The Archivist (11 page)

My education was thus formally removed from my parents’ control. Once I left home, I inhabited what is sometimes referred to as a parallel universe — a Manhattan with which neither of them, tied as they were to the Heights, was even remotely familiar.

During my four years downtown (I lived off Washington Square before moving, after my graduation in 1938, to the West Side), I read constantly and walked the city each day. I knew exactly the hour at which the sun, on a clear afternoon, would throw Broadway into shadow at the base of the Flatiron building. I knew when I could hear, for free, the NBC Symphony rehearse at Radio City, and who in the main Public Library could get me an advance ticket to an Auden poetry reading. I could hum the Sunday-morning belltones of all the churches on the West Side from Fifty-ninth Street to Harlem.

While at NYU I experienced most of these things on my own, but I wasn’t entirely alone. I had several male friends who shared my interests and toward whom I felt affection. I learned how to eat out, and how to be entertaining. After our graduation one of my friends helped me find a job at Brentano’s bookstore, where I worked for six years. By the time I left Brentano’s in 1944 to begin graduate school, I had become one of the store’s managers, and it was evident that I had a natural talent for finding and selling good books.

In those years I slept with a few women, all of whom I told myself I liked without admitting that they confused me, and that the pleasures of their bodies in no way mitigated the fear they inspired. Although I formed no lasting attachments, I always made sure to part on amicable terms. When I met Judith, soon after my twenty-seventh birthday, I’d been alone for several years, and it didn’t seem worrisome that this was so. I was used to long stretches of solitude. Certain things seemed immutable: my often aching lower back and the late-evening walks I took in Riverside Park to ease my discomfort; the difficulty of my encounters with my father after my mother died; the eruptions and reverberations of memory; the relief of books; and above all, my ignorance of God’s motives, which I was not in any case in a position either to abet or oppose.

My mother’s death, after her prolonged illness, had lifted a burden of guilt. She had felt betrayed by me. I’d called her regularly but visited seldom, and she knew I’d resolved not to enter the turmoil of her dying. She told me about repeated nightmares, hoping somehow that I would transmit the calm of my own belief. But that was precisely what I couldn’t do. My calm was a function of passivity. I could transmit nothing, even had I wanted to.

In January of 1943 my father was diagnosed as having cirrhosis of the liver, the disease that killed him by the end of the summer. I’d watched him decline after my mother’s death and had urged him to cut back on his drinking and smoking, but he would hear nothing of it. As removed as he’d become from my mother during the course of their marriage, he still missed her. She had been the touchstone of his embittered life, the only person to whom he could display the full range and depth of his frustrations. Scotch dulled his need for her presence.

He was a man of unusual intelligence, but because his anger was so diffuse, he couldn’t make full use of his incisiveness. It was continually subverted by his need to confer harsh judgments. I suspect he knew that he’d made a profound mistake in choosing to become an accountant. His choice had really been a compulsion — the result of a powerful, unconscious urge to force balance on a world dangerously out of kilter. And the work itself only heightened his sense of ineffectuality. He knew that what he did made no difference — it too was a stopgap measure. He too was powerless.

My father’s disappointment in me was somewhat reduced by my ascent at Brentano’s. The fact that I became, at last, a manager gave him some measure of satisfaction. Before his hospitalization we would meet, now and then, in one of several midtown bars near his office, and talk politics. He was predictably pessimistic about the war, though he was glad when the United States finally entered combat in Europe. It was about time, he said, that Americans put themselves on the line for their supposed ideals.

We didn’t mention my mother. There was nothing to say. After her death he had given me all her books and her engagement ring. We’d taken her clothing and other belongings to the Salvation Army. I’d kept a few photos of her, and her Bible. The ring I sold (without telling my father) almost immediately. I never visited my father in the apartment on 180th Street; we always met downtown.

