The Archivist (3 page)

Emotion. Words.

Waste. No clear delight.

No light under my fingers. The room, The

walls, silent & deadly. Not

Music.

The poem had a strange starkness, at once alienating and enthralling. I’d never read anything like it. I looked over at Judith, whose eyes were closed. Her eyelids’ skin was purplish-pink, the color of vulnerability. I had no idea what to do. The experience reminded me eerily of times when my mother had cried, recounting her nightmares to me, and I could not console her.

Judith said nothing more. Uncomprehending and shaken, I climbed into the bed and held her — conscious of the silence that gripped us both, but incapable of breaking its embrace.

Why, I sometimes wonder, did Judith and I marry so quickly? Marriage wasn’t a state either of us had sought. We’d both had a few brief romances, more friendly than ardent, in our early twenties, along with a handful of purely physical liaisons. Yet none of these experiences had left either of us feeling the need for a permanent companion. In our basic natures, we were reclusive.

Judith did have acquaintances she saw occasionally, and a few closer friends — women she’d known in college, all of whom had moved out of the city. She seldom communicated with them. Like me, she allowed intimacy only a small entrance; she knew how to bar intrusions. But Judith didn’t like to be alone quite as much as I did.

In her casual dealings with people, she impressed me. Though she didn’t have what could be called an arresting presence, she was a woman one noticed, whose attractiveness moved steadily into focus. People listened to her. She liked fierce literary or political discussion, and she would argue with someone she barely knew if the issue mattered to her. Yet considering her quick-wittedness, Judith was at times oddly insensitive to irony. She claimed to be bored by it. Once she cited Kierkegaard’s argument that irony ends up destroying itself, but I think her rejection of it had deeper roots — in an instinctive ethic of engagement, in some deeply felt obligation not to step to one side of important questions.

Right from the start I knew that I understood my wife incompletely, partially. Yet there was no reason, I told myself, to be afraid of what eluded me. Gradually I would discover more of Judith, and she of me.

This much I would’ve said, had I been asked. Yet there were things I couldn’t acknowledge. Her brief withdrawals, the vacancy that sometimes glazed her expression — these disturbed me profoundly, and I had no words for my disturbance. I consigned it to the realm of silence.

On our wedding night Judith and I lay on our bed, feet on the footpost, drinking champagne and reading Mallarmé poems aloud in awful French until finally we both passed out. I remember awaking the next morning, groggy, to discover that Judith had already risen. She was in the kitchen in her robe, fixing us breakfast. As I watched her bend over the skillet, whisking eggs, I saw that my existence was bounded by that of another person; and I was full of awe, and something like dread.

We were together for fourteen years, and apart for six; and then she was gone.

What would she be like now? If she had overcome her demons, would I really have managed to vanquish mine?

Thoughts of a dry brain
, said Eliot,
in a dry season.

Judith’s been gone for so long. She began leaving many years before her death, in fact. And I had a hand in her departure. I shouldn’t have tried to take her God from her — the passionate, demanding God of the Old Testament, the God who spoke to the desert tribes as if they were his children or his lovers, capable of wounding him as much as he could hurt them. I found this God unacceptably proximate. The One I had known all my life was believable in direct proportion to the distance He took from all the particulars of my life; His force as well as my faith lay in this remove. But Judith had tried to set up her Jewish faith like a home, and over time I chipped away at it until finally there was no place for her to go.

The doctors at Hayden may have erred about the details of her condition. They need their labels, their certainties. What are depression and psychosis, after all, but lapses from realism? And what’s that? But the doctors were right about the general crisis.

An insufficient God is better than no God at all.

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN’S NAME
was Roberta Spire. I discovered her identity when she returned, a few days after our initial encounter, to speak with me again. Immersed in cataloguing some new acquisitions for the main library, I was startled to look up and find her in front of me.

“Hello,” she said.

