“Just her. And only twice. I don’t apologize, I don’t. But there were other, well, opportunities, so many of them. As if I was the fool. They didn’t make me do it, it was my fault. I’m not excusing myself, not at all. But the way people talked, what they understood, the way the rules were. I was different. I was the one who was strange.”
“What was her name?”
“Don’t do this, Rose. It doesn’t help.”
“You want me to just put it away? Forget about it? Move on?” I was tempted to fling myself away from him, storm off toward the car, but keeping the baby asleep seemed as important. A sparrow pecked at the packed dirt by the table, alert to the possibility that Fred’s mostly finished ice cream cone might fall there at any moment.
“Where was she from?” I asked quietly.
“Connecticut, somewhere.”
The couple got in their car, a Chevy. Instead of driving away, they sat talking animatedly, as if engaged in making up a story. A story about us.
“I keep wanting to forgive you, I do. I keep trying to figure out the way to do it, to put this behind us, to move on. For Natalie.”
“For us,” he said. “I don’t want to give up on us.”
I said, “I’m not the one who did it.”
Fred slammed a hand down on the picnic table. The girl in the car giggled loudly. “God, Rose, what am I supposed to do? How can I prove to you how sorry I am? I can’t take it away, what happened. I was terrible. I admit it. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Now what? How can I fix it? Tell me what to do.”
What right did he have to be angry?
“It’s not my problem,” I said coldly. “I am not the one who . . . I’m not the one who fucked another woman. Fucked her. You did. You have to fix it. You have to make it right.”
“But how? I don’t know what to do.”
“How could I know? I’m no expert. This isn’t my area,” I said. The boy started the Chevy and backed out, onto the highway, raising a cloud of dust that shimmered in the humid afternoon light. He straightened the car, heading west, back toward Skaneateles. The girl stared at us through her open window, shocked, as if, without meaning to, she’d stumbled onto our horrible secret. Ten years have passed, but still I could blush, thinking of her face.
“Rosie, don’t be this way. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything you want me to. I’ll spend the rest of our lives proving to you what a good husband I can be, how important you are. It’s always about you, Rosie, it always is. No matter how badly I screwed things up.”
He started to sneeze, an alarming series of explosions that went on and on and on, his eyes growing wider in apology, damp with tears. He could not catch his breath. I had the baby on my lap, could not move without awakening her, and Fred and I watched one another—him sneezing, me guarding our daughter—for perhaps a full minute, until his outburst stopped, as suddenly as it began, and we both started to laugh.
Sometimes that’s as good as crying, or yelling, for breaking an impasse. I couldn’t help myself. “Okay, Fred,” I said to him, the smiles still on both our faces. “We’re done with it. That’s all.”
“I love you, Rosie,” he said. He came around the table, and helped me up, balancing for me as I hauled myself to standing, Natalie against my hip. She stayed asleep. We got into the car, and Fred turned on the motor, put the car in gear. I didn’t say the words back to him, not then, but I remembered how.
You think you know what you can handle, and what you can’t. But the truth is, almost anything is endurable. Because we’re made that way, to make the best of what we have. I never told myself, well, this is Tuesday and it’s now been a year, or even two, and soon I will forget. I never organized and made a plan to put it behind us, and nor did he. But we went on, and in truth, we got better. And in time, I came to see that I trusted in him more than I had before we went to Bennington: I knew the worst of which he was capable, I knew what it would do to him, and I knew we could survive it.
I’m not saying this was the perfect solution. Only that I don’t regret it.
Twenty-six
THE HOUSE, and you don’t have to believe this, had told the truth. Shirley Jackson did die that summer, just as I had dreamed she would. So very Shirley-like that this would be the case.
We must have made that trip to Skaneateles Lake on August 7, a Saturday, because Shirley Jackson died in her sleep on the afternoon of Sunday, August 8. She’d gone upstairs to take a nap, apparently in a cheerful mood. Shirley never awakened. She was forty-eight years old.
