Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  Jason was the last to speak. He wore an elegant black suit, cut perfectly to his tall, slender figure, and stood beside Miriam’s grave with his hands folded primly in front of him. His voice was soft but sure, and when he spoke he seemed to look everyone around him directly in the eye.

  “Miriam was a very strong woman, as I’m sure all of you know,” he said, “and so I won’t tell you how gentle she was. Miriam wasn’t gentle. She was hard as nails. She worked at everything obsessively, like Saint Thérèse on her Histoire d’une âme. She was a kind of Jewish Jesuit when it came to commitment.” He smiled. “I won’t tell you she was tolerant, either. She was intolerant, especially of laziness, shoddiness, ineptitude. She didn’t have the kind of moral waffling that poses as understanding and so forgives everything. She would say of an evil thing, ‘This thing is evil.’”

  He glanced around at all of us, the look on his face somber but somehow uplifting, as if he felt good about the world because he felt good about Miriam.

  “This woman had opinions, and she wouldn’t shut her mouth. She thought religion was a carnival oddity and most of what the world talked about, sheer nonsense. She was very political, but even in this she had a literary bent. One evening when I was at her apartment along with her husband, William, something was said about that occasion some years before when one of Franco’s brigands had given a speech with the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno sitting mutely right behind him. It seemed that this commander had had an eye patch and had lost one arm, and I remember that Miriam noted just how physically he represented, as she put it that night, ‘all that is blind and crippled in the fascist heart.’”

  I remembered that evening very well as he spoke of it, and for the first time since her death, I felt my loss completely.

  “That’s the sort of thing Miriam would say,” Jason continued, “the sort of thing she would feel.”

  He stepped aside with solemn deliberateness, as if this gesture of taking one long step away from Miriam was his way of saying, finally now, good-by.

  Within a few minutes it was over, and we all straggled down the hill to our cars. Mary walked beside me, with her four-year-old daughter, Martha, in tow. Elena walked with Jack MacNeill, her hand tucked beneath his elbow. Sam and Jason strolled along together, talking quietly. Besides these, there were a few others, mostly a smattering of Miriam’s authors, all of them fittingly subdued in the presence of what they must have thought of as the powerful publisher, Sam Waterman, the radical novelist, Jack MacNeill, and the legendary expatriate, Elena Franklin. One of them later wrote a poem about the funeral, a very bad one, as it turned out, but published anyway. It was entitled “Luminaries in their Mourning,” and it stretched its feeble ironies to the bone. Still, I saved it through the years, then finally added it to that huge collection of Miriam’s unpublished manuscripts, an award, perhaps, for all the sleeplessness and anxiety and hard labor that had gone into creating them.

  After the funeral, we “luminaries” returned to my apartment. It felt terribly empty without Miriam pacing through it, whispering bits of dialogue to herself. And yet, her death had also liberated the space within the rooms, opened it up to an uncomplicated light, as if her long dying were no more than clutter, an episode of disarray in the long pax et ordo of my life.

  For a time we all sat around the dining room table, drinking coffee and talking quietly, as people do on such occasions, as if we do not wish the dead to know that we have gone on living.

  Jack sat to my right. His hair was now completely white and very beautiful, the crowning touch to a handsomeness that had graced him all his life. Jason sat next to him, and directly across from Elena. From time to time he would glance at her.

  Only Sam was unbuttoned. He played on the living room floor with Martha Farrell, grinning delightedly as he rolled her right and left across the carpet or slapped gently at her hands in a game of pitty-pat. It was a relief for Mary, who’d been at her wit’s end with Martha all day. She was clearly tired of motherhood by then and looked dry as a pretzel; but her tongue was as sharp as ever.

  “I’ll sell you that kid for a good price, Sam,” she called to him from the dining room.

  Sam shook his head. “I got plenty of time to make one of my own, dearie.”

  Mary turned to Elena. “How about you? I’m talking a bargain here.”

  Elena smiled faintly but said nothing. She appeared a somewhat more reserved person than she had been in Paris, one who increasingly kept her counsel — something I have no doubt that Jason saw that afternoon, and instantly admired.

  Still, he always directed his attention to someone else, Mary or Jack or me, while guiding them away from Elena in a movement which was, I think, essentially a feint.

  “When are you leaving for Europe, Jack?” he asked.

  “Two weeks,” Jack said. “I have a little place in Wales. A cottage by a lake. Perfect for thinking and writing. A friend owns it.”

  Jason nodded. “Sounds very good indeed.”

  Jack shrugged. “Well, what do I have to hang around here for? The reactionaries are in the saddle.”

  “Wait them out,” Mary said. “What the hell, this’ll blow over in a few months. We’re in the tail end of it.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Jack said.

  “Christ, Jack,” Mary said, “they’ll make a hero out of you before long. That’s the way things are, fickle.” She turned to Elena. “How about you? You going back to France?”

  “I’m not sure,” Elena said.

