The Letters

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 22: The Letters

The letters were in a shoebox on the top shelf of the bedroom closet in the house on Hawthorne Street, the house that Lin and David had occupied for forty-six years, the house whose closets and drawers and shelves held the accumulated evidence of a marriage the way the library's shelves held the accumulated evidence of a civilization, and the evidence was not organized, was not catalogued, was not assigned call numbers or subject headings, was simply there, in drawers and boxes and folders and the spaces between books on bookshelves, the evidence of daily life stored in the way daily life stores things, which is without system, without intention, the accumulation the system, the accumulation the only organization that daily life provides.

Miriam found the shoebox on a Sunday afternoon in late November, the week after Thanksgiving, when she had gone to the house on Hawthorne Street to collect things Lin had asked for -- the dark green sweater, a second pair of the flat shoes, the framed photograph of Miriam at twenty-two that had been on Lin's bedside table at the house before it moved to the bedside table at Evergreen House, the photograph traveling from one room to another the way Lin had traveled from one room to another, from the bedroom on Hawthorne Street to Room 6, the photograph maintaining its position beside the bed, beside the sleeping, beside the person whose bedside it occupied, the photograph a constant while the rooms changed. Lin had also asked for a specific book -- not The Pillow Book, which was already at Evergreen House, but a volume of Emily Dickinson's poems, the complete edition, the book that Lin had described with the librarian's precision: "It's on the third shelf from the top in the bedroom bookcase, between the Basho and the Szymborska, catalogued under 811, American poetry." And Miriam had gone to the house and had found the sweater and the shoes and the photograph and had climbed the stepladder to reach the third shelf and had found the Dickinson between the Basho and the Szymborska, exactly where Lin said it would be, because Lin always knew where the books were.

The shoebox was behind the Dickinson. Or rather, the shoebox was behind the row of poetry books on the third shelf, in the space between the books and the back wall of the closet, the space that exists in every closet, the dead space, the space that is not shelved but that is there, behind the visible, behind the organized, the space where things accumulate that are not part of the system but that the system's owner cannot discard, and the shoebox was in this space, and the shoebox was not labeled, was not catalogued, was a plain brown shoebox from Nordstrom, the lid slightly warped from the closet's humidity, the cardboard softened by years of the Portland air that penetrated every closet and every drawer and every space in every house in the city, the moisture persistent, pervasive, the Portland climate's signature.

She opened the box.

Letters. Dozens of letters. Handwritten, on various papers -- stationery, notebook paper, the backs of envelopes, Post-it notes, the margins of newspapers, the small sheets torn from the pads that Lin kept in the kitchen and the bathroom and beside the bed for the purpose of writing down the things that needed to be written down, and the things that needed to be written down were, apparently, everything, because the letters covered everything, spanned everything, addressed everything that a marriage of fifty-four years contains, which is everything, which is the full range of human communication from the profound to the mundane, from the declaration of love to the reminder to buy milk.

She sat on the bed -- Lin and David's bed, the bed they had shared for forty-six years in this house, the bed that was a king-size mattress on a simple frame, no headboard, the bed that David had built from Douglas fir two-by-sixes and three-quarter-inch plywood, the bed an engineer's bed, a structural bed, the bed over-built in the way that engineers over-build, the safety factor excessive, the bed capable of supporting a load many times greater than the load of two sleeping bodies, the excess a form of care, the engineer's care, the care that says: this thing will hold, this thing will not fail, I have calculated the load and I have exceeded the requirement because exceeding the requirement is how I express concern, and the concern is the love, and the love is in the structure.

She read the letters. She read them in no order because there was no order, the letters jumbled in the box the way they had been deposited over the years, one on top of another, the most recent on top and the oldest at the bottom but the layers shuffled and mixed the way geological layers are shuffled by seismic activity, the strata disrupted, the chronology broken, and the breaking was the box's disorder, the box's refusal of the system that Lin had applied to everything else in her life, the Dewey Decimal System that organized the books and the kitchen and the closets and the filing cabinets, the system that organized everything except the letters, because the letters were the exception, were the thing that resisted organization, were the part of the marriage that could not be catalogued because it was too daily, too various, too much of everything to fit in any single category.

A letter from David, undated, on Multnomah County Library stationery: "Lin -- I replaced the washer in the kitchen faucet. The drip was caused by a worn seat, not the washer, but I replaced both. The specification for the replacement washer is 3/8" flat, neoprene. The faucet should not drip now. If it drips, the valve body may be scored and the entire faucet assembly will need to be replaced. I love you. -- David." The love declaration appended to the plumbing report, the love and the washer in the same sentence, the emotional and the mechanical not separated but joined, the joining the marriage, the marriage a structure that held both the love and the washer, the heart and the neoprene, and the holding was the thing, the holding was what the letters showed, the capacity of a marriage to hold everything, the profound and the mundane, the declaration and the reminder, in the same box, in the same letter, in the same sentence.

