The Archivist (27 page)

“Treatment?” I asked.

“Yeah. Drugs and whatnot. Therapy.”

His eyes interrogated me.

“She was given Miltown regularly. It’s a tranquilizer, fairly common. As far as therapy goes, during the last couple of years she talked with Dr. Clay several times a week. Sometimes with other psychiatrists too, but mostly him.”

“What about shock. Electric shock. Did you authorize it?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t. Dr. Clay asked me to, but Judith didn’t want it, so I refused.”

Len’s eyes held steady.

“Carol thinks you let them give Judy shock treatment,” he said. “She’s pretty much convinced you did.”

I closed my eyes. Judith’s image lunged into my consciousness. I sat immobile. Grief picked me up and threw me down. I fell into its hole, and the hole was covered over. In this hole was nothing but my loss; it was all I had.

“Matt,” Len said. “Did you hear me?”

Out of nowhere came Eliot’s ending to “Prufrock” —
Till human voices wake us, and we drown
… Panic rushed me, animal-like, insistent. Somehow, words found their way to my mouth.

“Len,” I said. “I authorized nothing.”

The expression he wore wasn’t suspicious so much as frightened. He’d accused me of lying, and the accusation had unnerved him. He lit another cigarette.

“I never should’ve co-signed those admittance papers,” he said. “She shouldn’t have been there. They screwed her up. Those fucking doctors. Those sons of bitches.” His large hands went to his face, covering it.

“Len,” I said. “Blaming the doctors won’t work. Blaming Hayden won’t work. There’s no point.”

The face he showed me, as he took his hands off his eyes, was newly dark with pain or fury — both, I guessed.

“No. Too easy,” he said. “Carol and I wanted Judy out of there, but we respected your judgment — and that doctor’s — and you kept saying she should stay.” His voice spiraled. “Like a prisoner! She couldn’t even read the newspaper, for Christ’s sake! So cut off — how could she keep from getting worse in a nuthouse like that?”

I was no longer fending off panic, and I no longer had access to my loss. Both were gone. I knew what I wanted to say.

“She had newspapers, Len. You and Carol brought her newspapers, even though the doctors told you not to. Has it occurred to you that maybe giving her newspapers wasn’t such a good idea? That perhaps you confused an already dangerously confused person? Or that maybe you should’ve told Judith the truth about Lottie and Sam a long time ago?”

He looked at me with scorn. “I told her years ago,” he said. “She knew about them.”

“She didn’t know everything.”

“Listen to me. I told her all of it when she was a girl — eleven, twelve — you know that! I told her who they were, how she came to us, how they died in an accident —”

“— which accident, Len? The one on Broadway? Or the one in Russia?”

I had never seen him so thrown off guard.

“So she told you, then,” he said. His tone was quiet, half-questioning; he wanted to find out exactly what I knew.

“Yes.” My lie was a reward for enduring his lie. Len knew nothing of the well-typed pages, the notebook in the bottom drawer of my desk. I’d buried Judith’s devastations, and I wasn’t going to exhume them for Len. She hadn’t intended that I become her archivist. Clay alone, whom she despised, was her intended reader.

I waved at the bartender, who returned with the bottle and poured us each a shot. I drank mine down.

“I saw no reason to tell her sooner,” Len said. He was once again staring into space. “The whole thing was too complicated. It seemed like much more than a kid could handle. And then, once she got older, neither of us — Carol or me, I mean — could make ourselves do it. The real story just kind of emerged, sometime last year when we were visiting Judy. I said something, and she figured it out. I guess it wasn’t all adding up right in her head, so she asked me a direct question. What could I do — lie to her face? Of course not.”

He drank his shot.

“But I didn’t think it was necessary to tell you. After she was gone, I mean. Before that — well, it was her call, Matt. Evidently she chose to tell you. I sure as hell wasn’t going to.”

It seemed to me that at last he was speaking the truth.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It was basically nobody else’s business but Judy’s.”

In the silence that followed, I acknowledged to myself what I wanted: never to have to talk to Len Rubin again. I felt nothing like hatred toward him, only a profound sense of futility. He was a wall I chose not to scale. I would need to be very direct. Nothing in our twenty years of skirting one another had prepared us for this.

