“I’m folding laundry, son. Take that fish to the kitchen.”
And off he went, running all hilter and such with a group of boys following.
“Have fun,” I said into the empty wind he’d left behind.
So different, my boys were—Davy tense and studious and Douglas gulping life by the mouthful. Still they sparred; after taking boxing classes at school they practiced with each other, ignoring my dissuading arguments that boxing was a disgusting sport. Davy was also studying magic, while Douglas studied the pond’s rich life.
Slowly I folded the clothes, setting them into the basket with great care. It had become these small things that nourished me. If I could have allowed this life to be enough in New York, could I have saved my marriage? Why had these tasks, the ones I now did with a happy heart, once been such drudgery, Sisyphean tasks that took me away from my writing?
I folded Jack’s shirt, a white button-down that needed mending, and I set it aside to remind myself to take a needle to the collar that evening.
No, it wasn’t entirely within my will.
What I had with Jack—the intimacy and understanding, the collaboration and laughter—transformed everything in its path: every chore, every moment suffused with great love.
I mused over how much had changed between Jack and me. Chad and Eva Walsh had come to visit us a few months before. Eva and I had taken a long walk alone, and she’d whispered to me, “Are you two in love?”
I told her the truth. “I believe I’m alone in that budding emotion.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said.
“Honestly, Eva.” We reached the end of the path and stood before the pond. “He has no interest in anything more than this deep friendship, what he calls philia.”
Eva had turned to me and shaded her eyes against the evening sun. “I see the way he looks at you. It’s like no one else exists and you have a secret language. He looks to you first when he says something, as if he’s checking with you.”
My chest filled with this hope that Eva’s words offered, but I knew the truth. “It is love, but a different kind to him. The man has been a philosopher since he was eight years old and he picked up Dante—it’s his medieval world view.” I shook my head with a smile. “His complete dedication to the virtues keeps him from falling into the kind of love that captures a heart. He knows how, after all these years, to guard his heart behind the moral goodness he’s practiced. He belongs to God and the church almost more than most priests I know.”
“But he’s not a priest, and you’re a woman, and a vibrant one to boot.” Eva drew closer to me and took my hands, one in each of her own. “Be patient, Joy. The heart has its own rhythm and timing.”
“I don’t think it’s a sense of timing, Eva. I must accept the golden friendship that we do have.” I paused. “And there’s more. His friends are suspicious of me—especially Tollers, who calls me ‘that woman,’ and he cares what Tollers thinks, cares a lot. I’m divorced. I have children. I’m a New Yorker. I have Jewish ancestry. There are reasons.” I glanced at the sky, thunderheads forming. “And the last time he loved wholly—his mother—he lost her in the most catastrophic way. He’s cautious. Temperate.”
“Joy, give him time.”
I shrugged and looked back to her dear smile. “These are only guesses, Eva. How could I know? I’ve come to know him better than anyone except Warnie, but still how could I truly know? He tells me he is too old to begin another love affair and that philia is our destiny.”
I hugged her as Chad approached from the far end of the pathway, calling his wife’s name.
As I folded the last of the pants, I reminded myself to tell Jack of the phone call from Dutton, scooped the basket under my arm, and ambled to the back door of the house. When I entered the common room, the sight of a woman in Jack’s chair startled me. It was too dim to make her out exactly, but she was definitely a woman, reading a book and curled comfortably with her shoes tossed to one side of the chair.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, rage flaring in a dark burst of the old angry-Joy.
She startled and dropped the book, stood and stumbled before pressing her fingers to her temples. “I’m Moira Sayer. We’ve met before.”
“I don’t think so.” I held close the laundry basket and took two steps toward her.
She held to the edge of Jack’s chair. “I have every right to be here, same as you. I’m George Sayer’s wife. Jack said I could come here to read while George worked at Magdalen.”
George.
Sayer.
