Becoming Mrs. Lewis(119)
Let me tell you my side of the story.
I read on with an invisible hand around my throat.
He told Jack that when I’d left five years ago, I’d been “disturbed.” He claimed my mind had been a mess and my heart set on Jack. He wrote that I’d never made very much of my writing career and that he’d supported me in the Presbyterian Life articles so that I could feel good about myself. He claimed I left my boys too long (he was right), and that when I’d returned I’d been both angry and hostile. And there was more. His bitterness was so palpable it thrummed off the page and into my body, an electric current.
Bill ended with this.
There is nothing more my sons need than their dad.
I closed my eyes and then dropped the pages to the floor, and Jack allowed them to scatter like trash. “No.”
“We won’t let him, Joy. We will not allow it.”
Grief began to heave within me, then made way for anger. My eyes flew open and I attempted to sit, for a moment forgetting that I was bedbound. The traction pulleys clanged against each other in protest, and a knife-pain sliced down my left thigh. But anger won and I slammed my fist into the mattress.
“His accusations, Jack. What a woman that must be for all of those things to be true. A horrible woman. One I wouldn’t want to even know, much less be.”
“It’s Bill’s way of telling a story he needs to believe.” Jack’s voice low and quiet, a balm.
“And nothing of his affair with my cousin? His anger or his rages or his alcoholism and breakdowns? His suicide threats that kept us captive? He doesn’t say why I might have been angry when I returned home? Only that I was bitter and what else . . . violent? What a farce.”
Jack rested his hand on my arm. “Joy.”
I took in a long breath.
“Please get me a pad of paper and a pen. I must write back.”
“I already wrote to him.”
“Then I’ll add to it, Jack. I can’t let him leave this as a legacy, these pages of lies.” Tears flooded my eyes, and I wiped furiously at them. “I’m tired of crying. Of hurting. I want only love now. Only love. It should be all that remains.”
“That is what we have.” He kissed me again and reached for the poetry book. I closed my eyes, let the hostile fury ride its wave, and listened to Jack quote Wordsworth. “‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’”
Inside my mind I heard Bill, but when I opened my eyes to Jack, I knew that whatever Bill believed or whatever he’d written did not and could not affect the love that breathed between Jack and me.
I understood for the first time the apostle Paul’s words, “Death, where is your sting?”
CHAPTER 55
Beyond the foaming world; here is the chart
Of the last journey, past the last desire
(LAST SONNET, LAST LINE)
“SONNET XLIV,” JOY DAVIDMAN
June 1957
“Your cancer has been arrested.”
These words fell so casually from the mouth of the doctor in the white coat and tortoiseshell spectacles that I thought I might have misheard him.
I sat in my wheelchair with Jack standing at my side and stared at the drops of dried blood on the doctor’s sleeve, his stethoscope hanging from his neck like a dead snake, as the words sank into my consciousness with soft mercy.
“Arrested?” Jack and I asked simultaneously.
The man nodded, his brows knit together in confusion. “Not healed. But the disease has been arrested. Your bones are solid as a rock, at least for now.” He paused and fiddled with his stethoscope. “We don’t understand. If you’d like to call it a miracle you could. But it is not what we expected. You, Mrs. Lewis, are growing new bone. Your body is depositing calcium into your bone, strengthening it. Honestly, when we sent you home we didn’t have any other plan but to keep you comfortable. Death was imminent.”
“But it isn’t now.” My voice didn’t rise with a question. “It isn’t imminent now.”
“No, not from this cancer, it is not.”
Jack and I had come to the orthopedic hospital for my monthly checkup, girded as always for the worst news. Jack, Warnie, and I had reached a grieving acceptance, but on that day we were granted a reprieve. We hoisted our hearts onto that life raft and held tight to each other. Jack bent over my wheelchair, his lips on mine, and a burst of laughter after the kiss. “Bloody good news.”
It was early evening in the common room when the truth flooded me—it was a miracle. “You took my pain,” I said to Jack in stunned realization, the truth taking my breath. “Your doc, Old Lord Florey, told you that you have a quite obscure case of osteoporosis, while now we discover that I’m healing.”
Not only had Peter Bide prayed over me, but also Jack, asking to be my substitute. Was there a greater love?
“What?” Jack was red-faced and groaning, strapping a body brace around his waist to support his back. I perched in my wheelchair with a bright metal caliper that held my leg fast in its straight position.
It had been six months since my diagnosis, three months since they’d sent me home to die. We had been told to prepare and pray. But one by one the accoutrements of illness had fallen away: first the pain pills were banished, and then the trapeze above my head gone, then the night nurse fired (she was dreadful as it was). After that, when Jack was at Cambridge, I began sitting to crochet and knit, to write letters and welcome visitors, perched on my bed with our poodle, Suzie, and old cat, Tom. Then came the day when I was able to sit in a wheelchair while Jack wheeled me outside. I’d wept with relief in the pure June air, the fragrance of the pine and spruce, the wet ground and fecund earth. Then eventually I had walked there, with a limp of course—my left leg now three inches shorter than my right.