The Archivist (7 page)

In the early 1950s, Judith began writing about the Kabbalistic myth of God’s exile. One evening I asked her to explain this notion. How could a divinity responsible for all things be in exile? How could He be separated from Himself?

It happened with the Fall, she said. Adam disrupted what had been whole — God and His Shekinah, the male and female, the apple and its branch.

I scoffed at this. Do the Kabbalists think that Adam had so much power? Of course the eating of the apple was evil. But did this act have the power to exile God Himself? Surely that stretched things.

Remember, she said: He created Adam, so naturally Adam possessed real power. Adam was meant to receive his partner, Eve, as holy. Instead he shattered the union, and part of God went into exile. Each of us has something to offer the Creator, and it isn’t belief. It’s the returned Shekinah — the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It’s redemption, in which each of us is called to participate. Nothing else matters.

Listening to her that night, I was determined to close the gap between us. Undoubtedly all marriages had something like this at their core, I told myself — some issue on which both people are unbudging. But this gap wasn’t philosophical. It was a rift in feeling, experience, perception. And it had its parallel within me as well. Judith’s interest in Kabbalism awoke in me memories of my mother’s urgent, alienating faith. I had never been able to tolerate it. Yet I also hadn’t succumbed to my father’s cynicism. I recognized the utility, even the elegance, of doctrine.

After hearing Judith’s explanation of God’s exile, I made a final play for compatibility. Look, I said, we’re not so far apart in our views. Christians think of their one job as the service of Christ. All acts are an homage to Him. And reparation for the first sin. What’s the difference between that and the return of the Shekinah?

Christianity, Judith answered, is a lie of consolation. There’s no consolation for what we’ve already lost — all of us …

Her voice trailed off, and then she turned and looked directly at me. Her eyes were a deep green; they held me as if they were hands — hands that would not release me even if I were to resist.

You should grasp this, she said.

Why, I said.

Because of your name, she replied. Matthias replaced Judas, right? And Judas was really just another version of Adam — the same man in another guise. Both of them betrayed the Holy One. What are we supposed to do — are we meant simply to take Judas’s place, to eat his dinner and wear his clothes and carry on?

I hadn’t realized that Judith knew the story of Matthias, and I’d never expected that she would throw it at me. I became angry. Judith’s eyes left my face, and our conversation stalled. Soon after, I walked out of the room and then the apartment, desperate for my solitude.

Sudden as it was, my withdrawal scared Judith. When I came back, several hours later, she was gone — once more to Boston. The next day I called her office, as her brief note had instructed me to do, and told her colleagues that she was ill and would be out for a week. I spent the next seven days reading voraciously — mostly novels, nothing to do with my life and its questions. I read, and I suppose I waited. The time passed easily, a blur of distraction.

Judith’s return this time was not unlike the first; we took pains to patch things quickly. But once again I’d tasted solitude as an alternative to the life I was leading, and the possibility of its permanence scared and attracted me.

In those days I wondered sometimes about Eliot. At that time, of course, I knew nothing about Emily Hale, but stories of Eliot’s trials with Vivienne had been in circulation among literary scholars for some time. I’d heard from a visiting English researcher that the Eliots were separated, that Vivienne was unbalanced, that Eliot was reclusive, private, unlikely to change his almost monastic life. When I read “Four Quartets,” it was Vivienne who seemed to lurk in all the painful allusions to intimacy — as in “The Waste Land,” where the details of a woman’s life, “her hair / Spread out in fiery points,” could unnerve and arouse, just as Vivienne had always done.

So I assumed it was Vivienne whom Eliot had in mind, writing that line in “The Dry Salvages” that sometimes broke into my consciousness when I thought about my own wife: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” I thought I knew precisely what Eliot meant by that, and I wanted to bring about a different fate for my marriage. I decided that I had to accept Judith more completely than I’d managed thus far — to make amends and be done with arguing over religion and other intractable matters.

But I was withholding. When Judith read aloud to me, when she whistled Roy Eldridge riffs as we walked through the park on Saturdays, when she turned toward my back in bed, draping one arm across my shoulder, I might have grasped more at what was being offered …We didn’t know how to teach one another to do these things together, and it wasn’t enough that we loved each other in tender ways, like the old friends we were not.

