The Archivist (14 page)

I never wanted to keep separate from him. But after a time it began to dawn on me that the question isn’t what one wants but what one can bear.

The attendant stood quietly in the doorway for the last fifteen minutes of the visit while Matt finished crying and I stopped begging. We were finally silent, sitting side by side on the bed (like two people waiting for a train to arrive), when the announcement came that our visit was over.

That much I do remember: the two of us sitting in what could be called communion because love persists between us, but which must also be called separation because fear now reigns.

June 3

Len and Carol. Some New Yorkers wouldn’t last twenty minutes outside the city; they take their whole life from it. Len and Carol are that kind. I can’t remember going anywhere with them except Jones Beach. When Pam invited me to Boston for a weekend, sometime in the fall of our sophomore year, Len was skeptical. Why do you want to go there, he said, if you want history and old buildings you can always run up to the Cloisters.

And when I went to Boston and came back, Carol said welcome home, and I knew then that she didn’t mean
home
as the three of us, as the apartment on Grove Street; she meant New York, a larger home, where we three were thrown in with people but didn’t need to engage with them.

If you don’t want them to be, New York’s intimacies aren’t personal.

Len and Carol are utterly assimilated Jews, but this is how their repressed Jewishness has always manifested itself: in their desire to stay in New York without ever having to think about leaving it, about uprooting. There are enough Jews in the city to afford a kind of protection — safety in numbers — but not enough to require affiliation.

When I was fourteen, Carol took me to a synagogue for the first time. You should at least see the inside of one, she said. You’re at the age where religion might interest you. And besides, you should know where some Jews go every Friday night and on the Holy Days, when Len and I don’t have to go to work because — well, because we don’t!

Carol’s nice infectious laugh. Sometimes it was like a first snow, refreshing and unexpected. At other times her laughter repelled me with its high-pitched insistence.

She hid behind it. She and Len are good at hiding. Manhattan suits them. They work hard and drink and club-hop, and no one asks them any questions they’d rather not answer, because no one gets that close.

Happily lost in the shuffle.

They do know how to have a good time. But they also know jazz, which means they know something other than a good time.

But they aren’t talking.

And over the years they’ve moved away from music that’s too unsettling or subversive. Swing has become their idea of jazz. They aren’t keen on bebop, they don’t know what to make of Miles or Coltrane. After the war, all they wanted was energy, technique — the brilliance of Bird’s runs without any of the excruciating pain that buoyed the playing, kept it airborne.

Len and Carol don’t hear pain. For them there’s never been anything painful to acknowledge. Especially since the war.

That first visit to the synagogue, in 1931. A couple of years after the Crash. Manhattan: a deflated balloon. Probably lots more people than usual were attending church or temple back then, scrambling for solace — though on the day Carol and I walked into Central Synagogue, the place was deserted.

I remember thinking less about its physical features than about its wonderful quiet, so different in quality from the quiet of the few churches I’d entered.

Carol got bored right away and walked out. The only cool dark places I like are jazz clubs, she said.

I stayed, poked around a little, found a shelf in the entrance foyer with some printed material on various subjects. Reprints of newspaper articles, mostly. Matt would’ve appreciated my persistence: I dragged Carol back in — she was smoking a cigarette on the corner of Lex and Fifty-fifth — and asked her if I could take some of those papers on the shelf.

You mean this stuff? she said, thumbing it. It’s just a heap of propaganda. But sure, go ahead, she said, you’re Jewish, anybody who’s Jewish can help themselves. That’s what it’s here for. Just don’t expect to find it interesting.

I took a sampling of the poorly mimeographed sheets and brought them home and read them. They concerned obscure topics about which I knew nothing: Torah, Midrash, matters of law and observance.

