Shirley (23 page)

F
RED
WAS
RIGHT
,
OF
COURSE
. For all his bombastic relevance in the forties and fifties, and even the early sixties, Stanley's energies, his status as a public figure began to fade almost immediately after Shirley's death. If there is any proof of how vital they were to each other, it is that he did not know how to be Stanley without Shirley there to make him so.

Shortly after Fred's father died in 1975, we decided together that our small inheritance should permit Fred to take a break from teaching. He wanted to write about Stanley, and I agreed; I thought it might right his course. I trusted Shirley that much, still. Ten years dead, and yet I still believed she had our answers.

We went together to visit the Library of Congress archives in Washington, on the way dropping Natalie in Philadelphia to stay with Lou, his wife Sandy, and their six-year-old son. I had a sense of pilgrimage, as if somewhere in this visit I might discover for myself a way to think about the wrong turn we'd made all those years ago, to finally settle what might have happened if my turn had been the left one, not the right.

The security guard, a lanky white-haired man in a black
policeman's uniform, nodded to me with a friendly air that seemed like recognition. The manuscript reading room was a grand one, with high ceilings and a terrazzo floor. I imagined that, come afternoon, when the light hit the row of windows along the western wall, it would grow warm in there. I filled out an application card, told the wide-eyed sprite of a librarian that I was helping my husband to do research on Stanley Edgar Hyman, that I was assisting him in writing a book. I gave our address and telephone number, affirmed my honesty, and went back to the guard, who gave me a locker key so I could hang my coat. Then I found Fred at the edge of the room, where connected desks were arrayed in austere rows.

This reading room was a repository of lifetimes of essay drafts and novel drafts and letters and birthday cards and diaries all bundled into cartons by bereft children and mournful helpmeets. Stationed at the reading room tables were researchers eager to wrest history from all those frankly uncollatable life moments. Fred already had four cartons of Stanley's papers on a book cart at our desks. I pulled out the heavy red leather chair next to his and sat.

“What should I do?” I whispered. “Read some of these? Take notes?”

“These are Stanley's class notes, from the early years, when he was working out the details of the folklore course.”

Line after line of seemingly disconnected thoughts. Page numbers, proper names, names of books and ballads and poems. “I wouldn't have been able to teach the alphabet using these,” I said.

“But I know exactly what he's saying.” Such wistful lingering of his fingers on the thin typescript. “I could teach it right now, using this.”

I looked up, saw that one of the librarians—a man in his thirties, casually dressed, with the requisite wire-rimmed eyeglasses—was staring at us down the long length of the room with a curiosity bordering on disapproval. We were about to get shushed. “How can I help?” I lowered my voice below a whisper, barely mouthing the words.

“I don't know,” he said absently. “Why not look through her stuff, Shirley's?”

“Shirley's? She has papers here, too?” I couldn't imagine what it would be like, to look through her things. After all these years, to paw through the remains of her writing life, like a Peeping Tom in a lingerie drawer. My heart began to pound excitedly.

Fred handed me the cloth-covered notebook listing the contents of Shirley's files at the Library of Congress. Oh my. There were her high school journals, old photos and papers—letters, novel drafts, Christmas lists! Cartons upon cartons of Shirley. “Can I?” I asked him breathlessly. “What would I look for?”

He shrugged. “Anything. Look for what interests you.”

I almost couldn't believe it. Even as I filled out my first request form, I was certain something would go wrong. It wasn't possible, was it, that I could actually be with her again? But the librarian took my request without questioning my right to Shirley Jackson. Her files were on-site and available. It would be a few minutes; he would bring the cartons to me at my desk.

Cartons of Shirley. I imagine it was much the way one feels about a loved one's ashes, seeing all that accumulation of personhood reduced to several dry, crumbly cups of undistinguished afterlife—and yet feeling certain the essence is in there, quietly seething with
watchful expectation. Empty and full at the same time. For me, she was about to be alive again. The most important woman I had ever known.
My Shirley,
I told myself. I would see her once more, after all: her mind at work, her thoughts active, no expectation of death. Perhaps I would find forgiveness here, or understanding.

