Becoming Mrs. Lewis(7)

I paused with a desire to take this slowly, thoughtfully, not rush into it as I did nearly everything else, stumbling and falling and getting back up.

My history—that is what he had asked for. It had been too long since anyone cared for more than what was for dinner or if the laundry was finished or the schoolwork done.

Dear Mr. Lewis,

How very wonderful to receive your letter during the frigid cold of the New Year here in New York.


So now? How does one begin to articulate what is only seen dimly by the person who lives it? All my life I’d been seeking the Truth, or at least my version of it. If there was anything I’d always done with single-minded intent, it was this—seek means to soothe my troubled heart.

I’d believed in so much and so little.

I’d ruined myself and saved myself.

This is Mrs. Gresham writing in return. Thank you for answering some of our questions. Most astoundingly, you have knocked the props right out of my argument about longing being something we must battle—your assertion that if we long for something more, then surely that something more must exist (God)—rings as true as the sky above me.

But, by cats and whiskers, you’re not asking me to argue or agree with you. You ask about my history.


I paused, took a breath.

Shouldn’t I be funny and witty? A pen-friend he’d want to answer and engage with in intellectual pursuits? Intelligence was the one thing that had sustained me through the years. As my parents reminded me (and anyone else who would listen), I was not fully bestowed with beauty, grace, or charm. My cousin Renee encompassed that particular set of attributes. She was the pretty one. And wasn’t I smart?

Masks are the hallmark of my life, my theme if you will, the history of Joy. The fa?ade changes have been innumerable, but the aching and emptiness inside have remained steady, which I now believe is the longing that brought me to my knees.


Was this too serious?

No, he had asked.

It was my parents who gifted me with my first mask: a Jew. I was born Helen Joy Davidman. But I have always been called Joy.


I typed as if in a fugue state—pages dented with black ink, the staccato sounds of metal on rubber. When my sons’ calls let me know they’d returned home from school, I typed the last of it.

After the profound conversion experience that shook me from my firm atheist foundation, my soul will not let me rest until I find answers to some of my spiritual questions—questions that will not go away, questions that have every right to nag at me until I find peace. Who is this God I now believe in? What am I to do with this Truth? Was it real at all or have I deluded myself with another cure-all that cures nothing?

Yours,

Joy


When I finished, my heart stretched as if waking from a long and lazy slumber, and a secret hope fell over me. I smiled. Then I whisked the final page from the typewriter and folded the four pages into an envelope.

The winter afternoon howled with a coming storm; my sons played knights fighting for the maiden, my husband closed himself into his office, and I sealed a letter to C. S. Lewis, shedding all my masks.

I wanted him to know me. I wanted him to see me.





CHAPTER 4


And this is wisdom in a weary land;

ask nothing, shut your teeth upon your need

“SELVA OSCURA,” JOY DAVIDMAN


Nineteen months later

August 1951

August shimmered thick with heat and rain as our old Impala, choking on fumes, pulled into Chad and Eva Walsh’s Vermont summer property. After I’d contacted Chad about his article, we’d forged an intellectual and spiritual friendship through phone calls and letters, and then finally his wife and four daughters visited our farm in upstate New York. The Walshes had become dear friends.

Davy and Douglas bounced around the back seat, weary from the long drive and hungry, as they’d eaten all their well-packed snacks before we crossed the New York state line. Bill’s hands were tense on the silver steering wheel as we entered a lush landscape of craggy rocks and moss-crusted trees, of thick, wild fields and a crystalline lake winking in the sunlight.

We’d both agreed, this trip to visit Chad and Eva held some promise of reprieve.

Yet even that morning Bill had balked. “Do you want to spend this vacation with Chad because he’s close to Lewis?” he asked as we packed.

“That’s absurd.” I stood at the end of the bed with my open suitcase half full.

Bill opened a dresser drawer and then turned back to me. “He’s the one who told you to write to Lewis in the first place.”

“Bill,” I said and stepped closer to him, “Chad is the foremost scholar on Lewis in the United States. He’s a professor. And like us, he’s a middle-in-life convert. He’s a dear friend to you as much as to me. If you don’t want to go on this vacation, we won’t go. Just tell me now.”

Bill kissed me dryly, missing my mouth to land on my cheek. “We need to get out of here. We need a break,” he said. “Vermont might be just the trick.”

Joy:

Mr. Lewis, I feel lost in what Dante calls a “dark wood, where the road is wholly lost and gone.” Motherhood is selfless. Writing is selfish. The clash of these two unyielding truths creates a thin tightrope, one I fall off of daily, damaging all of us.

Yet my garden has been sustenance. Has yours yet blossomed?