Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  Elena continued to watch the streets. She had remained rather remote and preoccupied since Mr. Brennan’s death, and even Miriam had noticed a flagging of energy, a drawn quality in her face.

  “I suppose you’ll miss Elizabeth,” I said.

  “I suppose,” Elena said. She glanced to the right at a group of shabby vagrants sprawled along a stretch of hurricane fence not far from the river.

  ‘Times are out of joint, aren’t they?’ I said.

  Elena turned back toward the front of the bus and stared straight down the avenue. Later, in Calliope, using the hard, almost mordant voice of Raymond Finch, she would describe what she saw:

  Some of us had decided to head down to the pier and see Harvey off on the Normandie, so we motored down the west side by the river. The whole avenue was littered with smoking cabs, some overturned and smoldering, huge metal insects helpless on their backs. Davey said it had been “great fun” the night before, the mounted cops galloping down the street while the cabbies dove out of the way of the horses, scattering, he said, like ants across an anthill. That was the way he thought about them, the way he’d been taught to think about them, the way we’d all been taught, all of us in that sleek black car, which cost plenty and which, we all thought, could never be turned over and set on fire by a bunch of crazy hacks. But I looked up ahead and got a little twinge of, well, anxiety, I suppose, because of the Hooverville stretching out into the water like the raft of the Medusa, and then down below that, the international piers where the great luxury liners sat heavily in the water, their gangplanks pulled up like the drawbridges of besieged medieval fortresses, and below them a line of striking seamen filing about, muttering to themselves, while a heavy breeze from off the river slapped at the placards they juggled above their heads. And I guess, just for a moment, all the sorry dislocations of the time swept in on me from that long, gray avenue, as if everything about the current troubles had become concentrated on either side of the street, that one desolate stretch of protest and ruin which lined the avenue from Times Square to the squat little boathouses of the Cunard line.

  We got off the bus a few minutes later and began walking southward toward the huge fleet of ocean liners we could see in the distance.

  “You should be on top of the world, Elena,” I said cheerfully. “The book is a raging success. And you certainly have your youth.”

  She continued to walk silently beside me.

  I shrugged playfully. “Of course, you know that line of Samuel Butler’s, that youth is like spring — an overpraised season.”

  Elena glanced away from me. She looked curiously baffled, as if her recent success had only served to increase the vague distress which, it seemed to me, had dogged her almost all her life. I guessed that my sister was one of those about whom the Buddha wrote, the sort who seeks only fulfillment, and finding that, seeks only the renewal of desire.

  For a time we continued to walk silently together, both of us looking needlessly forlorn, I suppose, to the army of striking dock workers and longshoremen who lined the wharves. To them we must have seemed impossibly self-absorbed.

  “I feel enclosed, William,” Elena said after a moment.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Captured. Locked up.”

  “I still don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  Elena nodded apprehensively to one of the strikers as he passed. “Morning, ma’am,” he said softly.

  “You’re in a kind of postpartum depression, Elena,” I said. “Miriam says that most writers feel that way in between books. They think they’ve poured everything into the last book, that they have nothing left to say.”

  Elena looked at me, almost coming to a halt as she did so. “But I really don’t have anything else to say.”

  I laughed. “You’ll think of something. You’re only twenty-four years old.” I pulled her gently over to a street vendor and bought two ears of roasted corn. “Here, take this,” I said. “This’ll give you a bit of energy. You shouldn’t look so run down when you see Elizabeth.”

  Elena took the corn and we walked on toward the pier. I decided to change the subject.

  “It’s too bad Howard and Elizabeth couldn’t have stayed in New York before leaving,” I said.

  “Howard wanted to leave right away,” Elena said without the slightest interest.

  I let her keep her own counsel after that. She was never one to be lightly extracted from a mood.

