Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  Elena shook her head, her eyes fixed upon his.

  “I’ve seen shacks made out of soup cans and Kotex boxes, and a good many other things. That’s part of the American story, don’t you think?”

  “But Elena wasn’t writing what you call ‘the American story,’” I protested.

  Jack looked up at me. “I know that. I’m just trying to suggest what grit is, the little detail that makes you feel something instead of just think about it.” He turned to Elena. “I don’t mean to offend you, and I don’t think it’s my place to tell you how to write. It was just an opinion. You can take it or leave it.”

  Elena looked at him pointedly. “Too internal, you said?”

  “Yes,” Jack replied. He nodded toward the windows at the front of the room. “There’s a lot going on out there.” He tapped the side of his head with his finger. “And there’s a lot going on up here. The hard thing is to get those two worlds together.”

  Elena continued to watch him, but said nothing.

  “You have a lot of talent, Miss Franklin,” Jack said. “That internal world of yours, it’s electric. A kind of steady charge runs through your whole book. But the fire keeps dying away.” He stood up. “It was nice meeting you, Miss Franklin,” he said.

  And with that, he sauntered away, edging gently through the well-heeled crowd.

  Elena’s gaze followed him, a very intense look in her eyes. I saw that same look years later, when she and I were walking in the wildly disordered garden surrounding her house on Cape Cod. She had been talking about Jack with immeasurable fondness and affection, her white hair dancing in a small breeze from off the sea. Then that look came in her eyes. “I was growing a eunuch’s soul, William,” she said. “Then Jack came along for me.”

  And she might have added that same afternoon, just as she turned to watch a line of surf break along the shore — the foam very much, as I remember quite vividly now, the color of her hair — she might have added, “Just as Miriam came along for you.”

  I suppose a less lonely man might have given up after Miriam’s casual, but repeated, rebuffs. He might have found a less demanding and independent woman, “selfless,” as Raymond Finch says of his working-class girlfriend in Calliope, “because she has no self.”

  Miriam Gold, on the other hand, had a pronounced self. Her early childhood had been spent in those crowded tenements on the Lower East Side which Mike Gold (no relation) had already immortalized in his novel Jews without Money. By the time she was ten, however, Miriam’s father had moved to the upper reaches of Manhattan, settling his family into a spacious Harlem apartment and beginning the life of reasonable comfort that had been his waking dream for forty years. Thus Miriam’s early poverty had been transformed into miraculous prosperity by the time she came of age. But it had not been forgotten. She would often talk of the smells that had wafted up into her bedroom from the open store windows, of peddlers’ carts below, of the incessant noise that had poured into her room from the hawking and bickering of that vast open bazaar which was once Orchard Street. On those same streets, she had listened to tales of an older world, of pogroms and forced migrations, and from these she had gained a sense that for the generation that preceded hers, America had offered itself as a dream of unprecedented dimension, one whose bounty she could not deny and wished, I think, only to extend.

  To all of this, Miriam added the experience of moving from an earlier density into the world bought for her by her father’s good fortune, so that she could sit in that grotesque parlor he had designed in imitation of David Belasco — all swooping oriental drapes and Middle Eastern water pipes — and dream of the junk markets of Houston Street, its swarming crowds and myriad dialects. From her ornate and luxurious bedroom, she looked back purposefully to those earlier days, to a world of direct and simple toil, presided over by the dictates that had come down from Sinai rather than by the labyrinthine contortions of the New York Civil Code. Her father’s good fortune had set her both morally and ethically adrift. It was a complex condition, one which Elena tried to capture in the section of Quality that deals with the Jewish novel of immigration. The great accomplishment of that genre, she wrote, “was to give our literature the profound sense of a beached moral order, of reluctant but inescapable abandonment, of the ransom the old exacts from the new, of that deep nostalgia which is unmistakable in the closing passages of The Rise of David Levinsky, and which is essentially a form of ethical wistfulness. It is the voice of the cantor heard above the roar of urban traffic, the call of the shofar over the hum of the shirtwaist machines.”

