The Archivist (4 page)

“Why those letters?”

Her mouth and jaw lost a certain tightness that had constrained them since our meeting, and she sat back in her chair in the attitude of one who has decided that at last some real business can be done. I noticed that she had the same sloping nose and thin brows that had set Judith’s face apart from those of the women of my early childhood — my mother, Eunice Carey, Betty Keep. This woman was attractive in an unexpected way, as Judith had been. But unlike my wife, who had always dressed conservatively, Roberta wore a tight-fitting black sweater accented by a red and purple scarf; her pants, too, were black, as were the noisy heels I had heard earlier. Black was a color Judith had never worn, though I had pushed her to; she claimed it washed out her complexion. On a woman, black has a certain undeniable elegance — even when worn aggressively, as Roberta wore it.

“I’m fairly sure those letters will show that Eliot was feeling remorse for the way he treated his first wife, Vivienne. He walked out on her. All his friends kept her away from him, and eventually she was committed to a mental institution.”

“I’m acquainted with the facts of Eliot’s life,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Then I’ll cut it short. I want to read the letters because Emily Hale was probably the only person Eliot honestly confided in. With others he equivocated about his feelings for Vivienne. Nobody else really knew the workings of the marriage. But I figure Eliot told Emily the truth.”

The quiet room in which we sat seemed to attend to us, as if all its books were appraising this exchange.

“Well,” I said, “even assuming your curious theory is correct, what makes you think you have a right to letters that other scholars must wait for decades to see?”

“Because I’m not a scholar. I’m not doing this for a class or a book. I’m not interested in getting something from the letters — some personal gain, acclaim for a brilliant thesis, all that stuff. I’m a poet. I just want to know, for myself, what really went on between Eliot and Hale. What she wanted him to think about, to consider —”

“— to reassess?”

She looked somewhat startled by my interruption. Pausing, she stared at me for a moment; then she continued.

“Yes. I suspect Emily wanted him to rethink why Vivienne went crazy on him. He’d told all his other friends that it was Vivienne’s nerves, her crankiness, her interminable complaints that made him leave her. I think it was something much simpler. He hated having to fuck her.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

She leaned forward. “Having to fuck her,” she repeated evenly. “He felt unclean. Having sex got in the way of having Christ, and Vivienne
was
sex to him, all the physical and emotional mess of it. Emily was a different matter; she was the safe one. Never mind that
she
might have wanted
him
— he told himself that he didn’t have to want her, since she wasn’t his wife or a mistress, just his very great friend. That meant he could talk openly with her. But you know all this, don’t you?”

“Do I?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Because you’ve read the letters.”

I became quite unsure of how to proceed. There was a brief silence between us; then Roberta spoke again.

“I can tell,” she said. “But I won’t. Tell anyone else, I mean.”

I raised my brows. “How good of you,” I said. “And how can you tell?”

“Your use of the word ‘reassess.’ It’s too precise for you not to have read the letters.”

“You’re assuming,” I said, standing, “that your fantasy about Eliot and Hale is true. Moreover you’re allowing your imagination to fuel some rather odd notions about me. I’d say that this conversation has outlived its usefulness. Shall we go?”

She said nothing, though her heels tapped out their stubborn rhythm as I escorted her back to the main library. There I handed her card to her.

“Silence,” I began, but she finished the phrase for me.

“The better part of virtue,” she said, and was gone.

T
HE FIRST TIME JUDITH LEFT
was in the autumn of the third year of our marriage. I arrived home from an evening class to find a note telling me that she’d gone to Boston to stay with a friend. She would be there indefinitely; I could write her but was not to call. She was sorry, but she felt as if she were coming apart, and she didn’t want me to watch.

I was stunned. She might as well have told me that she was going to Antarctica. I sat at my desk, staring at the note and struggling to make sense of it. I remember feeling a peculiar detachment — as if I were someone else, trying to unravel a mystery that was captivating but in which I wasn’t personally implicated.

