The Archivist (6 page)

“From what I’ve read, it was one hellish marriage. Vivienne asking for more and more, Eliot giving less and less, till finally he couldn’t take it anymore. Apparently he and her brother, Maurice, had Vivienne committed to an institution in London. Out of sight, though of course never out of mind. She’s everywhere in the verse.”

She paused, bringing her knees together and slipping her hands between them. “He knew Emily first,” she said quietly. “And better, too.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. It was becoming difficult for me not to glance at her hands nestling between her legs. I focused briefly on her eyes, but that too was difficult.

“He met her in Boston,” she said. “Emily was a friend of some relatives. They were both sixteen or so. He sent her flowers after a recital she gave. She sang, you know, and acted; in fact, she was involved in theater all her life. Hard to imagine. Vivienne was the histrionic one; Emily was quiet and repressed, just like Eliot, until she got on a stage. Then it came out — the tougher self, brassy and smart, fun-loving. She was apparently a terrific actress. Eliot heard her sing, sent the flowers, they took garden walks, they corresponded. Then he left the States. They fell out of touch for quite a few years, during the worst stretches of his marriage. But he couldn’t forget the moments of connection. It’s Emily he’s talking about in the first section of ‘The Waste Land,’ you know. Not Vivienne. That stanza about the hyacinth garden …”

She smiled briefly; when she spoke again, her voice was softer. “What a peculiar, powerful remembrance … It was inevitable that Eliot would seek her out again. That they would move once more toward intimacy. And that he’d back off again.”

Beyond my office, the Mason Room was silent. It was noon. We were alone.

“Why?” I asked.

“I have my hunches,” Roberta replied. “But they’re just hunches. Which is where you come in.”

I drew a long breath. She watched me inhale.

“Not yet, Roberta,” I said. “Not just yet.”

E
DITH BEARDEN STOPPED ME
in the hallway one afternoon a few weeks later to tell me about an upcoming meeting of the library’s board. I was on my way to find Roberta in the cafeteria for our afternoon spot of tea, as she called it.

“Where are you headed?” Edith said.

“A meeting with a researcher,” I answered. “What’s up?”

She looked a little distracted, as she often does. Edith is my diametrical opposite. Her life is full of people and activities: her husband and sons, several grandchildren, golf and tennis games, season’s theater tickets. My life, in her eyes, is a miracle of tranquility. Edith comes to me for steadying, and I go to her for a kind of vicarious upheaving — the sensation of being more of a player, perhaps, and less of an observer.

“Too much happening,” she said. “This board meeting is going to be a total free-for-all. I’m running around like a chicken, and Tim’s sick at home with a fever, and a part of me wants to catch whatever he’s got so I have an excuse to avoid all this crap.”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “You poor kid,” I said.

“And to make things worse, I’m on my way right now to the damn bookkeeper’s office.”

“Just make nice to him,” I said. “I don’t want him knocking on my door. By the way, I can skip the board meeting, right?”

Edith stopped walking and turned to me. “No such luck, pal,” she said, still smiling but shaking her head. “They’re expecting a report on all bequests. Which reminds me,” she added. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

I glanced at my watch. I could picture Roberta waiting, frowning.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I was going over the sign-in sheets for the Mason Room — doing a head count — and I noticed the name Spire kept cropping up. Then last week this woman came up to my office, introduced herself as Roberta Spire, and asked if she could talk with me about the Hale letters. She wanted to know how we store them.”

“How?” I repeated. “You mean she wanted to know where they are?”

“No, not exactly. Or at least I don’t think so. You’ve met this woman, I gather?” Edith threw me a puzzled look.

“Yes,” I said, shrugging. “A poet, very keen on Eliot. I showed her a few manuscripts.” I was acutely conscious of what I wasn’t telling Edith. The skin at the base of my neck felt tight and damp.

“Um. Well, she struck me as a bit odd. She wanted to know if we kept the letters in the same packaging in which they’d arrived. I explained all about storing old letters in sets of clear plastic sleeves — she seemed interested. Then she asked a strange question.”

“Oh?” I said.

“She wanted to know if we’d saved the envelopes. I said, you mean each individual letter’s envelope, and she said yes, and I said of course, we have to — for the addresses and postmarks, you know. And then she said she wanted to see the Hale envelopes.”

