Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  Sam opened the offices of Parnassus Press during the winter of 1932. He rented three rooms in a rundown, nearly empty building in Hell’s Kitchen. The lobby door was left open at night, and the homeless swept in at sunset, stretched themselves out across the floor, and slept until morning. Then they struggled out onto the street again, leaving behind nothing but the rolled newspapers they had used as pillows. Each morning Sam cleaned up after them, trudging down the littered staircase with mop and pail in tow, his freshly shined shoes and carefully pressed pants safely tucked into a pair of enormous black galoshes. “I could keep the stiffs out,” he once told me with a smile, “but the Party frowns on that sort of thing.” When I asked him if he did not fear theft, he assured me that the upper floors of the building were sealed off. “I’m a philanthropist, William,” he said, “not a fool.”

  In fact, there would not have been much to steal, since the actual offices of Parnassus Press were quite Spartan. They consisted of three drafty rooms, each containing one lamp, one desk, and one typewriter. The floor was covered with a speckled gray linoleum which buckled up at the corners. There were no curtains, sofas, or potted plants, and there was only one picture on the wall, a kind of sampler which hung behind Sam’s desk, with Horace’s advice to writers quilted in red over a blue canvas: “Take this, leave that, and fitly time it all.”

  “Well, how do you like it?” Sam asked expectantly after he had given me the tour. “A humble beginning, wouldn’t you say? But what the hell, William, that’s the story of my life.” He sat down in the swivel chair behind his desk and pulled a large manuscript from a drawer. It was the original typescript of New England Maid. “I suppose you’ve read this?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I think it’s a very remarkable book.”

  Sam grinned. “Normally a brother’s ideas about his sister’s manuscript wouldn’t be worth all that much, William. But in this case, I think you’re right.”

  “Have you told Elena that?”

  “Yes, I have,” Sam said. “By phone, this morning. We even settled on the advance. One hundred dollars. Of course, that’s not much.” He waved his arm out, indicating the barrenness of the room. “But then, we’re not much, either.” He lifted the manuscript from the desk. “But this? This is something rare, William. We’re going to depend on it. It’ll be the premier volume of the house. The way I see it, we’ll either sink with this book or sail to heaven.”

  I was skeptical. “That seems a little imprudent, Sam, putting everything on one book.”

  “Depends on the book,” Sam said. He looked at me dolefully. “To tell you the truth, the stuff we had to pick from was pretty weak.” He waved Elena’s manuscript in the air. “But this is the real thing, William, the sort of book that could get the bluenoses in a terrible dither. And that, my boy, means sales, sales, sales.” He placed the book gently down on his desk. “But the main thing, William, is that Elena has written a very fine book, and we’re going to put all our resources behind it.”

  Sam elaborated at some length on the campaign he envisioned for New England Maid. “The goal,” he concluded finally, “is to establish Elena with one book, to get that name out there in capital letters.”

  Teddy McNaughton came into the front office just in time to stop Sam from launching into another lengthy discussion of the publishing business. He was a short, thin man, and I suppose he was no more than twenty-five at the time. Sam had always described him as a whiz kid, a boy who was so smart he had even had the good sense to drop out of Harvard. But to me, he always seemed shy and insecure, already suffering from the strain and nervousness which would make New York unbearable for him only five years later.

  There was a young woman with Teddy that morning. She was slender and dark, with strangely languid eyes. She was wearing a belted tweed overcoat, which she took off and folded over her arm. The two of them moved toward Sam’s office, then glimpsed me and held back.

  “Oh, come on in,” Sam said loudly. “This is William Franklin, Elena Franklin’s brother. You know Teddy,” he said to me, “and this is Miriam Gold.”

  She nodded to me as she stepped into Sam’s office. “Your sister wrote a very fine book,” she said.

  “We snatched Miriam from the offices of New Masses,” Sam told me. “I got her by making promises I don’t expect to keep.”