A letter from Lin, on a Post-it note, stuck to the inside of the box's lid: "David -- the Kawabata is on the table. Read it tonight. I want to discuss the scene at the train window. The reflection and the landscape superimposed on the same glass. It's architecture, David. It's Miriam's windows. -- L." The cross-reference. The librarian's cross-reference, linking the novel to the architecture, linking the husband's reading to the daughter's practice, the cross-reference that was Lin's method, Lin's way of connecting the things in her life the way the Dewey Decimal System connected the books in the library, the connections running between the categories, the cross-references linking 895.63 to 720, linking Japanese literature to architecture, linking the novel to the window, linking the reading to the building, and the linking was the system, and the system was the mind, and the mind was Lin's.

A letter from David, on the back of a Safeway receipt, the receipt dated March 14, 2003: "Lin -- I will be late. The Burnside Bridge inspection found corrosion in the gusset plates. I need to write the report tonight. There is pasta in the refrigerator. Heat at 350 for 20 minutes. I will read to you when I get home, even if it is late. Even if you are asleep. I will read to you because the reading is the thing. -- D." The reading is the thing. The sentence that David had written on the back of a grocery receipt twenty-three years ago, the sentence that described the marriage's central practice, the reading aloud, the voice and the ear, and the sentence was there, was in the box, was in the evidence, the evidence that the reading had been the thing for decades, had been the marriage's structure, the reading the load-bearing member, the reading the beam, the reading the thing that held the marriage up the way the gusset plates held the bridge up, and the corrosion of the gusset plates was the bridge's illness, the bridge's decline, and David had written the report and then come home and read to Lin, the engineering and the reading in the same evening, the professional and the personal in the same life, the bridge and the marriage in the same man.

A letter from Lin, on the back of a library catalogue card, the card blank except for Lin's handwriting on the reverse: "David -- I catalogued a book today about the engineering of long-span bridges. 624.2. I thought of you. I think of you every time I catalogue a book about bridges or roads or dams or any of the things you build. I think of you and I think: my husband holds the world up. My husband's calculations are the reason the roads hold the cars and the bridges hold the trucks and the dams hold the water. My husband's mind is the reason things stand. And then I come home and you are sitting at the kitchen table with your calculator and your pencil and you are checking the numbers, always checking, and I want to tell you: the numbers are right, David. The numbers are always right. You don't need to check. But you check anyway, because checking is how you love the world, and loving the world by checking the numbers is the most David thing, the most engineer thing, and I love the thing, I love the checking, I love the numbers, I love you. -- Lin." The love letter. The love letter written on the back of a catalogue card, the medium the message, the card that organized books now holding the words that organized a marriage, the system repurposed, the professional tool used for the personal declaration, and the repurposing was the letters' essential quality, the quality that made them different from organized correspondence, different from filed letters, different from the systematic communication that Lin conducted in every other area of her life -- the letters were the system's holiday, the system's day off, the place where the librarian set down the cataloguing and simply wrote.

Miriam brought the shoebox to Evergreen House. She brought it on a Tuesday afternoon, after the drive from Bend, after the three hours and twelve minutes of corridor between the building and the mother, and she carried the box into Room 6 and she sat in the visitor's chair and she placed the box on the bed beside Lin's hand, and Lin looked at the box and Lin's eyes changed, the eyes widening slightly, the recognition visible, the recognition of a thing that had been private, that had been in the closet, that had been behind the books, and was now here, was in Room 6, was in the light from the east-facing window, was being seen.

"The letters," Lin said.

"I found them in the closet. Behind the poetry."

"Behind the Dickinson."

"Yes."

"I put them there. I put them behind the Dickinson because Dickinson understood letters. Dickinson wrote letters the way other people wrote poems and wrote poems the way other people wrote letters, and the confusion between the two -- between the letter and the poem -- was Dickinson's genius, and the confusion is mine too, the confusion between the letter and the love, between the writing and the feeling, between the words on the paper and the thing the words hold, which is the marriage, which is the fifty-four years, which is everything."

Miriam opened the box. She took out a letter at random. She read it aloud.

She read David's letter about the kitchen faucet, the washer and the love in the same sentence, and Lin smiled, the sharp quick smile, the smile of recognition, the smile that said: yes, that is David, that is exactly David, the man who fixes the faucet and appends the love, the engineer who cannot separate the repair from the declaration because the repair is the declaration, the fixing is the loving, the maintenance of the house is the maintenance of the marriage.