  Jack smiled at her. “Well, you could always live with me in my little cottage in Wales. We could walk by the lake. Even resume old passions, perhaps.”

  Elena shook her head. “Too rainy.”

  Jack nodded quickly, then turned away.

  “She’s a European now,” Mary said. “One of those literary ladies.”

  Jason leaned toward her slightly, and for the first time that afternoon addressed her directly. “Are you tired of Europe?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Elena said.

  He smiled softly. “Curious how modern man has forgotten that in ancient times exile was considered the most severe of punishments.”

  Mary laughed. “Well, that was before they started serving meals in the air.”

  Jason laughed at that, but only politely. He kept his eyes on my sister. “So you are going to stay in New York?”

  “For a while, I think,” Elena said.

  Jason sat back in his seat. “Good,” he said. He stood up slowly. “Well, I’d better be going now.” He shook hands with each of us, last of all with Elena. Then he left.

  For a time the rest of us continued our conversation, though we were all so busy shuffling around Miriam’s death that talk became a kind of dodge.

  Finally a certain weariness overtook us all, and we trooped down to Sam’s car. He drove Mary and Martha to the airport, leaving Jack and Elena and me standing on the sidewalk, waving at them. Mary hoisted her daughter up to the back window, grabbed her wrist and waved it for the little girl. Martha grinned and pushed her nose up against the glass, making a pug-nosed face as the car pulled away.

  “Well, I’d better be going, too,” Jack said to Elena.

  “It was good seeing you, Jack,” Elena said.

  Jack took her hand. “You know, you could come and stay with me in Wales sometime,” he said. “No one would think the worse of it.” He looked at me. “Right, William?”

  “Not in the least.”

  Elena gently pulled her hand from his grasp. “I’d better stay here for a while.”

  “Are you sure?” Jack said with a slight smile. “Think how we could liven up poor Wales.”

  Elena shook her head. “I’m sure.”

  “All right,” Jack said, “I won’t press you. But I hope you’ll come and see me off. I’m leaving on the twentieth.”

  Elena smiled. “You didn’t want me to see you off when you left for Spain,” she reminded him.

  “I’ve changed,”
Jack said. There was still a kind of yearning for her in his eyes, the sort that seems not so much a matter of passion as of stubborn pursuit. There was no doubt that he still loved my sister, though not with an unbearable need. Instead, I think, she continued to possess the powerful allure of something we have lost. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m off to Wales on the twentieth.”

  “I hope you like it there,” Elena said softly.

  “I suppose I will,” Jack said. “I would very much like it if you would come and see me off.”

  “All right,” Elena said, “I will.”

  I went with her the day she did. At the pier Elena gave Jack a single long-stem rose, which he flung back at the reporters hounding him as he went up the gangway. “Here,” he said, “America needs all the beauty it can bear.” The remark made minor literary history. When I read it now in yet another chronicle of the period, I no longer see Jack as the singularly resilient person he was but just as a figure made famous by a single dramatic moment in his life, reduced to cliché by a gesture he thought far less significant than even the least significant of his works. “I have become a single line,” he told Elena not long before he died.

  After the ship pulled away, Elena and I took a train uptown, got off at Columbus Circle, then walked for a while in Central Park. We sat down at a bench near the Sheep’s Meadow, perhaps on the very bench we had taken so many years ago when I told her that she need not be ashamed of a single line in New England Maid.

  “Have you decided when you’ll be going back?” I asked.

  “No.”

  Elena looked at me. “Americans want so much to be good, William,” she said. “Have you ever noticed that?”

  “It’s part of their naiveté,” I said.

  “It’s not naiveté, William, it’s desire.”

  Whether this interpretation was true or not, she never abandoned it. It surfaced once again in the opening chapter of The Quality of Thought in American Letters. For there she chose John Woolman, that gentle Quaker parson of endless moral striving, as the figure with whom to begin her exploration: “All his life, Woolman acted against the currents of his age, defending those without defenders, asking questions that prudence would have silenced, making of our mortal clay at least a dream of paradise. He extolled the subtler acquisitions of the soul over the grosser ones of the hand. He turned resolutely away from the imperial politics of Winthrop and the closed theology of Edwards, fighting their fires of conquest and judgment with the cool water he presumed to flow from a righteous stream. In doing so, he came to voice, in the early morning of our history, those questions of justice and equality which Jefferson would later raise so powerfully, and in the raising, as Frost wrote, set our minds ablaze for a thousand years.”

  Do you think that when Elena came back to the United States in 1954, she intended to stay here?” Martha asked.

  “Yes, I do,” I told her. “But I’m not sure she had Quality in mind at that time. She certainly didn’t mention it.”

  She leaned back in her chair. It was one of our last interviews. Elena had been gone now for almost a year. Her small flower garden looked lonely and untended under the spring sun. From where I sat in the back yard, I could see Elena’s day lilies tossing in the breeze that swept in off the bay. She had insisted on planting them, even though Jason had dismissed them as “cotillion flowers.” Elena always got her way with Jason. “She was the volcano,” he wrote in his memoir, “and I was falling ash.”

