We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  In the dining hall, I had my own force field, and ate most meals alone. When one boy asked if the seat in front of me was taken, I looked up at him too eagerly, I’m sure. “Nope!” I said with a smile.

  “Thanks,” he said and pulled the chair across the way.

  I had left a city I loved and an apartment I loved and a job I loved. A blossoming relationship wasn’t wearing the long distance well, and I resented that I felt like I had been asked to choose between work and romance. Would the same have been true if he was the one who had to move?

  But a secret part of me was also relieved. I believed—without daring to let the thought become fully conscious—that if I was happily in love, I would forget the visceral experience of longing for it, and I would lose access to Jane.

  In order to make the sacrifices worth it, I threw myself even further into Jane’s story. I signed up for the Harvard University Police Department self-defense course. They gave me that metal baton that looked like a ribbed shiv, and they warned me not to try to take it on airplanes. “It’s legal, for now,” one of the officers said. Walking around the Square, I practiced sliding away the fifty years. Bank of America was once again Elsie’s, JFK Street was home to the Wursthaus, the wurst of all possible houses. The punk kids by the T stop were Jane’s “ankle biters.”

  But it wasn’t just Jane’s life that imposed itself on me.

  Adrienne Rich describes her experience of feminism as a kind of re-vision in her 1972 essay “When We Dead Awaken.” “The sleepwalkers are coming awake,” she wrote. “It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.” Her words registered in me like a shiver.

  Because this strange second chance at college was insisting I also re-see my time at Harvard.

  The undergraduates, thank goodness, were just as remarkable as I remembered my classmates being—but little else was spared.

  Academia no longer felt like an idealized kingdom of learning; it was nasty and political.

  The graduate students who had seemed creepy and sad were now my peers. And I realized that many were downtrodden not because that was the type attracted to academia, but because of the system they were locking into. Treated as interchangeable and disposable.

  I saw some undergraduates—the chosen few, I knew—wearing heels and tuxes and rushing down the street. I knew they were headed to a “punch” event, where hopefuls would try to impress the final club members enough to give them a spot in the new class. The clubs hadn’t been my entire life at Harvard, but they had been a bigger part than I cared to admit. I knew the clubs were elitist, I knew they created a problematic power dynamic, and I knew that many of my best friends had never stepped inside, and yet, I was never so critical of them that I stopped going. I had even joined one of the few all-women ones, telling myself that there was no damage done if its very existence helped mitigate the power imbalance. I saw now that it was a privilege not to be forced to examine the issue more critically, and that no matter how much I thought I stood apart from them, my hands were not clean of having perpetuated the structural problems they reinforced.

  There was the Vonnegut quote that Jane had loved: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” And as I thought of it, I smiled, realizing that she’d done it again. I thought I was in Boston to retrace her steps, when in fact I was also retracing my own. And in trying to track Jane’s ghost, I had become a ghost myself.

  Toronto

  FOR YEARS, EVERY TIME I took a flight, I’d route the layover through Toronto, so I could contact Jim Humphries and say I’d be in town. The first time I tried, his wife replied to my email saying that my request was reasonable, but that Jim was going through a rough time. She wasn’t going to pass along the message to Jim, she said, but she asked me to try again later. I never again got a reply to my messages, but the initial response had opened the door just enough for hope. This time I had sent a handwritten letter. As long as she didn’t write back with a definitive no, I told myself, I could show up at his front door. I knew that Jim probably wouldn’t talk about Jane, but I just needed to know that someone had actually asked.

  On the day I landed in Toronto, still not having heard from either Jim or his wife, I considered how little I still knew about this man, despite my years of research. All I knew was that after four more seasons at Tepe Yahya, he suddenly withdrew from the Anthropology department. He never completed his PhD. Instead, he took over the family business on the farm he had grown up on, got married, and all but disappeared from the lives of his archaeology cohort.

  The next morning, I wrote down Jim’s name, and the phone number of my mother in case I didn’t return home that night, and handed it to the friend of a friend who had agreed to host me for a few nights. He flashed me a look that meant, What have I signed up for?

  I put on the most wholesome thing I owned, an ankle-length yellow sundress that made me look like a character in Little House on the Prairie, and took an Uber to Jim’s place, which had been described to me as the last remaining farm in Mississauga. The address I put in turned out to be the side of a two-lane road. Even the driver was concerned: “Are you sure you’re in the right place?” Uh-huh, I said unconvincingly.

  I walked down a long driveway surrounded by woods on both sides. It would take me at least five minutes to run back to the main road, I realized. Toronto’s Pearson Airport was less than a mile away, so planes were screaming in the sky. No one would hear me if I yelled.

  In the silence between planes, I heard a woman’s voice in the distance. I started toward it and came upon a house. I walked up to the front door and knocked. Nothing. I took pictures and kept moving down the small road, deeper into the woods. I scared a flock of birds into a sudden, flapping movement, and the surprise made me shake. I came upon another house, this one with a tennis court and a giant gate protecting the driveway. It seemed too fancy to match the description I’d heard from Arthur Bankoff, who had kept in touch with Jim over the years.

