My eyes? They would not focus, would not unblur, as if the mechanism that usually handled this activity had stopped performing. Blink, and blink again, but nothing doing. I could not see. It wasn’t until my ears heard the nearly silent water droplets hit the table that I realized what it was. My own tears, warm to the touch and slightly oily.
At a table, in a public library, on a winter Saturday, and yet I felt as if I’d arrived home. That house in North Bennington, another winter ten years earlier, and I as young as a girl could be and yet as old as any other Mother Earth, and I had learned what it was to love. How to be loved and how to provide love, and how to be of service as a gesture to the gods. Had I known how fast it would all go, how little it would amount to, would I have lived each day more consciously? Ah, me. I don’t have the faintest idea.
• • •
FROM SHIRLEY’S JOURNAL, dated December 3, and the year was 1964, and I am certain I was in the house. I was upstairs in the house, and this is what she was writing.
all day yesterday and this morning i have been thinking of these pages as a refuge, a pleasant hiding place from problems and troubles; that i suppose is because i told the doc yesterday that the writing was happy, which of course it is. writing itself is a happy act, and when i can remember the future and plan for it i am very happy indeed. i am oddly self-conscious this morning because stanley is at home and there is literally no telling him what i am doing. i think he would regard me as a criminal waster of time, and self-indulgent besides. but the endless explanations involved in merely telling stanley anything he does not immediately understand are beyond me right now; it would take all my writing time only to tell him what i am doing.
writing is the way out writing is the way out writing is the way out. too early to think of plots.
there is a calm that begins to come. and my fingers are more limber.
While Shirley wrote this, I had to have been in the house. Upstairs. Perhaps napping. Or maybe I was reading in the living room, or doing dishes. A slim possibility that I was out, in the village, visiting the library or buying groceries. And if so, as I did those errands, they were done for her, for the life I shared with her family, in that house on the hill in North Bennington. But in the writing, there is only Shirley, Shirley and Stanley. As if the world held no one else. Lower down the page, she wonders if she should invite Barbara for coffee? Who is Barbara? Why don’t I remember her?
I opened the next folder and riffled through it quickly. And then the next, and the one following. Where was I? Where was I mentioned? I had been there, every day of that entire winter. Where was my name? Was all of it imagined?
I found it difficult to read further. I closed my eyes. As if imprinted on the inside of my eyelids, I could see the walls of that bedroom upstairs, the one Stanley and Shirley gave to us, the one we slept in all that long winter. I’d believed myself a grown-up, hadn’t I? And the room itself served better than the mother I’d been born to, its windows looking out onto those huge, threatening, snow-covered trees, that steep climb up the icy hill to campus, but me held safe inside. I’d never lived another place, before or after, in which a house itself had so protected its inhabitants. The house had loved me, hadn’t it?
So Shirley didn’t see me, not as I saw her. I hadn’t known. Ah, the snufflings of scholars: noses sniffed, throats cleared, pencils tapped, chairs shifted. With my eyes shut, I could hear paper sheets being turned respectfully over, the squeak of one resentful library cart’s wheels, and under it all, the constant whining rhythms of the photocopy machines. My stomach growled. How very, very anxious I was, suddenly.
I felt the air shift as Fred sat back down, placed a pile of Xeroxed sheets on our table. “You can staple these,” he said. Offering distraction at a most opportune time.
Mostly, Stanley’s papers were endless listings of course plans, notes for lectures, ideas for articles—how familiar the sight. They were always scattered around the house, on tables and chair arms, piled on the window seat, or left abandoned on the kitchen counter. One thing Fred had copied that caught my fancy was a handwritten document from Box 33, Stanley’s early writings. It was called “Me—In Outline” and began with the lovely phrase: My ancestors were normal people . . .
I showed it to Fred, but he barely glanced at the paper, didn’t bother to smile.
And then I picked up the next folder, the one Fred had set aside to look at next. Oh, god. That list of names, that single sheet of paper atop a pile of lecture notes and book reviews. Fred had not read it yet, or he’d have seen her name there. Maybe, without examining the list, he thought he’d look them up, the students from the fall of 1946, look them up one by one and find out how brilliant each of them found Stanley. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t lift my eyes, couldn’t move my elbow: What if Fred realized what it was? What if that overly responsible librarian chose this moment to glance my way? But Fred was standing now, about to go ask permission to photocopy more pages. And the librarian watched as he advanced, and I did it without thinking: I simply folded up the original page and tucked it in my bag. Two quick movements and it was over.
I told myself she’d have done the same for me.
• • •
“LOOK,” FRED SAID, returning minutes later, “another letter from one of Stanley’s childhood friends. I bet you’ll find this interesting.”
It was dated December 8, 1946. The first two paragraphs were inside jokes to Stanley and Shirley, mentioning their old friend June and her reaction to the sale of Stanley’s first manuscript. “The Armed Vision?” I asked. Published eighteen months later, this was a celebration of the brilliant pioneers of literary criticism Stanley had been trained by, a widely lauded, career-making treatise that I knew was now considered to be hopelessly optimistic about the future of the craft. Even Stanley, twenty years later, when we knew him, believed he had been wrong—the brilliant techniques for reading and analysis developed by Blackmur and Burke and Empson had become unusable tools in the hands of lesser scholarly minds. Stanley would, in moments of unbridled (read: inebriated) self-pity, include himself in the latter company.
