Becoming Mrs. Lewis

by Patti Callahan

  Jack squeezed my hand. “How is it that my heart is breaking and yet I’ve never been so happy?”

  A ward sister in a prim habit stood with Warnie, who wore a suit pressed so straight he looked frightened to move. He smiled at me and held his hands clasped behind his back as if hiding something. Sober, his cheeks red with health, he stated to all present, “I love Joy as a sister, and now we will make it official.”

  Jack entwined his fingers in mine. He was handsome in his black suit and knotted blue tie, his hair slicked back. Without a cigarette or pipe, his mouth held only a shy grin. A great wash of love and admiration, and the realization of miracles, filled me with a swelling ecstasy that surged inside me like a sacred sea.

  “Can I ask you something before we start, Father Bide?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “How did you finally decide that this was sanctioned? That the Church of England would give permission? We’ve asked everyone we know, even the bishop.”

  “I asked the only source that mattered.” Father Bide paused and closed his hands around the black prayer book in his hand. “The only court of appeal I thought had the final argument—and that was God himself. What would he do in this case? And the answer was clear.”

  “Then let’s get married,” I said and turned my face to Jack.

  He squeezed my hand. “Yes, then let’s be married.”

  So it came that on March 21, 1957, while I lay in bed in a nightgown with my left leg lifted high on ropes and pulleys, I finally married the love of my life.

  Father Bide began to speak the words of the ceremony, and I listened to the melody of the Church of England’s holy matrimony litany.

  In the presence of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

  We have come together

  To witness the marriage of Helen Joy Davidman and Clive Staples Lewis

  To pray for God’s blessing on them

  To share their joy

  And to celebrate their love . . .

  Peter continued in the most serious voice, as if we were standing at the altar of Westminster Abbey and the queen herself was in the congregation—the hospital room no deterrence to solemnity.

  “Jack,” he finally said, “will you take Joy to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and protect her, forsaking all others, and be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?”

  “I will,” he said, and then again for emphasis, “I will.”

  “Joy,” Peter asked, “will you take Jack to be your husband? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and protect him, forsaking all others, and be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”

  “I will.” Tears rolled from my eyes and down my face where Jack kissed them away, the wetness of them on his lips.

  Warnie and the ward sister, whose name I never learned, also cried silently. Maybe it was the line “as long as you both shall live,” or the boundless love that filled that room, I didn’t know. Peter finished the ceremony—vows, rings, and declaration.

  It wasn’t the wedding a small girl dreams of—the white lace dress and a flowing veil. There were no bridesmaids or a symphony orchestra or long trails of white roses. But what does a small girl know of real love? I hadn’t ever known how to dream. I hadn’t known that love would arrive in the most unlikely of places—a hospital room where fear and despair usually reigned. I hadn’t known that love could not be earned or bought or manipulated; it was just this—complete peace in the other’s presence.

  All the years wasted believing that love meant owning or possessing, and now the greatest love had arrived in my greatest weakness. In my supreme defeat came my grandest victory. God’s paradoxes had no end.

  Peter ended the ceremony with the final prayer. We closed our eyes, Jack’s hands in mine.

  “The Holy Trinity make you strong in faith and love, defend you on every side, and guide you in truth and peace; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be among you and remain with you always.”

  It was Warnie who let out a great whooping sound. “Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis.”

  “My wife,” Jack said, and laughed that resonating merry sound that had buoyed me all these months.

  “My husband.”

  We set to laughter, and the ward sister shook her head. “I’ve never seen such celebration in a hospital room.”

  “Well, you’ve never seen anyone quite like the three of us,” I said.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  I knew what she believed: that this was a deathbed marriage, one to satisfy the sad woman in the cast with cancer. But it was no such thing. It was holy matrimony between a man and a woman who had grown to love in ways that no words or explanations could contain.

  It was then that Peter turned around and brought a tray to us both, offering us our first Holy Communion as husband and wife.

  “Peter,” Jack said when we had finished the Eucharist. “If I may impose with one more request.”

  “What is it?” Peter placed the tray on the bedside table.

  Jack cast his eyes to Warnie and then to Peter. “I know you don’t like to make much of it, but I do know that when you prayed over that young boy dying of meningitis, he recovered. I don’t believe it is in you that healing is given, but if you would pray over Joy right now as my wife . . .” Jack’s voice broke. “Please.”

  My wife.

  Peter didn’t answer with words, but instead placed both his hands on my head, the warmth of them comforting me. He closed his eyes. “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open and all desires known . . .”

  I closed my eyes to his prayer, his voice mingling with the cleansing power of a holy marriage and Holy Communion. The space around us shimmered, as sacred as if we knelt at a candle-festooned altar on red velvet cushions in the grandest cathedral on earth. If there was a time heaven might hear our pleas, this consecrated moment swelled around us, this boundless mystical silence beneath Peter’s voice as he uttered the prayers of the Church of England and then those of his own, pleading for healing and restoration, but in the end, for God’s will to be done.

  After Peter finished, the silence extended, enveloping us all. The hospital and the world paused with us; time was suspended. It lasted for only seconds but felt an eternity in my soul. Outside, a songbird sang a single note. A tray banged across the hallway. A child called out below my window. A doctor called for a nurse, and the world began again.