  We found Howard and Elizabeth only a few minutes later, both of them looking quite elegant as they waited near the gangplank of their ship. Elizabeth was dressed in a fashionable velvet coat with a fur collar. Howard held to his characteristically conservative attire: tan cashmere coat and Homburg.

  “Well, I’m awfully glad you two could make it to see us off,” he said cheerfully as we approached.

  There was a round of handshakes and embraces, and then Howard, as usual, anticipated the question he no doubt thought foremost in every human mind. “I suppose you think it odd that I can run off to Europe now,” he said with a laugh. “Poor Howard Carlton, who couldn’t stay a single night in New York.”

  When no one ventured to remark upon this, he began again, monotonously going over the nature of his disorder. He reminded me of that character in Stendhal, the one who greatly loves music, but only three songs.

  “The fact is, I’m doing it for Elizabeth’s career,” he said. “Her painting, you know.”

  Elizabeth smiled happily. “Howard thinks that all painters should live in Paris for a while.”

  Howard patted her hand. “Yes, that’s right. And so, despite my condition, I’ve decided to take her there.”

  “For the good of my career,” Elizabeth repeated. She looked affectionately at Elena. “Speaking of careers, I read New England Maid, Elena. I’m Jennifer, aren’t I?”

  Elena nodded. “Of course.”

  “And Dr. Houston’s in it, and Mrs. Nichols,” Elizabeth said excitedly. “I think I knew most everyone in it.”

  Elena smiled. “Well, you probably did. Most of them still lived in Standhope when you moved there.” For a moment the darker tones of Elena’s mood, that film of worried preoccupation, seemed to vanish in her delight at seeing Elizabeth on the eve of a great adventure. “I’ve never been on one of these liners,” she said.

  “They’re quite wonderful,” Howard told her, “but, you might as well know, quite expensive, too.”

  “They have restaurants and libraries — just like a small town,” Elizabeth added. She giggled. “Just like a floating Standhope.”

  “Well, let’s hope it’s better than that,” I said.

  “It’s going to be a splendid trip,” Howard assured us. He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. “And it will be such a treat for Elizabeth, such an education.”

  Not far from us, a woman in a fur coat flung a spray of confetti into the air and sullenly watched as it floated down. The man beside her quickly drained the last of his champagne, and then the two of them hurried into their waiting car. Across the street, one of the striking seamen hurled a can at their departing limousine, and the men around him laughed and slapped him on the back as he returned to the line.

  “Sometimes I think we’re getting out of this country just in time,” Howard said.

  “You won’t find it any better in Europe,” I told him.

  Howard laughed, but a bit nervously. “Perhaps we should disguise ourselves, then. As peasants, maybe.” He looked at Elena. “What do you think?”

  “I think you look just fine, Howard,” Elena replied dully. She looked at Elizabeth. “How long’s the honeymoon?”

  “We don’t know,” Howard said. He swept Elizabeth under his arm. She nuzzled him delightedly. “We’ve not decided.”

  “How … romantic,” I said.

  “You’d probably rather tour the United States, William?” Howard asked.

  I shook my head. “Not in these times.”

  Howard turned t
o Elena. “We’ll live like kings for a while, you know, live the high life. Then we’ll come back and Elizabeth will get on with her work.”

  Elena said nothing. She simply turned to the array of passenger ships that lined the harbor, dwarfing the small wooden boathouses along the shore.

  “Oh, Elena, I forgot to tell you,” Elizabeth said. “Standhope has a bookstore now. Just a small one, right in the center of the square.”

  Elena nodded. She was watching the line of seamen on strike, clearly preoccupied with them, as if the real focus of the day’s drama was on them, on the flapping of their placards, their resentful, muttering voices.

  “We’re going to stay outside Paris for quite a while,” Howard said. “The light in the provinces is supposed to be perfect for painters. I want Elizabeth to try it.” He glanced at his gold watch. “Well, Elizabeth, we’d better be boarding, don’t you think?”