  I continued even farther. I saw a smaller house to the right and a barn off in the distance. It hadn’t occurred to me how hard it would be to show up unannounced at a farm—there were doors everywhere. I approached a greenhouse with broken windows and three canoes out back. I knocked. No one. There were papers pinned up against the windows inside. One sheet was a calendar from 1997.

  I continued on, letting my imagination wander. There was rusting farm machinery everywhere: car parts, metal pipes, wooden pallets. So many dark spots where heavy equipment could fall on me, and it would look like an accident.

  What if he were watching me from one of the windows? “MR. HUMPHRIES,” I called. I didn’t want to scare him. “MR. HUMPHRIES!” Nothing. I walked past the hay storage barn and the tanks of diesel. It felt like a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek, but I wasn’t sure if anyone else was actually playing. I crossed the high grass field to a brick house crammed with unused furniture. I knocked, reluctantly. Again, no answer.

  I promised myself that I wouldn’t leave until I had searched everywhere I could. I had waited too long. I’d come this far.

  The path ended by opening into two final fields. Mississauga’s new highway ringed the edges of his farm. Cars glinted in the space between the trees. I was standing in a bubble of the decaying past, surrounded on all sides by the encroaching present.

  I turned back up the driveway and passed by the smaller brick house I had walked by earlier. Walking down its tributary driveway, I finally saw the white paper sign taped to the door. On it, handwritten, was the number of the house I had been looking for. It was so straightforward that it made me laugh. I walked until I could see my reflection in the glass pane of the outer door. I reached for my phone to take a picture of the sign, but before I could, I noticed through the door’s mesh screen, silhouetted by the windows at the end of the hallway, a shape in an armchair—head tilted back, glasses on head. I didn’t know if the person was looking at me, but I knew w
hoever it was was facing me. I put away my phone. The buzzer was an actual bell, and I pulled the string to sound it, trying not to lose my courage with each tug.

  November 1968

  JANE HAD TO YANK HARD to open her door. She had shut and locked it while she was with her family in Needham for the Thanksgiving break. The wood had swollen and warped so much in that time that she couldn’t be bothered to lock it again for the rest of that winter of 1968. Her apartment was cold, and she made a mental note to get the landlord to fix her heat. Not long after, she found a letter from Jim Humphries waiting for her in her mailbox.

  Over the summer in Tepe Yahya, imagining Jim’s semester away, she had worried about getting letters signed Sincerely Yours. Addressing him in her journal, she mused, “Maybe you could compromise + put Dearest Jane instead of Dear or something?”

  Dear Jane, Jim’s letter began.

  Look, I know I’m not terribly encouraging on phone calls but don’t beg for comfort and affection and sentiment. It’s degrading for you and it’s no compliment to me. I know you’ve had and have more than your share of troubles but not to throw them at me. The Humph’s slanted and probably threadbare shoulder is always available with pleasure if it helps anyone, but don’t make it a basis of a relationship.

  Less than six months before, Jim had literally been sweeping her off the street in London, where they shared a few days before continuing to Iran. He had bought her flowers at 5:30 in the morning. Now this letter was her reality. Even before she’d left Cambridge for the summer, she warned herself not to let her guard down: “Should have been my old wary self and known there’s gotta be a catch somewhere.” But there had been one day in particular when she’d let herself think it was going to be different with Jim.

  While in London, they had taken a day trip to Oxford. They lounged by the river and allowed themselves to imagine the peaceful rural life they could have if they stepped away from academia. They were so happy they half joked that it’d be a good idea to cable Fearless Leader—what they called Karl—to say they were retiring to raise ducks and the hell with archaeology.

  On the train back, Jane and Jim ran into an old friend from Jim’s college years, who had insisted on treating the two of them to a round in the Paddington Station bar. They made friends with a few locals, each of whom also insisted on treating them to a round, so Jim and Jane were tipsy and tired by the time they poured themselves onto the Underground to head back to the hotel.

  At 9:30 p.m., they still hadn’t had dinner.

  “What about food?” Jane had asked.

  Jim walked over to the phone. She couldn’t hear who he was speaking to.

  “Get dressed, we’re going to eat,” he’d called over to her.

  Once he had finished putting on a new shirt, he walked back to her and saw what she’d picked out. “No, you better put on something dressy,” he said. “It’s kind of a swish place.”

  “Where are we going?” Jane asked. Jim didn’t answer. He shaved in her sink and changed his shirt again.

  It wasn’t until their taxi pulled into the driveway off the Strand that Jane understood: They were at the Savoy, the fanciest hotel in the city. After dinner, Jim took to the dance floor. “Have you ever danced with anyone 6'7" in altitude?” Jane would later write.

  It was almost 3 a.m. by the time they started making their way back to the hotel. They bought a bottle of milk off a milkman and drank it down and sang Irish songs, and Jim picked her up and carried her across Russell Square, with Jane playfully yelling, “PUT ME DOWN!” A cop smiled at them.

  Jane woke up early the next morning to rearrange the bedding before housekeeping came so it would look as if Jim had just come in to pack up his gear. When Jim left to do some errands, Jane started a letter to her parents: “Ah to be in London + in love. He is, you know. With me, I mean. […] Said so, too. Funny, I think, all things being equal, this might be the real thing. Time will tell.”