It took me a moment to place her. She wore her hair, which had been loose around her shoulders when I first met her, in a tight knot that accented her jawline and gave her the air of someone older. I’d put her in her mid-twenties, but she now looked closer to thirty.

“Hello,” I returned.

“I would like to see any letters written by T. S. Eliot to his family or friends during the period from 1911 to 1914,” she said. She had a nicely modulated voice and fine enunciation. Clear speech is compelling, and I noticed hers.

“Which part of that period are you more interested in — his time in Paris or the return to Cambridge?” I asked.

“Both,” she said.

“Why?” I said.

“A number of good reasons,” she shot back, cleanly. There was no hint of a whine in her voice. A decent volley, I thought, but I’d make her run for the next one.

“Who was he corresponding with during that time?” I asked. I knew, and I suspected she knew I did, but I wanted to see her reaction.

“Apart from his mother Charlotte and a few other relations, he wrote fairly often to Conrad Aiken and possibly to Van Wyck Brooks. His Harvard friends. Undoubtedly to others I’m not aware of,” she answered.

“Ah,” I said, nodding. Then I stood, reaching into my trouser pocket for my keys. She’d done well, displaying both erudition and modesty — a winning combination, yet one she hadn’t overdone.

“Your library card,” I said. She produced the card quickly. It bore a photo in which her hair was once again loose. Her university code listed her as a graduate student in English literature.

“Roberta Spire,” I said. “What sort of name is Spire?”

“It’s from Spier,” she said. “German. My parents changed it.”

“I see,” I said, and paused before launching into my caution-ary speech. She watched me closely as I talked.

“Your ability to enter the library will be permanently compromised if you break any rules,” I said. “I’m taking you into a special archive. Only a few scholars are admitted there. You understand me?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, without a touch of either obsequiousness or sarcasm. I was expecting one or the other, and the well-maintained evenness of her tone surprised me. I put her card in my breast pocket.

As we walked down the quiet hallway, I could feel a battle of wills take form. She had passed the first test, but I still didn’t trust her. I knew she wasn’t after any letters to Conrad Aiken. Her high-heeled shoes and my old crepe-soled ones alternated in a loud-soft dialogue that might have been an argument, and though I led the way, I could see her determined walk as clearly as if I stood to one side of us both, watching a clash in the making.

At the door of the Mason Room I stopped abruptly, but she had kept her distance and didn’t pile awkwardly into me, as hovering students sometimes do. She stood to one side as I produced my keys and opened both locks on the door.

“The receptionist is at lunch,” I said. “Ordinarily she lets people in after I’ve approved their research requests. Come in. Shut the door hard behind you.”

The battle took a turn at this point. It entered a lull. Roberta’s object was clearly to throw me off, to fool me into thinking that she would perhaps settle for less than her initial request. We looked together at about a dozen of Eliot’s letters — a few written from Paris to Aiken, the rest sent from Harvard to his mother and brother in the Midwest. I was struck by Eliot’s descriptions of Paris, the wet dark streets at night, whores in doorways gesturing at him. We read in silence.

Roberta seemed restless. She tapped her heels lightly on the Mason Room’s parquet floor. I decided to complicate things. Opening one of the combination-locked cabinets, I produced a surprise, a set of galleys for “The Waste Land.” In them Eliot’s markings mingled with the printer’s in a delightful mash of the poetic and the technical. Leafing through, I pointed to where “extra leading” was scrawled in a rough hand after the ominous “Consider Phlebas.” Eliot had edited the line in careful pencil, adding that necessary “once”: “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”

Without taking her eyes off the galleys, Roberta nodded. She smiled now and then as she turned the fragile pages with what I had to admit was real dexterity. Clearly she knew something about old manuscripts. Partway through, she paused and pointed, careful not to touch the print.

“‘Those are pearls,’” she read, “‘that were his eyes. Look! Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations.’”

She turned and gazed at me.

“Do you know what ‘Belladonna’ means?” she asked. Her voice had lowered slightly.

I am unused to having students quiz me, and her question threw me off.

