to hear.”

  “Not now.” The nurse had arrived without my knowing, her white hat pointing east and west, her red lipstick bleeding into the lines around her mouth. “You must rest. Surgery is tomorrow, and the doctors need to see you.” She held a syringe in her hand, and the boys withdrew in horror.

  “Go be good little poogles,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And soon we’ll plant pole beans in the garden with Paxford and fish for perch in the pond. We’ll fly a kite or go punting in the Cherwell.”

  Jack’s face tightened against these statements, grief-stricken, and it hurt more than the shattered bones in my leg. It was his countenance that told me those things might never happen.

  “I’m going to pray for you, Mummy,” Douglas said with his shoulders back and a serious, grown-up look on his face. “I’m going to pray for God to heal you.”

  “Please do, my love.”

  Douglas ran from the room in a movement so swift that the curtains fluttered as if the window had been opened. Davy followed, fear coiled tight in his body and his fists at his sides.

  I stared at the empty space where my boys had just stood, but now all I saw was the bedside table with a vomit bucket and a glass of tepid water. I spoke without looking at Jack. “You told them everything, right?”

  “I did.”

  “Jack, no matter what happens, you must promise me you will never let my boys move back to America. You must make sure Bill never gets custody. Before I even go into surgery, I must make sure of this. I want papers drawn, a will that gives you full rights.”

  “Joy.” Jack came to me and kissed me, as if this were the way we’d always been—a kiss before a comment or conversation. I closed my eyes to the sheer pleasure of it. “We have plenty of time to deal with that.”

  “We don’t know that, Jack. You have to promise me they will never return to America, to his abuse and rage, to my cousin who betrayed me. This is home to them now.”

  “I promise, Joy.”

  “Will you go to them?” I took his hand in mine. “They need you, and they love you, Jack. You know that, don’t you?”

  “As I love them.” He kissed me and left as a father to my sons.

  I settled back into the pillow, into the floating anesthetic. I’d been exhausted for so long, and now I knew why—I was dying.

  All my searching and doctors and wondering, and then the labeling of fibrositis and rheumatism and hypothyroidism . . . hadn’t God known all along? Hadn’t he seen the cancer growing, eating away at my insides? Could he not have intervened in human form? Sent a doctor to diagnosis it long before it ate me alive?

  How could my body have gone on destroying me while I mustered my courage and resolve to rebuild a new life? My body worked against me as I tried hard, so bloody hard, to start over? Couldn’t one doctor of the dozens I’d seen notice that cancer ravaged my body? That it coursed through my flesh?

  I wanted to cry, “Thy will be done.” It would be the best thing if I could, but instead, alone in that hospital room, I wept long, hot tears of despair and begged God for a miracle.

  CHAPTER 52

  I would create myself

  In a little fume of words and leave my words

  After my death to kiss you forever and ever

  “YET ONE MORE SPRING,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  March 1957

  Maybe I deserved all of it—the five months of surgeries and pain and vomiting, the weeks of fear and hospital transfers and inexhaustible disease. Maybe this had all been accumulating with each terrible thing I’d said or done in my life to beset me at forty-one years old. But did God work that way?

  No.

  He was not meant to be bargained with as he doled out punishment.

  My leg was set and plastered and my ovaries clipped out; evidence remained in the form of crooked black stitches that ran along my stomach like tiny spiders. My breast lump had been excised—the cursed lump I’d known about all along but that had been dismissed. Radiation to the hip under groaning machines, and I’d swallowed medicines I’d never heard about before. The cursed-awful list of cancer’s sites: in the left femur, the left breast, the right shoulder, and the right leg.

  During these months I went from experiencing the mystical peace of God to black doubt and the abysmal dread of annihilation. But in the end, did I really believe all I claimed to believe? Did I believe God could exist at all? Or was he just like my Fairyland—a tactic to navigate life, imagining there was something more, something better, something out there that I’d longed for but that only existed in dreams? Maybe, just dammit maybe, there was nothing but being human and being in pain and in suffering until there was nothing.

  In a ledger I could list the reasons I deserved this fate. I could list and I could flagellate myself, but the vile cancer was doing a just fine job of it all by itself.

  Dear God, love finally arrived, and you will take me? Are you that selfish? That jealous? Is this my payment for loving Jack with such fierce intensity? For finally finding a life of peace? Or did I conceive you of my own making for consolation?

