Becoming Mrs. Lewis(89)

“Just read, Mommy.” Davy pulled the covers up to his chin.

With a low voice, I began. “‘There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious . . .’”

My sons rested in bed as I read, but I knew their imaginations were elsewhere, in a land through a wardrobe where a false Aslan reigned.

“Go on, Mommy,” Davy said. “One more chapter.”

Always one more chapter.

I kissed them good night before joining Jack in the common room, the words ready on my tongue to tell him how the boys were enthralled with the new story, but on my way out of the room, I paused beside a photo in a tarnished silver frame that sat on the hall table. I’d passed it many times and turned away—an older woman with white hair and a look of scorn upon her tight mouth. Beside her sat a younger girl with lush dark hair. Bruce II, the predecessor to Bruce III, sat upon their laps in what appeared to be the backyard of the Kilns. Janie and Maureen Moore. I don’t know what caused me to pause that evening, or why it seemed time to dig into the past with a shovel when I had let the dirt on top of this phase of his life rest long enough.

After the intimacy of the past days, for the first time I attempted to imagine Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen. But my mind failed me—I had no reference to see two other women in the house. Jack and Warnie, as undefended with me as an eternal hallway of flung-open doors, had never once discussed the two women who had lived some twenty-odd years at the Kilns.

Twice her name had come up in casual conversation, and twice Jack had changed the subject, and a cloud, a dark cloud, had passed over Warnie’s face. I was adept at ignoring things—I’d done it for most of my marriage. I knew the drill: if it was too much or too difficult to look at, you just turned away, pasted on a smile, and went about your day.

But we’d come too far now, Jack and I. I had to ask. I entered the common room to see him, his spectacles sitting atop the end of his nose, as his head had bobbed down while reading. He wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t awake either. I’d try. Just try.

“Jack.” I said his name in a whisper. If he opened his eyes, I’d ask. If he didn’t, I wouldn’t try again.

“Yes?” His head rose slowly, his forefinger pushing his spectacles back to his eyes.

“Am I staying in Mrs. Moore’s room?”

He ran both hands across his face and sighed. “We were to talk of this one day, weren’t we?”

“Yes, I suppose we were.” I sat before him and leaned forward, my hands on my knees so I could be closer, look closer. What I cared most was that this relationship had possibly soured him on true love, on the sensuous pleasures of a body pressed against his—as if it were wrong or in the end must be paid for with great and heavy duty.

Had Janie ruined it for me? For us? Or was I merely and always looking for a reason that we were only friends?

Jack stood and moved to poke the dying fire. “Joy. I fulfilled a promise, and whatever emotions or leftover feelings I have about how it all . . .” He turned to me, his hands clasped behind his back as I’d seen him do when he was nervous. “I don’t believe Mrs. Moore’s situation has much to do with us.”

“But it does.”

“I made a choice. I was young, and my friend Paddy had been killed in the war. I made it out; I was alive. Whether it was foolish or prudent or sensible, it matters little now. I promised Paddy I would care for his mother and sister.” He drew closer to me, looked down as the firelight behind him created a nimbus around his body.

Then he moved, only half a step, and the angelic countenance was gone; what remained was a man battling the words he needed to say or not say about the nature of his relationship with a woman who had died years earlier: a woman who may or may not have been his lover, but had definitely been his obligation.

“Please, Jack.”

He cleared his throat. “Now it is only a historical question; I fulfilled my responsibility, and, Joy, she is gone. The decisions I made as a young man, hedonistic and believing my actions right and true based on feelings I carried then, are regrettable now.”

It was all he would say. I could see that, but of course I wanted more. Did he love her? Was she a mother replacement? Was she a lover? Deep down I knew the answer, of course—she was all of those things. There was no separation in these matters—no either/or; nothing was truly black or white.

Jack took a breath and said, “When I submitted to God’s will, I changed, but my obligation remained. That is why she lived here. It is Warnie who has held on to the anger. He says his private life was hardly ever at peace with ‘that senseless woman in the house.’” Jack imitated the slightly stronger Irish brogue of his brother. “Warnie believed her to be a horror. He is adamant that I could have written much more without her here. And I do believe he is right. But we’ve avenged that; there’s no need to hold on to the anger as he does.”

“What does that mean? Avenged?”

“It’s over.” He opened his palms to the ceiling. “Look at what we have been given, Joy. See the happiness of our life now?”

I did see, but the vengeful part of me wanted to find Janie Moore in the past and throttle her for whatever damage she had done to the man I loved. And again I saw a comrade in Warnie, another who felt the same as I did.

Frustration overwhelmed, and the words blurted from the deepest part of me. “You keep your heart hidden very well. You close that door and make sure no one opens it even a crack to see what is stored inside.”