The Archivist (15 page)

No, he broke in. I already told you: manic depression has no cure. It only has controls. You accommodate this illness. You do not recover from it. It’s a way of being.

I felt my strength and my will start to slide from me then, slipping like the glutinous, wine-red effluence of my inmost self in which the fetus whose existence I had not even suspected was dislodged, sent down, expelled from me. The same slipping sensation. Something mine and not mine, departing.

I’d thought I wanted a child. Then the war years, and I stopped wanting it; then Matt came into my life and I wanted it again, briefly, a kind of flickering — until the war’s aftermath, which was for me the war’s real occurrence. Then the desire to give birth was suddenly unsustainable, and Matt in any case was unready, his own fear so palpable.

October, was it? In 1946? That month passed and I was late, and when it came, my period was not a period at all but something viscous and dense and significant as it had never been before, and I saw I was losing a pregnancy I hadn’t even recognized. I hadn’t known the baby was there — often I’m late, irregular — I had no clues in body or feeling, and suddenly what had begun was gone, vanished.

My will and strength leave me as easily as Lottie and Sam left, as unexpectedly as the embryo: no pain at the instant but then the wordless shock of discovery, after the fact.

July 10

Clay is on me all the time about my childhood. Details, he wants details. I prefer spinning them out on these pages; with Clay, I’m never sure where my words go. Here I can write as if for him, or for other listeners I don’t have.

Letters are still too difficult. Pam has written twice; I send back short postcards, nothing real. I can’t stand the solicitude in her letters.

It’s not that I don’t register her affection. Or Len’s and Carol’s. It’s there between us, a slack filament on which we pull now and then, to make sure somebody’s at the other end. Fondness, yes I feel for them a certain fondness.

Love is what I reserve for Matthias.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name …

Until I came here, Matt also wanted details. He is happiest when he doesn’t have to handle abstractions directly. Which is why he likes libraries. And the early work of Klee and Picasso. Robert Frost’s poems. But not Bud Powell’s music, because no matter how full of particulars it is, it’s always got something abstract going on.

Matt was afraid of Powell from the start. Did he see me in Powell, in those fits of rage?

Poetry: where I encounter what is not in memory but arises through a kind of instinct, deep-running, inventive. Recognition of something I don’t know I knew; something I know only as I write and a poem begins to deliver itself, to assert a reality, startling but oddly familiar.

Until I came here
. There are still mornings when I wake up and cannot believe I’m in this room, my books neat on their shelves, my typewriter, clothing, hairbrush, nailpolish — everything mine but in the wrong place; it’s not our apartment, there’s nothing here to remind me of Matt.

Who is he? I must conjure him, which is different from remembering. When he arrives each week, he doesn’t match either my conjuring or my memory.

During the last visit he said my hair was growing in nicely, and I asked him if he knew why I cut it off, and he said he could imagine why, which at first I took to be an extension of sympathetic understanding until I realized it was a way of fending off further details. He can’t bear the specifics of my existence here, how I go from session to session with Clay as if on a desultory stroll; how I lose hours wandering the beautiful grounds, my mind lulled, reciting a litany of plant and flower names — epimedium, columbine, portulaca.

They’re treating me with Miltown. I wonder if they know that poem by Robert Lowell, how it starts (so scarily!)

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed

and goes something like this (once I knew all of it by heart)

All night long I’ve held your hand

as if you had

a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad —

its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye —

and dragged me home alive

Matt and I have faced the kingdom always, though not squarely; but Matt isn’t here to hold my hand.

Details. Matt’s thick fine hair, sandy-grey, brushed off his forehead with that smooth careless movement he makes with one hand.

Our hands together, large, broad, coiled as we lie in bed; his hands reaching for mine when he dreams and wakes sweating, his entire body inarticulate, only his hands able to speak such uncertainty.

His hands are questions.

I guess at the questions.

August 1

Matt didn’t have bad dreams until after the war, when I started keeping my files.

Why are you doing this, he asked me.