With my mother I’d known where I stood. I knew that her love for me was actually fear for my emotional safety, masking her own profound insecurity. I had pitied her, not wanting to. I knew, even as a child, that pity wasn’t a useful response to her, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d wanted even less to hate her for what she had been — my well-intentioned jailor.

With my father, however, everything was reversed. I hated him, not wanting to. I wanted even less to pity him. And I couldn’t be certain that his reluctance to love me was not somehow my fault. This uncertainty was as old as my earliest memories of my father’s stern blue-grey eyes, his deep-chested voice telling me to come to him, the impatient movements of his hands as he pulled on my overcoat and mittens, and his long-stepped stride (with which I scrambled to keep up) as we walked the streets of Washington Heights on cold Saturday afternoons, ostensibly to do errands but really so that my father could have a few quiet drinks in the company of other taciturn men — I was always the only child there — in a bar on 176th Street.

Sometimes I wondered whether he would notice if I were to slip away and run out the back entrance. How far would I get before he realized I was missing? Unlike my mother, I had never doubted God, but I did doubt my father.

My father died just a few weeks after the Allies’ disastrous raid on Schweinfurt, about which he’d been enraged: how could we not have known that the Germans were waiting for us? During my final visit with him in the hospital, he told me he was glad I’d been unable, because of my back, to serve. I’d probably already have been killed, he told me, and for nothing.

Listening to him, I understood that he wasn’t celebrating my present safety but predicting and promising future dangers, and I felt a purer sorrow and loss at that moment than at any other. When the hospital called to tell me he was gone, I went out and bought a fifth of his favorite scotch. I’d intended to distract myself, but my first drink had the unavoidably bitter taste of my father’s life, and I couldn’t finish it.

I did, however, drink a good deal in the year after his death — a year I spent reading poetry. I relished the problems that poems presented, and I enjoyed the effort of figuring out how and why each one managed or failed to move me. I discovered that I wanted to be moved. All this I undertook along with my graduate work, at which I excelled. It was easy for me to do well in something that had always consumed my interest and energies. Having decided that I wanted to work with literary archives, I traded in my goal of becoming an archivist at the Library of Congress for that of working in an elite academic setting, where the collections I would supervise would be diverse and of high quality.

My labors appeared to be restorative. In spite of my drinking I ate and slept well, waking on most mornings to sensations of vigor and directedness: I knew what the days held for me. I didn’t often want or seek the company of others, preferring (when I wasn’t tucked away in one of several libraries I used for my work) the anonymity of bars. I had come to appreciate the reality of solitude and the illusion of community that bars provide. Like my father, I developed a few favorites, including the Five Spot, uptown, which offered some of the better jazz in Manhattan.

It was there, in fact, that I met Judith. She was sitting alone at the bar, reading Auden’s collected poems, which had only just come out; I had a copy on order at Brentano’s but was surprised to see one in the hands of a stranger. She wore a dark blue cashmere cardigan over a tan broadcloth shirt, rather male in cut and finish but softened by a necklace of gracefully linked silver leaves. Her hair was pulled back by a silver clasp. She wore small pearl earrings. I remember perfectly these neutral but elegant colors: that deep blue sweater, the dun of her shirt, the creamy circles on her earlobes, the silver’s glint at the base and nape of her neck. These things stood out then as now, but the long leanness of her body was less apparent. She sat as if curled around the book she was reading, placing it at the center of her body, and she didn’t notice me noticing her, then sitting next to her, ordering my drink and straining to see which poem she was reading. When I finally spoke to her, she started in surprise. I remember how ambiguously colored her eyes were as she stared at me for a moment, trying to identify me.

“Do I know you?” she said, and I shook my head and introduced myself.

“Which poem are you reading?” I asked.

She handed me the open book. My eyes landed on the lines to which her red-tipped forefinger pointed:

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:

They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end

The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

I read and then glanced at her.

“Overstated,” she said without self-consciousness, “but still scary.”

Her eyes were neither grey nor green. I was instantly, irrevocably drawn in.