I found out on Monday, August 9. Fred called from the campus office he shared with five other grad students. Stanley and Shirley had met at Syracuse, in the late 1930s, and news of her death was buzzing down the brick-trimmed paths and through the academic offices, shock passing through the faculty like a virus.
“Shirley’s died,” Fred said awkwardly, and at first I didn’t understand what he meant. And then once I did grasp the words, I could not grasp the reality. Experienced as I was in poverty and abandonment, I knew nothing of death.
He said, “It’s too late now. You should have written to her.”
I tasted bitterness in the back of my throat. “She could have written to me.”
“I’m sure there’ll be a service.”
“Go if you like.”
“We could both go.”
I unplugged the iron, emptied the heated water into the sink. When he realized I wasn’t going to answer, he said, “Never mind. There’s no need. With that crowd, nobody will know who shows up and who doesn’t.”
“I did nothing wrong, Fred. I did nothing wrong.”
His voice was stiff. “Do I have to say it again?”
I remember that after we hung up, I sat on the couch, watching saliva bubble at Natalie’s mouth, her closed eyelids flutter, some dream overtaking the peace of her sleep. I sat. I did not cry, or sort the dirty laundry into darks and lights, or think about dinner. I did not think. I simply sat, and watched and waited. One road had closed, one path to resolution. I would never make it up with her, never get to apologize or tell her what she’d meant to me. I would not be her friend again. I had not conceived this possibility.
Forgiveness. I hoped she had forgiven me.
Twenty-seven
STANLEY DIED FIVE SUMMERS after Shirley did, five years ago, in 1970. A heart attack at the end of a convivial dinner at the restaurant down the hill from the house. Irony of ironies, he’d married a Bennington student only months after Shirley died. The house had told me that, as well. Who knows if they were happy? I’ve heard the new wife was pretty, one of his folklore students, well trained in musicology. If memory serves, she was pregnant at the time of Stanley’s death.
Stanley’s Iago book had just come out. It was not a huge tome like most of the other Hyman books, but Fred nevertheless deemed it Stanley’s culminating masterpiece. In examining Iago’s motivation using a multiplicity of critical techniques, Stanley demonstrated how much prejudice comes built in to a particular methodology. Reading the book, I could hear Stanley’s voice, could hear him arguing with Fred—that note of amusement that always tangled through even his most pompous assertions, as if to make clear that he was smarter than even his own language would demonstrate.
Stanley, by the end, was no longer interested in producing a critical technique that met Aristotelian standards, in developing an overarching scientific standard for analyzing literature. He’d come to believe that every method of analysis was flawed, that the wise critic had to draw on a multiplicity of disciplines at once, keeping a keen eye out for his own prejudices and biases. I found his Iago book accessible and fascinating, and often thought about it afterward, imagining how Stanley might have read a new Roth novel, or Joyce Carol Oates or John Barth, or Iris Murdoch.
Fred cried when I handed him the folded-over section of The New York Times with Stanle
y’s obit. We were still in Syracuse then, the dog days of the August of 1970, swimming in dank upstate humidity as we raked through our gloomy basement apartment, packing five years of our lives into cardboard cartons, this in preparation for the move to Stanton. A temporary downgrade to the English department at a prep school would be a little side note, dinner-party fodder, a rest stop on Fred’s professional journey. Just because Syracuse had denied Fred tenure didn’t mean he wouldn’t find another tenure track position elsewhere the following year. Still, we were silent as we crated books and sorted winter clothing, each of us isolated in separate sulks, bitter thoughts.
