Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Elena, you really should snap out of this,” I told her one evening at my apartment.

  She looked up from a magazine she had been scanning. “Out of what?”

  “This damned silly mood you’re in.”

  She closed the magazine and gave me an absolutely withering stare.

  “It’s really sort of boring, Elena,” I added irritably. “You’re not much fun anymore.”

  Elena said nothing. She simply held her eyes on mine for a moment. Then she stood up. “I’m tired, William. I’m going home now.”

  “Well, it was a splendid evening,” I said.

  Elena placed the magazine neatly on the table beside her chair and quietly left the room. I did not see her again for a month.

  But Mary did. She became far more devoted to Elena during this period. The poet Horace once said that certain people are “privileged to dare what flights they please,” and Mary understood, as none of the rest of us did at that time, that Elena was one of these. During all of that long spring, she was amazingly solicitous toward Elena. She later explained it rather simply to her daughter. “People have said that Elena was near a breakdown during the time she wrote New England Maid. She never was. Elena had sadness, that’s all. A very bad case of sadness.”

  This “case of sadness” grew less severe later in the spring. Perhaps by then Elena had decided that she would, in fact, write the book that was in her. By May the pall that had darkened fall, winter, and early spring lifted entirely, and Elena finished up her classes in a final burst of vigor. She was able to graduate right on time, in June of 1932.

  My father came to New York for the graduation ceremonies, and we sat together in the auditorium and watched the long line of graduating seniors as they marched across the stage. When Elena’s name was called, I saw his eyes lift toward the front of the room with a sudden energy, all his weariness and boredom dropping from him like crusted earth.

  Outside the hall I took a photograph of the two of them together. Elena stood beside him in her cap and gown. She smiled reservedly, while he beamed proudly at the camera.

  After Elena changed clothes at Three Arts, the three of us wandered down Broadway, casually chatting about matters of limited scope. Elena talked about a job she had applied for at the New York Public Library, about Elizabeth’s letters, which were hinting at a move to the city, and about the general run of her college life. My father smiled appreciatively at everything she said.

  Later that evening, he took us to dinner at a restaurant a good deal less fashionable than was usual for him. There were small wooden tables with checkered tablecloths, and toward the back a myna bird squawked the president’s name from a large cage shaped like a pagoda. Nor did my father look as much the dandy as he once had. There was no silk handkerchief peeping up from his breast pocket, and the stud pin that adorned his tie was lusterless and vulgar. He had probably left the gold one sitting on a hotel nightstand or had pressed it into the hand of some woman who had asked for nothing more. He lifted his water glass high above the table. “Here’s to Elena’s graduation.”

  We touched our three glasses together gently. My father drank the water as if it were a fine red wine, rolling it over his tongue in a mocking gesture which he ended with a large, brave smile. “The Democrats will get the booze back again,” he said. Then he folded his hands together and looked soberly at each of us. “I know this is a celebration,” he began, “but since I’ve got to be in Hartford early tomorrow morning, there’s something I have to tell you tonight. There’s just no other time to do it.” He looked at Elena. “I hate to spoil the evening, though.”

  “What is it?” Elena asked immediately.

  My father shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was dressed in a plain brown double-breasted suit which added a note of unaccustomed shabbiness to his appearance. In Calliope, Raymond Finch describes a down-and-out hustler as being “plain as a wood shaving, a dapper little man with oily hair who’d gone to seed at the betting tables and had ended up in a shiny suit and cracked calfskin shoes, which he tapped incessantly to some tune playing in his mind.” Except for the betting tables, it could have been our father that evening in the restaurant, his rubber soles beating a muffled cadence under the table as he spoke to us.

  “You know how times are now,” he began. “Well, they’ve finally hit home. I’ve tried to stay afloat. But what with all the trouble these days, it’s been hard.”

