The Archivist (26 page)

“Carol walked out, still holding the letter opener, and took a cab home. She told me right then and there that she’d have no further contact with my sister or her husband. She wasn’t crying or anything, and I was confused. When I asked her what she was talking about, she took the letter opener from her bag and threw it across the room. I remember how she did that, just like one of those knife-throwers in the circus — you know, the way they hold the blade between the thumb and forefinger and give it a little flick, and the thing travels straight and fast? It was an impressive toss, let me tell you. ‘Don’t pick it up,’ she said. ‘Let it lie there.’ And then she told me what I just told you.

“The next morning, I found Lottie at home. She looked awful. Her face was grey. She told me she’d just got back from a friend’s place where she’d been staying for the past few days, recuperating. ‘From what?’ I said. ‘I had another miscarriage,’ she said.

“I handed her the letter opener. ‘Where’d you get this?’ she asked, and I told her to ask Sam. She knew something was up. ‘What’s going on here?’ she said, but I wouldn’t answer her straight. I told her Carol had borrowed the thing from Sam the night before. Lottie didn’t buy it, but I didn’t have it in me to tell her the truth. I felt relieved to have a reason not to see her again.”

Len sat down again and lit a cigarette. I took one from the pack and we smoked together, silently. The apartment resonated with Judith’s presence. Her death felt suddenly and wholly real to me. Nothing I might say or do would make any difference.

“Did you see Lottie and Sam again?” I asked.

“Not for several years,” Len said. “And then they just showed up one day, carrying a newborn. Carol heard a knock and opened the door. I knew from her silence who it was. Lottie looked the way women do right after childbirth, kind of shapeless but happy. Sam never spoke one word. Lottie had this expression on her face — I knew what it was saying: ‘See, I’ve forgiven you.’

“Carol took one long look at the baby, said ‘Mazel tov’ to Lottie, and turned to Sam. ‘Lucky man,’ she said. It chilled me — it was like a curse.

“Lottie looked at me. In that moment her eyes were talking only to me; it was as if Sam and Carol weren’t there. Her look wasn’t a confession — it was so much sadder than that. She was saying something to me about how our life had been before Sam broke it up. But it was all happening too late. I felt completely empty. Even if we’d been alone, just Lottie and me, I wouldn’t have known what to say.

“Carol took command at that point. ‘We were just on our way out,’ she lied. ‘Some other time, maybe?’ Everyone knew what was happening. The weeks went by; we didn’t call on them, they didn’t call on us.

“Carol and I didn’t talk about them. We both knew it was better not to get into any of it; we wanted to put the whole thing behind us. I can tell you exactly how we felt: we finally had our lives to ourselves, and there was a scary kind of thrill in that. For both of us.

“Another year went by. Then one night some guy shows up at our door, carrying Judith.”

It was nearly noon. The apartment’s rooms were sun filled and utterly silent. I walked through them several times. On the kitchen counter were the remains of breakfast: near-empty coffee cups, half a roll, a full ashtray. The dining-room table was covered with stacks of unopened mail. Before he left, Len had helped me carry it up from the building’s foyer, where it had been accumulating for a week. All of it — including several cartons bearing Hayden’s return address and postmarked two days after Judith’s death — was addressed to me.

The bed in the room I had shared with her was neatly made. Since Clay’s call I had been sleeping in the chair by the living-room window, or on the sofa; the bed had ceased to exist. I looked around the bedroom, noting its details, remembering them. Judith’s navy-blue robe hung on a hook next to mine in our closet, in the place it had occupied for six years; the closet door was open and I could see the robe resting there, its back to me.

I closed the door and returned to the living room. My chair beckoned me. Sitting, I realized that I was exhausted; my lower back ached, and my hands and legs felt swollen. I moved to the floor and lay on my back, straightening my knees and arms. Patches of sunlight bobbed on the white ceiling. I slept.

When I awoke, several hours later, my first thought was that Len was still in the kitchen; I could smell his cigarettes, the strong coffee. His voice, too, seemed to linger. I contemplated the people he had sketched for me. Their lives had crisscrossed Judith’s life, enmeshing it.