  It all began again.

  CHAPTER 54

  Under the quiet passion of the spring;

  I would leave you the trouble of my heart

  “YET ONE MORE SPRING,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  They sent me to the Kilns to die in April of 1957.

  Helpless to assist, I closed my eyes and allowed the crew of many medical personnel to pack me: my medicines and wheelchair (for the possible day when I might use it); the bedpan and trays. Two nurses had been hired—day and night. This business of dying wasn’t as simple as surrender to the great light. It was real and dirty and untidy. As Jack said, “A walk through the Garden of Gethsemane.”

  My emotions clashed brutally—everything one can feel I felt and usually all at once.

  When I’d prayed to one day live at the Kilns as Mrs. Lewis, maybe I should have been more specific. Because that prayer was answered as they rolled in a hospital bed and settled me into the common room with the familiar egg yolk– yellow walls and blackout curtains, the well-worn chairs and leaning bookcases. The fireplace with the perpetual aroma of slag, and the faded carpet embedded with cigarette ash. It was my house now as Mrs. Lewis, and yet I might as well have been strapped to the floor to observe a life I’d never live, a happiness tasted and snatched away.

  The bed had already been set up when the ambulance crew wheeled me in on a stretcher to gently lift me onto the sheets. But with a sudden shift of their arms a swift pain sliced through my leg, and I cried out.

  “Joy!”

  “Joy!” />
  Jack’s and Warnie’s voices comingled as they came running to the side of the bed from the far wall, where they’d been observing and allowing the attendants to do their work.

  “I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth and tears. I settled back onto the hard mattress and tears ran down my cheeks, unbidden. I wanted to be courageous for them, for me, for the memory of me. But the pain and the lost happiness and the fear held sway.

  It took some time for the hospital staff to unload and settle me and then to finally leave me alone with Jack, who sat next to my bed and rested his head on the pillow next to me in an awkward bent fashion.

  “I want to take your pain away, Joy. I want to heal you.”

  I turned my face and kissed him. “And I want you to take me upstairs to your room and make love to me. For as long as you can. We can finally be together, and it’s only my cancer that keeps us apart.” A sob broke loose. There was no more courage remaining at that moment, only despair. And if God couldn’t bear my despair, then he couldn’t bear me.

  “My love, the minute you are able, I will take you in my arms and to my bed.” His voice was heavy beneath the burden, and he bowed his head.

  Jack’s and Warnie’s voices were murmurs much like background music in a pub or a radio playing in another room. The cadence and accents, the elongated Rs and brief but lovely laughter carried me like waves. I was awake, but not in any real way that they would know I was. It was more like a dreamy consciousness of my surroundings while my eyes stayed closed and I floated in and out of knowing. Much like a dream where one was in one situation and then another without the synapse connection carrying them forward—nothing was in between.

  Lying supine—my leg in plaster and a contraption much like a circus performer’s trapeze hanging above my thin bed—nausea suddenly overwhelmed me like a rocking boat lurching me forward. My eyes flew open and I reached up to grab the triangular handle bar and pull myself to sitting. I wasn’t given warning; my body was slow with warning bells for anything at all, and I vomited all over the clean bedsheets and warm brown blanket the day nurse had tucked in around me. I groaned with not only misery but also with embarrassment.

  Jack was at my side, so quickly that maybe he’d been standing there all along. “Joy, I’m here.” Then Warnie too.

  “I’m sorry.” I fell back on the pillows in shame.

  Warnie, lit with the evening sun filtering into the room, held a silver kidney basin—the ubiquitous throw-up basin we’d brought home from the hospital. How I’d hoped that leaving the hospital after five months would mean leaving these accoutrements behind. No such luck.

  Jack hastily yanked the blanket from its moorings and then grabbed the bowl from Warnie to lickety-split spill the liquid into it. Warnie placed a wet washcloth on my forehead as I moaned, humiliated and emptied. This was not how I wanted to be seen or remembered.

  Jack placed the basin and the blanket on the floor as the nurse bustled in to research the commotion. Jack’s precious face obliterated my view of all else in the room as he bowed over me. In an instant his lips were on mine with a kiss full and kind and overwhelmingly imbued with compassion. He heeded no mind to the sickness that remained on me, to the propriety of asepsis; he only loved me.

  I’d felt certain of his eros in the months before this unsterile kiss, but perhaps some small and niggling part of me had believed it pity or forbearance, that his medieval virtues compelled him to love me in my dying. But non! It was this wink of time when I whorled toward understanding, into and resting in the arms of the love we shared—an uncommon and vulnerable combination of the four loves we’d traveled with and toward: agape, storge, philia, and now, unquestionably, eros. Our journey—riddled with both pain and joy—culminated in a kiss I would never have anticipated as the revelation it became, as the comfort and mastery of love.

  Jack rested his head on my pillow, and when I thought he might stroke my head or cheek, instead he began to pray, an earnest prayer that God would give him my suffering, allow him to bear my burdens. Then he rested for a while facing me with his eyes closed and his lips ever so gently on mine.

