The Archivist (31 page)

The archives were dark and still. I remembered my bedroom in Washington Heights — how it would fill with that same deep stillness, late at night. I would sit on the floor in the dark, next to my bookshelves, and all my storybooks would begin their susurration. Down the dark hallway, my mother lay awake next to my sound-asleep father. I knew she was listening to her Bible, mesmerized by its murmur — the bright promises, dark threats — and if I called out, suddenly afraid, she wouldn’t be able to hear me.

T
HE GREATEST RISK
to paper is humidity; even excessive dryness isn’t as destructive as damp air. The temperature in the Mason Room is controlled by a thermostat separate from the one regulating the rest of the library, and a combined humidifier-dehumidifier maintains a uniform level of moisture throughout the archive. A few very old manuscripts lie under Plexiglas in an even more precisely controlled cocoon of air. I remove them once a year, at most, to inspect them — an operation that requires special gloves and extremely careful handling.

I learned all the physical routines of archival work in graduate school. As a student I was taken to all the noteworthy public archives in New York, and to a few privately held collections as well. Their owners generously allowed student librarians to handle astonishing materials — chronicles and documents and notes whose existence none of us had even imagined. We sometimes found ourselves in a kind of archival heaven.

This was the aspect of my work that intrigued Judith when we first met. She was otherwise no more interested in what I did than I was in her secretarial job at the law firm. She accepted my need to be an archivist, and for the first few years of our marriage she found nothing in it to trouble her.

Gradually, though, my work assumed larger and more difficult proportions for her. One day in 1951, I came home from the library at Columbia, where I was working at the time, and told her that I’d taken a group of students to see the document collection at the Museum of the City of New York. I described its highlights to her: the marvelous essays of obscure borough-level politicians, whose written language was so inflected by their immigrant accents — Irish, Italian, Yiddish; a humorous and touching account by a courageous Brooklyn fireman; and the quietly riveting letters sent by a Civil War soldier to his parents as he made the long journey home through war-ravaged Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Judith was clearly moved by my description of the soldier’s letters. They must have been so disturbing for the man’s parents to read, she said — that revelation of a horror known only from a distance.

It was around this time that Judith began collecting news accounts of European survivors of the war, especially of Jews who had lived through the camps. One Sunday morning I found her sitting at the dining-room table with a small pile of clippings and several file folders. She was carefully affixing typed labels to the folders. I asked her what she was up to, and she said she was documenting what she called the realm of survival. She’d categorized her materials along very definite lines: children, adults, slave-labor and concentration camps, bombing, resistance, collaboration, heroism. From her office she’d brought home a sturdy carton into which she began putting her files.

The next day we had a short, somewhat tense discussion of her project. The whole thing seemed suspect. Something about the energy with which she approached this activity disturbed me. It wasn’t simply her fixation on the dark details, which on some level I felt I understood, although it troubled me. My unease sprang more from the way in which she seemed to be casting herself in the role of witness, as if that were a duty. I knew she wasn’t being self-righteous, but I wondered if she was perhaps taking things too far.

At one point she spoke of common themes she’d noticed in various accounts she’d been reading: the survivors’ bittersweet relief, as she called it, and their guilt.

I asked about the guilt. Was it because they’d managed to live, and wondered why they deserved to?

No, she said, not that exactly. Guilt was what they felt when they realized they couldn’t feel anything at all for the people who hadn’t stayed alive — not grief or anger or pity; nothing. The survivors were numb, unable to respond to the scale and precision of the extermination that had passed them over.

She said other things I couldn’t fully comprehend — something about the war as a manifestation of the initial divine crisis, and exile as humankind’s mission. At this point my habits of skepticism began to assert themselves. I found her collecting of news accounts and personal stories depressing and needless; in fact, her entire stress on survival was problematic. And Judith’s “remembrance” poems — she wrote a series on the Jews of Europe during this period — seemed heavy-handed to me, in danger of yielding to bathos or nostalgia.