  For perhaps the first time in my life, I made a directly flirtatious remark. “Well now, Sam,” I said, “Miriam doesn’t look like the sort of person you could dupe that easily.”

  Miriam watched me expressionlessly. “I was surprised when I heard that Elena was in her twenties,” she said in one of those husky voices which were coming into vogue at the time. “It is a very mature work for someone so young.”

  “Well, Elena is a very mature person,” I said. Then I spread my cape before her once again. “As I suspect you are, as well, Miss Gold.”

  I have sometimes wondered why, of all people on earth, I chose to pursue Miriam Gold. I was twenty-seven years old, and by that time I had had a few inconsequential romances. But I was also old enough to have grown tired of mirthless, solitary meals, of the silence that swept over me when I turned out the light above my bed, the same one that greeted me next morning.

  I took one look at Miriam’s lambent eyes and instantly sensed as if it were a revelation that the oldest commandments were perhaps the best ones, closest to our most basic needs, and that the first mandate of an ancient creed had long ago declared that a man should not live alone.

  “I’m sure Sam’s delighted to have you at the press,” I added lamely, feeling, under her stringent gaze, witless as a toad.

  “Well, it was nice to have met you, Mr. Franklin,” she said. “And please tell your sister that I look forward to meeting her very soon.”

  And with that Miriam walked quickly out of Sam’s office and took her seat in the adjoining room. I could hear her typewriter clattering away as Sam began another summation of his plan for Elena’s book, and the sound of it, of those long brown fingers dallying upon the keys, was curiously thrilling.

  I did not see Miriam again for several months. By that time, Elena’s book was, as they say, between the boards, and Sam had arranged a press party to introduce it to the New York literary world. Harry had offered to provide a hall at the New York Athletic Club, but Sam had refused. “Jesus,” he told me irritably, “up there on Central Park South with that cold, formal exterior and God knows what kind of stuffiness inside. Hell, William, that place is an island of anti-Semitism surrounded by a sea of anti-Semitism.”

  And so the New York Athletic Club lost the distinction of having Elena Franklin’s first book introduced there. Instead, Sam chose the somewhat less imposing atmosphere of the Columbia Club, and it was there, on an afternoon in the fall of 1933, that Elena, her friends, and a varied assortment of “book people” gathered for the occasion.

  Typically, Elena herself arrived early. She was dressed plainly, as always, in a dark skirt and white blouse. She had had her hair trimmed, however, and there was a hint of rouge on her cheeks.

  “I have no idea how to behave today,” she said.

  “Just be charming,” I told her. “That’s what’s expected, isn’t it? Charm and wit and intelligence.”

  Sam quickly shuttled her away from me, and from across the room I watched as he instructed her for a few minutes, drilling his advice into her with many nervous gestures. Then he escorted her to a sofa near the back of the room, one so large she looked lost as she sat upon it, her hands folded neatly in her lap, as if she were posing for a photograph much too formal for her nature. Still, she did not seem entirely ill at ease, and I think that her apprehension that day may have come from a feeling that she had to appear more unsophisticated than in fact she was. It was a pose that she maintained a good deal longer than I expected and did not entirely abandon until she returned from France with the idea for Quality already in her mind, not completely realized but powerfully imagine
d.

  The guests soon began to filter in, and Elena nodded to each of them. Everyone received a copy of New England Maid upon arriving. Thus, at the age of twenty-three, Elena was treated to the sight of her own eight-year-old face — for one of her childhood photographs adorned the cover — staring back at her from beneath the arms of countless, gossipy strangers.

  Mary came rushing in not long after the hall was half-filled. She was carrying a copy of the World.

  “Look at this,” she said excitedly as she thrust the paper in front of me.

  I glanced down at the photograph of a group of baggy-pantsed farmers dumping milk on the highway outside Sioux City, Iowa, while their fiery leader, Milo Reno, looked on approvingly.