  As Orual cried out to the Grey Mountain in defense of her love for Psyche, so I cried out to the God I’d felt and believed in and surrendered to in my boys’ bedroom all those many years ago.

  You will give me great love and then sweep me to the heavens—if they exist at all?

  But did I believe God punished? The old wrathful God who smote his enemies and burned their cities? I was no better than Job or Jonah, railing
against my lot in life. Just when it seemed everything might work out, that I might have the life I’d dreamed of for very, very long, I would die?

  All my life I’d pushed too hard, tried too much, attempted to convince the head what only the heart can decide. But dying now? When I understood the grace of surrender? When love had arrived? What cruel injustice.

  It took weeks, but I slowly emerged from that parched desert of doubt stronger in my faith than ever. Through reading and prayer, holding tight to Jack as he absorbed my doubt and pain, talking until we couldn’t find another word, Jack and I found if not peace, then acceptance. Grace, I wrote to Eva, arrived as I prayed. Whatever my fate, I would be able to bear it with Jack at my side and my Creator’s love surrounding me even as the doubt appeared and disappeared like smoke from the past, whispers of the woman who shadowed me and mocked my belief.

  November was a kaleidoscope of pain and surgeries. By December I’d made it clear that only the two most basic of my desires remained: to live out whatever days I had left as Jack’s wife in the eyes of the church and our community, and to keep the boys in England.

  While frigid rain lashed the hospital windows, Jack came to me in the worst of the December nausea.

  “I’ve gone to the bishop and presented our case for marriage.”

  “What did you tell him?” I asked. The nausea—I’d swallowed a pint of anesthesia when they removed my ovaries—was all consuming. I needed something, anything to assuage the suffering. Becoming Mrs. Lewis in God’s eyes was a hope that burned as brightly as any light. I didn’t want to be sick in front of Jack one more time. I wanted to be strong, to be the woman Warnie and he believed I was: courageous in the face of despair. But it was getting harder and harder.

  “I told the bishop that your marriage to Bill never bloody counted because Bill had been married before you. But because they deem me a public figure, they are afraid they will be flooded with other requests, other exceptions. His answer was no.”

  “That’s what you get for being a public figure.” I tried to smile.

  Jack didn’t laugh.

  In many ways, in such a short amount of time, our roles often reversed. Instead of it being Jack who held me, it was I who must quote from his favorite mystic—Julian of Norwich. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

  I held his hand. “My love, the pain is cleansing me. Soon I’ll be walking with a caliper splint and living with you.”

  Together we pretended it to be true, but it was only as real as Perelandra or Narnia.

  Weeks passed; the boys returned to school. Eventually I felt well enough that Warnie brought me my typewriter. I began to preoccupy myself while waiting for test results, healing, and treatments by catching up on correspondence and informing everyone of my plight: My parents. Chad and Eva. Belle, Marian, and Michal. And finally, my brother—we reconciled as best as two siblings can when across an ocean with one of them at death’s door. I knit and crocheted everything from scarves to mittens to tablecloths for the Kilns, as if I could move myself there with my hands alone.

  It was the January doctor’s announcement that almost destroyed us.

  “Months to live,” he told us. “Months at best.”

  Together we took the news inside, let it churn our hearts to pulp. “If I could have made you love me all those years ago,” I said, “we’d have had more time.”

  “Free will,” he said and kissed me. “It’s the only thing that might make love worth having.”

  I nodded in fear. “We cannot look at what horror has happened to us, but at how we will turn to God in it. If I only identify with the three-dimensional world I once believed in, I will despair. But we know better, Jack. We know there is more.”

  Jack’s face, the ruddiness now white and sallow as if I’d drained him of his life as well, drew close to mine. “I want more of life here with you.” His voice carried a tremor, and for one split second I thought I knew what he must have sounded like when he was a small boy and his mother was dying in the back bedroom of Little Lea. “I want more of you,” he said.

  “As do I want more of you.”

  During those months in the hospital Jack was at my bedside as much as possible. For three-day weekends he never left me but to sleep at the Kilns. During the times I believed I’d heal we relished our moments together; he sometimes sneaked sherry into the hospital. We recited poetry and read together. We talked of the future, whether it was a day or a month or more. We kissed and we held each other and felt great expectation of what might be. During the worst moments we prayed, feverishly we prayed.

  “It’s hopeless,” I told him on a February afternoon when they removed the cast and found that the bones were not healing. “We must stop living in denial.”

