A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
“The Temple,” a voice said. “Cat told me you’re working on The Temple.” There she stood. The voice had been her voice. However much the intervening years had altered her, she was so undeniably herself that Spurlock was certain she too must recognize him, though he had long since shaved his beard. But of course she did not.
“Do you have a favorite?” she asked.
“A what?” he stammered. Her face was so plainly the same, yet just as surely changed, its lines not harsher with age but clearer, as though the years had brought her into focus.
“A favorite poem,” she said.
“No,” he said, then, “I mean, they are all my favorite. Favorites.”
“May I?” she asked, lifting the book from the foam blocks in front of him. “I’ve been meaning to look through this since I first found it in the holdings.”
She hummed under her breath as she flipped the pages.
“My father used to sing me one of these. Not that he could really sing,” she said, smiling. “But we had a song, at bedtime. Herbert wrote the words; someone else set it to music.” She began to hum again, this time a tentative tune. “Gak!” she said, and laughed. “I shouldn’t have even tried!”
He could see how easily she had secured the job, her youth falling in her favor, an alumna of the college, friendly but poised, at ease in her surroundings. A sweet life it must be, he thought, to inhabit this quiet, the only sound the tap of rain on the glass. When had he known such silence in New York? When had the wash and jostle of the avenues not pressed in on him, even in his prayers, even in his long nights with the homeless in the impromptu shelter? Never, that’s when. And why should the young not choose quiet, if they were moved to? So many had teemed to New York, it had never occurred to him others might set out in an opposite direction. Was this what she had sought, the leveling horizon, the quiet of rain on glass, where a stranger’s arrival was something to notice? It occurred to Spurlock that his very presence (to say nothing of the envelope he’d brought) would breach the sanctuary she had sought out and painstakingly maintained.
“You’ll let us know if you need something,” she said.
“I promise I will let you know,” Spurlock said, and she disappeared through the door marked Stacks.
What he needed, he thought, was to leave this place, to leave his envelopes on the table, tagged with a note saying nothing more than “For Em Oppen.” Yes, a note. That was the way to do it. He would write it on the back of a call slip.
Spurlock lifted his pencil over the little slip and then stopped. He had assumed all along that she was entitled to her father’s testament, that whatever madness or torment had claimed him, whatever privilege of secrecy her father had unilaterally invoked, the story was not his but hers. The testament had been detained in his possession, but now that Spurlock knew who she was, he could and should hand it over. But hadn’t Spurlock—by reading it, by keeping it, by brooding on it, by refraining from seeking her out for seven years—had he not agreed implicitly to the terms that Oppen had laid out? Had Spurlock not consented to tell no one but God? Had he not afterward, in prayer, imagined even placing the envelope in Christ’s pierced hands? And yet now he would merely abandon it, leave it, and leave her alone with it.
Perhaps there was a simpler option, a kinder one. Why not leave just the smaller airmail envelope, the one forwarded from the lawyers? That was the only one addressed to her. Yes, that was what he should do, he thought, but even then he could not move. Cat had left the reading room. Spurlock was alone.
—
During an interview for his job at the Church of the Incarnation, he’d said to his interviewers that he had sensed “a reservoir of prayer” held within the church’s walls. The grandiloquence of the phrase had surprised him; what had he even meant by it? Maybe he had felt—or wanted to feel—that the church was a sort of cistern or catchment basin, a pool into which the halt and the lame, himself included, could immerse themselves and be healed. Or maybe he had just repeated, unwittingly, an orotund locution he’d heard or read somewhere before. He realized, abashed, that he’d had no idea what he had meant then, but now this unvisited room seemed such a reservoir to him. The silence over which the nearly forgotten books presided seemed to him a holy silence, the silence of things that had come to an end.
Likewise his long journey had come to an end. Having done obediently what had been asked of him, he could lay his burden down, hallelujah. Something, however, hounded him still. He knew it had to do with that other, deeper desire to affix a name to her face, the face of the girl-no-longer who had appeared seven years ago in his church—to affix not just a name, but his own wondering gaze. But in this silence of things that had come to an end, Spurlock saw at last that underneath the obedience and longing, a darker motive lay: to pry free once and for all a foreign body, a hook, a barb set in the bone. Yes, that was the way David Oppen himself had described it. It had lodged in him seven years ago, that longing, that question—Who are you, Clementine?—and only one person could allay that ache. His heart knocked in his chest.
—
“I’ve got it now,” she was saying. “I know what it was.”
She had pushed through the door and had rested a stack of books she was carrying on the edge of his table.