I tried to conjure images of my wife, to reconstruct her behavior over the last few months. Were there clues I’d been blind to, hints of unhappiness or turmoil? All I could think of was her fatigue. She had often seemed tired. The law firm where she worked had been especially busy of late. Yet for the most part she’d maintained her writing schedule, and we’d been leading our usual life: a walk after work, a bottle of wine at supper; reading, listening to the NBC Symphony on the radio. On weekends we would visit a couple of museums or galleries and take a long stroll across Central Park.

There had been two small breaches in the calm of our life together. Judith had wanted me to go with her to a local synagogue for Yom Kippur services, and I had refused. The holiday had fallen on a Thursday, and I felt I couldn’t afford to miss my classes. I’d never before accompanied her, and I saw no reason to begin doing so. I assumed she attended holiday services out of habit, as she never went at other times of the year.

She was clearly disappointed, but we didn’t speak of my refusal. Several weeks later she expressed a similar disappointment in my indifference to a new British-instigated cease-fire in Palestine. I was cynical about all the antagonists in that part of the world — the Egyptians and other Arabs, the Jews, and especially the British — but she wanted the Jews to prevail, and my lack of heat distressed her. She called me complacent. I tried joking with her, but she wouldn’t back off.

Don’t you see how important it is to have an actual home? she asked.

Yes, I said, but when different people claim the same place, who can say who’s right?

It’s obscene that Jews have to fight now for a homeland, she said. This should not be going on. Not after what’s already happened.

I didn’t give these incidents their due. And although Judith’s note disturbed me, I told myself she was overtired and needed to get away for a little while. I read Eliot while awaiting her return — for I was certain she’d come back, and all in one piece. The end of “Little Gidding,” in “Four Quartets,” seemed to be making a personal promise of redemption, my own and that of my marriage:
All shall be well …

I couldn’t acknowledge the fear that stalked me. At the core of my wife’s love for me lay a single searing question:
Are you going to show me who you are?
She didn’t accuse; the question was a plea. And I had no reply. Love required speech, and beyond a certain point, speech could only be dangerous. Unconsciously I had begun a migration into the realm of silence, and Judith knew — as I did not — what its consequences might be.

She returned the next weekend. She looked haggard, and we spoke little about her departure or her stay in Boston. I told her I was glad to see her, and I took her out for a good dinner — surprised at how glad I really was. I’d thought I was angry, but instead I found that I was shaken. Suddenly I realized that what I’d most wanted, during her week away, was to be left alone, and I had come perilously close to having my wish granted.

R
OBERTA CAUGHT UP WITH ME
in a hallway near the Mason Room early one morning; on her face was the look of one who’d snagged her prey. After we exchanged perfunctory greetings, she invited me to have breakfast with her. This time I hid my surprise and suggested the cafeteria in the library’s basement.

She didn’t like that idea. “No. Neutral territory,” she said. “Off campus.”

Something in her seriousness made me give in. We walked outside and followed a brick path to the campus gates, where she paused before pointing up the street.

“I know a good place a few blocks north,” she said.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s your breakfast. I don’t eat this early in the morning.”

We entered a small coffee shop after a brisk walk during which neither of us spoke. The place smelled of bacon fat and burnt toast, two of my favorite scents, but I wasn’t in the least hungry. Roberta clearly was. She tucked into a sizeable portion of fried eggs and sausage while I sipped coffee. Her table manners left a certain amount to be desired, but her speech was as eloquent as it had been during our first encounter. She started off cleverly, on a pacific note.

“It occurred to me,” she said, crumpling one egg-stained napkin into a tight wad and helping herself to another from an adjacent table, “that you might want to know a little more about my motives. About why I’m so interested in the letters. Or in Eliot and Hale, for that matter.”

“How keen of you,” I said, smiling at her.

She picked up a piece of toast and eyed it carefully, then trimmed off its burnt edges before consuming it in three rapid bites.

