Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  “What do you mean, William?”

  “She said that he had the beauty of a grave resolve. So did my sister, I think.”

  Martha eased herself back into her chair. She looked rather addled, no doubt grasping the alarming fact that were I to die, a very important primary source would be snatched from her.

  “Relax, Martha,” I said, adding a little wink. “I’m eighty, but I’m not going yet.”

  Martha nodded quickly, unamused, then glanced out toward the small, weedy garden that rested between the house and the beach.

  “When I interviewed Jason a few months ago,” she said, “he told me that he thought of Elena almost all the time.”

  “That was gallant of him.”

  “Do you think he was telling me the truth?”

  “I have no doubt of it at all,” I said. “He loved my sister.” I lifted my hand and swept it out slightly. “This is where they had their best years, those summers in this house.” I laughed. “I remember the second one we spent here better than the rest. It was the summer of 1959. Elena was at work researching her far more expanded version of Quality. Jason was putting the finishing touches on his latest effort. They were very happy together that summer.”

  I could remember it very well. It was the summer they planted the flower garden. We had come up toward the end of May. Alexander had come along, too. He had finished his freshman year at New York University, and he’d brought Saundra, the young woman he would soon marry, and also a young man named Roger Whitman, a fellow student at NYU. Saundra was very personable and accomplished, a music major who dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. Roger, however, dreamed of nothing whatsoever, and we were all amused by his immense indolence. It so happened that Elena was researching the twenties at that time, and I have always believed that Roger’s languid manner must have fit right in with the era she was studying. Even now I think of him when, from time to time, I take down Quality and read a passage or two from her section on the twenties:

  It was an age that encouraged the adoration of a certain kind of writer, who laughed at work and slow increase while swigging gin in dark speakeasies where papier-mâché grapevines framed wall-sized pictures of the Bay of Naples. Even a frivolous time must have its hero, and for the twenties it was the sort of character who looks for an inheritance as his salvation as surely as others look for work, who exalts money and even grovels for it, as Amory Blaine does in This Side of Paradise, but who sneers at the labor that earned it.

  Beside this listless, supercilious creature, the characters of Sinclair Lewis burn with an almost holy flame. One finally comes to respect the plodding Dodsworth, the grasping Babbitt, and even the naive Carol Kennicott, whose sleepless reformism is as noble as it is ridiculous. At least these people acknowledge, however unintentionally, the truth that effort is a moral and a biological imperative, that growth comes only through extension, and that if this were not so, then life would not have evolved beyond the humblest glob of undirected protoplasm.

  Roger Whitman was probably as close as any human could have ever been to a glob of undirected protoplasm, but even he could not spoil that summer. For a while he and Alexander lazed on the beach below the house, Alexander attempting to rouse him to the effort his sophomore year would require. Elena and Jason and I smiled to ourselves at both Roger’s effete malaise and my son’s evangelical relentlessness in trying to dispel it.

  “I must say that I’m proud of Alexander,” Elena said on one occassion. We were busily breaking ground, readying the garden for the first planting. Elena was dressed in a cotton blouse and flannel pants rolled at the cuff. She looked, Jason said that day, like a Norman farm woman, thinner, perhaps, but with that same outdoor bloom of health.

  “Proud of him?” I asked. “For what?”

  “The way he’s determined to turn his friend around,” Elena said. “It’s admirable.”

  “I can’t imagine why he’s taken up with that boy,” I said, shaking my head. “I think he should expend his reformist efforts on less intractable subjects, like war and poverty.”

  “Speaking of war,” Jason said, without looking up from the plot of ground he was hoeing, “I brought you a copy of von Steuben’s Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops in the United States.”

  I looked up. “Me?”

  “No, Elena,” Jason said. He laughed. “I can’t imagine you reading von Steuben, William.” He turned back to Elena. “Also various works by Jonathan Dickinson, Freneau, and Odell. They should help you figure out the Revolutionary period.”

