Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

No matter your age, may you never, ever grow too old for fairy tales. Mhamó

Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said. C. S. Lewis

December 1950 Worcestershire, England

George Henry Devonshire is only eight years old and he already knows the truth. They don’t have to tell him: the heart he was born with isn’t strong enough, and they’ve done all they can. And by they, he means the doctors and nurses, his parents, and his older sister, Megs. If they could save him, if they could give their own life for him, they would. He knows that too. But they can’t.

Next to him is a dark oak table with pill bottles and a glass of water and a gone-cold cup of tea that his mum left behind. Among all of that clutter is a book, just published, called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.

Now he believes adults don’t know what’s what any more than he does. But the man who wrote this book—this storybook that transports George out of his bedroom and into Narnia—this man knows something. What that something might be is a mystery.

George is waiting for his Megs to come home for the weekend from university so he can tell her about this remarkable book, about this white land where it is always winter but never Christmas, where animals can talk and the back of a wardrobe opens to another world. He loves Megs more than all the words he has to describe the feeling.

He places both hands on the thick handles and opens the heavy doors. There isn’t a looking glass on the outside of this wardrobe like there is in the book, just carvings of trees and birds. The doors creak and George spies his few pieces of clothing hanging there. (A boy who lives mostly in bed doesn’t need very many shirts and pants.)

“I need you to do something for me.” He sounds like an old man, or if not old, then just like Dad. “Anything.” I drop into the hard, wooden chair next to his bed. “Have you ever seen him?” he asks. “Seen who?” “The man who wrote about Narnia. The man who wrote the book.” “C. S. Lewis. Yes, I do see him quite often. He walks quickly with his pipe and his walking stick along High Street and Parks Road, as if he’s always late for something.” “I need you to ask him a question.”

“What do you want me to ask him?” “Where did Narnia come from?” “I don’t understand.” “Have you read it?” He asks as if his question is the answer. I shake my head. “It’s a book for children. I’m consumed with physics and the way numbers hold together the universe. I’m learning about Einstein’s theories and . . . I haven’t had time to read some children’s book.”

It’s not a children’s book. It might look like it on the cover, but it’s a book for everyone. Please, Megs. I need to know if Narnia is real.”

“Alice,” he says. “This is different. I know you think the whole world is held together by some math formula.” His voice has an unaccustomed annoyance in it. “But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the world is held together by stories, not all those equations you stare at.” He’s rarely angry, and this might not even be anger but something sparks up like a quick flame.

“Please. Just ask Professor Lewis, Megs. This book of his is different. It’s as real as Dad’s apple tree outside, as real as Mum’s flowers, surely as real as this house. I need to know where it came from.” George doesn’t have to say any more, because I realize the answer he wants means life and death to him. If my little brother needs to know where Narnia came from, I will find out. “I will ask him. I promise.”

I mean to read for just a few minutes, to show him I’m not such a prig about math, that I can read a fairy tale as well as anyone else. A few minutes, I said. Just a few. But when I look up hours later, having missed the train, and the final pages resonant in the room with my tears blurring the last lines, I understand my brother. I understand it all. We must, absolutely must, find out where Narnia came from.

“I thought you were asleep, silly boy.” “No! How could I possibly sleep in the middle of a story? I was just . . . in the story. Which isn’t sleep at all but something brighter and . . .” “In the story?” “Yes. Don’t you do the same?” “No, I don’t think so.” “When I read a story or you tell me one, I can go into them.”

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’”

‘Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning.’”

Jack was missing his brother more than ever, feeling more alone than ever. He was praying because downstairs, on the beautiful wooden kitchen table where Mother usually kneaded dough or sat with a book or cut a loaf of bread, she lay unconscious, having surgery. Unimaginable. Too much to understand. They called it cancer.

“With stories, I can see with other eyes, imagine with other imaginations, feel with other hearts, as well as with my own. Stories aren’t equations.”

“I realize that. I just thought . . . Well, I don’t want my brother to escape into fantasy, that is to say, to believe something is true that isn’t.” The brothers look at each other as if deciding who will tell me how very wrong I am.

There is false hope everywhere, and I want to give George the kind of hope that is good and tru...

“Miss Devonshire,” Mr. Lewis says and looks out the window as if what he wants to say dances in that dormant winter garden. “The fantastic and the imaginative aren’t escapism.”

“Good stories introduce the marvelous. The whole story, paradoxically, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual world. It provides meaning.” “Yes,” Warnie says. “It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world.”

‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’”

I don’t think Mr. Lewis wants us to do that, to assign the things of his life to the things of his story. I think, if I’m guessing right, he wants us to see that stories are all tangled together. Like physics theories that are true and contradictory at the same time.”

George climbs into bed with the bag that holds the sketchpad and pencils. He spills the colored pencils onto the bright quilt and lets out a sound of glee. I watch him. The thing is, I want a miracle for George. I want something or someone like Aslan to prowl through the door and save us, save us from the sorrow and the pain and the absolute loneliness of it all.

“Where’s Dad?” I ask. “He comes home so late now. It’s hard for him to be here because he can’t fix things, and he’s a man who fixes things. He loves us so much, but he doesn’t know how . . .”

“I heard you today. That was a scary story. There’s no reason George needs to know about a young boy losing his mother or going to a dreadful boarding school. That is just awful, and I want George to be happy, to hear good stories.” “But it is a good story, because that same boy grows up to be the man who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s a good story I am telling George because Jack was brave, and he became the man who . . .” I don’t know how to articulate what I mean so I sit quietly for a minute. We both do. “Mum, all fairy tales have a bad part. They all have a scary part. George knows that. It helps him to know that.”