  I suppose my face must have looked like a blank desert landscape to him. I was, after all, so inexperienced with the world he knew, with the battle for territorial dominance he waged up and down New England, the jungle warfare of the general store.

  He glanced from my face to Elena’s then back to mine again. “I managed to put you through school, Billy, right?”

  I nodded.

  He looked at Elena. “And now I’ve done it for you.”

  Elena’s eyes softened as he spoke to her, and she lifted her face to him, offering it up, like a prayer on his behalf.

  He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “I made quite a few shrewd investments early on,” he explained, leaving out the details, I suppose, because he suspected that we would never be able to understand them. “Mostly land deals in Florida. I did some selling down there, too. And just at the right time. Before the bust.” He blew a stream of white smoke out of the side of his mouth. “You’ve been living off those investments for quite some time. They paid for your college.” He crushed the cigarette into the ashtray. “Well, to make a long story short, the money’s about gone. And that’s what I’ve come to tell you.”

  Elena and I looked at each other. We had no idea what to say to him or what he was asking of us. Did he want pity, gratitude, respect? I suspect he already had them all, in some degree.

  Elena leaned forward and touched his hand. “You know I’m already looking for work. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  My father smiled. “I’ve never worried about you, Elena, not for one moment.” He looked at me. “And you’ve been on your own for quite some time, Billy. Having any trouble?”

  “I’m getting by.”

  My father shook his head. “No, you kids’ll do fine. The only reason I’m talking about all this is because the place in Standhope is getting to be a burden for me.”

  He was talking about our home, the “place in Standhope” he used like a hotel room — though, I am sure, with less pleasure.

  “The fact is, I can’t afford to keep it anymore,” he added. He picked up his glass and twirled it in his hands. “It’s as simple as that. It just sits vacant most of the time. I hardly ever get back there. When I see you kids, it’s in New York, not Standhope.”

  “So you want to sell it?” Elena asked.

  “That’s about it.”

  I looked at him questioningly. “And live where?”

  He smiled. “Here and there, Billy. There are hotels everywhere.” His face was luminous. That was what he wanted: a life lived entirely on the road, the apotheosis of a nomad. For the rest of his life, he would live in a world of small kingdoms, rooms ten feet square with the toilet down the hall. “Of course, I might be able to rent the house,” he went on. “Keep it that way. Sort of for sentimental reasons, if you kids would prefer it.”

  I shook my head. “No need.”

  He glanced at Elena for unanimous approval.

  “William’s right,” she said. “Sell it.”

  “Well, I wish I didn’t have to spoil things with bad news. I’m really sorry for having to bring it up on your graduation day, Elena.”

  I forced a chuckle. “Actually, I’d always wondered how you managed everything, where the money came from.”

  My father smiled radiantly. “I’ll tell you where it came from, Billy.” He tapped his index finger against his skull. “Brains, that’s where. But I’ll tell you something else. After a while, they’re not enough.” He looked at Elena. “You just get swallowed up by the wave, like those little razor clams you use
d to pick up on the beach. Remember?”

  Elena nodded.

  “Just a little thing, a razor clam,” my father continued, “but for a long time it can hold its own. Then one day its luck runs out. Same thing happened to me.”

  He went on for quite some time in a kind of monologue on his life. It was an artless account, delivered with slowly dissipating energy as he neared the bad news of the present. I could almost hear the little engine in him running down. In a sense it made me wistful for those earlier days of his lustrous dandyism — the hop in his walk, the way he bounded down the walkway to his car, the swaggering tip of his hat. And yet there was a certain resilience in him even now. He was no doubt pleased that his idea for selling the house on Wilmot Street had met with so little resistance from Elena and me. But there was a more telling buoyance, which was inseparable from him. I felt somehow delicate and frail in his presence, incapable of weathering the storms he had already weathered, and I think, although I learned it very late, that my father was, all his life, a curiously happy man.