She read Lin's letter about the bridge engineering book, the catalogue card letter, the love letter, and Lin closed her eyes and listened, the way she listened to David's reading, the closing of the eyes the opening of the attention, and the letter entered her ears and she received it and she said: "I remember writing that. I remember the card. I remember the pen. It was a Tuesday. I remember it was a Tuesday because Tuesdays were the days when I catalogued the engineering books, the 620s, and the 620s were David's numbers, the numbers that held David's profession the way the shelves held the books, and every Tuesday I touched David's numbers, handled David's profession, held in my hands the catalogue cards that organized the knowledge that organized David's mind, and the handling was a form of intimacy, a librarian's intimacy, the intimacy of a woman who touches the numbers that hold her husband's world."

She read another letter. And another. She read letters from David about porch repairs and calculus homework help for teenage Miriam and the correct torque for the lug nuts on the Volvo and the observation that the sunset through the kitchen window was the color of the underside of a cumulonimbus and the speculation that the color was a function of Rayleigh scattering at low solar angles and the conclusion that the physics of sunsets was the most beautiful physics and that Lin should come look before the light changed. She read letters from Lin about books received and books catalogued and the patron who had asked for a book about dying and Lin had led her to the 100s and the 200s and the 600s and had wanted to lead her further, to the section that did not exist, the section that would catalogue not the fact of dying but the experience of dying, the lived reality, the room, the light, the hand held, the voice reading, the section that was not in the Dewey Decimal System because the Dewey Decimal System was for knowledge and the experience of dying was not knowledge but life.

Lin remembered some letters. She remembered the faucet letter and the bridge letter and the letter about the sunset's Rayleigh scattering. She remembered them the way she remembered books she had catalogued -- by their position in the system, by their cross-references, by the associations that connected one letter to another letter to a Tuesday to a book to a number to a shelf.

Others were new to her. Others she heard and did not recognize, the words unfamiliar, the sentences arriving as though written by a stranger, a stranger who shared her handwriting and her syntax and her habit of cross-referencing but who was someone else, someone she had been and was no longer, and the being-no-longer was the forgetting, and the forgetting had begun.

She did not say this. Miriam saw it. Miriam saw the moment when the recognition did not come, when the eyes did not widen, when the smile did not arrive, when the letter entered Lin's ears and was received by a mind that did not file it, did not catalogue it, did not place it on the shelf where the letter belonged, because the shelf was empty, the shelf had been cleared, the forgetting had removed the book from the shelf, and the empty shelf was the evidence, and the evidence was the decline, and the decline was not only in the body but in the mind, the system failing, the catalogue corrupted, the cross-references broken, the links between one memory and another severed, and the severing was the loss, and the loss was the thing that the letters made visible, the letters that were the record of a marriage that the mind was losing, the marriage preserved in the box while the marriage was dissolving in the brain.

Miriam read. She read and Lin listened. The letters filled Room 6 the way David's reading of Snow Country filled Room 6, the words traveling the twelve inches from the mouth to the ear, the words entering the room and being held by the room, the room holding the letters and the marriage and the fifty-four years and the faucet washer and the bridge inspection and the Dickinson and the catalogue cards and the sunset's Rayleigh scattering, the room holding everything the letters held, which was everything, which was the marriage, which was two people writing to each other across the small distances of a house -- the kitchen to the bedroom, the bathroom to the hallway, the note on the counter, the Post-it on the mirror, the letter left beside the coffee maker -- the small distances that the letters crossed, the distances that were not miles but feet, not the three hours and twelve minutes of the drive but the twelve seconds of the walk from the kitchen to the bedroom, and the smallness of the distance was the marriage's intimacy, the intimacy of two people who wrote to each other not because they were apart but because they were together, the writing not a substitute for presence but an expression of presence, the letters the physical evidence that two people occupied the same house and thought of each other while occupying it, and the thinking-of was the love, and the love was the letters, and the letters were in the box, and the box was on the bed, and the bed was in the room, and the room held everything.

"Keep reading," Lin said. Her eyes were closed. Her hands were still. The blanket was loose across her chest.

Miriam kept reading. She read from the box the way David read from the book, with the voice steady and the love in the voice and the room holding the voice and the letters and the light from the east-facing window falling on the box and on the bed and on Lin's hands, the thin still hands that had written half the letters in the box, the hands that had held the pen and formed the words and placed the letters in the closet behind the Dickinson, the hands that could no longer hold the pen, could no longer write the words, could no longer add to the box, the box now complete, the collection now closed, the last letter already written, already in the box, already part of the record, and the record was the marriage, and the marriage was the letters, and the letters were being read aloud in a room designed by the daughter of the woman who wrote them and the man who received them, and the room held the reading, and the reading was the love, and the love was in the letters, and the letters were enough.