Open your door, lest the belated heart
Die in the bitter night; open your door
“SONNET XLIV,” JOY DAVIDMAN
1950
Didn’t most everything begin with words? In the beginning was the word—even the Bible touted that truth. So it was with my friendship with Lewis.
I descended from my second-story office in our farmhouse into the frigid January day to grab the mail. Two separate trains of thought ran along the tracks of my mind: What would I cook the family for dinner? And how would my second novel, Weeping Bay, be received into the world in a few months?
Frosted grass crunched under my boots as I strode to the mailbox and opened it. As I flipped through the pile, my heart beat in double time. On top of the pile of bills, correspondence, and a Presbyterian Life magazine was a letter from Oxford, England. I held the white envelope with the airmail stamp of a young King George in profile, his crown hovering over his head, in my hand. In slanted, tight cursive handwriting, the return address stated C. S. Lewis across the top left corner.
He’d finally written a reply. I ran my gloved finger across his name, and hope rose like an early spring flower in my chest. I needed his advice—my life felt unhinged from the new beliefs I’d thought would save me, and C. S. Lewis knew the Truth. Or I hoped he did.
I slammed shut the metal box, icicles crackling to the ground, and slipped the mail into my coat pocket to navigate the icy walkway. My sons’ quarrelling voices made me glance at our white farmhouse and the porch that stretched across the front—an oasis before entering. Green shutters, like eye shadow on a pale woman, opened to reveal the soul of the house, once pure but now clouded with anger and frustration.
The front door was open, and four-year-old Douglas came running out with Davy, age six, chasing close behind.
“It’s mine. Give it back.” Davy, only an inch taller than his little brother, brown hair tangled from the day’s wrestling and playing, yelled and pushed at Douglas until they both caught sight of me and stopped short, as if I’d appeared out of nowhere.
“Mommy.” Douglas ran to me, wrapping his arms around my soft hips and burying his face in the folds of my coat. “Davy kicked me in the shin,” he wailed. “Then he pushed me on the ground and sat on me. He sat on me too hard.”
Oh, how God loved to make a variety of boys.
I leaned down and brushed back Douglas’s hair to kiss his round cheek. In moments like this my heart throbbed with love for the boys Bill and I had made. Davy’s lithe body and frenetic energy were from Bill, but Douglas’s sensitivity to mean-spiritedness was mine. He’d not yet learned to cover it as I had.
“This is all nonsense.” I rustled Davy’s hair and took Douglas’s hand in mine. “Let’s go inside and make hot chocolate.”
“Yes,” Davy said with gusto and ran for the house.
All the while the letter burned in my pocket. Wait, I told myself. Wait. Expectancy always the thrill before having.
Davy flew through the front door, but not before riling Topsy, who now barked as if to warn us of a monstrous intruder.
“Be quiet, you fluffy mongrel,” I called out, “or you’ll make me sorry I ever rescued you.” I stepped over a pile of toy trucks in the foyer with Topsy fast at my heels. By this time in our lives we’d gathered a menagerie of animals—four cats, two dogs, a bird, and now Davy wanted a snake.
Bill was in his refurbished attic office, typing as fast as his fingers knew how, working on his second novel to pay the bills, which were piling as high as the snow would soon be. The shouting and barking and bedlam must have stirred him from his typewriter, for suddenly there he stood at the bottom of the stairwell.
Douglas cowered, and I reached for his hand. “Don’t worry,” I said softly. “Daddy won’t yell. He’s feeling better.”
Bill’s hands were limp at his side in a posture of defeat. At six foot three inches, my husband often gave me the impression of a reedy tree. His thick, dark hair was swept to the left side like an undulating wave that had collapsed. He was sober now, and his verbal lashings had subsided. AA was doing its job with the Twelve Steps, spiritual sayings, and group accountability.
He pointed at the spilled basket of library books beside the door, then pushed up on his rimless glasses. “You could pick all of that up, you know.”
“I know, sweetie. I will.”
I darted a glance at him. His blue button-down shirt was wrinkled and misbuttoned by one. His blue jeans were loose on him; he’d lost weight over the past months of stress. I, meanwhile, had gained—so much for life being fair.
“I was trying to write, Joy. To get something done in a house so full of disarray I can scarcely focus.”
“Dogs. Kids.” I tried to smile at him. “What a combination.” I walked into the kitchen. I wanted to defuse any anger—the argument that could ensue would be a repeat of a thousand other quarrels, and I wasn’t in the mood. I had a letter, a glimmer of hope in my pocket.
Davy climbed onto a chair and sat at the splintered wooden table and folded his hands to wait. I shook off my coat and draped it on a hook by the door, placing the mail on the kitchen table. Except for the letter. I wanted to read it first. Wanted something to be just mine if only for a small while. I slipped off my gloves and shoved them into the pockets to conceal it. With bare hands I dug into the dirty dishes piled in the sink—another reminder of my inadequacies as a housekeeper—and found the saucepan, crusted with tomato soup from the night before.
This house had once been the fulfillment of a dream. When Bill’s Nightmare Alley was released and Tyrone Power starred in the movie, we’d found ourselves flush with cash for the first time in our lives. It was just enough money to buy this patch of farm upstate. We didn’t know that dreams coming true weren’t always the best thing. That wasn’t what the stories told.
I turned to Davy, my voice full of manufactured cheer. “We might get snow today. Wouldn’t that be great fun?”
“Yes,” he said, swinging his legs back and forth to bang on the underside of the table.
Bill strode into the kitchen and stood by quietly, watching me clean the crusted pot.
“More bills,” he said, rifling through the mail. “Fantastic.”
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.