  Mary tapped her finger beside the photograph. “That’s my uncle Bill,” she said with delight. “Never would have figured him for a Red.” At that time, Mary still retained her satirical edge; but during the coming months, as the lines around soup kitchens steadily lengthened and small, brooding cities grew up along the wharves or out from under the bridges, she fell victim to a crazy panic, avoiding shadowy streets, slinking away from yawning alleyways, talking in mordant tones of what she called “uncontrolled events.” And of course it was not long after this that she sought out and married her first doctor, a man named Philip Newman.

  But on this happy day, Mary was spritely as ever. “Tom’s not coming to the party,” she said. “To tell you the truth, William, I think Elena’s success has got his goat a little.” She smiled at me impishly. “Are you sure you don’t understand his feeling?”

  “Not enough to resent Elena’s success, Mary,” I said. “If I were as good a writer, it would be my book being launched today. But I’m not. How can I blame Elena for that?”

  Mary looked at me seriously, then reached over and squeezed my arm. “I think Elena has a very good brother,” she said softly. “I think I’ll go over and tell her so.”

  Then she released my arm and I watched as she walked over and joined Elena on her voluminous couch. Elena listened quietly a moment as Mary talked to her. Then she looked up at me and nodded very delicately.

  Harry came in a few minutes later, his fiancée on his arm. Her name was Felice, and she was as flighty a child as I had ever had occasion to meet. Harry nonetheless seemed very proud of her, making a great show of what was, without doubt, her very considerable beauty. Still, her conversation was entirely vapid, and I remember thinking of her later as the most singularly trivial being I had ever met. Thus it was with profound surprise that I learned, years later, that she had taken charge of Harry’s daunting empire after his death in the war and had run that disparate kingdom with what was said to be both a firm hand and a foul mouth. Until then, it seemed to me, I had never guessed the depths of woman’s masquerade. When I related this to Elena, however, thinking it a rather cunning insight, she merely laughed and said she suspected there were plenty of beautiful young socialites who were every bit as empty as they seemed.

  Harry was still sweeping Felice gracefully about the hall when Miriam came through the door. Teddy was with her, looking ghostly, but Sam quickly tugged him away, leaving Miriam standing alone near the center of the room.

  “Remember me?” I said as I came up behind her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said dryly. “Hello.”

  I glanced about at the elaborate festivities. “I always thought that a book might sell merely on the basis of its quality. I suppose that’s naive?”

  “Yes, I think it is,” Miriam said. “Very naive.”

  I was about to serve another ball into her court when a large and very handsome man stepped up beside her.

  “Hello, Miriam,” he said.

  Miriam smiled. “Oh, hello, Jack. Are you enjoying the party?”

  He nodded almost shyly and withdrew a copy of New England Maid from under his arm. “I already had a copy of this, but someone shoved it at me as I came through the door.”

  “Have you read it?” Miriam asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think?”

  “That it was very interesting. I’ll write a favorable review.”

  “Good,” Miriam said. “I’m sure Elena will be pleased.” She seemed suddenly to remember that I was standing beside her. “By the way, this is Elena’s brother, ah …”

  “William,” I said and thrust out my hand.

  “Happy to meet you, William,” Jack said.

  ‘This is Jack MacNeill,” Miriam told me. “He’s a freelance journalist. I met him when I was working at New Masses. “

  “Yes, New Masses,” Jack said. “Funny how that already seems like the good old days.” He was wearing a brown suit, with a light blue open-collared shirt and no tie. His shoes were scruffy brown brogans, and his belt looked as if it had survived several near-fatal encounters. He was about thirty years old, with an angular face and tangled, rust-colored hair. In that elegantly appointed room, he looked shockingly out of place, like a jagged piece of metal sculpture set down by mistake in a gallery of Dutch masters.

