The Archivist (33 page)

“But eventually I wasn’t a child any more,” she said. “And they’d survived. We were a family — we were safe here —”

“— yes,” I broke in. “But they’d had to survive the knowledge that while they lived, their own parents perished. While they fled, saving themselves, their parents stayed and were doomed. And how could they tell you that? How?” I gestured toward Eliot’s poems. “‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’”

She was silent. I remembered Len at the bar, staring into space and speaking the truth:
Neither of us could make ourselves tell her.

“Your parents kept quiet,” I said, “to protect you. What else could you expect them to do?”

“Protect me less and tell me more! If they hadn’t taken it upon themselves to choose for me who I should be —”

I broke in. “No. You still would’ve had to choose, Roberta. In Germany they had one life, and when that life was annihilated, they had the courage to choose another. Whether or not we condone the choices of others isn’t really the question, is it?”

I reached out. Taking her jaw in my hand, I cradled the delicate border of her face, pressing lightly with my thumb and fore-finger. As she met my gaze, I felt myself reentering a space that had emptied when Judith left it. The end of “Four Quartets” came to me:

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

“We’re nearly strangers,” I said to Roberta. “And yet there’s this … this — what, rapport? Is that it? The right word eludes me. These things can sound ridiculous. But no matter.”

Quick now, here, now, always.

“I know,” she murmured, smiling slightly, as if to herself.

I was still holding her jaw. My hand began shaking slightly, the ordinary trembling of a wrist steadied in midair — a small banality of the body, but it forced the words from me.

“I’m not offering protection here,” I said. “But I do have a suggestion: that you not leave.” I released her jaw gently. “You could stay.”

Roberta took a small but definite step backward. “Wait a second. Matt, please — for God’s sake, don’t be saying something weird right now.” She had shut her eyes as if to fend off something dismaying. It was difficult for me not to reach for her hands, but somehow I kept my own at my sides.

“No. Hang on. It’s not what you think. I’m saying, stay till you’ve finished what you’re doing.”

Roberta opened her eyes. She managed a skeptical glance in my direction but wouldn’t look directly at me. “What I’m doing? Uh, let’s see — what might that be? Well, I’m pretty good at eating a peach while wearing my trousers rolled … Actually, you know what? Most of the time I’m just sitting on my goddamn hands.”

“Come on,” I said, shaking my head. “Drop the self-pity. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. You write poetry. Don’t get sidetracked, Roberta.”

“I can always write in the city.” She was trying for an assured tone, but her voice, softer now, gave away her uncertainty.

“You can always write anywhere. But you might do it better if you stayed here. Where you’d be undisturbed.”

Her eyes, encircled by dark, still-damp lashes:
where the grey light meets the green air
.

“Look,” I continued. “Ultimately this isn’t the place for you. I know that. You’ll end up in New York — it’s where you belong. And maybe, because of your mother’s health, it makes sense for you to go now.” I paused. “But I also know” — my ears were ringing, but I kept speaking — “that I’ve found it restorative, just asking you to stay here for a while. I feel tremendously good just making the case for it.”

She was contemplating my words: their veracity, their implications.

“Matt,” she said quietly, “isn’t it time you played your cards?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.” Without thinking, I reached for her hand. Her touch was cool and firm. Unhurriedly, her fingers surrounded and pressed mine.

“My wife was a poet,” I began. “She shared your horror of concealment. Her parents were American Jews — socialists — who went to Russia during the Revolution. They were killed in a pogrom there. The people who raised her in New York, her uncle and aunt, decided to hide that fact from her. After the war, when the truth began coming out about what had really happened in Europe, Judith started falling apart. She’d always sensed that she hadn’t been told the whole story about her parents’ death. And then, after she’d learned that most people had looked the other way during the war, everything came crashing down on her.

“She started having psychotic episodes. It was terrifying. Eventually she became — how do I describe it? — unreachable. I brought her to a psychiatric institution. At the time I thought it was the best thing for her. I didn’t understand that what she really needed was to be doing her work in a safe place.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means somewhere with people who would accept her as a poet, unreservedly, as I couldn’t — because poetry seemed to me to be part of her illness. I discouraged her from writing, in fact. I thought it was making her condition worse. I was wrong; separation made it worse.”

