All would be well, I believed. As Jack’s favorite mystic Julian of Norwich told us: All will be well. All manner of things shall be well.
CHAPTER 22
I made my words the servants of my lust.
Now let me watch unwinking, as I must
“BLESSED ARE THE BITTER THINGS OF GOD,” JOY DAVIDMAN
December 1952
A rustle outside my Nottingham hotel room stirred me, and I rose from the kitchen table where I’d been working on edits in O.H.E.L. to see that a white envelope had been slipped under the doorway. I wrapped my robe tighter and shivered. The frigid air that felt as if it went bone deep was the only thing that caused me to shudder at England. I bent down to retrieve the paper: finally, a new letter from Bill. I smiled at the expectancy of a witty correspondence with news from home and maybe a little money to eat more than boiled potatoes and canned soup.
I put the kettle on, tipped a tea ball into the china cup, and opened the envelope. I glanced at the pile of other letters I’d received since arriving in England. Chad Walsh. Marian MacDowell. Belle Kauffman. My publisher, Macmillan, and my agency, Brandt and Brandt. My Davy and my Douglas. A life in letters, a stack of them wrapped with twine. Of course there was only one letter from Mother. I had expected nothing more, but hope dies hard. Alongside the letters sat the mound of my work—both my own writing and Jack’s—as if all my life were made of words typed on a page.
I sat to read.
Bill:
Dear Joy,
I admit to my cool tone.
Ah, I wasn’t crazy.
Then he wrote of money troubles, but how much he’d been working through it with Renee’s help in the house. The kids, they missed me but were doing well—neighborhood parties and outdoor activities.
Then the proclamations were set down, one after the other in quick and unrelenting succession.
I must tell you the truth of our lives here also—Renee and I are in earthshaking love. We are blissfully happy and feel that we are more married than in our marriages. I know this must come as a hurt and a shock, but you and I both know that willpower cannot make you love me or me love you. Being writing partners and having a companionable friendship does not make a marriage work.
And to state the obvious, Poogle, you don’t much want to be a wife. You will never be anything but a writer. Renee cares about the things I do—making a home, taking care of all the children and her man. You could promise to try harder or attempt to be more like Renee, but we both know you would go insane.
Bill was both blunt and articulate, as if writing an appendix for his novel. His words were like a great bludgeoning hammer.
He suggested that I find someone to fall in love with in Staatsburg, and then we could live near each other and raise the kids together. Oh, he was even so kind as to suggest that he could wait to marry Renee until I too fell in love, of course with someone convenient and near.
And, could I believe, he didn’t see anything sinful in “attaining the maximum love with Renee”？
Nausea boiled. The cold felt colder, the bare floor rougher. How had I held this understanding at bay? Maybe I hadn’t. Maybe the past weeks of anxiety had been nothing more than this knowing breeding inside.
He ended by telling me not to feel “forsaken and unloved, Poogle.” But what the blazing else was I supposed to feel? I was a teenager and overweight, and my mom forbade me to wear the dress that made me look fat. I was in love with my professor, and he slept with me and went home to his wife. I was standing outside the circle of beautiful girls in college who knew how to giggle and flirt. I was reading a horrific review of my novel. Jack told me of my manly attributes and joked of his love for blondes. I relived all these moments in one fell swoop of the grand forsakenness Bill told me not to feel, each memory rising to join anger and rejection. My cousin? My beautiful cousin and best friend?
I slammed my hand on the table, typewritten pages of O.H.E.L. falling to the floor.
Bill ended the letter with the announcement that he wouldn’t carry my sons to the docks to pick me up in a few weeks, but they were excited I was returning home. The end of the letter was filled with chatter as casual as if he’d told me he loved a new car or book, not my cousin.
I sank to the kitchen chair and wondered what the annoying high-pitched scream above me could be when I realized it was the kettle. I rose in a daze and mindlessly poured the boiling water over the tea ball, bounced it up and down, dropped in two cubes of sugar, and took a sip. I cradled the cup and drank, tears as hot as tea rolling down into the corners of my mouth before I knew I was weeping.