The Archivist Read Online Free

considering her quick-wittedness, Judith was at times oddly insensitive to irony. She claimed to be bored by it. Once she cited Kierkegaard’s argument that irony ends up destroying itself, but I think her rejection of it had deeper roots — in an instinctive ethic of engagement, in some deeply felt obligation not to step to one side of important questions.
    Right from the start I knew that I understood my wife incompletely, partially. Yet there was no reason, I told myself, to be afraid of what eluded me. Gradually I would discover more of Judith, and she of me.
    This much I would’ve said, had I been asked. Yet there were things I couldn’t acknowledge. Her brief withdrawals, the vacancy that sometimes glazed her expression — these disturbed me profoundly, and I had no words for my disturbance. I consigned it to the realm of silence.
    On our wedding night Judith and I lay on our bed, feet on the footpost, drinking champagne and reading Mallarmé poems aloud in awful French until finally we both passed out. I remember awaking the next morning, groggy, to discover that Judith had already risen. She was in the kitchen in her robe, fixing us breakfast. As I watched her bend over the skillet, whisking eggs, I saw that my existence was bounded by that of another person; and I was full of awe, and something like dread.
    We were together for fourteen years, and apart for six; and then she was gone.
    What would she be like now? If she had overcome her demons, would I really have managed to vanquish mine?
    Thoughts of a dry brain
, said Eliot,
in a dry season.
    Judith’s been gone for so long. She began leaving many years before her death, in fact. And I had a hand in her departure. I shouldn’t have tried to take her God from her — the passionate, demanding God of the Old Testament, the God who spoke to the desert tribes as if they were his children or his lovers, capable of wounding him as much as he could hurt them. I found this God unacceptably proximate. The One I had known all my life was believable in direct proportion to the distance He took from all the particulars of my life; His force as well as my faith lay in this remove. But Judith had tried to set up her Jewish faith like a home, and over time I chipped away at it until finally there was no place for her to go.
    The doctors at Hayden may have erred about the details of her condition. They need their labels, their certainties. What are depression and psychosis, after all, but lapses from realism? And what’s that? But the doctors were right about the general crisis.
    An insufficient God is better than no God at all.
    T HE YOUNG WOMAN’S NAME was Roberta Spire. I discovered her identity when she returned, a few days after our initial encounter, to speak with me again. Immersed in cataloguing some new acquisitions for the main library, I was startled to look up and find her in front of me.
    “Hello,” she said.
    It took me a moment to place her. She wore her hair, which had been loose around her shoulders when I first met her, in a tight knot that accented her jawline and gave her the air of someone older. I’d put her in her mid-twenties, but she now looked closer to thirty.
    “Hello,” I returned.
    “I would like to see any letters written by T. S. Eliot to his family or friends during the period from 1911 to 1914,” she said. She had a nicely modulated voice and fine enunciation. Clear speech is compelling, and I noticed hers.
    “Which part of that period are you more interested in — his time in Paris or the return to Cambridge?” I asked.
    “Both,” she said.
    “Why?” I said.
    “A number of good reasons,” she shot back, cleanly. There was no hint of a whine in her voice. A decent volley, I thought, but I’d make her run for the next one.
    “Who was he corresponding with during that time?” I asked. I knew, and I suspected she knew I did, but I wanted to see her reaction.
    “Apart from his mother Charlotte and a few other relations, he