The Archivist (29 page)

I looked for consistencies, the usual physical details. Dates, salutations, and closings: these had to be recorded for every letter and postcard. Almost everything in the box was dated — day, month, year, with the month spelled out and the year given as two digits. The place of writing appeared routinely in the upper right corner of each letter. The salutations were remarkably similar: most letters opened with “Dearest Emily” or simply “Emily.”

The closings, however, were another story. They were unusually varied. As I prepared my inventory (because of the sheer size of the correspondence, this process took several days), I came up with no less than forty different closings. Some were amusing wordplays and puns having to do with cats or Brits; others were merely silly, or lightly affectionate. A few, scrawled in apparent haste and clearly connected with travel plans, were neutral (“till the 20th — Tom”). The conventional (but always, in letters, ambiguous) “Love” closing, and the more intimate “Your” followed by “Tom” (or, sometimes, the initial T), showed up frequently. But there were others, and among them I read a few whose heat completely startled me.

It was those few closings that spurred my further reading. My inhibitions (so sturdy after years of maintaining an ethic which seemed utterly natural, and which I never dreamed I’d violate!) — my inhibitions were overcome by a handful of closings so strangely ardent that I was unable to stop myself from exploring what had prompted them. This breach was the only one in my career. Naturally, it made me very anxious. I knew what might happen if anyone suspected I was reading the Hale letters, and there were days when it seemed almost unbelievable to me that I was jeopardizing my professional life in so bald a fashion.

Yet I was in the grip of a compulsion that only grew as I kept reading the letters. I read early in the morning, before any of the library staff showed up, or in the evening, long after everyone had left — never during working hours, which I devoted to cataloguing the collection. I told the library’s two security guards that I was working extra hours, and they inquired no further. To Edith Bearden I explained that I was taking my time with the Hale project. She had, of course, no objections.

In the space of about three months — during which I managed to catalogue Hale’s entire bequest, choose and install a set of new cabinets to house the collection, and perform the physical acts of filing and storage — I read every letter and card. I did, however, draw one clear line for myself: I read none of the half-dozen drafts of poems that I found in the collection. Hale was a critic as well as an intimate of Eliot’s, and he shared a great deal of his work with her. The two must have talked at length about his work when they were actually together; I found many allusions, in the letters, to writing-related conversations they’d had during her visits to England or his to America, in the thirties. It didn’t actually surprise me, I must say, to run across this buried work; Hale would’ve been its logical reader. But it took away my breath to find those poems.

I thus have no idea if the six drafts I came across — all of them untitled and neatly dated at the bottom — were of poems that have already become part of the Eliot oeuvre, or if they are wholly new and undiscovered work. I suspect, however (and here I’m drawing on a few oblique statements in the letters) that those drafts deal with matters not directly addressed in the existing canon. Matters concerning Vivienne, and a crisis of belief.

I did what I was supposed to do with the drafts: I assigned each of them a number (which I penciled very lightly on its back), and I recorded the date and physical condition of each one in a separate log. When the doors to the bequest are formally opened, this portion of the poet’s work will be read for the first time since Emily Hale delivered her treasure for safekeeping here.

In August of 1965, I made my report to the library’s Board on the status of the Hale bequest. Edith was very impressed with the quality of my work, and the Board was pleased that it could finally announce, to the academic community and the public at large, that its enticing new acquisition had been archived. The letters, I reported, would safely sit out the next fifty-five years in a temperature-controlled environment until their ultimate unveiling.

The job had been done. I, however, would have to live with my transgression.

T
OWARD THE END OF THE WAR
, before meeting Judith, I attempted to go to church. My very brief reentry into organized religion was sparked less by the war than by the death of my parents. Newly alone (or perhaps I should say alone in a new way), I decided to see what church felt like, now that nobody would attack or defend me for going. One Sunday late in 1943, I returned to the church of my childhood, a little Presbyterian chapel in Washington Heights. I sat in the back as the liturgy, familiar and meaningless, floated over my head; and I thought of the way my mother had said grace at our Sunday dinners, making it sound not like an offering of thanks but a plea.