  Elena was still seated across the room, and I noticed that Jack’s eyes often drifted toward her as he spoke. “Your sister is really very gifted,” he said. His voice was low, almost gentle, and it seemed curiously contradictory to his roughhewn façade. Of course, at that time I did not know Jack MacNeill, did not know that native tenderness which was deep within him but which he himself felt inconsistent with the tough, two-fisted reportage he was laboring to construct. It would be quite some time before he would abandon that tiresome duplicity and become the simple, kindly man he always was. But it was also one of his glories that in the end he did abandon it, so that, by the fifties, when he was hounded from the university and finally driven to England, he had embraced the gentler qualities of his own nature. And I remember that on the way up the gangway of the ship that would take him into exile, with reporters shouting baiting questions and flash bulbs popping all around him, he was able to turn toward them, pull the rose Elena had given him from his lapel, and toss it to that mean and gloating crowd. “This is for America,” he said. “It needs all the beauty it can bear.”

  But in the fall of 1933, Jack was cultivating a somewhat more brawny image, one which his every gesture enhanced, even down to the way he gripped his wine glass in a tight, white-knuckled fist.

  “I suppose I could find only one real fault with the book,” he said, glancing first at Miriam, then at me. “It seemed a bit interior to me.”

  “Well, it is an autobiography, of sorts,” I said.

  Jack nodded. “Oh, of course. But something beyond that. There is an interior quality, a distance, as if the whole story wasn’t really told by a person, but by a ghost.” He looked at Miriam. “I mean, the larger world is shut outside — never intrudes upon the book, as if it didn’t really exist. You have the town and the family, and that’s all. You hardly know the war happened, except for that boy who comes back to Standhope and shoots himself.”

  “Well, she wasn’t writing a history book, Jack,” Miriam said.

  “And I wouldn’t want her to,” Jack said. He looked at me. “It’s the graphic element that’s missing, the sense that the life she talks about was lived, not just thought about.”

  I nodded toward Elena, who was still seated on her sofa, looking rather stiff and wearied as one person after another joined her there briefly, then departed. “Perhaps you should talk this over with the author herself,” I said.

  “I think that’s an excellent idea,” Miriam said. She took Jack’s arm and tugged him forward. “Come on, let me introduce you.”

  The seat beside Elena had just been abandoned by a pudgy reporter from the Times, so that she was sitting alone as we approached her.

  “Elena,” Miriam said, “I’d like you to meet Jack MacNeill. He’s a freelance journalist, and he has some interesting opinions about your book.”

  Jack did not wait for Elena to respond. He immediately sat down beside her. “First off,” he said, “I should tel
l you that I liked your book quite a lot.”

  “Thank you,” Elena said demurely.

  “But I had some reservations, too,” he added cautiously. “I thought the book was a little too internal, as if everything in it only happened in your mind, not in the real world.”

  Elena smiled slightly but said nothing.

  “America is missing from the book, I think,” Jack added.

  He meant, of course, the America he had seen and documented in report after report as he wandered from his birthplace in Seattle, after his mother’s death when he was fifteen, to his present flat in Greenwich Village. He had worked as a migrant, lived as a migrant, and, as he said, thought as a migrant. “I don’t have a vision, you see,” he said, “just a fair amount of experience.”

  And so when Elena asked him what America he meant, he was able to tell her, speaking softly, his steady voice almost inflectionless, his eyes burrowing into hers.

  “Well,” he said, “have you ever seen a room with maybe fifteen living in it, and nothing on the windows to keep out the wind but ripped-up corn flake boxes?”

  Elena admitted, somewhat stiffly, I think, that she had not.

  And so he presented to her, in brief, America as he had come to know it.

  “… And in South Carolina they work from what they call ‘can see,’ meaning dawn, to ‘can’t see,’ meaning dead of night. And down in Oklahoma, when the dust storm comes, people die because they swallow so much dirt, even with masks on. I know a family — interviewed them — that walked from Arkansas to the Rio Grande because they heard that cotton was grown by the river’s edge. Have you ever heard of that?”