This was the first friend of Jack’s I’d met at the Eastgate. Moira, his wife, with whom I’d had tea only last year.
“I’m so sorry.” I clutched the basket tighter. “I’m very sorry.” I fled the room with the heat of shame burning through my skin. Would I ever learn? Or change?
I carried the basket upstairs and left a pile of Jack’s clothes outside his room and took the remainder to the boys’ room. I then entered my downstairs bedroom and closed the door to sit and drop my head on the desk.
How did I slip backward into horrid old habits so easily? Into jealousy and rage, as if they were as welcoming as a warm river swim?
It only took a few moments until the knock arrived.
“Yes?”
“Joy?”
I opened the door to Jack.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was an ass to your friend. She startled me; I didn’t know she was here. I think I must have deeply embarrassed you.” I shook my head. “My anger—sometimes I still find myself at cross purposes with the world.”
He laughed. “Oh, it’s not so bad. I explained to her that I hadn’t told you she was here, and you having such terrible eyesight didn’t know she wasn’t an intruder meant to steal my manuscripts for her own.” He laughed, with that merry twinkle in his eye.
“My terrible eyesight?” I tried to laugh, but nothing came out.
“Yes, what with your glass eye in one and your cataracts in the other.”
“Jack. You forgive too easily and warmly. I’m not accustomed.” I smiled and exited the room to join him in the hallway.
“Let’s get out into the sunlight,” he said.
“Yes, let’s gather some beans and tomatoes for dinner.”
“Very good,” he agreed. “And then we’ll walk into Oxford?”
Together we scooted down the thin hall, where I grabbed a basket for the vegetables and an apron to cover my dress. Then we were outside to the summer sunshine again. Moira had gone, and neither of us acknowledged her absence.
I glanced around the grounds. “Where’s Davy?”
“He’s decided that he must lay down bricks for us to walk on from the house to the pond; he’s out gathering them from the old kilns and setting them into the deep mud.” Jack motioned toward the pond. “He’s down there.”
“Well, isn’t he turning industrious?” I laughed and squinted into the sun. “Building walkways. I wouldn’t have guessed it.”
“Joy.” Jack bent over and popped two green beans from their stalk and dropped them into the basket. “What made you buggered with Moira?”
“I assume jealousy.”
“Jealousy?” He made a tsk tsk noise, teasing.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “I know it’s wrong,” I leaned down and chose a ripe tomato from the vine, placed it in the basket. “Like with Ruth Pitter.”
“You’re jealous of Ruth Pitter?” He almost laughed, but my seriousness checked him.
“I’ve read her poetry. She’s a more gifted poet than I am, Jack.” I held up my hand. “There’s no use arguing that, but that’s not the point—she’s in love with you.” I bent to pick another tomato, but my finger pressed too deeply into the delicate flesh. Red juice trickled down my arm. I dropped the fruit to the ground and wiped my palm on the apron.
“That’s not the case, Joy. We are longtime friends. We’ve been writing to each other for years now. We discuss writing and cooking and gardeni
ng and poetry.”
I faced him, my hand shielding my eyes from the late-afternoon sun. I wanted him to hear what he had just said. In that sentence he could have been describing us as surely as he was describing her.
“What is it?” he asked when I didn’t respond.
“She’s not any different from me, is she—to you?”
“Ruth any different from you?”
“Yes.”
Jack pressed his hands together as if in prayer and shook his head. “You’re right. This is jealousy speaking. You are here standing in my garden, after answering my correspondence and editing my work. You are right here with me and we are heading to town for a beer. Tonight we will read and play Scrabble and Davy will beat me at chess. Douglas will fall asleep talking a mile a minute.” He paused.
I took in a long breath. “I see when my ego takes charge. I’ve come to realize how my past affects me now—criticism and cruelty mingled with attachment have proffered a neurosis I’ll spend the rest of my life overcoming.” I paused. “I can’t get this Christian thing right. How does one get it right at all?” I slapped my hands together in frustration.