I was almost sure I could feel droplets of perspiration collecting on my throat.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“Obviously I told her no, and explained the policy. She seemed perhaps a little impatient at that point, but she was gracious enough. She thanked me for my help and then she left. What do you make of that?”

I was surprised at the ease with which I manufactured my careless tone of voice; beneath its skin my throat itself felt clammy, constricted.

“It takes all kinds,” I said. “She seems to be a pleasant person. She likes libraries.”

Edith nodded, then gave me another quizzical glance.

“Everything OK over there?” she said, tilting her head toward the Mason Room.

“OK?” I feigned incomprehension. “Secure, I mean.”

I laughed and touched her shoulder lightly. “Edith,” I said, turning her name into a reproach. “Really.”

“Oh, I know, Matt, I’m being silly,” she said, walking off. “Forget I even said it.”

J
UDITH LOVED JAZZ.
Len and Carol had communicated to her their passion for it, and she embraced it early. She understood the music of her generation as few people I knew did; it had sustained her, and she acknowledged the debt by paying the music a deep, close attention. As a child she whistled the Art Tatum tunes she knew by heart. She could move her hands and feet in perfect imitation of Jo Jones.

Len and Carol occasionally brought her along to hear big bands playing in uptown clubs where she sat surrounded by adults, the only child. Judith would sip sour pink lemonade through a straw and eat the chocolate cigarettes that Carol gave her. Finally, at midnight or one in the morning, she would fall asleep, and Len would wrap his jacket around her and carry her out to the car. Once, she told me, she awoke to find herself alone in the backseat of the DeSoto, which Len had parked just east of Broadway. She sat up and saw the street sign at the corner, its white-on-black letters spelling the name that later would become synonymous, in her mind, with death; but she didn’t yet know about Lottie and Sam. She knew only that she was alone in a car on a poorly lit side street, somewhere off Broadway. She thought of screaming but decided against it, sensing that the sound would hurt her ears and summon no one; and she sang to herself instead — like Bessie Smith, she told me — until Len and Carol showed up an hour later, filling the car with the reassuring smells of gin and smoke.

It wasn’t that Len and Carol weren’t to be counted on. They were always eventually there. They weren’t the type of guardians who would abandon a child. They had drawn the boundaries of their affection and concern, and as there was never any question of going beyond those lines, Len and Carol were without any bitterness toward the child in their charge. And the child, it seemed, understood this, and also the unbridgeable gap that lay between them.

Judith and I had this much in common, different though our upbringings were: the people who raised us were profoundly distracted. My parents were essentially unhappy, and Len and Carol were basically happy, yet these states made no difference to me or to Judith. What we were denied, as children, was a particular kind of attention, which neither happiness nor unhappiness are guaranteed to bring about.

It had never occurred to me, before I met Judith, that anyone else would be able to understand the peculiar sensation of invisibility I had experienced in the apartment in Washington Heights. When Judith and I first shared stories of our childhoods, I felt an odd, immense relief: here finally was someone who knew precisely what it had been like.
Overlooked
, she said — we’d both been overlooked by the people who raised us.

Sometimes, though, Judith’s judgments seemed severe. Childhood hadn’t been so bad, I once said to her. My parents didn’t stop me from pursuing my own pleasures.

What pleasures, she responded — books, you mean? — is that all? When I reminded her that books had been everything to me, as jazz and poetry had been for her, she told me that I’d just put my finger on it.

Much of what Judith said was true, but I didn’t take it as significant truth. I loved listening to her, regardless. She had a musical voice, big-ranged and reedy, and I found it tremendously attractive. Certain syllables in her mouth were chords. Her laughter was pitched low and spilled out in dense waves. Occasionally, as she spoke to me, her words would become a wash of color and light that bathed and restored me; and I would lose track of their meaning.