Len had come over that morning to let me know what my wife had been caught up in. I suppose he wanted to give me a setting for her chaos, and at the same time to free himself from the fear that the chaos was mostly of his and Carol’s making. But I mistook his rendition as a veiled plea for absolution. His motives were less simple than that. Len needed to confess, but he also needed to accuse, and his story was a preface to both acts.

At Len’s suggestion, our next and final encounter took place a few weeks later, in a little bar on Eighteenth Street, just north of Union Square. In those intervening weeks I managed to unpack the boxes from Hayden and sort out everything: clothing, albums, books. At the bottom of one box was a dark blue leather portfolio I had given Judith as an anniversary present, early in our marriage. I opened it, expecting to find some papers — poems, letters, notes — but it was empty. In another box I found a letter from Dr. Clay, taped onto a green looseleaf binder filled with typewritten pages. The letter stated that Clay was returning this notebook, which was Judith’s journal, directly to me —
against her wishes
, he wrote,
as you’ll see if you read these pages.
He had, he said, no other option. By law, Hayden must send the personal effects of deceased patients to their next of kin: me, in this case. Would I be so kind as to see that Mr. and Mrs. Rubin received their albums? If I wished to discuss the contents of my wife’s journal with him, he would be more than willing to do so. The choice, of course, was mine. I should know, however, that he had not read the journal in its entirety — only the final entry, in fact. It was the practice of the psychiatric staff to search immediately for notes from suicides to their families; typically, those notes were found at the very end of a diary or journal. Such was the case, Clay explained, with Judith. In closing, he sent regards and condolences once more, and hoped I would stay in touch. A discreet footnote indicated that a final invoice would be forwarded to me within the month.

I took care of the rest of Judith’s possessions before turning to her journal. Her clothing went to the Salvation Army, as my mother’s had; this seemed the easiest solution. I distributed her jewelry evenly among her women friends, whose addresses I found in a little book we’d kept next to the telephone. Each woman wrote back to me — brief, kind letters of thanks and solicitude to which I didn’t respond.

I gave most of Judith’s books to the local branch of the public library. It was too jarring to see the entire familiar collection on my shelves; I tried dispersing the books throughout the apartment, but that didn’t work. In the end I kept for myself only a few volumes of poetry and the Kabbalistic titles.

After everything else was disposed of, only a few days before my meeting with Len, I read through Judith’s journal twice. I started reading at about ten o’clock one night and ended at roughly the same time the next morning. When I finished, I put the notebook in a padded envelope, sealed it, and placed it in the blue portfolio. That afternoon, I took the portfolio to my office and locked it in the bottom drawer of my desk: the safest place.

M
Y MOTHER WAS THE CENSOR
and revealer of experience. She opened and shut its doors. Librarians, too, are gatekeepers — not of actual experience, of course, but of its written accounts. My job is to safeguard those accounts. Not to judge them; simply to see to their proper dissemination.

As an archivist I have power over other people. I control access to materials they desire. Of course this power has limits. I can’t arbitrarily bar from the library someone who is entitled to use it, nor can I prevent materials from entering the collection simply because I don’t like their authors or content. Libraries have rules, which librarians follow so that readers can find what they seek. A good archivist serves the reader best by maintaining, throughout the search, a balance between empathy and distance. It is important, I’ve discovered, to be neither too close to nor too distant from a reader’s desire.

These things I have learned through years of professional experience. But almost everything else I know, I’ve found in books. Reading has given me time to learn what I want to learn. Naturally, books contain confusions and ambiguities, but they arrive in a more easily assimilated form.

The most important things I learned about my marriage didn’t derive from my experience of it; I was closed off from that, much of the time. No: I learned the most important things from my wife’s journal. From its indictments of me, and its love, and its unreason.

