“Yeah. Sure,” she answered. “Deal.”
I
T WAS MY TURN
to choose the place. I drove Roberta and myself to a restaurant in town, a quiet Italian trattoria I visit regularly on my own. The maître d’ greeted us politely, revealing none of the surprise he must have felt at seeing a woman at my side. Roberta had turned up the collar of her trench coat; one of her bright silk scarves announced itself at her throat, the only color in her all-black uniform: V-neck wool sweater, jeans, thin suede belt. She wore flat shoes (also black, with pointed toes) instead of the usual heels. Dangling from her earlobes were a pair of gold-filigree hoops. They glinted in the dim light as she removed coat and scarf and ran her fingers quickly through her hair.
“This way, please,” said our host as he took our things, and we followed him. I watched gratefully as he seated Roberta and lit the candles on our table. Their steady flickering gave me something other than Roberta’s pale throat to attend to.
“So,” she said. “Can I have something to drink?”
“Of course,” I said, relieved to be inserted into my role. I ordered wine and, after consultation with Roberta, a plate of grilled mushrooms to begin our meal. She was evidently hungry. Her careful reading of the menu made it clear that this was to be a full-fledged dinner. She objected to the pasta I suggested as a first course — the veal we had chosen would have cream in its sauce, wasn’t a salad preferable? — and noted approvingly the array of cheeses. A sweet dessert, she stated, was a far less satisfying way to end a meal than fruit and cheese followed — not too quickly — by espresso. I agreed, all the while wondering how a woman who didn’t place her napkin on her lap until she was halfway through a plate of mushrooms bathed in olive oil and garlic could display experience with the shape and pace of a good meal.
“I love to eat,” she said, using some bread to mop up the oil.
“So I see.”
She glanced at me critically. “You look like you could do a little more in that department,” she said. “A bit thin for your age, aren’t you?”
Somewhat unnerved, I laughed. She had never remarked on my appearance.
“It depends how you measure things,” I said.
“I was thinking of pounds. And years. You’re around sixty-five, right? And you must weigh about one-fifty. But you’re tall — maybe six feet? Most men your age begin to get thick around the waist. From inactivity. Do you exercise?”
“Exercise? Do you mean jogging or some such thing?” I shook my head. “I’m active enough.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “I know. You putter around, tend your books.”
“I object to the word putter,” I said, smiling at her. “Where do you get your notions of how much a man should weigh?”
“From my father,” she replied. “I get most of my ideas about what men are like from my father. Not all of them conscious, of course.”
“Spoken like a good Freudian.”
“Why not? It all makes sense, as long as you don’t overdo it.” She emptied her glass and nudged it in the direction of the bottle; I refilled it.
“Thanks. A nice red you chose, by the way. Let’s make the next one a white — a Gavi, perhaps? Good.” She twisted her neck in a rapid circular motion, and her eyes closed briefly. “I like to drink, too. Wine, mostly. Beer when it’s really hot, in summer. My parents don’t drink at all, so they worry I drink too much.”
“Do you?”
“Not in recent years, but in my twenties I used to. Now I drink to relax, not to obliterate. It’s a tricky thing, though. You drink often?”
“Nightly,” I said. “Two glasses of wine, one before and one with dinner.”
“That sounds civilized.”
“I like to keep it that way.”
“A model of decorum,” she said, smiling a little. “Any drinkers in the family?”
Her directness startled me. “As a matter of fact, yes,” I said.
“Father, mother, wife?”
“The first and the last,” I said.
“Interesting,” she said. “You’ve answered another question I’ve had. I’ve been wondering if you’re married.”
“Was,” I corrected her. “My wife died in 1965.”
“Ah.” Her expression said nothing. “Any children?”
“No.”
She nodded, looked away briefly, then attacked the near-empty plate in front of her. The last mushroom, speared on her fork, was about to disappear, but she held off and spoke again.
“So you’ve been alone for a while now. You like it?”
I concentrated on the grey-brown button at the end of her fork, which she held in midair.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m very used to living alone.”
The mushroom vanished. She chewed noisily and drank some more wine. “Terrific,” she said, pointing with the fork at her empty plate. “I live alone, too. The privacy is right for my work, but I need to have other people around. So I’m out a lot. With friends, often at the movies. I hate watching videos at home. You like films?”
