Becoming Mrs. Lewis

by Patti Callahan

  I poured the melted goodness into three mugs just as Douglas came barreling into the kitchen.

  “Did you forget about me?” he asked, his hands overhead like he wanted to fly.

  “No, my big boy, I did not forget about you.”

  We gathered around that table, my three boys each holding a mug of hot chocolate and I a cup of tea. I wished for whipped cream to top it off for them. Why did the everyday-ness of my life sometimes feel constricting, when the everyday-ness was everything?

  I had other family, my parents were still alive, but I had no immediate desire to visit them. My brother worked in the city as a psychotherapist, yet I rarely saw him. Aside from our new Presbyterian church community, this was my family.

  There on our acreage in upstate New York, I felt isolated from the world, yet I listened to the news: Truman was president, the atomic bomb was still all the talk—what had we unleashed in splitting that atom? Apocalyptic chatter everywhere. In the literary world, Faulkner had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  “Thanks, Mommy.” Davy’s voice brought me back.

  I smiled at him, at his chocolate moustache, and then glanced at Bill. He leaned back in his chair and stretched. He made such a handsome picture, the “perfect mythical husband” I’d once called him during our great falling-in-love. I sometimes wondered how I appeared to him now, but my survival instincts didn’t leave room for vanity. My brown hair, long and thick, stayed in a loose and tangled bun at the base of my neck. If I was pretty at all, it was in an old-fashioned way, I knew that. Small at only five foot two, with large brown eyes, I wasn’t the va-va-voom kind of beautiful that men whistled at. It was more of a pleasing beauty that could be enhanced if I tried, although lately I hadn’t. But Bill? He was dashing, which he loved to hear, his Virginia Southern plantation ancestry adoring that particular word.

  He tossed one leg over the other and gave that lopsided smile, the one Douglas had inherited, at me. “I’m going to the seven thirty AA meeting tonight. Are you coming?”

  “Not this time. I think I’ll stay home with the boys and finish mending their winter clothes.”

  Under the table I clenched my hands, waiting for the rebuke, which didn’t come. I exhaled in relief. Bill stood and stretched with a roar that made Davy laugh before he walked to the entranceway of the kitchen. “I’m going to work now,” he said. “Or at least try one more time.”

  “Okay.” I nodded with a smile, but oh, how I ached to return to my own work. The editor of the magazine on the kitchen table had asked me for a series of articles on the Ten Commandments, and I was scarcely making headway. But Bill was the man of the house, and I, as he and society reminded me, was the homemaker.

  The little boys ran off to the playroom adjoining the kitchen, bantering in a language all their own. I hesitated, but then called out, “Bill, C. S. Lewis wrote back to us.”

  “Well, it’s about time.” He stopped midstep out the doorway. “What has it been? Six months? When you’re done reading it, toss it on my desk.”

  “I haven’t opened it yet, but I know you don’t have much interest in any of that anymore.”

  “Any of what?”

  “God.”

  “Of course I do, Joy. I just don’t obsess over answers like you do. Hell, I’m not as obsessive about anything as you are.” He paused as if weighing the heavy words and then tossed out, “You don’t even know what he wrote. He might request no more contact. He’s a busy man.”

  I deflated inside, felt the dream of something I hadn’t yet even seen or known collapse. “Bill, I can’t let my experience mean nothing. It can’t be discarded as some flicker in time. God was there; I know it. What does that mean?”

  “I sure don’t know. But do whatever you want, Poogle. Write to him or not. I must get back to work.”

  In my office, I shivered with the chill. If only our house were as full of love as it was books—now more than two thousand of them piled on shelves and tables and, when needed, on the floor. The house was drafty and again the coal had burned low. I would send Davy to bring more inside. Weeks before, we’d had to let the housekeeper go. I would write anything I could for the money just to get her back.

  Things had to change and soon.