  “Yes, good,” Elena said. She continued raking her square of ground. “It should also be a nice contrast to my notes on the twenties.” She looked up and smiled. “And then, of course, I’ve got to deal with The American Experience by Jason Findley.”

  Jason covered one of his bulbs and patted the ground softly. “I prefer perennials.”

  “Less work involved,” Elena said. “Don’t have to replant every year.”

  “Yes, but in the idea, too,” Jason said as he got to his feet. “You know, the business of something continuing to provide beauty year after year. I like the way they stand, symbolically I mean, for perseverance.”

  Elena laughed. “Of course, you wouldn’t want to pursue that too far, would you? Imagine the perseverance, for example, of crab grass or dandelions.” She shook her head. “That’s the problem with romantic symbolism. It’s not pared down, not precise.” She scowled. “It’s all moonlight and magnolias.”

  “Don’t be so harsh, Elena,” Jason said. He slapped some of the dust from his pants. “People shouldn’t expect information from a poet.”

  Elena looked at him quizzically. “What, then, should they expect?”

  “Sentiment,” Jason said. “It doesn’t matter what the truth is. It only matters that the feeling is genuine.”

  Elena frowned. “I don’t believe that,” she said. “If that’s true, then what’s the point of thinking?”

  Jason smiled. “Well, what is thinking, anyway? It’s only the arrangement of sentiment, nothing more.”

  Elena started to speak, but Jason lifted his hand. “There’s no such thing as thought, Elena, there is only intelligent feeling.”

  Elena looked at Jason as if she had just discovered an alien presence in his soul.

  “I don’t believe that,” she said.

  Jason shrugged, picked a bulb from the seed pouch which hung from his neck, then bent down and began digging a shallow hole.

  Elena continued to stand above him, looking down.

  “Did you have the same attitude toward thinking when you wrote The American Experience?” she asked after a moment.

  Jason did not look up from his planting. “Of course,” he said. “I’ve always had that attitude.”

  Elena watched Jason as he casually went about his gardening that afternoon, walking in a squat as he planted one bulb after another up the long row we had already cleared. “Much in him remained but weakly formed,” she would later write of the poet Joseph Rodman Drake, “as if at the moment of creation, nature had withdrawn something, stubbornly withheld that which might have brought him to completion.

  I have always believed that Elena wrote this passage, about a man of sadly scattered gifts, with Jason in mind, and that the process which ended in her writing it began that afternoon in the flower garden by the bay.

  Perhaps they should have had their battle that very night, sent plates and coffee cups crashing. Perhaps if Elena’s “close decorum” and Jason’s determined civility could have been laid aside for one instant of combat, then much of their later pain might have been averted.

  I don’t know what my sister might have surrendered to Jason in such a battle, or to what difficult lengths she might have gone to indulge him. But to suggest, as Martha does in her biography, that Elena would never have tempered her opinion as to the intellectual paucity of The American Experience is to render my sister so one-dimensional in her intellectual integrity as to stri
p her of her human needs. Elena loved Jason Findley more than she ever loved another man. She would not willingly have allowed a simple difference in ideas to have destroyed their relationship. Martha may portray my sister in heroic isolation, but in reality Elena did not want to end her days alone on Cape Cod, and certainly she would have preferred to spend them with Jason rather than with me.

  And so Elena moved very cautiously indeed for the next year. She had read The American Experience years before and delayed rereading it as long as possible. Perhaps even on that day, as we were planting the garden, she already suspected that “romantic wooliness” which dominated Jason’s thought, and in turn, his work. But if that were so, she kept it honorably to herself, as Manfred Owen does, “not as one who avoids an unpleasant truth, but as one who understands that the precious things of life form a tapestry rather than a hierarchy, and that of all the things we deem worthwhile, the values that contradict our love remain the most difficult to enforce.”