  Certainly Miriam felt this wistfulness. As her father’s finances became more and more entangled with those of the barons so excoriated by her fellow workers at New Masses, she sensed not only the oddity of her circumstances but their cruelty as well. She believed that her father was a victim of his own ambition, that he had forfeited the more intense life of the ghetto for the cold and charmless one of the Jewish middle class, and that this was a betrayal of his heritage far more serious, as she said, than grabbing a hot dog at Yankee Stadium.

  For Jack MacNeill, of course, all this was nothing more than a privileged person’s romanticization of early poverty, and he told Miriam so more than once during the years we lived so closely together. But I have always thought that there was more to Miriam’s conviction than that. Once she told Jack that America was the sort of country in which when you win, you lose, and when you lose, you lose. Jack had laughed quite a lot at that. But I believe that Miriam was talking about the losses that accrue to success in a very subtle way, moral losses of the most delicate sort, as well as about the grace and struggle of communal life, the wealth and strain of tradition, the charm of ancient things.

  Thus when Jack called her the most conservative radical he ever knew, he was probably right. To this day, when I think of her, I see her not as a fiery instrument of revolutionary revenge — a popular image in those days, one which numerous female Russian revolutionaries were said to embody — but as a peculiarly willful and competent person, one whose life was ennobled by a memory rather than a dream of justice.

  It is surprising to me now how little I actually know of the life she lived before we met. I know about her time on the Lower East Side, but once her father whisked her up to Harlem, things grow vague. I know that for a long time she was on the outs with her family and that the questions in dispute were mainly political. Perhaps on some morning she had marched into breakfast, hurled a few epithets at her father while he sat stunned above his wheat toast, then stormed out onto the street, slamming the door behind her. I know for sure only that there was a break, a series of hapless jobs, during which Miriam attempted, perhaps, to fuse her experience with that of the working class, and then a retreat. For she went back to her family after a time, gave an accounting of her life since she had left them, and asked if they might help her do the thing she had by then decided upon: go to college. Her father said yes immediately, and all of them alternately laughed and cried throughout the entire afternoon, until, as Miriam always said, the carved mahogany elephant on the mantel looked as if it would die of all this unexpected sweetness.

  The following year Miriam went to Smith, and she would remember her time there almost as fondly as her childhood in lower Manhattan. Perhaps, in the end, it was simply that for her the past was a sacred thing, that nothing could ever seem wholly ugly through the prism of remembrance, that remembering well, as she once said, is a kind of art. All her life she loved the sort of object that soaked up time — old letters and photographs, discarded magazines and yellowing newspapers. Perhaps it was finally this reverence for things remembered that drew her to New England Maid, then to Elena, and, at long last, to me.

  She finally agreed to have dinner with me during Christmas week. By then New England Maid had been out for almost three months. Reviews poured into Sam’s tiny office from all over the country, most of them either very favorable or very hostile. Miriam was coordinating everything for the book �
� directing the advertising, setting up all the interviews, whisking Elena from one reception to another. The two of them were so exhausted at day’s end that Elena would often collapse back in Miriam’s room and spend the night on the short, worn sofa by the window.

  “Surely Elena’s enjoying all this,” I said. “The attention, I mean.”

  Miriam took a sip of wine. “She does it well, but I’m not sure she enjoys it.”

  “But it must be dazzling,” I insisted.

  Miriam shrugged, then glanced away. She was wearing a gray wool suit with notched lapels, and I remember thinking how professional she looked, how completely in control of everything around her. It seemed a kind of miracle that she had consented to this dinner, and in a way it was. Not long before Alexander was born, we sat in the living room of our small apartment and talked about that first night while I pressed my hand to her stomach, searching for some movement, thrilled when it came. “It’s all such an accident, William,” she said, smiling quietly. “I was so damned tired that afternoon that I couldn’t face the prospect of going home and cooking. Then the phone rang and it was you offering a free meal, and I just thought, Oh, what the hell.”