“Not particularly,” I said. “I prefer books.”
She rolled her eyes. “Too much of a good thing, maybe?”
“Never.” I poured us both some more wine. Our salads arrived. I was glad to see that the portions were small. Roberta ate hers in an instant, and I had the waiter clear away our plates.
“You didn’t finish — you didn’t like it?” she asked.
“It was very good. I’m a smaller eater than you are,” I said. “I’m saving room for the veal.”
She pulled out her cigarettes. “Will it bother you if I —”
“— not at all,” I said. “I’ll join you.”
“Good. It’s tacky to smoke between courses, but I do it anyway.” The lit match was extended toward me. I bent my head over it and cupped the flame with my hand, careful not to touch her wrist. We settled back into our seats, and I felt a definite release of tension. Roberta’s earrings glinted as she exhaled, her mouth pouting. A line of reddish lipstick banded the filter of her cigarette.
“So what did your wife do?”
“Do?” I inhaled deeply, paused, and blew several smoke rings. Roberta began laughing.
“I can’t believe you’re doing that.”
“Why not?” I said, ending the act. “You must have yet another preconceived idea about archivists. Or men. Does your father smoke?”
“He quit. He used to smoke tons, but he never blew rings. I don’t know many people who can.”
“Can you?”
Unexpectedly, she blushed. “Sometimes. Usually not. Like when I blow bubbles with gum — I can’t be sure it’ll work.”
“Oh, go on,” I said. “Try it.”
She shook her head. I wanted to push her but decided against it; seeing her flustered was enough.
“Anyway. Your wife,” she said. “What did she do? Apart from drink?”
“She wrote,” I said. “She was a poet.”
Roberta’s dark brows lifted. “You’re kidding me,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Why would I?”
“True. Sorry — go on. What kind of poems did she write? Did she publish anything?”
I was at a crossroads. Some choices had to be made.
“She wrote long narrative poems. A few were published, in decent journals. She also worked as a legal secretary — not with any enthusiasm, as you can imagine, but because the money was good. We couldn’t have survived on my salary alone. But she thought of herself as a poet.”
“Did you think of her as one?” The question had a honed edge; I felt it as a small, sharp thrust into my memory.
“Yes,” I said. “A good one, too, if you like that kind of verse. These judgments are very subjective, you know.”
“Oh yes, I know,” she said. “And did her drinking affect her work? Do you mind if I ask?” she added.
I put out my cigarette before answering.
“No,” I said. “But I don’t have an answer, any more than to the question of how it affected her life. Or our life together. The problem got worse after the war. I began to drink less, she more — we were responding differently to various tensions. She did publish one poem in the midst of a particularly bad drinking period, so I suppose that says something. Her writing didn’t become gibberish.”
Our dinners were brought to us by the maître d’ himself, gracious as always. He called for a waiter to serve our bottle of Gavi and smiled at Roberta’s praise of the mushrooms. Then we were alone again. I took the opportunity to redirect the conversation.
“Did you know,” I asked, “that T. S. Eliot was quite a drinker at one time in his life?”
“Um,” Roberta said, her mouth full of veal. She paused to swallow. “This is great food, Matt. Very good choice.” She used her napkin for the first time, patting her mouth roughly before speaking again.
“Yes, I’ve read about Eliot’s drinking. Heavy during the marriage and then the war, off and on throughout. I’d drink a lot too, if I had a wife who kept having psychotic breaks and stank of ether.”
“Ether?” I said.
“Yeah. Apparently she used it like perfume. Some weird self-medicating thing. Vivienne had a few crackpot doctors and lots of her own ideas about medicine. Some people said she went crazy because of all the drugs she took for various ailments. Of course the line between psychosomatic and physical illness was always pretty blurred for her.”
I passed a basket of hard rolls to Roberta, who was eating with gusto.
“Have one,” I said. “And slow down. We have all evening.”
“So we do,” she said, fiddling with a roll. “A bad habit of mine. I picked it up from home — my parents eat too fast. Probably because of their time in Holland, when the food wasn’t exactly plentiful.” She put down her fork and knife and placed her hands awkwardly on either side of her plate.