We missed the meaning.
I know now that Eliot wrote the line not with Vivienne but with Emily in mind. After finally finding himself unable, after so many years, to pursue the promise of the rose garden at Burnt Norton, the promise of intimacy.

Emily waited patiently, but the man she loved couldn’t offer what was needed. She saw this at last and was nearly undone, yet survived. She and he were products of the same culture, and she would not disgrace him or herself by breaking down publicly. She walled out all feeling and carried on, consummate actress that she was.

Emily, whose hands were large. She cupped his face easily, gently, in her hands, as no one else had ever done. Not his mother, not Vivienne — no one.

I would meet you upon this honestly.

Emily, he said:
Love is itself unmoving
. But he could not move.
There was a door, and I could not open it.

What must she have thought, reading that letter?

What might have been is an abstraction.

T
HERE ARE PEOPLE
whose interests and knowledge range widely, whose talents are diverse, yet who are impelled by one preoccupation that shapes nearly everything they think, do, or imagine. Roberta was such a person, and her preoccupation was conversion.

The story of the conversion to Protestantism of Kurt and Trudy Spire was told to me by their daughter, whom I encountered after my talk with Edith. We met in our usual spot in the library’s cafeteria, which occupies part of the basement of the main building. The cafeteria is a good venue for storytelling. Ambiguously situated, half aboveground and half subterranean, it has small oblong windows at eye level through which you can observe many sets of feet tramping by as you sit at round wooden tables and drink coffee. Or, in the case of Roberta and myself, tea. We’d discovered that we both preferred strong tea to weak coffee, and as the cafeteria’s coffee was notoriously dilute, black Lap-song had become our beverage of choice.

After we’d settled in with our steaming mugs (Roberta’s laced with sugar), I asked her to tell me about her parents. She was an only child, as both of her parents had been. Kurt and Trudy were artists. They supported themselves with a house-painting and interior design business, collaborating in their spare time on large canvases, religious in theme, which they sold (for decent money, Roberta said) to various churches around the country. Their work was abstract and rich in allusions to New Testament narratives. Roberta described it to me as compellingly ugly. Apparently she hadn’t arrived at this judgment until she’d come to the university and taken several art history courses, after which she concluded that her parents’ work left her feeling annoyed and uninspired. Under closer questioning she confessed that as a child she had loved the busy, lurid paintings that filled her parents’ walls, but after entering high school she’d begun disliking them. She hadn’t admitted this even to herself, however, until her early twenties, when she made up her mind that visual extravagance might be compelling but didn’t make good art.

Yet she continued complimenting her parents’ efforts. By then, she said, they were accustomed to her praise: they took it for granted. And in turn they praised her poetry — simply, she said, because she had written it. For them it had always been sufficient that she claim the identity of a poet. She didn’t have to be a good one.

Her parents had left Berlin in early 1940, not an easy time for two nineteen-year-old Jews to flee Germany’s capital. They had escaped with the help of a neighbor of Kurt’s. The street in the Charlottenburg section in which his parents lived had also been home to the sister and brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was killed by the Nazis in 1945 for his role in the “officers’ plot,” and whose letters from prison made such a strong impression on postwar theologians. It was the pastor’s brother-in-law, Rudiger Schleicher, who arranged through friends in the Resistance for Kurt and his girlfriend, Trudy Lansmann, to travel on false papers first to Munich and then, circuitously, to Maastricht, in the south of Holland.