I sat as quietly as I could, but even the blood coursing through my body pulsed a little faster in anticipation. It was the moment just before, that most delicious cresting that jolts one aloft, time paused, time delicious—if the heart could salivate, it would.

The cart grumbled toward me, paused next to my seat. The librarian showed me how to manage the files. “This piece of cardboard is to save your place, so you remember exactly where the file was and can replace it in the same order. No copying without permission.”

“Why?” It seemed so silly to have to go up there over and over, request page after page, such a tedious, childish overlordishness.

“Bring whatever you want to copy up to the desk, still in the folder, and we'll look at it, and let you know. Anything that might be hurt by the machine, or damaged by the pressure of the lid, you won't be able to do.” He nodded at the small Kodak Fred had left on the table, and said, “You can take pictures with that, too. We don't want the originals folded or bent by the copiers.”

Most of what these files contained seemed to be Xeroxes already. Hardly damageable, but why point this out? Besides, I only wanted a little bit of time with Shirley. Why make copies? An hour of this would do the trick, probably leave me surfeited for the remainder of the years ahead.

I pulled out the first folder, placed the cardboard in its place,
and let the librarian signal his approval. Fred, over by the issue desk, preparing to make copies, waved at me agreeably. I opened the folder without examining its title. Whatever surprise was in store was fine with me. The first page was typewritten, single-spaced, with little punctuation and no capital letters. I ran my fingers over the surface, felt for the indents of the typewriter keys on the paper.

My eyes? They would not focus, would not unblur, as if the mechanism that usually handled this activity had stopped performing. Blink, and blink again, but nothing doing. I could not see. It wasn't until my ears heard the nearly silent water droplets hit the table that I realized what it was. My own tears, warm to the touch and slightly oily.

At a table, in a public library, on a winter Saturday, and yet I felt as if I'd arrived home. That house in North Bennington, another winter ten years earlier, and I as young as a girl could be and yet as old as any other Mother Earth, and I had learned what it was to love. How to be loved and how to provide love, and how to be of service as a gesture to the gods. Had I known how fast it would all go, how little it would amount to, would I have lived each day more consciously? Ah, me. I don't have the faintest idea.

•   •   •

F
ROM
S
HIRLEY
'
S
JOURNAL
, dated December 3, and the year was 1964, and I am certain I was in the house. I was upstairs in the house, and this is what she was writing.

all day yesterday and this morning i have been thinking of these pages as a refuge, a pleasant hiding place from problems
and troubles; that i suppose is because i told the doc yesterday that the writing was happy, which of course it is. writing itself is a happy act, and when i can remember the future and plan for it i am very happy indeed. i am oddly self-conscious this morning because stanley is at home and there is literally no telling him what i am doing. i think he would regard me as a criminal waster of time, and self-indulgent besides. but the endless explanations involved in merely telling stanley anything he does not immediately understand are beyond me right now; it would take all my writing time only to tell him what i am doing.

writing is the way out writing is the way out writing is the way out. too early to think of plots.

there is a calm that begins to come. and my fingers are more limber.

While Shirley wrote this, I had to have been in the house. Upstairs. Perhaps napping. Or maybe I was reading in the living room, or doing dishes. A slim possibility that I was out, in the village, visiting the library or buying groceries. And if so, as I did those errands, they were done for her, for the life I shared with her family, in that house on the hill in North Bennington. But in the writing, there is only Shirley, Shirley and Stanley. As if the world held no one else. Lower down the page, she wonders if she should invite Barbara for coffee? Who is Barbara? Why don't I remember her?

I opened the next folder and riffled through it quickly. And
then the next, and the one following. Where was I? Where was I mentioned? I had been there, every day of that entire winter. Where was my name? Was all of it imagined?