  I held the letter in my hand and, pulling my sweater closer around me, settled into a threadbare lounge chair. I wanted my husband to understand the longing inside me, a yearning for the unseen world hidden inside the evident world. Lewis was seventeen years older than I—the experience and the searching well behind him. I wrote him seeking answers that would satisfy both my heart and my intellect.

  I ran my fingers along the rise and fall of his words. The ink, obviously from a blue fountain pen, bled tiny lines from each character into the veins of the cotton paper. I lifted it to my nose and inhaled nothing but the aroma of cold air and dust. I slipped my finger under the sealed flap, eager to read every word, yet oddly I also wanted the expectancy to last—waiting and longing are often the cheap fuel of desire.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Gresham,

  it started.

  Thank you for your long and elaborate letter.

  I smiled. Long and elaborate indeed.

  My eyes quickly scanned to the bottom of the page to be sure.

  Yours, C. S. Lewis

  He had written to us.

  Of all the hundreds of letters he received, he had written to me.

  CHAPTER 3

  I have loved some ghost or other all my years

  Dead men, their kisses and their fading eyes

  “PRAYER BEFORE DAYBREAK,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  The day after Lewis’s letter arrived, I listened to the wind whistle its wintry call. A pile of sewing sat on the far chair, and yet I ignored it to stare out the window. I missed my rambling walks through our acreage and the apple blossom– tinged air of my spring garden that lay dormant beneath the frost. Spring would come again; it always did.

  I returned to my work, to the black-faced keys of the Underwood, blank paper in waiting. I had blocked that afternoon hour for my poetry: a gift to myself.

  The fires are in my guts and you may light/A candle at them that will do no good.

  I paused, sipped my tea, and tucked stray hair behind my ears. With eyes closed I searched in the depths of myself for the next lines. All my life I’d written from the knotted places inside me with a hope for the unknotting.

  “Joy!” Bill’s voice shattered the stillness.

  The line of poetry was blown away by his voice, a fragile dandelion pod now empty and scattered.

  “Up here,” I called just as he appeared and leaned against the doorframe, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  “Not in the house.” My words would do no good, but still I said them.

  “The boys are at school.” He inhaled a long drag and then exhaled two plumes of smoke from his nostrils before asking, “Didn’t you hear the phone ringing?”

  I shook my head, drew my sweater closer.

  “Brandt and Brandt called. They want to schedule your author shot with Macmillan for the back flap.”

  My agent calling about my publisher.

  “Thanks,” I said, slightly annoyed I’d missed them and it had been Bill who spoke with them. “I’ll call back.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked, walking closer and dropping ash into the trash can by my desk.

  “I’m restless. And I can’t find my words this afternoon, or at least not any that make sense.”

  “Why don’t you call Belle to come for a visit from the city? She always cheers you up.”

  “She’s busy with her family too. And we’re both writing as much as we can. Phone calls must do for now.”

  “This path we’ve chosen,” he said and drew his cigarette near his lips. “Being writers. Maybe we should have chosen something easier.” He was joking; it was a kind moment.

  “As if we could have chosen anything else.” I looked to him. “I miss my poetry, Bill. I miss it terribly.”


  “We do what we have to do. You’ll return to it.” He kissed my forehead as he held the cigarette high in the air. “Now back to work.”

  He clicked on my little space heater and then shut the door. These acts of kindness eased the tension, reminded me of feelings that now felt like mere memories. I faced the typewriter again. But instead of poetry, I wanted to answer Mr. Lewis. It had only been a day, and though I didn’t want to appear anxious, I certainly was.

  C. S. Lewis:

  Your spiritual search is much the same as mine has been. It’s quite stunning to be pursued by the great Hound of Heaven, is it not? My first reaction was rage and terror. I wonder if you felt the same. I believe I have spent my years since that moment attempting to make some sense of it all. But are we to make sense of it? I’m not quite sure that is the reason for our encounter. Yet, still we try. It sounds as if you are caught in the mesh of His net—you have not much chance of escape.