  Still, no matter how difficult, the judgment had to be made, and by the time Elena turned fifty she had begun the long process of making it. It was still an entirely inward affair, of course. My sister made sure no hint of it emerged. As a result, when Sam threw a party for her on her fiftieth birthday, she appeared content with the life she had made for herself. But it was all a show, as she would later admit, all a pointless show.

  The party was held in the afternoon. It was winter, and snow blanketed the ledges outside the arched windows of the Parnassus Press executive meeting room. Sam had asked Elena and Jason and me to come in a bit before the party started. He took us to a small room and unveiled the portrait of himself he had commissioned. It still looks down on that long oak table where Christina now presides, but it will always seem to me, in its hopeless exaggeration, uniquely Sam’s.

  “Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

  Elena took her glasses from her purse and put them on. Then she carefully surveyed the portrait. “You look … how shall I put it … you look in charge, Sam.”

  A huge smile swept over Sam’s face. “That’s exactly right, Elena, exactly right.”

  Jason nodded and puffed his pipe. “Saladin himself could not have looked more regal.”

  Sam’s glance slid over to me. “How about you, William?”

  I put my arm over his shoulder. “It bears a resemblance to its subject,” I said, patting his ample belly, “but I think the artist was more successful in taking off a few pounds than you have ever been.”

  Sam nodded gravely. “I told him to do that, shave off a few pounds. In a thousand years, who’ll know the difference?”

  “Absolutely,” Jason said. “Washington had the artist remove his facial scars, and no one ever accused him of being a liar.”

  Sam punched me lightly on the arm. “There, you see?”

  And with that Sam ordered the portrait transferred to the meeting room and hung. When the task had been completed, he slapped his hands together and stepped back to admire it. For a moment he seemed almost mesmerized, his eyes locked on that other set of eyes that stared back at him. Then he wrapped his arm around Elena’s waist and drew her to him. “Well, Elena, the grapes have ripened nicely on the vine, aye?” He gave her an affectionate little hug. “Come, let’s join the party.”

  Elena and Sam moved down the hallway, and Jason and I strolled along behind them. The walls of the corridor were decked out with photographs of the prominent authors Parnassus had either nurtured from their beginnings or lured away from other houses by treating them with more respect and even, at times, more money. It was an impressive array, for much that was worthwhile in American letters since 1934 had been published by Parnassus, and as Sam strode down the hall with Elena in tow he looked very much like one of those captains of culture he could now claim with some justice to be.

  He stopped at the large double doors of the reception room and turned to Elena.

  “Happy birthday, my dear,” he said.

  Elena smiled. “Thank you.”

  Sam kissed her. “We’ve worked well together, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take this little party as a token of my esteem,” Sam said. Then he swung open the doors.

  There must have been two hundred people milling about, and for the next hour or so Elena strolled among them with Jason at her side, not at all discontent in that role.

  “She looks very happy these days,” Alexander said as he walked up to me. Saundra was with him, looking a bit intimidated by the scale of the occasion. She was still a shy young woman, and she appeared almost to tremble in Elena’s presence.

  “I think she is happy,” I told him.

  Alexander took a sip of wine. “Do you think that’ll harm her work?”

  “I don’t think happiness ever harmed anything, Alexander,” I said. I looked at Saundra. “Do you?”

  Saundra shook her head. She had one of those highly animated faces, the sort in which every emotional nuance displays itself, no matter how simple or complex.

  “They look very beautiful together,” she said as she glanced at Elena and Jason. She tucked her arm playfully in Alexander’s and smiled at me. “Do you suppose Alexander and I will ever look like that?”

  “If you’re very lucky,” I said. Then I edged away, leaving them their illusions.

  Mary Farrell came plowing through the great doors only a few minutes later, wrapped in vast loops of brown fur.

