Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  I shook my head. “That’s too long a stretch.”

  Martha flipped open her notebook and grabbed her pen. “Well, there were some distressing events in her life during that time.”

  “Of course,” I said, “but most of them were over, the events themselves, I mean, by the mid-1940s.”

  “So her time in Paris was not distressing?” Martha asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Martha glanced at her notebook. “Elena came back to the United States in 1954.” She looked at me. “Because your wife died?”

  “That’s one of the reasons.” I was about to elaborate on this, give at least a suggestion of that spectral presence who stood across from me the day we buried Miriam, but Martha, wanting to keep things in chronological perspective, lifted her hand to stop me.

  “Let’s go back to 1939,” she said quickly. “Now, after the speech, what happened?”

  “Happened? Nothing very dramatic. Miriam and I took Elena home. Miriam was already pregnant by then, about four months gone, and she tired easily. So, we just drove Elena to her apartment and then went back to ours.”

  “Did Elena look shaken?”

  “No.”

  “How did she look?”

  “In control,” I said. Then I smiled. “Jack MacNeill once told somebody that Elena had always lived like a middle-class woman who was slightly suspicious of middle-class life, and that what she wanted most was passion and control. That night, at least, she had control.”

  Martha jotted it down. In her biography, she would refer to it as the central contradiction of my sister’s life, this war between her need both to release and to control herself. But since Martha’s book was not exactly made of a mingled yarn, this contradiction had to be locked up in the straightjacket of a larger one: Elena’s fear of being deserted and her need to control that fear. Thus does the quest for the prime mover triumph over an intolerably scattered heaven; the mind, as Elena once said, avoids chaos only by embracing error.

  “So Elena wasn’t terribly upset when she left you?” Martha asked.

  “No. Like I said, she looked completely in control. She had handled herself very well that evening. Even Joe Tully came over to congratulate her.” And I remembered that as I looked over Joe’s shoulder, I had seen Jack slink back out the front door and down the stairs.

  Martha tapped her pencil lightly against her ear. “When did you see her again?” she asked.

  “A week or two later, but it was uneventful. She was the darling of the liberal press by then, practically the patron saint of the anti-Stalinists. The reactionaries loved her, too, and even some of the decidedly Socialist papers had now altered their course a bit, granting her at least the benefit of the doubt.” I took a sip of my brandy. “Of course, the real hard core kept up the attack. The fools simply called her a traitor. The more learned ones said she was sadly mistaken, and that Calliope belonged with the worst of feuilleton writing — subjective vignettes — and that her book was an imitation of Schnitzler and von Hofmannsthal, that Viennese bunch who, like Freud, had fallen in love with neurosis.”

  “How did Elena react to that?”

  I smiled. “She started reading Schnitzler and von Hofmannsthal.”

  When her pen had caught up with me, Martha looked up. “So it was as if Elena had just spoken her mind and that was it?”

  “Yes. She seemed content. There’s a certain … what shall I call it? … There’s a certain searing glory to having taken a stand.”

  Martha nodded. “Did you see much of Elena between that time and when Elizabeth came back to New York?”

  “Not as much as I would have liked. Miriam didn’t have an easy pregnancy. She was never physically strong, and there were lots of problems.” I remembered the queasiness, the sleepless nights, the poor appetite, the loss of energy, which she never fully regained, and which gave to the years that remained to her after Alexander’s birth a kind of wistful insubstantiality, as if in giving birth she had used up the fire that had been her life.

  “So you stayed around your own apartment a lot?” Martha asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “but Elena was consciously avoiding me, I think.” Even as I said it, I could feel the strain of what now had to come. I had opened the gate, and I knew that Martha would not allow it to be closed again.

  “Avoiding you? Why?”

  “She was carrying a particular burden, and I suppose that since she knew I was having a little trouble with Miriam, she decided to keep it to herself, at least as long as she could.”

  Martha stared at me intently. “What burden?”

  I hesitated, watching Martha’s face. Such must have been the wanton stare of those who questioned Galileo. I glanced out the window.

  “Please go on, William,” Martha insisted.

  I looked at her. “All right.”

  It had been in mid-December 1939. The Christmas season was everywhere, filled with those common yet relentlessly ironic scenes that only New York can provide — a drunken Santa Claus wobbling down the street, or one of the Wise Men, complete with purple robe and jeweled turban, wildly cursing a taxi driver. I had come to Brooklyn for an editorial session with one of the new authors Sam had assigned me, a slender young man who looked so much the sensitive, tubercular poet that I knew immediately he could be no such thing. We had finished early, and so, rather than return directly to Manhattan, I had decided to drop in on Elena.

  I walked from Duffield Street to Columbia Heights, trudged up the three flights of stairs to Elena’s apartment, and knocked at her door. I could hear her voice and also a deeper one. After a few seconds, the door opened and my father stepped out into the hallway, carefully closing the door behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, astonished.

  “I’m helping Elena over some trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “It’s none of your business, Billy.”

  In one of those comic-opera turns which the mind can sometimes take, I remember thinking to myself that I had already written two books, one of them enthusiastically received, and that I would decide what was and was not my business.

