I felt his eyes upon me and knew they weren’t radiating with love. Love dwindled, but each day I gauged what remained. Companionship? Admiration? Security? At the moment it felt like rage. I lifted the clean pot and wiped it with a green dish towel from the side of the sink, then turned to him with a smile. “Would you like some hot chocolate?”
“Sure.” He sank into a chair next to Davy. “Mommy is going to warm us.”
I opened the old Coolerator—more white coffin than fridge—and stared at the lonely shelves. Wilted lettuce, an open can of last night’s tomato soup, milk, eggs, and a pan of ground beef that had gone the dark, foreboding brown of rancid meat. I needed a trip to the market, which meant another afternoon of writing would be lost. My mood curled over like the spoiled meat, and I hated my selfishness that cared more for the page, the writing, than for my family’s meals. I didn’t know how to change, but oh, I was trying.
I watched as the milk came to a slow boil in the pot; then I poured the chocolate flakes into the white froth, transfixed. Outside, the first snowflake fluttered into view, then melted as it settled on the windowpane; it was a natural wonder and it lifted my heart. The bird feeder hung from a low branch, and a cardinal paused there and turned its black eye on me. Every simple thing radiated for a brief moment with extraordinary beauty, a daily grace.
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.