Well, yes, I admit that I was disappointed. Fred was the star to whom I’d hitched myself, and while, on the one hand, I knew how special he was, how brilliant and hardworking, how deserving, there was that other hand, the one that resented him for not vaulting past his earlier errors. His dissertation, the one that had garnered so much attention while still in progress, had been defended, accepted, and published with little notice and even less acclaim. So much for the Child ballads and their repressive, pasteurized variations in American folksong. Fred had broken with Stanley over subtleties in the lineage of intellectual reasoning that led from Frazer and ancient ritual, through Freud and Malinowski, to Kenneth Burke and the question of the way the individual’s understanding of his or her culture is transformed by the very words the culture uses to describe the symbols and ideas it values. Perhaps Fred resented Stanley’s adoration of Burke on a personal level, and let it cloud his professional judgment. Ironic, isn’t it, that a set of symbols deriding Burke transformed Fred’s position in their common culture precisely as Burke might have predicted?
Thus, although Fred had been diligent with his students and dutiful in attending faculty meetings, volunteering for committees and shouldering scut work, he’d not made the tenure grade. Financial security first. Fred wasn’t even thirty yet; there was ample time to regroup.
We were pragmatic when we had to be. Fred had been given fair warning by his department head; no surprises there. We spoke of our situation the way one speaks of an illness, as if it were outside us, at a distance. Situation, I said, do you see? We never spoke of it as failure. And I think it’s true of both of us that we loved our little family more than any title or place to live, any power to be earned. We were delighted to shepherd our pretty girl around the central campus; we protected our group as if it were an indivisible unit, the prime number of our collective well-being. And so we soldiered on, past this unattractive reality, without going through sessions of blame and recrimination.
But the news about Stanley seemed to tap a well of sorrow in Fred. He finished reading the obituary, placed it on the table, and began to dig through cartons of packed books until he pulled out Stanley’s The Armed Vision. The pages were that tissuey paper publishers use for huge academic books and volumes of collected Shakespeare, and Fred gently ran his fingers over the pages as if they were love letters he’d stumbled on, sitting on his heels in front of the box. Rocking from toe to heel, back and forth, silently crying as he stroked the pages of Stanley’s book.
Natalie had been napping and now called loudly from the bedroom, signaling delight at having found herself awake. Fred did not look up. Instead, he closed the book, sat down hard on the wooden floor, and leaned back against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut tight.
“Someone should write about him,” Fred said. “He’ll disappear, he won’t matter, and it’s wrong.”
Twenty-eight
FRED WAS RIGHT, OF COURSE. For all his bombastic relevance in the forties and fifties, and even the early sixties, Stanley’s energies, his status as a public figure began to fade almost immediately after Shirley’s death. If there is any proof of how vital they were to each other, it is that he did not know how to be Stanley without Shirley there to make him so.
Shortly after Fred’s father died in 1975, we decided together that our small inheritance should permit Fred to take a break from teaching. He wanted to write about Stanley, and I agreed; I thought it might right his course. I trusted Shirley that much, still. Ten years dead, and yet I still believed she had our answers.
We went together to visit the Library of Congress archives in Washington, on the way dropping Natalie in Philadelphia to stay with Lou, his wife Sandy, and their six-year-old son. I had a sense of pilgrimage, as if somewhere in this visit I might discover for myself a way to think about the wrong turn we’d made all those years ago, to finally settle what might have happened if my turn had been the left one, not the right.
The security guard, a lanky white-haired man in a black policeman’s uniform, nodded to me with a friendly air that seemed like recognition. The manuscript reading room was a grand one, with high ceilings and a terrazzo floor. I imagined that, come afternoon, when the light hit the row of windows along the western wall, it would grow warm in there. I filled out an application card, told the wide-eyed sprite of a librarian that I was helping my husband to do research on Stanley Edgar Hyman, that I was assisting him in writing a book. I gave our address and telephone number, affirmed my honesty, and went back to the guard, who gave me a locker key so I could hang my coat. Then I found Fred at the edge of the room, where connected desks were arrayed in austere rows.