  It seems that my friend Chad Walsh has told you much of my life, do tell me about yours. What is your history, Mr. and Mrs. Gresham?

  I paused with a desire to take this slowly, thoughtfully, not rush into it as I did nearly everything else, stumbling and falling and getting back up.

  My history—that is what he had asked for. It had been too long since anyone cared for more than what was for dinner or if the laundry was finished or the schoolwork done.

  Dear Mr. Lewis,

  How very wonderful to receive your letter during the frigid cold of the New Year here in New York.

  So now? How does one begin to articulate what is only seen dimly by the person who lives it? All my life I’d been seeking the Truth, or at least my version of it. If there was anything I’d always done with single-minded intent, it was this—seek means to soothe my troubled heart.

  I’d believed in so much and so little.

  I’d ruined myself and saved myself.

  This is Mrs. Gresham writing in return. Thank you for answering some of our questions. Most astoundingly, you have knocked the props right out of my argument about longing being something we must battle—your assertion that if we long for something more, then surely that something more must exist (God)—rings as true as the sky above me.

  But, by cats and whiskers, you’re not asking me to argue or agree with you. You ask about my history.

  I paused, took a breath.

  Shouldn’t I be funny and witty? A pen-friend he’d want to answer and engage with in intellectual pursuits? Intelligence was the one thing that had sustained me through the years. As my parents reminded me (and anyone else who would listen), I was not fully bestowed with beauty, grace, or charm. My cousin Renee encompassed that particular set of attributes. She was the pretty one. And wasn’t I smart?

  Masks are the hallmark of my life, my theme if you will, the history of Joy. The façade changes have been innumerable, but the aching and emptiness inside have remained steady, which I now believe is the longing that brought me to my knees.

  Was this too serious?

  No, he had asked.

  It was my parents who gifted me with my first mask: a Jew. I was born Helen Joy Davidman. But I have always been called Joy.

  I typed as if in a fugue state—pages dented with black ink, the staccato sounds of metal on rubber. When my sons’ calls let me know they’d returned home from school, I typed the last of it.

  After the profound conversion experience that shook me from my firm atheist foundation, my soul will not let me rest until I find answers to some of my spiritual questions—questions that will not go away, questions that have every right to nag at me until I find peace. Who is this God I now believe in? What am I to do with this Truth? Was it real at all or have I deluded myself with another cure-all that cures nothing?

  Yours,

  Joy

  When I finished, my heart stretched as if waking from a long and lazy slumber, and a secret hope fell over me. I smiled. Then I whisked the final page from the typewriter and folded the four pages into an envelope.

  The winter afternoon howled with a coming storm; my sons played knights fighting for the maiden, my husband closed himself into his office, and I sealed a letter to C. S. Lewis, shedding all my masks.

  I wanted him to know me. I wanted him to see me.

  CHAPTER 4

  And this is wisdom in a weary land;

  ask nothing, shut your teeth upon your need

  “SELVA OSCURA,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  Nineteen months later

  August 1951

  August shimmered thick with heat and rain as our old Impala, choking on fumes, pulled into Chad and Eva Walsh’s Vermont summer property. After I’d contacted Chad about his article, we’d forged an intellectual and spiritual friendship through phone calls and letters, and then finally his wife and four daughters visited our farm in upstate New York. The Walshes had become dear friends.

  Davy and Douglas bounced around the back seat, weary from the long drive and hungry, as they’d eaten all their well-packed snacks before we crossed the New York state line. Bill’s hands were tense on the silver steering wheel as we entered a lush landscape of craggy rocks and moss-crusted trees, of thick, wild fields and a crystalline lake winking in the sunlight.

  We’d both agreed, this trip to visit Chad and Eva held some promise of reprieve.

  Yet even that morning Bill had balked. “Do you want to spend this vacation with Chad because he’s close to Lewis?” he asked as we packed.

  “That’s absurd.” I stood at the end of the bed with my open suitcase half full.