T
HE MORNING AFTER MY DINNER
with Roberta, I found two messages in my campus mailbox. One was from Edith, asking me to meet her for lunch to discuss the monthly report to the Board. The other was from my dinner companion. Roberta’s note said that her mother had suffered a mild heart attack and was in the hospital. Roberta would be in Hoboken for a few days.

I went to my office and called Edith to confirm our lunch. Then I decided to take a walk around the quad, to ponder Roberta’s news. I was surprised that she’d felt the need to share it with me — and surprised, too, by my own revelations, the night before. The only people who’d known about Judith’s suicide, apart from the staff at Hayden, were Len and Carol. I’d told everyone else who knew Judith that she’d died suddenly of pneumonia. Her friends were aware that she’d been weak and unwell, and they didn’t doubt my account. I justified my lie by telling myself that Judith herself would have countenanced it.

Her death had saddened but not shocked Len and Carol. She had been at Hayden for six years, and they’d seen little of her in the decade before that. They knew about the psychotic breaks that had periodically interrupted her depression. They knew that by the time she entered Hayden, in 1959, Judith hadn’t been able to go to work or even to eat regularly; that at Hayden she would sometimes refuse to dress or bathe, and that she always insisted on having a light on in her room. After their infrequent visits with Judith (conducted, as always, in a spirit of unresentful but fundamentally disengaged duty), Len and Carol had reported to me the same things I’d observed. Judith was reading various Kabbalistic writings. She was playing albums of Bud Powell and John Coltrane on the record player Len and Carol had given her. She was keeping a journal. She was sleeping a great deal.

Len and Carol understood that the woman they’d raised was retreating from the world the three of them had experienced together. Although they were distressed by Judith’s evident pain, they didn’t believe — they’d never believed — that there was anything they could do about it. It was a given, like Lottie’s and Sam’s accidental deaths and their own subsequent responsibility for Judith’s physical welfare. Her emotional welfare had never been, in their eyes, their business.

My move from New York to assume my post at the university broke my social links with them, and with Manhattan. I found myself finally in solitude, the point at which I seem to have been aimed all along, like an arrow that after much delay had finally found its target.

The university was and remains my haven. Naturally there are individuals with whom I have reason and desire to interact — Edith, of course, and others here and there. I’m no hermit, I like the sound of voices, the refreshment of conversation and laughter. I’m very fond of stimulating exchanges with particularly fine researchers. But behind or beyond these comminglings, I have safeguarded my solitude. It is essentially intact.

Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew — in the incontestable way that children know things — that God was an author who’d imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.

Between people it is less clear what is owed. Yet perhaps what’s called love is really an empathetic and hungry imagination. One must be willing to enter other stories — even terrifying or dangerous ones, or those of uncertain outcome.

Judith imagined too readily, and I too cautiously. Now I am no longer so afraid, but that doesn’t matter. Our shared life is not, after all, some story whose end I can keep rewriting. It was brought to a close.

T
HE BOARD
, ” said Edith, “is at it again.” She had ordered her usual lunch — an ungainly tuna sandwich surrounded by potato chips, which she pushed into small mounds on the plate. “Honestly, Matt, you’d think they have nothing better to do than pretend they’re archivists.”

As I watched her play with her chips, I could sense Edith preparing to spill her anxiety about the Board’s latest intervention. She reached for the salt shaker, but I gently restrained her.

“Your blood pressure,” I said. “You’ve told me to remind you.”

She frowned and blushed, obviously exasperated. “You’re right, I have,” she said.

I smiled at her. “Calm yourself,” I said. “It’s not worth ruining your lunch.” I sipped at my coffee, wishing it were stronger. Edith’s tension wasn’t contagious, but it required a certain kind of management, and I was tired. The night before, I’d drunk several more glasses of wine than usual, and they (along with the cigarettes, no doubt) had taken a small toll. I was conscious of a thrumming in my temples.