“Mr. Lewis has been telling me stories to write down for my brother, but maybe, now that I look at it, they’re also stories for me. He doesn’t say what he means by them. He just tells little tales of his life, and when I leave, somehow I know more about the world and my own life.

“That’s what he talks about the most,” Mum says. “Aslan.” “Yes, I think he’s God . . . or maybe supposed to be God. But Mr. Lewis doesn’t actually say.

“Megs, forgive me for saying you shouldn’t tell your brother stories. You tell him anything Mr. Lewis tells you. I don’t know the right answer to anything these days.” “Neither do I, Mum. I don’t know if anyone does. Only math problems seem to have right and wrong answers, far as I can tell lately.”

She squeezes my fingers before she lets go to chop the carrots. Because even with the dark parts and the light parts and the good parts and the bad parts, dinner must still be served.

“I want my own adventure. I want to go to Ireland. I want to see it.” I play along. “Okay, what do you want to see in Ireland?” “I want to see Dunluce Castle, where Jack’s mum took him on holiday before she died. I want to see the wild sea and the ruins. I want to . . . feel it.” George lifts his face as if the bursts of Irish air swell and rise around our tiny cottage in the middle of the English countryside.

When I solve a problem or equation that seems impossible, it’s like there’s some kind of light breaking through, or the knowing leads to some kind of satisfaction . . . and maybe joy. Or when I walk outside on a spring afternoon and the first crocus is born from the snow and the sunlight runs across the spider webs like messengers from tree to tree, that’s when I remember something, something I’ve forgotten and is waiting for me, something larger than me. And then it’s gone. And I want it back. I think that’s what Mr. Lewis is talking about.” “Like when you finish a story and you wish you could read it like you’d never read it before. Like you want to read it for the first time again,” George says.

“I also asked him what his favorite parts of the Norse myths were.” “And?” “He said ‘Northernness,’ and then he said ‘tragedy.’” “Yes,” George said as if Mr. Lewis’s wisdom had reached out and beyond the countryside, past the trees and then over the train tracks, and landed smack in the middle of the common room at the Kilns. “Tragedy.”

“You know what Einstein says about imagination, don’t you, Megs?” “No.” “I went with Dad to one of his lectures, and Einstein said that the true sign of intelligence was not knowledge but imagination.”

“It’s all a mystery, Megs. The stories and where they come from. Physics and how the universe works. We’re privileged to try to figure it out, whether it’s a story or a math equation.” “Surely you know physics is more important than fiction?” This is an absurd discussion. I can rightly enjoy a good story, but thinking novels are the same as Einstein’s and Newton’s theories is absurd. “I think they are neither more important nor less important,” he says to my surprise. “No. Not one bit.”

“You are ignoring imagination; you need it for your work too. But I can’t really understand my life without stories. They offer me . . . they offer all of us the truth in their myths, mysteries, and archetypes.”

Advances in science will happen because of people like my father and you, but it’s not everything, you know? You can’t measure everything. And there is more than one way of understanding our lives.”

“So do you think stories have a beginning? A place they come from? Like the universe? Like the Big Bang with a single primordial atom?” I take a breath. “I’m asking for George.” Padraig ponders in silence, and when I look closer at him I think to myself that I’m looking at a friend.

“Every life should be guided and enriched by one book or another, don’t you agree? Certainly, every formative moment in my life has been enriched or informed by a book. You must be very careful about what you choose to read—unless you want to stay stuck in your opinions and hard-boiled thoughts, you must be very careful.”

Tollers stopped short. “Jack, a myth can be true on more than one level.” “Yes,” Jack said. “A myth tells a truth without the facts. You do not have to believe it is true to see the truth. In this, we agree, but myth is still myth. It is not something to believe in!” They continued their walk as the trees turned blue in the shade of day’s end, and the birdsong quieted and the creaking sounds of night began: branches rubbing in the wind, wings flapping the air. Jack sensed a deep longing, a personal echo he’d heard all his life that told him truth waited somewhere near.

“Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”

Who is Aslan?” Mr. Lewis looks to Warnie, then to me. “Who is Aslan?” he asks. “He is the King of Beasts. Son-of-the-Emperor-Over-the-Sea. King above all High Kings. The Great Lion. High King of the Woods.” “Oh, Mr. Lewis, I know all of that. But who is he really?” “That is who he is.” “Is he . . . God?”

This is what I want to tell George: Aslan is God; all is well. There is a place where things are made right and good again. There is hope.

What I did when crafting this tale, Miss Devonshire, was to suppose that there was another world, and God entered it in a different way than He did here on earth. And so there you have Aslan.

But don’t we all know the White Witch? Must she be someone in particular? We can try and find the source, but we are all born knowing the Witch, aren’t we?” “Yes. We are.” I think about the disease that has ravaged my brother’s heart, making it weak. His illness is the White Witch. War is the White Witch. Cruelty is the White Witch. I take a breath.

Then he speaks. “Megs,” he says, calling me by my first name for the first time. “We rearrange elements that God has provided. Writing a book is much less like creating than it is like planting a garden—we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream that works, so to speak, its own way.” “In its own way?” I repeat. “Do you know Psalm 19?” he asks.

“The one about the heavens or the sky showing God’s handiwork?” “Yes. The cosmos reveals God’s handiwork.” “So you’re saying maybe stories are the same? That they reveal . . . God’s handiwork?” I think for a better word. “Or truth? They reveal some kind of truth about the universe? That’s what physics is all about.” “Yes, that is partly what I am saying. Megs, stars are made of dust and nitrogen; they are balls of gas and hydrogen. But that isn’t what a star is; it’s only what it is made of.”

everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. And archetypes,” he says.