Mostly I kept silent about my feelings. I did say to her, once, that evil can be trivialized by sensational renderings and that it might be better not to think so much about bearing witness. The future posed difficult challenges; it needed participants. The only way to repay victims of the past was to posit an entirely different future.

Her questions were unrelated to my comments, and unsettled me further.

What does Christ say to you, now that the war’s over? How do you know what He wants you to do or feel?

He doesn’t want me to do or feel anything in particular, I said.

I meant that Christ’s teachings were never directly prescriptive, but Judith heard something different.

That’s what I was afraid you’d say, she responded.

Her survivor files, as she called them, kept growing. In 1956 she began having trouble getting up and going to work. On several occasions she showed up at my office in the middle of the day, distraught, wanting me to read something. Once it was the story of a teenager who’d spent the war years alone in a barn. Another time it was a lengthy excerpt from a Frenchwoman’s diary that chronicled a recurring dream of a single gunshot, its sound more terrifying to the diarist than the noise of bombs because it signalled an execution taking place on the street outside her darkened apartment. It was with difficulty that I persuaded Judith to allow me to wait until I got home to read these things.

She drank more and more heavily. One Saturday morning I found her in the kitchen, pouring whiskey into a bowl of oatmeal. She lost weight. Then, in 1957, the bouts of delirium began. For several horrific hours she would speak in a kind of babble in which the war, the accident on Broadway, and Bud Powell kept surfacing, interwoven with other disconnected themes. Then, as abruptly as it had departed, her lucidity would return. These intervals were agony for me, but in some ways I dreaded her depressions even more. They would last for weeks during which she was unable to talk about anything serious for more than a few minutes without crying. She couldn’t sleep, she barely made it through a day’s work, and she couldn’t stand to be touched. The depressive periods too would lift suddenly, and in their place would often be a kind of brief arousal — usually to anger or laughter, seldom to sex. Then there would be a month or two of calm; our normal life would resume, and I would fall into thinking that she’d simply been under a great deal of pressure. She wasn’t ill, I’d tell myself; she was a very sensitive woman who was going through a difficult period.

During these years we made love infrequently, and always at my uneasy instigation, until her condition worsened and I could no longer find the courage to encounter her. The fierce deliverance of our early lovemaking was gone. I was ashamed of the resentment I felt toward Judith, knowing that the impediments to intimacy weren’t only of her making.

It had been Judith who took the chance, when we first met: breaking through to a place where I cowered, unable to express how much I needed her and too stunned to see how much she risked in reaching out to me. In the beginning all I knew was the unimaginable release of loving her: the moment of sourceless shuddering, when light seemed to spill from her body. I was awed by how unimpeded our lovemaking seemed. Awed, but also more deeply frightened than I’d ever been by anything in my life. The fear lay dormant, waiting for a chance to articulate itself.

Judith knew that certain tendencies were working their way up through us. From our parents, she said, we’d learned how to suppress attention. We were cut off from what we were feeling. Our own distraction was our greatest threat.

I thought she was too vigilant, and I told her the best thing we could do was to carry on with our shared life. I loved that life as I loved Judith, heedlessly, refusing to see what was falling apart.

Jesus knew God would never abandon His children, she said to me at Hayden. At the moment of death, Jesus had no doubts. But the rest of them, his supposed followers, took his name and twisted its meaning, jumbled the letters; and those letters could spell evil as clearly as they might spell good.

The son on the Cross spoke aloud, at the moment of death:
They know not what they do
. With this we comfort ourselves. But we always knew what they were doing, and how we might’ve stopped them.

I
T SEEMS TO ME NOW
that everything began unraveling after my discovery of Roberta in the Mason Room. Though perhaps unraveling isn’t the right word; it connotes something of panic and chaos, and what I experienced was instead a necessary severance. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Not long after my evening with Roberta, I came home to find a letter in my mailbox, postmarked New York City and addressed in a shaky hand I didn’t recognize. Opening it, I saw it was from Carol, whom I’d thought never to see or hear from again. I was stunned. Almost ten years had passed since Len’s funeral; on those rare occasions when thoughts of Carol actually broke the surface of my memory, I had assumed that she’d gone too — in her sleep, the same uncomplicated way. I counted decades: Carol had to be in her nineties. The letter lay lightly in my hand, two thin, pale yellow sheets.