“As I told you, I’m a poet. In my second year of the graduate writing program. This year I’m supposed to prepare a chapbook-size manuscript of my own work and to write two long papers, each on a poet of my choice. I’ve written one paper and outlined the second, but neither has really engaged me. They’re just academic requirements as far as I’m concerned. I read lots of different poets, but I don’t enjoy holding forth on them in a scholarly way.”

I nodded, and she drank some coffee before continuing. I signaled a waitress to give her some more.

“I’m very interested in the experience of conversion — all kinds, but especially religious. When my parents were in their twenties, they converted to Christianity. They were Jews before that, in Berlin — not serious Jews, they came from assimilated families — but after their escape from Germany and their emigration to America, they converted. To the Dutch Reformed Church. They raised me as a Christian; I didn’t find out until a few years ago that they used to be Jewish. Their name was Spier but they changed it to Spire — you know, like the thing on top of a church. Clever, huh?”

Again I nodded.

“To make a long story short, I’m now in the midst of figuring out my — how should I put it? — my affiliations. My parents’ revelation created a fair bit of tension between us. I can’t understand any religious conversion. I’ve always thought, where this stuff is concerned, people respond to the symbols of their childhood. It’s like a reflex. You know — play a little organ or recite some Latin or Hebrew, and the convert is right back in the thrill or terror of that first spiritual impulse. Conversion strikes me as something done out of desperation — an attempt to deny something you’re stuck with — something that can’t be changed by an act of will. But I clearly hold a minority view,” she finished. “I mean, people do convert all the time, and nobody thinks they’re strange because of it. So I must be missing something.”

“And how does this relate to Eliot?” I asked.

“Ah,” she said. “You know that Eliot converted to what is sometimes called Anglo-Catholicism, to the Anglican Church. It’s up there next to Catholicism in terms of rite and liturgy. I want to know what that conversion cost him. There are clues in his work, of course, but I’m sure he wrote about it in detail to Emily Hale. Also about Vivienne’s role in his conversion. It happened when his marriage was falling apart. I think he was driven from the arms of his neurotic wife into those of a neurotic church, and I find that an interesting swap.”

I began laughing, and Roberta stared at me without expression.

“Listen.” I wanted to take her down a peg. “You’re talking about a very complex process. A swap? I doubt it. I’m sure Eliot undertook both the ending of his marriage and his pledge to the Church in all seriousness. He wasn’t a frivolous man.”

She pursed her lips. “I don’t deny his seriousness,” she said. “But I’m not interested in that.” She pushed some spilled sugar into little hills on the tabletop. “Eliot knew he was in a completely untenable situation, and he had to get out of it. Vivienne was making him feel like a man in prison — it’s all there in ‘The Waste Land’! — and there was the Church, beckoning …”

She cupped her chin in her hands and looked away from me. Her eyes, more green than grey in the morning light, were fringed with dense, dark lashes.

“Do you remember those lines in ‘Four Quartets’?” she asked. “‘From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire …’?”

She recited well, without pomposity. I could tell she knew the work.

“He wrote so often about fire,” she went on, turning once more toward me. “He saw so many things in terms of burning. Imagine a life in which fire is the governing symbol! ‘The only hope, or else despair …’”

“‘To be redeemed from fire by fire,’” I finished.

This time she nodded at me, and neither of us spoke for a moment.

“It offered something good,” I suggested. “Something necessary.”

“Yes,” she continued. “From one fire — that crude sexual desire he hated in himself — to another — the love of Christ. There’s the swap. He wanted what he called a condition of complete simplicity, and he got it. One fire for another — redemption for suffering … But you know the verse that follows after that bit about simplicity?”

“‘Costing not less than everything,’” I answered. “But he put that line in parentheses, as if to downplay it.”

This time she laughed.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You aren’t fooled, are you? It’s the most important line in the poem!”

I didn’t know where Roberta was headed. My thoughts were like cotton, impossible to organize. I wanted more than anything to leave the coffee shop and return to the library. My companion was not, however, of similar feeling, and I didn’t have my way without some final words between us.

“Well,” I said, “it’s not the most important line to me. Shall we go? This has been illuminating, but I have work to do.”