Isolated, I had only myself to blame. I was the one who’d pushed for a move from the city to this banished and awful place far from my literary friends and publishing contacts. I’d begun to believe that I’d never been a poet, or a novelist, a friend or lover, never existed as anything other than wife and mother. Moving here had been my meager attempt to whisk Bill away from an affair with a blonde in Manhattan. Desperation fuels one to believe idiocy is insight.
Was he with another woman and merely feigning a breakdown? This didn’t seem too farfetched, and yet even his lunacy had its limits.
Or maybe it didn’t.
Our house in the Hudson Valley at the far edge of the suburb of Ossining, New York, was a small wooden abode we called Maple Lodge. It had a sloping roof and creaked with every movement our little family made: Bill; Davy, a toddler who was much like a runaway atom bomb; and Douglas, a baby. It often felt as if the foundation itself were coming undone with our restlessness. I was thirty-one years old, surrounded by books, two cats, and two sons, and I felt as ancient as the house itself.
I missed my friends, the hustle and bustle of the city, the publishing parties and literary gossip. I missed my neighbors. I missed myself.
Night surrounded my sons and me, darkness pressing in on the windowpanes with an ominous weight. Douglas, with his mass of brown curls and apple cheeks, dozed with a warm bottle of milk dangling from his mouth while Davy dragged toy trucks across the hardwood floors, oblivious to the scratches they dug.
Panic coursed through me as I roamed the house, waiting for word from Bill. I cursed. I ranted. I banged my fist into the soft cushions of our tattered couch. Once I’d fed and bathed the boys, I rang my parents and a couple of friends—they hadn’t heard from him. How long would he be gone? What if we ran out of food? We were miles from the store.
“Calm down,” I told myself over and over. “He’s had breakdowns before.” This was true, and the specter of another always hung over our home. I hadn’t been there for his worst one, after a stint in the Spanish Civil War before we met, when he’d attempted what I was frightened of now—suicide. The leftover traumas of war rattling and snaking through his psyche had become too much to bear.
As if I could cure the panic from a distance, I imagined Bill as I met him—the passionate young man who sauntered into the League of American Writers with his lanky frame and the wide smile hooded by a thick moustache. I’d immediately been drawn to his bravery and idealism, a man who’d volunteered and fought where needed in a faraway and torn country. Later I fell deeper in love with the same charming man I heard playing the guitar at music haunts in Greenwich Village.
Our passion overwhelmed me, stunned me in its immediacy as our bodies and minds found each other. Although he was married when we met, he had reassured me: “It was never anything real. It’s nothing like you and me.” We married at the MacDowell artists colony three days after his divorce was final—symbolizing our bond and dedication to our craft. Two writers. One marriage. One life. Now it was that very passion and idealism that tore at him, unhinging his mind and driving him back to the bottle.
Near midnight I stood over the crib of our baby, my heart hammering in my chest. There was nothing, not one thing I could do to save my husband. My bravado crumbled; my ego crashed.
I took in what was quite possibly the first humble breath of my life and dropped to my knees with such force that the hardwood floor sent a jolt of pain up my legs. I bowed my head, tears running into the corners of my mouth as I prayed for help.
I was praying! To God?
I didn’t believe in God. I was an atheist.
But there I was on my knees.
In a crack of my soul, during the untethered fear while calling for help, the sneaky Lion saw his chance, and God came in; he entered the fissures of my heart as if he’d been waiting a long time to find an opening. Warmth fell over me; a river of peace passed through me. For the first time in all my life, I felt fully known and loved. There was a solid sense that he was with me, had always been with me.
The revelation lasted not long, less than a minute, but also forever; time didn’t exist as a moment-to-moment metronome, but as eternity. I lost the borders between my body and the air, between my heart and my soul, between fear and peace. Everything in me thrummed with loving presence.
My heart slowed and the tears stopped. I bent forward and rested my wet cheek on the floor. “Why have you waited so long? Why have I?” I rested in the silence and then asked, “Now what?”
He didn’t answer. It wasn’t like that—there wasn’t a voice, but I did find the strength to stand, to gaze at my children with gratitude, to wait for what might come next.
God didn’t fix anything in that moment, but that wasn’t the point of it all. Still I didn’t know where Bill was, and still I was scared for his life, but Someone, my Creator it seemed, was there with me in all of it. This Someone was as real as my sons in their beds, as the storm battering the window frames, as my knees on the hardwood floors.
Finally, after wandering the streets and drinking himself into a stupor, Bill stumbled into a cab that brought him back to us just before dawn. When he walked through the front door, I held his face in my hands, smelled the rancid liquor, and told him that I loved him and that I now knew there was a God who loved us both, and I promised him that we would find our way together.
As the years passed, our coffee table became littered with history and philosophy books, with religious texts and pamphlets, but still we didn’t know how to make sense of an experience I knew had been as real as my heartbeat. If there was a God, and I was straight sure that there was, how did he appear in the world? How was I to approach him, if at all? Or was the experience nothing more than a flicker of understanding that didn’t change anything? This wasn’t a religious conversion at all; it was merely an understanding that something greater existed. I wanted to know more. And more.
One spring afternoon, after we’d moved to a rambling farmhouse in Staatsburg, New York, a three-year-old 1946 Atlantic Monthly magazine was facedown on the kitchen table and being used as a coaster for Bill’s coffee mug. I slid the mug to the side and flipped through the magazine as our sons napped. The pages flopped open to an article by a Beloit College professor named Chad Walsh. The piece was titled “Apostle to the Skeptics” and was an in-depth study of an Oxford fellow in England, a man named C. S. Lewis who was a converted atheist. Of course I’d heard of the author, had even read his Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce—both of them holding a whispered truth I was merely beginning to hear. I began to peruse the article, and it was only Douglas calling my name that startled me from the story of this author and teacher who’d reached American readers with his clear and lucid writing, his logic and intellectualism.
Soon I’d read everything Lewis had written—more than a dozen books, including a thin novel of such searing satire that I found myself drawn again and again to its wisdom hidden in story: The Screwtape Letters.
“Bill.” I held up Lewis’s book I was rereading, The Great Divorce, over dinner one night as the boys twirled their spaghetti. “Here is a man who might help us with some of our questions.”
“Could be,” he mumbled, lighting a cigarette before dinner was over, leaning back in his chair to stare at me through his rimless spectacles. “Although, Poogle, I’m not sure anyone has the answers we need.”