Those lines from Eliot’s “Little Gidding” …

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T
HE BAR WHERE I MET LEN
was musty and dark, with lots of booths in the back. When I arrived at a quarter to four, the place was empty. It was still early for the after-work crowd. I dragged the two boxes of records through the door and asked the bartender if I could stow them someplace. We stacked them neatly behind the bar, and he even produced some heavy twine for me to tie them together. I picked a stool at a distance from the TV and awaited Len.

The place was familiar to me, and completely unchanged. My father and I had met there several times to talk about matters unrelated to ourselves; chiefly about the war. My father had done most of the talking. Sometimes, after we’d both had too much to drink, he would invoke my mother, and through him she would come to abrupt, disturbing life. When my father spoke of her, his words cut through the bar’s noise. “Your mother” — that sudden vociferousness, how the two words could carve out a life! — “your mother went to her grave thinking that her prayers mattered. There it was, right in front of her — this was 1939, for God’s sake! The absurdity of prayer in the face of all this …Any fool could’ve predicted the mess we’re in. And there she was, praying for deliverance.”

He was speaking of death, of course, and its imminence — not only, I now see, for the millions in Europe; also for himself. Behind his boozy bitterness, which was all I could absorb then, was a cry of fear to which I would’ve had no response, had I been able to hear it. After my mother died, there was never any hope or question of a genuine dialogue between my father and me. For a little while, habit bound us with loose reins, a light harness. Then he too was gone.

Len was late. I was well into my first drink by the time he showed up.

“Sorry,” he said, dropping onto the stool next to mine. “Got held up. A little tiff with Carol, in fact.”

I smelled bourbon and cigarettes. Len wasn’t looking at me, so I stared at him a little. He seemed somewhat the worse for wear.

“I was thinking Carol might be with you,” I said.

He flagged the bartender. “Jack Daniels. Straight up, twist of lime. Water back.” The bartender disappeared. Len turned to me.

“Actually, Carol’s steamed at you,” he said. “Wonders why you haven’t phoned. Says you’re never home when she calls. You answering your phone?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t ring much.”

Len tilted his head back and swallowed the bourbon. He rolled the shotglass between the extended fingers of both hands.

“When the phone rings at your place,” he said, “it’s Carol.”

“Tell her I’ll be in touch one of these days,” I said.

Someone opened the front door. A cool draft slipped around us; the door closed and the air settled. The place was empty except for us. The bartender stood in front of a small sink, washing glasses; steam hovered on the surface of the soapy water. Len was still staring at nothing.

“You’re not getting it, are you,” he said. “She’s really mad at you.”

“Why?”

“You owe her a call. She needs to say a few things to you. How come you’re not answering your phone?”

His gaze swung toward me now: intent, pained, earnest.

I raised my glass in the direction of the bartender, who wiped his hands on his apron and brought over a bottle of whiskey.

“Another,” I said to him.

He poured, left the bottle, and turned away from us. I wanted him to stay, to listen, to intervene; to shield me.

“I’m not interested in justifying what I’m doing,” I said. “To Carol or you or anyone else. It’s really not what I feel like doing at this point.”

Len shook his head. “Nobody’s said anything about that,” he said loudly. “Nobody. Look. All I’m trying to tell you is you’ve got Carol pretty rattled. You haven’t once spoken to her, Matt. Not once since Judy died. You haven’t called, you haven’t let her call you. You haven’t dropped by. So of course she’s upset. Why not?”

He paused. When he spoke again, the hectoring tone was gone, and I understood that he wasn’t trying to persuade me. He was battling an irruptive despair.

“I mean, it’s her loss, too,” he finished.

He poured himself another drink. I took the bottle and slid it down the bar, out of reach. Len lit a cigarette. I felt him looking at me.

“I brought you the albums,” I said. “Two boxes. Judith wanted you and Carol to have them. You can take them home — they’re right over there. That’s all I can do. You’ll have to explain it to Carol. I can’t talk to her now. I guess she just needs to accept that.”

Len shifted his position on the stool, then turned to face me.

“Listen,” he said. “There’s something I need to ask you. It’s a question from Carol and me both. What kind of treatment did they give Judy?”