The Archivist (10 page)

“My parents’ conversion … it has me paralyzed, in a way.” She lowered her head. “In my early teens, long before I learned I was Jewish, I started dreading church. The liturgy, the kneeling and standing, the prayers — whatever meaning these things had had for me began draining out of them, and I couldn’t locate the rupture in that comfortable sensation I’d always had when I sat between my parents and sang hymns with them. That feeling of being safe.

“Eventually, my discomfort got so strong that I told my parents I didn’t want to go to church any more. They asked me why, and when I said it made me feel uneasy, they just said I was free to do as I liked. I’ll never forget that conversation — so brief, so strange! I was fifteen, and terrified of this unexpected divergence. Yet my parents were totally calm, as if we were discussing someone else’s not very interesting dilemma.

“It hit me then that they were telling me I’d better fend for myself. And it was only much later, when I found out about their conversion, that I saw why they’d been capable of such detachment. For them, converting to Christianity meant that they’d made a leap — only it wasn’t a one-time thing; this leap would have to be continous, a constant recommitment. They understood that they’d have to sever ties with anything that threatened to hold them back. Including, if necessary, their child. Because the leap was the most important thing. It’s like what Eliot wrote in ‘Marina’ …”

She paused, then recited from the poem’s closing lines:

let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope …

“But there’s a price to pay, isn’t there, when you resign speech? My parents couldn’t acknowledge my spiritual distress while continuing to affirm their newfound faith. As they saw it, they had to make a choice. So they chose a lovely, long, entirely believable string of lies.”

She ran her hands quickly through her hair, shaking out its tangles.

“In Eliot’s case, you know, it was Emily Hale who got in the way. And I think it’s so stupidly sad. She could’ve been at the center of his new life. She loved him. She was strong and funny, tolerant, clearheaded. There he was, terrified of the dark, and she would’ve illumined everything.”

Her gaze swung toward me; I could feel its charge, an electric longing. “Can you seen now why I’m so interested in Eliot’s conversion? And why I want to know what he actually told Emily about it?”

She lit a cigarette and exhaled; smoke clouded her face. I reached for the pack. She held out her match, offering its flame for my cigarette, and I bent quickly over her hand — acutely conscious of its nearness to my face.

“If you want to know how Eliot’s conversion worked for him,” I said, “I think you should stick with the poems. The real story’s likely to show up there. Eliot’s letters are notoriously unrevealing of his deepest feelings. You probably saw that from the Harvard collection. He made a point of staying near the surface when he wrote letters. I see no reason to expect anything different from the Hale correspondence.”

Roberta didn’t respond. The check had been placed on our table; I slid it to my side and took care of it quickly. Roberta looked directly at me and spoke a soft thanks.

“My pleasure,” I said. “Let’s walk a bit. I’m not used to such eating.”

“Don’t get the idea that I do this all the time,” she said as we rose. “It’s been a while since I’ve been taken out for such a meal.”

Our host helped her into her coat. Suddenly I needed to be outside, released from role and decorum. Roberta’s focus on the letters, expected though it was, had drained me. The night air was warmer than it had been earlier, and I was glad that we’d parked several blocks from the restaurant. I put my hands in my coat pockets and fingered my keys. We strolled at an easy pace, our bodies several feet apart but moving in tandem, as if we had linked arms. I caught occasional notes of her perfume. She wore it lightly; it was almost undetectable.

“Who else did your wife read?” she asked.

I was used to her rapid shifts of topic, but I wasn’t expecting Judith. I glanced at Roberta. She was looking at the ground.

“Poets, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said, “she used to read most of the poetry journals published in New York at the time. In the fifties she became quite excited about what they now call the Beat writers. Allen Ginsburg, of course. And later, LeRoi Jones.”

We had arrived at the car. I opened Roberta’s door for her. The car’s interior felt damp and noticeably cooler than the outside air; I shuddered slightly, but Roberta appeared not to notice. She sat with both hands in her pockets, her legs crossed.

“Your seat belt,” I said, and she put it on, straightening her legs. Her actions set off another small but definite wave of perfume.

“Tell me where you live,” I said.