  Martha touched the tip of her pencil to the note pad in her lap. She would come here for a final interview only six months later, looking very proud of herself, convinced that her biography of my sister was a true literary triumph, a book almost as great as its subject. On her last visit she said it needed only “a few loose ends tied up, you know, scholarship-wise.”

  “How would you describe Elena’s mood as she began Quality?” she asked. She slowly tapped her pencil against her ear and waited for my answer. She had developed several such donnish mannerisms since beginning her research. I half expected her to bring a goose quill and inkwell to our final rendezvous.

  “I would say that Elena was full of energy,” I told her. And I suppose it could be said that it was the energy of Quality that I found most striking when I read the manuscript for the first time. I remember looking up from the pages from time to time just to take a breather from the relentlessness of its prose, at once so alive with raging admiration and yet so expressive of bottomless disappointment, simultaneously floral and coolly analytic, centerless, yet deeply centered within the shifting lights and mingled textures of my sister’s mind.

  “Yes, I would say that she was very full of energy,” I repeated as Martha looked up from her pad.

  “When did you first realize that Elena had embarked upon a new book?” Martha asked.

  “In the spring of 1956.”

  We were sitting with Sam in Washington Square Park. Perhaps she had already been thinking about the book for some time by then. There were, after all, those stacks of books in her Paris apartment, almost all of them American, and looking rather like expatriates themselves as they rested beneath her window. Elena herself did not seem to know when the idea struck her. “Somewhere along the way,” she said in the 1980 interview, “I recognized that taken as a whole America’s tendency to encourage endless striving constituted a form of moral intelligence which was genuinely great, both in its drift, to use a phrase from Walter Lippmann, and in its mastery, and that American failure contained within it an element of poignancy which flowed more than anything else from the predicament of an early dream.”

  Thus on that spring day in 1956, my sister had perhaps no more than the vaguest notion of the sort of book toward which her mind was tending, and to which she subtly introduced Sam and me as we rested in the park that afternoon.

  It had been over a year and a half since Miriam’s death, and a great deal had transpired. Sam had finally ended his long bachelorhood by marrying the young woman with whom he had been tempestuously involved for six or seven years. She had all too promptly borne him a daughter, Christina. Elena had taken an apartment in Brooklyn Heights and had published several essays and short stories but had begun no larger work. Alexander and I had learned to adjust to Miriam’s absence and, despite the tremors of his adolescence, maintained a respectful congeniality toward one another. I had left Parnassus and was teaching at Columbia.

  And so the year following Miriam’s death had been a rather peaceful one for our circle of friends. The heavy sediment of middle age was drifting down upon us. We would all continue now along a graceful road, so I supposed, each of us mindful of our own good fortune as we drifted into a gentle elderliness, the sort, as Horace says, “not unbefriended by the lyre.”

  Sam and I had walked quite a way down Fifth Avenue to meet Elena that morning. It was a Sunday, and the avenue was almost deserted. Sam placed Christina on his shoulders and bounced her playfully.

  “I suppose Elena’s going to stay in New York for good now,” he said. He took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and swabbed his head, which was almost completely bald now.

  “I think so,” I told him.

  Sam nodded. “Good. Inwardness was a mordant French concoction, the type they love over there — sour in a sweet kind of way.”

  I had no idea of what he was talking about. But long ago he had predicted what Inwardness would be, and he did not intend to alter his opinion of the book merely because he had been wrong. The book would alter. It would be what he had said it would be. That was that.

  “Have you seen her new place?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Too busy. Kids are a lot of work, William, even when you have a nanny.”

  We passed under the Washington Square arch a few minutes later and took a bench alongside one of the walkways. Through the drooping limbs of the oaks, elms, and yellow locusts, we could see Garibaldi standing proudly to the east, not in the least unnerved by the drab façade of NYU.

  Sam
put Christina down on a plot of grass and watched as she tumbled about. Street musicians were playing here and there, but it was an amateur juggler who caught her eye, mainly by continually dropping his pins.

  “The Village has changed, William,” Sam said as he leaned back into the bench.

  “Everything does,” I said.

  “It was something back when they were publishing The Quill,” he added. “And nobody ever thought of moving to Connecticut.” He pulled down his tie and flung one arm casually over the back of the bench. “Now it’s rock and roll, and gangs roaming around like tribes of savages.” He shook his head. “Maybe it is time to leave New York.”

  I smiled knowingly. “Are you leaving, Sam?”

  “Not for good,” Sam said. “But I’ve bought a little place up on Cape Cod.”

  I laughed. “That’s even farther away than Connecticut.”

  Sam shrugged. “What the hell.” He stared out across the park. “I guess I’m satisfied.” He glanced down at Christina and grinned. “I made a pretty one, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “When you have children, you realize what a wilderness it all is, William, what a wilderness they must go through.”