“Your albums are in those two boxes under the bar,” I said, pointing. “I’m taking off now. I’m not going to say I’ll be in touch, because I won’t be. I’m leaving town in a few weeks, Len. I’ve got a job at a university library.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just want to be gone from New York. I’m ready to leave, and I don’t want to be in contact with anyone from here. It’s not a question of starting over. I don’t believe in that. I just want to be left to my own devices.”

I paused, then found my way forward. “I’m hoping you’ll be able to explain this to Carol. I can’t, Len. I can’t even face the idea of trying.”

I stood, drew my wallet from my pocket, and put a twenty on the bar. Len was struggling to absorb my words. He watched me vacantly, as if I’d already vanished and he was looking at the place where I’d just been.

“Be well,” I said. “OK?”

His eyes focused. I saw how alone he was. Even Carol hadn’t been able to rescue him from the adolescence in which he lived still — the isolation of Lottie’s kid brother, who longed for a father and instead got Sam. Judith’s death had stripped everything away, leaving Len only the quiet anguish of the man who remains, the one for whom adulthood is no solace.

“I’ll tell Carol,” he said, so softly I barely heard him.

We shook hands. It was the briefest, saddest handshake imaginable.

A few weeks later I left the apartment and New York. When I arrived at the university, I felt ready for a reconfigured life. In a sense, that is exactly what I entered, but such renewals do not obliterate what precedes them.

I didn’t see Carol again until Len’s death in 1977. I read the notice in the
Times
, and I knew I had to go to his memorial service. This realization was one of those certainties that can’t be questioned or fended off. I took a train to the city and walked from Penn Station to a funeral parlor on Madison Avenue, conscious of how many years I’d been gone.

There were a good many mourners present. I recognized no one but Carol. She found me and took me aside, after the service, to tell me that Len had died at peace. I remember her words:
He made a choice, to not go out miserable
. Her eyes were puffy, and her dry hair, flyaway as always, had turned the color of dirty sand. She was otherwise exactly as I remembered her. She thanked me for coming, and then she turned away from me. I saw she was habituated to her losses; she needed no condolences. I watched her circulate, her hands going out to the people around her, her high laugh occasionally lifting across the room’s quiet thrum of voices. Her behavior aroused in me a strong envy, and I left feeling glad that I’d seen her, too, for the last time.

I
T MAY SEEM OBVIOUS
, ” said Roberta, “but the way the world looks when you’re Christian is significantly different from the way it looks when you’re Jewish.”

We were sitting at adjoining tables by a large window in the Mason Room, as we’d been doing for several weeks. No one else was in the room. Its late-morning light was extremely strong, and I had drawn the blinds to shade our work. Spread out across Roberta’s table were piles of envelopes addressed, in T. S. Eliot’s distinctive hand, to Emily Hale. Some were white, some blue; most were personal-size, though a few were business envelopes with the return address of Faber, the publishing house where Eliot had worked in London. Hale had used a letter opener, and the top of each envelope was expertly slit. Massed on the table, the envelopes made a curious impression: each was empty, but collectively they represented several volumes of letters.

Roberta had understood immediately that the envelopes mustn’t receive direct sunlight — their ink might fade. In fact, she displayed a constant fastidiousness in dealing with the materials in her charge. I sat near her, organizing several drafts of a long H. L. Mencken essay that the Mason Room had recently acquired. Roberta’s carefulness impressed me. She was implementing Edith’s new cataloguing scheme — unenthusiastically, I could tell, though she didn’t complain.

She was easy to work with. Our separate tasks weren’t mindless, but they did involve a certain tedium, and I discovered that it was possible to talk with her and still make progress on the work at hand. That morning, we were carrying on about types of religious experience. I had just suggested that people make too much of the differences among faiths. The religious impulse was what mattered, I said. Its form was less relevant.

Roberta shook her head. “People stay in their own realms,” she said. “They don’t like to go beyond the walls of what they think they believe.”

“Look at Eliot,” I said. “‘Four Quartets’ is full of references to Eastern thought. So’s ‘The Waste Land.’ Eliot saw how his religion related to other religions.”

