You are not God, and neither are you mine
“SONNET X,” JOY DAVIDMAN
I awoke on Christmas Day and for a long while lay still in the bed thinking of home, of my boys waking with Renee and Bill. I imagined the Christmas tree and wondered if they put it in the galvanized bucket as I’d always done. I imagined Topsy tearing through the wrapping paper, and I almost smelled the bubbling cider on the stove. I’d practically handed my family over to Renee, and here I rested, in an empty bedroom in Oxford.
The fog had rolled back days before, and there was both ice and snow along with wicked gales. Yet every day these men still bundled up and, taking me with them, walked for miles—into Oxford to the Bird and Baby or Blackwell’s Bookshop, up Shotover Hill or into Magdalen’s parks. We walked and how we talked. And laughed so deeply and richly that if it had to last for all my days, I could make it stretch beyond its time.
Two nights earlier we’d gone to a Christmas pantomime, where Jack had sung at the top of his lungs and I had reveled in the silly display like a child.
Still in bed, I could hear the men gathering wood for the fire, murmuring to each other, a sound now familiar.
I rose and dressed, taking time with my appearance for Christmas morning. From my suitcase I withdrew the two gifts I’d bought and wrapped for them—both books—and entered the common room, already warm and smoke-filled. Both men rested in their chairs, Jack reading a book I couldn’t see and Warnie resting with his eyes closed.
We’d decorated over the past week with my urging to chop down the smallest fir from the acreage. Paxford had cut it down for us and hauled it into the room, dropping it into a bucket, temporarily transforming the aroma from smoke to evergreen. We decorated it with popcorn strings and pinecones, making up the silliest songs about the holiday.
“Merry Christmas,” I called out and bent over to put my gifts under the tree.
They both startled, and Jack rose with a stretch. “Feliz Navidad, Joy!”
He went straightaway to the tree and retrieved a package wrapped in brown paper with a red string ribbon. “For you.”
“Wait,” I said. “I have something for you also.”
“Open yours first,” Warnie said and rose to stoke the fire.
I stood for a moment, taking in the room and the Lewis men I had grown to love with such depth. Soon it would be over. I wanted to hold this moment close, tuck it into my heart, because I would need it when I went home.
I took the package from Jack, and then sat in the ragged chair I’d come to think of as mine and opened it slowly. It was a copy of The Great Divorce. I opened the cover to find a quote written in Jack’s now-familiar tight cursive handwriting, the fountain pen ink bleeding into the cotton paper.
There are three images in my mind I must continually forsake and replace by better ones; the false image of god, the false image of my neighbors, and the false image of myself. And then his signature, C. S. Lewis.
I held the book to my chest. “I cannot tell you how much this means to me,” I said. “Where is that quote from?”
“A chapter I never included,” he said with a nod.
“There’s more,” Warnie announced.
“Wait, it’s my turn to give.” I placed my new book on a side table.
From under the tree I brought out gifts for the men. For Jack, The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. Inside I had written a line from G. K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse, but slightly altered for my own influence on the line: And men grow weary of green wine and sick of crimson seas.
For Warnie, a new book of French history from Blackwell’s Bookshop. To Warnie, With great love, Joy.
There aren’t two men who would be more content with such gifts. They perused the books immediately and thanked me as if I’d given them a second home in Oxford.
After a long moment, Jack handed me another gift. This time it was not his own work but Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald—the author we’d both loved in childhood. I stared at the red cover with calligraphy letters spelling out the title, and tears welled in my eyes. I reached under my glasses and wiped them away before opening the cover to see that George MacDonald had signed his name on April 27, 1885. Below George’s signature Jack had written Later: from C. S. Lewis to Joy Davidman. Christmas 1952.
He had gifted me his personal signed MacDonald and signed it to Davidman. Not Gresham.
A flood of gratitude poured through me, settling into the cracks of my pain. I might have been reading signs where signs weren’t meant to be, like the ancient Greeks who believed that the Nine Muses hidden behind the golden cloud influenced their writing and creation. But read the signs I did.
I took a chance I had not yet taken and I went to Jack, put my arms around him, and hugged him tightly. I held to him for longer than he did me and then drew slightly back to look at him, my hands on his shoulders. His eyes, wet with unshed tears, felt like they bore right into my soul.
“Jack, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Joy.”
I let my arms drop to my sides but kept my eyes fixed on his. “You are precious to me. You are a gift.”
He smiled and touched my arm for just a moment. “As you are to me.”
I turned to look at Warnie. “And you too, Warnie. I don’t want to leave you or this place.”
“Don’t think about that now,” Warnie said. “It’s Christmas. There’s much to celebrate.”
Jack flicked ash off his trouser legs and straightened his jacket. “Let’s gather our things and begin the walk to Trinity,” he said. “The Christmas Eucharist begins in thirty minutes.”
I clutched MacDonald’s book to my chest and sent a prayer for my family at home. I felt it rise to the heavens. Then I opened my eyes to Jack and Warnie and all the day might hold.
It was after we returned from church that Jack stopped me in the hallway. “Joy, I must tell you how much your edits and work on O.H.E.L. have meant to me. I’ll be dedicating the book to you.”
“To me?”
He nodded and smiled as if he’d just offered the most beautiful Christmas gift—frankincense or myrrh. And he was right. It was a gift of immeasurable value.
When the men had wandered off for their nap, I found myself alone in the common room. I walked about, picking up framed photos in an effort to glimpse the Jack-of-the-past: the boy, the adolescent, the soldier, the atheist, the man. Seventeen of his years had occurred before I even entered the dingy world of the “Jewish ghetto” in New York City.
