Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  “We got through it,” I said. “So will they.”

  “I suppose so,” Sam said. He reached down to stroke Christina’s hair, then straightened himself up again. “There’s Elena,” he said.

  She was walking toward us, weighted down with a large shopping bag. She lowered it heavily to the ground when she reached us.

  “I made a stop at the library,” she said breathlessly as she sat down. “Sorry if I’m late.”

  “Howells, Twain, Van Wyck Brooks,” I said as I fumbled through her bag. I picked up another volume and held its spine up to get a better light. “The Damnation of Theron Ware.” I dropped the book back into the bag and picked through the rest. Some were famous titles, others less well known, and still others obscure, at least to me.

  “Are you reading for anything in particular?” Sam asked Elena.

  “Just reading,” she said.

  Sam was already smelling a purpose in her labor. “For no reason at all? No ulterior motive?”

  “Not one I fully understand.”

  Sam watched her suspiciously. “Not a foray into nonfiction, I hope.”

  “Possibly,” Elena said.

  Sam shook his head. “You’re a novelist, Elena. Why do other things?”

  Elena said nothing.

  Sam cleared his throat, a gesture of paternal disapproval he often used with writers. He had once expressed so much inarticulate disapproval at something Jason Findley was telling him that Jason had actually risen, walked to the pharmacy down the street from Parnassus, and returned with a throat spray.

  “Well, as your publisher, Elena,” Sam said, “I think I have some right to be given an idea of what you’re up to.”

  “A book on American writing,” Elena said.

  Sam shook his head. “That’s been done about a thousand times,” he said, as if such information would be news to my sister. “Ever heard of Vernon Parrington, Moses Tyler?”

  Elena smiled. “Is there something you’re trying to tell me, Sam?”

  “Just that those guys can’t write novels” Sam said, “but you can. Why mess with this other stuff? It’ll just confuse you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Elena said.

  Sam doubted it. “Well, why will your work be any different from the others?”

  Elena did not skip a beat in her reply. “Because it will be mine.”

  Sam nodded wearily, snatched Christina up, and began bouncing her on his knee. There was really nothing more to say to Elena on the subject, and so rather than continue in a direction that could only end in dispute, he quickly opted to engage his daughter, who was, at least at that point in her life, the sort of female he could handle.

  While Sam played with Christina, Elena and I chatted casually. I mentioned a teaching offer I’d received from a Midwestern university. “I thought about taking it,” I told her, “but I decided against it.”

  Elena smiled. “You’re the complete New Yorker now,” she said. “You couldn’t live anywhere else.” Years later, when she visited me for the first time in my new apartment in Cambridge, she brought a huge poster showing the Empire State Building at night. “So you don’t forget your roots,” she said as she taped it to the wall.

  After a time, Christina became cranky, and Sam fled across the park in search of a taxi.

  “He’s quite the incompetent father,” I said, watching him. “Panics at the slightest thing.”

  Elena nodded. “Well, he’s used to having a lot of help. I’m not sure he could get along without it anymore.”

  I laughed. “He wanted a kid, now he’s got one,” I said. “Why he wanted one, I’ll never know.”

  Elena looked at me as if she found my remark quite unusual. “He was lonely, William.”

  I shook my head. “You learn many things when you have children, Elena, and one of them is that they are no solution to the problem of loneliness.”

  “So when Alexander grows up and leaves, that won’t bother you?” she asked.

  “I’ll miss him,” I said, “but I won’t be lonely without him, because I won’t be any more or less alone.” I stood up and stretched my arms out. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Elena grabbed her bag of books. “Where to?”

  “Oh, just around,” I said, taking the bag from her as I started off toward the opposite side of the park. “How about you? Do you need a companion? Husband? Lover?”

  “Something of that sort,” Elena said. She smiled. “Does that seem so shocking?”

  I shook my head. “Of course not.”

  We reached the southern edge of the park, and up ahead I could see a long line of paintings displayed on a wrought iron fence, the sort of art the universal tourist buys, whether munching a hot dog on MacDougal Street or a croissant in Montmartre.