“Do go on,” I said. “You know quite a bit about the Eliots. You’ve investigated them.”
“Lots of reading,” she said, twirling the stem of her wineglass with a restless hand. “A couple of biographies, a bunch of letters in the collection at Harvard — you’re familiar with it, I’m sure. They let me look at some stuff Eliot wrote to his family in the States. This was not a man with a lot of deep loyalty to old friends! Ezra Pound was a huge help to Eliot at the beginning of his time in England, but once Pound started going off the deep end, Eliot dumped him. And Vivienne — well, it gets extremely complicated with her. His motives, I mean.
“It’s Emily Hale I want to know more about. And not just because I’m interested in the story of her relationship with Eliot. For me the important thing is Eliot’s conversion — how it happened and what Emily knew about it.”
She picked up her glass, again revolving its stem. I continued to eat, slowly, while Roberta talked about Eliot. The substance of what she was saying didn’t surprise me, but I was struck by her grasp of Eliot’s complexities. She did know a great deal, and she painted a colorful picture. Her animation began having a tonic effect on me, and I regained my appetite. When Roberta paused to sip at her wine, I reached for the bottle.
“So how,” I said, refilling our glasses, “does all this relate to you?”
She gazed across the room without answering. I watched as her brows pulled together for an instant, her lips pursing slightly. Her face was peculiarly expressive. I gazed at her, and an inexplicable gratitude welled within me. I heard Eliot’s incantation in “Ash Wednesday”:
Rose of memory/rose of forgetfulness …
The moment passed; our waiter arrived, napkin over forearm, to announce the dessert offerings.
Roberta shook her head at him.
“A nice cheese, perhaps?” she asked him. Her expression remained concentrated.
The waiter suggested a parmesan with pear slices. I ordered espresso; Roberta asked the waiter to bring hers in a little while. The bitter aroma of the coffee calmed me; I sipped at it while Roberta ate cheese and fruit.
“So then. I’d like to answer your question,” she said, pushing away her plate. “But I’m unsure.” She spoke more softly than usual. “It’s like this. I keep going back to Eliot’s work because it has something to teach me. About craft, obviously, but more than that. The hollowness that Eliot could describe like almost nobody else. But even that’s not all.
“In the poems he wrote during the forties, after Vivienne was locked up, there’s this counterweight: an urgent move toward atonement. Toward release from all that daily pain and tedium. I’m talking about the period when he was closest to Emily. She was the one who listened, who accepted his trauma and made no demands — the utter opposite of his wife. And this was also the time when his conversion became a reality, when he committed himself to the Church.
“Something just doesn’t add up. Vivienne dies in 1947, and there he is, a hugely successful poet — a man released from an awful marriage, with a woman friend who would marry him instantly and gladly. And what does he do? He rejects her completely, isolates himself for a decade, and lives like a hermit. And at the end of the decade he suddenly marries his secretary — a woman almost forty years his junior.
“I mean, he had his conversion to give him strength, and he had his secure place in the world. He seemed as ready as a man could be to settle into a mature, intimate relationship. Yet he repudiates the one person who had consistently loved him through everything, who knew his darkness and could actually bring out his playful side. A lot of those little cat poems were for Emily, you know. How can you explain this?
“My guess is she must have had something on him. Like Vivienne did. They both knew things he couldn’t bear them knowing. And I have the feeling that his faith was no match for an obsessive self-protection — his need to reveal only the self he could control. Vivienne had threatened to expose the naked man, and he just wasn’t going to let that happen again.
“He converted in 1927; he left Vivienne in 1933, and she was institutionalized in 1937. She died ten years later. He and Emily corresponded throughout those two decades. I’m sure his letters to her give a sense of what was really going on with that new faith of his — that anti-Unitarian, anti-rational faith that was supposed to deliver him from his tormenting memories. I want the details: how his belief protected him from overwhelming emotions. I need to understand this, Matt. I need it for my own work, and I need it for my life.”
“I don’t follow you,” I said.
She leaned back in her chair and tilted her head so that she was staring up at the ceiling.