The Archivist (5 page)

“Hold on,” she said. “The letters. We need to discuss the letters.”

“What is there to discuss?” I said, as coolly as possible, though I could feel a growing pressure at my temples.

“Don’t you see? Those letters are the part of the picture that’s missing.” Her tone was urgent, and she fastened her eyes on mine. I couldn’t stand up, though I felt I must; my left hand lay unmoving on the wallet that I’d placed on the table.

“I need to know what it cost Eliot, mentally and emotionally, to convert,” she said. “I need to find out what he gave up. You don’t get something for nothing! ‘Four Quartets,’ ‘Ash Wednesday’ — they make clear what he felt he’d gained. But I’m convinced that only Emily knew what he lost. Only she knew how desperate he really was. Remember? — ‘the greater torment of love satisfied’? Everyone thinks he’s talking about Vivienne there, and of course he is, on one level. But beneath that? The screwed-up marriage was the sign of a deeper problem. And Emily Hale was the logical person for him to confide in about that.”

“Why?” I asked, unable to restrain myself.

“She was the first woman he loved. After his mother, of course. To such a person one tends to spill everything.”

I saw my opening. Standing, I pulled ten dollars from my wallet and handed the money to an approaching waitress.

“You have a charming notion of first love,” I said to Roberta, easing my voice carefully through a narrow passage between condescension and flattery. I was by this time somewhat restored in confidence, but I had to press my advantage.

“Perhaps,” Roberta said, obviously on guard.

I opened my palm to receive the change from our waitress and handed back a generous tip. The action achieved the desired effect. Roberta grew suddenly flustered.

“Wait. You just paid for breakfast — you weren’t supposed to!”

“A small thing,” I said. “Shall we?” I motioned toward the door.

She was struggling toward graciousness. “Thank you,” she said at last, proceeding ahead of me. “Especially since I did all the eating.”

“I hope you feel” — I searched for the right word as I held the door for her — “replete.”

On the sidewalk she turned to me. “Yes,” she said. “But unsatisfied.” She waved as she stepped away from me. “I’m going this way. I’ll see you.”

I watched her walk off. The sight of her filled me with distress and longing such as I hadn’t felt in years.

J
UDITH’S PAST
had something layered about it. Beneath the gauze of ordinariness that covered its surface were different textures — things I came to sense about her experience, not see directly. When I first met and fell in love with her, I could see nothing directly. I wondered at nothing but my good fortune at having found her. The discomforting sensation of boundedness that I felt the morning after we were married did visit me occasionally, but I dismissed it as a residue of my solitary years.

As time passed, I began sensing in Judith a deep seriousness — something more than mere soberness, or the quietude of an energetic mind. Very gradually, I began to see how much inner effort her outer equipoise required. Judith lived with a continual tension, obscured by good-naturedness but always there. To myself I described it as a kind of shadow: the underside of an earnestness I’d always found attractive in her. And I wondered, sometimes, where it came from.

Certainly not from Len and Carol Rubin, the uncle and aunt who’d raised her. They were entirely unserious people. Judith’s natural parents had died in a car accident when she was a baby. Len, the only sibling of Judith’s mother, and his wife had taken in their niece as their own child. They had none of their own; Carol was infertile, and in a sense Judith was the answer to their prayers.

Yet that puts it too strongly. Neither Len nor Carol were much given to importuning. They had no large unmet needs. Together they skimmed the surface of things, helping themselves to what they found — lighthearted fun, mostly — without bothering about what might have been or could be. Judith used to say that Len and Carol wouldn’t have been unhappy had they remained childless, and I knew what she meant. Judith was their daughter, but in a proximate sense. They raised her to call them Len and Carol, not mother and father. Their attachment to her was based on duty, kindness, and habit.

Len was twenty years old when his sister Lottie died, and Carol was eighteen. Once Judith told me she couldn’t understand how their marriage had survived the arrival of an unexpected child, but I could see how. They knew their limits. They never risked their own relationship by forming too close a bond with Judith.

