Once Upon a Wardrobe(14)

Six

The Ruined Castle




We knew George was sick the day he was born. I was nine years old, and Mum and Dad had been trying to have another baby for many years. Mum went into labor so quickly that cold November day of 1943, while the war raged through Europe and the Vatican was bombed. George was born in Mum and Dad’s bed—not nearly enough time to rush to hospital.

And then a boy! A beautiful boy with eyes so blue they radiated like small round oceans from his face.

But he was too soft, too . . . floppy. Weren’t babies supposed to be squirmy and round-about in your arms? Not George. Yet the sweetest spirit emanated from that body.

His weak lungs and pale complexion, his limp arms and legs, had specialists rolling in and out of our warm cottage, all uttering the same doomed answers. It was George’s heart. There was nothing to be done. Blood didn’t go to the right place. It was weak. After doctors poked and prodded and tested and x-rayed, the doctors warned Mum and Dad George would most likely not see his fifth birthday.

But he had, and three more after it.

His life was contained by the spaces in and around our house—the kitchen and keeping room, the garden, and once in a while, at his best, a trip to the village for church and picnics. Activities were planned based on how he felt. On a strong day we went on long walks while I pulled him in a wagon. On weak days he stayed in bed and slept and read and was read to. We never knew what kind of day it would be, but winter days were the worst. The frigid cold seized his lungs, so he didn’t much go outside. I was grateful for Narnia, for it took him outside in his mind, as did all the stories he loved. Winter was the time for stories of journeys and quests, of adventure and travel. The Enchanted Wood. Jack and the Beanstalk. Winnie-the-Pooh. Little People of the Woods. The Wind on the Moon.

Stacks of books.

Stacks of adventure.

I’d read none of them, of course. But I was content that they helped George.

Sometimes in the middle of winter’s dark afternoon I would find him in the chair that usually sat next to his bed, but he’d have scooted it to the window. There he stood upon it with his nose pressed to the glass, his breath fogging the pane. It was then that I remembered that his world, although stuck with ours, was his own altogether. Whatever was in his mind—matters of adventure, sorrow, or comfort, I could never fully know. Whatever he saw out the window, or whatever he wanted to see out the window, was his alone.

At seventeen years old, I left for Oxford after earning a scholarship for my understanding of the theory of relativity from Albert Einstein, a teacher who had visited Oxford three times. I could grasp his formulas just as clearly as day. Einstein’s equations changed the world, and I wanted to be a part of that new world, where numbers and equations unraveled mysteries.

But stories? Those were for George. Books kept him occupied, and I do believe alive, during the long convalescence between each worsening bout. Stories and fairy tales allowed him to be another person, another child, another being. He could leave his bed and soar above the stars, or roar like a lion, or fall fast into a river and swim like a fish. Mum allowed him the luxury, but Dad turned away from the fairy tales.

I loved Dad with a fierce love, but I loved George more. Maybe when we know we will lose someone, we love fiercer and wilder. Of course there will always be loss, but with George the end lingered in every room, in every breath, in every holiday.

That December night at our cottage, before I give George Mr. Lewis’s second story, darkness falls in a quick way—one minute a golden light resting against the window, then the black of a moonless and cloudy night.

I return to George’s room while Mum and Dad talk about business, the ledgers of the market. George sits awake, reading again, the same book with four children riding on a lion’s back under a bough of leaves. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Instead of sitting in the chair, I scoot him over and slide in next to him on the soft bed.

“Mum is going to come in and make me say my prayers and go to sleep,” he says. “So hurry.”

“There’s no hurrying these stories,” I say with a grin and open the notebook. I change my voice, add more singsong. “Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago.” I pause and look sideways at him.

“And not very far away,” he says and we both laugh.

*

George listens as his sister resumes reading the pages in her black notebook. Megs is so beautiful, and he knows the light in her eyes is her love for him. It makes him feel that no matter what happens, he will be okay, and so will she.

“Now,” she says, “it is 1908, and we are still in Little Lea in Belfast. Jack is almost ten years old and Warnie is twelve.”

His sister loves her facts, but again his mind spins toward the story like he’s been transported to Ireland, a place he’s never visited except in stories and photographs. He sees a young boy on his knees next to a bed in a room with a wide window framing a murky night.

Please, God, save my mother. Save her now. Make her well. I cannot live without her.

Jack was on his knees on the cold hard wood, his knees aching. He squeezed his eyes shut so tight that he felt his eyebrows slide down as he uttered the prayer again and again.

The aroma of ethers—a smell that bit the back of his throat—seeped into his room. Jack was missing his brother more than ever, feeling more alone than ever. He was praying because downstairs, on the beautiful wooden kitchen table where Mother usually kneaded dough or sat with a book or cut a loaf of bread, she lay unconscious, having surgery.