  “But one thing I want both of you to know,” he said, drawing his commentary to a close. “I don’t want you to think that I made great sacrifices to keep you in college. I didn’t. I had money at the time. Now I don’t. It’s as simple as that.” He took a sip from his glass. “Which finally gets us back to the beginning, I guess, with this whole business of the house in Standhope, the fact that I need to sell it.”

  Through all of my father’s tale, Elena had sat watching him warily, as if trying to maintain her own necessary detachment. I think now, that as he spoke she must have been thinking of all the painful things she had already written about him and that one day he would read. When he did read them two years later, he drove down to New York from New London, picked up Elena at her apartment, and took her to dinner. When it was over, Elena told me, he pulled out his copy of New England Maid from his briefcase and handed it to her with his best salesman smile. “Would you sign it for me, please?” he asked.

  My father leaned back in his chair and looked at us intently. “Now, just one last time, I want to make sure we’re in agreement about the house.”

  “Sell it,” Elena said without the slightest hesitation.

  He sold it two months later, then telephoned Elena to tell her the news and suggested that she might want to tour the house a final time. “There might be some of your mother’s things you’d like to keep,” he said.

  We rode on the train together, Elena sitting beside me, writing in her notebook.

  “That the whimsical novel?” I asked jokingly.

  “Yes, it is,” Elena said flatly, without looking up from the page.

  We took a cab from the railway station and found our father drinking from a flask on the steps of the house. He waved as the cab pulled up, darted down the walkway, then swept us both into the house. I had never seen him look more unencumbered. “Whatever may be said of my father,” Elena wrote in a letter to Martha Farrell, “he never attempted to give his feelings a more noble face. He could not counterfeit guilt or love or mourning. In his own strange way, he was as guileless as a child, though never would I say he was as innocent.”

  “The place is empty,” my father said as he halted at the front door. “I sold the furniture. Didn’t think there’d be anything you’d want.” He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth. “As for your mother’s stuff, I put it in a few boxes and stacked them up in one corner of her old room.”

  While my father spread out leisurely on the front steps, Elena and I quietly wandered through the house, our voices echoing softly down the long hallway and out into the yard. In my mother’s room, we went through the boxes my father had stacked so precariously. All her jewelry was in one of them — brooches of imitation emerald, rhinestone pins, an elegant cameo which her own mother had given her and which I offered to Elena. She shook her head. “No,” she said, “you take it.” I took nothing else, and Elena, after meticulously sorting through all the boxes, even flipping through a recipe book my mother had made of clippings from the Standhope Gazette, took only one of my mother’s old romantic novels.

  At the time it seemed a baffling choice. I did not really understand it until, years later, I read a passage in Quality: “It is one of the powers of symbolic thought to free an object from its native and inherent qualities, granting to the mundane and unexalted a special dispensation of the imagination. By this process a leaf crushed between the pages of an old picture album, a necklace rescued from the darkness of an ancient portmanteau, a book of crusty yellowed pages — these humble curios, valueless to those uninformed of the secret meaning with which they have been invested, are for the symbolic imagination articles of the most profound resonance, slowly shaped by memory and experience to form the kind of rich, instantaneous recognition to which the best in art aspires. This is that high achievement of thought whose general result we call, in an uninspired phrase, ‘sentimental value.’”

  My father left shortly after Elena and I had finished going through our mother’s things. “Just close the door behind you,” he said. “Nothing in there to steal.” Then he walked jauntily to his car and drove away.

  For a few minutes Elena and I walked the house again, glancing at the curtainless windows and the bare wooden floors.

  “What do you think we’re supposed to feel, William?” she asked me after a few minutes.

  I opened the front door and looked back at her. She was standing near the center of the small living room, one hand thrust deeply into the pocket of her sweater, the other holding Mother’s book tightly to her side.

  I stepped out onto the front porch. “We need to catch our train,” I said.

  Elena walked passed me, stopping at the first step. She seemed reluctant to move farther.