I told him I wanted to know what had actually happened, and he said he didn’t see why I was keeping so many articles and photos. It seems morbid, he said.

Morbid
. I’ll never forget that.

My survivor files.

By ’47 all the New York papers were running feature stories on people who’d made it through the war. The Boston papers, too. When I left Matt that first time and went to Pam’s, I looked through lots of back copies of the Globe and the Herald, and there were some articles I could hardly believe, about rural children who’d been hidden in barns or potato cellars, people who lived for four years in cemeteries like Weisensee right in the middle of Berlin. People holed up in the crypts of bourgeois Jews.

Pam hadn’t read any of those articles. She said, I skip that type of story when I read the news, and you should, too. The war’s over, time to move on.

Or something like that. And so we spent our weekend together drinking gin martinis as in the fun old days at Barnard.

Matt and I had our own separate wars. Matt’s was the one he had managed to elude physically, the one he felt guilty about not fighting. Mine was the one I refused to acknowledge until it was over.

Our shared shame was that we’d turned away from overwhelming evidence. We couldn’t read what was in front of our eyes, couldn’t speak about what we had heard, couldn’t act.

Len and Carol spent the war years in clubs, drinking. Matt and I (we didn’t even know each other yet!) spent those years reading. At work, nobody talked much about the war except when Nora’s son was wounded in France and we took up that collection for him. As if there were an unwritten rule not to bring the war too far into the office.

But there were a few lapses.

Jack Schwartz — that summer day in ’43 when he came in and told me he’d heard Chaim Weitzmann at the Garden, heard him shouting that two million Jews had already been exterminated and what were we going to do to save the rest?

Two million lost, Jack said, looking at me (and for the first time I understood: as one Jew looks at another Jew). And I said, what exactly did Weitzmann mean by exterminated?

Knowing that I should not have to ask this question.

August 10

For fourteen years my words have been wrapped up in Matt’s, my speech inflected by his. I have been afraid to speak in a language I might want to call my own. Because if he can’t or doesn’t understand, what then?

It has been easier to borrow than to lend words.

With Clay I don’t borrow anything. I don’t lie to him; in fact sometimes I tell him truths. But I never know where it all goes.

In this notebook I write and write and never look back, never re-read.

Then there are the poems. My stubborn little offerings. Maybe one day I’ll send them out again into the world; for now I clutch them to myself.

August 15

Matt asked me today if I felt I was changing.

How, I said.

Do you feel calmer, he asked. You seem calmer. You seem not to be fighting with everything so much.

He was thinking about last winter, before I came here. That was the worst time for him because I wasn’t even trying to not lash out; I flared at everything.

That afternoon at the library. The secretary told me he’d gone home and I knew he hadn’t, I knew he was in some bar, one of those dives near Columbia, drinking to avoid everything, and I yelled at the secretary — abusively, Matt said later — to make her tell me where he was. Then he walked in on us.

He’d been at a meeting in the dean’s office.

I blew up, called him names, threw books around, made a mess.

He pulled me into his office and shut the door and told me to stop it, didn’t I see I was out of control?

I saw.

What Matt didn’t see: how lonely I was, how much I needed just to talk, how I’d been working for weeks on a difficult poem and I thought maybe I would read it to him, it’d been so long since I’d shown him anything.

If I seem calmer, I said to him at the end of our visit today, it’s because of the Miltown.

He looked upset then, and I could feel him forcing himself to paint a bright picture for me. Listen, he said, I know you’ve never liked tranquilizers but it does seem that you’re calmer, you look more rested.

Matt, I said, I didn’t come here for the rest. I’m not after tranquility.

I understand that, he said. All I’m saying is I’m glad you’re looking more relaxed. It makes me confident that we made the right choice for you to come here.

I don’t feel like I chose anything, I said.

Matt took my hand in both of his; the palms were dry.

You couldn’t keep going as you were going, Judith, he said.

(So quietly I could hardly hear him.)

You weren’t eating or sleeping. Here you’ve been taking care of yourself.