  “I think I’d like to see Elena,” I said determinedly.

  “You heard me, Billy,” he said. “The fact is, she’s already lost it, and I don’t guess she wants a crowd of people around.”

  “Lost it? Lost what?”

  My father’s eyes widened. “You mean she didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Elena’s pregnant, Billy. At least she was. She miscarried.”

  I’m sure it took me awhile to grasp the news, and during those few seconds I must have appeared stupefied.

  “It’s that MacNeill guy,” my father said. “He’s the one who did it.”

  I was about to say something, although I have no idea what, when Elena opened the door. She looked drained of all color, pale and ghostly — a body left from a vampire feast. “Come in, William,” she said softly.

  With that, my father briskly stepped aside, following me into the apartment, where the three of us sat down in the living room.

  Elena was dressed in a dark blue robe. Her hair looked matted and stringy; her eyes were glazed. More than anything, she seemed completely exhausted. She held a damp cloth in one hand and occasionally wiped her forehead with it.

  “It started yesterday,” she said.

  “She called me this morning,” my father said, “and I came right over.” He hitched one of his thumbs beneath a suspender strap. “I was staying at the Edison,” he added, as if I might want to verify it.

  “I had already told him I was pregnant,” Elena said.

  I nodded. “And it’s Jack MacNeill’s?”

  “Yes. He came over after the speech. He brought some roses.”

  My father sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “She don’t want MacNeill to know, Billy.”

  “That’s right,” Elena said. “I didn’t want any
one to know, at least until I knew what I was going to do.”

  “Did it ever cross your mind to marry Jack?” I asked.

  Elena shook her head. “No.”

  “It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing,” my father said casually. “You’re a married man, Billy, you must know about that sort of thing.”

  I knew then why she had gone to my father in her trouble and had hidden it from me. The common ground that had always united them suddenly rose before me like the strip of an island as it first breaks out of the surrounding sea.

  He understood the passionate quality of her impulsiveness, because it was exactly like his own. Elena’s sudden decision to tour the country with Jack, to confront her critics, and then to take Jack to her once again was no different in its origins, or its irresistibility, than the impulse with which my father might pinch some shop girl on the road. She was like him; the same current flowed through her. And I was like my mother, cautious beyond imagining, a wire drawn tight.

  I looked at Elena. “I didn’t know you were still seeing Jack,” I said lamely.

  “I’m not,” Elena said. “It was just that one night.” She shrugged. “He came over after the speech, and that’s when it happened. I thought I might keep the baby, but there’s no need to think about that anymore now.”

  I was too numb to think about anything. “Well, don’t you think you should see a doctor?” I asked.

  “She saw one last night, Billy,” my father said quickly. “Pal of mine, a guy I know from the Bronx. He came down here, and that was it.”

  “I see.”

  “We got everything under control, Billy,” he added.

  Elena smiled thinly. “Yes, we do,” she said very softly, glancing toward the front window.

  I stood up slowly. “Well, Elena, I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do for you.”

  “Been taken care of,” my father said.

  Elena looked up at me. “I do prefer that you keep this to yourself, William.”

  I nodded.

  “Jack might feel … obligations.”

  “Perhaps he should.”

  “He should if I want him to,” Elena said, “but I don’t.”

  My father stood up and actually slapped me on the back. “Thanks for coming over, Billy,” he said, as if he were ushering one of his better customers to the door.

  I walked partway out of the room, then turned back to Elena.

  “If you need anything, anything at all, I hope you’ll let me know,” I said.

  She nodded. Then suddenly she stood up and rushed into my arms. I could not remember ever having been so powerfully embraced.

  “I love you, Elena,” I said softly.

  After a moment she pushed herself slowly from my arms. My father stood behind her, as if ready to catch her should she stumble. She did appear to totter slightly as she stepped back, but regained her balance. She rubbed her eyes with her hands, then sank her hands into the pockets of her robe.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “The worst of it is over.”

  I touched her face. “Let me help you, if I can.”

  “If I need anything, I’ll call,” she said. Then she gently drew my hand from her face.

  She never called me, at least about anything having to do with the miscarriage. I checked in on her several times during the next few days, and within a week Miriam and I had dinner with her. But the call for aid, pure and exact in its intent, never came. I suppose, as I told Martha that afternoon, that it was during the following weeks that Elena adopted that rigid sense of self-reliance which would finally sustain her through so much of what was to come.

  “I am without spirit, soul, or any foreign anima,” Dorothea Moore says in Inwardness. “I have only the bulk of a bulky thing, and pneuma is the hard bread I chew into a sodden mass, and God is the wine with which I wash it down.” This is, of course, a terrible materialism, unacceptable to the faint of heart, but for Elena it was part of a larger contract she was in the process of making between her mind and reality, one which required her to cast off any but the hardest data and to shun even the most comforting of illusions. “The need to believe a thing,” Dorothea continues, “is the least acceptable reason for believing it.” These “things” constituted for Elena all manner of conjecture, faith, and an enormous assortment of ideas, which she dismissed with that word she often used in her later years, “etherealism.”

  Etherealism. The word caught Martha’s interest immediately.