I found it difficult to read further. I closed my eyes. As if imprinted on the inside of my eyelids, I could see the walls of that bedroom upstairs, the one Stanley and Shirley gave to us, the one we slept in all that long winter. I'd believed myself a grown-up, hadn't I? And the room itself served better than the mother I'd been born to, its windows looking out onto those huge, threatening, snow-covered trees, that steep climb up the icy hill to campus, but me held safe inside. I'd never lived another place, before or after, in which a house itself had so protected its inhabitants. The house had loved me, hadn't it?

So Shirley didn't see me, not as I saw her. I hadn't known. Ah, the snufflings of scholars: noses sniffed, throats cleared, pencils tapped, chairs shifted. With my eyes shut, I could hear paper sheets being turned respectfully over, the squeak of one resentful library cart's wheels, and under it all, the constant whining rhythms of the photocopy machines. My stomach growled. How very, very anxious I was, suddenly.

I felt the air shift as Fred sat back down, placed a pile of Xeroxed sheets on our table. “You can staple these,” he said. Offering distraction at a most opportune time.

Mostly, Stanley's papers were endless listings of course plans, notes for lectures, ideas for articles—how familiar the sight. They were always scattered around the house, on tables and chair arms, piled on the window seat, or left abandoned on the kitchen counter.
One thing Fred had copied that caught my fancy was a handwritten document from Box 33, Stanley's early writings. It was called “Me—In Outline” and began with the lovely phrase:
My ancestors were normal people . . .

I showed it to Fred, but he barely glanced at the paper, didn't bother to smile.

And then I picked up the next folder, the one Fred had set aside to look at next. Oh, god. That list of names, that single sheet of paper atop a pile of lecture notes and book reviews. Fred had not read it yet, or he'd have seen her name there. Maybe, without examining the list, he thought he'd look them up, the students from the fall of 1946, look them up one by one and find out how brilliant each of them found Stanley. I couldn't breathe, couldn't lift my eyes, couldn't move my elbow: What if Fred realized what it was? What if that overly responsible librarian chose this moment to glance my way? But Fred was standing now, about to go ask permission to photocopy more pages. And the librarian watched as he advanced, and I did it without thinking: I simply folded up the original page and tucked it in my bag. Two quick movements and it was over.

I told myself she'd have done the same for me.

•   •   •

“L
OOK
,” F
RED
SAID
, returning minutes later, “another letter from one of Stanley's childhood friends. I bet you'll find this interesting.”

It was dated December 8, 1946. The first two paragraphs were inside jokes to Stanley and Shirley, mentioning their old friend
June and her reaction to the sale of Stanley's first manuscript. “
The Armed Vision
?” I asked. Published eighteen months later, this was a celebration of the brilliant pioneers of literary criticism Stanley had been trained by, a widely lauded, career-making treatise that I knew was now considered to be hopelessly optimistic about the future of the craft. Even Stanley, twenty years later, when we knew him, believed he had been wrong—the brilliant techniques for reading and analysis developed by Blackmur and Burke and Empson had become unusable tools in the hands of lesser scholarly minds. Stanley would, in moments of unbridled (read: inebriated) self-pity, include himself in the latter company.

“Not that,” Fred said. “Keep reading.”

The next paragraph:

What with all your young lady students disappearing as they are . . . if she turns up mumbling hysterically about Tammuz we will know who to look for and if she turns up mumbling hysterically about Cthulhu we will know who else to look for.

I knew who Tammuz was, the god of the harvest, who was slain by the cruel and selfish goddess of love, that courtesan of all courtesans, Ishtar. But who was Cthulhu? I nudged Fred and pointed to the word.

He whispered, “It's from a science-fiction story, by Lovecraft. Cthulhu is the high priest of a cult, I think he's from outer space. Gargantuan. Hideous. Shirley must have liked the story. Stanley didn't read anything so lowbrow, nothing that wasn't quote-unquote literature.”