There he was—a boy wearing knickers and knee-high black socks, a dress shirt with a triangular white collar, a white whistle lanyard looping down and into his top left pocket. I picked up the photo, ran my finger along the grainy black-and-white of the boy with a mother who loved him and had not yet fallen ill. Then there was another—a young boy, maybe eight years old, standing with his brother in the Irish countryside, both in suits and knotted ties, holding onto their bicycles, staring almost blankly at the camera. Then the soldier with a pipe in his mouth, a roguish smile on his face as if he knew he would survive and that God was fast on his heels. The posed photo of a man of maybe twenty, sitting in a three-piece suit with a book on his lap, gave me quite the thrill. Goodness, he struck such a handsome pose, so trim as he looked directly into the camera, his grin the same, impish and ready for trouble. I loved that young man I never knew. A far-reaching yearning bled backward in time, to a world that existed with Jack in it while I was still young and an ocean away. I pined for the time lost, something and someone I never could have had even then.
I set the past aside and entered the kitchen. I’d volunteered to cook Christmas dinner and half expected the men to retire to the common room or their offices while I bustled about the kitchen. Instead they planted themselves at the wooden kitchen table, regaling me with stories as I basted the turkey and simmered the cranberries, as I lit the stove and chopped the potatoes.
In the lull of another story about Warnie and his childhood happiness at Little Lea, I spoke.
“I once believed that it was Christianity that would finally make me happy.”
“Oh, the history of man looking for something to make himself happy.” Jack smiled.
“Well, I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier than I’ve been today, even with the melancholy of missing of my little boys.”
“If you’re looking for a religion to make you happy, it wouldn’t be Christianity,” Jack said with a laugh. “A bottle of port might do that, but Christianity is rightfully not here to make us comfortable or happy.”
“Cheers to that,” I said and lifted my glass. “Tell me another childhood story.” I poured a cup of burgundy from Magdalen’s wine cellar into the gravy and stirred.
“Wait!” Warnie stood. “You pour wine into gravy?”
I stopped midstir. “You’ve never seen such a thing?”
“Never,” Jack said.
“Well, I’m here to educate you on finer cooking.”
Warnie scoffed with laughter. “Oh, don’t you let Mrs. Miller hear you talk of any finer cooking than hers.”
“I won’t let her hear me, but my goodness, of course there is.”
Silence settled for a moment, and then it was Warnie who answered me first. “My favorite times were the ones when our family would go to the seashore. It was where I fell in love with the ocean. With ships and with mariners.”
“When Mother was alive,” Jack added, in a voice so tender it took great self-control not to put down my whisk and sit before him, take his soft and beautiful face in mine, and kiss every corner of it.
“Let’s not talk of this on Christmas Day,” Warnie said firmly. “Look at that huge turkey. I’m not sure where you found one that size, but in anticipation, let’s imbibe immediately.”
“What we need,” I said, “is some champagne.”
“Oh no.” Jack placed his burgundy glass on the table and lifted his hands in surrender. “Anything but champagne.”
“Who doesn’t like champagne? That seems nearly impossible.”
His brow furrowed between his spectacles, his eyes going distant in the look I’d come to understand meant his mind’s eye had been cast to the past. “It was the Battle of Arras in 1915,” he said, but then fell silent.
This was the first time I’d heard him talk of his time in the First World War. I knew from his writing he’d been a commissioned officer in the Somerset Light Infantry and he’d reached the front line in France on his nineteenth birthday. I could barely imagine his fear, yet he not once had spoken to me of it. That May he’d been injured in the Battle of Arras—these were the facts, but I knew nothing else. I set my wineglass on the counter in a silent urge for him to continue.
“It was during an artillery barrage when I’d taken my men over the parapet.” He shook his head. “A debacle. It was my sergeant who died instead of me.” He blinked slowly, as if all these years later, it still cut deeply in his psyche. What the public saw was a mask, just like any I wore. Behind it was a man who still trembled with sorrows and pain: the death of his mother, the harsh bringing-up at boarding school that had tortured him as a young boy, two wars, his failures at Oxford.
Humankind’s cruelty in its entirety.
“The shrapnel buried into my body and sent me to the hospital. While the cries of other men echoed in my ears, they moved me behind the lines. The only liquor available was champagne, and I swallowed rivers of it. I’ve not been able to abide the taste of it since.”
I stepped closer to him. “I’m sorry for that,” I said. “Blast the champagne then. We shall break out more wine!”
“It’s all in the past,” Warnie said.
“Except when it isn’t,” Jack replied, and they exchanged a look, the kind that only those who know your innermost spirit can read.
“I wish I could scrub the horrid parts of the past clean for both of you.” I paused. “For all of us.”
We were silent for a while longer until I served the food and Warnie lit the candles, and we all began to sing the verse from the Christmas pantomime we’d gone to a few nights before.
Jack first: “Am I going to be a bad boy? No. No. No.”
Warnie next: “Am I going to be awful? No. No. No.”
And then finally my tone-deaf voice joined in: “I promise not to pour the gravy over baby’s head.” And with that I poured the Magdalen burgundy gravy over the turkey and we sat to eat.
We prayed over the meal and lifted our glasses to Christmas Day. Before he took his first bite, Jack reached over and took my hand. “Merry Christmas, Joy.” He ran his thumb over the top of my hand in a motion so innocent and yet intimate that my limbs loosened and my breath was lost.
“Merry Christmas to you too, Jack.”