  “My God, Sam’s right,” I said. “The Village has changed.” I took Elena by the arm and steered her eastward toward Fourth Avenue. “Perhaps you have, too, Elena. I remember sitting with you in the Luxembourg Gardens only a few years ago and you said that you’d missed a few things in life, but that you could get along without them.”

  “I have, and I can,” Elena said. “But I don’t want to.” She stopped suddenly and there was an unexpected fierceness in her face. “I’m forty-four years old, William. I’m not ready for my dotage.” She glared at me. “I intend to enjoy what I can. Why should my work defeat everything?”

  It was only three months after our walk in the Village that Elena met Jason Findley again. In the meantime, she had been actively pursuing those invitations and gatherings which would most likely have put her in touch with interesting men, “the intellectual equivalent of occupying bar stools,” as Mary so bluntly put it in a letter to her at that time.

  Still, for all this effort, she had had little success, and by the fall some of her energy had clearly dissipated. The need remained, however, and because of that, she showed up at a party at Sam’s penthouse apartment in the fall of 1956.

  It appeared that everyone else on earth had shown up at Sam’s party as well. There were crowds around the buffet tables and the makeshift bars, crowds roaming through the tiny art gallery and somewhat larger library, crowds milling about in the foyer, and probably in the laundry room as well. Somewhere in all that teeming mass was Jason Findley, and by some act of either accident or design he spotted Elena and immediately approached her.

  I was seated with her on a sofa in one of the more remote corners of Sam’s cavernous apartment. It was as far away as we could get from both the string quartet and the smell of hot hors d’oeuvres. Elena was already getting fidgety, but she seemed to calm down as Jason came up to her.

  “Good evening, William,” he said, bowing slightly. “And to you, Miss Franklin.” He smiled. “May I call you Elena?”

  “Of course,” Elena said. “Would you like to join us?”

  “I would, yes,” Jason said. He took a chair from a few feet away and brought it over to us, sitting opposite the sofa, his legs crossed and pulled under the chair to keep them from looking, as he said, like a raised drawbridge.

  “Rather crowded, isn’t it?” he said. He was fifty-seven but always appeared somewhat older, or perhaps simply more experienced. It was as if by writing his history books he had lived more lives and now looked back at you not through his own life alone but through vast distances in time.

  “I feel as though I know you, Elena,” he said. “I’ve read all your books and learned quite a lot from them. I remember the whole episode with Calliope. They bounced you around a bit on that one, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” Elena said.

  “You had one thing on your side, however,” Jason added. “Your detractors were fools.”

  “Not all of them,” Elena said.

  “No, not all,” Jason admitted. “Of course, one’s enemies never are entirely foolish.” He smiled. “That’s one of the more disturbing elements of life.” He took a sip from the glass of wine he had brought with him. “Are you working on anything now?”
he asked her.

  “Nothing in particular,” Elena said. “Just some research. And you?”

  “Just finished a book on John Randolph. Parnassus has it now. I suppose it’s in good hands.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it is,” Elena said.

  “You were just back from France when I saw you last,” Jason said. “I’m happy to see you’ve decided to stay with us. As I said to you before, I believe, exile’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Elena said.

  “Of course, I’m a bit of one myself. Southerner, you know.”

  Elena nodded. “How did you happen to come north?”

  Jason laughed. “Well, I was born in the Mississippi Delta, like Basil Ransom in The Bostonians — both of us beached and forlorn in the North.”

  “Do you feel that way?” Elena asked immediately. “Beached and forlorn?”

  “Well, maybe that’s a bit too strong,” Jason said. “The fact of the matter is, no one made me come up here, it was all my doing. I fled the South like it was a house on fire.”

  “Rather like you did Standhope,” I said to Elena.