  He’d aged during these last months: I could see this. His hair was thinner, as was his face, but to me he was even more beautiful. His full and beautiful mouth. His deep eyes.

  “You want to take my suffering but you can’t, Jack. It’s mine to carry. You’re the one who told me there is no bargaining with God.”

  “No.” He lifted his head from my pillow. “Your pain is not yours alone anymore. It’s ours. I want to carry it for you. I’m asking God.”

  “This is mine, but with you I can bear it. It’s you who’s guided me here—to faith: I know I’m beloved.”

  “You are beloved by more than God, Joy. By me. By Warnie. By your sons and all the friends who have embraced you; I’ve never seen anyone make friends as easily and quickly as you.” His voice cracked, and he rested his head on my pillow. “I love you with all my being.”

  “I love you too,” I said in a faded voice. “But just because we love God and are committed to him doesn’t mean we are exempt from the pain and loss in this world. We can’t ask to be the exceptions.”

  We rested there for quite a while, the sounds of spring outside: wind, birdsong, and Paxford’s voice calling out. The creak of the floors told us Warnie was upstairs. The kitchen pots and pans clanged together as Mrs. Miller made lunch. I fell asleep quickly and deeply, as I often did now, a sudden sleep completely different from the slow falling of an unmedicated rest.

  I awoke when Jack’s head lifted from my pillow.

  “Poetry,” I said. “Let’s read.”

  He scooted back his chair and fetched Wordsworth from the side table. “Before we read, I have something to tell you.”

  “Is it bad news? Because I’m not sure I can take anymore.”

  “It’s Bill.”

  I girded my heart with what armor remained and clenched my hands into fists at my sides. My foot, raised in traction, began to throb again—the birth pangs of a greater pain. I reached for the bottle of pain pills and swallowed one. “Tell me.”

  “He’s written to us.”

  “Let me see.”

  “I don’t think you should read it, Joy. You just need to know that he’s demanding that if . . . if something happens to you, he wants the boys back with him. He laid some terrible accusations at your feet. But don’t trouble yourself; I’ve written back to him in the sternest way possible. He will not and cannot have the boys return to America.”

  “Let me read it,” I said. “Now.”

  He didn’t argue, but rose and left the room. His footsteps echoed up the stairs to his office and then back down again. When he returned he handed the letter to me.

  Dear Jack,

  it began . . .

  There were condolences about my prognosis and a reference to the fact that Bill’s only spirituality was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and then the dagger:

  Let me tell you my side of the story.

  I read on with an invisible hand around my throat.

  He told Jack that when I’d left five years ago, I’d been “disturbed.” He claimed my mind had been a mess and my heart set on Jack. He wrote that I’d never made very much of my writing career and that he’d supported me in the Presbyterian Life articles so that I could feel good about myself. He claimed I left my boys too long (he was right), and that when I’d returned I’d been both angry and hostile. And there was more. His bitterness was so palpable it thrummed off the page and into my body, an electric current.

  Bill ended with this.

  There is nothing more my sons need than their dad.

  I closed my eyes and then dropped the pages to the floor, and Jack allowed them to scatter like trash. “No.”

  “We won’t let him, Joy. We will not allow it.”

  Grief began to heave within me, then made way for anger. My eyes flew open and I attempted to sit, for a moment forgetting that I was bedbound. The traction
pulleys clanged against each other in protest, and a knife-pain sliced down my left thigh. But anger won and I slammed my fist into the mattress.

  “His accusations, Jack. What a woman that must be for all of those things to be true. A horrible woman. One I wouldn’t want to even know, much less be.”

  “It’s Bill’s way of telling a story he needs to believe.” Jack’s voice low and quiet, a balm.

  “And nothing of his affair with my cousin? His anger or his rages or his alcoholism and breakdowns? His suicide threats that kept us captive? He doesn’t say why I might have been angry when I returned home? Only that I was bitter and what else . . . violent? What a farce.”

  Jack rested his hand on my arm. “Joy.”

  I took in a long breath.

  “Please get me a pad of paper and a pen. I must write back.”

  “I already wrote to him.”

  “Then I’ll add to it, Jack. I can’t let him leave this as a legacy, these pages of lies.” Tears flooded my eyes, and I wiped furiously at them. “I’m tired of crying. Of hurting. I want only love now. Only love. It should be all that remains.”

  “That is what we have.” He kissed me again and reached for the poetry book. I closed my eyes, let the hostile fury ride its wave, and listened to Jack quote Wordsworth. “‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’”

  Inside my mind I heard Bill, but when I opened my eyes to Jack, I knew that whatever Bill believed or whatever he’d written did not and could not affect the love that breathed between Jack and me.

  I understood for the first time the apostle Paul’s words, “Death, where is your sting?”

  CHAPTER 55

  Beyond the foaming world; here is the chart

  Of the last journey, past the last desire

  (LAST SONNET, LAST LINE)

  “SONNET XLIV,” JOY DAVIDMAN

  June 1957

  “Your cancer has been arrested.”

  These words fell so casually from the mouth of the doctor in the white coat and tortoiseshell spectacles that I thought I might have misheard him.