  “My God, William,” she said as she rushed up to me, “Elena is fifty and I am fifty-five, and look at this, will you.” She drew a photograph from her handbag. It showed her daughter, Martha, standing in robe and mortarboard, a proud graduate of Hollywood High. “I have a daughter who is practically a woman.” Her hair was streaked with more than a little gray now, but otherwise she looked somewhat less parched than before and her mood seemed less acrid, as if her body and her mind had finally come to some agreement as to their future course.

  “Is your husband with you?” I asked.

  Mary smiled. “Why no, William. Should we have an affair?”

  I laughed, but a bit self-consciously, unsure of whether or not she meant it, and certain only that I would have gone with her in an instant if she had.

  “Speaking of affairs,” Mary said, “this thing with Jason has been going on for a while.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  “All smooth to the naked eye?”

  “I think so.”

  “He’s not blinded by her light?”

  “He has one of his own.”

  “Not pulling a MacNeill and trying to get her to do things he can’t do?”

  “No.”

  Mary looked suspicious. “Sounds a bit idyllic for my taste.”

  “Well, you always did like tragic endings, Mary,” I told her.

  She glanced across the room. Elena had seen her and was coming quickly toward her, with Jason at her arm.

  “Do you like him?” Mary asked me quickly in a whisper.

  “Very much.”

  “I had no idea you were coming, Mary,” Elena said delightedly as she drew Mary into her arms.

  “All the way from California,” Mary said. “Just me and my minks.” She stepped out of Elena’s embrace and looked at Jason.

  “Hello,” Jason said, somewhat shyly.

  Mary looked him up and down. Then she looked at Elena. “Looks stable enough, Elena,” she said. “Does he have good teeth?”

  “Reasonably good,” Elena said.

  Mary was about to reply, when suddenly the lights went out. Then the doors opened and a huge cake was wheeled in, glowing brilliantly with fifty candles. At a signal from Sam, the crowd began singing “Happy Birthday,” and Jason bent forward and kissed her.

  “I think a short speech is in order,” Sam said once the singing had stopped and the lights had come back on. “What about it, Elena?”

  Elena walked to the front of the room, briefly surveyed the large crowd that had gathered to honor her, an
d for one of the few times in her life spoke extemporaneously.

  “Long ago, when I was a little girl,” she began, “I wrote a poem, which one of my teachers didn’t like. Her name was Mrs. Nichols, and a few years after we had our little conflict, she left Standhope. It was evidently quite a show at the railway station that day. Mrs. Nichols was screaming at her husband, causing quite a commotion. Then the train pulled up and she disappeared into it and was never seen again.” She smiled quietly. “From time to time when I leaf through my yearbook, I always pause at the picture of Mrs. Nichols. It’s one of those pictures you can’t forget, one that, as you look at it, you want to come to life. You want those gray features to take on human colors, you want to hear her speak: ‘Remember me. I am Mrs. Nichols, who left in such a huff one day and was never seen again. Listen now, this is what I did. This is what happened to me.’

  “In the end, I think, every life is like that, a story. Some are more interesting than others, but all of them can be regarded as tales of some kind. When we do that, see our lives as if they were the creations of someone else, as if we were figures in a novel, then I think we can get some perspective on ourselves. Am I really a hero or a villain, a wise man or a fool?” She laughed softly. “At fifty I can look back on my own life in that way, as a story which began in 1910 and which has lasted until now.” She lifted her gaze toward the rear of the room where her oldest friends had arrayed themselves. “I can’t come to any judgment about it, however, except to say that, from this place, from this moment, it seems to have been enough. And I could say this, that it has been enough, even if it ended before dawn, even if there were nothing more.”

  She stepped into the crowd and began making her way slowly toward the rest of us, shaking hands as she edged her way through. She seemed quite content, and from the perspective of that moment — and even as I now remember it — it would have been impossible to imagine that only a few years later Manfred Owen would declare in a voice that was clearly Elena’s that of all human states, serenity is the least admirable, and that at fifty he had looked back upon his life and seen only charred or burning fields.