“Of course,” I said. Immediately I regretted my defensive tone.

“Literally it means ‘beautiful lady,’” she said, as if I hadn’t answered. “Also it’s the name of a poisonous plant. Curious, no?”

She was still staring at me, and I knew the time had come to draw the line.

“Listen,” I said, “just what do you want? I’ve shown you some priceless portions of our Eliot collection. You are extremely lucky to have seen these things. I’m sure your work will be better for it.”

Her gaze didn’t flicker, and I thought I saw the beginnings of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

“I want,” she said, “to read the Emily Hale letters.”

Thus was our battle formally joined, after diversionary skirmishes.

“Sit down,” I said, pointing at the large table in the center of the room. We both sat — on opposite sides, our arms on the smooth surface, our hands crossed in what might have looked to an observer like prayer.

J
UDITH AND I SPENT
the first few years of our marriage in what I would now call poverty, though at the time I didn’t perceive it as such. Our furniture was shabby, but each of us had a desk. Mine, the larger of the two, also served as our dining table. I’d never been a hearty eater; a bowl of soup at lunch and an omelette in the evening was enough for me, and Judith never complained. She did most of the cooking, and she could stretch a small chicken into several meals.

I was attending graduate school in library science, paid for by a small inheritance I’d received upon my father’s death. Neither of my parents would have approved of a librarian’s degree, but I’d made up my mind, and they weren’t around to dissuade me.

Judith worked as a legal secretary for a small midtown firm. My inheritance covered my tuition, and books and food for us both. Judith’s salary covered rent. She used her lunch hour as writing time, and sometimes she stayed late to type her poems on the high-quality second sheets of her firm’s letterhead. I could always tell when her day had been too busy for a proper lunch-break: she would come home, find a pen and a pad of paper, and immediately lock herself in our bedroom for an hour, to make up for her lost time.

Judith shared her poems with me reluctantly, and by an un-spoken agreement we kept our discussions of them to a minimum. I sensed that she found my comments distracting even when they were praising. Perhaps — no: in all likelihood — she knew what I really thought of her poems. The truth was that while I found them very well crafted, I was unnerved by them.

Many of her poems drew on Old Testament stories and situations. One of them dealt with the seduction and murder of the general of Nebuchadnezzar’s army by the biblical Judith. After reading it, I wanted to know why Judith — my Judith — had written a poem about her namesake.

She said she’d wanted to imagine what it would be like to serve God in an extreme way, without any withholding.

For such a risk, God hadn’t promised Judith very much in return, I said.

Flesh-and-blood Judith laughed and said my Christianity was showing. But I could tell I’d wounded her. Not long after this incident — which wasn’t long after we were married — she told me that I seemed scornful of Judaism. We began arguing.

I don’t think I’m scornful, I said. But why is it that for Jews, faith is always so questionable? I can understand doubt, but doesn’t Judaism take doubt too far?

Christianity takes grace too far, Judith said. Like it’s guaranteed — which it isn’t. We’re here for the repair of our breach, to restore grace. That’s our job. It’s pretty natural to have doubts in the face of such a job, isn’t it?

It all sounds complicated, I said. Too complicated.

Our argument culminated in an uncomfortable silence. Later, in bed, it was resolved in tenderness. But I knew we were both shaken by it.

When Eliot’s “Four Quartets” came out, after the war, Judith devoured it. She would sweep the apartment’s splintery floors while reciting her favorite verses aloud:
History may be servitude, history may be freedom.
I remember reading to her from the fourth quartet:

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

Neither of us read aloud the question and answer that spoke most directly to our condition:
Who then devised the torment? Love.

Perhaps Judith read them later to herself, as I did, and despaired.

S
EVERAL LONG MOMENTS PASSED
before either Roberta Spire or I spoke. During that time I kept my eyes on the table, to avoid being dragged into a visual tug-of-war with a student whose persistence was beginning to baffle me. Finally I broke the silence.