“Get it right?” he asked quietly. “What exactly is getting it right?”
“Sometimes I forget to turn to him, and then the woman I have been for all of my life rises up and is no less damaging than she was before.”
“God is no magician, Joy.”
“Oh, how I could use some magic—it might take all of my life, what remains of it, to surrender fully.”
“All of this life, Joy, and maybe most of the next.” He winked but then drew closer. “As with our art, we must surrender and get ourselves out of the way if any good is to come.”
“Must I surrender again and again?” I paused for effect. “And again?”
“I believe all of us must.”
Our basket was full by then, the vegetables enough for dinner, when I told him, “The truth is I was already on edge—you see, I might not be here for long.”
His eyes widened. “What do you mean? Whyever not?”
“The British Home Office won’t renew my paperwork again. I’ll have to take the boys back to the States.”
“Joy, I’ll not let you be sent back home. We’ll find a way to make sure you stay.”
“There is only one way to stay, Jack. And that’s marriage. So unless I take myself over to the Globe Tavern and pick myself a good Englishman to seduce, it looks as if I will be packing for America.”
“You can’t leave,” he said. “I will not let you return to that terrible place.” He took my face in his hands. I dropped the basket, tomatoes and green beans scattering to the earth.
I placed my hands on top of his. “You don’t want me to go?”
Our faces were close now, his lips near mine, his eyes shadowed by sadness.
“No. I would miss you too terribly. I have come to depend on you, Joy.” He dropped his hands and placed them on my shoulders, drawing back a step.
My body trembled with the need for him, and I could feel the same from him—a thrumming below the words and the touch. He pulled me close and held to me, and I rested my head on his shoulder.
“You musn’t leave.”
CHAPTER 46
Now, having said the words that can be said,
Having set down for any man to see
“SONNET XLIV,” JOY DAVIDMAN
“I have something I want to show you.” Jack stopped on the Oxford sidewalk next to one of the ubiquitous red phone booths. August heat pressed upon us, and a woman pushing a pram strolled past, smiling at Jack in recognition.
“You do?” I asked, redirecting his attention to me.
It was only the day before that I’d told him about the British Home Office. He hadn’t said another word and I was nervous, reticent to bring it up again. Davy browsed through Blackwell’s, and Douglas ran off to find some friends to punt with at the Cherwell.
“I do.” He waved his hand. “Follow me.”
We moved a few blocks down the road, and he stopped in front of a split brick house, 10 Old High Street.
“This is for sale,” he said and pointed.
“That’s nice.” I continued to walk forward. Noticing the goings-on in town during our daily walks was as much a part of our routine as his morning correspondence.
He placed his hand on my shoulder, stayed me. “I can help you buy it if you’d move to Oxford,” he said.
Then the strangest thing happened—I had nothing to say, no fanciful retort, no witty comment. I stared at the little house, the dark red color of the geraniums planted in window boxes all around the city. The house was split with exact mirror images of two thin front doors set next to each other—a duplex. There were two upstairs windows, two down. A brick wall ran across the front of the house and pruned shrubbery hid the bottom half of the lower windows.
“Move here?” Even as I asked, I already saw us—Davy, Douglas, and me—with boxes and furniture, books and toys, Sambo the cat, our lives in tow and moving into this house within walking distance to the Kilns, to town, to a better life.
Jack moved to stand before me and took both my hands.
“I’ve thought of little else since you told me that you might have to leave. I knew in the sleepless night that I would do whatever it takes to keep you here. We can marry, a civil marriage of course, and you can move here.” He pointed to the house, the FOR SALE sign pasted in the window.
“Marry me?” I tried to swallow the laugh but could not. “This might not be the most romantic proposal.”
“It’s not meant to be romantic. It’s meant to be sincere. I want you to stay here. I want you near to me.”