But there were two short articles that interested me. Both were from German newspapers, awkwardly translated. One announced a lecture series taking place in Berlin on “the Kabbalah, or the study of the Tree of Life and its hidden secrets.” I had no idea what that meant, but the image of the tree and its secrets captured me. The other article was about Ernst Thalmann, the Communist who was making a bid for the German presidency. His most dangerous opponent, the article said, was Adolf Hitler — a known Jew-hater; progressive American Jews should provide moral and financial support to the Communist party.

Oh, Christ, Carol said, when I showed her the article.

I had heard her and Len discussing the situation in Germany, and I knew they disliked Hitler and his party. I figured she would find the article enlightening, but it only annoyed her.

Look, she said. People here are barely keeping body and soul together. Why are these people after
us
for money?

She put the article aside and turned to me.

The thing to remember about most Jews, she said, is that they don’t know how to leave well enough alone. I mean, they’re over there in Germany, and here we are in New York, and still they’ve got to stretch their arms across the ocean and try to pull us back into their troubles. Who needs it?

I remember watching her light a cigarette, then exhale noisily.

Your grandfather worked like a bastard to get over here, she said. His son doesn’t need to be harassed by a bunch of shtetl types all in a tizzy because some Communist needs money. Ernst Thalmann’s not even Jewish, for God’s sake! We’ve got our own damn troubles.

I hadn’t ever heard her refer to my grandfather, the father of Lottie and Len. There was a shock in this, in the sudden realization that I had a history that involved a language and place that were foreign and thus — to me — exotic, attractive.

Carol was still irritated.

Don’t let anyone tell you there’s anything wrong with being Jewish, she said. But don’t let anyone tell you there’s anything right about it, either. The world these days is not a safe place.

More surprises. Carol had never been given to large pronouncements. She left that to Len, who did most of his pronouncing on the topic of music, not politics or religion. But here was Carol suddenly not taking something lightly. And there I was, torn between the pleasure of discovering more large secrets and the fear that the next revelation (there had to be more!) might not be harmless.

But there weren’t any more.

When I think back, I see how I got through the 1930s: just as Len and Carol did: work and jazz. I listened to music all the way through those days.

I had my first drink with Len and Carol the night Ernst Thalmann was thrown in jail by the Nazis. We heard the news on the radio, and at first Len said nothing. He fixed three strong, cold martinis. I was sixteen.

Thalmann died in a camp at the end of the war. Later I heard he was a Stalinist and probably an anti-Semite. I remember Len, his first martini gone, pacing the floor of the living room, cursing the Nazis, cursing Thalmann, cursing all of them. He was scared, as he damn well should have been.

Carol laughed at his cursing and told him to forget about it — what good did it do to get so riled up?

The war, when it came, was a sorry thing. That’s how Len referred to it: a sorry but necessary thing. This Hitler guy’s insane, we have to stop him from taking over all of Europe, don’t we?

And the Jews? I can remember Len’s words: Yeah, seems they’re having it especially rough. But who can tell what’s really going on over there? Rumors — who can tell?

No new revelations.

That day at the temple Carol had said all that Carol would say on the subject of Jewishness, which wasn’t much and amounted to this: Leave me alone.

Eliot: …
human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.

June 5

Clay tells me I should be putting this time at Hayden to good use. He is suggesting something about what I’m not facing, what I’m hiding. As if in the middle of nowhere, hours from home, in the company of strangers, I am supposed to reveal important secrets about myself.

As if. Everything here is as if.

I keep telling him that whatever secrets I contain are nothing compared to the average German’s secrets. Just what
was
that smell carried south from Sachsenhausen into the village? Somebody had a father, mother, sister, brother who looked the other way. What are my secrets as against theirs?

June 29

Matt’s visit this week, another failure for me, though perhaps not for him. I can’t tell how things register in him. The pain is there in the way he only glances at me when we speak. None of those long stretches I remember, when our eyes would lock in an easy languorous embrace. Matt’s eyes so blue, a deep navy. His brows haven’t turned color yet. His hair and mustache are greying, but those brows still have their first sandy shade, that earliest smoothness.