  Crochet needles wrapped in gray yarn sat on my lap, abandoned mittens for Davy.

  “It is not hopeless,” he said with surety. “It is uncertain, and this is the cross God always gives us in life, uncertainty. But it is not hopeless.”

  “Jack, all I’ve ever wanted was to bring you happiness. And here I am bringing you pain. It would have been best if you’d never met me at all.”

  “Not met you at all?” He stood and paced the hospital room and then turned to me with fire on his face. “My life would have been but dry dust compared to having you in my world. With whom could I have ever been this close? Till We Have Faces would not exist. My biography would be but half what it is. My heart would still be hibernating, too troubled to feel.” He came to my side and kissed my face, first one cheek, then the other, and then my lips. “Whatever we face together is better than never knowing you at all.”

  “There is so much to live for now. So much,” I said and closed my eyes, shook off the dread.

  “It does seem fate designs a great need and then frustrates it.”

  I smiled at him. “Now tell me how the boys are doing. Give me news from outside this cellblock of a room.”

  “I’ve restored the old falling-down guesthouse for them,” he said with a grand smile. “Now they have a place all their own to play and hide. And guess what they found in there.”

  “Dead animals?” I asked.

  “Your ham! On a top shelf. There it was. I used the guesthouse for storage during the rations.”

  I laughed so heartily that Jack wiped tears from my eyes. “I remember sending that to you.”

  “They ate it,” Jack said with his own laughter. “They took it right back to the house, and Mrs. Miller opened that tin and it was still good.” Then he grew serious. “I cleaned that little house because I think they need to get away as best they can.”

  “Or you need to be away from them.” I kissed his hand, which held mine. “It must be a burden, Jack. I am so sorry.”

  “It’s not a burden, Joy. I love them. But they do bloody well fight.” He paused. “I don’t believe Warnie and I ever brawled like that. Douglas often takes off into the woods leaving a roaring Davy behind; I found him one midnight skating on the pond under a full moon.”

  “They have been knitted together so differently.”

  “Yes. And that clashes. But also they worry. They worry about you. And they don’t know what to do with those emotions.”

  “It breaks my heart in more places than my moth-eaten leg. If only we could promise them answered prayers.” Immense weariness settled on me again, as it often did without warning. “Read to me, please. It takes away the pain.” I closed my eyes. “Anything at all, Jack.”

  It was Shakespeare he chose that day, and I dozed, slipping in and out of the cadence of his words. It was only when I opened my eyes to see why he’d stopped that I realized he hadn’t been reading at all, but quoting from memory.

  Whenever I believed I could not love him more, I did.

  CHAPTER 53

  Could you listen to your devoted lover?

  Listen just a while, it will soon be over

  “ACROSTIC IN HENDECASYLLABICS,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  It was a Thurs
day, March 21, the spring equinox, the time I’d told Jack at our first meeting was a signal of new beginnings. He’d believed new beginnings were heralded by autumn. But it looked like I was right, for this was our wedding day. A real one.

  My hospital room, now so familiar I could see it with my eyes closed, was cluttered with books and papers, with my typewriter and notepads. Newspapers and even a Scrabble game were scattered on the rolling table across from my bed, yet it would become a sacred cathedral in the next moments.

  Plaster held my leg in place and my foot was propped high in traction, metal poles overhead, pulleys and gears, as I lay supine in the bed. Pillows were stuffed behind my back and shoulders to prop me. A clean white blanket was tented over my raised leg. My hair, brushed and clean with the help of the orderly, fell over my shoulders. From the wife of a patient down the hall, I’d borrowed a tube of red lipstick and swiped it across my lips.

  Warnie came to my bedside first. “Joy, I have loved you like a sister, and now you will be my sister.” His sober eyes were clear and yet filled with tears. “I have never loved you more.”

  “Warnie, look at us, loving each other and loving the same man.”

  He placed his hand in mine. “I pray for you every day.”

  Warnie moved away as Jack leaned close so only I could hear him, his lips soft against my ear, his voice filling me. “You have allowed me to become my true self with you. I hide nothing. Now let us become as one.”

  I took Jack’s face in mine and kissed him, not as ardently as I’d have liked, for next to me stood the priest, Peter Bide, a former student of Jack’s, his white collar a comma against his throat and his black robes swishing like smoke with every move.

  “Are you ready, Joy?” Peter asked in such a serious tone that I wondered if he’d practiced.

  “I believe I’ve been ready for this moment all my life,” I said.