  And so we had ended up in the dining room of the Hotel Lafayette, small and very French though it was only a block or so from the drab façade of New York University.

  Miriam turned back toward me. “Elena says you’re writing a book.”

  “Sort of.”

  “On Cowper?”

  “I’ve been plowing through it for quite some time. Since graduate school. I think of it as my doctoral dissertation, not really a book.”

  Miriam nodded but said nothing. She seemed preoccupied.

  “I suppose you meet a great many dashing men in your profession,” I said.

  Miriam closed her eyes wearily. “Dash is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  I looked at her intently. “You know, of course, Miriam, that I’ve been trying to make an impression on you.”

  Her face softened a bit. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “Wit didn’t work. I suppose now I’m trying … what, humility?”

  Miriam kept her silence. She was watching me with those calculating eyes. She had been “gone over” by the best of them, had batted away the most refined pitches. But not without some loss to herself, for there was something in her that had already been scraped to the bone.

  “I don’t think I’m a weak man,” I said. “I can live without you. I can live, I think, without anyone. But I don’t want to.”

  Miriam sipped her wine, her eyes evaluating me over the rim of the glass.

  “You don’t have to be clairvoyant to see that I’m sort of lonely, sort of tired of being lonely.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how to court you, Miriam,” I said feebly. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  Miriam lowered her glass slowly to the table, her eyes still watching me with either the deepest seriousness or the most blasé indifference.

  “I think Elena loves me,” I added. “Might I offer her as a reference?”

  Miriam smiled. “Elena says you have the heart of a little boy trapped in a man’s body. She says that’s your great gift, William.”

  “I want you to agree to have dinner with me again, agree right now. No matter how this evening turns out, I want to know that there will be another one.”

  She thought about it for a moment. “All right,” she said at last.

  As it turned out, the rest of the evening was very nice indeed. Miriam grew increasingly relaxed, talking almost exclusively about herself. She recalled her days at Smith, of long walks about the campus, of the girls gathering in their rooms to smoke with delicious malice while the matronly house mother patrolled the hallway outside with warlike rectitude.

  “She was very, very proper,” Miriam said, laughing, “the sort whose parents came to America a few months behind the Mayflower, and who never really felt quite right about herself because of that.” She took a sip of wine. “I suppose your family’s old New England stock?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

  “You’re indifferent to your family history, then?”

  “Yes, indifferent.”

  Miriam looked at me strangely. “That’s very American, isn’t it? The notion that everyone starts his own life when he’s born.”

  “I suppose it is. It doesn’t seem such a bad thing.”

  “No one uplifted or brought down by their family’s past,” Miriam said. “It’s a myth, though, one of our illusions.”

  “Except that no one really believes it,” I said. “Certainly the rich know better, and the poor know better still.”

  This launched us into a political discussion, which was mercifully ended after several minutes when the waiter stepped up with the check.

  A few minutes later, Miriam and I walked out onto Ninth Street. We drifted toward Fifth Avenue, then down toward Washington Square.

  Miriam drew her scarf more tightly around her throat as we walked. A steady rain had been falling, soaking the densely packed leaves, which gathered at our feet so thickly you could imagine yourself walking through a drenched New Hampshire wood.

  “Well, tell me, Miriam,” I said, quickly avoiding any return to politics, “is it true that editors are all failed novelists?”

  “Maybe not all,” she said, “but I am.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes,” Miriam said. She glanced up at the spires of the Church of the Ascension, then back at me. “I’ve probably a thousand manuscript pages in boxes around my apartment. Terrible stuff. Really terrible. It’s the rage and self-pity that get you.”

  “Has Sam seen any of it?”

  Miriam laughed. “Sam? My God, no. If he saw that junk, he’d fire me.”

  “Oh, it can’t be that bad.”

