Becoming Mrs. Lewis(2)

“Joy.” Bill’s voice through the telephone line came so shaky I thought he might have been in a car wreck or worse. “I’m coming undone again and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”

“Bill.” I hugged the black plastic phone against my ear and shoulder, the thick cord dangling, as I bounced our baby son, Douglas, against my chest. “Take a deep breath. You’re fine. It’s just the old fear. You’re not in the war. You’re safe.”

“I’m not fine, Joy. I can’t take it anymore.” Panic broke his voice into fragments, but I understood. I could talk him off this ledge as I had other nights. He might get drunk before it was all over, but I could calm him.

“Come home, Poogle. Come on home.” I used the nickname we had for each other and our children, like a birdcall.

“I’m not coming home, Joy. I’m not sure I ever will.”

“Bill!” I thought he might have hung up, but then I heard his labored breathing, in and out as if someone were squeezing the life out of him. And then the long, shrill, disconnected buzz vibrated like a tuning fork in my ear and down to my heart, where my own fear sat coiled and ready to strike.

“No!” I shouted into the empty line.

I knew Bill’s office number by heart and I called him back again and again, but it rang endlessly while I mumbled a mantra: “Answer answer answer.” As if I had any control from where I stood in our kitchen, my back pressed against the lime-green linoleum counter. Finally I gave up. There was nothing left for me to do. I couldn’t leave our babies and go look for him. He’d taken the car and I didn’t have help. I had no idea where he might be other than a bar, and in New York City there were hundreds.

Isolated, I had only myself to blame. I was the one who’d pushed for a move from the city to this banished and awful place far from my literary friends and publishing contacts. I’d begun to believe that I’d never been a poet, or a novelist, a friend or lover, never existed as anything other than wife and mother. Moving here had been my meager attempt to whisk Bill away from an affair with a blonde in Manhattan. Desperation fuels one to believe idiocy is insight.

Was he with another woman and merely feigning a breakdown? This didn’t seem too farfetched, and yet even his lunacy had its limits.

Or maybe it didn’t.

Our house in the Hudson Valley at the far edge of the suburb of Ossining, New York, was a small wooden abode we called Maple Lodge. It had a sloping roof and creaked with every movement our little family made: Bill; Davy, a toddler who was much like a runaway atom bomb; and Douglas, a baby. It often felt as if the foundation itself were coming undone with our restlessness. I was thirty-one years old, surrounded by books, two cats, and two sons, and I felt as ancient as the house itself.

I missed my friends, the hustle and bustle of the city, the publishing parties and literary gossip. I missed my neighbors. I missed myself.

Night surrounded my sons and me, darkness pressing in on the windowpanes with an ominous weight. Douglas, with his mass of brown curls and apple cheeks, dozed with a warm bottle of milk dangling from his mouth while Davy dragged toy trucks across the hardwood floors, oblivious to the scratches they dug.

Panic coursed through me as I roamed the house, waiting for word from Bill. I cursed. I ranted. I banged my fist into the soft cushions of our tattered couch. Once I’d fed and bathed the boys, I rang my parents and a couple of friends—they hadn’t heard from him. How long would he be gone? What if we ran out of food? We were miles from the store.

“Calm down,” I told myself over and over. “He’s had breakdowns before.” This was true, and the specter of another always hung over our home. I hadn’t been there for his worst one, after a stint in the Spanish Civil War before we met, when he’d attempted what I was frightened of now—suicide. The leftover traumas of war rattling and snaking through his psyche had become too much to bear.

As if I could cure the panic from a distance, I imagined Bill as I met him—the passionate young man who sauntered into the League of American Writers with his lanky frame and the wide smile hooded by a thick moustache. I’d immediately been drawn to his bravery and idealism, a man who’d volunteered and fought where needed in a faraway and torn country. Later I fell deeper in love with the same charming man I heard playing the guitar at music haunts in Greenwich Village.

Our passion overwhelmed me, stunned me in its immediacy as our bodies and minds found each other. Although he was married when we met, he had reassured me: “It was never anything real. It’s nothing like you and me.” We married at the MacDowell artists colony three days after his divorce was final—symbolizing our bond and dedication to our craft. Two writers. One marriage. One life. Now it was that very passion and idealism that tore at him, unhinging his mind and driving him back to the bottle.

Near midnight I stood over the crib of our baby, my heart hammering in my chest. There was nothing, not one thing I could do to save my husband. My bravado crumbled; my ego crashed.

I took in what was quite possibly the first humble breath of my life and dropped to my knees with such force that the hardwood floor sent a jolt of pain up my legs. I bowed my head, tears running into the corners of my mouth as I prayed for help.

I was praying! To God?

I didn’t believe in God. I was an atheist.

But there I was on my knees.