Roberta carefully set her pad and pencil to one side of the envelopes and put her elbows on the table.

“Some of them,” she said. “You’re talking about an antiSemite, remember. Have you read ‘Christianity and Culture’? Now
there’s
a scary little book. Eliot was never fond of Jews. They offended his sense that civilization had to be Christian if it was going to be civilized.”

She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest.

“You’re oversimplifying, Roberta,” I said.

Without looking at me, she smiled a little. “Maybe.”

She stood and walked over to a pitcher of water we’d set up on another table. Pouring herself a glass, she moved to the window and drank. It was obvious that she was no longer in the mood for work. Making a note of where I’d left off with Mencken, I covered our materials with muslin cloth and then opened the blinds.

Warm light streamed in, bathing us. For the first time I noticed that Roberta’s hair had coppery highlights; they glinted as her head moved. She returned to her chair and sat with her legs stretched out in my direction, her hands wedged in the front pockets of her black jeans. Her feet, exposed in flat sandals with thin leather straps, were long, like her hands. The toenails wore a muted polish, nearly flesh-toned — a paler shade than her fingernails, which were very well manicured, each week a new color.

The sun’s glare was powerful. I angled my chair so I could see Roberta without squinting. When she spoke again, her tone was reflective.

“I was just remembering how Virginia Woolf once said Eliot was sordid and intense. Did you know that when he was still married to Vivienne, he occasionally wore face powder when they went to dinner parties? Can you imagine? I guess he couldn’t resist the temptation to dramatize his suffering — God knows Vivienne wore
hers
on her sleeve. I read someplace that he once sent Conrad Aiken a page from an English journal of midwifery in which he’d underlined all the words describing vaginal discharge. No comment, no accompanying letter — just those underscored words. I mean, this is a world-famous poet with some very strange preoccupations, no?”

I opted for silence.

“But he did find a great place to escape, didn’t he — the Church of England! I mean, he could say his prayers and confess his complete unworthiness and never have to deal with what Vivienne knew — that the two of them had created a waking nightmare for themselves. And that he’d abandoned her when it got out of control.”

She gazed absently into space, absorbed in her narration.

“You know, after he and Vivienne’s brother Maurice had her committed, Eliot never visited her. He paid the bills — that was it. Locked the door and threw away the key.” Her laugh was short and hard. “A shining example of Christian charity.”

“You’re so dismissive of Eliot’s faith,” I said. “You have no way of knowing how it helped him — or what it showed him.”

“No,” she said, “I’m not dismissive. It’s just that I find his belief highly questionable. I mean, what kind of faith allows a man to diagnose the spiritual illness of his culture so well, and at the same time view his wife as some kind of witch who needs to be walled in? Even if she
is
sick?”

She shook her head. “You know, there’s something about Eliot’s kind of belief that terrifies me. The way he could tell himself, oh yes, I’m unworthy, and let that be an excuse for such passive-aggressive behavior.”

“You’re being an amateur psychologist — the worst kind,” I said. “You trivialize Eliot’s spiritual pain. It’s right there in the poems — his doubts, his torment. Not being able to act. The tendency to be heartless.”

Her eyes drifted over the envelopes. “Heartless? I’d say spineless. If I’d been Emily Hale, I’d have dumped him. Who needs it — all that guilt, that resistance to being loved, everything gussied up as faith?”

It was time, I felt, to tone down our conversation. “We should either get back to work or stop for lunch,” I said. “It’s noon.”

She stood and stretched her arms over her head. “So let’s take a break. We can pick up sandwiches and sit on the quad.”

“Too hot,” I said. “I want to stay indoors. Air-conditioned indoors.”

“Forget the campus cafeteria — you know the food’s revolting. I feel like having a sandwich from that deli on Third Street — ever been there?”

I nodded. “But it’s take-out only,” I said.

She paused. “Does your apartment have air conditioning?” she asked.

The question, so casually asked, left me speechless. I sat silently before her; she stared at me, then burst out laughing. I’d never heard her laugh like that — loudly, carelessly. It was a provocation, a testing of my composure.