On one hand, there’s me, arguing for the benefits of staying awake. At one point in our marriage, I was persuasive, but you’ve been steeling yourself against me for years. When I ask you about the family you lost, your mouth becomes a steel trap. You won’t describe, for instance, your mother, as if you believe that somewhere, crossing the distance from your lips to my ear, aspects of her will come under fire.
Once, wanting to talk, hoping to eliminate the secrets between us, I dared to ask you about the father you lost. You were folding laundry over our bed. You must have been feeling patient that day, while you opened and shut my shirts like thin closets, because you considered for a minute before deciding against me. “Please don’t,” you said. “You know how it is.”
I dropped the subject. Instead, I wrapped my arms around your waist. Your head fit under my chin; I kissed your hair and you sighed, dropping the laundry. You didn’t move away from my arms. We must have stayed like that for a while, both of us resting, tucked warmly together.
That’s what I was given, in exchange for simply dropping the subject. Can you blame me for letting it go? It’s not that I hoped to leave it behind us. I was only grateful for the new place we’d come to. I was so proud of the marriage we’d built. Our house, arranged so ideally. The cat we adopted, the garden we planted, the way we never really fought.
When Ada passed away, we buried her in the backyard. The house seemed empty without her. After an appropriate period, I started to talk about adopting a kitten, but you always shrugged me off. That was confusing; more even than I, you were in love with our Lady Ada. She followed you from room to room. You read with her curled in your lap. Why, then, were you cold on the topic of adopting a kitten?
I suppose your interest had wandered. You never even planted a sapling over her grave, as we’d previously discussed. That spot remained a bald patch in our garden, a sight that always rubbed me wrong. You’d become oddly inactive. You were already researching computers. Some part of you had been diverted. When I talked to you, you were no longer all with me.
And in the face of this lengthening distance, was it my job to follow you? To trail you to wherever you’d gone and bring you back by force or persuasion? I didn’t even know where you went. When you started insisting on giving MARY memory, I guessed you’d gone back to Europe. I might have been willing to follow you back there, but you gave me so few directions.
Still, maybe I should have tried harder. I do know certain facts. For instance, I know that you lived with your sister, your parents, and your grandfather. I know the small apartment you shared was on the second floor. Your family wasn’t wealthy, but you also weren’t poor. Your father was a pharmacist. When you and your sister were told to switch schools, and then when you were given a curfew, your parents must have been anxious, but they didn’t plan to emigrate. No one could have imagined what happened later, and anyway, your parents were busy providing. They made smaller, more reasonable changes. They cut down on expenditures and put more money away. They attempted to find scholarships for their daughters.
A year after I embarked on my journey, you won a place at a school in the north. According to a certificate I found once in your files while looking for your tax information, you had displayed great mathematical promise. While your sister stayed home, you went up north, where you lived with other talented children.
Does it anger you, Ruth, that I came across that certificate? I can imagine your eyes growing darker, narrowing as they do into daggers. What was I doing, rifling your files, looking for your W-2? Well, let me tell you something, Ruth. I feel I deserve a certificate of recognition, for respecting your secrets as much as I have.
From the early days of our marriage, I understood our differences. I came with my family; you came as an orphan. Based on such a fundamental division, I accepted your right to keep secrets. I know, for instance, about your sister’s diary in the top drawer of your desk. I saw it once, when I was looking for a sharp pencil, and while it hurt me to realize you’d kept it from me, that I’d never known about its existence, I didn’t even open it. Can you imagine such restraint? I only touched the leather cover, traced your sister’s initials with my pointer finger. And then I closed the drawer again and walked quickly out of your office.
I’ve respected your right to keep secrets, and what do I get in return for my efforts? The honor of witnessing your growing devotion to an idiotic computer. Maybe, when you visit her at night, you read her that diary. Maybe you’ve shared that secret with her, a secret you kept all the years of our marriage. Maybe that’s why you want to give her memory: so she can save your sister’s story, then call it up later as the answer to some innocent question.
I see why that might be appealing. As long as your sister’s still talking, she hasn’t fully ceased to exist. But what good are her words if they’re not comprehended? Sure, MARY will remember them, translated into binary signals. But is that understanding? Is that more understanding than I have? I’ve pieced a few things together, and what I don’t know I can imagine — something, by the way, our computer can’t manage. Faced with my own ignorance, I can imagine the facts.
For two years, after moving north, you must have been able to travel. You must have visited your family often. In your third year at the new school, as war was building and travel was forbidden, you stayed and wrote letters. Your sister wrote back.
In the fourth year of your separation, letters from your sister stopped. Alone at your school in the north, you continued to study. That winter, a wealthy alumnus arranged for the departure of the school’s Jewish students. You and eight of your talented schoolmates — the lucky ones, plucked away from your families — were smuggled out on a fishing boat. Huddled down below deck, you felt sick with good luck.
Once you were out of the country, your luck refused to run out. You won another scholarship, this time in Pennsylvania. They had a place for you, so you went, but by this point you were sleepwalking. What else could you do? You studied for a few weeks. You walked to your classes, passed tennis courts and baseball fields, sat beside boys with neat spiral notebooks. After three weeks, you left school to take a position at the Philadelphia Signal Depot. There were plenty of positions for women, since so many men were leaving to fight, and you wanted money to save for your family. You took a post as inspector in the office for telescope crystals. Your telescopes would be used by army meteorologists, in order to predict motions over the city you’d left. Your unit was adjacent to the one that trained pigeons. Often, while measuring crystals, you dreamed of freeing the birds from their cages.
You turned twenty. A young woman now, you didn’t think of falling in love. To do so would have been a distraction. In the attic apartment where you were living, you trained your mind to be a museum. You had to remember things right, so that when your family arrived, you could pick up where you left off. Instead of falling in love, you wrote letters. You sent them to the house where your family had lived, in case they somehow returned. You wrote letters to the authorities, to the associations for refugees. To the charities, the governments, the newspapers, waiting for some word from your family.
Oh, my barely slumbering wife. My wife who escaped on a fishing boat, who spent her twenties writing to no one. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not equipped for such difficult stories.