  “That’s a judgment on ideas, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “I would say so, yes.”

  “But what about people? What you seem to be saying, William, is that Elena was getting rather hard in the way she thought about things, rather rigid.”

  “I would say her standards were getting higher.”

  “Was she getting more judgmental?”

  “Yes. Why shouldn’t she? Would you rather she had settled for Jack MacNeill?”

  Martha smiled. “Why didn’t she? He would have married her, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But of course, Elena wouldn’t marry him.” I smiled. “Once, long after the miscarriage, the two of them were having an argument, and Elena told Jack that he had applied everything he had to politics but his mind.”

  “How did he react to that?”

  “He let it pass,” I told her. “Jack could never be intimidated by Elena. His own experience was too authentic, and he always considered Elena’s too cerebral to be respected beyond all bounds.”

  Martha looked doubtful. “Then why did he make love to her that night after the speech? And why did she let him?”

  “Because she wanted to,” I said. “She said they both needed it, and that more than anything it was like a good cry.”

  Martha quickly jotted it down. Then she looked up at me. “Did she ever talk about that evening?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Elena had already gone to bed when he arrived, drenched by the predicted rain. She had not in the least expected him, as she told me later, and for a moment she had had the impulse to slam the door in his face like some dejected heroine in a movie melodrama. But she had caught herself in time and stepped back from the door to let him in. It was then she saw the roses, soaked and crumpled beneath his arm. “I never gave you flowers,” he said as he handed them to her. “Too bourgeois.” Then he told her that he had seen her at the meeting but had sneaked out of the room before it ended.

  She left him in the living room, slumped in the chair by the window, as she made coffee in the kitchen. From there he related his trials in Spain. When she walked back into the living room, he told her what must have seemed to him at that moment the central secret of his life.

  “I know that review must have hurt you a great deal, Elena,” he said, “and I suppose that’s exactly what I wanted it to do. You see, while I was in Spain, I couldn’t think of anything but you. I felt like a dupe, you know? A sap. While Franco was taking Catalonia and the Loyalists were giving it to the Deutschland, I was completely preoccupied with a woman in New York.”

  Martha’s pencil was flying across the page. I stopped to let her catch up. When she had, she looked up at me with a quizzical expression on her face. “Do you think — this may sound silly — but do you think that Jack hated Elena because he loved her?” she asked tentatively.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But there is the line from Pope about one’s becoming the thing one most abhors. Well, maybe when Jack found himself thinking about Elena when he should have been thinking about nothing but the Loyalist cause, maybe he resented that — resented the fact that he’d become something of a bourgeois romantic.”

  “Ah, yes,” Martha said, as if a light had just gone on in her brain. “So Elena’s speech must have really gotten to him, all that talk about nonmaterial needs.”

  I nodded. “It probably did,” I said. “But you should be careful to remember that Jack MacNeill always believed in his own ideas. He knew that he could be
turned aside by a romantic notion, but only for a little while.”

  “So he didn’t come back to Elena in order to apologize or anything like that?”

  “Apologize for what?”

  “For his review.”

  I shook my head. “He never believed Calliope was anything but a piece of obscure, breast-thumping nonsense, Martha, and he never took back one word of that review.”

  Martha nodded, wrote something down in her notebook, and looked back up at me. “So that review — it was not a subconscious effort to destroy Elena as a person?”

  I shook my head. “No. It was an attack upon a book Jack felt to be utterly wrong-headed. He felt Elena had betrayed what he no doubt saw as her social duty. He felt that he had spent valuable time in Spain mooning over such a person.”

  “So he didn’t spend his whole life loving Elena?” Martha asked.

  “Absolutely not,” I told her. “Jack was a very committed man, and when Elena took her interests away from matters of immediate political importance, Jack simply stepped aside.” I glanced down at her notes. “Put down in your notebook that Jack MacNeill was as much his own man as Elena was her own woman and you’ll be closer to the truth than you would be with any portrait of either one of them pining away for the other.” I laughed. “Believe me, they didn’t do that.”

  “Yes, all right,” Martha said, accepting my judgment. “But did either one of them learn anything from this — what would you call it — this romance?”

  “Elena learned something,” I said. “She felt very stupid for getting pregnant, and I think because of that she began to think of her impulsiveness as something dangerous, something that could seriously mislead her.”

  “But how can you control your own impulsiveness?” Martha asked.

  “By using your will,” I told her. “And I think that for a while in Elena’s life, she believed only in the will.”

  Even as I said this, however, it seemed to me that there was more to it than that, more to it than simply Elena’s severe sense of self-reliance combined, as it was in her, with a deep distrust of her own impulsiveness. No doubt she felt very much alone after Jack left her, and no doubt that loneliness grew as she realized that she was carrying his child. But I also think that for a time she saw the baby as a way out of her dilemma, saw it as the one thing in life she might feel free to love with absolute heedlessness. In her short story “Work of Art,” which was written only a week or so before her miscarriage, a connoisseur bestows just this kind of adoration upon an ancient urn because “it is complete in its beauty, flawless beyond particularities, so perfect that it seems unmade. Conceived without reservation, such a work can be loved the more for being mightier than our thought.”