Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

I learned in secondary school how there are . . . what? Twelve types, I think. And they each show a kind of person or trait. Is it that each one represents a universal pattern of human nature?

But yes, archetypes are patterns. They are there in Narnia.” He glances at the notebook on my lap, open to the end with only a few pages remaining. “I do believe your notebook might be full, and it’s time for you, my dear, to live and tell your own stories.”

“This has felt . . .” I stumble and forge through my thoughts for the right word. “This feels important.” “Megs, every human interaction is eternally important.” He smiles, and I swear those eyes that usually twinkle are swimming with tears.

“George knows you can take the bad parts in a life, all the hard and dismal parts, and turn them into something of beauty. You can take what hurts and aches and perform magic with it so it becomes something else, something that never would have been, except you make it so with your spells and stories and with your life.”

“The way stories change us can’t be explained,” Padraig says. “It can only be felt. Like love.”

Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago and not very far away, a little boy entered the world in a small stone cottage in the English countryside. Some babies are born closer to the end of their story than others, and this little boy was one of those.

But when the boy read a certain kind of story, or heard a very particular type of tale, he had the nudge of a memory, a thrilling kind of prescient joy, an echo or reminder of something more, of somewhere very important, of somewhere where it all began. That feeling returned with every book he picked up and with every story he begged his sister, Megs, to tell him. And Narnia was his favorite of all. The young boy wanted to know how the author found this story of a lion and a witch and a wardrobe, a tale that carried him to new adventures.

Dad perches on the end of the bed, picking up George’s sketchbook. “These drawings are jolly marvelous.” Dad flips through the pages, and Mum and I walk behind him, peering over his shoulder to watch the sketches go by. Each page is a scene from Mr. Lewis’s life, and each page has a colored lion in the background: fierce, tender, curious, or protective. George has captured all of them in the expressions and stance of his lion. “George,” Dad says, “it looks like you think the lion followed the author around for all of his life.” George nods. “I think the lion follows all of us around. We just have to look for him.”

It’s all I can do to keep from sobbing. At the end of the passage.

“Maybe . . . maybe Narnia also began when Mr. Lewis sat quietly and paid attention to his heart’s voice. Maybe we are each and every one of us born with our own stories, and we must decide how to tell those stories with our own life, or in a book.” I stop and clear my mind, my heart, and my eyes. “Or . . . could it be that all our stories come from one larger story?

Maybe . . . Mr. Lewis’s tale already existed in the bright light where every story, legend, and myth is born.” “Yes, Megs,” George says so quietly that Mum leans closer. George’s eyes alight not on any of us but on the wardrobe across the room. “Yes. The bright lamppost light where all stories begin and end.”

“Wait!” Young George’s voice stops me. He jumps from where he’s been sitting on the floor of the library and rushes to my chair, climbs into my lap. “Start over. Say it again.” I laugh and tousle his red curls. “We’re only on page three.” “But if you start again, it will last longer.” I understand this logic. It’s why I wrote the book in the first place, to make it all last longer. I kiss my grandson’s round cheek. Growing up in the countryside, he’s as wild as the land and his parents’ farm of sheep and goats and cows. His wild red curls are an imitation of his grandfather Padraig’s in his younger days.

The library here is just like the kind my brother dreamed for himself, the kind George talked about and wished for. I designed it with his imagination in mind. The high shelves of dark wood, with leather-bound books of classics, include an entire collection of the Narnia chronicles, signed by Jack. There came six more after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There’s a ladder that rolls along the hardwood floors so I can reach the top shelves and grab a George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, or one of Mum’s many Dorothy L. Sayers novels that she left me.

It was the end of 1950 when we bid farewell to my brother.

I wasn’t crying because I’d cried as much as one body knows how to weep. I’d believed—fool that I was—that because I knew this end was coming, I was prepared, that I would not grieve as I had. As if one can pre-grieve and get it out of the way. It’s not true. Grief is the price I paid for loving fiercely, and that was okay, because there was no other choice but to love fiercely and fully.

Mum and Dad had asked me to talk about George. It wasn’t customary, getting up and speaking in such a way at an Anglican service where the priest usually just reads the Book of Common Prayer pages for the Burial of the Dead, but I’d said yes. George would have wanted me to say something. I knew he would. That didn’t make it easier, just necessary, and there was a difference.

I thought of the snow outside and how George would never again see spring, or not the kind of spring we would see when the baby lambs were birthed and the crocuses burst from the ground. George’s would be a new spring I couldn’t yet see.

I thought how we are never, any of us, in one place at a time, but in our minds and in our imaginations we are many places all at once. We were here and there at the same time; it was my body in a black dress at the front of the church, but my heart was with George.

Padraig had taken a step or two back. I reached for him. He came closer and knit his fingers through mine and held tight. It was the best I could do at that moment, the only way I knew to say, “I love you.” But he knew. I could see that he knew.

Mr. Lewis and Warnie approached. It was an odd feeling to see them together outside their home or acreage or college, as if a storybook had come to life. I didn’t think about it as I let go of Padraig’s hand and threw my arms around them, both of them, one arm each, and embraced them.

In a matter of weeks I had come to know these two men better than some of my own family. They had changed my life, my heart, without telling me what to do or think or believe, and I didn’t understand how. And they had eased George into a new world.

“We wanted to meet him. I am so sorry that didn’t happen.” “He met you in your stories,” I said. I looked away from these men I had come to love. I looked to the sky, to the stars hidden in sunlight that would reveal themselves in the night. I looked to wherever my brother might be. “And you’ve allowed me to see that we are enchanted not by being able to explain it all, but by its very mystery. That is—finally, that is—enough.”

I read the ending, the words I’d read at a service all those years ago when we said good-bye to my brother. The brave boy’s story was short but full of just as much courage as any knight in shining armor fighting a dragon, just as full of bravery as any explorer journeying to the ends of the world to save a maiden, just as adventurous as any odyssey to the center of the earth. The young boy understood now, after all the tales and adventures, after all the drawings and stories, and he told the grown-ups, who aren’t as smart as children, “There is a light, a bright lamppost light where all stories begin and end.”

This feeling in his room was far better than the stories he loved, and yet the same. The hints had always been right in front of his eyes and inside his heart. The stories that thrilled him were echoes of the world that waited for him. And he heard, as loud as a new world thundering out of the cosmos, the mighty roar of a lion.