  Elizabeth drew Elena into her arms. “I hope everything goes well with the book,” she said. She kissed Elena’s cheek. “I don’t know when I’ll be back in the States.”

  Elena stepped slowly out of Elizabeth’s embrace, then pulled herself back into it again, hugging her fiercely. “I want to hear all about your adventures,” she said. “Promise to write me.”

  We both shook hands with Howard, then watched as the two of them made their way up the gangplank, Howard steering Elizabeth from behind, as if she were a pushcart. At the passenger deck they turned and waved to us. Then, very slowly, with a kind of massive deliberation, the ship backed out into the river then made its way southward toward the bay.

  I took Elena’s arm and we began to move out of the crowd. “Do you want to go home now?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No, not yet.”

  And so we walked to a small coffee shop not far from the docks and took a table in the back corner. Elena was preoccupied again.

  I regarded her closely. “What’s bothering you? You should be very happy these days. The book’s doing better than anyone could have expected. You have enough money to sit back and relax for a while.”

  For a long time, Elena simply sat silently in her chair, her eyes moving from one object to another, focusing on nothing.

  The waiter came up and I ordered coffee for us both. Outside, a wet snow had begun to fall, turning the edges of the sidewalk slate gray. I dreaded the slippery walk back to my Village cubicle, to its bad lighting and its sudden drafts and the wooden crate littered with books about a poet who had been dead for over a hundred years.

  Elena continued to stare silently about the room until our coffee arrived. Then she took a hesitant sip, the steam rising into her hair. “I’m sorry to have gotten so out of sorts,” she said.

  “You’re like that, Elena,” I said. “You’re moody.”

  Elena placed the cup back down on the table. “Am I, really? I’ve never thought of myself as a moody person.”

  I smiled coolly, “Take it from me, you’re moody.”

  We talked of inconsequential things after that, both of us rather tired of each other’s company. When we’d finished our coffee, I walked Elena to her bus.

  Later that day, I ended up at Miriam’s apartment off MacDougal Street. She greeted me cheerfully and ushered me into her tiny, plant-strewn living room.

  “Elena’s in one of her bad moods,” I said. “What do you suppose it is?”

  She shrugged. “General dissatisfaction, maybe. Don’t you ever feel that?”

  I shook my head. “No, I always know exactly what’s bothering me.”

  Miriam sat down beside me. “Well, some people aren’t so lucky.”

  The phone rang as I was about to add something else. Miriam answered it. She listened for a moment, staring at me pointedly the whole time.

  “Yes, I have it,” she said into the receiver. Then she recited a telephone number and hung up. “That was Elena,” she said.

  “What did she want?”

  “Jack MacNeill’s phone number.”

  I suppose she must have rung him up that very night, because the next morning Jack called Miriam at Parnassus and told her that he had had a very interesting conversation with Elena, that she had asked for what he called “a guided tour of the other world,” and that he had agreed to give it.

  In her biography, Martha called the period during which Elena and Jack were so closely associated her “social period,” the time during which she seemed to confront, in Martha’s words, “the full contradictory thesis of Depression America.”

  Of course, for those of us who lived through the thirties, the notion that the Depression had to be “confronted” seems a bit odd. It was simply there, a constant presence in our lives, “like living on a fault line,” as Raymond Finch says in Calliope, “when the earth begins to tremble.”

  I suppose that some people could have avoided the surrounding misery. One did not have to seek it out, as Elena did, with Jack’s help, on that Saturday morning when the two of them began what Martha melodramatically refers to as their “odyssey.” Elena did not need to feel her own dissatisfaction so deeply, or to have listened to Jack so attentively when he spoke to her at the Columbia Club, or to have called him up a few weeks later with her peculiar request.

  In my mind I have heard Jack’s phone ringing a hundred times, the sound of it rattling through his disheveled flat, disturbing that old yellow cat who slept, more or less continuously, in the open suitcase beneath his bed. Now, as I think of it, it seems quite romantic. But in fact, the phone must have been jarring, the disordered room dank and smelly, and Jack’s voice when he answered somewhat cold and irritable, since he liked to nap in the afternoon and was probably sound asleep when the phone rang beside his bed.