  I closed the front door and turned toward her. “Well, I’ll say this much,” I told her, “it’ll be hard to treat this part of our story whimsically.”

  Elena looked back at me, smiled very faintly, then walked slowly down the stairs and out into the yard.

  Four months later, in a cold autumn rain, I waited at the bus stop, drenched and irritable, for Elena to arrive from downtown. Seconds later she had come and gone again, and I trudged back to my library cubicle, her manuscript held securely under my coat to protect it from the damp. That same evening, warming my soaking feet by the radiator, I opened the envelope and withdrew a sheaf of neatly stacked typing paper. I remembered the first line Elena had recited to me almost a year before — all that business of duos and trios and quartets — and I sighed wearily, expecting her book to be far from my personal taste but willing to do my editorial duty as a brother. Then I turned over the title page and read the first lines of New England Maid: “Memory is the iron that sears but from which we cannot draw away. I was born to a wandering father and a mother who stayed at home, into the autumn hope of an optimistic age, into a town grown cold as if by wintry destiny, into a family fumbling for its pride.”

  It was almost midnight by the time I finished, but that didn’t matter. I called Three Arts immediately, rousing a weary dancer from her sleep no doubt, and demanded to speak, absolutely demanded to speak, with Elena Franklin.

  She came to the phone a few minutes later. “Yes?”

  “Elena,” I said, “it’s beautiful. Very, very beautiful.”

  Her voice sounded weary, strained. “Good, William, thank you.”

  “I mean it. This is not just brotherly pride. I tried to be objective.”

  “I’m pleased, William,” Elena said, “I really am.” Her voice was low, almost tremulous. I felt all that I revered sweep out to her, to all the thought and strength and labor that had gone into the making of that book, and all the somber decency and justice, too, the penalties she exacted and the pardons she dispensed, all the terrible clarity with which she had seen our lives, and then that final act of will, to write it down. And I suppose that I wanted to tell her all these things, to let go of my restraint and speak
in sheer and edifying rhetoric to the greatness of my sister’s book.

  “You must be tired, Elena,” I said. “I’m sorry to wake you. It was just my … my enthusiasm, you see.”

  “Thank you for calling,” Elena said. And then there was only silence on the line.

  I saw Elena the next day. We met at one of the ponds in Central Park, the small one near the Plaza. Elena seemed almost as weary as the night before.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Surely you don’t have any doubts about the book.”

  “No, I don’t,” Elena said. She watched as a gangly swan made its awkward way to the water.

  “What is it, then?”

  Elena shrugged. “Oh, only that I feel as if I treated everyone very unfairly — you and Father and all the people in Standhope — that I nailed them to a public cross.”

  I lifted the manuscript from my lap. “Elena, there is nothing false in this book.”

  Elena looked at me and shook her head. “Truth is not the only value, William. It may not even be the highest one.”

  For a long time I sat silently beside her. Any defense of the book I might make seemed at the time superfluous.

  After a few minutes, Elena’s mood lightened somewhat. She watched a very old man as he walked shakily beside the pond, his cane dipping rhythmically into the water, his figure bowed, all his days behind him.

  “Well, whatever happens now,” Elena said, “it must be sweeter to be like us, to look forward to life rather than back on it. Don’t you think, William?”

  I could not answer her then. Now I can. No, Elena, the sweetness is at the end.

  CALLIOPE

  When I think of that paneled meeting room in which Martha’s biography was launched, I am amazed at the miracle Sam Waterman wrought. In the very trough of the Depression, he established a publishing company dedicated, at least in relative terms, to quality, controversy, and the social ideals he held at the time, an amalgam of Jewish compassion and Marxist dialectics. As Jack MacNeill never tired of pointing out, this resulted in the publication of some of the most mystical proletarian literature ever written, novels of revelatory class consciousness, along with a few tough detective stories in which the vaguely left-wing private eye saves both a principle and a pretty girl.