From the threat of returning to America to the thrill of having my own place in Oxford. He wanted me there. He wanted me near. And yet, a marriage of convenience? I smiled the truest way I could, and together we turned to stare at the house. “A real house,” I said. “I haven’t had one since I left New York. A real home.”
Jack’s cheeks rose with his smile. “Yes,” he said. He spun his walking stick in a circle and tilted his fisherman’s hat to me. “Home.”
Back at the Kilns later that evening, Jack had fallen asleep in his chair when I jostled him awake. “Oh, buggers. I nodded off.” He stretched and smiled at me. “I hope I wasn’t snoring.”
“Snoring? Of course you were. But that’s not why I woke you.” I looked at the folder I’d set on the table. “I have something for you. Something I thought I would never give to you, but now I am. It’s time.”
“You are oh-so-serious, Joy. What is it?” He shook the bleariness from his voice and eyes.
I held out the folder, my hand trembling same as my heart. “I’ve been writing these for years, Jack. They’re sonnets.”
When he proposed a civil marriage, I decided, standing there on an Oxford sidewalk with the sun beating down on his offer of both a house and marriage, that I would give these to him.
He plucked from me the beige folder with the word Courage written on the front, his hand brushing mine.
“Courage?” he asked.
“Yes, I needed it to hand these to you.”
“Sonnets?” He beamed. “You’ve been hiding your poetry from me? And now I have a great treasure to read?”
“I think you will have to decide for yourself if they are treasure or trash.”
What I didn’t tell him, what he would find for himself, was that the sonnets dated as far back as 1936. I’d spent hours putting the verses together into a coherent storyline, a progression of sorts shadowing the loves I’d felt before and my growing love for him. I’d woven the past and the present together in a collection that might illustrate the clearest vision of my heart. It was bold. It was an action that might very well embarrass me and break my heart.
The sonnets swung wildly from passion to despair, from desire to embarrassment. But I wanted him to take that wild journey so that he might finally understand the larger arc of my abiding love for him.
I also included fifteen poems that weren’t part of the forty-five love sonnets, poems painting pictures of our days together—from “Ballade of Blistered Feet” (our first hike on Shotover), to my “Sonnet of Misunderstandings” after leaving him that Christmas morning, to the last one titled “Let No Man.”
He flipped open the folder, carbon copies of every troubled-heart sonnet exposed to his eyes, to his knowing. But I couldn’t hide anymore. As Orual lifted her veil, so I handed him the folder.
“I’ve stopped writing them,” I said. “The last one was after my parents’ visit.”
His eyes grazed the cover page, on which I’d typed a silly rhyme and note to him—Dear Jack, here are some sonnets you may care to read . . .
“You’ve stopped writing poetry? Whatever for?”
“No,” I said with a smile. “Not all poetry. Just that kind of poetry. You’ll understand when you read.”
I stood as he sat in his chair, evening falling through the windows like honey.
“It’s the only gift I’ve got.” I quoted the opening letter in his hand. “You have given me so much, and now you offer me a home here in Oxford. This is a gift in return.”
His eyes radiated tenderness, and then he began to read. I walked away and left him with the love sonnets—with the poetry and with my heart.
It was the next afternoon, late in the day, as I stood in the kitchen sifting through the mail and humming a tune from an old song I hadn’t thought of in years—Bing Crosby, “Swinging on a Star”—when Jack came to me. I’d spent the day in the garden, and I was dirty with the sweet earth under my fingernails and swiped across the kitchen apron over my flowered dress. Tired and satisfied.
“‘Between two rivers, in the wistful weather; Sky changing, tree undressing, summer failing.’”
Sonnet VI. From the days of our first meeting.
“You’ve read them.” I dropped the mail to the table.
“Not all of them. Not yet. I want to savor them as slowly as a fine glass of wine. They are stunning and, as I’ve described your work before—flaming. The imagery and heartache and aching loss are palpable. I’m honored that you offered them to me.”
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