  It was the first time he had said it. She couldn’t stop smiling. She wrote that she felt like a piece of tarnished silver that had just gotten polished.

  “The thing about this one is that he’s real. And does insane and unanthropological things like cares. And likes doing things for people (like me, for example) and doesn’t have any kind of macho complex or take drugs + loves horses + let’s just see what happens. He’s the only person I’ve EVER met who can snap me out of a Mood + also tells me I’m beautiful which is horseshit but what an incredible feeling.”

  Jane realized how much she was spilling to her parents—“God, this drivel I’m pouring out!”—so she turned to her journal. “And all this time I thought you were just making the last days of the marmot a little (hell, infinitely) more blissful. Oh, I love you too, big Canuck. It’s been a long time since I really loved someone, pure + simple + no questions asked, instead of playing at being in love.” Jane tried to suppress the sense that it might all come tumbling down. She prayed he wouldn’t turn back on his words. “It would tear me apart,” she had written.

  But now here was this letter. He spent the next third of it explaining that he couldn’t help guarantee her a spot on the next season of Tepe Yahya. “If you are wanting to continue at Yahya, either for proximity to me or for putting in time, it would be much better if you knocked it off.”

  He had said he didn’t want to be alone anymore. He had said he really loved her. That day in London, she had felt like the girl bunny in Pogo, her favorite comic strip, with whom a fish fell in love and the girl replied: “And me only a week old.” That’s how Jane had felt. Different. Softer, somehow. Numb, even.

  Jim ended the letter:

  I enjoy and cultivated your company because Jane Britton is capable, intelligent and has diverse and imaginative interests, not because she is one bedraggled, bewildered marmot with a potential for scratching backs, affection, comfort and other silly things. I’m not moving around for crumbs of cookies but for a whole big cake with chocolate icing as well. In other words, there is no question of Dogsbody wanting a fur coat but this man wouldn’t mind escorting a queen, otherwise forget it entirely.

  Above not intended as a broadside but as a warning of a state of mind.

  Looking at his letter, dashed off on loose-leaf paper, her fears about Sincerely Yours seemed silly in comparison, because was there anything more horrifyingly indifferent than “Health + luck, Jim”?

  Jim Humphries

  THE FIGURE SILHOUETTED BY THE window of that Toronto farmhouse did not move. Another emerged, however, and as this second figure got closer, it took the shape of a woman. She had short-cropped white hair and was maybe five foot three. She opened the door, and when I saw the brightness of her blue eyes, I instantly felt apologetic. There was no hint of wariness. She had no idea who I was.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “I just wanted to introduce myself,” I said, and her eyes narrowed a bit. She knew what I was about to say. “My name is Becky Cooper—I had written you a couple of emails and letters—”

  “We’ve been trying to tell you. Jim doesn’t want to see you.”

  “I just—” I stammered. I wasn’t welcome there. The insanity of having just trespassed on his property registered all at once. “I’m just trying to do my best to celebrate Jane’s life, and I’m talking to as many people as possible who knew her. If I could just ask Jim in person if he—”

  “I’ll ask,” she said reluctantly. “But he did tell me that if this happened, he just didn’t want to talk.”

  She shut the door and walked to the figure in the armchair. The figure uncurled his body from his seat and became bigger as he approached the door. He opened the screen and then the glass—the removal of each one like lifting a filter off himself. When he appeared in the doorframe, with nothing mediating the space between me and him, it was like color rushing into a black-and-white film.

  He propped his hand on top of the door and leaned his hip into it to keep it open. “So you’ve finally tracked down Jim,” he said, k
nowing he was already a character in my story.

  He was wearing a dark chambray shirt, and the front pocket was loaded with pens. He was much more handsome than I expected him to be. And much more mischievous. His hair was gray, but he had a full shock of it, and he tilted his head boyishly. I almost didn’t know if it was really him. He seemed too young, too playful. I wanted to shake his hand—to bridge the gap—but I didn’t.

  “Now we know what the other looks like,” he said. I had entered into his life as a character as well. He continued: “But look, two things.” He told me that he had to deliver hay somewhere right now and that he should get going soon. “And, second thing: I don’t want to talk about Jane.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “It’s a long time ago,” he said. “And I just don’t think it’s anyone’s business.”

  I had expected this. I had my own version of this complaint, which I offered to him, as a kind of entreaty: “What bothers me is that people talk about what happened to Jane, but no one knows anything about her.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. People will talk,” he said. “Even in farming we have our stories.”

  I let the moment linger. That was all I had needed to know. It felt like the world’s quietest victory just to have finally been able to ask and to hear his answer. I promised him I would no longer bother him. And then I took the long walk back to the main road.

  On the car ride home, I reflected on the irony of all these archaeologists telling me that something was too far in the past. They claimed that there was no point in unearthing a truth from so long ago, but of course this claim stood in direct opposition to the central premise of their work. Sure, any story told about Jane was bound to be contaminated and flawed—a narrative used in service of a current purpose. But there was value in the truth preserved, and value in studying the distortions introduced and the nature of the details lost.