“Waldorf Street,” she answered. “Number ten, just past the corner of Plains. In an ugly apartment building. You know how to get there?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you?”

“The other side of the university. Anderson Road.”

“Nice,” she said. “I should live in such a neighborhood.”

“All in good time,” I said.

We rode in silence. I found her building easily. She lived in a neighborhood I knew well, having rented an apartment there when I’d moved to town over twenty years earlier. I remembered the quiet of that space — a large, ramshackle flat with high ceilings and little heat. I’d been too absorbed with my new job to care much about how cold it was, but now I remembered and shivered again.

I pulled up in front of Roberta’s building.

“When I first moved here,” I said, “I lived a just a few blocks away. On Pine Avenue.”

“With your wife?” Roberta lit two cigarettes. “A final smoke,” she said, passing one to me.

“No, not with my wife,” I said. “She’d just died.”

“Oh.” She pulled open the car’s ashtray and flicked some ash into it. “How?”

“How?” My temples pounded in a muted but unpleasant rhythm.

“Yes,” she said.

I didn’t know then why I told her, and I don’t know now. The voice emerging from my mouth did not sound like my voice. I felt oddly separate from it, from my entire body, and from the self who’d experienced the substance of the words.

“She killed herself,” I said.

Roberta exhaled slowly and very softly.

“How?”

“Roberta,” I said. “Do you really —”

“— tell me,” she said, in the most gently emphatic voice I’d ever heard.

I obeyed her. “She cut her forearms with a razor and sat in a tub and filled it with warm water and died maybe an hour later.”

“Did you find her?”

“No. This happened somewhere else. I was told about it.”

The street was dark, the car’s interior even darker. We sat for a while in silence. Her face in profile was a shadow among others, yet I sensed its approach — sensed before actually feeling the quick, direct pressure of her lips at the juncture of my jaw and ear. A short swift kiss, essentially mysterious. There are no words for what such contact communicates. If I could’ve translated, I believe I would’ve heard Roberta saying something about an unbreachable solitude. The car door opened. I heard instead a murmured good night and her quickly receding steps.

T
HE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS APARTMENT
in which I lived until I was eighteen wasn’t a prison, but my life in it was that of a prisoner. My book-filled room, the small but well-stocked kitchen, the square living room with its corduroy-covered chairs and long sofa — these weren’t oppressive spaces. They were utterly familiar and comfortable. As a child I spent far more time indoors than outside, and I knew the apartment as an extension of myself, the natural setting of my inner life. Prisoners live in full awareness of the existence of an external reality, but the cell is of greater significance.

My mother was the gatekeeper. She arbitrated between me and the exterior. Knowing that my father was too advanced in an alcohol-induced depression to play this role, my mother tried to do what she felt had to be done so I could survive on the outside: teach me the love and fear of the Lord. She succeeded in arousing in me something only superficially akin to these emotions — a kind of clinical interest in the details of Christ’s life and an aversion to those of his death.

Both of my parents had been unpopular teenagers — my mother because of her already too-strident religious beliefs, my father because of his cynicism, expressed with an unmodulated relentlessness that echoed, in another key, my mother’s Christian ferocities of opinion. They shared a profound distrust of the social world of their adolescence, the middle-class Manhattan of the 1920s, whose narcissistic culture was completely unprepared for the inevitable tumble from grace that the Depression brought about. This distrust had alienated my parents from their peers, and adulthood did nothing to change their uneasy relation to the place they chose not to leave. Washington Heights had always been their home. There was nowhere else to go. They clung to a hope — increasingly diminished as time wore on — that their marriage would provide some relief from loneliness. It could not do so, but they were bound to it.

I was brought on the scene to mitigate their stress, but instead I added to it by refusing their diagnoses of the world’s ailments. I knew the dangers of too open a rebellion. If I were to push too hard, my parents would become even more frustrated and anxious, and I didn’t want to harden them completely to my actual isolation. I thus spent my childhood in the grip of the prisoner’s constant worry about antagonizing the wardens.