  Jason nodded. “Yes, like that. I hated it down there. All I thought about was escaping.” He cleared his throat softly, then went on. “I was the only son in an old family that had gone entirely to seed. We lived in a crumbling mansion. A family of sparrows was nesting in a hole in my bedroom wall.” He laughed. “You wouldn’t have seen that at Tara. Anyway, we’d lost everything in the war. The Civil War, I mean. We’d deserved to lose it, but we’d never have admitted that.”

  “Why not?” Elena asked.

  “Pride,” Jason said. “Pride’s a big thing, especially down there.” He shifted in his chair to release the tension in his legs. “You know, in the Salem witch trials there was a man named Barrows who’d falsely accused his wife. Well, as it turns out, he was convicted of witchcraft not long after his wife was executed for it, largely, I might add, on his own testimony. Anyway, he was sentenced to being pressed to death, and when it was almost over somebody came over to him and said, ‘Well, George, is there anything you want?’ And Barrows said, taking all his guilt, you know, admitting it, he said, ‘More weight.’” Jason leaned back in his seat. “Now that’s the way my family should have acted. They should have said that they deserved their destruction. Instead, they just became bitter about it.”

  “And that’s why you left?” Elena asked.

  “Well, that was certainly part of it,” Jason said. “Of course, I was only fifteen at the time, so I had the general adolescent heat that most boys do.” He smiled. “I was certainly touched by that current, you may be sure.” He looked at Elena almost impishly. “But only at the fuse, if you know what I mean.”

  Elena laughed, and so did I.

  “I don’t suppose that was part of the reason you left Standhope, Elena,” Jason said.

  “You might be surprised,” Elena said.

  “You know, when I was growing up, young men never suspected that young women might feel as … shall we say, turbulent as they.”

  “They did in medieval times,” Elena said. “There was a word for it. Furor uterinus, fire in the womb.”

  Jason looked at her intently. “And was that considered a pathology?”

  “Not exactly,” Elena told him, “only an appetite, but singularly difficult to control.”

  Jason nodded. “Well, that it certainly was with me. I was in a terrible rage, or frustration — whatever. I’m sure that that was part of my need to leave the South. I felt completely smothered, physically smothered, like when I was a boy I used to go out to the corn crib and jump in, sinking all the way down in the shucks and husks, so far down it felt like drowning.”

  “Yes, that was like Standhope,” Elena said.

  “At the time, of course, I never would have guessed that New England had such prisons, too.”

  Elena looked at him in disbelief. “Really?”

  “We all think that ours is the only cell,” Jason said. “Or at least, I did. My God, I felt that any place on earth would be freer than the South. But, to my adolescent mind, New England seemed the best place on earth to run to. When I decided to get the hell out of the South, all I could think of was the North. Never the West or the Midwest; always the North. I yearned for snow and ice and bitter winds — anything but that sweltering basin I’d lived in all my life.” He shrugged. “So one night I just up and did it. I walked out and looked up at the stars to see where the North was, exactly, then jumped on the first train that came by going in that direction. It took me all the way to Washington, DC., without a stop.” He placed his glass down on the table beside his chair, took out his pipe, and began filling it, watching Elena as he did so. “Do you and William still have family in Standhope?”

  Elena shook her head. “No. Except for William’s son, we’re the last of the Franklins.”

  I looked at her and smiled. “Well, there may be one or two left somewhere in Rhode Island.”

  “Not in touch with them at all?” Jason asked.

  “Never,” I said.

  “Are you in touch with your family?” Elena asked Jason.

  “I do keep in contact with some of them,” Jason said. He tamped the tobacco down tightly into the bowl of his pipe. “Cousins here and there, scattered over Dixie.” He smiled. “They’re all probably pretty busy these days keeping the Negroes down.” He lit the pipe, took a few short puffs, then lowered it from his mouth. “I got the impression from New England Maid that your home life was rather unusual, Elena.”

  “It was,” Elena said.

