“Yes,” I said. “But I’ve no desire to eat my lunch there. Two meals a day is enough.”
She eyed me, then nodded. I’d passed the test. But her next sentence upturned everything.
“Well, my place has fans and a couple of beers; it’ll do.”
The first thing I noticed, as we entered the apartment, was a large canvas that dominated one wall of what appeared to be the living room. The canvas was actually a collage. On a background of paint thickly layered in shades of brown and grey, various photographs overlapped. Some were whole, some in torn or cut pieces; all were snapshots — color and black-and-white. The photos seemed to be scenes from a summer camp: girls and boys standing in a semi-circle next to low clapboard cabins; a girl by the side of a canoe (perhaps Roberta — impossible to tell); several children waving from a tree on whose wide trunk was a lively bull’s-eye. One photo showed a cluster of children in the main hall of Grand Central Station. The children were waving and smiling at the camera, and their parents were gathered behind them. Everyone was pointing at a conductor who stood in the doorway of one of the platforms, holding a sign that read “LET’S GO TO CAMP!” Another snapshot, somewhat out of focus, showed what looked to be the same group of children emerging from a train. To one side was a small station-house, forest-green and predictably quaint, draped with a bright banner on which “You’re Here!” had been painted in bright block letters.
Next to the photos (which filled much of the canvas’s left side) were cut-out clippings. They were advertisements, I realized, for summer camps in the Berkshires, the Adirondacks, New England — various pine-sheltered places with pseudo-Indian names where (the ads said) children could learn archery and weave lanyards and sleep outdoors.
On the canvas’s right side, painted in neat letters, was the word “CAMP.” Beneath it was a list of definitions, also in blue and evidently taken directly from a dictionary:
a tent or cabin for temporary lodging, a place in the country for vacationers, a group of people supporting a common cause
.
The last two definitions stood out. One, printed in a brilliant orange, was nearly ugly against its grey backdrop:
banality, mediocrity, or ostentation so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal.
The other definition, painted in very small black letters, was harder to read, but I was able after some peering to make it out:
a place you’re sent when we’ve had enough of you and are planning never to see you again
.
Roberta stood silently for several minutes as I looked at the collage. When I turned to her, she shrugged her shoulders.
“One of my few attempts,” she said. “I’m not much of a visual artist, even though my parents are painters. Maybe I should say because of that. Whatever.”
She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bag and lit one, then held out the pack.
“Want one?”
I shook my head. “When did you do this?” I asked, nodding at the collage.
“When? Oh, I don’t know — around the time I graduated.”
She wasn’t looking at the canvas as she continued talking. “I remember showing it to my mother. She hates anything too conceptual, so she had trouble praising this thing. I mean, she wanted to; she always praises anything I do. But with this, she was kind of stumped. I figured it hit a nerve, though of course at the time I didn’t know which one.”
Roberta’s gaze moved back to the collage.
“So my mother restricted her comments to technique — ‘nice how you placed the photos within the larger composition’ and so on.” Roberta snorted lightly, then smiled. “My father’s reaction was more interesting. ‘What’d you call it?’ he asked. ‘The Meaning of Camp,’ I said. ‘You might consider leaving it untitled,’ he said — which is of course a perfectly defensible position. ‘Why?’ I asked, and he said, ‘To let it speak for itself.’ I suspect he really knew what I was doing. But then he took it all back, because he went on to say how strong the photos were, the composition, blahblah. The usual pointlessness.”
“You’re not easy to please,” I said.
She stubbed her cigarette. “Who likes obvious flattery?” she said. “Let’s bring the sandwiches in here — it’s cooler by the window.”
I followed her to a large room with a table that apparently also served as a desk. Roberta hastily cleared it of books and papers and then produced plates, napkins, and beer from the adjoining kitchen.
“That should do it,” she said.
An overhead fan and the open window kept the room pleasant; a soft crossdraft blew over us. We ate quickly — whether because of hunger or a certain awkwardness, I couldn’t tell. Roberta pushed our plates to one side, but neither of us made a move to get up from our seats. The air and light generated a languor I found difficult to resist.
“You have a nice apartment,” I said. “They’re not easy to find.”