  Miriam stopped and gave me a serious look. “It’s terrible. It really is.” Years later she let me read a little of it, a page or two, no more. She was right; it was terrible. A kind of awful moan rose from every page, then disappeared into a little hiss of bitterness and resentment. I could hardly imagine that she had written it, that so much anger and disappointment rolled about within her, like the floating uterus posited by ancient medicine as the final locus of all female woe.

  “Now, Elena — she’s a different story,” Miriam said, walking on once again.

  “In what way?”

  “Talented, William. I think that the words must flow directly from her mind into the typewriter. There doesn’t seem to be a jerk anywhere, just that amazing fluidity. A natural writer.”

  “Very little work for an editor, then,” I said lightly.

  “Fortunately, yes.”

  We stopped to watch a group of young people struggling to maneuver a large canvas up the stairs of the Salmagundi Club. I started forward to offer my help, but Miriam caught my arm. “They’re artists,” she said. “They know how to move a painting.”

  Within a few minutes we were walking on MacDougal Street, not far from Miriam’s apartment. The street was alive with tearooms and nightclubs in those days, and there was a constant flow of taxis and private cars. But just around the corner, at the entrance to Miriam’s building, the welter suddenly subsided and we were once again on one of those New York streets which, in its serenity, resembles nothing so much as a country lane.

  “Well, just to make us even,” I said as Miriam turned to say good night, “I’m no novelist either. I’d probably be embarrassed if I were.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because my book would probably be so old-fashioned, full of medieval virtue and romantic fire.”

  “The cloister and the hearth.”

  “Exactly.”

  Then, just at that moment, the year’s first snow began to fall lightly, each flake silver in the glow of the streetlight. Now, a symbol may be, as Elena wrote in Quality, “as blatant as a trumpet or as maudlin as a tear of dew trembling at the leafy edge,” but I will always insist
that the snow began to fall just as we parted, that the light did, in fact, turn each flake to silver.

  “I enjoyed the evening very much, William,” Miriam said.

  “So did I.”

  She put out her hand, and as I reached out and took it, she pulled herself forward and kissed me, drawing her arms around me tightly.

  She has been gone now for over thirty years. But there are times, particularly late at night, when the rain is heavy or the snow rests in waist-high drifts beside the wall, when I wrap my own arms around my body and pretend that they are hers.

  Mr. Brennan died in January of 1934, delivering Elizabeth from her long vigil at last. Two months later, Howard married her in a quiet ceremony in the Congregational church. Elena acted as bridesmaid and I was the best man.

  They planned to go to Europe on their honeymoon, a decision that surprised me, given Howard’s agoraphobic tendencies. And yet that April, Elena and I found ourselves on a bus heading down to the west-side piers to see them off.

  A taxi strike had been going on for quite a while by then, and the previous evening a small riot had taken place near the docks. As Elena and I rode toward the towering stacks of the Rochambeau, we passed a disturbing array of cars turned over on their sides, some of them little more than burned-out husks, a black smoke still rising from their charred interiors.

  “Sign of the times,” I said.

  Elena glanced out the window as the bus moved down Eleventh Avenue. There were scores of mounted police still patroling the littered streets, eyeing the line of strikers picketing the garages of the Parmelee, Radio, and Terminal cab companies. At Twenty-third Street, the avenue turned almost blue with police uniforms, while across from the Parmelee garage, silent, disgruntled cabbies broke slats to feed a huge bonfire.

  “It’s getting worse, you know,” I said. It had been getting worse for at least two years, but the rich had maintained their taste for travel and I had managed to hang on to my job at the travel agency. Still, the times intruded even upon my modest security, and I remember the dread that always washed over me as I passed a soup kitchen or a stack of men sleeping in a doorway. There was a tone of rising tension in the atmosphere more tangible than the sight of hurling bricks or the sound of scattered gunfire, a disquieting concern, as Evelyn Waugh once put it, that the train from the capital might never arrive.