I paused, and Roberta let the silence stand for several long moments.

“What were her poems really like?” she asked at last.

“They were extraordinarily disturbing. And very powerful.”

She nodded; I felt her fingers relax slightly around my hand. “And what was your wife really like?”

“The same.”

“And she loved you?”

I didn’t speak. Her hand jiggled mine, as if to awaken me. “Yes, she did,” I said.

“What was that word you used before — ah, yes — ‘unreservedly’?”

“Yes.”

“And you loved her.”

Roberta’s fingers, their gentle cool tugging, retrieved me. For the first time in two decades, I found myself seeking actual speech. This desire, unfamiliar but urgent, left me shaky.

“Yes — no.” I wobbled. “Insufficiently.”

“Uh-uh,” she said, lightly shaking my hand once more. “You can do better than that.”

I began again, concentrating on the sensation of her fingers around mine: this, only this would deliver me.

“I mean — God, what do I mean? — I mean I was too afraid of her, of her fierceness — of everything she was capable of seeing and feeling — to love her sufficiently. In the way she loved me.”

“Which was … Say more.”

“She trusted me.” The words were burning in my mouth; I wasn’t crying, but I shed the words like tears. “She was very ill, and her illness made her terribly erratic and unpredictable. But fundamentally she was always constant. Toward me, I mean. Even when she realized I’d failed her, she kept trusting me.”

“And you suspected you didn’t warrant it.”

“I didn’t suspect it, Roberta — I knew it. I was like a paralyzed man. It’s clearer to me now, what she needed from me. But I got it all wrong. I tried to shield her from the present, from the city, the daily stresses — as if any of that could stop her illness, or make it go away. I tried to hide everything from her — the war, all the horrors, without understanding that she’d already seen them. I did what her family had done, what most people did — what most people always do — I tried to conceal the terrifying things, to keep quiet about them. That’s what got to her, more than anything else. She couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t bear that I, too, was silent. She’d always believed I’d resist silence — that I was capable of resistance. And I wasn’t.”

Roberta released my hand, then placed both of hers on my forearms. We had been standing for a long time. My legs ached. As if she knew this, Roberta pushed me gently backward, walking me toward a chair. She made me sit, then she pulled up another chair opposite me.

We sat there for what felt like a very long time. Her gaze, which took in my entire face, was neither scrutinizing nor caressing, but like a reader’s, as if she were carefully scanning a page.

Finally she spoke. “I think I get what you’re telling me,” she said. “Only there are a few pieces missing.”

“There are,” I said. “They concern you.”

Her brows drew together in that frown I loved — a grimace like a child’s, both serious and amusing. “You’re not wanting to rewrite any scripts, are you? Because I —”

“— no, Roberta. I’ll say it again: I’m not asking you to stay here with me. This isn’t some kind of bizarre plea for rescue. I’m asking you to think about why you’re leaving. I just don’t believe you when you say you’ll be writing. Sure, you’ll work on your poems — but not wholeheartedly. Because you’re distracted.”

She shifted slightly in her chair — an attempt at demurral — but I kept going.

“You said it yourself: you want your parents to tell you everything. So somehow you can trust them again — isn’t that right? But you don’t really believe they’ll come through for you; or even if they do, it won’t matter — the damage will have been done. And it’s not only Kurt and Trudy who’re untrustworthy; it’s Peter, it’s everyone. You’re thinking, if even the people closest to you can’t be counted on, why bother? Why not simply disengage? At least you’ll already be in a place where disengagement is easy. Another solitary New York poet — it’s a venerable tradition …”

She had closed her eyes once more, but I knew she was listening. I plunged ahead.

“Trust involves truth, betrayal involves lies — isn’t that your formula, Roberta? The problem is, it doesn’t apply. Everything’s tangled — we can’t draw those neat lines we long for … Look, I know you understand this. You’re scared — who isn’t?”