Something I couldn’t identify flitted across her face.
“I inherited it a few months ago,” she said.
“Literally, you mean?”
Her smile was slow.
“Figuratively. It belonged to a man I lived with for a year. He moved out, and I took over his lease.”
“Was he a graduate student?” I asked.
“No. He was an engineer. Not the train kind — the building kind. Also a writer, an essayist.”
“How did you meet?”
She sipped her beer before answering. “I met him at a public lecture. On Martin Buber, of all things.”
“So you and he shared an interest in philosophy,” I said. My words sounded wooden to me, but the prompting worked. For a few moments, Roberta was silent. Then she lit a cigarette and began talking again.
“Theology, in fact. I’d just found out I was Jewish, and Peter had decided he wasn’t.”
“How do you mean?”
She slid a bottlecap across the table and tapped ash into it.
“He was raised a Protestant, like me, and when he was twenty-one he married a Jewish woman and converted — for her, basically. Her family wanted it, she wanted it, and so he went along. The marriage was lifeless. At the point when I met him, he’d begun extricating himself from it, though he was still living with his wife and children. And he was rethinking his entire relationship with Judaism. He ended up leaving everything — his family, his adopted faith. Me, too.”
She paused, drumming the fingers of one hand on the table in a delicate yet aggressive rhythm. Her hair was pulled back by a clasp, exposing her neck. I could see the tendons tighten slightly as if in response to her moving fingers. The wide neckline of her white shirt revealed her collarbones and, between them, the dip of mauve-toned skin at the base of her throat. The shirt’s fabric lay loosely over her breasts; its hem rested at the top of her hips and abdomen. Although her legs were hidden by the table, I knew from her body’s angle that they were crossed: the left over the right.
“Peter was a brilliant man,” she said. “He read constantly, and he was always taking in something new. It’s hard to describe him without sounding hyperbolic. He had one of those minds that link things.”
“Well,” I said. “So do you.”
“No. Not in the same way. Peter was someone with special powers. At times I felt completely daunted by him.”
“That’s natural,” I said. “People with special powers are frightening to love. That’s why Eliot and Vivienne were doomed, by the way — why their marriage was bound to fail. They terrified each other.”
She looked at me, and a question crossed her face, but she said nothing. Then she leaned back in her chair, her hands folded in her lap. Her body was large and definite, and I felt as if in the silence I could hear not only her breathing but the interior sounds of her lungs working.
“Peter didn’t terrify me,” she said. “Although maybe he should have. Sometimes people like him become sociopaths and commit horrible crimes without blinking. But Peter wasn’t violent or cruel. It’s different — it’s hard to describe. Peter’s not plugged into the same switchboard as the rest of us. He’s unassailable. Nobody lays claim to him.”
She stopped, looking away. Her sudden silence disconcerted me.
“Well, it doesn’t seem like you could’ve seen any of this coming,” I said.
Roberta shook her head — whether in agreement or disagreement, I couldn’t tell.
“I was totally blindsided,” she said. “You know, I do have some sympathy for Vivienne Eliot, even though she was such a mess. I can imagine how she kind of got pushed over the edge. I mean, she took intimacy for granted — it seemed utterly natural to her. She and Eliot were both writers. He’d always shown her his work, and she was one of his first editors. Plus, he published some of her work. How could she possibly have anticipated that he’d ditch her? In his eyes, you know, Vivienne simply ceased to exist except as a symbol of his own fallen state. To be turned into an abstraction — that really must’ve been more than Vivienne could handle.”
Her grey-green gaze pinned me for a few seconds. Then she closed her eyes and brought one hand to her neck, idly massaging it as she rolled her head gently from side to side. The tendons at her collarbones arched, and in that instant I wanted her without reservation. My eyes closed, and Judith rose before me. It was morning, and she was singing “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” in her reedy, dense voice as she pulled on her blue robe and her boots and headed down the back stairs. My eyes opened, and Roberta was touching my wrist, saying, “Matt, you still here?”
Somehow the moment passed, the aperture closed. We were once again the man and woman who had entered the apartment an hour earlier, carrying white sandwich bags.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m here.”