I’m confused, I said. I think it’s the Miltown. Lots of times I don’t have any idea why I’m here. Sometimes I don’t know what day it is. I feel uprooted.

But it’s necessary, he said. (Still holding my hand in his dry palms. Soft and dry like his voice.) You need to pull up some of those roots. The dark entangling ones — like you wrote once — remember?

He was gazing off now. That one phrase, he said. So startling.

(And I realized — a quick small shock — that my poems had affected him powerfully, that it was absurd for me to think they hadn’t. Even the ones he disliked.)

Matt, I said, if I’m going to stay here, I need the newspapers.

No, you don’t (his voice agitated now), you don’t have to dig there any more. It’s over and there’s nothing to be done, you’re not responsible.

He stopped, his face suddenly haggard. He’d been fighting this one as long and as hard as I had, but with a different motive: to suppress the questions, to banish doubt so he could say simply
I’m unworthy
. As if it sufficed to be humble.

Humility is endless
, Eliot wrote. But that’s the trouble with it.

The door opened. Time to go, said Bud Powell.

August 29

Recent daydreams, memories: the interior of the Five Spot, Chet Baker’s horn on “It Could Happen to You,” and then the street afterward, dark and windy as we walked downtown at 2 A.M. in silence because Baker’s playing had overwhelmed us. The aching pull and reach of his trumpet …

New York’s permanence. The facade of the Met, austere, grey, immutable. Bryant Park, those straight-spined trees behind the Public Library, a stand of green and brown sentinels guarding all those books. Matt clambering on one of the stone lions in front of the library, in that season when we wandered the city like lost happy children.

Matt’s body was draped easily over the lion as if he’d fallen asleep on it. I sat at its base and tilted my head upward, and Matt looked down at me and began whistling “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” slow and languorous — I’d never heard anything like it. And then he slid slowly off the lion’s back and sat down and held me from behind.

Sitting there with him, both of us looking down Forty-first Street in the middle of the dead-quiet night, I knew that whatever linked us was wordless, and would be hard to break.

Eliot:

Before the urban dawn wind unresisting

Beyond any meaning we can assign to happiness

September 5

Len and Carol’s first visit.

Well, it took us long enough, Len said, but here we are.

Yep. Here we are, and here’s the damn record player at last, said Carol, smiling, then breaking into one of her quick trills, and Len laughing with her. I laughed, too, though not exactly with either one of them. Or at least it didn’t feel that way. But it
was
laughter, and profoundly strange because I never laugh here.

They brought some wonderful albums. Joe Morris’s orchestra, and Monk and Bird. Dizzy. Oscar Peterson. Coleman Hawkins. And Powell, a double set. I almost asked them to leave when I saw the Powell records. I just wanted to listen, alone. But Len started talking like he does when he’s got nothing much to say, that easy rapid chatter kicking in automatically, and I knew they were bent on getting their full visit out of me. So I settled back.

We heard Art Blakey the other weekend at the Vanguard, Len said. Terrific set. He’s got a real bunch of hot-shots now. Couple of new drummers working with him — Carol, what’s that one kid’s name?

And also, said Carol (ignoring Len and looking me up and down to see how much weight I’d gained or lost), we heard that sax player, what’s-his-name, yeah, Coltrane. You’d mentioned him once. He was at the Gate, so we checked him out. I don’t know, he’s not my taste.

Though he can blow, said Len. He can definitely blow, but we didn’t like how he broke up the melodies. It sounded odd, kind of pretty sometimes but just not — well, you know, Judy, you always like that kind of oddball stuff and we’re just a couple of conservatives. Give me Dizzy any day.

Carol stretched out on the bed. She can get comfortable anywhere.

The city was a mess this Labor Day, she said, and you wouldn’t have believed the traffic. Washington Square just stood still. I swear, the Village isn’t what it was. Sometimes I tell Len we should get the hell out — move uptown, or to the Heights or Kew Gardens or something. You know, a little room, some peace and quiet. But then Lenny reminds me I’d get bored in Queens.