As movers and trucks came to dismantle my life piece by piece, I felt I was crumbling along with the rotten wood on the porch. But it was the piano that broke me open to tears. I hadn’t played it in years, and yet when they came to load it, I sat on the bench before my Steinway and began to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. My fingers remembered the score and fluttered over the keys, heartache thrust upon the ivory and ebony as the music came alive. My sons watched with clenched fists, as if they would fight someone to keep the instrument.
The movers, two large men sweating in the late-August heat, watched me too and didn’t move.
“Ma’am,” one said, “would you like us to leave this?”
“It can’t be taken on a ship,” I said. “It has to go.”
“Mommy?” Davy came to sit next to me on the piano bench. He wiped my wet face with his small hand. “Don’t cry. Remember that story you told us? The one about the man waiting in the forest? Think about that instead.”
Oh, the wisdom of small children.
One sad night after the house had sold, I’d told them a story of two young children lost in the woods who stumbled upon the house of a shepherd—an ivy-covered cottage that very much resembled the Kilns, a pond that very much imitated their lake, and an old man who looked very much like Jack. It had been my way of telling my boys that yes, we were lost and scared, but we would find our way.
Now it was my son who comforted me with the same story.
As Jack had written to me, the world holds a long sordid history of man searching for happiness in everything but God.
No more would I do so—or at least that was my intent, an intent I would again and again forget and again and again remember. I gently closed the piano top and then stood. I turned my back to avoid seeing the men take my Steinway, and we set off to the creek. The boys fished for carp, and I picked apples from the orchard for the last time.
Joy:
Dear Jack and Warnie,
I have done it. The house is sold and we shall be in London come November.
Jack:
This is jolly news, the best I’ve heard in weeks. Between sinus infections and examinations and student demands, I have been fathoms deep. We shall see you soon. And as you know, if there is any kind of help that you need, Warnie and I are here for you.
In October my sons and I moved into a boarding house on the winter-whipped bay in New Rochelle, New York, where we shared a kitchen with other women, bided our time, and waited for our departure on November 13.
I prayed fervently, out loud, silently, all day. Whatever kinds of prayers there were, I prayed them. Begging. Repenting. All of them to carry us toward a new life. While my boys played on the sandy beach, foraging for shells and discovering sea life carcasses as treasure, I prepared for the journey. Bill had finally ceased fighting our leaving, exhausted in his own right as I was, and he promised that money would be waiting for us at Phyl’s house.
It seemed impossible, but my entire life’s belongings had been distilled to this—four trunks, three suitcases, and tickets to England on the SS Britannic for an eight-day journey to London.
PART IV
ENGLAND
November 1953–July 1960
ASLAN
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what
Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about
safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, C. S. LEWIS
CHAPTER 32
I wish you were the woman, I the man;
I’d get you over your sweet shudderings
“SONNET XXXVII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
November 1953
England embraced us with cold, foggy arms. Douglas had turned eight years old on the Britannic in the midst of a gale fierce and wild. He’d clung to me and wondered in dramatic fashion if we would make it to the port alive. Well, we did. Alive and bedraggled and quite nervous.
Life is ahead.
Whatever dreams or fantasies I’d formulated of our romantic arrival in England evaporated in the soggy air as Davy stood on the dock and declared, “I don’t like it here. It’s ugly and cold.”
I’d arranged for us to stay at Avoca House Hotel, near Phyl and her son, Robyn, in the convenient London neighborhood I’d already come to know. When we arrived, Davy clung to me in fear and Douglas was wide-eyed with hesitant wonder. My sons hid behind me as we entered the boarding house, seeking tea and biscuits on our first morning.
“Mommy, I want to go home.” Davy’s voice cracked under the exhaustion and unfamiliarity.
“Davy.” I cupped his chin in my hands as the clerk came to check us in and give us our key. “This is home.”