Roberta went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water, which she placed in front of me.
“Drink it,” she said. “You look kind of flushed. It’s warmer than I thought, even with the fan. We should head back — the library’s nice and cool, you’ll feel better there.”
She gathered up the sandwich wrappers and beer bottles and took them into the kitchen. I followed with my empty glass, but she wouldn’t let me enter.
“Out,” she ordered. “It’s not a pretty sight.” She glanced at my face. “You’re looking much better.”
“I don’t do well in hot weather,” I said.
At the front door, she turned to me. “Are you up for the walk back? We can drive, you know. I have a car.”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine as long as we stroll. I walk everywhere. An old habit from when I lived in the city.”
“New York, you mean — that’s where you’re from originally, right? I thought so.”
We descended the stairs. Despite the heat, I was glad to be moving. Roberta’s street was well shaded and quiet, with little traffic. We walked at a leisurely pace.
“I miss the city,” Roberta said. “Do you?”
“Seldom,” I answered. “I haven’t been back in years.”
“Why not?”
Her hair glinted again. A small exultant ache claimed me; then it passed.
“I have plenty to do here,” I said.
“Any friends left in New York?” She threw me a glance as she spoke.
“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“Family?”
Several blocks down, the university’s brick walls beckoned; I could just make them out.
“No. My parents died in the mid-forties. Neither my wife nor I had siblings.”
“What part of the city did you live in?”
“I grew up in Washington Heights. My wife and I lived on the West Side.”
“And when did you leave?”
“In 1965.”
“You came straight here?”
“Yes.”
Roberta frowned, calculating. “That wasn’t long after the Hale letters arrived.”
I could see the library now, its grey mass ringed by large rhododendrons. Its fixity calmed me.
“Just a few years after,” I said.
“Who catalogued them — you or Edith?”
“I did.”
This time she gave me a longer glance.
“Did you enjoy it?”
I laughed. “I’m not sure I’d put it that way. It was a hell of a lot of work. The correspondence was immense, you know. It took me several months to deal with everything.”
“I’ll bet it did.” Her tone was superbly uninflected.
We had arrived at the library. The hallway to the Mason Room seemed exaggeratedly dark after the bright outdoors. I unlocked the door, and we entered the cool, familiar space. At my side, Roberta laughed softly.
“I just remembered the first time you let me in here,” she said. “How I alarmed you.”
“That’s not the word I’d use,” I said.
She turned and looked directly at me, and I felt a sudden rapid murmur of blood in my ears. A momentary flare; a caution-ary signal.
“I never use the words you use.” Her eyes performed a featherweight dance, a delicate scan of my face.
I turned away. She moved to her table, and I moved to mine. We worked the rest of the afternoon in a silence neither dangerous nor safe but provisional.
I
BEGAN WORKING AT THE UNIVERSITY
on April 3, 1965. About six months later, after thoroughly familiarizing myself with the Mason Room collection, I undertook the task of organizing Emily Hale’s bequest. I knew it would be a huge job. The first thing I did was to assign responsibility for my more tedious duties to one of the junior librarians so I could closet myself with the sequestered materials. Then I moved a worktable into my office, shut and locked the door, and emptied the cardboard cartons onto the table.
The contents were completely disorganized. Many of the letters weren’t in their envelopes, though I discovered (after several hours of what felt like a mix-and-match game) that each did in fact have one. A large portion of the airmail correspondence, written on pale blue onionskin, was wadded in a corner of the box. The rest was interspersed, without apparent logic, among letters written on plain but top-quality bond stationery. For some reason all the postcards were rubber-banded together, and I set them aside — they would be a separate cataloguing task.
To my surprise, nearly everything in the box was handwritten, although there were a few typed letters here and there. I also came across several pencil sketches, mostly of cats, with annotations. These didn’t surprise me; since the publication of Eliot’s
Old Possum’s Book
, it was no secret that the great poet liked cats. For most of the letters, Eliot had used the same fountain pen and the same ink color, a deep blue-black. The pen had evidently had a narrow nib. All the letters were drafted in a hand that was neither crabbed nor messy but quite compact, as if Eliot had wanted to cover as much of each page as possible.