Jack’s ruddy face turned ruddier, his smile crooked and his eyes averted. “Thank you, Joy.”
“Yes,” Warnie said, and we both looked at him as if we’d forgotten he was there at all. We were deep in our cups, but Warnie, I realized, was sloshed. Adorably so, but sozzled.
For an hour, or maybe it was longer, I lost track of time. The three of us talked about our favorite books, what had influenced our childhoods and our minds, and most importantly what had ignited our imaginations. Our voices grew quiet as we drew closer and closer to each other.
When our yawns overcame our words, we rose to leave. Outside, rain thrashed the sidewalks, blurring the sky with a waterfall veil. Gray skies and bent tree limbs, leaves loosening from their final anchor and swaying to the ground, socked us in. Yet there was nothing in that moment that could dampen my soul. Water dripped into my shoes, filling them as if I’d waded into Crum Elbow Creek.
We bade a soggy farewell with promises of tomorrow. I made it to my little room and collapsed wet as a fish, exhausted but satiated. Before I allowed sleep to steal the memories of the day, I took pen to page and started to write “Ballade of Blistered Feet.”
But my mind was restless. Away from Jack and Warnie, I was back in the guest room, where a letter from Bill sat on my bedside table. My other life rushed in like a tidal wave.
Bill:
Thanks for the story suggestions. I’m working hard to get something together. The boys are doing well and they have enclosed letters here. Davy now has turtles and Douglas is building a fort down at the creek. Renee is keeping us all together—I don’t know what we would do without her. Right now she is mending the boys’ clothes.
Joy:
Dear Collection of Poogles,
I miss you! I wish you could see the complex splendor of this city. I could never, ever grow tired of Oxford and its towering buildings and moss-covered stone. I don’t miss London at all but for the chummy friend I’ve found in Michal Williams. I pray every day for all of you and hope that things are getting better there financially. Bill, once you set your mind to it, I know you’ll find the right story. You have always been talented this way.
P.S. Will you please send my thyroid meds, and a copy of “Longest Way Around”？
As I readied for bed and thought of my sons, I sent a prayer to cover them with love. Oh, how I wanted them to see everything I’d seen that day, let them touch the heather that ran across Shotover Hill, have them feel the rain soft on their faces, raise a kite in the wind at the top of the hill.
Putting the pen and paper aside, I gave up on the poem that memorialized the day. I drew the pillow close—all that was soft for me to hold.
CHAPTER 14
And yet, not too forlorn a memory:
Oxford, autumn leaves, and you, and me
“SONNET VI,” JOY DAVIDMAN
Oxford held ancient secrets, and if I leaned close enough and was quiet, I could hear its whispers, and then maybe even hear my own. In that place I started to feel the contours and edges of my internal landscape, a world that at thirty-seven years old I’d still never quite mapped.
I saw Jack and Warnie every day during that week and a half. When we weren’t together I wandered Oxford, where I’d found a corner in Blackwell’s Bookshop to read or write until my eyes ached for nature. In my letters to home I attempted to describe the landscape, but found myself giving up and walking outside, leaving the letters unfinished on my bedside table at Victoria’s.
In New York I’d spent hours anticipating Jack’s letters—the anticipation to see him now was no less than that waiting, just more pleasant, like being hungry but smelling the meal to be served in the very next room.
For days I’d walked the paths from my room in Victoria’s house on High Street, a cramped room full of dark English furniture too big for the room, dusty and mildewy, but warm enough with her chatty companionship, to the staid elegance of Eastgate and around the green and flower-speckled perimeter of Headington. I climbed to the top of its hill and spied the hummocks and lakes below. Jack’s home—the Kilns—was a three-mile walk along Headington to Kiln’s Lane, but I didn’t venture there. I hadn’t been invited.
On Tuesday afternoon I wandered slowly to meet Jack in his rooms. Students spilled out from the heavy, carved door of Magdalen with books under arms, laughter echoing just as it had in the generations that had come before. Coasting as if I were on a punt in the Cherwell, I passed the deer park and imagined my boys, how they would run through it, battling with imaginary swords, chasing the fallow deer with the huge curved antlers. I closed my eyes and offered a prayer for my sons’ safety.