In 1946 and 1947, stories of the camps, of DPs turned away from America and refugee boats from Palestine, began slowly to be told. In stores and restaurants and offices there was talk, as there hadn’t been during the war itself, of deaths — not hundreds or thousands but millions of deaths, and not of soldiers but of people, an entire culture. At one of our small dinners in the winter of 1946, two friends of Judith’s read a letter they’d received from a relative in Holland, a man who had briefly sheltered a Jewish family. One sentence in that letter was striking in its directness: “It’s over — European Jewry has been snuffed out like a candle.” When our guests left, Judith fell silent. As she stood over the sink, washing plates and handing them to me to dry, her face paled. I asked her what she was thinking, and when she opened her mouth to speak, she began to cry instead, quietly at first and then fiercely, her entire body trembling. She would not let me hold her.

The war’s truth terrified us both, but Judith was the one to register the terror — not in words, for we couldn’t speak of it directly, but in actions. It is difficult for me even now to pinpoint the changes in her. They were neither large nor consistent, and often I wondered if I were imagining them. She began to write more, and to show me less of her poetry. Sometimes she stayed up late, drinking and smoking heavily. At other times she went to bed soon after dinner, complaining of headaches. And the music she listened to began to change: less ensemble and large-scale swing, more solo keyboard — Monk and his young protégé, Bud Powell.

Several times in the late 1940s we went up to Minton’s in Harlem to hear Powell. Even then, still young and raw-edged, he played with depth and force. I lacked Judith’s keen musical ear, but I believed her when she said that Powell was literally changing jazz piano, widening its possibilities. I also knew he was quite unstable — and because of that, I disapproved of her attraction to him. Stories of his behavior circulated in all the clubs: of uncontrolled laughter during other musicians’ riffs, of things thrown around in bars, days of incoherence. I didn’t trust him, and his playing scared me.

When Powell was institutionalized for the first time, some years after we heard him uptown, Judith found out his address. She sent him several poems — a few of her own, a few by Langston Hughes and LeRoi Jones — and some blank composition paper, along with a letter in which she urged him to keep writing music. I realize now how closely she identified with Powell, with his rage and despair, but at the time I was distressed by her loyal concern for him. It was one more thing separating us.

I have an excellent memory, yet the postwar years are for me a kind of blur. People speak in retrospect of recovery, of how the nation pulled itself together and resumed its life with a renewed sense of purpose, but that was not my experience. I went to school, graduated, worked, read books. I didn’t pray or attend church, though I persisted in a belief — unarticulated, unquestioned — that Christ’s intercession would govern the course of my days. I did not wish to know how, or why.

There were moments when panic broke through, when I was overcome by a pure sensation of my own powerlessness. At those points I felt myself to be absurdly ineffectual, and that quality itself seemed evil. I loved my wife, yet could only approach her — could approach but never reach her. And that failure, too, felt sinful; and frightening.

Yet on the surface we weren’t in pain or trouble. We got along well. Our marriage floated as if on a glassy sea, reflecting off its serene surface the muted pearl-grey tones of Manhattan’s streets and sky. The city that was our home thrived, or seemed to, and we took our cues from it and carried on.

When Judith began rereading some of her books on the Kabbalah, I assumed she was doing so to gather fresh material for her poems. I was wrong: theodicy had begun to obsess her. She was looking for a way to understand evil, not as a metaphysical abstraction but as a reality — the war’s reality, whose contours swelled and sharpened with each new piece of information we received from abroad. Judith sought proof of a beneficent God. I had settled for evidence rather than proof of His goodness, having convinced myself that the latter was unnecessary and in any case unavailable. For Judith, such a compromise was unacceptable.

We didn’t know what was happening to us. Emotions we could hardly acknowledge to ourselves, let alone to each other, dominated our shared life. Judith’s preoccupations troubled me, and my passivity upset her. The one outward sign of our relationship’s distress was my reluctance to have a child. “Not yet” was how I put it, though I could construct no image of myself as a father.

The issue, I knew, wasn’t Judith but my own inertia. I read Eliot’s “Christianity and Culture” in 1949; written ten years earlier, it still shook me. Referring to “the events of September 1938,” the essay ended on an ominous note. Eliot spoke of a new, unexpected feeling of humiliation that demanded personal contrition: “What had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible.” Reading this, I recognized the feeling Eliot described — the queasiness I’d experienced during the war years. I hadn’t served; many men my age had served and died. Even more, I had avoided learning what was happening in Europe. My deliberate ignorance had indeed implicated me. And I realized I had no idea what contrition meant — what acts it might require.