Perhaps all children are solipsists; perhaps I was merely more of one than most. I don’t know; I know only that when I was eighteen, reading for the first time those astonishing lines in “The Waste Land” —
I can connect / Nothing with nothing
— I felt that T. S. Eliot had stated exactly the terms of my life. Yet I cannot say I was unhappy. I didn’t understand the meanings of unhappiness or happiness, those paired conditions I came across in novels and stories and poems. I guessed at what they might involve: anxiety and relief from anxiety. In this I was my mother’s child, preternaturally conscious of the cinching and loosening of my nerves. Happiness might be the heavy sleep sometimes induced (if I was lucky) by warm milk; unhappiness the light sleep, dream-punctured and unrestorative, with which I was far more familiar.

My mother’s poor health was a constant, like my father’s drinking but with less predictable consequences. My father and I both understood, though we didn’t speak of it, that the person my mother should have fussed over wasn’t me but herself. As she grew heavier and paler and more short of breath during my adolescence, my conflict with her enlarged to incorporate — always in wordless and unconscious ways — a lack of patience with her physical ailments that was simply the other side of my disdain for her brand of Christianity.

My mother was the person who introduced me to the New Testament: to my namesake and the other Nazarenes, to Paul and his epistles, to election and witness and grace. From her I learned of sin, transgression, and repentance, of abnegation and atonement, redemption and eternal salvation. And, of course, eternal damnation. My mother lived with a barely suppressed anxiety about her status with respect to the life to come. The good acts she might perform would never, she believed, fully counterbalance her various sins. The roots of my mother’s faith somehow managed not to encounter sustaining soil, the come-what-may of forgiveness. Her spiritual doubt was not of the sort that characterizes — even legitimizes — most faith. It was dark, neurotic, urgent. At times it shaded into hysteria.

I discovered early on that my mother’s God wasn’t mine. I saw His intercession, in the person of Christ, as perpetual, unvarying, and utterly reasonable. Human beings might be capricious, but God was not: He was bound to deliver on His promises. On this issue I developed a way of thinking that merged elements of both my parents’ worldviews, and by my twelfth year I had constructed for myself a deity to whom neither parent could give any credence. The God I knew was tolerant, relaxed in the knowledge that He and eternity were coterminous, and preoccupied with more weighty matters than my sins — which were unremarkable, and in any case carried with them their own punishment: isolation, my childhood enthrallment.

My father, who as an accountant had witnessed many massive reversals of fortune in the late Twenties, had no patience with self-deception, financial or spiritual. For him, the central question was whether and how other people, in their greedy stupidity, would make his life more difficult than it already was. Scotch on ice was his armor. Wearing it, he felt free to rail at the world. His hope for me was that I would become the renegade he couldn’t be, except when drunk, and his disappointment (which gradually became indifference) sprang from his feeling that I too had opted for stopgap measures.

What my father didn’t see was how extreme my divergences from my mother really were. She knew this, however, and undertook all possible manipulations to bring me back onto the solid ground of Protestant doctrine. My refusal of church would offend the Lord. My sense of His holiness was too inward. The discipline of spoken prayer was necessary, she insisted, to avoid the pitfalls of pride. That was it: my relations with God were too confident — and too tacit — to be trusted. Christian faith without community was dangerous.

Neither of my parents could possibly grasp the imaginative force of my god-concept — the exuberance of it. The God I had imagined was capable of anything and obliged to do nothing, although He would do whatever needed to be done, and only He knew what that was. This God would leave us to our own devices. His forgiveness was never in question: He had offered Christ, to make that clear. We had our Savior; what remained at issue was what we would do with Him — whether we would allow Him to save us. It seemed clear to me that God had stepped to one side of this question and was simply waiting for us to make up our minds.

Adolescence conferred power, but in a limited and crude sense. I stopped accompanying my mother to church when I was fifteen. In my sixteenth year I told my father that I wouldn’t leave New York to go to college. I had no interest in Harvard or Yale. Instead, I was determined to know the city in which I’d lived almost like a visitor — and especially to spend time downtown, where my parents seldom took me and where I hadn’t been encouraged to wander alone. I decided to apply only to schools in Manhattan, and after being accepted at New York University, I made it clear that I wouldn’t remain at home but would live in an apartment building with other students.