They were a hardworking, hard-playing couple. Len sold pianos, quite successfully; even during the Depression he had lots of customers. He was affable, and he knew his instruments. Carol managed a large sheet-music store frequented by local musicians. When they weren’t working, which they were six days a week, Len and Carol liked to go out — usually to midtown or Harlem clubs, where they listened to big-band music or solo piano and drank into the small hours. Jazz and gin were their two passions. As a child Judith learned to heat her own supper, carefully assembled by Carol, and clean up afterward. Early in the morning she would hear the Rubins enter the apartment and whisper outside her door, and the next day she’d find two half-finished nightcaps and a full ashtray on the coffee table, and a recording of Fats Waller or Count Basie on the record player.

When I first met the Rubins, in 1945, Len showed off a formidable collection of Ellington albums and made me the stiffest martini I had ever encountered. He and Carol and I got along; they thought I was a bit peculiar and I found them slight, but we liked one another. Yet Judith and I rarely saw them. They had us to dinner at their small apartment on Grove Street a few times each year, and Carol called every month or so. If Judith was out, Carol would ask about her in the cheery, unencumbered tones of a friend of the family, and I would have to remind myself that this was the woman who had brought my wife into adulthood.

When Judith was twelve, Len told her that he was her uncle and Carol her aunt. The story of her parents’ death came, she said, as a relief; it accounted for the avuncular quality of Len’s affection, for Carol’s big-sisterliness. Judith had observed her schoolmates’ parents, and she knew that for some reason Len and Carol were different. The news of her status answered the question and freed her from a large burden of guilt: she had wondered if the problem lay with her. Clearly it didn’t. It lay with circumstance — with the sudden, unintentional swerve of a truck on lower Broadway that had demolished instantly the grey Ford in which Lottie and her husband Sam sat unsuspecting. Sam had purchased the Ford just a few weeks before his daughter’s birth, to the reported delight of Lottie. In photographs (Len had given Judith several), Lottie looked very much like her child would look at the same age.

But at twelve Judith hadn’t been able to see herself in the pictures of the black-haired woman or the tall, rangy man; they were merely interesting strangers. She knew they had everything to do with her existence, yet they were no more her mother and father than Carol and Len were. She asked Len to tell her about Lottie and Sam, but he said he hadn’t spent much time with them. She couldn’t make his random details — the brand of whiskey Sam drank, Lottie’s aversion to dark turkey meat — cohere into portraits of two people who were supposed to have been the most important in her life.

They cropped up in her poems, her Lottie-and-Sam visions — as representatives of what Eliot called
the still point of the turning world:
the safe center, home in an inner sense, which Judith sought above all else. I encouraged her to write about Lottie and Sam, to imagine them, but my urgings were purely intellectual; I’d never equated parents with safety, and I couldn’t empathize with Judith’s need to do so. I felt she was fortunate in having no memories to tamp down, no voices to silence — most of all, no sensation of chronic disappointment to endure.

In my own still center was the image not of a mother and father but of the Cross. I believed that God had planted that image there as if it were a tree — a sturdy tree on whose limbs I could clamber and then rest, as if in a pair of arms. I’m surprised, looking back on that image (for I no longer hold it within me), at its sacrilegious dimension: I actually envisioned myself perched on the Cross like some boy in his favorite oak or maple, safely surveying the world from the vantage of the instrument of Christ’s death.

During my last visits with Judith at Hayden, she occasionally reminded me of that death. She was always medicated, but she could still say things that would rouse me later from a deep sleep, or catapult one of my dreams into a nightmare.
Don’t forget
, she would say,
when you killed him you killed a Jew. One of us redeemed you, and you murdered him. Now you’ve tried to murder the rest of us.
She had purplish half-moons under her eyes, and her hands were chapped, the nails broken.
Lottie and Sam. How do I know where they died? Broadway? That’s what Len says. What does he know? Broadway! Balanowka, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Bar, Belzec …

W
ELL ,” SAID ROBERTA.
Her voice placed the word on a border between question and declaration.mmmm mmShe was sitting at a small table across from my desk — the seat she’d occupied during an hour of conversation that morning, and the morning before. After our off-campus breakfast I had guessed, rightly, that I’d be seeing more of her. When she showed up at my office door twenty-four hours later, I hadn’t been surprised. Our morning chats had assumed, in the three days since that breakfast, the quality of a familiar ritual, and their ease owed much to Roberta. She was bright, well-read, and humorous. Despite all the warning lights that flickered within me whenever I thought of our first tense foray into the Mason Room, I awaited her visits with growing eagerness.