  Bill opened a dresser drawer and then turned back to me. “He’s the one who told you to write to Lewis in the first place.”

  “Bill,” I said and stepped closer to him, “Chad is the foremost scholar on Lewis in the United States. He’s a professor. And like us, he’s a middle-in-life convert. He’s a dear friend to you as much as to me. If you don’t want to go on this vacation, we won’t go. Just tell me now.”

  Bill kissed me dryly, missing my mouth to land on my cheek. “We need to get out of here. We need a break,” he said. “Vermont might be just the trick.”

  Joy:

  Mr. Lewis, I feel lost in what Dante calls a “dark wood, where the road is wholly lost and gone.” Motherhood is selfless. Writing is selfish. The clash of these two unyielding truths creates a thin tightrope, one I fall off of daily, damaging all of us.

  Yet my garden has been sustenance. Has yours yet blossomed?

  C. S. Lewis:

  Mrs. Gresham, I have also been lost in that dark wood and felt the same, not about motherhood of course (which would be quite odd), but about my life and work. God promised us these times; darkness is part of the program. I find solace and nourishment in nature as you do, and on my long walks up Shotover Hill (one day will you come see this place and walk with us?). The only command nature demands of us is to look and be present. But do not demand more of her than she can give.

  It had been a year and a half since that first envelope had arrived from Oxford, and I couldn’t count the letters Mr. Lewis and I had exchanged. They flew over the ocean like birds passing each other in flight. I’d gather the tidbits of my day and save them like treasures. I wanted to share it all with him, to show him my life and read about his. I was as eager for his letters as anything in my life, rereading old ones until the new one arrived.

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had reached our shores the year before, and I shared Mr. Lewis with my boys as I read it to them. Now Prince Caspian had been published and brought with us on the trip. Over and over I narrated, until Aslan and Lucy and Edmund were as familiar as family members.

  C. S. Lewis:

  Ah, yes, you see the medieval influence in my stories—it is above all my world view. Professionally I am mainly a medievalist with a desire for meaning and search for Truth, and I believe stories are there to delight and inform.

  Joy:

  Your Arthurian influences are deep within your prose. You must have found
his legends early on.

  C. S. Lewis:

  I did find King Arthur at a young age, eight to be exact. The same age you decided to be an atheist, I see. And ever since then he’s probably been influencing much of my imagination. Along with Dante, Plato and moorings in Classical Greek thought and of course many others. How can we know what has filtered into our work? This is precisely why we must be careful of what we read.

  Out of the corner of his letters I experienced a different kind of life: one of peace and connection and intellectual intimacy, of humor and kindness, and I indulged.

  Meanwhile in that year of 1951, the world spun on its axis: the Great Flood filled the lands of the Midwest, the nuclear bomb was tested at a private site in Nevada, the Korean War was taking our men’s lives. Perry Como, Tony Bennett, and I Love Lucy attempted to alleviate our fears with music and laughter while Harry Truman fired General MacArthur.

  But in our house a different battle raged. Fights with Bill grew monstrous. I was embarrassed by who we’d become and was resolute to change it, to heal our marriage.

  Only a month before the vacation, drunk and throwing pages of a failed manuscript across the room, Bill had grabbed his hunting rifle and swung it wildly about.

  “Stop!” I cried out. “You’re scaring me, and the boys are asleep.”

  “You’ve never understood me, Joy. Not once. You got the house you wanted, the fame you desired, but what about me?”

  “Bill, you’re not making sense. You’re drunk. Put down the stupid gun.”

  “It’s empty, Joy. Stop being dramatic about everything.”

  He pointed the gun at the ceiling, pulled the trigger, and blew a hole in the plaster. In an adrenaline rush of fear, my heart a bird against my ribs, I bolted up the stairs, unable in my muddled mind to decipher where the boys’ room was compared to the shot. Panic choked me until I reached the top of the landing and realized that the bullet had entered the guest room, a peephole now in the floor.