The next week I went to a church on the West Side, near Seventy-ninth Street; the week after, to one off Seventh Avenue near Sheridan Square. There were a few others, scattered around Manhattan. Each was decorated for Christmas, its altar hung with pine wreaths and poinsettia.

I didn’t bother about denominations, and I didn’t listen to the sermons. I went because I needed to tug on the invisible cord that bound me to the sacred. I wanted to feel the slack rope tighten in response to my tugging: that affirmative pull, like an undertow, which I hadn’t felt in many years.

These visits offered none of the quiet luminosity of my earliest spiritual experiences. When I closed my eyes, I no longer saw the Cross as a tree to climb and then claim — my secret vantage. I knew that the physical spaces in which I sat, during those Sunday forays, were meant to serve as Christ’s capacious, high-vaulted residence; yet I found myself transported instead to my first home, the low-ceilinged apartment in Washington Heights. I saw my father standing silently in his darkened study, heard my mother praying softly behind her bedroom’s locked door; I smelled stale Pall Malls in the living room and the bittersweet, steaming cocoa my mother made me for breakfast. As each choir sang its hymns and each congregation knelt for communion, I drifted up and down the apartment’s long central hallway, the narrow spine of my childhood. Eliot’s lines from “Burnt Norton” returned to me:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened …

It didn’t occur to me that Eliot might be mourning an actual intimacy, one he’d forfeited. The apartment in Washington Heights was the incarnation of loneliness, just as Christ was the incarnation of holiness. I harbored no belief that a living person could deliver me from one condition to the other. That, I told myself, was the task of faith.

Europe’s undoing was well under way by the time I made the decision, sometime in the spring of 1944, to stop attending church. Instead, I would read the New Testament and stay alert to signals, clues to action. I accepted a certain inertia as the natural response of a thinking person faced with the vast moral and physical chaos that the war represented. Now and then my emptiness took on the aspect of a ubiquitous landscape — a sere flatness extending to all horizons — and I panicked and looked for a woman to take to bed; or else I drank, hard and purposefully, until the landscape blurred. Meanwhile the radio and papers blared the news of an unassimilable nightmare, and I read, among others, Eliot:
There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing
.

T
HE DAY AFTER OUR LUNCH
, Roberta called and left a message with the Mason Room receptionist. She wouldn’t be coming in; her mother had had another heart attack and had been hospitalized.

I spent a restless morning with the Mencken materials and an even more restless afternoon performing tedious record-keeping tasks. A few students and professors showed up, and I helped them half-heartedly. At six o’clock, disgusted by how little I’d gotten done, I left the library and drove across town to a small pub I like, a quiet place with decent music and food and fewer preening intellectuals than the other nightspots near campus. I ate a light meal and read the newspaper, nursing a beer for a while, but my restlessness caught up with me. At about eight-thirty, I decided to go back to the Mason Room and finish off something, anything. My life seemed suddenly full of loose ends.

I entered the side door to my wing of the library and flicked on the light. The entrance hall blinked into brightness. The air conditioning, a relief after the evening’s mugginess, whirred around me. I paused for a minute as my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent glare. Then, keys in hand, I walked down the hallway toward the Mason Room.

A few yards from the door, I stopped. The door was slightly ajar. There was no master key in the doorknob and no key in the second lock below the knob. The hallway was completely silent; I knew my approaching footsteps must’ve been audible to whoever was inside.

I stood to one side of the door, debating what to do. My instinct was to enter, so I did — although I had the presence of mind to pull on the door itself rather than the knob so as not to disturb any fingerprints.

I walked past the secretary’s desk and through the door, also open, leading into the archive itself. A pair of reading lamps suspended over the long worktable had been turned on. The rest of the room lay in darkness. I approached the table.

Roberta was sitting at its head. A manila folder and a pad of paper lay in front of her. Scattered around the table were loose sheets of yellow paper, typed, with handwritten notes and cross-outs in colored ink. I took in all of this automatically and quickly; nothing seemed to me to be disturbed or out of place.