I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees, my gaze full upon her. When her eyes opened, she didn’t flinch.

“We’re all terrified — of possession, connection, belonging to others. Eliot put his finger on it — ‘Till human voices wake us …’ But, Roberta, you know as well as I do that we can’t just sit around worrying about drowning. We’ve got to wake up anyway. Even Eliot finally figured that out.”

She sat entirely still.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m rattling on like this. I’m an aging man, my dear, but not quite yet a foolish one. There are a few mistakes I’d like not to make again. When you’re gone, I want to be able to look back at this particular moment and tell myself I wasn’t shirking.”

Roberta opened her eyes, then laughed softly. It felt to me as if everything between us, none of it utterable, was captured and contained in that full-throated laughter of hers.

“Shirking?” she said. “Now there’s an odd verb. No, Matt. I don’t believe shirking’s your style.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said.

“Not at that level, anyway.”

“No,” I said, “not at that level.”

Her mouth as I kissed her tasted very lightly of lime, with an underlay of something — rainwater, dew? — that kind of elusiveness.

“I’ll remember this,” I said. “And everything else.”

Her smile was at once grave and amused. “That’s quite a sum,” she said, picking up her bag.

“Wait — I have something for you,” I said. Unlocking the bottom drawer of my desk, I pulled out Judith’s blue leather portfolio.

“What’s this?” she asked as I handed it to her.

“The portfolio belonged to my wife. The contents belonged to Emily Hale.”

Her mossy eyes widened. “No,” she said disbelievingly, opening the portfolio and quickly thumbing its pages. “These are original letters?”

“No,” I said. “Poems. Original poems. Six of them. Not the actuals, of course — I made you a set of photocopies. A little risky, because of the machine’s heat and the bright light — it’s not advisable, but I decided it was safer than scanning them. You know, the last time I ran a document through our scanner — my income taxes, in fact — the machine devoured it. Tore it to shreds. Taught me a useful lesson about betrayal.”

Roberta took a breath and exhaled, softly and fully. Her color had risen a little, pinking her cheeks.

“Matt. These aren’t, uh, little cat poems, are they?” she asked.

“I’d say not,” I answered.

“You’ve read them?”

“No. I’m making an educated guess.”

She squinted at me. “You’re being rather elliptical,” she said.

“It’s necessary,” I said. “It’s my job.”

Roberta looked at me for a long while. Neither before nor since have I felt so penetrated by a gaze. She was, I knew, contemplating her next question, which I awaited with an uncertainty approaching dread. I felt like a man on trial who is about to perjure himself. But when Roberta finally broke the silence, what she asked was something I could answer.

“This is about trust?”

I nodded. “It’s about trust,” I said.

Four

I
N WASHINGTON HEIGHTS
, solitude was my safest hiding place: the sanctuary from which I would never be evicted. When I left Washington Heights, the Second World War broke out. While everything that had seemed certain — the boundaries of nations, of decency and order — began caving in, I waited, immured in my solitude, believing in Eliot’s truth:

Even among these rocks
,

Our peace in His will …

I met Judith in 1945, and the war ended. We were safe. But Eliot had spoken another truth as well:

The memory throws up high and dry

A crowd of twisted things

Gradually, Judith dredged it all up; she wouldn’t turn away from it.
Postwar collaborators
, she wrote in one of her remembrance poems:

we who say it couldn’t have happened …

Afterwards which is worse:

the irrefutable facts

or the way we keep refusing them?

In 1959, just before going to Hayden, Judith wrote me a note asking me to safeguard her survivor files. I opened the file boxes soon after her departure. Along with the clippings, I discovered pages of handwritten annotations. I knew what those pages represented: they were the makings of poems. Yet this didn’t matter to me. I believed that those pages, perhaps more than anything else, nourished Judith’s illness. I told myself I had to act, to overcome my usual passivity. Judith could no longer cope. She desperately needed my help; our shared anguish had to end.

A few days after she left, I threw away all her files.