Kurt and Trudy had needed no persuasion to go; they knew they were in danger. Their parents, however, had refused to leave Berlin. In 1942 they were sent to Flossenburg, the camp where (along with Bonhoeffer himself, as it happened) they were killed at the end of the war. In Munich, Kurt and Trudy were denounced as Jews by a stranger who didn’t like their looks, and they avoided imprisonment only by virtue of the high quality of the identification papers given to them by Herr Schleicher. After arriving in Maastricht, they were hidden for a time by an elderly Catholic couple. Between 1944 and 1945, they lived clandestinely in the city’s only synagogue. The century-old building had been locked up by the occupying Nazis, who for some reason hadn’t smashed the synagogue’s windows but had merely boarded them up. Thus, the interior had remained relatively dry, warm, and free from infestation by rats. Members of the Dutch Resistance had broken in through the basement trapdoor at the back. They kept the door covered with boards and brush so that neither the Germans nor the local collaborators knew that the decrepit temple was an important safe house in Maastricht. In the second-floor women’s gallery, Kurt, Trudy, and several other Jews were secretly encamped, fed by Resistance members who made weekly deliveries of bread, cheese, apples, and a few tins of jam and jars of water and soup.

In the winter of 1944 the water pipes in the synagogue froze, and its inhabitants didn’t bathe properly for several months. In the spring the air in the shuttered gallery was hot and close, and Trudy developed the shortness of breath that was to plague her for years after the war. Yet they survived. For reasons they could not fathom, no one had suspected that the dead-seeming temple might actually house living Jews, and their presence went undetected until the city’s liberation in 1945.

The eventual emigration to the United States of Kurt and Trudy Spier — who were married, in a civil ceremony, in Maastricht at the start of 1946 — was no less complex than their exodus from Berlin. They were helped along each difficult step of the way by Dutch Christians — Protestants who gave them shelter and food, then work and money, and finally contacts in America. In 1948 they arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, on a Holland-America liner. The small port across the river from Manhattan was full of Dutch immigrants and felt familiar, like the country they had just left. They settled in a tiny apartment on Washington Street, near the busy docks and the train station. Kurt found employment as a house painter, and Trudy worked for a Dutch bakery. They had little money but plenty of fresh bread, and they were thousands of miles from Europe. They set about building a life in which fear and despair would be relegated, as Roberta put it, to the basement of their consciousness.

For this effort they sought new identities. A little over two years after their arrival in Hoboken, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison were published posthumously. Kurt Spier received a copy of the book from a Dutch friend who knew of his boyhood connection with the pastor’s family. The letters had an effect on Kurt and Trudy that their daughter described as incendiary. Bonhoeffer’s experience of separation and uncertainty spoke directly to their own, and his affirmation of spiritual vitality — of the power of Christian faith — seemed to carry the promise of a transformed existence. The two immigrants had led thoroughly assimilated lives as German Jews; they knew almost nothing about Judaism as a faith, practice, or culture. As teenagers they had considered themselves bohemian, inheritors of the work of Oskar Schlemmer and other Bauhaus artists. Being Jewish meant one thing only: being targeted for extermination by fascists. The people who had helped them during the war were Christians — men and women of the Resistance whose acts of bravery and sacrifice had saved many lives, and whose piety had grounded those acts.

Kurt and Trudy Spier talked of nothing but Bonhoeffer’s theology for weeks after reading his book. They discussed it intensely with several members of the local Dutch Reformed Church who invited them to attend services and Sunday-night meetings. Kurt and Trudy participated in heated debates on the direction of postwar Christianity. They heard members of the congregation discuss Bonhoeffer’s views on a Christian life in a religionless world, his conviction that God lay not on the boundary but at the center of human life and action — “beyond in the midst of our life.” For the first time in their young, overwhelmed lives, they felt the possibility of community, and they seized it as if grabbing the baskets of food extended by anonymous hands through the cellar trapdoor of the synagogue in Maastricht — hungrily and in gratitude. In 1950, after changing their last name to Spire, Kurt and Trudy were baptized into their new world, into a new life.

Roberta was born five years later. The family moved into a larger apartment on one of Hoboken’s narrow side streets. Kurt’s small painting business had begun to flourish, and they could afford the light-filled rooms in which Roberta spent the first decade of her life. Kurt hired several men to work with him, and Trudy took design courses at the local polytechnic college. Her instinctive decorative sense and familiarity with the principles of Bauhaus design made her an excellent student, and she soon added her skills as an interior designer to her husband’s business. She also proved to be a sharp entrepreneur, and through her efforts, Manhattan opened as a market for the couple’s enterprise.