I moved closer so I could see Roberta’s face more clearly. She stayed motionless in the soft light, making no effort to avert my stare. Her eyes were completely empty of defensiveness or apprehension. It almost seemed — except for a certain distractedness, something slightly unsettled in her expression — that she’d been expecting me. She said nothing.

“Would you tell me what you’re doing here?” I asked.

“Working on some poems,” she answered, leaning forward a little. She was wearing a silky, pale-gold shirt — sleeveless, with a scoop neck — which I hadn’t seen before. It called attention to her bare arms.

I remained standing at the side of the table. “How did you get in here?” I said. My voice sounded strained to me, artificially neutral. Out of nowhere I remembered Prufrock’s little aside, in the “Love Song,” about women’s arms —
But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!
— and the tension in my voice invaded the rest of me. I was suddenly perspiring, despite the coolness of the room.

“The security guard let me in.” Roberta picked up a pencil and twiddled it; the orange tip of its eraser bobbed up and down. “I told him I was assisting you on a project. He believed me. I gave him my ID card, and I said I’d leave the door open so he could check periodically. To make sure nobody else was here.”

“Which guard?”

“The tall one. Thomas, maybe?”

“I know who he is,” I said. “He’s new. I’ll have to speak to him. Nobody comes in here alone.”

She frowned. Behind the frown was a kind of vacantness. She was attending to something unrelated to my words.

“I wanted to work on a couple of poems. It’s so much quieter here than at home. When I’m working there with the windows open, I can hear everything on the street. Some nights even the passing of a car is more than I can take.” She paused. “I needed the silence.”

“There are other places,” I said. “This is an archive, Roberta. Not a writer’s room or a study hall. And it’s not open at night. I’m actually stunned to find you here.”

She looked at me almost as if I’d just entered the room.

“So what are you doing here?” she asked. The stress on the
you
was light but unmistakable.

I found myself unable to feel anger. Instead, all the muscles in my torso and shoulders tensed as in a fight-or-flight reflex.

“I don’t have to answer that question, Roberta,” I said. “But you do.”

She stood up and began circling the table. Her pace was neither sauntering nor purposeful; she wasn’t moving around to distract me but rather to release a stored-up energy. When she began to talk, I sat. It was obvious, though not for any reason I could consciously assign, that I needed to listen to her.

“My mother’s sick again,” she said. “The reprieve’s over. It turns out she’s got a serious heart condition. She’s stabilized. This attack wasn’t a bad one. In fact she’s already back home. The hospital released her this morning. But if she has another heart attack in the near future, it’ll probably kill her. The doctor says that’s not inevitable, but the situation’s unpredictable.”

In the room’s dim light her silk shirt looked like chamois cloth, supple and tawny. The shadows around her eyes were a soft taupe. I could see she hadn’t slept the night before; the tiredness was there in her posture, in the way she was pausing now to lean against one of the book stacks.

“My parents seem to be handling it all right. It’s not like they haven’t dealt with it before — I mean, this is her second attack, and in a weird way it’s less scary than the first one. Ever since leaving Holland, my mother has thought of each year as the extension of a deadline. That’s how she sees things.”

Roberta resumed her circling of the table. She walked with her hands in her skirt’s pockets.

“You know, my parents never talk about their experience of the war — the dislocation, the hiding, the losses. Everything that happens in our family happens in relation to those events, but the war itself is invisible. Nobody ever mentions it.”

She was standing before me now. She closed her eyes; I could see their full lashes, the tips turned delicately upward. I was conscious of her nearness as I’d never been before. Her low voice filled the space between us like water.

“There’s something ridiculous in all this, I know,” she said. “My divergence from my parents, our failure to communicate — it’s inevitable, commonplace, it’s what happens when you grow up. You spend a few years of adolescence feeling betrayed because your parents no longer understand who you are — if they ever did — and then you move on. None of this should be mattering to me, but it does. My mother will be gone soon, and I have this horrible sense that her death will be like a seal on me — like a key turning, locking me in. I should be able to budge, and I don’t.”