“Not that,” Fred said. “Keep reading.”
The next paragraph:
What with all your young lady students disappearing as they are . . . if she turns up mumbling hysterically about Tammuz we will know who to look for and if she turns up mumbling hysterically about Cthulhu we will know who else to look for.
I knew who Tammuz was, the god of the harvest, who was slain by the cruel and selfish goddess of love, that courtesan of all courtesans, Ishtar. But who was Cthulhu? I nudged Fred and pointed to the word.
He whispered, “It’s from a science-fiction story, by Lovecraft. Cthulhu is the high priest of a cult, I think he’s from outer space. Gargantuan. Hideous. Shirley must have liked the story. Stanley didn’t read anything so lowbrow, nothing that wasn’t quote-unquote literature.”
“And so?”
“Your girl, the one that disappeared, the one you thought about so much—”
“Paula Welden?”
He nodded. “She disappeared in 1946, didn’t she? Right after Thanksgiving? I thought they didn’t know her.”
“What? Don’t be silly, Fred. This guy’s joking. It’s only a joke.”
He sighed, turned the page over carefully, and closed Folder 11, placing it back into Box 13. “I thought you’d like to see it.”
“They didn’t know her,” I said loudly, not caring when researchers at other tables turned curiously to see who the rude scholar was. “They didn’t know Paula, she told me.”
Fred shrugged, put a cautionary, comforting hand on my arm. I did not glance down at my purse, where the class list, from the fall of 1946, the class list with P. Welden’s name the last alphabetical entry, was neatly folded. This was one thing I could do for Shirley, one way I could thank her, no matter how little she had thought of me.
> For, in fact, I was the same as Paula, wasn’t I? Rose Nemser: cipher, dream, fraud. I didn’t exist. I’d been through all the later boxes—letter, journals, photos—and found nothing. Not a word about us, not anywhere in this accumulated detritus of a life. She had not thought enough of me, she had not thought to record even a mention of my existence. Not for a moment, not for a meal, not for a conversation about fidelity and marriage, not for an arduous, extraordinary winter. Not for the darning of a sock or the roasting of a chicken. Not even for a crying infant.
Rage tingled the length of my back, between my breasts and across my scalp, as if my whole life had been a sprinter’s burst and I was pushing through those last arduous strides. Before I left the reading room, I checked to make sure my husband was okay. Wasted worry: his nose was buried in a folder from Box 41. He had returned to studying what he’d come there to find, the folders with Stanley’s lectures on myth, ritual, and literature—the part of Stanley Hyman’s life that Fred Nemser most wished had been his own.
It was cold outside, achingly so, and the streets correspondingly empty of people. I paused in front of the library, tightening the scarf around my neck, checking the buttons on my jacket. Fred appeared next to me; I’d known he would, I suppose. That’s why I waited.
We strode briskly down to the Mall, not talking. His breath coming in foggy bursts that puffed from his nostrils, dragon’s smoke. I could barely feel my fingers, or my toes, but I liked how cold my brain got, how my thoughts slowed and my cheeks burned.
It was practically deserted—only temperatures this cold could keep the tourists at bay. We began to march down the path, wind cutting at the exposed skin of my neck and face. The anger dissipated, my whole being taken up in resisting the bite of the frigid air.
Our footsteps crunched on the icy gravel. Fred’s boots damp at the toes and limned with salty residue, the hems of his trousers speckled with mud. When he spoke, I thought at first I had imagined the words:
“Why’d you do it?”
Walking faster to keep warm, our strides matching despite the difference in our heights, we would be at the Washington Monument in two minutes. It loomed ahead of us and made me think of a sword, the kind a knight would use for battle with an enchanter. “Do what?” I asked.
“All those years ago. When we knew them. Why’d you throw yourself into the breach? You were the only person in the right. And you made yourself more wrong than anybody else.”
“Stanley must have hated me,” I said. “For what I did to you, for taking you away from him.”
“I wanted to leave, I wanted to go with you. And there’s time. There’s still time for us to matter.” He’d never before admitted that he wanted to.
“That house,” I said. “I had to get out of there.”
“There are better ways to start a marriage.” He touched my hair, a tendril escaping from under my scarf. “But why, Rosie, why’d you kiss him? Why’d you say that to him?”
“That’s easy,” I said. “I made a choice.”
I simply meant that I’d decided. To be as wrong as the rest of them. Just as I’d decided on Fred, that afternoon on the Temple University campus years before. And then I’d decided to make it work. Because I needed him and he me. I took his gloved hand between my own, pulled him to a stop. We were both shivering.
“They didn’t remember us.”
“I suppose.”
“I’m as absent from the world as Paula Welden. Or my mother.”
“Absent from their world, but the center of ours. We have our world, Rosie. We have each other, we have Natalie. We didn’t need theirs, we didn’t.”
