The few minutes’ stroll down High Street was familiar enough to make me feel as if I almost belonged.
“Does Mr. Lewis know you’re coming?”
“I told him.” I squeezed her arm tighter. “We’ll see. He might be too busy to even notice us.”
“How many people could possibly come to hear a lecture on Hooker?”
“With Jack as the speaker, I suspect many.”
We strolled down the leaf-strewn pathways to one of the other colleges in Oxford—Christ Church, fondly called “The House.” We only had to ask two students where the Senior Common Room was before we found it—a cozy, dark room where the dons went to smoke. By the time we arrived we realized we wouldn’t be able to see Jack. There wasn’t enough space even to enter. Disappointment swamped me.
Victoria stood on her tiptoes to peek and then nudged at all five feet two of me, who couldn’t see over anything or anyone. “Guess I was wrong about how many people want to hear this,” she said.
It was then that the crowd, like a wave, began to move toward us. “Excuse me,” a short bald man in a black robe said. “We’re moving to the lecture hall.”
Buoyed then, Victoria and I trailed behind the crowd into a larger room with a pulpit at the very front. I felt like a student, and rather liked it. We found seats in the back row and settled in next to each other. Murmurs filled the room, conversation rising and falling until Jack appeared.
It was difficult to see him beyond the group of large, bearded men in front of us, but Jack’s image was with me, everything from his smile to the glimmer in his eyes to the tap-tap-swing of his walking stick to the jacket with the worn elbow patches.
Another man in a robe （they were all beginning to look alike） stepped to the lectern to introduce C. S. Lewis and his subject: Hooker, the great Anglican theologian of the 1500s who had broken away from the theology of predestination.
Jack stood, as I’d now seen him do a few times, with his hands behind his back, where I was certain he would be worrying his thumbs back and forth. His bright eyes behind his rimless spectacles moved across the room as if taking it all in, one face at a time. I watched with fondness, marveling at his warm familiarity, at the sheer wonder of how we’d become friends. Who was he looking for? Then, with a great surge of delight, I knew for whom he searched—because when his sight rested on me, his smile burst into such a sunbeam that I felt its warmth. I gave him a little wave, and he nodded.
In that moment, all sense of rejection crumbled like ancient armor. Certain emotions can be hidden, but a smile like that can’t disguise a heart—he was as connected to me as I was to him—friendship of the highest order.
Victoria leaned over to me and whispered, “He was looking for you, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, I believe he was.”
She made a soft noise that sounded like a hum and squeezed my hand.
Jack stepped to the podium and cleared his throat. The lecture was informative and witty, and I hadn’t expected anything less. When Jack used his Oxford lecturing voice, I could almost forget he was a Belfast man. But then he turned on that charm, and the Irish in him was unmistakable as he captured the room.
When it was over, Victoria and I sat still, allowing the people to move past us. As the crowd thinned, Jack slowly wound his way to the back of the room to greet us. Our talk was pleasant, quick and interrupted by men who needed his attention. But it didn’t matter what he said; it was his smile I’d carry with me through the rest of the day.
Once back in the hazy, cold air of Oxford’s November, Victoria and I walked to town. It was always in the smallest moments that I understood larger truths, if I paid attention. And as we walked in rhythm side by side, the sunlight falling thin and straight through the naked branches, I burrowed into this happy feeling, asking myself what it really was about.
Acceptance.
The word winged its way toward me. And I realized that I could live a better life without the ill-rooted feelings of dismissal that slithered within me, without the curdled knowledge that I wasn’t or couldn’t ever be enough. Those were lies I believed. It was Jack’s smile that broke me free, if only for that moment, and I would carry the remembrance of it always. I would tack that brightness to my heart as a placard.
“You’re in an awfully good mood,” Victoria said as we ambled the sidewalks of High Street.
“I am.” I laughed as I pulled her into the Bird and Baby, where we drank whiskey, talked, and laughed until I needed to catch the bus back to London.