  The miracle, as I once told Martha, was that he picked it up at all, and then, having done so, that he listened to what must have seemed to him the innocent and naive voice of my sister. But he did.

  And so it was Jack MacNeill who introduced Elena to that larger world she thought it necessary to explore, who tempered, as he would always claim, her learning with experience, playing Virgil to her Dante. And when there was no more hardship to soak up, Elena turned to the work before her, thinking it would be The Forty-eight Stars of Jack’s vision. But it became Calliope, a curiously medieval book, which begins in a ballroom anointed with champagne and ends in a dream of crucifixion.

  She met Jack in the lobby of Three Arts the next Saturday morning. She had telephoned me the day before to break our lunch date.

  “You remember Jack MacNeill?” she asked, almost hesitantly.

  “Yes, the fellow who had some suggestions about New England Maid.”

  “That’s right,” Elena said. “Well, we’re going to sort of tour the city tomorrow, so I don’t know if I can make it for lunch.”

  “You mean you can’t.”

  “I can’t, yes.”

  “Dinner, then?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “All right, about seven. Meet me at Three Arts.”

  Through most of the next day, I worked on the final draft of my Cowper book. Sam had by then read enough of it to offer a contract. “We need some highbrow stuff,” he explained. “I mean, something for the serious egghead, you know?” Despite his obvious lack of enthusiasm, I leaped at the chance to publish and hauled myself into the heavy labor of rescuing from all those piles of notes one small book about a poet.

  Thus as I was going about the last stages of my editorial work, Elena was beginning a relationship that would, for better or worse, last for forty years.

  Jack had borrowed a car that morning, a Graham Prosperity Six which a friend of his had bought three years before and which Jack loved because of the irony of the name. He picked Elena up at Three Arts and they set out, driving south down Broadway. Later, over time, Elena would relate her experience to me bit by bit, stitching small anecdotes together, until finally, years later, I had a vivid image of the entire journey.

  When they started out, Elena told me, Jack began to ta
lk again about the provincial air of New England Maid, reiterating the objections he had voiced before. Then he moved into a more general discussion of the American literary community, which he held in some contempt, calling the literary life “one-half wind and one-half breeze.” At the same time, however, he confessed to a few literary ambitions of his own. He had already published one novel, about a strike in Detroit. It was a bad novel, he said, too narrow in its scope, completely ineffectual in rendering what Jack grandly called “the whole life of the workplace.” He suspected that he lacked the particular talents of the novelist: the ability to make a fictional circumstance genuinely real, the flair for the brilliant image or the galvanizing scene, or even the capacity to tell a story.

  For Elena this first conversation alone with Jack would always be precious, and throughout her life she would return to it again and again. “He could have come on as completely worldly and self-assured,” she said in the 1980 interview, “but instead he modestly displayed his failures, so that he seemed almost to be asking me for guidance, just as the day before I had asked him.”

  He took her directly to the southern tip of Manhattan, where they watched the Staten Island Ferry chug toward them. Jack spoke quietly about what it was like on the immigrant ships, of the terrible shock of Ellis Island, its grueling and pathetic chaos. “I’ve seen people walk out of that place,” Jack said, “and not know what sex they were, or even what their names were — their real names, not the one some Irish cop gave them.”

  In everything, Elena told Martha Farrell, Jack was kind and generous. And to me she related more than once the almost boyish innocence in the way he spoke to her or touched her arm. “I never felt any effort at what we’d call a seduction,” she said to me one night at my apartment, with Alexander in her lap. “Not the slightest hint of anything like that.” Then she drew her arms more tightly around my little boy, as if it were not a sleeping child she was protectively embracing but Jack MacNeill’s reputation.