I would stroke them with my index fingers, over and over, one finger on each brow as we lay on our sides talking, our eyes embracing. The hair beneath my fingertips incredibly soft and smooth.

Those first months of marriage — a kind of dream now, in which I want so desperately to believe. They did happen, I wasn’t dreaming them; so why do I feel obliged to call those months a dream?

I began waking up slowly into history, from which we do not emerge as from other nightmares.

During the visit I asked Matt to ask Clay to let me read the newspapers again. He refused. You’re on their side, I told him, it feels to me like a conspiracy.

There’s no conspiracy, Judith, he said.

I saw how it exhausted him to say it but I didn’t care. I kept pushing and finally he got angry. He told me he’d thrown away all my files.

I couldn’t believe it.

For your sake and mine, he said. I couldn’t bear having those files in the apartment anymore.

They weren’t yours to throw away, I said.

It doesn’t matter, he said.

It does to me, I said. I was trying to hold his eyes, but he pulled his gaze away and I was suddenly overwhelmed with loss: all my dwindling connection.

We didn’t speak any more, and then the attendant who is like Powell came in and told us to say goodbye, and we said it. Then Matt left quickly, quietly, like any dream evanescing.

July 3

Today Dr. Clay played God and handed down his judgment upon my head.

We have arrived, he said, at a diagnosis of your condition, which we would like to share with you.

Keep it to yourselves, I said.

We think you should know, he said. So we can talk about what it means for your future.

My future is not a function of your diagnosis, I said. With all due respect.

That may be, he said (quickly) and then (more slowly) but you can look at the diagnosis as a resource. Something helpful, useful. A way of thinking about what lies ahead.

Go on then, I said.

You are suffering from manic depression. It is a fairly common disease characterized by high and low moods, erratic emotion, intense shifts from elation to despair. It afflicts many people. It cannot be cured — or rather, we don’t yet have a cure for it — but it can be controlled through certain therapies.

Such as, I said. (Stiffening.)

Shock therapy for one, he said. A treatment that can be highly effective, although it is not without risks to the system.

What system, I asked.

Physical and psychic, he said. Body and mind. Here at Hayden, before we administer shock therapy, we need the consent of the patient’s nearest relatives.

You mean the people who brought the patient in, I said.

No, he answered, not necessarily. You came here of your own volition. Nobody committed you. But we need your husband’s consent to treat your illness.

And have you asked my husband, I said. (My neck’s tendons like bone.)

Yes. He is opposed. On what we accept as reasonable grounds. He doesn’t think such an approach is necessary in your case. He is in favor of an ongoing program of medication to help you become calmer, more balanced. He is worried about the effects of what he sees as a radical strategy.

I exhaled and felt myself breathe out the name like a prayer of thanks:
Matt!

I did come here freely, I said. My husband and I have agreed to a trial period of separation. We will decide together when it will end. Not you — just the two of us. And I will decide what if any of your strategies I will follow. And what if any diagnosis I will accept. Or whether the words strategy and diagnosis will have any meaning for me.

(These are the exact words I spoke. Odd how I can recall, word for word, my conversations with Clay, but not those with Matt.)

It’s not that simple, Clay said. Your condition is not something to be taken lightly. It has the potential to become rather debilitating. If you want to be released from the manic-depressive cycle, you will need to be open to certain realities. Beginning with the fact that your diagnosis does have meaning for you, whether or not you accept it. The same holds for your treatment. If you cannot open yourself to it, you will find it almost impossible to gain release from your mood swings. Your husband understands this.

Don’t tell me what my husband understands, I said. (Look at you trying to insert yourself into my life, your dirty doctor’s hand up my skirt into my darkness,
mine!
— but I held off saying this.)

You grow angry quickly, Judith, he said. Has it been like that since the miscarriage?

And then I saw where he was headed.

Listen, I said. We are not talking about the miscarriage now, we’re talking about your fucking diagnosis, your strategies, your cures.