This reading room was a repository of lifetimes of essay drafts and novel drafts and letters and birthday cards and diaries all bundled into cartons by bereft children and mournful helpmeets. Stationed at the reading room tables were researchers eager to wrest history from all those frankly uncollatable life moments. Fred already had four cartons of Stanley’s papers on a book cart at our desks. I pulled out the heavy red leather chair next to his and sat.
“What should I do?” I whispered. “Read some of these? Take notes?”
“These are Stanley’s class notes, from the early years, when he was working out the details of the folklore course.”
Line after line of seemingly disconnected thoughts. Page numbers, proper names, names of books and ballads and poems. “I wouldn’t have been able to teach the alphabet using these,” I said.
“But I know exactly what he’s saying.” Such wistful lingering of his fingers on the thin typescript. “I could teach it right now, using this.”
I looked up, saw that one of the librarians—a man in his thirties, casually dressed, with the requisite wire-rimmed eyeglasses—was staring at us down the long length of the room with a curiosity bordering on disapproval. We were about to get shushed. “How can I help?” I lowered my voice below a whisper, barely mouthing the words.
“I don’t know,” he said absently. “Why not look through her stuff, Shirley’s?”
“Shirley’s? She has papers here, too?” I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, to look through her things. After all these years, to paw through the remains of her writing life, like a Peeping Tom in a lingerie drawer. My heart began to pound excitedly.
Fred handed me the cloth-covered notebook listing the contents of Shirley’s files at the Library of Congress. Oh my. There were her high school journals, old photos and papers—letters, novel drafts, Christmas lists! Cartons upon cartons of Shirley. “Can I?” I asked him breathlessly. “What would I look for?”
He shrugged. “Anything. Look for what interests you.”
I almost couldn’t believe it. Even as I filled out my first request form, I was certain something would go wrong. It wasn’t possible, was it, that I could actually be with her again? But the librarian took my request without questioning my right to Shirley Jackson. Her files were on-site and available. It would be a few minutes; he would bring the cartons to me at my desk.
Cartons of Shirley. I imagine it was much the way one feels about a loved one’s ashes, seeing all that accumulation of personhood reduced to several dry, crumbly cups of undistinguished afterlife—and yet feeling certain the essence is in there, quietly seething with watchful expectation. Empty and full at the same time
. For me, she was about to be alive again. The most important woman I had ever known. My Shirley, I told myself. I would see her once more, after all: her mind at work, her thoughts active, no expectation of death. Perhaps I would find forgiveness here, or understanding.
I sat as quietly as I could, but even the blood coursing through my body pulsed a little faster in anticipation. It was the moment just before, that most delicious cresting that jolts one aloft, time paused, time delicious—if the heart could salivate, it would.
The cart grumbled toward me, paused next to my seat. The librarian showed me how to manage the files. “This piece of cardboard is to save your place, so you remember exactly where the file was and can replace it in the same order. No copying without permission.”
“Why?” It seemed so silly to have to go up there over and over, request page after page, such a tedious, childish overlordishness.
“Bring whatever you want to copy up to the desk, still in the folder, and we’ll look at it, and let you know. Anything that might be hurt by the machine, or damaged by the pressure of the lid, you won’t be able to do.” He nodded at the small Kodak Fred had left on the table, and said, “You can take pictures with that, too. We don’t want the originals folded or bent by the copiers.”
Most of what these files contained seemed to be Xeroxes already. Hardly damageable, but why point this out? Besides, I only wanted a little bit of time with Shirley. Why make copies? An hour of this would do the trick, probably leave me surfeited for the remainder of the years ahead.
I pulled out the first folder, placed the cardboard in its place, and let the librarian signal his approval. Fred, over by the issue desk, preparing to make copies, waved at me agreeably. I opened the folder without examining its title. Whatever surprise was in store was fine with me. The first page was typewritten, single-spaced, with little punctuation and no capital letters. I ran my fingers over the surface, felt for the indents of the typewriter keys on the paper.
Shirley Page 21