“Well what?” I said. We had just finished a short but animated debate about Robert Frost, whose poetry she claimed to dislike — though she knew it well enough. I was ready for a renewed argument, but Frost was no longer on her mind.

“It’s been three days,” she said.

“Since what?” I asked.

“Since we last talked about the letters,” she said.

I decided to deflect her gently. I didn’t want to antagonize her. Deliberately I put my hands behind my head, leaned back in my chair, and stared at her.

She stared back. She had become familiar to me physically as well as intellectually; I knew her dark brows and good coloring, her predictable black clothing and noisy shoes, the large hands, the slope of her neck, the slight overbite of her upper teeth. I was familiar with the details, yet she eluded me. Something to do with her motives remained completely beyond my grasp.

“Roberta,” I said. “What do you want me to do, now that three days have passed? Roll away the stone?”

“Spare me,” she said.

“I could say the same to you,” I answered.

“Who’s the fucking archivist around here?” she asked, leaning forward. “You are, after all. No?”

Her color rose — not in shame, I knew. She was obviously, unabashedly mad at me.

I too leaned forward. “Yes. I am. But there’s no need for hostility, is there? After all.”

She sighed. “Please, Matt,” she said. She had used my first name before, but never in so personal a tone. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t convince myself that she was pleading. She displayed too much self-possession. Pleading never works with me, but authentic and angry self-interest does.

“Let’s talk about this,” I said.

“Fine,” she said, settling back in her chair. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Not about the letters,” I said. “At least not immediately. I want to talk about you.”

She frowned — an appealing half-grimace, like a child’s. For one panicked instant, I thought she might stand up and walk away. Then the frown lifted and her lips opened.

“So,” she said, “what do you want to know?”

I pushed on with a kind of automatic urgency. “Tell me why you write poetry. Why you like Eliot.”

She closed her eyes, and my office grew still. When her eyes opened, they were a brighter-than-usual shade of green; I had put her on guard.

“I don’t have a short answer to the first question,” she said. “As to Eliot — I never said I liked him. What does it mean, anyway, to like a poet? I think of Eliot as unavoidable. Sometimes I think I hate his work. And him too, the man — such an uptight snob! It’s hard to believe the trouble he got himself into, first with Vivienne and then with Emily. Like a teenager, really.”

I laughed. “I’ve heard Eliot called many things,” I said, “but never an adolescent.”

Roberta again leaned forward, her forearms on her knees. She gazed away, as she often did before speaking. Her pose was curiously male; it reminded me of the way young men sit on the subway, their legs carelessly spread apart. I was conscious, for the first time, of her hips, the round swell of them in black jeans as she sat with her body inclined in my direction. Her hips were large, in balance with her broad shoulders, her large hands.

“Let me tell you some stuff about Eliot,” she said. “The proper gentleman, right? More British than the Brits. Punctual, formal, wry, all that. But some other things too. When he married Vivienne — impetuously, in his early twenties — he wrote to his father that he owed Vivienne
everything
. And then, after she began to get sick all the time, when the psychosomatic weirdness began in earnest — the headaches, colitis, panic attacks — he just couldn’t deal with her. He couldn’t respond to the craziness, the need, most of all her rage at him for denying her. Because what he’d said to his father was true, and crazy Vivienne knew it: he
did
owe her everything. She’d given him his first chance to break out.

“She loved his work, his mind, his body. The body — that’s where he really fell apart. To be needed bodily — always the demands of the physical — her body in sickness, their bodies in sex — it terrified him, it appalled him. And the worse she got, the worse he got.