“I trusted her,” I said bitterly. “She didn’t even notice. No record. Not a word, not in all those days we spent together. Not even a note that I hung her laundry out on the coldest afternoons, that I cracked the icy sheets before I brought them in. That Natalie was born. That we talked. Oh god, Fred, she was my friend. I was certain of it.”
He was silent.
“We have our world,” he said stubbornly. “She doesn’t make our life. We do.”
“My name is nowhere! I pawed through every single page of her journal. I read her letters. I don’t exist! In her mind, I was never alive!”
“We’ll write about them, we can do it, we’ll bring ourselves to life.” As if that was the answer. Fred stared up at the monument, reverential, determined.
“I envy you your faith,” I said. And then I opened my purse and took out Stanley’s class list from the fall of 1946, consigning his connection with Paula Welden to the place where it belonged, one of the dark hooded trash bins that sat like chess pieces taken prisoner along the edges of the Mall. I shoved my hands back into my empty coat pockets, stretched my cold fingers into the stitching at the corners.
• • •
WHEN WE RETURNED, I felt distinctly better. I went directly to the last box I’d ordered—Shirley’s Box 29, the one with her incomplete literary manuscripts. I wanted to find the book she’d been writing at the time of her death.
I pulled out the first folder, opened it, and looked at the densely typewritten sheets. If I closed my eyes, I knew I’d smell her cigarette smoke. Harum-scarum punctuation, yellow paper, handwritten corrections: I could hear the proud flourish of the typewriter roll as she drew forth the finished sheet. There was always a louder one, at day’s end, as she pulled that last sheet out and tapped the day’s pile into place. That sound marked the end of labor, the beginning of our evening celebration. Oh, I could still hear it now!
I extracted the first of Shirley Jackson’s unpublished manuscripts from the stack, and began to read.
i know where i’m going
and i know who’s going with me
i know who i love
but my dear knows who i’ll marry . . .
It was to be a novel about the yearning to be an artist, the story of a woman who believes she can make an art form out of the life of an artist without ever actually doing the work to become one. Shirley wrote, This is to be the story of a strangely haunted woman, whose life becomes a cheap tragedy because of her anxiety to be an artist in the sense in which she sees art, as irresponsibility and lack of discipline.
There was no date anywhere on the file. I had no recollection of her mentioning such a project, of her reminiscing about beginning it or why she abandoned it. I wondered why she did. Was this the project she’d begun when she discovered Stanley was in love? Was this an early project she later deemed beneath her evolving talents? I tended to doubt that. This plan was good; the story had everything—characters, plot, ominous threat, fantasy, gossip and petty nastiness, farm fields and urban settings. It was rich in the psychological; the characters were whole. I would have loved to have the volume now, to have one more work of Shirley Jackson’s I could read. Even the notes had extraordinary lines, as in her description of Oscar as a husband who believes any woman will make [a] good wife in the country if he is fond enough of her. The plot was rife with devil imagery and dreams, with ominous self-delusion and the ever-present potential for tragedy and violence.
I would write this book myself, if I could. It seemed to me a universal tale. I pushed back my heavy armchair, made my way to the front desk, and received permission to photocopy all ten pages of Shirley’s proposed plan.
I know who I love, she called it. I liked that phrase enormously; it rattled my tongue as if it were pinballing between the different areas for sweet and salty, bitter and sour. Ah, this was the thing she taught me, isn’t it?
• • •
AND THEN, as if the witch of Bennington had waited in these cartons a full decade for the moment when I’d do this, I selected the last file from the folder.
Her last novel had barely six chapters completed when she died. It was to be the story of an older woman who sells her possessions and leaves home, takes a new name, sets herself up in a new c
ity. Makes a fresh new life. The novel begins with the cheerful comment: I always believe in eating when I can.
I always believe in eating when I can.
I said that.
I said it, and the words must have tricked Shirley into action, thrilled her, driven her to her desk. I remember the kitchen that morning: water steamed over the breakfast dishes, the sponge dropping from Shirley’s reddened hand, the pause as she took the words in and moved them through her brain, the way her shoulders stiffened and her smile went vague. I should have known.
Coffee grounds on the counter, a curtain partly twitched by a cat skulking at the window ledge in search of stealable leftovers. The air still charged by her exit. I always believe in eating when I can. I remember that I put my toast down and stepped to the sink to finish the washing up.
With my eyes closed, I saw it perfectly. Yes, I remembered precisely how her face changed, and what followed. How even Stanley had to thank me, everyone knew there were moments of relief I’d brought into the fraught landscape of their home.
It was the very first sentence. I always believe in eating when I can.
See, world, I was there!
“We’re boring,” I whispered, and Fred nodded, not really listening. The word felt glorious, an enveloping sea of comfort and understanding. I tapped his hand, said, “Our boring little family—I miss our girl. Let’s drive back tonight; let’s get Natalie and go home.”
“We’ll finish here, we’re almost done.”
And then Fred sighed as he moved the holder card to the next place in the file box, removed the next folder. I put my hand on his and squeezed it gently. His thumb shifted and pressed mine, and then we both returned to work. It was good.
I, too, know who I love.
Shirley Page 22