The voice was unmistakably Carol’s.
I have terminal cancer
, she wrote,
and I’ll spare you the details but I can say it’s no fun. I’m weak most of the time, sometimes in pain. Though God knows I’ve lived long enough, so it’s not a huge problem, you know? Just a difficulty.

When you’re going soon, lots of things come up you might not wonder about, except now you have to. I’ve been thinking about Judith. I miss Len, but I don’t need to think about him the way I do about her. And Matt, I have to tell you, it took some doing to find out where you are but I was determined because I have a question for you. And I won’t be calm till I get an answer, and I expect truth.

All these years I’ve wondered. Did you tell those doctors they could give Judy shock treatment, and did they give it to her?

It just doesn’t make sense, why she’d kill herself, unless they were doing that to her. It’s the only reason.

Judy always took things so seriously. She didn’t have such a gift for taking the long view like Lenny did.

You know, Lenny suffered things in his life too, he was a man with losses, but he kept the long view. Judy never gave him as much credit as he deserved. She was only a little infant when we got her, but I think maybe she already didn’t trust the idea of a father. That would make sense because her real father was a real bastard, let me tell you. And maybe Lenny was in the same league in Judy’s eyes. Who knows?

All I know is Judy adored you, Matt. She always did, right from the start and all the way through, and if you did this to her, if you told them they could give her shock, you have her death on your hands. I have to say this to you. Because all she ever wanted was to live a life with you. I can see it now so clear! You were the only one she trusted.

So now I’m asking you. Write me and just tell me this one thing, whether you told the doctors to go ahead. Yes or no — either way I’ll sleep better knowing.

The envelope had a West Village return address. I mailed her a postcard with one word in its message portion:
No
. I signed my name; the truth deserved that much, I decided.

Seven weeks later, I received a postcard in return. It bore Carol’s address but had been sent by her landlord, a Mr. John Kelly, who informed me of his tenant’s death a month earlier. Mr. Kelly didn’t indicate whether Carol herself had ever seen my card; this question is one I’ll be left with, when my turn for sleeplessness comes.

R
OBERTA’ S BREACH OF THE MASON ROOM
took place just before the start of the university’s July Fourth recess — a long and very hot weekend, which I spent cloistered in my apartment.

Most holidays bore me. The ones I remember best are those I celebrated with Judith — especially our birthdays, which were two days apart and which we marked, on the day in between, by going to a concert or a jazz club and then to one of the nicer mid-town hotels for a late, quiet supper. On that in-between birthday of ours, money ceased mattering to us; we dressed up and entertained ourselves. And the city was our ally on those celebratory nights, at least in the early years of our marriage.

Until one March evening in 1959: our birthday night. We’d each turned forty-one. At an elegant little downtown place where we were having dinner, Judith began giggling at a poor joke I’d made. Suddenly her laughter turned into hysterical weeping, and I had to get us both out of the restaurant and into a cab. Judith resisted. It was icy and wet outside. She slipped and fell against the open cab door; the calf of her right leg was cut, and blood fell on the sleet-covered sidewalk. I remember little dark red rivulets like lines of ruby ice; that, and Judith’s panicky wailing.

The next day, at work, I did some research. I called Hayden in the afternoon and had a long discussion with Harold Clay, head of the psychiatric staff, who advised me to bring in my wife for what he called a consultation. I told him we’d be there that same weekend.

When I got home that night, I insisted that we see Dr. Clay. I think Judith sensed in me something larger than stubbornness, and she gave in. On that Saturday we drove up the Hudson River valley in silence. I remember my first look at Hayden’s secluded greenness, its well-tended gardens and narrow gravel paths, the long drive to three brick buildings in a cluster of dark boxwoods. Tears ran from Judith’s closed eyes.
Is it beautiful
, she asked,
I can’t look — Matt, tell me!
And I answered her:
Yes
.