And yet what was it, this single sheet, torn from a notebook, this poem by Yeats you could have found in any library, any anthology? What was I meant to do with it? She had not changed it, had only copied it out by hand in blocky capital letters. Standing there, thinking none of this but knowing it, I read it through. Or rather, it read itself to me. After all, I knew it by heart, from the first stanza:
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand…
To the last:
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
Jessica Burke would have sent me the poem no earlier than a day or at most two before her death. Her death, I knew now, was not an accidental overdose but a suicide. In sending it, she had said: Do you remember? You admitted that you knew it. You admitted you knew it well.
THREE
Three years ago that was, the inception of my secret. In sending the poem, Jessica Burke had entrusted me with the fact, suddenly obvious, that she had taken her own life. I was to keep this final fact as I had kept all her others, as its mute, hired guardian. That, at least, was how I understood the envelope she had sent me and the poem it contained. Or so it seems to me now, Father, now when I ask myself why I said nothing, told no one. Whatever secret Jessica Burke had confided in me, surely I was obliged to keep it. Whom, in any event, would I have told? Not her mother, who lived in Pensacola with her third husband and tormented her daughter with maudlin, alcoholic telephone calls. Should I have told the police? They had done their job and drawn their conclusions. My job was different. Was I not by trade the custodian of stories the world would not hear?
In any event, the window for disclosure snapped promptly shut. Each hour of delay would be an hour I would have to explain, and I had no explanation to offer. Thus the secret declared me its home. As for the postal box itself, I had no reason to open it again, and the key itself took its place among the other odd objects washed up in my years of practice: a Zuni fetish sent by a patient who had moved to New Mexico, a headless action figure an autistic child had named (to my amazement) the Danger of Speculation. Surely box and key required nothing else of me, having discharged their emissary duty. Surely Jessica Burke had no more letters to send. I brought home the poem and placed it in an empty pigeonhole in my desk.
Nevertheless, I must have peered into box 5504 from time to time on my weekly trips to the post office, as though my eye sought repose in its perfect emptiness. I know I must have because one day, three years later, that emptiness had been replaced by the bend sinister of an envelope’s diagonal shadow in the box.
Father, I ask you this: Why did I not assume that the letter was for someone else, that the box itself now belonged to someone else? I had never, after all, received anything else in it, had not in three years even received notice to renew its lease.
This envelope was roughly the same size as the first one, the one with the poem, though smoother than standard manila with a faint striation, a European envelope, I thought, like the ones I had used during my years in Paris. It seems to me now that when I removed it from the post box and read my address, spelled out patiently in careful block capitals, there followed a moment of stillness, a floating like the floating of a vase or glass that, having escaped the hand’s grasp, turns lazily, luxuriates in air, as though no haste could trouble it before it shatters on the floor.
The letter had been sent four days earlier. It could not have been sent by Jessica Burke, dead now these three years. These were new instructions: from where, from whom? A wave of vertigo seized me and drove me out onto the sidewalk, cresting in a surge of nausea that broke in a splatter of vomit on the curb. Someone, I seem to remember, approached me to ask if I needed help, but I must have simply walked away, apparently in the direction of the park, because after a while I was sitting on a park bench, the new envelope resting beside me, still unopened. My attention had affixed itself to the ordinary, the circumstantial, the dusting of pollen that lay on the bench, the few bruised daffodils lolling at the border of the