  “Mine too,” Jason said. “They had suffered a malaise for what seemed like generations.” He then described the nature of it in a somewhat comical fashion. But despite the joking manner in which Jason portrayed the deep sleep of his progenitors, something of the sorrow of their plight rose from it and moved deeply into Elena’s mind, to emerge finally once again in a passage on William Faulkner in Quality: “One detects in so many of these strangely moving tales, as well as in the general sensibility of Quentin Compson, a tidal dissipation, an atrophy of will welded to a galvanizing passion, a heart at once broken and rebellious. The voice is unique in American letters, full of the rage of its retreat. It is the whimper, one might say, of a volcano.”

  “So they just mostly sat out life,” Jason concluded with a quiet chuckle. “You know, listlessly, like it was one long advertisement for something they couldn’t afford.”

  Elena was watching him very closely, taking in the entire man, everything from the look of his body, so very erect in his chair, to the sound of his voice, soft and unassuming, to the gentle humor of his mind, its kindly self-deprecation combined with an absolute authority.

  He shrugged. “You’d have thought nothing could rouse them, my family. But when I left home, being the only son, you know, this desertion hit my family like chain lightning. My father simply would not stand for it. He came raging North like some crazed Paul Bunyan, striding across the hills, knocking over buildings, scattering the terrorized populations of countless Northern towns.” He laughed. “He wanted his son back, you see. I was the only thing on earth for which he could generate any passion whatsoever.” He took a puff from the pipe. “Hell, he even hired a bunch of gumshoes to find me. They tracked me like a pack of Shawnee scouts. Why, sometimes they’d show up at some flophouse I was staying in and give everybody the third degree, rough up the bums and derelicts, you know. Nobody to stop them.”

  A waiter passed and Jason took a glass of wine from the tray and took a sip. “Good stuff. Sam spares no expense. You have to hand it to him. I guess we’re all lucky to be at Parnassus. That the way you feel, Elena?”

  “Did he find you?” Elena asked. “Your father?”

  Jason nodded. “Yes, he did. Can you believe it? He found me in a little hotel in the Village. I’d been living there for a month, working as a sweeper in a bathhouse. I didn’t care. Just to be in the Village was all that mattered.”
He smiled, remembering it. “I saw Floyd Dell one time, and a portly fellow who looked a whole lot like Henry James.” He grinned boyishly. “Friend of mine punched me one day and said, ‘Look there, it’s Isadora Duncan,’ but it was just some stripper he knew from a burlesque show.”

  “You said your father found you,” Elena said, coaxing him back to his narrative.

  “Yes, and we had a talk in my room,” Jason said. “We made an agreement. Sort of a strange one, but it worked for us. He agreed to live without me, if I’d agree to come back before he died.” He looked down at his hands, his mind now captured by that distant moment in his life. He was silent for several seconds, then he glanced back up at Elena. “Well, I did go back. About two months before I left for the war.”

  He stopped then and stared into his glass.

  Elena smiled. “I’d like to have the whole life in one telling, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  Jason smiled back at her. “Well, I had the usual experiences in the war. Took a bullet in the thigh, but I was never gassed. I got back to New York in 1919.” He chuckled. “Fancied myself an actor. I married a young actress named Jill Thornton, who had a stage name that was truly ridiculous: Eureka Patterson. Can you imagine the credits? ‘And Eureka Patterson as Ophelia.’” He laughed and shook his head. “But, my God, I loved that girl. She decided to go to Hollywood. She was tired of bumming around Broadway. We got divorced over that. I didn’t want to go to California.” He mused a minute, and then his eyes brightened. “And you know, once in a while I’d see her in a movie — just an extra — I’d see that face staring back at me from a crowd in a Roman coliseum or the streets of some dusty cowboy town … poor Jill, in a toga or with a bonnet strapped to her head.” He shrugged. “I have no idea what happened to her.” He stopped again and looked at Elena. “Do you really want the whole life?”

  “Certainly,” Elena said lightly.

  “It’s interesting.” “If I give you mine this evening,” Jason said, “will you promise to give me yours over dinner next Saturday night?”